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Zerg is the most underrepresented of the three races taking players from all leagues into account, globally. If you are willing to presume that the 8.65% of players who play random either have no race preference or just enjoy playing random for the challenge, that leaves you with what should be ~30.45% for each of the three races if they were all played equally. However, only ~20.26% of players play Zerg, across all leagues and regions.
These statistics are of course for the 1v1 bracket. Surprisingly, they get even worse in the team brackets! For instance, in the 4v4 Random bracket, Zerg is played by 15.49% of players! That is less than those who play Random, and less than half of those who play Terran or Protoss each!!
So, the question is, why do less players prefer Zerg as their race, and why is this magnified in team games? Is Zerg harder to learn? less interesting to play? underpowered? Thoughts? How does this inform current Zerg players in terms of strategy?
1v1 Stats: http://sc2ranks.com/stats/us/1/all
2v2 Stats: http://sc2ranks.com/stats/us/2R/all
3v3 Stats: http://sc2ranks.com/stats/us/3R/all
4v4 Stats: http://sc2ranks.com/stats/us/4R/all
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Zerg can be difficult race to play if you don't have game sense. Even in Brood War, the idea of when to make attacking units and when to make drones was always a difficult concept. Too much of either can wreck you.
Compare that to Terran or Protoss when you can always make workers and attacking units at the same time.
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Could it be because everywhere you go, every time a prominent English-speaking zerg player opens his mouth, people float the completely unproven claim that zerg is underpowered?
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In my experience with the typical gamer it is that too much effort is not worth the reward. A lot of players like Zerg but are quickly put off by the higher learning curve (in my opinion). As a result they simply just race switch and go on their way.
The other thing I notice (and it tends to be more prevalent with Blizzard's games) is that a lot of people are wagon-jumpers or FotM players. They go to online forums, see the pages of QQ posts about ZvT balance and go queue up as Terran. Its the OP thing to do and you'll get instant wins! Mark my words, after Terran gets a balance patch all these players will jump ship to the next FotM race be it Zerg or Protoss. I saw it in WoW, and I'll see it here.
Fortunately these are the players that tend to leave games after the next big thing is released. Diablo III should provide some relief after they jump on that wagon too.
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this is the same with SC1
i started out playing toss because it was the 1a2a3a race, building cannon d was also very intuitive. you control fewer units in total because each fighting unit was at least 2 supplies. so protoss was the noob race.
terran on the other hand, almost every unit has a manually activated skill, like stim, siege, etc. you cant just 1a to victory.
zerg is the hardest to play for beginners. from the get go, when to get overlord and when to get 2nd hatch is not a simple decision for a beginner.
so ya, the population breakdown seems to make sense.
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On August 11 2010 00:11 kajeus wrote:
Could it be because everywhere you go, every time a silver English-speaking zerg player opens his mouth, people float the completely unproven claim that zerg is underpowered?
fixed
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I don't find it surprising, Zerg is the harder race to play because they units were given low health overall so it isn't advantageous for many zerg players to attack head on which seems to be the trend everyone likes so far, however I think once people learn to work around this slight set back the numbers will begin to favor zerg more then the other races but don't take my word for it.
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On August 11 2010 00:11 kajeus wrote:
Could it be because everywhere you go, every time a prominent English-speaking zerg player opens his mouth, people float the completely unproven claim that zerg is underpowered? Then why is Zerg the worst represented in Korea and Latin America?
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Because people make threads about Zerg being:
- played less
- or weak
- or hard to master
Which one is true?
I dont want to know.
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1. When to make drones vs attacking units
2. Low health units, not forgiving on mistakes when you micro
3. Need to have a good macro and continously expand
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On August 11 2010 00:14 SpaceYeti wrote:Show nested quote +On August 11 2010 00:11 kajeus wrote:
Could it be because everywhere you go, every time a prominent English-speaking zerg player opens his mouth, people float the completely unproven claim that zerg is underpowered? Then why is Zerg the worst represented in Korea and Latin America?
Beats me! I'm only talking about what I know.
If you can link me CheckPrime or Cool saying zerg sucks, I'd love to see that.
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So? maybe ppl just dont wana play zerg + there are A LOT of new players that played terran and a little bit of toss in the campaign so most of them are going to choose one of these
also if each race got 1/3 of all players chances for that are very slim.
after HotS its probably gona tip towards zerg and then later after the toss add on (cant remember what it was called) we'll see more toss and after some time this number will even out.
so in maybe 2 years or more you can look at the race statistics again then we will actually gain something from it imo 
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Seems obvious to me...
Zerg simply has less units, which makes it less interesting to play. That being said I may not be the average player since I like playing random. In my experience playing terran and protoss it just feels like I can do more openings where with zerg its somewhat limited.
Please don't flame me I'm not saying zerg is one-dimensional I'm saying they simply have less attacking units. It's a fact..
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IMO Zerg is much harder to play than other races. Micro is good to have, but perfect macro is necessary as Zerg because there's just so much damn stuff to do. You need to constantly be injecting larvae. You need to constantly be spreading creep. You usually have more expansions to control than your opponent. You need to know what to make drones and when to make units. You need to control your overlords. It's just a pain in the ass to play Zerg, in my opinion, when you can just cookie cutter MMM or 4gate, either of those you can pull off with 30 APM and be fine, seriously.
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1. Zerg is the only race you don't play as in the campaign.
2. Zerg is the least standard and intuitive race. Anyone who has played an RTS before knows how to make production buildings and train units out of them but Zerg works in a different, unique and fairly confusing way.
3. Zerg has the least combat units and the least variety. Even back when Zerg was considered strong, there were many complaints that they were bland and underdeveloped.
4. Zerg is widely considered the hardest race to play.
5. Zerg is widely considered the weakest race in the game.
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Because this is the 3rd or 4th topic made this morning on zerg having problems.
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On August 11 2010 00:11 kajeus wrote:
Could it be because everywhere you go, every time a prominent English-speaking zerg player opens his mouth, people float the completely unproven claim that zerg is underpowered?
This is probably one reason. Alot of my friends who have never played RTS before picked up a copy of SC2 as it is the "next big thing". They all asked me which race to play and which was the easiest and I told them Terran and Protoss are much easier than Zerg imo. Only one guy out of about 15 now plays Zerg and he is in bronze when the rest of my friends are in gold or higher now.
The other reasons I would suggest as to why Zerg are less played are:
1. Zerg really has a reactive style of play as opposed to Terran and Protoss, what I mean by that is, what you do is Zerg is really governed by what your opponent is doing. E.g. he makes Zealots you make Roaches, he makes Banshee you make Hydra. Where as Terran and Protoss have more opportunities to choose the direction of the game. Noobs find it difficult to play well in a reactive style and simply don't do it. Hence don't play Zerg.
2. Zerg require much more macro tasks like spawning larva and spreading creep than Terran and Protoss. Terran is one click every 65 seconds, Zerg requires a bunch of actions every 30 seconds + creep spread. Noobs don't like this.
3. The campaign race is Terran. You also play as Protoss in the campaign too. I would be surprised if this wasn't a reason behind a lot of players not choosing Zerg.
4. Zerg is underpowered. Not sure if this is really true after seeing some recent games of Zerg. At high level they might be competitive I don't know. At general level it does take much more skill to play Zerg than it does to play another race. This might change over time as players get better but at the moment you can play another race and get the same results with much less effort.
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I think PaterSin hit the nail on the head. You don't get to play zerg during the campaign.
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i'm winning 64% of the time as zerg...
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On August 11 2010 00:11 kajeus wrote:
Could it be because everywhere you go, every time a prominent English-speaking zerg player opens his mouth, people float the completely unproven claim that zerg is underpowered?
zvt imbalance Is widely accepted aside from the noobs who dont know any better.
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EPT
