I don't think Protoss is the worst race - Page 6

Terran: 117 (31%)
Zerg: 148 (40.5%)
Protoss: 104 (28.5%)

On July 16 2022 21:28 Magic Powers wrote:


Huh? I'm offering a valid explanation, not claiming it to be definitive. I'm only saying it's a better explanation than "protoss is too weak". Lacking pepresentation appears to explain the lack of titles better.

On July 16 2022 21:38 Magic Powers wrote:


Now we're getting somewhere. Yes, zerg overrepresentation demonstrably didn't lead to them winning the most titles, that's exactly why winrates don't sufficiently explain the number of titles, because the title count defies expectations. You can't explain both observations (zerg and protoss lack of titles) with the same reasoning, and neither can I. I'm not claiming to have the correct explanation, I'm disputing the claim that matchup balance explains the lack of protoss titles, and offering alternative explanations that are at least equally valid.
I'm arguing that pointing to titles for evidence of imbalance is generally flawed.

On July 16 2022 21:38 Magic Powers wrote:


Now we're getting somewhere. Yes, zerg overrepresentation demonstrably didn't lead to them winning the most titles, that's exactly why winrates don't sufficiently explain the number of titles, because the title count defies expectations. You can't explain both observations (zerg and protoss lack of titles) with the same reasoning, and neither can I. I'm not claiming to have the correct explanation, I'm disputing the claim that matchup balance explains the lack of protoss titles, and offering alternative explanations that are at least equally valid.
I'm arguing that pointing to titles for evidence of imbalance is generally flawed.

On July 16 2022 19:16 Magic Powers wrote:


I'm not going to stop posting just because you ask me so nicely, tyvm. And I know very well what I'm talking about, because I've been around since the very early days of SC, I know the historical development of most of the strategies, discoveries and trends, I've followed the pro scene and a decent portion of the amateur scene, and I have a good understanding of statistical fallacies.
The balance debate has raged for decades and it was never settled. It's never been proven beyond doubt that PvZ is actually imbalanced, it's only been shown that protoss players are losing more than zerg players. That by itself is not proof of imbalance, it's only an indicator that needs supporting evidence, of which none has ever been found.

2012 marks the end of the most competitive era of BW because of the migration of much of the pro scene to SC2. The latter is not up to debate, it's a fact.

Furthermore, this observation "the biggest change in balance over the last couple of years has been tvp swinging slightly towards being terran favoured." - i.e. terran having a positive record against protoss post-Kespa - is a perfect example of the observed winrate changing over time by several percentage points. Several percentage points. Ring a bell? 54% ZvP winrate? If this is a natural development, then it can just as well happen in the other matchups without any changes to the balance. Somehow your argument is that ZvP can only be imbalanced as demonstrated by the 54% ZvP winrate, even though provably another matchup statistic in TvP has demonstrably shifted over several years, which can just as much happen in ZvP as well (in either direction).

You're lazer focusing on the ZvP winrate to support your hypothesis of imbalance, but you're ignoring other data points when they point to some unknown variables being in play that contradict your hypothesis.

Edit:
Furthermore, you're contradicting yourself. On the one hand you're rejecting the claim that the late Kespa era was the most competitive era, on the other hand you're outright admitting that JD's and Bisu's skills have strongly declined.

"Jaedong is garbage and has been for years, and Bisu chokes so hard that it's fairly obvious he's not even the best protoss player in a competitive setting."

Please point to one player post-Kespa who has a winrate of >70% in any of the matchups, other than Flash. I'll wait.

On July 16 2022 16:19 Magic Powers wrote:


Most people regard the years leading up to and including 2012 the most competitive era, because that's when the trio of Flash/JD/Bisu was dominating the scene. That era is almost always mentioned first.
Today's standard of games is quite significantly lower, albeit still at a very high level.

On July 17 2022 03:38 Magic Powers wrote:


The reasoning still doesn't suffice. If you explain terran's disproportionate number of titles with it being the best race, while also explaining zerg overrepresentation with zerg being a better race than protoss, then we should observe a terran overrepresentation that is significantly greater than zerg. This is why the explanation of representation being caused by winrate doesn't add up.

On July 17 2022 03:38 Magic Powers wrote:


The reasoning still doesn't suffice. If you explain terran's disproportionate number of titles with it being the best race, while also explaining zerg overrepresentation with zerg being a better race than protoss, then we should observe a terran overrepresentation that is significantly greater than zerg. This is why the explanation of representation being caused by winrate doesn't add up.

On July 17 2022 03:56 Magic Powers wrote:


You're making valid points, but you're also presenting them in favor of today's competition.

I can argue that more difficult execution opens the door to new possibilities, and thus to different strategies altogether. Muta micro for example is highly execution-dependant. Post-Kespa a lot of the top zerg players failed to demonstrate the necessary skills to perform proper muta micro. Over the past few years some have improved it by a large margin, and top zerg players are now once again able to execute it much better.

During the Kespa era every single pro zerg was required to have strong muta micro, it was considered an essential skill. Things like that push the overall competitiveness of the field up.

Furthermore, I have a hard time buying into the idea that competitiveness goes up even though incentive goes down. Entertainment value is far more important for a streamer's income than being good at the game. The pros have admitted to this.

On July 17 2022 06:14 Magic Powers wrote:
I think you guys are not getting the logical contradiction.

In the Kespa era progaming scene, the racial distribution of zerg is severely above expectation, terran is slightly below expectation, and protoss is severely below expectation. And expectation would be 1/3 (since virtually no one in the pro scene played random).

Observation: Zerg is overrepresented (in tournaments and overall in the pro scene, at the highest level). Terran is a lot more appropriately represented (in tournaments and overall yada yada highest level). Protoss is underrepresented (in tournaments yada yada highest level).

If 1) then why is zerg overrepresented, but not terran? The terran winrate (at the highest level) is higher, therefore the winrate doesn't explain the zerg overrepresentation, since it's not leading to a terran overrepresentation.

On July 17 2022 03:23 TT1 wrote:


Today's gameplay is on another level, competitiveness doesn't matter as much when the game isn't fully discovered yet. Execution and game knowledge has a huge impact on balance.

All sports evolve with time, BW is no different. With more time people become better at decision making, macro, micro, multitask, builds get optimized and the game completely changes. It's kind of like you're unlocking new levels, players are able to do things they weren't able to do before, that in turn gives them more options b.o-wise.

It's the reason why 2h muta basically killed 3h muta for example. When high lvl pros started to mineral boost every game ~3 years ago, all the pros were forced to learn mining optimizations so they wouldn't fall behind. It's the same reason why as more time goes on builds become more and more greedy (players game knowledge evolves, their micro becomes good enough to defend with the bare minimum while maximizing their eco). It's the same reason why PvT is moving away from arbiter to mass speed shuttle storm style. Basically I'm giving you examples of why past games are meaningless when you're talking about todays balance, because the game wasn't played at the highest level execution-wise and b.o-wise.

You can think of it like this, if we take our modern day ladder ranks (1500/C being the default), how would you rank all the different eras, skill-wise? The earliest era would obviously be the lowest rank and eras would rank up as more time went on (due to mechanics/execution and game knowledge improvements).

It's no different than game knowledge/execution among players today, a D/C/B/A/S rank player doesn't have enough game knowledge or execution to understand the intricacies of higher level play, which ends up clouding their perspective. This applies to everyone up until the highest lvl of play.

TLDR: you over-think/over-analyze things when the issue is much more simple, just look at the stats of the highest lvl players in any era (compare them against their own era, not against all eras)