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On April 08 2011 04:41 Liquid`Tyler wrote:Show nested quote +On April 08 2011 04:07 Swarmed wrote:
Tyler beat IdrA in showmatches and is clearly a great player whom I really like listening to when he talks about Protoss. I just wonder how much he actually understands about playing Zerg and I have my doubts there. There may or may not be a reason why most Zerg pros feel something is lacking. Maybe they're just all whiny by nature. Maybe Tyler understands the metagame better than all of them combined. Or maybe not. IT'S A MYSTERY. I can see mistakes that zergs make every time they lose. That's all a player needs is to know their mistakes and fix them. I never see a zerg player play perfectly and lose. And I see weaknesses in the way I play pvz that zerg hardly ever take advantage of but obviously I'm not gonna shout from the tops of mountains about how to beat me.
Ofcourse you will see misstakes from a zerg who loses a game.....
The question is, did he make more misstakes and more severe misstakes then his opponent?
Was it possible to have the information needed not to make the misstake?
When I watch games, it seems to me that you can do MUCH more misstakes as protoss and still win games. If you do any misstake as zerg its extreamly unforgiving, and makes it incredibly hard to make a comeback. Someone would call this imbalanced.
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On April 08 2011 07:29 Rhodan wrote:Show nested quote +On April 08 2011 04:36 Logo wrote:
The thing about it all though with the opening door analogy is that zerg isn't struggling because they can't beat certain strategies or whatever. That's usually what people complain about at the moment, but eventually they seem to get solved out at least somewhat reasonably. But despite this, Zerg doesn't feel any better. For every step forward Zerg takes so do T/P and Zerg ends up in the same place they were before.
2-Gate transitions were hard to handle, Zerg finally starts to figure them out (+ help with zealot/roach changes) and Protoss starts pylon blocking/cannoning. Zerg responds by getting used to gas openings while P refines 3-gate expand and macro compositions. Zerg starts to step up mid-game pressure and P players get better with ambiguous openings, force fields, and mid game defenses, Zerg starts to do well with larger armies and Protoss players start using blink more heavily to boost their cost efficiency. And so on. At every step Zerg players fight to refine and safely adopt new styles to bring themselves up even with Protoss players and every time it feels like P just takes one more step forward to stay ahead. (Same with T in different ways kinda).
Now I'm not saying this means imbalance, but it's essentially why it feels so shitty to play Zerg sometimes. Zerg players make adaptations, mostly through cutting corners and exposing weaknesses to out of favor strategies or cheese, and they quickly just get outpaced by improvements in the Protoss play. I fail to understand your point here? You're saying that every time zerg players adapt to protoss builds, protoss should just keep using the same builds and lose? Zerg will win for a while and Protoss will adapt to this new style and start winning and it will flip back. How is that imbalanced? Look at TvP at the moment, a lot of Terrans are struggling because they haven't had to adapt their play style vs Protoss since the beta. Now, Protoss have finally figured out how to play PvT and its only natural that they're going to win more often - once Terran players start to adapt it will flip back around. Thats the natural order of a strategy game, as the metagame becomes established players come up with new ways to counter it by changing their play style.
The issue is that zergs don't really start winning massively when they figure out the current state of terran/protoss - they often just go back to being ~50/50 until terran/protoss figures out some new way to kill them.
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Australia8532 Posts
Oooh i missed this live i can't wait to here about the State of the Game :p
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8751 Posts
On April 08 2011 07:30 debasers wrote:
Tyler, the big problem with your analogy and the reason why it doesnt prove or have any relevance at all, is that even if the game was imbalanced (presuming it isn't now), your arguments would still make sense, so what you're saying is always valid, but the game might be really imbalanced and in the end it really does not matter.
Then I think my analogy worked perfectly on convincing you of my position. Part of the reason I posted it is to help people understand why I wouldn't want to talk about balance.
It's not an argument for the game being balanced.
It's primarily an argument against the idea that Day[9]'s position is faith-based. He sees closed doors that need to be opened. That doesn't require faith. If you've opened 2 doors out of 5 and haven't found food, it's sort of a ridiculous question to ask "do you really think there's any food at all?" The only thing to do is open the rest of the doors.
It's not cool when someone says "I've opened half the doors and haven't found my food yet, so I'm beginning to think there isn't any food behind this set of doors, so I'm gonna start complaining and stop trying to open doors. And rather than trying to open these other doors, I'm just going to keep going through the ones I've opened until one day food miraculously appears (Blizzard patch, lol)."
Nothing good comes out of players using tournament interviews as opportunities to opine on balance. When Blizzard wants opinions on balance, they ask privately. Blizzard can see the games. They can see the statistics.
Some people wanted a general discussion about ZvP balance on SOTG? I don't want to do that. Give me a specific game and I'll discuss it. But I'm not gonna listen to a bunch of shit I already know, like what builds and compositions are going on when Zergs lose games to Protosses, when the punch line never comes -- "this is why we lose 51% of the time instead of 50% of the time" -- because no one is capable of making that argument.
No zerg is consistently doing the things I think a zerg ought to be doing so I don't want to listen to their complaints. And then what, people are gonna say "well what are those things" and again it comes down to specifics. I can look at a game where a "lesser skilled" protoss beats a "more skilled" zerg and point out how the zerg could have won without doing anything excessively risky. It's different every game.
And seriously wtf, like I'm gonna start brainstorming with every zerg on how to play zvp better. What if there was only one player with a high win rate vs zerg. Is it reasonable to ask him how zergs can beat him? No, of course not. Protosses figure shit out and then copy each other, so we're all like clones of the best possible protoss player. So what if we all had a high win rate vs zerg? There's nothing about that phenomenon which makes it ok to ask us how to beat us. No protoss is going to enthusiastically enter such a debate because every argument he makes to win the debate is bad for his game. The zerg has already laid all his cards on the table in the games that he has played.
And even when we're really kind and explain how a zerg fucked up, they fall back to this notion of "well you're expecting us to play way better than you are. that's not balance" Well, first of all, we're usually pointing out how you can win the game. Not how you can win 50% of the time, which is what would be balanced. We're pointing out what you could have done to win that game. If you do that move well, you win like 90-99% of the time. So yes, it should involve you outplaying your opponent. A lot of the time it doesn't even involve that. It just involves you being smart and knowing all your options.
Second of all, this is really funny for me in the case of idra. Cuz as far as I can gather about what the reasoning was between him and artosis picking zerg, it was that if you are a really good player mechanically (someone who doesn't fuck up a gameplan when you've got a good gameplan) then zerg is the best race to play. Sure it might be hard as fuck to play zerg in such a way, but idra has those mechanics, so he can be equal to that challenge, and have a great win rate without ever taking risks. Well gee golly they might have been right. But such a gameplan has been too hard to make. And the mechanics are too difficult. Too unforgiving. Or maybe it's just imbalanced.
But at this point if you ask me if you double the current skill level and have a zerg and protoss play each other, my true inclination is to think that zerg would seem overpowered. So I think they were right, but it just hasn't settled the right way so far. Or maybe they just didn't understand that saturating 4 bases is arguably a worse position than saturating 3 bases, because of supply issues, and it's imbalanced....
In any case, I think they wanted to have a race like sc1 terran, that is beautiful and super strong when played well, but can fall apart terribly and lose games due to one error. It's just that no one has been able to break that threshold and show the strength. The potential is still there, and zergs admit it when they say "you expect us to play better than you." The most mechanically demanding race is the one with the most "potential" but the one that looks the worst when not crossing the current skill threshold.
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8751 Posts
On April 08 2011 08:10 MonsieurGrimm wrote:Show nested quote +On April 08 2011 07:29 Rhodan wrote:On April 08 2011 04:36 Logo wrote:
The thing about it all though with the opening door analogy is that zerg isn't struggling because they can't beat certain strategies or whatever. That's usually what people complain about at the moment, but eventually they seem to get solved out at least somewhat reasonably. But despite this, Zerg doesn't feel any better. For every step forward Zerg takes so do T/P and Zerg ends up in the same place they were before.
2-Gate transitions were hard to handle, Zerg finally starts to figure them out (+ help with zealot/roach changes) and Protoss starts pylon blocking/cannoning. Zerg responds by getting used to gas openings while P refines 3-gate expand and macro compositions. Zerg starts to step up mid-game pressure and P players get better with ambiguous openings, force fields, and mid game defenses, Zerg starts to do well with larger armies and Protoss players start using blink more heavily to boost their cost efficiency. And so on. At every step Zerg players fight to refine and safely adopt new styles to bring themselves up even with Protoss players and every time it feels like P just takes one more step forward to stay ahead. (Same with T in different ways kinda).
Now I'm not saying this means imbalance, but it's essentially why it feels so shitty to play Zerg sometimes. Zerg players make adaptations, mostly through cutting corners and exposing weaknesses to out of favor strategies or cheese, and they quickly just get outpaced by improvements in the Protoss play. I fail to understand your point here? You're saying that every time zerg players adapt to protoss builds, protoss should just keep using the same builds and lose? Zerg will win for a while and Protoss will adapt to this new style and start winning and it will flip back. How is that imbalanced? Look at TvP at the moment, a lot of Terrans are struggling because they haven't had to adapt their play style vs Protoss since the beta. Now, Protoss have finally figured out how to play PvT and its only natural that they're going to win more often - once Terran players start to adapt it will flip back around. Thats the natural order of a strategy game, as the metagame becomes established players come up with new ways to counter it by changing their play style. The issue is that zergs don't really start winning massively when they figure out the current state of terran/protoss - they often just go back to being ~50/50 until terran/protoss figures out some new way to kill them.
This is only natural until zvp gets revolutionized. Like zerg was better than protoss in sc1, and the best protosses could do is take risks based on metagame to get to 50/50, until pvz got revolutionized and zergs had to pretty much start from scratch. Until protoss has to start from scratch, it'll be hard for zerg to dominate.
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United States22883 Posts
Tyler, I know you're married and all but if you want to become butt buddies and move to Utah, I'm all for it.
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wow tyler you're going on a crusade against balance whine? sincere good luck to you.
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Tyler, you're awesome. I completely agree.
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Geoff is right, everything Tyler says is insightful as fuck. It's even better when you read all that in his chill tone.
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The 5 doors analogy is very good. And I will agree that viable strategies have not fully developed yet. It's plain and simple: The game is still young, there are patches every few months that potentially change the meta-game for certain match-ups, one viable strategy gets developed and is cloned (as Tyler put it) until another viable strategy comes along and defeats it.
Maybe I'm in the zerg minority, but when I lose games I know I fucked up somewhere, be it macro/micro. Because chances are if you play a near perfect game executing some safe build, you probably wont lose.
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On April 08 2011 09:36 Liquid`Tyler wrote:Show nested quote +On April 08 2011 07:30 debasers wrote:
Tyler, the big problem with your analogy and the reason why it doesnt prove or have any relevance at all, is that even if the game was imbalanced (presuming it isn't now), your arguments would still make sense, so what you're saying is always valid, but the game might be really imbalanced and in the end it really does not matter. Then I think my analogy worked perfectly on convincing you of my position. Part of the reason I posted it is to help people understand why I wouldn't want to talk about balance. It's not an argument for the game being balanced. It's primarily an argument against the idea that Day[9]'s position is faith-based. He sees closed doors that need to be opened. That doesn't require faith. If you've opened 2 doors out of 5 and haven't found food, it's sort of a ridiculous question to ask "do you really think there's any food at all?" The only thing to do is open the rest of the doors. It's not cool when someone says "I've opened half the doors and haven't found my food yet, so I'm beginning to think there isn't any food behind this set of doors, so I'm gonna start complaining and stop trying to open doors. And rather than trying to open these other doors, I'm just going to keep going through the ones I've opened until one day food miraculously appears (Blizzard patch, lol)." Nothing good comes out of players using tournament interviews as opportunities to opine on balance. When Blizzard wants opinions on balance, they ask privately. Blizzard can see the games. They can see the statistics. Some people wanted a general discussion about ZvP balance on SOTG? I don't want to do that. Give me a specific game and I'll discuss it. But I'm not gonna listen to a bunch of shit I already know, like what builds and compositions are going on when Zergs lose games to Protosses, when the punch line never comes -- "this is why we lose 51% of the time instead of 50% of the time" -- because no one is capable of making that argument. No zerg is consistently doing the things I think a zerg ought to be doing so I don't want to listen to their complaints. And then what, people are gonna say "well what are those things" and again it comes down to specifics. I can look at a game where a "lesser skilled" protoss beats a "more skilled" zerg and point out how the zerg could have won without doing anything excessively risky. It's different every game. And seriously wtf, like I'm gonna start brainstorming with every zerg on how to play zvp better. What if there was only one player with a high win rate vs zerg. Is it reasonable to ask him how zergs can beat him? No, of course not. Protosses figure shit out and then copy each other, so we're all like clones of the best possible protoss player. So what if we all had a high win rate vs zerg? There's nothing about that phenomenon which makes it ok to ask us how to beat us. No protoss is going to enthusiastically enter such a debate because every argument he makes to win the debate is bad for his game. The zerg has already laid all his cards on the table in the games that he has played. And even when we're really kind and explain how a zerg fucked up, they fall back to this notion of "well you're expecting us to play way better than you are. that's not balance" Well, first of all, we're usually pointing out how you can win the game. Not how you can win 50% of the time, which is what would be balanced. We're pointing out what you could have done to win that game. If you do that move well, you win like 90-99% of the time. So yes, it should involve you outplaying your opponent. A lot of the time it doesn't even involve that. It just involves you being smart and knowing all your options. Second of all, this is really funny for me in the case of idra. Cuz as far as I can gather about what the reasoning was between him and artosis picking zerg, it was that if you are a really good player mechanically (someone who doesn't fuck up a gameplan when you've got a good gameplan) then zerg is the best race to play. Sure it might be hard as fuck to play zerg in such a way, but idra has those mechanics, so he can be equal to that challenge, and have a great win rate without ever taking risks. Well gee golly they might have been right. But such a gameplan has been too hard to make. And the mechanics are too difficult. Too unforgiving. Or maybe it's just imbalanced. But at this point if you ask me if you double the current skill level and have a zerg and protoss play each other, my true inclination is to think that zerg would seem overpowered. So I think they were right, but it just hasn't settled the right way so far. Or maybe they just didn't understand that saturating 4 bases is arguably a worse position than saturating 3 bases, because of supply issues, and it's imbalanced.... In any case, I think they wanted to have a race like sc1 terran, that is beautiful and super strong when played well, but can fall apart terribly and lose games due to one error. It's just that no one has been able to break that threshold and show the strength. The potential is still there, and zergs admit it when they say "you expect us to play better than you." The most mechanically demanding race is the one with the most "potential" but the one that looks the worst when not crossing the current skill threshold.
Very well said dude. I'm keeping my balance opinions to myself for now (since I'm a lowly diamond with much to learn), but everything you've said is spot on. And I don't want SOTG to be one big balance discussion either, that would get boring (and frustrating).
Personally I think idra's problem is he gets tunnel vision when he's frustrated. If and when zergs figure out more optimal ways of playing the game in the future, idra will be able to capitalise on the new styles with his amazing mechanics. But I don't know that he has the strategic mind to come up with those new strategies himself.
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8751 Posts
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Fuck the door. Just break the wall. Genius.
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I wonder what is true - balanced until proven otherwise or the other way around ?
If we assume that the game is balanced then at what point it can be considered imbalanced ? Tournament results prove that ? The overall ratio of zergs making deep runs in cups ? The majority of zerg pros agreeing that something is wrong ?
And if we assume its imbalanced should zerg players just sit there silent taking a hug voidray/colo dick up their asses and smile ? Watching how lesser skilled players win the prize money just because they play protoss ? Of course they are going to speak out.
Until the hypothetical fifth door will be found zergs are screwed. Fix the imbalance now and WHEN and IF the door is found and it skewes the match up in the other direction balance it out again FFS. Dont make zergs wait for some magic solution.
P.S fifth door = we need to use more nydus worms
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Australia8532 Posts
On April 08 2011 10:16 Liquid`Tyler wrote:i've just had an epiphany! here's how zerg can win + Show Spoiler +
I had the same epiphany last night .. but i was just thirsty :p
Oh no, Oh no, Oh no!
OH YEAH!
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On April 08 2011 09:47 Jacuzzi wrote:
Geoff is right, everything Tyler says is insightful as fuck. It's even better when you read all that in his chill tone.
Agreed. That was a great post, and I have to agree.
Of course it is difficult to know if Zerg is truly imbalanced, or if they simply need to unlock more of their potential.
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Okay, let's stretch this metaphor as far as we can. Let's say there are a huge number of doors, so many that you can't see all of them from where you stand. Let's say the zerg players have opened up every door you can see. How many times will you send them out saying "I'm sure there are more doors you haven't tried, or unlocked, that I can't see," before you might come to the thought that there's something inherently wrong with the race?
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On April 08 2011 10:36 hinnolinn wrote:
Okay, let's stretch this metaphor as far as we can. Let's say there are a huge number of doors, so many that you can't see all of them from where you stand. Let's say the zerg players have opened up every door you can see. How many times will you send them out saying "I'm sure there are more doors you haven't tried, or unlocked, that I can't see," before you might come to the thought that there's something inherently wrong with the race?
if there are a million doors, and you can see 100 of them from where you stand, and youve opened 100 out of 1000000 would you come back with the opinion that "not enough of my options work"?
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This is what I think is kind of funny about IdrA's obsession with balance -- If IdrA absolutely, truly believes that ZvP is broken, then he has absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain from trying crazy, risky shit and just having fun.
That's what I think Day 9 was alluding to with his suggestion of massing infestors. If playing conservative doesn't work, then fuck it. Just go extreme and see what works.
I remember there was a phase when Dimaga was struggling (this was the pre-roach patch) and he starting all-ining and trying "extreme" strats. And in a way, I think that experience helped him, because all of a sudden he can break out a 6-pool against Nestea without second guessing himself.
I myself suck at Starcraft, and was really struggling against ZvP. But then I discovered the Aquanda build, started using mass mutas, and most Protosses are ragequitting against me now (It doesn't matter how many blink stalkers they have if your one-shotting them with your 36 mutas).
I'm not saying its a viable strategy at all, but I'm having a lot of fun.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://drivingwhiledumb.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/koolaidman-554x600.jpg)
