That is 12,5% for protoss wins. Over so many seasons and different maps. How is that not a disgrace for all of us?
Imo, our biggest failure was that in 25 plus years we still don't know scientifically how a map will pan out before it is played extensively. Not even the more standard ones. Map science? No, map guessing is what we have, that and this "standard" map dogma that lead to structural years long imbalance with terran, and somewhat zerg, dominance. If you wanted to pick up BW today with the goal of becoming the best, who in their right mind would pick Protoss? It's like deciding to play serve and volley in today's tennis. You can be good, but you won't be winning. You continue like this and the race will die out, as will pro brood war with it.
Few will contest the fact that protoss is by nature not an adaptable race. For goodness sake, shouldn't you build the maps more around that race, and let the other races adapt, as they are simply designed to be more able at it? Not because of protoss crybabies - for me, the only thing I like about protoss better than other races is their soundtrack and nothing more - but for logic sake and the good of the game?
When Patch 1.08 was released, nobody had a grasp of modern map design, modern metas, and build orders, nor were people aware of all the mechanics and tricks like Muta stacking or Stop Lurker, which were discovered much later.
The issue with Patch 1.08 isn't the patch itself, but rather the fact that it was the last one. I'm not sure why Blizzard stopped updating the game after that.
On September 16 2026 02:29 oxKnu wrote: LOVE when this happens.
You can search my posts in the original thread when the maps were first released. I claimed then and there that the maps were absolute graveyards for Protoss (even against T). So sweet to be 100% right on this.
Salute to that 910 guy that has been picking the ASL mappool for the past 5 years especially to protect the ever so delicate Terran players of any "unfair" disadvantages. What an absolute joke.
Someone in this thread brought up the argument that we have enough of a sample of games between real competitive pros over the past 20 years to SAFELY conclude that the game doesn't need a patch to balance the races. Brother, you could send a mega dataset of all pro matches of this game to the best data scientist in the world and I assure you, hand in fire or whatever the fuck you want that the conclusion would be the exact opposite. Protoss is far weaker than any of the other races.
That being said: I still think that these organizers should grow a fucking pair and fire that guy doing the maps and stop asking Terrans what they think of the maps for the next 5-10 years. Don't worry, it's a very solid race, they'll never be disadvantaged to a degree comparable to what P (and Z, sometimes) has to deal with.
910 retired from picking maps after ASL20. It is a new person/team picking the maps this year.
On September 16 2026 06:56 Rainalcar wrote: Don't forget KCM wins.
15 terran 13 Zerg 4 protoss
That is 12,5% for protoss wins. Over so many seasons and different maps. How is that not a disgrace for all of us?
Actually, that Liquipedia page hasn't been updated in over a year and a half (missing 6 tournaments). Protoss's win rate is a bit higher now:
17 Zerg wins 15 Terran wins 6 Protoss wins
That’s 6/38, or 15.8%.
Either way, it's pretty terrible. Protoss performs noticeably better in the Escore Tournament, though obviously its prestige is lower than most other events.
On September 16 2026 08:04 Lazyer wrote: i hope leta wins this tournament
Finally a man of dignity and class
Though even if he by some miracle survives Soulkey he's got either Soma or Jaedong in the semis and I have no hope of him surviving either of those two.
On September 16 2026 02:29 oxKnu wrote: LOVE when this happens.
You can search my posts in the original thread when the maps were first released. I claimed then and there that the maps were absolute graveyards for Protoss (even against T). So sweet to be 100% right on this.
Salute to that 910 guy that has been picking the ASL mappool for the past 5 years especially to protect the ever so delicate Terran players of any "unfair" disadvantages. What an absolute joke.
Someone in this thread brought up the argument that we have enough of a sample of games between real competitive pros over the past 20 years to SAFELY conclude that the game doesn't need a patch to balance the races. Brother, you could send a mega dataset of all pro matches of this game to the best data scientist in the world and I assure you, hand in fire or whatever the fuck you want that the conclusion would be the exact opposite. Protoss is far weaker than any of the other races.
That being said: I still think that these organizers should grow a fucking pair and fire that guy doing the maps and stop asking Terrans what they think of the maps for the next 5-10 years. Don't worry, it's a very solid race, they'll never be disadvantaged to a degree comparable to what P (and Z, sometimes) has to deal with.
910 retired from picking maps after ASL20. It is a new person/team picking the maps this year.
The eye test confirms some of these. Interesting how we don't get maps like Butter or Invaders as repeaters but we somehow get Matchpoint or Benzene dropped out of a helicopter every now and again. I guess Sylphid is an easy choice because it's pretty balanced in the early to mid game across all matchups. Which is where most games conclude in a short-format like ASL anyways.
On September 16 2026 07:05 Maks wrote: When Patch 1.08 was released, nobody had a grasp of modern map design, modern metas, and build orders, nor were people aware of all the mechanics and tricks like Muta stacking or Stop Lurker, which were discovered much later.
The issue with Patch 1.08 isn't the patch itself, but rather the fact that it was the last one. I'm not sure why Blizzard stopped updating the game after that.
Originally Korean online broadcast companies payed Blizzard for the game license with the agreement that the game was to stay untouched. They needed a stable game to keep running the first leagues. It made sense at that time, they need compelling stories for people to come back league after league and making changes to the game was considered a threat to the stability/credibility of the leagues. The world was simply different back then, there were no professional e-sports everything was a hit and a miss. Some geniuses thought since Starcraft was a game about space battles they needed to play in space suits. Seriously.
I'll give you another data point worth taking into consideration about this whole PvZ thing.
In the remastered era there's been the online Proleagues that have amassed a phenomenal amount of data across ASL maps. Same players, with some variation, across hundreds of games.
In all seasons there's been at least 1 or 2 very good performing protosses. Mini (who is one of the all-time goats of this format), Snow and Best. All of these guys are not great tournament performers, routinely playing below expectations in live settings. That's ok, we know from another individual sport, tennis, that this is a huge factor in determining outcomes at the end of tournaments.
That being said, it's worth noting one observation I've had over the years: initially the balance of the races WAS MUCH better in the proleagues. High variety in outcomes (even with Flash playing).
Remember KSL? Check out some of those maps. Don't tell me you don't see the skew compared to the normal ASL progression.
In proleagues, in decisive games (and you cannot motivate a BW playe rmore than winning money via proleague) the winning percentage for P is suddenly nearing that of ASL, even though the players involved are supposedly in a more comfortable format, and the maps are the same.
It's clear to me the demise of P has been a combination of 910 Terran terrorism and a consistent weakness of P in PvZ in the early game.
Quite possible that that's enough to conclude that we need a slight balance patch and the Terran organizer mafia to take a prolonged break from being around ASL or Blizzard mapmaking forums.
The problem is that all you're doing is providing evidence that the winner isn't random, which we already knew regardless. We know that the players aren't all exactly equal in skill, that there's asymmetry in their strengths and weaknesses, and it's also fair to say that given a particular map pool, the races won't all be perfectly at 50% either. We can never disentangle these factors fully or determine the "right" number of victories each race should have earned over the long run. Unless the point is that we should just blindly make the map pools more Protoss-favored for a while until we balance out the numbers again in the long run, the historical perspective is an interesting fact that doesn't help create a balanced tournament today.
People like to say we're in a Zerg-dominated era due to Soulkey x4 and Soma x2. An interesting detail is if we look at who was in the Round of 4 in those last 6 ASL's, it's 8 Zergs (Soulkey x4, Soma x2, Effort, Hero), 8 Terrans (Light x2, Sharp x2, Rush, Leta, Barracks, Flash) and 8 Protoss (Snow x4, Bisu, Rain, Best, Mini) total. In every season except for SSL/Season 18, the eventual Zerg winner was pushed to the final game in a series at least once on their way to win. 1 game from Bisu, 1 game from Flash, 1 game from Mini, all of whom are extremely capable of beating Zergs, and suddenly we could have easily had a completely different pattern.
The four seasons before Soulkey went on his fourpeat, he lost 2-3, 2-3, 3-4, 2-3 in the play-offs. It's a funny coincidence he lost four times in a row, then won four times in a row when it could've easily been more mixed. Queen won Season 9 after getting dangerously close to being eliminated by Rush in the round of 24, he could've easily lost that one game and Flash probably would've won another season if that had happened. He might still be looking for his first ASL win had that happened. That's how easily small differences can cause huge effects. Would any of that prove structural imbalance?
Snow himself is also one of the greatest catalysts of Zerg dominance. He is a fantastic PvT and PvP player who constantly makes it far by killing non-Zergs, who has a habit of getting eliminated by the first strong Zerg he faces. There's no other player in the ASL with a meaningful number of games, let alone a winning record, who is even close to being as lopsided in their winrates. Only RoyaL and JyJ come close, with the opposite problem that they're only strong vZ. During those four semi's, he beat Shine and Action in a single game, and only beat Effort in a full series. On the other hand, he had a hand in eliminating Mini and Bisu multiple times, who have both proven themselves to be much stronger in PvZ series. The other 4 recent Protoss semi-finalists all have PvZ winrates over 50% in ASL, it's just Snow that has 41%. Conversely, Soulkey and Soma have the two highest ZvP winrates in ASL (65%), whereas most other strong Zergs are in the 50-55% range. They're beating a relatively bad vZ player with their relatively good vP, which shouldn't be surprising.
This is all to show that games & tournaments at the very top have so many factors going into them that proving anything by just pointing out differences is impossible. Right before ASL S22 started, Snow beat Jaedong & Hero, then lost to Shine and Effort today, despite these players having relatively lower ZvP winrates. Bisu went 8-0 in PvZ to win the first open, only to lose to Shuttle and Rush in the ASL. Mini beat Soulkey and Effort 2-0 to win the second Open, only to lose to Queen and Effort in the ASL. These players clearly have it in them to win games against any Zerg right now on these exact maps, it just didn't happen in this particular tournament. Why these players seem to struggle more to put their online performances into offline games is an interesting question to ask. Maybe Protoss needs more players like Rain who manage to put their skill into high-stakes tournaments. A slight nudge towards Protoss next season wouldn't be the worst thing, just to seed some more Protoss players in the tournament again going forward. But a Protoss could win next season without that, and they could still lose despite more favorable maps, depending on all those other factors.
EPT![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/toY4J7f.png)
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/Qx6OxRb.png)
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/9eew9Ca.png)
