Batzy tell us about zerg “micro” - F2 a-moving ling bane into marine tank armies and winning despite best marine splits etc. A moving ultras etc.
While i agree that skytoss is problematic for zerg, i am also aware that lurkers are to be blamed. Suppose you play protoss and you opt to go for gateway-robo army. Do you believe in all honesty that anyone below pro level could beat lurkers with gate-robo ? So maybe nerf lurkers before you start crying.
In masters every single game is either immortal/archon/HT or carrier/void/HT. Immortal archon wipes the floor with lurkers pretty easily. In fact I see immoral/archon more often than skytoss when I am going hydra/lurker/viper.
You gotta remember with feedback being basically autocast now from the minimap, Zergs spellcasters are pretty much useless and can’t pull in high value targets anymore.
Somehow i don’t believe you because i’ve seen lurkers completely shredding toss ground army to pieces. If zerg has few lurkers then toss should be able to beat it but past certain critical number (+10 lurkers) gate robo evaporates unless you have god-tier warp prism micro (juggling 2 immortals at once). Phoenix could help, but lurkers are almost always accompanied by hydras and when zerg adds viper support - it’s absolutely unbeatable. I’m not masters but if you really see immortal/archon/ht then perhapsh toss was somehow able to do some eco damage and zerg cannot afford these lurkers ? I have no idea how it is even viable at your mmr.
Can you explain to me why my zerg apm is 100 higher than my protoss apm when I feel like I’m playing at the same rate? if you hold done the build drone or ling etc it spikes to like 800 in the replay that’s most of why I would guess maybe I just have more reps with z or take more basses quickly but I play a lot of toss too. I cant play Terran for crap man but with zerg I press 3 for queens and tap my thumb on space bar and v at the same time a few flutters and boom all my hatches injected in half a second with rapidfire once I got used to pressing them at the same time it became stupidly easy. Like I know I’m bad with Terran less reps I expect it to be down at low apm but toss I can sweat and spam and try hard I don’t break 200 apm with zerg when I try that hard its 250-300 maybe its my adhd and that my brain just thinks zerg is easier to understand but 100 apm at my rate is like 50% increase how is it possible I’m that much faster with a similar number of Protoss reps and my fingers feel the same. So if its not inflated why can I click 50% faster when I play zerg than toss?
Don’t talk to him. This is an argument that he has convincingly avoided his entire “career” on this forum. It obvious to anyone who has many years of experience in SC2 that zerg APM is highly inflated by repetitive actions zerg does alot in a game which are very easy to do and require little to no skill. Just like you said, zerg apm blows through the roof the moment when you queue units. Depending on “repeat rate” setting in your OS it can spike to even 2000 apm for a brief moment. Also injecting, spreading creep also boosts apm significantly. You cannot do that with T or P.
All above gives false impression of zerg “being the hardest because they have highest APM”.
https://i.imgur.com/CCFuGRp.png
https://i.imgur.com/5oM9BXK.png
AlphaStar was essentially an experimental study. They found increasing APM reduces performance, and AlphaStar was strongest with the lowest-APM race and weakest with the highest APM race. These trends mirror the human population, with the highest-APM race being the least common in Grandmaster and the lowest-APM race the most common. Furthermore, terran grandmasters who offrace are much stronger with Protoss (~300 mmr): https://i.imgur.com/hCh7gwO.png. This aligns with balance metrics calculated via a gumbel analysis of the pro scene, grandmaster win-rates, grandmaster representation, bradford hill analysis of skill metrics, matchup performance trends in the pro scene, chi-squared analysis of worldwide grandmaster, skill metric trends of the ladder, and population parameters of the whole ladder.
By the way, there are even more analyses that I can link you to. I’ve done analyses of ESL cups for example. But frankly I am just beating a dead horse at this point because a single one of these would be indisputable proof that protoss is overpowered and I haven’t given you one – I’ve given you 9. It’s just ridiculous that flat-earth science-deniers were given the power to balance SC2’s design. How on Earth did these people, of all people, end up with the ability to do balance patches. It’s like making a flat-earther the professor of geology at Princeton. That’s how absurd it is. That’s not hyperbole in the slightest. People who have no clue how to interpret data were given a very important job for which interpreting data is the primary requirement of the job.
I think you’re confusing administrative apm in way of operative apm. It’s a quite difference between both. Zergs are inorder o Administrive apm. Many of this apm doesn’t mean to quit game attention just in way to make units with fast key, Instead operative apm is in order to understand the attention that a player need to have in all instances while playing. Zergs has many mechanics that allow to stress less than terrans but a little more than protoss.
APM should be a metric to know how much attention you’re putting in the game and how stressfull is the game for each race. But because it is contaminated by administrative apm it can’t be used as this.
this explains nothing and misses the point. Why is it that when i play with the same level of effort do i have 100 more apm with zerg than toss. Because when I hold z it spikes to 800 its really that simple. My lowest apm is Terran and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt they are my worst race by hundreds of MMR. MY highest mmr is zerg it feels the most easy for me to play and when I hit 250-300 it does not feel like I’m moving any faster it feels the same as 180 with toss.
So let me reiterate one i don’t care about balance like at all I want a fun game where the skill cap and pro players can win tournament games with 150 apm. I want strategy to be more important than speed of clicks or mechanical prowess from endless repetitions as one is fun and the other is boring. If you cannot in plain English with your own words explain a simple concept and instead drop links no one will ever click on i think that speaks to the strength of your argument. You post as many links to pears trees as you like but you have yet to address I’m simple question directly. Why is it that when I play zerg i get higher apm more mmr and more wins with higher apm and perceive it as easier when i have a similar number of toss reps. Why is it I’m so terrible at Terran by comparison to the two I’m not exactly sure but I have hard time thinking one is way harder when I try less make my own random build up every game and have more success? Maybe my adhd works best with zerg I don’t know but i can tell you form my own perspective zerg and toss are both easy by comparison to terrain and no mater what race i play i have to sweat and try way harder than i want to if I want to play close to optimally. The pace of the game is too fast to be enjoyable as a strategy game they could littealy forice us to play at half speed and it would be a better game. Too late for that now the reamining player base is used to all this but i hope if they release a new RTS they remebr brood war / wc3 pacing = huge success sc2 pacing = think ill go play dota.
So from my perspective the biggest out of balance race is Terran as its too hard to play. You ever listen to Terrans talk about what they do different to win a game? Like with Z its oh i did wrong units or man that was a bad decisions Terrans be like i built my depot 2 seconds slow then this 3 seconds slow so I lose like holy crap what an unenjoyable race if i have to memorize builds and cant just wing it whats even the point lol.
Simply untrue. You can label and categorize the actions but one fact remains: every action has a time cost. In a real time game, you have limited time. If you have more actions to perform on a limited time budget, you’re disadvantaged. It’s that simple. Dark lost a game in the GSL because of this. He accidentally rapid fired some swarm hosts vs terran, a huge mistake that wasted about 40 army supply & caused him to lose an unlosable game. But you’re saying zerg’s apm is inflated, even though it’s an absurd argument on its face, and even though it’s easy to point out examples of how inject can cause zergs to lose games for free thereby demonstrating that inject isn’t meaningless apm spam. If inject waves are meaningless inflation, why do they decide the outcomes of games? They are the definition of meaningful and apm is not inflated. It is laughably absurd to suggest otherwise.
Furthermore, even if APM weren’t synonymous with skill, it’s still highly predictive of skill & this is sufficient to prove protoss in GM have an inflated ranking that wouldn’t be possible for the same skill level as terran or zerg. It’s the same way astronomers measure distance to galaxies. There is a correlation between a certain star’s brightness & its pulsation period. You take the average of several of these stars’ pulsation periods and you know their average brightness. Brightness falls off with distance, so you know the distance. If you take the average APM of protoss in GM then you know the average skill level of protoss in GM, and if you did this measurement you’d find protoss performance level exceeds their skill level in the range of 100-300 mmr. It’s just a fact of reality that apm metrics prove protoss is imbalanced. But if that weren’t enough, there are a dozen more analyses that have been performed that give the same result.
None of which addresses that when I hold zone one key z with 50 larva my apm spikes to 800 with one click. Zerg apm is inflated because it measures it poorly its that simple things that take 1 second and no effort spike it beyond what makes sense. You like math right if i have 5 bases all injecting how much does me using my hotkey for hatcheries then clicking s and holding z increase my apm vs if I slowly clicked z every single time. IT would be so slow I couldn’t even do my cycle the numbers are arbitrary and what’s more its painfully obvious where it comes from. When I’m Terran if I click my hotkey for barracks and hold down the marine key my apm does not spike its the same action though. Its measurement errors all your stats worthless as the method for collection unreliable. Camera hotkeys don’t count as APM if I turn them off to increase my APM is that predictive in an increase in my skill XD.
In fact almost all bad mechanics could be replaced with more apm in a way the better your are mechanically the less apm you should need. Not a single click wasted now that is impressive. I want to see pros beat 400 apm players with 140 apm and pure efficiency and strategy now thats starcraft.
There is a very simple way to fix this “Zerg APM” problem. The game could count only actions, ONLY if the next action is DIFFERENT from the previous one. Thus, if you press your build key and make 50 units instantly, then it would count only as ONE action. The same with spamming “move”. If you click “move” like crazy, around the same spot on the map, it would also count only as a single action. The problem with Zerg APM, are all those build busts, where you keep your build key down, which inflates the average APM.
Alphar-star was capped at a set average APM of ~200, irrespective of race. Humans have dramatically different real APM/EPM depending on what style/race they are playing; the highest is Ling/Bane Zerg, while Protoss is significantly lower; it’s very often a 20-30% difference in APM between playing Protoss and playing Zerg. Some pros, when they race swap (eg: Reynor), have 100 more APM as Zerg than they do as Protoss - it’s the same player, and they aren’t unpracticed on Protoss.
Given that Protoss is the race with which players of equal skill score the lowest APM (even disregarding the current state of Protoss overperforming in low GM/Masters. The APM difference has been there since the beginning of WoL; it’s not a new thing that cropped up as a result of current balance.), Alpha-star performing better with it under the APM restriction was to be expected.
It’s an AI and doesn’t interface with the game in quite the same way as a human. It’s possible/likely that this is more beneficial to it playing as Protoss due to how Protoss micro/macro works: Protoss is the only race where basic unit production involves mouse/screen movement and can’t be queued or have cycles stalled with negligible loss - warp gate cycles are much shorter than inject cycles and can’t be banked. A human will never have perfect timing on warp gate cycles, but an AI can do it very easily, resulting in more efficient production than a real human can get, and the mouse movement that slows down a human performing warp ins relative to producing out of standard production/larvae, is practically irrelevant for the AI.
And those time costs can vary dramatically depending on the type of action; a fact that you like to ignore, and explains exactly what goes on with APM.
I don’t think there’s anyone sitting around claiming Protoss is fine right now at the masters-low GM level like you seem to think either, nor have I seen anyone opposed to addressing that, though the very top level, where Protoss seems to underperform, should be taken into account - it’s not blanket nerfs that are needed, but some more deft re-balancing that reduces Protoss’s margin for error at the masters-GM level, while still allowing it to perform at the very top, or perhaps even slightly buffs it at the very top end.
Ok, so you don’t understand fundamental basics of how the RTS genre works. Might as well argue with a flat earther. Next!
Explaining game basics to forum randos be like:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xbs1FBw4HLw
Every time you speak I feel like I’ve wondered into reddit. Why is it so hard to explain to me whey my apm and winrate is so much higher with zerg with less perceived effort than the other races with a similar number of protoss reps. Why can I hit 300 with zerg and never even seen 180 with Terran ever? Maybe with terrain its games played but toss I have just as much and if I watch my own replays and track every action in the game it becomes obvious the macro cycle that takes me less time and effort with zerg awards more clicks than the ones i do with he other races maybe i just know better zerg mechanics but once you learn how to do the thumb tap rapid fire inject it just feels like you get free mechanics for almost no effort. Even that doesn’t really explain it as I don’t eve use that method until 7-8 minutes in the game. What does explain it is the 600-800 apm that’s displayed every time i click my hatchery hotkey s then hold Z or D or whatever.
It’s not hard. It was explained to you in a way that conforms to all the data (and is the only explanation that can conform to all the data). You ignored the explanation and lied that there had been no explanation. You’re within millimeters of simply being blocked.
Every action has a time cost. If you are doing injects, you aren’t doing something else. That apm number represents opportunity cost that is very real. Let’s say that every time a terran has to make a marine, he must mindlessly click on the barracks 1,000 times before he is allowed to make a marine. True or false: will the terran’s win-rate go up, or down, with this new requirements? Obviously, it goes down. Doing actions within the game has a time cost. If inject produces higher apm, it is equivalent to a higher time cost and that is equivalent to a reduced winrate.
In this case it’s painfully obvious that rapid-fire keys for larva artificially inflates zerg apm. You’re generally a smart person so I think you could reason with this. In the opening especially, we are waiting on larva, and getting a thousand APM by holding the key down. This goes beyond data-science, and into the realm of common sense.
The common sense interpretation of the real time strategy genre is that time is your most valuable resource because you have limited time to input your actions into the game, meaning having to do longer actions or more actions is equivalent to being harder because it’s harder to fit more actions (or longer actions) into the same amount of time.
Which one is harder? It’s painfully obvious how this works, but you guys pretend like you don’t get it. My argument is the common sense interpretation of the rts genre and to pretend otherwise is facially absurd. We might as well start talking about unicorns if you believe apm is merely an “inflation” metric.
Again, you aren’t tracking your performance to see what happens when your apm is higher or lower. If you did, you’d find you are more likely to lose when your apm demands are high, because you have to pick either inject OR something else, but not both, because your apm limits are taxed. When your apm limits are taxed, you make mistakes because you can’t do everything and inject puts you closer to that limit thereby increases the probability of a mistake. At high levels, the time requirement of inject definitely interferes with your ability to micro and do other such tasks in the game. It’s absurd that anyone belles otherwise.
I’m only talking about rapid-fire for larva, not injects. Obviously, if I’ve spent 90% of the opening minute holding down the Z-key, I’m going to have a higher average APM.
As long as the time cost is non zero my argument is true. Any action that takes >0 seconds to complete has a time cost and if it has a time cost it contributes to the difficulty of the rts genre because the entire idea of the rts genre is to limit how much time you have to input your actions – that’s what separates it from turn based strategy where you can take as long as you want to do a single move. In rts, you have to make your move or the game leaves you behind. Any action with a non-zero time-cost contributes to the difficulty of the game, period. Yes, that includes rapid fired abilities.
You’re being purposefully dense. You know what’s harder between moving the mouse around, issuing orders, and a key that fires 1000 times per minute.