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Recently I was chatting with a friend of mine about balancing issue in starcaft2. In which he said that the game is imbalance against zerg, he has to be 10times more skilled than the other players to win. I then ask please define what skill is in starcraft2.
We established something we both agree up on, skills in starcraft2 are micro/macro/strategy/decision making.
Then the discussion turned into how do we qualitatively measure each area so that he can put some fact into his claim about the 10x better in skill is required.
For micro/macro which are mechanics and control of the game, I proposed the APM measurement should to some degree suggest the skill of a player in multitasking. If we look at a replay in BWchat the effective apm is a good estimation and suggestion of how skilled a player is in the mechanic of the game.
So we load some replays of sc2, and surely his apm is twice of almost all his terran opponents. So this really seem to support his argument.
Then I asked him, in BW there is a undeniable difference in apm requirement to play terran, zerg and protoss. Where terran requires the highest apm to be decent with, protoss can reach top level with just around 200apm. of course we have the zerg somewhere in the middle. But we don't dare say ppl like Sea is 10x better than Stork, because there is no such fact supporting that claim.
And then I went on to explain to my friend that there is a different learning curve for each race mechanically in sc1, terran requires the longest to master, and protoss is the easiest. But that does not make the game imbalance, because at the end when everybody acquired mastery of their race's mechanics it comes down to a battle of strategy, and decision making.
It is true that he needs higher mechanical skill to play zerg in sc2 than his terran opponents to just pull out a even record on the ladder, but that does not suggest an imbalance. I am in agreement with nazgul in this matter
+ Show Spoiler +On September 24 2010 05:22 Liquid`Nazgul wrote:
Nobody still has a clue about learning curves of the races. It's hard enough to find balance in RTS but to control the learning curves of 3 different games (races) this complicated to be similar is pretty much impossible. How hard is basic control for tank/marauder, now compare it to how hard it is to control the correct counter ling/infestor. Clearly Zerg needs more time to reach its max than Terran does.
That and every Zerg out there still doesn't creep properly. You see top level Zergs not getting multiple tumors at all times in the game, not getting overlord speed. Why complain about unit strength when you aren't getting the number one upgrade for your units (creep) in the whole game. This is just puzzling.
There may or may not be balance issues, but let's start with these things. It's like Terrans forgetting concussive shells and siege mode every game they play. Creep spread is simply a lot harder to pull off than just pressing an upgrade button, but that brings us back to not knowing the learning curves of each race, which is not the same as imbalance.
After we agree upon the mechanic part, we moved on to the other 2 aspect of what is considered to be skill. Decision making and strategies. These are a lot more significant than mechanical sill in sc2, due to the easier interface.
The question becomes how do we qualitatively measure these?
Decision making:
after some brainstorming I proposed that the more decision a player made correctly the better the player is. And then He goes ah ha, got you, Zerg has to make a lot more decisions than terran. Under your system of measuring decision making skills zerg will need to make more correct decisions than the terran, therefore will undoubtedly have a higher max score than the terran.
I reply: What you said is only true if we can find evidence in which zerg needs to make more decision than the terran in any given game.
So we head out and start going through zvt check lists.
First we need to list the different type of decisions, these is what i got so far.
1, unit production. (decide what to make, tech choice)
2, Timing decision. (is it a good time to attack? is it a good time to pull back? this based heavily on scouting and understanding of yours and your opponent's strategy)
and then it hit me, everytime a zerg build something with larva there is a decision, drone or any other units, therefore it doesn't matter how many more units terran have in game once their infrastructure is establish there is no more decision to make,(if you make 5 rax, you are going bio, a lot of starports? going air) zerg will undoubtedly need to make more decisions. Terran is never ever going to come close to match a zerg in the number of decision.
But wait.... Zerg in BW also has the same dilemma, they use larva, make more decisions, but how come it's fine for bw and not fine for sc2?
ahh This shit is getting long, i thank all those who read this wall of text to this point, but let's discuss what i got down so far, maybe i will add more if people offers solid arguments.
 
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The thing about APM/EAPM is that you really need to observe a player's FPV in order to qualify how good their mechanics are. It's less about the number of actions they can do in each minute and more about how many different things they can manage at once. In order to multitask like a beast you need high APM (not absurdly high but you can't multitask efficiently at 100APM) but just because you have high APM doesn't mean you multitask like a beast.
You can't reduce a players micro/macro down to a number, it really has to be observed and qualified.
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On September 25 2010 03:14 frog HERO wrote:
The thing about APM/EAPM is that you really need to observe a player's FPV in order to qualify how good their mechanics are. It's less about the number of actions they can do in each minute and more about how many different things they can manage at once. In order to multitask like a beast you need high APM (not absurdly high but you can't multitask efficiently at 100APM) but just because you have high APM doesn't mean you multitask like a beast.
You can't reduce a players micro/macro down to a number, it really has to be observed and qualified.
That's probably why he said "to some degree" and also more or less made a correlation between good multitasking and high APM. However there is no axiom that high APM = effective multitasking, because the APM has to be used. The question is, to multitask well, you need high APM, but which race really needs more APM to effectively multitask, assuming that the APM is mostly doing something instead of spam?
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Froghero I agree with you, however it is possible to make an estimation that we both can agree on, some guy with 300Eapm usually better than some guy with 100.
and the point i was trying to make was that In general broodwar protoss does not required a player to have over 300eapm in order to master the mechanical skill, where as a terran does. Yet the game bw is balanced around these differences in skill curves.
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I think that furthers my point that APM is a mostly useless metric. Because you have to throw racial diversity into the equation the line between a good player and a bad one based on APM becomes even more fuzzy. If you want to evaluate a player's mechanics then you really have to spend some time watching their FPV.
And that leads nicely into balance: in order to determine if one race is more mechanically demanding than another you need to observe the two player's (of known equal skill) FPVs and then try to qualify how much faster one player must be than the other to be on equal footing.
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hm.. let me give you a specific example. Go to youtube and type in sea[shield] FPV, and then type in stork FPV. You should be able to dig up some fpv of those 2 players. Both are consider S class terran and protoss in broodwar. You judge if they are even in speed. The Eapm they show in games suggest Sea[shield] is faster.
I too agree with you that APM is mostly useless metric, it is merely a by-product of the mastery of multitasking and mechanic of a given race. If one is able to master the mulitasking and mechanics of their race without moving fast then they are just as skilled as another play who mastered the same thing but needed to move faster than the first player.
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On September 25 2010 03:08 rei wrote:
I reply: What you said is only true if we can find evidence in which zerg needs to make more decision than the terran in any given game.
So we head out and start going through zvt check lists.
First we need to list the different type of decisions, these is what i got so far.
1, unit production. (decide what to make, tech choice)
2, Timing decision. (is it a good time to attack? is it a good time to pull back? this based heavily on scouting and understanding of yours and your opponent's strategy)
and then it hit me, everytime a zerg build something with larva there is a decision, drone or any other units, therefore it doesn't matter how many more units terran have in game once their infrastructure is establish there is no more decision to make,(if you make 5 rax, you are going bio, a lot of starports? going air) zerg will undoubtedly need to make more decisions. Terran is never ever going to come close to match a zerg in the number of decision.
But wait.... Zerg in BW also has the same dilemma, they use larva, make more decisions, but how come it's fine for bw and not fine for sc2?
ahh This shit is getting long, i thank all those who read this wall of text to this point, but let's discuss what i got down so far, maybe i will add more if people offers solid arguments.
The only thing I don't like about this is that it assumes decisions are all equal, without delving into any sort of complexities or depth of any decision and how much it affects the game, and I find that it would be harshly unreasonable to actually qualify and/or quantify that for any player.
Also, you say that Zerg has to make more decisions, and I can't agree fully . Its that maybe the Zerg decisions are more complex, I think. Similar to Zerg creeping, a Protoss would be wise to put Pylons out in the battlefield in order to reinforce without using potentially long travel distances. Creeping involves giving your army mobility so they can run away or assault much faster, and it has to be done tactically well in order to make sure your units will be where they need to be and Pylons in the field serve a similar purpose. Pylons, though, can be more arbitrarily placed and still be effective, although considerations have to be taken for keeping them alive. Similarly, Protoss also needs to consider what units to warp in, but not ALL of our units are in one facility where we have to decide between supply, workers, or armies. I'd say quantity of decisions is about equal, but Zerg's are just more complex, and they also may have more weight on them, meaning that a mistake is more punishing.
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BW terran wasn't harder to master than Zerg imo. BW Terran had a higher mechanical requirement, whereas zerg had a higher strategical-gamesense-decision making requirement.
In SC2, zerg has both the higher mechanical requirement and strategical-gamesense-decisionmaking requirement.
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I definitely agree with Rei in regards to the zerg player having to make more decisions. One of the simplest examples is the choice between drones and combat units as zerg.
When playing zerg if you make one to many rounds of drones you will die to the incoming attack because your army is much smaller than it would of been had you made those larvae into units. So for a zerg to make a decision on what combat units to make he needs to know when the terran player is moving out, what he's moving out with and then he needs to know how many of what kind of unit he needs and morph each larvae accordingly. Where as the Terran player can continually make scv's and use mules and has the ability to produce many many catch all units, which makes their decision making process a lot easier and more forgiving.
So I honestly think it's fair to say that zerg has many more decisions to deal with than a terran player.
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@RageOverdose I agree with you on the part that not all decisions are weighted the same, some decision like placing an overlord in a place that spots potential harassment is not as game changing as a decision to defend a doom drop or go for a base trade.
Just for the sake of argument, when we try to qualify decision making skills, there is only right and wrong decision making. And usually given both players who have mastered their race in terms of mechanics, the player who make more right decision in a given game will usually win. One could argue that there are exceptions, for example a player made the right decision 99 out of 100, but that one wrong decision is what cause him to lose the game. If you ask those 2 player to play 100 games in total, that player is highly unlikely to make that same wrong decision in all the other 99 games.
If we wanna approximate decision making skills what else can we do other than counting the number of right decision vs the number or wrong decisions? since many decision are situational and different in each game.
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Protoss in BW needs the most multitask and gets screwed by a single mistake the most (a ling runby, a lot of fights are purely won and lost by storms, .. )
User was warned for this post
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On September 25 2010 05:02 OutlaW- wrote:
Protoss in BW needs the most multitask and gets screwed by a single mistake the most (a ling runby, a lot of fights are purely won and lost by storms, .. )
Really??? Really??
Man, playing Terran must have been easy then...unseiging those tanks, sieging them again, putting down those mines, making sure to build those turrets, splitting your bioball so it doesn't die to lurkers, making sure to never get caught out of position. Nope, clearly the protoss had it way harder in terms of multitasking...
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There are 2 reason I put this in blog instead of in sc2 forum, 1st is i can ban ppl from my blog who intentionally derail the discussion, 2nd trolls don't wanna read a wall of text on blog section, because they would be wasting their time since they don't get much attention here. Stay on topic or GTFO, or I can help you to GTFO because it is my blog.
actually you know what, here i just banned outlaw for troll. done.
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Back on topic, we are discussing the difference between the decision making for zerg in sc1 and sc2. Zerg would have to make more decisions, hence more chances to get something wrong, therefore requires more skill in terms of decision making for both sc1 and sc2. Then WHY does sc1 balanced and sc2 not?
Could it be that the decisions the zerg make does not effect the outcome of the game as much in sc2 than it was in sc1?
if so then What are these particular decisions??
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I would say that the biggest difference in zergs from sc1 to sc2 is complexity. In BW there were less things to worry about. However with the advent of cliff walking, and units like the marauder, there are just more avenues for terran and protoss to take in order to cause zerg hell, and zerg doesn't have the ability to reciprocate. This makes zerg more reactive, and each decision more important to get correct.
Also with protoss and terrans ability to wall in effectively, information gathering as zerg is much more difficult. This means it's harder to gather the needed information in order to make correct decisions as a zerg player.
So really the fact of the matter, in my opinion, is that each of zergs decisions effect the game more in SC2 than they did in BW. This seems to be being cause by terran and protoss having more options and zerg having a much harder time collecting the information that is needed in order to make correct decisions in any given situation.
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How is anyone sure that BW is balanced? In what way? It's rather an assumption (dogma), and as hard to prove, as this study here in the OP.
Yeah, zerg has larva management, which is very unique, and the more I watch replays and VODs, I'm not even sure in BW it has reached perfection. It seems so impossible to perfect.
But... this perfection could be irrelevant. If the race could win enough without reaching it..
p.s. + Show Spoiler +I'd appreciate a study on the volatility factor of major Zerg players. If it turns out their results are the least stable of all races (i.e. major ups and downs), it could be because sometimes they hit nearly optimal larva management, and sometimes they don't, adding more randomness to their results.
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@figq you are right, it is an assumption. It is an assumption because the results from all the games played in broodwar history as far as we can see makes the correlation that, the game is to some degree what we the gamers considered balanced competition. and of course correlation is not causation.
@logic i think bw zerg depend on their decision just as much as sc2 zerg, information gathering for zerg is just has hard in sc1, I do agree that terran with the marauder kite and protoss with the force field cause a lot of problem for zerg's early game. On the account of being reactive or being proactive it depend heavily on the player's style in sc1, but in sc2 players seem to think that there is not much room for them to be proactive given the available units on each match ups. I think there are room for improvement there from the player side. What is viable and what is not, is not yet set in stone, this game still young, need players with creativity like TLO and boxer to lead the way.
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EPT
