Hi there. There is talk going on around that Zerg have slight advantage right now and even Blizzard confirmed there are problems in at least the broodlord and infestor play.
In the wake of MLG Anaheim I'm posting the MLG Columbus TvZ stats: Note: Only groups and beyond to finals are taken into account. Open play qualifying is not count. T vs Z 30:44 2:1 0:2 0:2 1:2 2:1 1:2 1:2 2:0 1:2 0:2 2:0 0:2 0:2 1:2 2:0 1:2 2:1 0:2 1:2 1:2 0:1 0:2 2:0 0:2 2:0 0:3 2:4 2:0 2:1 Terran 32% Zerg 68% 29 sets were counted, 74 matches total.
On July 27 2011 18:05 SenorChang wrote: Is this Pool Play and Championship bracket onwards? Pool play only? Need some more context
i would guess that, there's 32 matchups in that, he lists 29 so i guess he may have merged some extended series or missed one or two
but that's besides the point. look at who played there. from a terran pov you have MMA smashing everyone and then, er... that's about it. thorzain beat idra in a dead rubber, knocked out machine as you'd expect. fenix took out sheth which isn't a huge surprise. all the good terran players either got knocked out by other terrans/protoss, or by objectively superior zergs.
and it's 72 games total, a hilariously low sample size.
MMA accounts for exactly 1/3rd of all TvZ wins. It is a small sample size but one problem might be NA terrans were not as well prepared to play on some of the larger GSL maps that were featured and some of the new trends/strategies zerg had come up with at that time.
Especially MLG Columbus is a bad sample. Of the five Korean Pros there (not counting Moonan and Select), three played Zerg (Moon, Losira, July). At the bottom of group play were ... Gretorp, Moonan, Select and TLO. If there had been three Korean Terrans instead of three Zerg, the balance might have flipped to the reverse.
The Korean Zergs obviously skewed the results. Also, there are more good NA zergs than NA Terrans. Notice that the sole Korean Terran there, SlayersMMA demolished every single Zerg there, and won without dropping a set. He lost 1 game to Losira and won every single other TvZ, even against opponents like Idra and Sheth.
Looks to me in every matchup, the better player won, and there were more good zergs than good terrans. There wasn't a single TvZ where I thought, "wow, Terran is doing multi pronged drops, creep denying, pressure expanding, beautiful tank positioning, excellent marine splitting, oh w8 Z has infestor/broodlord game is over." When the Terran outplayed the Zerg, the Terran won. When Zerg was down 50 food, the Terran won.
On July 27 2011 18:26 Aesop wrote: Especially MLG Columbus is a bad sample. Of the five Korean Pros there (not counting Moonan and Select), three played Zerg (Moon, Losira, July). At the bottom of group play were ... Gretorp, Moonan, Select and TLO. If there had been three Korean Terrans instead of three Zerg, the balance might have flipped to the reverse.
This. Not only the number of games is too small to be relevant, but the number of players is also too small. Even if you have a sample of 1 000 000 games if its the same two players playing them all it doesnt mean anything, since the skill difference between them can be huge.
On July 27 2011 18:26 Aesop wrote: Especially MLG Columbus is a bad sample. Of the five Korean Pros there (not counting Moonan and Select), three played Zerg (Moon, Losira, July). At the bottom of group play were ... Gretorp, Moonan, Select and TLO. If there had been three Korean Terrans instead of three Zerg, the balance might have flipped to the reverse.
On July 27 2011 18:08 AnxiousHippo wrote: A sample size of 74 is rather small...
This is true, however the top 20 ppl on the korean GM ladder is a good sample size by all accounts.
I dunno. It's so hard to do statistics when you have to factor in that people can be better than other people.
the top 20 accounts on kr ladder doesnt mean anything since they are not all different players. I believe sc is playing on a lot of accounts.
you also have to consider that a lot of teams will be practicing in-house, so it's not necessarily the case that everyone is laddering 100% seriously and the top 20 are terran,
There's been a very bad balance problem with the match-up for a while (same unit is the same problem in pvz too), but no one wants to hear that. They only want to hear that the game is "balanced" and that you should keep working on finding a solution to the problem (such as broodlord infestor mass corruptor lategame).
Let me dare to say...
Just a little bit of insider info or perspective - of course a pro has the mindset to overcome anything that could potentially be imbalanced by hardwork/practice, but if you were to talk with the majority of pros online, both T/P, they will tell you that they are very unhappy with how powerful infestors currently are.
If anyone has watched a certain person's stream b4, you can see him beating some korean progamers by massing almost exclusively infestors/lings/broods...yeah...
The infestor counters every unit essentially, including it's counters, such as ghost and templar, it even counters all mech units (with good control) just from researchin neural. That's the nitty gritty of it, and regardless of the optimistic mindset that pros need to have to keep improving, the game is not balanced at all right now. Actually, let me rephrase - the game is pretty closed to balanced, the infestor...is not.
No one wants to really be the person to put that stuff out there, but i don't mind stepping up and pointing that out. Maybe other pros could comment too...
For TvZ the match-up itself, following up what I just said, regardless of MLG/GSL stats, I think it would be perfectly balanced if not for how powerful the infestor is right now, especially with broods. It's also really strange that not a lot of korean progamers have experience with the infestor metagame yet...or maybe they just recently started to learn about it.