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When balanced is discussed, most of the time numbers are shown, winrates, statistics etc.
But do we really need them to determine balance?
Here is my 6pool allegory:
Lets say a hatchery, a drone, a queen and an extractor all cost 5000 minerals. Also lets assume that a 6pool always has a 50% chance of winning a game.
What would happen?
Every TvZ, the zerg player would do a 6pool. Overall TvZ statistics would be 50%. If that would be the only way to determine balance, would you say that TvZ is balanced?
Obviously not. What is really wrong here is the balance of the diversity. The 6pool strategy is balanced, but not the 7pool, not the hatch first builds, not the speedling builds.
Zerg players would claim that, but terran players would always point at the statistic and say "if you buff the drone now buy reducing its cost, zerg would be completely overpowered!!1"
No. It would give zerg another option, and then this option has to be balanced, too. And another option, more diversity, makes the game more watchable.
Today, I think the TvZ matchup is watchable, but the patch that changed the ghost completely removed it from the terran lategame army. Instead of balancing it, it was changed so that it is nearly useless, and that lowered the diversity of the game.
The matchup can still be "balanced" in a way that every other unit or strategy is fair, but the ghost is not balanced in my opinion. So we dont see ghosts in tvz now, that is no balance problem for the matchup, that is lower diversity.
In a perfect world, every unit would have its place in a game, everything would be balanced so that every strategy is viable. I would like to see patches and metagame go that way, to more diverse gameplay - that is balance in my opinion.
thanks for reading 
  
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The Ghost is still usable in Terran armies, in EMPing and sniping Infestors. The problem that was addressed in the patch was that now, all tier-3 Zerg is no longer countered by Ghosts. Ghosts, I think, were intended to be a niche spellcaster unit that are good for specific situations, not something that is the backbone and main damage output of your entire army. I think the metagame is still shaky after this last Queen patch, and it'll be a bit of time before standard strategies really solidify for TvZ.
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Nice idea but I'm pretty sure that this is one of the most difficult things in the world. You basically want every unit to have a place in a strategy....and none of these strategies should be stronger than another one? It's not only about options, eventhough it is a part of it. It is just incredibly difficult to balance every strategy there is and people always come up with new ones anyways.
Let's say that every zerg strategy has a winrate of 50%, but suddenly your 6pool is getting overpowered. Would the matchup be imbalanced right away? Don't think so, especially because the terrans will figure out how to be safe against it, but then there are problems with other strategies etc etc. The metagame is very decisive IMO. The last balance patch brought us the Queen buff and ZvT winrates were pretty imbalanced, but eventhough it's still not completely balanced, Terrans figured out a way to deal with it and new strategies came up etc etc.
Also... what will you balance? The individual skill and execution is the key to winning. For example Bio: I think it has a great potential because of drops, multiple attacks at the same time and a well split Bio force with medivacs can take out big armies. You might say: But it's much harder for the Terran to win with Bio and you need to be faster and micro and overall just more skill, which is right in my opinion TBH, but the potential is, what makes it good.
Well I hope you get my point, in the end, balance is not as easy as it looks I guess.
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The exact same can be said of the game before the Ghost nerf, as every TvZ was just a question of whether or not T could reach a critical mass of ghosts and mass snipe his way to victory.
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I acknowledge that the previous TvZ lategame with mass ghosts was ridiculous but I think the nerf was done in a bad way. I know qxc touched on this in a blog right after the nerf and proposed that the snipe damage would stay but decreased vs massive units exclusively. This would solve the mass snipe vs endgame zerg tech but also maintain a wider area of viable usage for the snipe ability.
I still miss being able to open a TvT with early ghosts, sniping scvs and marines in one snipe T_T
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Russian Federation683 Posts
But why would you suppose a 6-pool has 50% chance of winning a game ? If it's all a Zerg can do, it is bound to always fail. Now I understand it was an allegory, however you pick a matchup that we'll consider balanced and deprive the Zerg of almost everything, then claim that if it that situation they have 50% winrate, and still have once all their stuff kicks in, then the "buff" to their race has not shifted the balance.
You cannot postulate "6 pool works half the time" here, because it won't, and it won't because less options means more predictability. The matchup is necessarily more favouring to Zerg after the buff.
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The ghost was too powerful before, but I think it could have been nerfed differently. The ghost deathball against Zerg was actually imbalanced. There was a game of MVP vs Darkforce in the GeForce Pro/Am where Darkforce controlled the entire map (Shattered Temple), and MVP was not mining and contained to 1 base. But Darkforce couldn't kill him because MVP had the ghost deathball.
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The ghost was OP but the current metagame of sticking to your t1 army and use counters to their t3 is just terrible to watch.
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I dont want to talk about ghosts, i want to discuss the way we determine balance.
i just want to point out that winrates are not the right way.
---
btw, why do they give "the terran metagame time to adapt strategys, to find a way to deal with the queen buff" but on the other hand the ghost was changed right away.
moreover, there are so many things that coutner the ghost: lings, roaches, banelings, hydras etc.. even fungal can kill so many ghosts at once.
"when the terran player maxes on ghosts he can just snipe everything" this is just completely wrong. first, you need 2384234 apm to do this. second, the zerg let him get that many ghosts. third, ghosts are slow and run out of energy very fast.
tvz without ghosts is like something is missing 
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You decided to complain that ghosts no longer counter everything, and you got slammed for it. If you don't want to talk about it, remove it from the OP.
Pre-snipe nerf, every late game terran was just spamming ghosts, and r-clicking everything to victory. There are so many things that counter the ghost in theory, but most players aren't braindead enough to build only ghosts and ignore tanks, marines and medivacs.
Some common sense logic to refute your arguments: It takes 4 fungals to kill a ghost, taking a grand total of 13.3 seconds. Before the infestors reach the ghosts, tanks will kill them. If that doesn't happen, the ghosts have a 13.3 second window to snipe the whole damn zerg army. And that's excluding medivac heal.
If you watched any TvZ pre-nerf it just boiled down to mass ghosts. Even me, who's nowhere near the skill of pro players, could spam snipe and kill everything with my limited apm.
Btw, snipe costs 25 mana. Run out of energy fast? Not when there's 20 of them.
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On August 05 2012 21:49 graNite wrote:I dont want to talk about ghosts, i want to discuss the way we determine balance. i just want to point out that winrates are not the right way. --- btw, why do they give "the terran metagame time to adapt strategys, to find a way to deal with the queen buff" but on the other hand the ghost was changed right away. moreover, there are so many things that coutner the ghost: lings, roaches, banelings, hydras etc.. even fungal can kill so many ghosts at once. "when the terran player maxes on ghosts he can just snipe everything" this is just completely wrong. first, you need 2384234 apm to do this. second, the zerg let him get that many ghosts. third, ghosts are slow and run out of energy very fast. tvz without ghosts is like something is missing
You dont want to talk about Ghosts? I have the feeling you want to ...
On Topic:
I dont think we have other ways to determin balance than the winrates ... I mean u cant say one strategy is stronger that the other and nerv it right away, its always more difficoult because you have the choise of different strategys.
In the end one guy wins, so something he has done must have been stronger (imbalanced).
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Ghosts aren't useless right now it's just no Terran really decides that emp is good against infestors and even then they still don't use them as a soft counter to T3 as opposed to the hard counters of Vikings and marauders
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I don't think that terran's ghosts are unusable, its just that they haven't found a new niche to fill, they filled an older one against GGlords, but then Blizz said that the unit was not "intended" to fill that role. As BS as that answer is, the Raven and other units can really fill the roles that have not been set and the Ghost could be amazing when SC2 moves from death balls to smaller scale unit harrass with attacks and counter attacks as we have been seeing more of a transition to that recently, take HasuObs game vs. EG.ThorZain, today Hasu pulled off tons of counter attacks which won him the game.
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