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I think all zerg progamers can agree that ZvP for them is the easiest match up by default. Why is this nearly always the case?
I have 2 reasons to explain for this disparity in results.
1. Protoss lack of early game scouting in combination of Zerg's volatility/adaptability.
2. Disparate risks/rewards inherently favor Zerg in this match up.
If anyone can pull up the statistics of how often PvZ ends with Zerg cheesing/ all-in or doing some variation of some aggressive strategy that can still transition into mid/lategame, I'd like to see that. Because when I watch this match up, it seems protoss loses to some kind of aggression play before it develops to mid/late game at least 30% of the time or more.
This goes into my 2nd point, we all should agree that the higher the risk, the higher the reward should be. If zerg does a 4 pool that's a high risk but the reward is you'll win the game if its successful. I think that's a fair trade-off for the decision you make. No one should agree that an all-in strat you decide to do should go unpunished if it fails. But that's kind of what we are looking at here in the ZvP match up albeit not as high of a degree as a 4 pool high risk/high reward, but still the ratio between the risk that zerg takes to do a hydra bust or ling bust is relatively small compared to the advantage that zerg gets even if it doesn't outright win them the match. Hydra bust in the past back in the late 2000s used to be punished heavily if it failed and Protoss would have a macro advantage by mid game but modern Zerg strategies today have become so efficient that Zerg can just force Protoss to make cannons and then time up their drone macro cycles to come back into the game without a hitch and it's like it becomes still an even game at worst for Zerg.
My solution to solve this PvZ imbalance would be for blizzard to patch Zerg hydra upgrades to either cost a little more or take a little longer. Because if you think about it, this hardly affects ZvT and doesn't affect ZvZ at all. It only applies to early zerg aggression against protoss, when they have shitty options for scouting. Probe will get killed by speedlings and basically have to hope zerg is incompetent enough to allow a probe to sneak in to scout Hydras at the right time, or wait until corsairs which can often times be too late where Protoss is forced to sacrifice probes to stay alive, and then zerg equalizes any economic advantage Protoss should've had. I know many will say well Corsairs technically can scout a hydra bust as long as stargate timing was fast enough and the sair goes along the pathway hydras would go, but even then Protoss is still forced in a lose-lose scenario because they have to sacrifice their economic advantage to still stay alive even if the game continues. Their econ advantage is equalized because of probes having to buy time for cannons warping in. The intel that corsairs give is still too late to punish zerg for going for a hyper aggressive strategy.
This doesn't even mention or go into late game PvZ where Zerg has more cost efficient defense and atking options. A sunk, lurker, spore defense can hold almost a maxed Protoss army, think about Larva vs Rain in ASL season 3. Yes I realized Rain suicided his army, but the point still stands, Zerg static def is much more cost effective than Protoss static def options. It seems Protoss has to stay much more on top of Zerg in skill if he wants to win more. In late game, defiler swarm + cracklings and lurkers can take down any defensive structure and protoss have to rely on HTs and reavers stationed at the proper locations because of army movement is much slower, reinforcing battles and war of attrition nearly always go in zerg's favor as long as they were relatively evenly matched in skill and performance in the game.
In early game, and late game, it's said Zerg maxed out army is much scarier than maxed protoss army. So the only way for Protoss to win is to take advantage in mid game or late game exchanges to cap Zerg from exponentially growing out of control. Once Zerg starts winning, it becomes much more impossible to win, where as the reverse isn't true. If Protoss starts winning, Zerg can make a comeback more easily than Protoss can in the same position. And looking at Zero's macro hydra style, it seems few protosses can actually handle a huge hydra army build where there's just not enough units for Protoss to be pumping out and the supplies become relatively even in number. When historically Protoss should always be 20 supply ahead. Protoss seems to have much less windows of advantage and have a higher hill to climb at each stage of the game as well as possibilities of comebacks. How often do you see Zerg winning despite Protoss being 30-50 supply ahead vs Protoss being 10 supply behind if we take into account Zerg units take much less supply so the equivalent scenario would be Protoss being 10-20 supply behind.
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Even if it does need one (I don't think it does), it's not getting any. So further discussion is utterly useless.
Anyway, all balancing is being done by maps, not by patches from Blizzard. Afaik, last balance patch was 1.15 or something and it boosted zealots, nerfed storm and nerfed spawning pool.
Idk how and why people are unwilling to grasp this in 23 years of BW - Blizzard (thankfully) won't make balance patches for this game. It's all up to mapmakers to give challenges to the races.
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Can you explain your reasoning why you don't think it needs a change? Unless you want to create maps always in Protoss favor to help the ZvP imbalance and make rush distances always longer , and limit map pool diversity and variation for creativity. I understand that maps help balance match ups, but when one match up is heavily skewed, I think you should still create the races to be relatively equal as much as possible and then use maps as more a secondary measure for balance, because if you don't address the main root issue, it'll just be masked under different seasons of maps and ASLs where performance can just be chalked more directly to the map pool rather than be a small factor. We saw this with ASL season 5, where the map pool was heavily Protoss favored, and guess what we had more Protoss and one of the few ASL Protoss victories. Any other season where PvZ maps were skewed to favor Zerg, we can predictably see there's less chance for Protoss success to a big enough degree that it matters. I think people want a more fair racial balance first and not have to think based on the map pool which race will prevail.
I think it's to the benefit of the e-sports scene to make the match up more balanced. Appealing to what Blizzard has done in the past isn't much of an argument of objectivity. You're simply appealing to authority, saying well since blizzard isn't interested in fixing it, therefore there must not be anything that needs to be changed. I don't buy that circular reasoning. And besides this is a discussion of what SHOULD happen, not whether or not it WILL.
How do you address the fact that Zerg's aggressive early game strategies go unpunished while Protoss suffer in more lose-lose scenarios? Remember, the higher the reward of the strategy should be held accountable by a similar risk. Zerg faces not much risk in many ZvP games when they decide to go for higher reward strategies instead of a macro game.
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yeah. remove protoss from the game.
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On October 07 2021 04:48 JoinTheRain wrote:
It's all up to mapmakers to give challenges to the races.
Um, well let's just say that the mapmakers have done a very poor job at challenging zerg so far. It's been a few years.
I disagree with the premise though. The game has had imbalances and they're obvious to most people by now, but overall BW has had a circle of life sensibility to it form the start, which is Terran beats Zerg, Zerg beats Protoss and Protoss beats Terran.
So the balance is actually a trade-off. The balance by map-makers theory is a fallacy perpetuated by white-hat gamers that has very few credible examples in real competitive play.
The reality is, Protoss has been losing to Terran more than expected and that's why they're at the bottom of the pile.
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Maps balance BW, end of story.
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Across ASL + KSL RO4 appearances, P showed up 20 times, T 18 times, and Z 22 times. In the last three seasons, it is true P has struggled with appearances aside from Mini last season. But, let's not get carried away here by recency bias.
In a pro scene with a tiny pool of relevant players, we're more likely to be biased by the prevalence of championship (or near championship) level players. The reality is P doesn't have that many anymore, and they took a huge hit when Rain left the scene. Really, it's just been the same suspects: Snow, Best, Mini, Bisu. Stork has always been solid, but if we're being honest, he's a notable step below the others. You can kind of-sort of make a case for Shuttle, but not really.
Terran lost Last, and Flash carries nearly half of T's RO4+ showings in ASL. Take him out and your results plummet. Other T's lately are doing better, but let's see how they perform over multiple ASL's.
You're then left with your top tier Zergs: Larva, Hero, Zero, Soma, JD, Soulkey, Effort. Not to mention at least 3-4 more notables (i.e. Action / Shine) who aren't quite championship caliber but are still dangerous in tournaments.
ZvP has historically been challenging for P but not to the point where it is in need of a balance. P's outside of your top 4 drop off pretty heavily and nothing about the results stands out as a massive imbalance problem, other than what we already knew.
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Of course Blizzard won't patch anything but I think this is still an interesting discussion.
OP is correct in that Hydra bust (or 973) is probably the only all-in strat in the game that can transition very well into midgame. Game 1 between Queen and Snow yesterday is a prime example. Snow played a standard, solid game but the disadvantage in build order put him behind whole game despite not making any notable mistakes.
If you look at all the cheese in the game, nothing is as frequently used as Hydra bust, and they are either scout-able or can be dealt with by micro. In a properly executed Hydra bust, you can't scout on time and no amount of micro can save you.
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I just proxy 3gate in the center to fix this issue.
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Blizzard did in fact increase the cost of Hydralisk Den upgrades in their most recent balance patch. Of course that balance patch was 20 years ago, but hey who's counting? 
This is one of those cold day in hell requests. The korean pros during the creation of StarCraft Remastered specfically told Blizzard to never touch anything involving balance. This includes the "derpy Dragoon" AI pathing that Blizzard said they could improve but the pros said no to that because it would disrupt game balance.
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,
ZvT - Terran has the slighter advantage, in a game where no side makes a mistake Terran wins.
ZvZ - Randomess, you either instantly play from a position of advantage or disadvantage depending on your choice of BO and who gets scouted first with the overlord.
ZvP - Zerg is OP, make it harder for Zerg.
How good does Zerg look now? If someone wants to play Zerg for all three matchups then you can't look at one matchup in isolation and suggest something to be changed, you have to take all matchups into consideration.
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which zerg gamer agree zvp is the easiest?
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Yeah I wish you had more playable openings as P that don't involve placing 1st pylon in one specific position to make a tight wall FE and rely on expensive corsairs to get critical survival info every game while causing rather little threat, I loved PvZ more in the era where 1 base openings were thought playable but they aren't really [save for some mixing up of 2 gates mind games] because of the need for corsairs to scout or defend mutas almost always. I think it started kinda same time as muta micro trick was discovered eh. Makes it impossible to defend without corsairs so you can't for example do archons plays into robo if lurkers and stuff like that you basically just need the corsairs.
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the intern won't be too happy to hear this!
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I’ve always wanted to see the DWeb upgrade moved from the fleet beacon to cyber core. It’d prob make dbl gate cair openings way too strong but it’d be worth seeing on a test map. Maybe it can be upgraded at the cyber core after temp archives or adun is built.
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Maps balance BW, end of story.
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After than 20 years, people still talk about balance of the best balance game ever. There is only the fact: T = P = Z. Today, Arto lost a game just by one zealot and he said that game is great game and so fair with so much angry. But I've never seen he says that, when he beat 10000000 zerg players in less 5 minutes.
I wish I can beat Zerg like him. I am one of people watch his stream so much. I come the stream before it starts and go out after it ends every day. But I can't beat any Zerg players from 1000 to 1800 mmr. I have 49% win rate from 7580 games with 1683 hours play game.
This is my 200 games that I recorded
The first 100 games:
TvP: 19-30 38%
TvZ: 8-14 36%
TvT: 10-10 50%
Free win: 9
The second 100 games:
TvP: 18-24 42%
TvZ: 4-20 20%
TvT: 13-10 56%
Free win: 11
I don't think Terran is weaker than Zerg, maybe everyone agrees with me. I think Terran = Zerg but I am so weaker than Zerg. All of players even have strengths and weaknesses severally. Do you know win rate TvZ of Flash is the worst and TvT is the best?
Playing well instead of cry, whining, complaint to the balance of StarCraft. It's balance but you are not.
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/KupqYHH.png)
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Fun fact: if you check the result of all ASLs you'll notice that ZvP has a losing record in about half of them. And trust me, it doesn't get any easier below ASL levels.
I do believe the T>Z>P>T anecdote is an outdated axiom from Proleague days. I'd say ZvT had been zerg favored since the fall of 1-1-1 and PvZ is almost perfectly balanced (at top levels, at low levels P is favored). It's always funny to see protoss players single out 973 as the problem while conveniently overlooking the strength of gateway expand and the raw power of the midgame protoss army.
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imo PvZ would be fixed if sairs could lift like phoenixes and scouts had cloak
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Can you guys address the root issue
Disparate risks/rewards inherently favor Zerg in this match up especially in regarding to the 973 hydra bust.
It's an objective fact that zerg takes much less risk relative to the reward of outright winning the game or resetting Protoss econ to be ahead of them or at worst have an even game while getting all the benefits of the low risk cost they take.
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EPT
