800 people at the top compared to over a million on 1v1 ladder, it would seem that P is the overpowered race allowing their general population to skew towards diamond rather than T being overpowered since T players overall skew towards the low end of the ladder...
Racial Distribution in Patch 1.0 - Diamond Ladder - Page 7
Forum Index > SC2 General |
Kryptix
United States138 Posts
800 people at the top compared to over a million on 1v1 ladder, it would seem that P is the overpowered race allowing their general population to skew towards diamond rather than T being overpowered since T players overall skew towards the low end of the ladder... | ||
StarDrive
90 Posts
On September 02 2010 09:31 ToxNub wrote: Sure, but this data doesn't say that. That's your opinion. That's all i'm saying. Well by this argument then all the data in support of General Relativity could have been manipulated by aliens to make it look like General Relativity provides a good model of the universe when in reality Newtonian mechanics is better. The data does not disprove that hypothesis so to anyone who believes otherwise: "It's just your opinion." | ||
imbecile
563 Posts
On September 02 2010 09:14 NATO wrote: Alternative explanation: Racial differential in skill scaling: I think this has very little to do with skill scaling. It's simply a result of promoting for wins and demoting for losses. So someone who wins a lot quickly disappears from the lower ranks, and in the lower ranks the win percentages necessarily are always near the perfect balance. That's the point of the whole system. At the top there is no more promotion, so any discrepancy will accumulate there. When there is a group that consistently adds up more wins than everyone else, there will be more of that group at the top. And the most obvious group that consistently gets more victories than everyone else is terrans. And just the fact that they are terrans is a sufficient explanation. And it's the only explanation that the data allows. Because every other explanation needs data that is not available, and frankly is a hard sell with a lot of unreasonable assumptions. Now what exactly causes this high terran win rate, that can't be swept under the rug, that is a a different question. All you can say for now, that it is more likely/easier for terrans to win. | ||
Synk
United States297 Posts
Only time will tell and I imagine Blizzard, having a lot of experience in balancing games, knows this and they are waiting to do anything drastic. So its no surprise 1.1 is a relatively small patch, if these kind of numbers continue though for say 6 months I bet they start making some pretty sweeping changes. | ||
tacrats
476 Posts
On September 02 2010 08:31 Mortecian wrote: It means that at the highest level of play, there are more terrans than all other races combined. If you are looking at the whole population, for instance, let's say that population is "Highest level of play", then there is no need to speak of sample size... you're looking at the whole population, there is no estimate. Is this totally indicative that there is imbalance? No. But it supports that idea. - If many experts are saying terran is imba, it again supports it. - If blizzard says terran is imba and will tweak in 1.1, it again supports it. - If experts in other races do not refute that terran is imba, it again supports it. So, saying that at the top level of competitive play, terran is imbalanced is supported by: - Data above. - Experts opinion (Idra, Sheth, Morrow, etc. etc.). - Designers opinion (Blizzard Patch 1.1 status update). Whether it's true or not, I'm not really vested in or against... as I dont play starcraft 2, but these three sources all point toward the same idea and that gives the idea weight. So many signs pointing to one thing, but people still will defend it until their deaths. its amazing. | ||
ToxNub
Canada805 Posts
On September 02 2010 09:27 blacktoss wrote: I'm only going to respond to #2. Um, the GAME [sic] is not a population. The GAME is what it is. The players of the GAME form a population. The data discussed in this thread is not talking about the population of all players. If it were, then it would be useless, because it is not a random sample. It is all diamond players. If you want to make inferences about a population from a subset of that population, you want to use random sampling. But that is not the reasoning used here. The first line of reasoning is to ask whether there is any racial bias in the distribution of players in higher level diamond league that is not due to random chance. The answer is, without a shadow of reasonable doubt, yes. There is such a bias. The next question is "What causes this bias?" And in this case, there can be many claims trying to explain the bias. Why is racial imbalance a good one? The claim is not that one is trying to generalize from a 'sample' (diamond population) to a 'population' (the GAME), it is one of measuring one variable with another. The variable we have to work with is racial distribution in upper diamond league. The variable we are interested in is racial balance. When you try to infer one variable from another, the one you measure is called a proxy. This is not the same as an inference about a population from a sample. Please do not conflate the two. It is an inference about a population from a sample, you simply word it in a way that obscures it. You want to say "the current players in top diamond have a racial bias". Yes, the data shows that. However, then you want to pretend (and this is a subtle difference) that it implies that any new top diamond player is likely to follow the distribution. You must, if you intend to propose that the game, which affects any player that uses it (and not just the current top diamond players), is responsible. A simple example: I flip a coin to determine the "preference" for heads or tails, let's say I do that for different brackets. But for each bracket I flip it a different number of times. 1300 (10 flips): 5:5 1400 (5 flips): 3:2 1500: (1 flip) 1:0 Now I could make a big graph of this, inflate the number of trials on the low end, and make a thread about coin imbalance. You would come into my thread, and you would ask "Is there any preference bias in the distribution of coin flips in higher level coin league that is not due to random chance. The answer is, without a shadow of reasonable doubt, yes." Think about that for a second. It doesn't matter if all of the coin flips in 1500 is the entire population, you must consider a NEW sample's likelihood to follow this distribution. That is the whole point of a confidence measure. | ||
ToxNub
Canada805 Posts
On September 02 2010 09:37 StarDrive wrote: Well by this argument then all the data in support of General Relativity could have been manipulated by aliens to make it look like General Relativity provides a good model of the universe when in reality Newtonian mechanics is better. The data does not disprove that hypothesis so to anyone who believes otherwise: "It's just your opinion." WTF are you talking about. YOU are manipulating data and providing your own indepedent opinion as a substitute for an accurate interpretation. If you have to fill in holes in the data with your opinion, then it's no longer data, it's your opinion. | ||
STS17
United States1817 Posts
| ||
Cloak
United States816 Posts
| ||
ReplayArk
Germany23 Posts
40-50% more people play Protoss than Terran @Cloak, I would like to see the source for this number. | ||
TehForce
1072 Posts
| ||
Sisko
United States121 Posts
Whether this has to do with the perceived preference for terran or an actual one is an interesting topic that is hard to evaluate. My gut says the trend TvZ represents the array of viable openings on one side that Z just gets to suffer through until midgame. | ||
noD
2230 Posts
| ||
Grend
1600 Posts
Edit: that does not mean Zerg is up. | ||
Three
Japan278 Posts
| ||
TitleRug
United States651 Posts
On September 02 2010 10:51 Three wrote: Nice to read comment from people who have heard the word "sample size" before saying that it isnt large enough. He isnt using part of the population of high ranked players to show a trend for high ranked players. He is using ALL of the high ranked players. He isnt saying anything about what effect race has below diamond level. I think by "sample size" they mean the low amount of top level players compared to the rest of the population. | ||
Three
Japan278 Posts
On September 02 2010 10:52 TitleRug wrote: I think by "sample size" they mean the low amount of top level players compared to the rest of the population. Thats not what hes looking at | ||
Sentient
United States437 Posts
On September 02 2010 10:52 TitleRug wrote: I think by "sample size" they mean the low amount of top level players compared to the rest of the population. Right, but it's still a decent sample size. Medical studies on rats are often done with only 8-10 samples and those are generally statistically sound. Someone needs to actually crunch the uncertainties instead of letting people merely assert that the sample size is too small. If you think it's too small, do the uncertainty calculations to prove it. | ||
esaul17
Canada547 Posts
Is it not equally possible that Protoss players who approach perfect control start losing to Terran players with lesser control at around the 1200 level and this just gets worse as the ratings get higher? It seems unfair to say "At lower skill levels Protoss can win more" when it seems just as likely that the figurative skill ceiling of Protoss is simply lower, causing more skilled protoss players to be left at the lower levels. And man I feel sorry for Zerg in the TvZ match up. | ||
TitleRug
United States651 Posts
maybe you're right, I lost track of what people said. On September 02 2010 10:55 Sentient wrote: Right, but it's still a decent sample size. Medical studies on rats are often done with only 8-10 samples and those are generally statistically sound. Someone needs to actually crunch the uncertainties instead of letting people merely assert that the sample size is too small. If you think it's too small, do the uncertainty calculations to prove it. don't quote me, I'm just assuming that's what those people meant. | ||
| ||