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Poland3751 Posts
So Khaldor started a topic about balance.
The entry is rather brief so there is not that much to think about. Because I maintain few statistical articles on LP I have some data aggregated, mostly about top4 appearances in premier tournaments.
This data is maybe not ideal but top4 finishes in the tournament are definitely the best players at any given competition.
First: what I'm actually showing. I'm defining period windows - i.e. 12 months - than I'm counting Top4 places available at that period (4 * tournaments that ended on a month in a given period) and I'm calculating how big percentage of this spots was grabbed by representative of each race. The percentage part is important - without it it's a lot harder to compare state of things between different months.
Each period is identified by last month of that period so first twelve month period in StarCraft 2 is 2011-07 and encompasses all tournaments between 2010-08 and 2011-07 (twelve months).
I started with 12 month period, as can be expected. This will mostly show the general trends in SC2:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/3DrRm.png)
As can be seen the SC2 balance started horribly - terrans grabbed nearly 1/2 of spots in all semifinals while zergs get only a little more than 1/5. Interestingly protoss started nearly ideally.
As can be seen - the lines finally meet but by the end of the year the imbalance starts to show up. Whether this is a fluctuation or not it remains to be seen. Note that this statistics does not include all-zerg semifinals in HSC6.
The 6 months period is not as interesting and does not bring that much to the table.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/LFE7x.png)
It is however worth to note that two things. First - while zergs are not hugely dominant, the terrans are showing signs of huge underperformance in the most recent periods. Second - the difference between zergs and protosses in 2012-12 is smaller than on the graph for 12 months period.
The 3 months period is a lot more dynamic.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/MwQ3I.png)
If we look at early 2010/2011 terran dominance, we can see what true imbalance really is. Zergs is hitting all time high - 40%. Worth to note - the zerg dominance is no way as high as protoss holiday dominance. However terrans are falling and they are falling hard.
Finally the final graph I prepared:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Oj1fB.png)
The graph is already erratic and hard to use as a basis of anything. Let's give it a try, though. The zergs are on a rise however that's nothing we didn't see. Protoss of 2012-11 or 2012-07 or terrans of 2012-04. All that happened before.
So on the graphs it doesn't look that bad. Is it?
It is relevant to remember that balance - in statistics builds up. Qualifications, points in a "season", seeds based on results - that's all influencing what we can see, especially now when we have many ends of a seasons. To a degree it may be clouding the pure statistics.
Additional factor is that the end of the year brought us tons of tournaments and zergs' relative short period of dominance means tons of wins for their race.
The other thing is the perception. We are more accustomed to zerg underperforming than to zerg dominating. Also - arguably - there is a perception of matchups. Generally - I believe - mirror matchups are less entertaining than non-mirror matchups. But among mirror matchups TvT is arguably the most interesting one. PvP (especially in the period of 4gate dominance) and ZvZ are generally boring to watch. I don't have any solid data to back up statements in this paragraph, but I think I'm not mistaken that much.
So back to the essential questions:
Is the game imbalanced? Apparently it is imbalanced but for the terrans.
Are the zergs overpowered? To soon to tell. It is possible that HotS will hit the shelves before we can say for sure - and by that time we can assume the question will be irrelevant anyway.
TL;DR: It's not that bad as it appears to be, lol. Unless you are terran, of course.
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Imo tournament results are a bad way to measure balance because there aren't enough samples. More importantly, HotS has little to no tournaments, and that's where most of the balance tweaking is going on. Even then HotS will definitely have more tweaks, and I'm expecting some more big ones to happen too.
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Poland3751 Posts
HotS has to be balanced - like WoL - on all levels of play from bronze league up. However from the e-sports point of view the balance has to be measured on the top of competition. If there is even one zerg that can outplay every terran around than there is good argument that the matchup isn't really imbalanced.
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On December 23 2012 03:56 nimdil wrote:
HotS has to be balanced - like WoL - on all levels of play from bronze league up. However from the e-sports point of view the balance has to be measured on the top of competition. If there is even one zerg that can outplay every terran around than there is good argument that the matchup isn't really imbalanced.
SaviOr would disagree with you. That is where great players are made, they take horrible matchups and flip them around. Furthermore, that is not a good argument whatosever, especially when you consider how MU %win rates for singular players don't reflect only skill, they reflect mind games and other things that make some players great.
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It would be nice to change the colours like its the most common way (terran: blue, toss: yellow, zerg: red)
Found it a bit confusing at first.
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Canada8033 Posts
On December 23 2012 03:56 nimdil wrote:
HotS has to be balanced - like WoL - on all levels of play from bronze league up. However from the e-sports point of view the balance has to be measured on the top of competition. If there is even one zerg that can outplay every terran around than there is good argument that the matchup isn't really imbalanced.
What the heck does balanced for bronze league even mean? If the game is fine at high levels, the one that needs to improve isn't the game, it's the player. Anything that happens in bronze is meaningless in terms of balance.
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The thing is bronzes players shouldn't have to be at a disadvantage when playing someone of their own skill level. Certain races have a harder time doing things that would be easy for another race to do (micro, macro, upgrades). The point is that these skills should be equally difficult to execute for all players. These skills should not be easier or harder for a specific race to execute like it is now.
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On December 23 2012 03:56 nimdil wrote:
HotS has to be balanced - like WoL - on all levels of play from bronze league up. However from the e-sports point of view the balance has to be measured on the top of competition. If there is even one zerg that can outplay every terran around than there is good argument that the matchup isn't really imbalanced.
Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to balance the skill required for each race throughout the entire ladder. Even in BW, one of the best balanced games at the highest level, protoss was still known as the ezmode 1a2a3a race in the lower levels and terran was known to be harder to play.
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It would be even more interesting to control for the race distribution within each tournament, especially considering that invitational only tournaments tend to go for even race distribution (as opposed to qualifier only tournaments, where the race distribution would theoretically reflect racial balance), but that data probably doesn't exist or would be really hard to gather.
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It's a shame that the amount of race players weren't accounted for. Because, what would happen if there are more zerg players in tournaments in general? Wouldn't that skew the average for other races?
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On December 23 2012 04:31 docvoc wrote:Show nested quote +On December 23 2012 03:56 nimdil wrote:
HotS has to be balanced - like WoL - on all levels of play from bronze league up. However from the e-sports point of view the balance has to be measured on the top of competition. If there is even one zerg that can outplay every terran around than there is good argument that the matchup isn't really imbalanced. SaviOr would disagree with you. That is where great players are made, they take horrible matchups and flip them around. Furthermore, that is not a good argument whatosever, especially when you consider how MU %win rates for singular players don't reflect only skill, they reflect mind games and other things that make some players great.
this!
a very skilled player can outplay an opponent, even though the odds are against him
and if he does outplay the opponent, it's never a question of balance but why the other player got outplayed
imo, wol is quite balanced at the moment (i'm terran)
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EPT
