606 unique players, aka all my opponents for the last several months. Notice how the protoss players have lower apm/spm for the same win-rate. That’s equivalent to saying Protoss is easier.
There is a barcode toss who spams nothing but storm carrier every game. Let’s see how he compares:
https://i.imgur.com/wkuh7Vv.png
Decent APM. Terrible SPM. Average SQ. All in all, an average-tier player. But he’s not average in win-rate. I wonder why.
We can predict his win-rate via the correlations in this data using the mean/standard deviation:
Variable
Mean
Standard Deviation
Barcode Protoss Z score
APM
146.0048
59.95050022
1.784725725
SPM
16.098928
10.13395995
-0.3452675971
SQ
101.7312
16.91290101
0.3115255034
SC %
9.279552
5.512778436
Win-rate
0.442131891
0.4267656725
1.307200051
Win-rate Predicted by skill metrics
1.010930871
He’s doing about 30% better than expected. Hmm. Interesting. I wonder why that it. It’s a mystery!
Anyone with a brain knows this. I’m almost in GM and I still see Protoss players sit in their base until they max out and a-move storm wins with 100 apm. As a Zerg there is literally nothing you can do about it either. You’ll lose 9/10 attacking into cannon/battery. Its kind of weird so many people don’t realize they selected easy mode when queuing for ladder.
I know who the barcode is. I could say their name. I don’t because it’s not a call out thread to single out a player. This thread is to emphasize that balance is messed up beyond comprehension. PvZ is a free win for players who are objectively terrible at the game (https://i.imgur.com/gqJi25O.mp4). It’s not a skill issue when PvZ is the only matchup that is difficult and it’s the universally difficult matchup for all zergs with rare exceptions (https://i.imgur.com/7XZVpFX.png).
The thing that bothers me the most is that it’s basically cheating. They know they are advantaged. They know we know. We know they know we know. They do it anyway. Zero morality. Zero ethics. Cheating to win. SC2 balance has fundamentally reshaped my views on humankind as a whole. This many people willing to cheat in such a blatant, obvious, fashion, and if you take issue with the cheating they put the blame on you. You’re somehow the bad guy to want a fair game. Growing up in a highly religious, borderline cult, community, I know cult mentality when I see it. Cult mentality is all about towing the line no matter how absurd and anyone who doesn’t is mentally abused using a variety of guilt tripping tactics. That’s exactly what happens in SC2 over the balance fiasco. It’s legit a cult.
There was a theory that the religiosity of mankind would decrease as people gained access to education & information. That theory is definitely wrong. We live in the information age and the amount of mysticism and cultism has never been higher. Mankind is inherently a group-thinking species that forms cults based on mystic beliefs. They are good at generating ideas & sharing those ideas, but terrible at validating if those ideas are correct, and that causes cults to form over bizarre mystic beliefs. This is one of the big issues that the elite democrats don’t realize. They want mass immigration, thinking america’s education system will correct the erroneous thinking that causes the wars & other problems in far off places in the world. It won’t work. People are inherently superstitious and tribal, and there’s no fixing that no matter how many universities are built.
The ability to think rationally is an incredibly rare trait – most people think in terms of “is this good for my group” and that’s really only lens they use. “Is Protoss advantaged?” will always be answered with “no” because to answer anything but no would violate their loyalty to their tribe. Their allegiance is to their tribe, not to the truth, and that’s why they can’t think rationally.
That’s one of the things I like about Bill Maher. He’s obviously a Democrat but he’s not a cult-Democrat who tows the line no matter how absurd the mystic beliefs are. He’s willing to call them out & make fun of them. That means he kinda doesn’t have a place in his own group. He violates the unwritten rule that to be part of the tribe you must have unwavering loyalty. He certainly can’t join the republicans. To be loyal to the truth is equivalent to saying you will be hated by both sides. It’s very respectable. This is universally true, by the way. It doesn’t matter what part of society you look at, these mechanics exist. If you are a truth-speaker, you will be hated because you don’t have unwavering tribal loyalty like the rest of mankind. The tribe simply won’t trust you. You did something against the tribe’s interests.
Thor ghost loses to mass swarm host bane and nydus, plus mass spines. It’s not hard to beat. The reason it works is because the locust waves ignore liberation zones, the swarmhosts are a better value engine than snipe, and the nydus provides a level of mobility the terran can’t match. TvZ is balanced if not zerg favored. ZvP has no solution except to pray the protoss is genuinely 70 iq or narcoleptic.
At a certain point you have so much value saved from the swarm hosts that you can crash a wave of mass banes into the thor ghost from all directions. You do it after you kill a base with the nydus & he thinks he can move out while the locusts are on cool down. You just have 20 supply of banes and crash them in over and over while he pushes through the spines. All the meanwhile the locusts & nydus eviscerate his economy. It’s zerg favored.
Another good move is to nydus behind him. He will run the ghosts away from the locusts and into the banes on the other side. It’s so easy to beat it’s practically a sleeping aid. Just play a TvZ and you’ll be off to sleep in no time.
This is not true imo. Zerg APM is naturally inflated because of mass unit production, and Protoss APM is naturally deflated because they make the least amount of units in comparison to other races. Also repeat rate settings heavily impact your APM. Measuring someone mechanical competence by this metric is imo very inaccurate and misleading.
Spending more time making more units somehow doesn’t equate to a higher cost in the mind of a proton. Imagine doing everything you do like normal but now your macro Cycles take an extra one or 2 seconds. If you think that isn’t going to interfere with your ability to do other tasks in the game, then you are living in another universe.
The fact that protoss can’t wrap their heads around this concept it’s proof that they have no concept of speed within the game. And that is proof that protoss is way too easy. Nerf it.
Terran and zerg are scrambling all game long to find enough time to do all the tasks within the game, and no matter how fast you play you will miss things. Toss on the other hand says apm? What’s apm? Isn’t apm inflated? Thry prove the point themselves. They have no concept of ehat makes sc2 hard. Toss is way too strong.
