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On August 17 2010 06:20 Sadistx wrote:
It's been mentioned several times already that the ladder is designed to have ~50% win rate among all players. However those stats are meaningless since balance can only be aptly judged at the very top.
The part about the matchmaking is true. The system is designed to give 50% win/loss rate to everyone it can.
However i wouldn't say its true that balance can only be aptly judged at the very top. Balance in the silver/gold leagues is a very important thing to blizzard as well because they don't want to have a game where it's unbalanced for 99% of players. However it is also true that generally if you can balance for the top of the league it should be mostly balanced for the rest of the league.
A real problem right now is determining if the whole TvZ situation is a result of true race imbalance or if it's mostly map imbalance due to too many chokepoints on maps. Its probably a combination of both.
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You already hit upon the reason. Somebody did a study on BW proleagues in Korea and the win rates of T over Z, Z over P and P over T is around 52-54%. The overall win% for each race would be 50%, even though none of the matchups are.
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Another casualty of being mislead by statistics.
It's one thing to have numbers but another thing entirely to interpret the numbers correctly.
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OP: Do a small thought experiment with me, will you?
Imagine that you know 3 players among the vast numbers of players on Battle.net. Skill-wise, two of them (who play Terran and Zerg) belong in mid Platinum. Another one (Protoss), skill-wise, belongs in mid Gold.
However, in this hypothetical example, Zerg is so massively underpowered compared to the other two races, that other T and P players who belong in mid platinum will generally crush Zerg players of the same skill level.
So, our Zerg player, who skill-wise belongs in mid platinum, gets bumped down to Gold. There, he's facing other somewhat-skilled Zergs and less-skilled Protoss and Terran players. There, he can compensate for his weaker race with his greater skill. And he will achieve the same winrate as the less-skilled Protoss in Gold, and the equally-skilled Terran in Platinum; roughly 50%.
Battle.net matchmaking is DESIGNED to make everyone have roughly the same winrate over a large number of games (unless they're at the very top or at the very bottom), ergo the winrate and rating of the pack of players at the middle means squat. The only things it could reveal would be matchup-specific imbalances; for instance, if you had T>Z, Z>P, and P>T, then players would tend to lose versus the race they're weak against and win versus the race they're strong against.
If you want to know whether imbalances exist, go look at the very top; if one race is hugely over-represented, it's a fair assumption that some of the players there might not belong at the very top, skill-wise, while others of the under-represented races who don't quite make it rank-wise, do belong there, skill-wise. Or, ask the progamers; if they, who know and understand the game best of all, generally agree on an imbalance, then that's also telling.
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The game could appear completely balanced at most levels of play, but where it really matters is at the top between pro-gamers. A significant imbalance may only become apparent when the players have a certain amount of skill. That is why I don't consider these kinds of numbers to be necessarily revealing.
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Kyrgyz Republic1462 Posts
You need tournament statistics for this to make sense, ladder is useless.
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saying that because each race wins 50% of their games does not mean things are balanced, people just love to believe that in my opinion. hypothetically, if protoss had some sort of uber strat that was unstoppable once executed versus a terran but due to poor play and mistakes made by the protoss, the terran was able to win 50% of the time. but the other 50% of the time, the protoss did everything right, and no matter what the terran did or how he prepared, it resulted in a loss. is this balanced just because there's a 50% win rate? i surely don't think so
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Statistics are meaningless when it comes to balance and I don't understand why everyone keeps trying to bring them up. Skill is always the number one factor when it comes to winning. And so you will never see 70% TvZ winrate because the system will just pair Terrans up with better Zergs until they start losing.
Example: Let's say the #1 Zerg is equal in "skill" to the #1 Terran, #2 Zerg = #2 Terran, and so on. If there's an imbalance, the system will eventually work itself out so the #5 Terran is playing the #5 Zerg (who he can beat because of the imbalance) and the #4 Zerg (who he can't beat, because he is less skilled). 50% win rate. And so every single Terran would have a 50% winrate because there is always a better Zerg player, even with the imbalance. The problem only arises at the very top: the #1 Terran cannot lose. But for EVERY OTHER TERRAN there will be a 50% winrate.
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On August 17 2010 06:28 Zato-1 wrote:
OP: Do a small thought experiment with me, will you?
Ah, okay. Thank you for your explanation. You're the first person in this thread to actually answer my serious question in a reasonable manner, instead of simply saying, "You're an idiot, the answer is obvious". Thank you.
I think I've found some stats to back up your claims. Here's a breakdown of race rankings at each level of play: http://www.sc2ranks.com/stats/race/all/1
What's interesting to note is that the races seem to be reasonably balanced at the lower divisions, but at the top, Terran squeezes out both Protoss and Zerg.
Another thing that's kind of weird is there seems to be a lot of high-ranked Zerg in the lower four divisions, and practically no equally ranked Terran or Protoss. This seems really strange; I'm not sure what the explanation is for this.
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On August 17 2010 06:26 SlowBlink wrote:
This whole premise is flawed. What you're trying to say is that since zerg players win 50% of the time, there is no imbalance for zerg. What you don't take into account is the fact that Blizzard's matchmaking system is specifically designed so that you come out with a 50% win/loss record. Battle net will match you up against a player of equal skill so to speak, and reevaluate your skill based on whether you win or lose. With this mechanic you can have pro level zergs getting matched with plat/gold level terrans, simply because the zerg player is losing more to higher level terrans. Then when they beat the lower level players, it balances out their win/loss to 50%.
tl;dr- all this proves is that battlenet matchmaking actually works.
This. Although it seems to be designed to give most people a 55-60% W:L ratio.
It takes an understanding of how the matchmaking works to realize that you can't say the game is balanced based on these stats.
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I know blizzard likes stats and I know the stats show that terran seems to win a bit more than their fair share of games if you actually spend some time to interpret the numbers, but you don't have to be a statistician to realize that you don't have to be nearly as good of a player to win with t or p than as z. I'm random but I played zerg for about 80% of the beta and the only games I win anymore are games where I have to be significantly better than my opponent. Also zerg is boring as f to play and I've always hated the roach since phase 1 beta. I think it's going to be stuck like this for a while since it doesn't look like blizzard cares and even if they did the only way they'll fix things is by changing the values of stuff around. Maybe they'll make decrease ultralisk build time which might be balanced and even out the stats but it wouldn't make the game any better.
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The matchmaking system makes people have about 50% W/L ratio, so 50% overall for all matchups makes sense. The real problems come on the pro level, where the W/L rates are way off of 50%, sure that's only .1% of the population, but it's the more high profile part. If pro's vs. pro's all say that TvZ is imbalanced, I would tend to agree.
However, for the regular player, like the one's on TL, it probably isn't as imbalanced as we think at our level, (I'm talking mid plat to mid diamond) so the huge imbalance threads are probably unnecessary. For instance, I'm mid platinum, and I think EMP is imbalanced because I see pro's use it to great effect and rape protoss armies twice their food size, but in my games, I've only been EMP'd once. Therefore, I think all the zerg tears come from people like IdrA and DIMAGA saying that the MU is imbalanced, and that they're going to move to terran, and not from personal experience.
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Could someone please lock this please? The discussion has been pummeled into the ground OVER and OVER and OVER. We know the TvZ matchup is broken, and we know that the stats won't show either side of the arguement.
The point is, there is no reason for this thread to be here. Since everyone has talked about this so damn much, blizzard is sure to do the correct thing for the TvZ matchup, and if not, people will still complain and it will be changed again. You guys have to have a little faith in blizzard. (I am being kind of hypocritical here...I don't really like blizzards balance changes.) They listen to the community. Resolved.
Mods please lock this and throw away the key.
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On August 17 2010 06:28 Zato-1 wrote:
So, our Zerg player, who skill-wise belongs in mid platinum, gets bumped down to Gold. There, he's facing other somewhat-skilled Zergs and less-skilled Protoss and Terran players. There, he can compensate for his weaker race with his greater skill. And he will achieve the same winrate as the less-skilled Protoss in Gold, and the equally-skilled Terran in Platinum; roughly 50%.
And as I said, in your example, there would be a lower representation of zergs in diamond leagues compared to other leagues. This isn't the case - actually a higher % of zergs are in diamond than other leagues compared to the other two races. So this cannot be it.
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It looks balanced because all of the T players arent good enough/don't understand how to fully use their advantage with the race
If you looked at the games of the top 200 of each region I guarantee it'll be vastly different than grand totals.
once the strategies start becoming passed down to gold level we'll see a large tilt in the scale
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On August 17 2010 06:45 TLOBrian wrote:
Could someone please lock this please? The discussion has been pummeled into the ground OVER and OVER and OVER. We know the TvZ matchup is broken, and we know that the stats won't show either side of the arguement.
The point is, there is no reason for this thread to be here. Since everyone has talked about this so damn much, blizzard is sure to do the correct thing for the TvZ matchup, and if not, people will still complain and it will be changed again. You guys have to have a little faith in blizzard. (I am being kind of hypocritical here...I don't really like blizzards balance changes.) They listen to the community. Resolved.
Mods please lock this and throw away the key.
I'm sorry for flogging a dead horse, and I'm sorry I don't read every single message that gets posted on these forums. The question I was asking was in all earnestness: I very much did not know why the statistics did not jibe with anecdotal reports.
I was not trying to accuse anyone of being daft or biased. I simply wanted to find an answer to my honest question.
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Yeah its the AMM that gives a close rating - which does work well. However, that doesnt mean the matchups are balanced.
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Someone should compare the Win/Loss of +50 Diamonds vs other +50 Diamonds only. This should give more of a realistic statistic.This could obviously bad changed to +25 diamond etc.
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this is too misleading cause of AMM
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EPT
