On January 19 2011 14:49 branflakes14 wrote: The GSL proves that when the game is pushed, it's fairly balanced. A bunch of Terran and Protoss wins at sub-Code A tournaments isn't evidence of imbalance.
... TWO zergs earned a spot in the ro16 and we both had relatively easy ro32 groups
You and Nestea made it through, based on skill. I think if either of you played a different race you'd still get through.
Leenock, Check, Zenio, and Fruitdealer did not deserve to move on. Fruitdealer has been playing very nonstandard and has been failing on one base. Leenock played sub-par and was unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of a (rare) good game by Rainbow. Check has bad economy management, especially compared to the players in his group (you and Jinro) I never thought he had a chance of advancing from your group. I don't think it's racial imbalance, it's just that most of the top Zergs right now aren't playing well compared to the likes of MC, MVP, MKP, and others (everyone who made the RO8 except Choya basically)
As for the original topic, the data you used was trash. TLPD is not up to date and it doesn't use all of the tournament results. Idra doesn't have a 100% winrate vs Zerg, for example.
You can't draw any conclusions from your "data"
EDIT: Or maybe I'm misunderstanding. Are these all tournament FINALS wins, or tournament results through every round?
So just because you can meticulously find all the vaguely possible citicisms about his data, no matter how miniscule or insignificant, means that that data he has put together is useless for drawing any conclusion? No need to defend your race like that, its just comical.
On January 19 2011 08:57 Silidons wrote: but yet zerg has won 2 GSL's, which if you wanted to win any tournament, you would want to win that one.
sorry but zerg UP isn't going to work, GSL has the best players in the world.
Zerg's #1 issue - complete inability to scout is somewhat negated in GSL where top zergs have the ability to snoop around match histories and more or less prepare for the opponent's playstyle.
I feel like the reason for this is that there's a lot of opportunities for protoss and terran to pressure zerg early (4 gate, bunker rush just to name two possibilities) while zerg really doesn't have that much potential to do that (9 pool doesn't work against wallins ). This might be the reason why zergs tend to lose more often in tournaments especially considering that you have to advance far in them to get to a bo3 or bo5 stage. Once zergs are there the game should be balanced imo, but bo1 feels imbalanced to me.
On January 19 2011 14:49 branflakes14 wrote: The GSL proves that when the game is pushed, it's fairly balanced. A bunch of Terran and Protoss wins at sub-Code A tournaments isn't evidence of imbalance.
... TWO zergs earned a spot in the ro16 and we both had relatively easy ro32 groups
You and Nestea made it through, based on skill. I think if either of you played a different race you'd still get through.
Leenock, Check, Zenio, and Fruitdealer did not deserve to move on. Fruitdealer has been playing very nonstandard and has been failing on one base. Leenock played sub-par and was unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of a (rare) good game by Rainbow. Check has bad economy management, especially compared to the players in his group (you and Jinro) I never thought he had a chance of advancing from your group. I don't think it's racial imbalance, it's just that most of the top Zergs right now aren't playing well compared to the likes of MC, MVP, MKP, and others (everyone who made the RO8 except Choya basically)
As for the original topic, the data you used was trash. TLPD is not up to date and it doesn't use all of the tournament results. Idra doesn't have a 100% winrate vs Zerg, for example.
You can't draw any conclusions from your "data"
EDIT: Or maybe I'm misunderstanding. Are these all tournament FINALS wins, or tournament results through every round?
So just because you can meticulously find all the vaguely possible citicisms about his data, no matter how miniscule or insignificant, means that that data he has put together is useless for drawing any conclusion? No need to defend your race like that, its just comical.
First of all, I don't play Zerg, so I'm not "defending my race."
Second, yes, you CAN dismiss the "data" because it clearly is not sufficient. It lists multiple players as having 100% winrates against Zerg when I've seen them lose against Zergs in various different tourneys. The fact that this data doesn't include hundreds of GSL games makes it pretty unreliable, too. It's like comparing football national teams without looking at the World Cup, only international friendlies.
You can never draw conclusions on insignificant data, because they're unfounded until you have a large enough sample size. Clearly TLPD is not giving us a large enough sample size of games here, if Idra is listed as having 100% winrate against Z, for example.
On January 19 2011 14:49 branflakes14 wrote: The GSL proves that when the game is pushed, it's fairly balanced. A bunch of Terran and Protoss wins at sub-Code A tournaments isn't evidence of imbalance.
... TWO zergs earned a spot in the ro16 and we both had relatively easy ro32 groups
Clearly you feel that this is a result of imbalance. What specific matches so far do you think were won by the lesser skilled player, with the Z player being eliminated due to imbalance?
(this question is for anyone else, as well, since I doubt you're reading TL an hour before your match)
I don't think there have been any big upsets this whole season so far, except for Fruitdealer and Maka's elimination. MC might have been a favorite to win, but I don't honestly consider it a huge upset because MK and Jinro are also sick good.
Imbalances that exist if any, are probably more subtle than just straight up "I lost because I played Z". Also, there are now far less BitByBitPrime's in Code S.
On January 19 2011 14:49 branflakes14 wrote: The GSL proves that when the game is pushed, it's fairly balanced. A bunch of Terran and Protoss wins at sub-Code A tournaments isn't evidence of imbalance.
... TWO zergs earned a spot in the ro16 and we both had relatively easy ro32 groups
Clearly you feel that this is a result of imbalance. What specific matches so far do you think were won by the lesser skilled player, with the Z player being eliminated due to imbalance?
(this question is for anyone else, as well, since I doubt you're reading TL an hour before your match)
I don't think there have been any big upsets this whole season so far, except for Fruitdealer and Maka's elimination. MC might have been a favorite to win, but I don't honestly consider it a huge upset because MK and Jinro are also sick good.
Imbalances that exist if any, are probably more subtle than just straight up "I lost because I played Z". Also, there are now far less BitByBitPrime's in Code S.
Fruitdealer and Maka losing were not upsets. They just played badly.
On January 19 2011 14:49 branflakes14 wrote: The GSL proves that when the game is pushed, it's fairly balanced. A bunch of Terran and Protoss wins at sub-Code A tournaments isn't evidence of imbalance.
... TWO zergs earned a spot in the ro16 and we both had relatively easy ro32 groups
Clearly you feel that this is a result of imbalance. What specific matches so far do you think were won by the lesser skilled player, with the Z player being eliminated due to imbalance?
(this question is for anyone else, as well, since I doubt you're reading TL an hour before your match)
I don't think there have been any big upsets this whole season so far, except for Fruitdealer and Maka's elimination. MC might have been a favorite to win, but I don't honestly consider it a huge upset because MK and Jinro are also sick good.
Imbalances that exist if any, are probably more subtle than just straight up "I lost because I played Z". Also, there are now far less BitByBitPrime's in Code S.
Fruitdealer and Maka losing were not upsets. They just played badly.
That's like saying Flash getting eliminated from the MSL/OSL was not an upset, he just played badly. Yes, that might be true, but it's still an upset.
Since everyone keeps mentioning GSL, maybe we should look at the most recent GSL results to see if they correspond with the current tournament results...
you can't take sub samples of larger data sets just to prove your point, it's the same reason why 120% of statistics online are made up (see what I did there?) Because you can skew data to make it look like what you want it to look like.
I'm not gonna sit here and say that this proves anything, but if you think that the fact that Zerg won 2 GSL's means they are balanced then you need to go back to school and learn some statistics (or common sense).
Statistics don't prove anything, reason and induction does. It is enough to look at a few replays and games to understand that Zerg is not OP by any means whatsoever.
It's time to go back to Rob Hustle song from a while back.
just like i said some months ago. statistics will get abit silly when u add in the foreigner scene because we dont have many good zerg players who compete in tournaments also zerg has been a very weak race for a long period of time. its clearly not as imba as it used to be
nestea saying its imba or marineking saying he has 90% winrate tvz close pos LT says alot more than chunking up all the statistics from the database.
i wish artosis would just go interview a couple of progamers and ask them what the deal is rather than seeing so many statistics threads :p (i appriciate these threads i just say artosis interviews would be better)
I know its cool and hip to pretend like theres no imbalance, but its pretty obvious that at the GSL level with the current map pool that terran is indeed OP, if no changes are made its only a matter of time before terrans take the GSL over, next season we are most likely increasing the number of terran players in Code S.
Saying zerg has 2 GSL champions and Toss 1 is very silly, if you look at all the 4 tournaments the great majority of players on RO8/4 were terran, they just choked or played poorly, see oGstop vs fruitdealer @ kulas ravine.
I can name a lot of talented terran players but only few protoss and zerg... Maybe that is why.. I don't understand why people have to bring this up when terran hasn't even won a gsl yet. If zerg and toss players are just that much better than all those terran players that they get a handicap and still loss would make even less sense considering the bonjwas from bw didn't even beat nestea who was some no name.
On January 20 2011 07:26 Raid wrote: I can name a lot of talented terran players but only few protoss and zerg... Maybe that is why.. I don't understand why people have to bring this up when terran hasn't even won a gsl yet.
I don't quite understand why everyone throws away TONS of evidence regarding something because of a few games played by a handful of pros... That is all that GSL is: a very small sample of games between top players. How can that negate all the evidence?
What evidence?
The stats from tournaments since the game was released, the stats from TL's player index, the stats from Blizzard's countless Top 200's, the statements from the pro-gamers themselves from ALL the races... All these facts are pointing to the same conclusion. A conclusion that everyone wants to reject because of a handful of games between a handful of players.
Do you want links to both Korean and NA polls stating the game is imbalanced? Do you want links to the comments from players like IdrA, FruitDealer, Artosis, Dimaga, Morrow, Drewbie, TLO, Sen, Sheth, MasterAsia, Psy, and countless others? Do you want the stats from sc2ranks.com?
All the evidence is there. But many people like to ignore the flood of evidence in favor of the exceptions, to make the tail wag the dog. The GSL's do not dissprove anything, especially when the most recent results have Terran's completely dominating the GSL with 87.5% of the Ro8 being Terran. And no, this can't be explained by more Terran players. Obviously Terran's do not come close to making up 87.5% of either players or professionals.
I wish people would just admit they don't give a damn about the evidence, they just don't WANT to accept imbalance so that they can accuse those who do of being whiny, poor players.
The way you calculated win rates is wrong from a quick excel check. It looks like you just added up the win rates from every player and just averaged that value, instead of adding up their individual wins and losses and finding that win ratio. Thus, the win rate you found vs zerg is inflated because all those 100% win rates vs zerg are probably only like (1-0 or 2-0) and yet being given equal weight to all the other ratios.
I don't necessarily think that we need any terran nerfs or zerg/protoss buffs, but I do think that we need to see some map changes. I think 4 player maps people shouldn't be allowed to spawn close positions (like shakuras). Have you ever seen a game on shakuras and said, "wow that person just won because of imbalance!". Have you ever seen a game on steppes or metal close positions and said, "wow that person just won because of imbalance!" Metal and lt close positions are worse then steppes, and I'm sure we can all agree that steppes is a horrible map.
All these super close rush distance maps make Terran OP. Even if the statistics show that terrans are winning 33%, protoss 33% and zerg 33%, its more or less a coin-flip based on what maps you get and which spawning positions.
On January 20 2011 07:26 Raid wrote: I can name a lot of talented terran players but only few protoss and zerg... Maybe that is why.. I don't understand why people have to bring this up when terran hasn't even won a gsl yet.
I don't quite understand why everyone throws away TONS of evidence regarding something because of a few games played by a handful of pros... That is all that GSL is: a very small sample of games between top players. How can that negate all the evidence?
What evidence?
The stats from tournaments since the game was released, the stats from TL's player index, the stats from Blizzard's countless Top 200's, the statements from the pro-gamers themselves from ALL the races... All these facts are pointing to the same conclusion. A conclusion that everyone wants to reject because of a handful of games between a handful of players.
Do you want links to both Korean and NA polls stating the game is imbalanced? Do you want links to the comments from players like IdrA, FruitDealer, Artosis, Dimaga, Morrow, Drewbie, TLO, Sen, Sheth, MasterAsia, Psy, and countless others? Do you want the stats from sc2ranks.com?
All the evidence is there. But many people like to ignore the flood of evidence in favor of the exceptions, to make the tail wag the dog. The GSL's do not dissprove anything, especially when the most recent results have Terran's completely dominating the GSL with 87.5% of the Ro8 being Terran. And no, this can't be explained by more Terran players. Obviously Terran's do not come close to making up 87.5% of either players or professionals.
I wish people would just admit they don't give a damn about the evidence, they just don't WANT to accept imbalance so that they can accuse those who do of being whiny, poor players.
I think your numbers are skewed toward the post you wanted to make, but claimed you didn't make in your post here:
lol my OP didn't have any whining at all, I'm just trying to understand the numbers. Your explanation is that Zerg's simply aren't playing in the tournaments? Any reason why?
You ignored the individual player results in favor of focusing on the winner. For example, if we look at ESL Go4SC2 Cup #73 (Jan.16) , we'd see a tournament where Terran absolutely dominated: TvZ: 3-1 (75%) [ Games ] ZvP: 4-0 (100%) [ Games ] PvT: 0-2 (0%)
Also, there are tournaments like Competo Cup #22 (Mon 10. Jan), which had the following player list: Terran 6 CuteZer, Daut, GoOdy, Kas, PlanetSystem, Satiini Random 1 Nerchio Zerg 1 MoMaN
There are tournaments I can find where Zergs did have good representation, such as: US CraftCup #16 (Sat 18. Dec) Terran 3 ArminvB, CocoA, Fuu Zerg 3 MeYera, mkengyn, Rigid Protoss 2 Antimage, Cheese
Literally, the only conclusion you can reach by your numbers is that Zerg representation in tournaments is consistently weak. After that, it's conjecture. Tossing around perspective and opinion like it's fact and berating people for it is pretty low - especially when your 2nd post ( I think ) was saying you weren't whining.
Besides, if you actually read pro responses from people like IdrA, MarineKing (Specifically, MKP said his absurd win-ratio is close position metal, which I bet is right considering it's shorter distance than Steppes), etc, most of them focus on maps. Instead of thinking "Terran must need nerfs" why not look at the maps and say "How often is Terran favored here in each state of the game?" Just consider that maybe if we're playing on a different pool of maps we'd draw different conclusions.
That said: I've played both Protoss & Zerg to a mid diamond level. Anyone who thinks that Zerg is an easier race to learn is seriously kidding themselves. Does this mean the game is imbalanced? Maybe; I'm not really qualified to say. I do know that at the mid-diamond level, the macro advantage that Zerg has is almost meaningless because you can't exploit it anyway. So I will say that, at the mid-diamond level, Zerg is probably the most difficult of the 3 races with which to win consistently.
Using the master league's distribution for what kind of distribution you'd expect at high level tournaments doesn't seem to be wise to me. That's still a rather large group of people and most of them are just amateurs with no hope of ever making money from the game, so they're free to just pick the race they like best. I would actually guess that the difficulty of playing zerg is an appealing trait to those people (just anecdotal though, but it's why I play zerg).
I've heard several instances of Korean progamers that chose terran because it was especially strong when the game was released. In Europe, a high amount of progamers come from a WC3 background, and zerg is less suited to those people's skills. I mean, the incredibly high amount of terran players in Europe can't just solely be because of balance, there also has to factor in that a lot of those players view terran as more abusable, or better at a pro level.
I will say that balance in general is pretty meaningless so far. When a good zerg wins a macro game, he tends to do so in a dominating fashion that looks just impossible for the other player to stop. That a lot of terrans still win games because of map imbalances doesn't mean that terran is stronger. Terran is more suited to a certain mappool, but that's quite volatile and simply introducing some new maps can swing that around a lot. I honestly expect that good zergs will seem just unbeatable if some of the super-large GSL test-maps were to be used and that if there wasn't a whole array of tricky strategies to "cheat" wins with for terran, then the forums will quickly come up with conventional wisdom that zerg is broken.
I'm not really sure about the actual late-game balance, I'd be happy to be corrected on this, but regardless of the specifics, what matters is that maps play such a large factor that balance judgements are meaningless if Blizzard doesn't fix them first (and they're doing an awful job at it: why not have a seperate mappool for high level players for one? and why not regularly update map-imbalances?)
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