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Is balance an impossible goal? Or, why  losing to  really means is weak to  .
Warning: this post suffers severely from tl;dr. Read the abstract to see if this interests you. If not, just move to the next thread.
Abstract: Balance is one of the favorite topics on this forum despite the fact that there is little critical thought about what it actually means and how it can be measured. This post will lay out why it is impossible to achieve a complete objective measure of balance. It will describe exactly what a player would see on average in terms of wins and losses as a result of imbalance (I guarantee this will surprise you). It will also discuss what I think might be the only "good" measure of balance, which has not been discussed openly by Blizzard as far as I have seen. Even then, it won't work that well. Note that I don't consider the role of maps here, which is enormously influential. Changing the map pool can completely rebalance the game of course, so assume every statement is made with "using the standard ladder rules and map pool" after it.
This whole post starts with a whine. Any whine will do. Oh, here's one now.
"I lose to all the time. Blizzard loves and hates . I quit forever."
Lovely. So here's my question: If Blizzard was actually insane and loved and hated and really had no feelings whatsoever about money, what would happen to ? And for that matter, to ? Try to predict the outcome. I bet you can't.
Before we dive in, some quick background. I will identify two types of imbalance, "racial" imbalance and "matchup" imbalance. Racial imbalance is an imbalance that affects *both* of a race's non-mirror matchups, i.e. making SCVs mine faster would allow to beat both and more easily. Matchup imbalance is an imbalance that primarily affects *one* of the matchups, while leaving the other alone. For instance, making EMP's area of affect larger would allow to beat more easily, but it wouldn't really do anything to the v matchup. Obviously a lot of changes would fall in between, but we'll get to that.
The whine that I described above specifically complains of a matchup imbalance, that Z loses to T, but doesn't complain about any of the other matchups. So we will assume that P versus either of the two races is balanced. And of course the mirror matches are balanced. If that was actually the case, what would happen?? Well, here's your answer: If T actually beat Z a little more than 50% of the time, Z players would have, on average, a little lower MMR than they should. That means they would, on average, be matched up against slightly weaker P players. This means Z would beat P slightly more than 50% of the time. So from the perspective of Z, T>Z>P. Easy peasy. Let's all complain to Blizzard... But not so fast. Because decent Z players are losing to slightly less skilled T players, those Z players have a lower MMR than they ought to. That means your average P player is facing more skilled Z players than he should. That, in turn, lowers his MMR slightly leading him to face slightly weaker T players. So from P's perspective, Z>P>T. To round it all off, we know that T us supposed to beat Z, but we just figured out that due to the magic of the ladder and MMR ratings, T now loses to P more than 50% of the time on average. So from T's perspective, P>T>Z. What a disaster! A single matchup imbalance causes everyone to lose, on average, by some non-50% amounts to every race except their own (in a mirror match). So the source of the imbalance is completely disguised. You cannot figure out by any means which race is the culprit. T being overpowered against Z causes T players to *lose* more games against P. Note that they deserve to lose these games.. they are inadvertently facing more skilled P players than they should be due to their extra "unfair" wins against Z. Did you predict that? Liar!
What happens in the case of a racial imbalance, where, say, Z is equally weaker than *both* T and P, which are balanced with respect to each other? This case is a little simpler, though no less infuriating. A Z player will win 50% of his/her games against each race and look for all the world to be perfectly balanced. Why you say? Well because the imbalance will lead him to face weaker T and P players on average. He will be lower in the ladder than he should be, but there's no way for him to know (except by the brilliant intuition that he should be higher in the ladder than he is because he is so pro). As long is the imbalance isn't so severe as to cripple the top of the ladder, it is invisible. Top players playing Z will be forced to be more innovative in the metagame to make up for this "unfair" advantage, but if the imbalance is relatively minor or confined only to certain situations: say, Z has a hard time responding when T and P do low-econ openings in close position maps that force Z to make extra units and delay their third, much of the time Z will overcome this disadvantage by either taking the risk and getting away with it or making up for the late third later. However, this balance issue (hypothetically, I'm not actually saying Z is underbalanced here, I just need an example) allows P and T players of lesser skill to defeat Z players a slightly higher percentage of the time. This imbalance would be entirely invisible statistically.
Now imagine a world in which there are *multiple* minor imbalances of *both* matchup and racial types, i.e. reality. Sorting out which race needs tweaking is hopeless. Nothing yet described publicly by Blizzard even approaches being able to do that. As I said at the beginning of the post, there are two ways I think it could be done. But first, one common idea that *wouldn't* work.
The logical impulse is to use random players. Sure, each random player may be better at one race than another, but on average, random players should give an idea of which race is best. In reality this doesn't work, and that's because being random changes the game. Now your opponent doesn't know what race you are, and that lack of information may confer a greater advantage in certain matchups than in others. In other words, this would only work if random players' races were announced at the start of the match. However, even if you were to fix that, it changes the game in another way. Random players at high levels of play are notorious for being bad at the late game in their weak matchups because they have less time to study the late game of each matchup in detail. That means that, on average, how random players do (or even dedicated multi-racers) will reflect more on race balance for players who are bad at the late game (and note also that their opponents may be gearing their builds to force a late game for this specific reason, further convoluting the situation). So random players and multi-racers can't be used to balance the game.
One thing you could is look at the top off-ladder competitive or professional play. This is probably the most sound method for achieving balance, though there are problems here as well. The first, which I mentioned above, is that a minor imbalance may just force more creativity from players of the "weaker" race. This will be especially true soon after the release of the game, i.e. now. This factor becomes less important as the game gets older and the strategies are tested further. The other major problem is the sample size. If you only look at GSL players your sample is too small to be significant in diagnosing all but glaring imbalances. If you include all professional and top amateur competitions you might have a better chance of getting a significant read on which matchups are imbalanced, but remember that the metagame changes relatively rapidly in the first years after release, so the data won't really mean anything at first.
So this brings me to the conclusion. I'll put it in bold. There is no way your personal experience can determine which matchups are balanced. You can't even do it with masses of data. Measuring balance is a huge problem for Blizzard, and my assumption is that they probably have a bunch of numerical systems, but that in the end it's a refined "squeaky wheel" model that trumps. (of course, only certain wheels get any attention, and they are probably deaf to whining)
A little about me. I am a diamond , though not high enough diamond that it means anything. I am a professional measurer of things (i.e. scientist) so I have some idea what people face when they try to measure things that are hard to measure. There are assumptions in what I say here that are all based on what Blizzard has actually communicated to the community. It may be that the system is actually different, but whatever system they use, it will still suffer from this problem. I hope this post serves to help people realize what a complicated system this 3-race game is and what steps are probably necessary to actually bring it into some semblance of balance. Really the best work that can be done in achieving balance is innovating within each matchup. The faster the metagame is mapped out, the faster the statistics at the top levels of play will actually matter.
Thanks for reading. Go Jinro.
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balance is pretty damn close right now. Any race can win in almost any situation. Maps play a small part but definitely not as big as some people claim. Without idra there to say "i only lose because that map favors terran" and etc, no one would be talking about maps really.
This is probably the best we're gonna get til HotS comes out, then we start all over again with the balance of new units, yay.
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I don't think the game is necessarily unbalanced, but I do think that there are holes in some races timings that probably wont be fixed until the expac
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On January 20 2011 11:41 Skyze wrote:
balance is pretty damn close right now. Any race can win in almost any situation. Maps play a small part but definitely not as big as some people claim. Without idra there to say "i only lose because that map favors terran" and etc, no one would be talking about maps really.
This is probably the best we're gonna get til HotS comes out, then we start all over again with the balance of new units, yay.
I disagree with your point about maps, I believe maps play a HUGE role in terms of balance. A game on steppes of war is completely different from a game on xel naga. Certain gameplay mechanics become much stronger such as slow tank pushes because on steppes of war slow tank pushes are actually quite fast.
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On January 20 2011 11:43 Pocketpurple wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 11:41 Skyze wrote:
balance is pretty damn close right now. Any race can win in almost any situation. Maps play a small part but definitely not as big as some people claim. Without idra there to say "i only lose because that map favors terran" and etc, no one would be talking about maps really.
This is probably the best we're gonna get til HotS comes out, then we start all over again with the balance of new units, yay. I disagree with your point about maps, I believe maps play a HUGE role in terms of balance. A game on steppes of war is completely different from a game on xel naga. Certain gameplay mechanics become much stronger such as slow tank pushes because on steppes of war slow tank pushes are actually quite fast.
You're right maps do play a huge role in balance that is the hole fucking reason why GSL is removing old maps and introducing new ones. Skyze is just being dense and he is obviously just trying to take cheap shots at IdrA
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i realllllllly hope this isn't one of those undershadowed zerg whine threads, that seems innocent in the beginning but then the true colors come out.
there is literally one of these types of threads everyday.
User was warned for this post
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No two things are the same, so how could anything be balanced. No human plays any where near to optimal so it is impossible to say. But certainly given perfect play one race is better than other, but that doesn't matter.
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i dont think it cant be fix without changing the game way too much i agree with hakker theres just holes in race timings not completly imba
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Amazing write up, very well thought out.
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On January 20 2011 11:45 Silidons wrote:
i realllllllly hope this isn't one of those undershadowed zerg whine threads, that seems innocent in the beginning but then the true colors come out.
there is literally one of these types of threads everyday.
NOT UNTIL YOU FEEL OUR PAIN 
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The game is close enough to balanced that now maps are being scrutinized.
Everyone knows what type of maps favor what race in what matchup, so logically the solution is to make every single map the same size as the ideal map (which is probably XNC). The problem is we also want a variety of maps to play on, which begins the never ending cycle of balance vs variety.
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Thanks for the analysis. I've thought about this, but I never realized that a single imbalance would have such a snowball effect.
So this is why blizzard has such a hard time balancing...
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There isn't much of a standard unit to judge perfect balance. Balance is something that isn't tangible, but nonetheless the game's experience doesn't get ruined by the balance. I'm just happy the game the way it is. Games are games, and there's no such thing as a perfect game for everybody. There's always a weakness of some sort, but Starcraft is one of the best around right? For me, the best overall :D
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On January 20 2011 11:41 Skyze wrote:
balance is pretty damn close right now. Any race can win in almost any situation. Maps play a small part but definitely not as big as some people claim. Without idra there to say "i only lose because that map favors terran" and etc, no one would be talking about maps really.
This is probably the best we're gonna get til HotS comes out, then we start all over again with the balance of new units, yay.
mkp or mvp(i dont remember): close positions on metal is 90% win in TvZ
yeah map imbalance is completely noexistant, thats why there are absolutely no statistics to back it up. (sarcasm)
anyways on topic: balance is impossible as long as the metagame is shifting. you can get close but then the metagame will shift just slightly and everything would no longer be balanced. but we're not here for a completely balanced game, if we wanted to play a completely balanced game all play a one dimensional game.
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I work on the Balance Team for Age of Empires Online, and I can say that perfect balance is so hard for a fallible team of developers to achieve that it should be deemed impossible. Also, there isn't really a way to quantify balance, and as such all balance changes must be made based off of qualitative experience. If you define "perfect balance" as balance that is created based off of qualitative measurements, then sure perfect balance can be achieved. It seems that the OP is making the assumption that what is "best" or "perfect" balance-wise is both empirically verifiable and that balance can be quantified using some sort of unit-based measurement.
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On January 20 2011 11:51 Amui wrote:
Thanks for the analysis. I've thought about this, but I never realized that a single imbalance would have such a snowball effect.
So this is why blizzard has such a hard time balancing...
They have a hard time balancing because they're too busy deep underground in their testing laboratories completely oblivious to what's happening in the real world aka the pro scene. That's why they come out with ideas like "hmm I wonder what would happen if we reduced the build time of a Bunker by 10 seconds" when Zergs are having an unbelievable amount of difficulty already versus Marine Bunker rushes.
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as long as there is more then one race balance is nearly impossible but MAYBE some awesome computer AI could make a "fuckload" of game and they could make some sort of balance but like it is now no it will never be
still i think map balance is a bigger problem that race balance atm
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even international chess isnt balanced
the greatest thing about sc balance is maps. maps affect balance and therefore the game can be perfect, they just need better maps. just look at sc1...maps are soooo important and you can control which race is strong
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your missing the whole point
mmr varies in skill level of everyrace thats why we have leagues
lowest mmr is in bronze, highest in masters
if we look on similar skill level of all three races those players from all 3 races will be facing stronger and weaker oponents regardless of race imbalance
your argument is not logical in reality
User was warned for this post
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or you could not care so much about mmr and imbalance and just play the game. the only reason there are "imbalances" is because play styles havent been worked enough to be used as counters and what not. its just a relatively young game and system and will equalize with time
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On January 20 2011 11:41 Skyze wrote:
balance is pretty damn close right now. Any race can win in almost any situation. Maps play a small part but definitely not as big as some people claim. Without idra there to say "i only lose because that map favors terran" and etc, no one would be talking about maps really.
This is probably the best we're gonna get til HotS comes out, then we start all over again with the balance of new units, yay.
we dont complain about maps cos idra complains about maps... we complain about maps cos they are TERRIBLE
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I believe the racial mechanics are relatively balanced, I only feel some maps give an advantage to a particular race's mechanics.
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I think at this point balance can be accomplished through maps, more or less--maybe a few more tweaks are needed on top of that.
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I believe the maps are really the culprits behind balance.
For the most part, I'd say balance is fine, but the game favors rushes and aggressive play over a macro game.
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[QUOTE]On January 20 2011 11:39 Rodeo wrote:
Is balance an impossible goal? Or, why losing to really means is weak to .
"I lose to all the time. Blizzard loves and hates . I quit forever."
you do realize that in the early years of starcraft (original) Terran was considered to be vastly in-superior race so ya, they were trying to even out the teams
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I think the matchmaker aims for 50% win ratio against all races, not just in general. This may mean there is a seperate MMR for each matchup.
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On January 20 2011 11:56 CecilSunkure wrote:
It seems that the OP is making the assumption that what is "best" or "perfect" balance-wise is both empirically verifiable and that balance can be quantified using some sort of unit-based measurement.
Actually, my point is more or less the opposite. I go through the process of "trying" to measure balance, but mostly to show that you can't. I then suggest a method that I think would make a little sense to use as a template if you had enough data. However, my point wasn't so much about what would happen under conditions of optimal play, but why this is so impossible to measure. In other words, I feel your pain.
People seem to have understood me to be complaining that the game is imbalanced. Actually, I think it is remarkably well balanced. I have my personal opinions on some of the maps (as I think everyone does) but that's not why I'm writing. My point is more to show that identifying an imbalance based on wins and losses, which is the metric that Blizzard has put out to show that their game is balanced, is meaningless. You have to use something else. But whatever Blizzard really uses (and I don't think it's those numbers), they are doing a very good job.
-edit- In response to the post just above this one, that may be true, but you run into the same problem of not having an objective measurement to compare to.
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This is a very interesting idea. I thought though that the whole "adjusted-win-percentage" thing was to account for the fact that the MMR-system would make everything 50/50.
Like you said you can't take personal experience into account when talking about game balance because let's say that, in your example, from the Toss perspective Z>P>T. Then he is winning over 50% against T, 50 against P, and under 50 against Z. This means that the Toss would be winning ~50% of all his games, but other Toss's with a weakness against T would be balancing his win/loss spread. With all of this, even the mu stats should still be 50/50 for ZvP, ZvT, and PvT. The calculated adjusted win percentage, I thought, was supposed to account for this.
Blizzard has done online competitive support for a while, and I'm sure you aren't the first person who has proposed this concern, which is probably why they came up with this statistic (adjusted win percentage) in the first place.
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United States360 Posts
Interesting read.
Nice first post.
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The game is never going to be balanced by simply changing numbers and stats on units. And this is the only thing that Blizzard is doing so far. The game needs actual core changes to the way it works (maps, unit sizes, macro mechanics, unit designs in general) to eventually be as balanced as BW.
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One of the first balance threads that I had no problem reading. It makes sense, but I believe Blizzard does have a way of correcting the MMR difference when they look at their data. To be honest, I feel like the game is close enough to balance that I would be ok with Blizzard simply stopping the patches. But I'm a Terran, which is the op race, so I probably don't count.
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On January 20 2011 12:18 Angra wrote:
The game is never going to be balanced by simply changing numbers and stats on units. And this is the only thing that Blizzard is doing so far. The game needs actual core changes to the way it works (maps, unit sizes, macro mechanics, unit designs in general) to eventually be as balanced as BW.
Balance is like playing a game of Jenga; large changes are almost certain to cause more problems than they fix. Blizzard is only being smart and efficient by taking on balance with the policy they currently enforce, as I can say from personal experience from working on a major RTS title on a balance team. You have no evidence or backing to your claim and posts like yours are just spammy. I hope other people refrain from making posts like this. Merely asserting your opinion upon others is counter-productive to the entire community.
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On January 20 2011 12:18 Angra wrote:
The game is never going to be balanced by simply changing numbers and stats on units. And this is the only thing that Blizzard is doing so far. The game needs actual core changes to the way it works (maps, unit sizes, macro mechanics, unit designs in general) to eventually be as balanced as BW.
Is that why every matchup has been perceived as imbalanced in both ways, shifting left and right pretty much every week? Is that why when they give Roaches a +1 range people flip the fuck out? Please. The game will not be balanced by armchair designers playing God. The game will be balanced incrementally, more by the community than by Blizzard.
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It is incredible how many people seem to be incapable of reading a text, and understanding what it says.
For example, how you can get the impression that a thread that talks about the technical viability of imbalance statements in general based on the system used, and which specifically comes to the conclusion that even finding or confirming an imbalance is incredibly hard, because it would screw up different data which would lead to strange results, is a zerg whining thread, is beyond me.
Basically, most people whining about game balance do so because they feel like their own skill level is higher than the results indicate, and thus believe that there must be a flaw in the system giving the results. This usually manifests in either thinking that the ladder system does not work right, or that their chosen race is weaker then the others. As the OP stated, it is very hard to either verify or falsify such a statement empirically, which makes it a question of faith, which can not be solved rationally. This is probably also where this "Everyone knows the game is imbalanced" mentality comes from that usually does not have anything solid to back up its claims except for gut feelings.
However, it should not be impossible to prove or disprove such a statement scientifically. It is just not very obvious, and the obvious statistics might be misleading. So if you want to claim something like this, you need to take a very close look at your methology. As has been stated in the OP, pure ladder win percentages at anything but the very highest level do not give any good data directly. At the very highest ratings, there are not enough people to form a statistically significant group, i believe.
The often stated statistics with the overall tournament wins is obviously flawed, again. First of, most of these tournaments did not even take place in the same version of the game we play at the moment. Secondly, the skill levels of these tournaments are sometimes vastly different. Also, you would obviously need to normate the results relating to the actual participations of the races.
It would be very easy to make statements about balance if it were possible to directly measure the skill of the players, since players of equal skill should play 50/50 against each other. However, as the OP stated, since the most common definition of "equal skill" is "playing about 50/50 against each other", this circularly leads to nothing. This means that it is technically not possible to give each person which exactly defines their skill if you don assume that all matchups are balanced.
Another important problem is generalisation. An imbalance is not necessarily existant throughout all skilllevels.
Also, it is really nice to see someone writing something up that makes actual sense and shows a working scientific mind instead of taking rumours for facts, and basing general statements only on personal feelings.
@Elkram, do you have any sources to that "Adjusted win percentage" thingy? It sounds interesting, especially to know by what they adjust the win percentage.
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The fact that few people read your text due the "wall of text thread" fear, does not stop of making it an amazing ladder analysis. One of the most interesting threads i ever read in TL.
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This is a very interesting post Rodeo! Thanks for this.
I have a general question and would be interested in peoples thoughts as to how it would change the situation.
Would the problem be easier to analyze for Blizzard if we had separate MMR ratings for each match up? This seems like it would be easy to implement (it is all behind the scenes) but may be able to separate balance issues.
For example I have been doing really well in PvZ these days. And I have noticed that my PvT has been terrible (I'm pretty confident it is because of the reasons you mentioned above). If I was playing Z and Ts at separate MMR ratings, I would (should) have 50% win rate against both. Then Blizzard could just look at the sum of everyone's (probably in masters league) MMR ratings for the match ups to decide what they should do.
Thoughts?
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great OP. I think the most useful conclusion to draw is that trying to determine imbalances is useless except at the very highest of play. the problem then becomes that the sample size is so small. basically, locating sources of imbalance is hard as fuck.............................and that's not even worrying about fixing them
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To quote IdrA:
+ Show Spoiler +if statistics get you hard make one of those ladder analysis pages or something, but stop interfering with balance discussions.
Ladder should never be mentioned in balance discussion.
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O-o, that is alot of words
what a great read, i agree with you at almost every point.
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I don't know if your beginning analysis is supported by the facts, but I like the thought process. It seems logical, and it's actually quite profound. Thank you for the thoughts! It would truly be interesting if one matchup imbalance could snowball around in just such a way. I would tend to think no, but I'd have to work through some more things in my head.
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Cool point, I never thought about that but it seems to make sense.
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it is theoretically impossible
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I think the original post is flawed in that it doesn't actually take into account skill.
When I consider balance, I consider balance as it pertains to high level players, and how they perform against others. The way the rating system in SC2 works right now gets you to 50% overall winrate, in general. Most players actually have a higher than 50% overall winrate, other than those in bronze. No one could dispute the fact that reapers in TvZ made TvZ very imbalanced a few months ago, before the barracks after supply and reaper speed upgrade change. HOWEVER, most Z players would have winrates against T that were similar to their vP or overall winrates even in that patch, simply because of the way the rating system works.
Also, for high level players, specialization matters less than for players of lower skill. Players of lower skill can be good in one matchup but suck hard at another, and it's never consistent across the vast pool of players. In GSL 1 we saw, though, that the only exception to the hardship of Zergs was Fruitdealer, and even he had to be very lucky to actually do what he did.
Personally I think that balance is something that CAN be quantified, it just can't be quantified using the ladder system or most players' concerns. I think players should work on improving their game before actually claiming that something is imbalanced.
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Very nice write up. You've concisely echoed a lot of my own thoughts on this issue. A couple of other problems Blizzard face in achieving 'perfect' balance are:
1) There is no way of determining whether the players of one race are on average more or less skilled than the players of another race. In other words, if say all Z players switched to T, all T players switched to P, and all P players switched to Z, there is no reliable way to predict how things would shake out.
2) What is balanced at masters level may be significantly imbalanced at bronze level, and vice versa.
Truly, I think Blizzard has done an incredible job balancing the game, and keeping it balanced at a wide variety of skill levels.
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I agree with the principal idea of this post that balancing the races is very difficult. MMR definitely throws a wrench into things. It's spot on that one matchup being imbalanced will affect the other matchup, placing more skilled players against lesser players (even though both have equal MMR).
But I disagree that it's an impossible task to balance. Firstly, you need consistency in the map pool. Blizzard's maps are wildly bad. It's ok to have differently themed maps (i.e. more cliffs, more open spaces, etc.), but it's not OK to have these TINY TINY rush distances that some maps have. Bringing more consistency to the OPENING game will help a lot. Strategies like 2 rax/SCV pressure are ruining the TvZ data, because you can't deduce core long-term imbalances. As a reference, even Xel'Naga caverns is too small of a rush distance. You need maps minimally with the rush distance of Scrap Station (and preferably without the destructible rocks).
Second, once you have balanced maps you must make a sample pool. Master's league is an excellent start point. Each race will be represented by MANY players within master's league. You also have to assume that the average player skill of each race is equal. Lastly, you can compare global player % to Master's league player %.
If MMR is hiding imbalances, Master's league will show that. If 40% of players play race X globally on the NA server, but 50% of Master's league is race X, then you have yourself an imbalance.
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Balance is completely objective to the map. When you say that, say, Zerg has a 56% win rate, you are really saying that, with the current map and stats, Zerg will win more often. Do you think brood war was balanced based on stats of units entirely? Of course not. The maps will eventually evolve to create interesting gameplay that is balanced, even if the stats aren't changed much.
I know you mentioned maps, but the map pool truly is the only way to achieve "perfect" balance.
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in your example a T advantage vs Z ends up causing things to look like T>Z>P>T from everyone's perspective, and win rates will reflect this. so what is the response? buff ZvT, PvZ, or TvP. suppose you pick to do one of these randomly, what do you get?
1/3rd chance to make the game balanced
1/3rd chance to make Z underpowered in all matchups
1/3rd chance to make T overpowered in all matchups
so your 1st disaster scenario can be averted and reduced to the 2nd disaster scenario
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On January 20 2011 13:45 wherebugsgo wrote:
I think the original post is flawed in that it doesn't actually take into account skill.
That is the main point. How do you measure actual player skill? Obviously, it would be incredibly easy to find imbalances in matchups if you could give every player an exakt skill number, and then say "Ok, they have the equal skill number, so they should play 50/50. If it is not after a statistically significant number of games, there is an imbalance." Or "That guy has a much higher skill number, so they should play 70/30" However, the only way to determine the skill of a player is how much he wins. Which makes the whole logic circular, since if you base that skill number on win percentages, and then the expected win percentages on that skill number, you obviously get good results. One of the main points was that since you can not directly measure the player skill, stuff has impacts on other stuff, which could delude your conclusions regarding the skill of someone, or a matchup imbalance.
When I consider balance, I consider balance as it pertains to high level players, and how they perform against others. The way the rating system in SC2 works right now gets you to 50% overall winrate, in general. Most players actually have a higher than 50% overall winrate, other than those in bronze. No one could dispute the fact that reapers in TvZ made TvZ very imbalanced a few months ago, before the barracks after supply and reaper speed upgrade change. HOWEVER, most Z players would have winrates against T that were similar to their vP or overall winrates even in that patch, simply because of the way the rating system works.
Exactly hits the point. If there were a 10% handicap for one race in one matchup, this would just result in you getting respectively worse/better enemies of that race, and alter through the MMS the relative skill of matched players of all matchups. Which, in conclusion again means that it is hard to draw data of a potential imbalance out of any ladder stats.
Personally I think that balance is something that CAN be quantified, it just can't be quantified using the ladder system or most players' concerns. I think players should work on improving their game before actually claiming that something is imbalanced.
Then, how would you quantify it? I, too, am of the opinion that there probably is some way to do so, but it seems to be neither easy nor obvious, or at least i can not see it right now.
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All I know is I like Blizzard's approach with SC2. The way they balanced WC3 was laughable. They'd change multiple variables on multiple units at a time and just hope it'd work.
The problem right now is the maps. So far they've been balancing based on Steppes/Blistering type maps (Reaper nerfs, Zealot nerfs, depot before rax, etc.). Hopefully they move to bigger, non 2 player maps and balance around that.
I do think balance is impossible on the small Bloodbath maps.
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Great read, I agree with you and I can't really say to much about balance because I am just not good enough to completely understand all the match ups and units. However, too many people blame their loses on balance. They need to look back at the replay and I am sure there were other reasons. For example I played a game where the Z player said P was imba because I beat him 2 base vs 3. When in reality he has poor macro and mirco skills, so when I attack he suicided most of his units to my colossi.
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no balancing issue the games not fully understood give it a year there is a few things that need fix tho
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Balance is possible, but everytime you join a game, theres some kind of an advantage for a player because of the map. Although I dont think its fully balanced at the moment, but its not far from it. Obviously some strategies are way stronger than others and theres yet to find a counter for them which is probably why people are complaining about OPness frequently. And yes zerg has weak units, but thats how the race was designed compared to protoss with high HP/dmg units.
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Statistics are of course one measure to gauge balance. But at the same time, I tend to look at actual games and how the strategies from each race play out and how the other race tries to counter. Also look at what kind of tools are available for each race to counter a strategy executed by other races.
I think anyone with decent knowledge with the game can get an idea of balance by looking at a game, and what's possible and what's not. If some of the strategies look relatively easy yet require overwhelming response from the opponent, then I know the strats are OP.
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On January 20 2011 13:59 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 13:45 wherebugsgo wrote:
I think the original post is flawed in that it doesn't actually take into account skill. That is the main point. How do you measure actual player skill? Obviously, it would be incredibly easy to find imbalances in matchups if you could give every player an exakt skill number, and then say "Ok, they have the equal skill number, so they should play 50/50. If it is not after a statistically significant number of games, there is an imbalance." Or "That guy has a much higher skill number, so they should play 70/30" However, the only way to determine the skill of a player is how much he wins. Which makes the whole logic circular, since if you base that skill number on win percentages, and then the expected win percentages on that skill number, you obviously get good results. One of the main points was that since you can not directly measure the player skill, stuff has impacts on other stuff, which could delude your conclusions regarding the skill of someone, or a matchup imbalance.
You can't, generally. This is one reason why balance concerns should never be based around ladder. However, you CAN identify those who are very good at this game, and those who suck. This is why balance is not based around what happens in Bronze, or we'd see a very weird game indeed.
You can, however, identify flaws in the game by looking at how professional players fare with their matchups. If, clearly, the majority of upper level players of one race are having difficulty with a certain matchup, something is wrong. This was obvious with ZvT before the big changes that happened a few months ago.
On January 20 2011 13:59 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +When I consider balance, I consider balance as it pertains to high level players, and how they perform against others. The way the rating system in SC2 works right now gets you to 50% overall winrate, in general. Most players actually have a higher than 50% overall winrate, other than those in bronze. No one could dispute the fact that reapers in TvZ made TvZ very imbalanced a few months ago, before the barracks after supply and reaper speed upgrade change. HOWEVER, most Z players would have winrates against T that were similar to their vP or overall winrates even in that patch, simply because of the way the rating system works. Exactly hits the point. If there were a 10% handicap for one race in one matchup, this would just result in you getting respectively worse/better enemies of that race, and alter through the MMS the relative skill of matched players of all matchups. Which, in conclusion again means that it is hard to draw data of a potential imbalance out of any ladder stats.
Yep, you can't use the ladder to balance.
On January 20 2011 13:59 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +Personally I think that balance is something that CAN be quantified, it just can't be quantified using the ladder system or most players' concerns. I think players should work on improving their game before actually claiming that something is imbalanced. Then, how would you quantify it? I, too, am of the opinion that there probably is some way to do so, but it seems to be neither easy nor obvious, or at least i can not see it right now.
Again, watch trends at high levels of play. Was it coincidence that every professional player prior to patch 1.1.2 had trouble with ZvT? Was it coincidence that it was almost always because of reapers?
Clearly, Terran players had no problem using builds like 1/1/1 against Zerg (like TLO's hellion expand, Thor drops on Kulas and LT, banshee builds) but it seemed like reapers were just so imbalanced. There was an obvious early-game imbalance at the time.
Now, right now, there's nothing really to suggest this. I don't think there is significant information yet, and right now there are no statistics that really back one argument up more than any other in regards to balance. It'll be a few months as the game matures before there are any issues, I think. And from here on out, I think the balance issues will be much smaller than the old ZvT issues. The only thing that could make the problems worse is a patch that changes too much.
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On January 20 2011 12:50 Redmark wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 12:18 Angra wrote:
The game is never going to be balanced by simply changing numbers and stats on units. And this is the only thing that Blizzard is doing so far. The game needs actual core changes to the way it works (maps, unit sizes, macro mechanics, unit designs in general) to eventually be as balanced as BW. Is that why every matchup has been perceived as imbalanced in both ways, shifting left and right pretty much every week? Is that why when they give Roaches a +1 range people flip the fuck out? Please. The game will not be balanced by armchair designers playing God. The game will be balanced incrementally, more by the community than by Blizzard.
Do you honestly believe that adding +10 health here, taking away -5 damage there is going to eventually make the game have absolutely perfect balance while at the same time keeping it a dynamic, interesting, competitive game?
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Sorry for how short this post is but...
1/3 = 0.33333333333333333333333333333...
Technically the post could be longer.
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On January 20 2011 13:17 Whole wrote:To quote IdrA: + Show Spoiler +if statistics get you hard make one of those ladder analysis pages or something, but stop interfering with balance discussions. Ladder should never be mentioned in balance discussion.
IdrA should never be mentioned in balance discussion.
Great post OP!
As a couple of other s have mentioned, Blizzard do have an 'adjustment' mechanism which they can apply to their match statistics, but it removes the influence of the *matchmaker*, not the effects of misrepresentative MMR defined by OP. There's little point in tracking distinct MMRs for each matchup too, as it still suffers the same effects.
I agree there doesn't seem to be any mechanism by which Blizzard can use their aggregated statistics to prove or disprove balance, and that there's definitely no way individual players can do so. At best it can give hints. Resolving it statistically requires a known quantity to test each race against - the hypothetical "perfect play in all situations", but that's not currently feasible.
What we can hope for in reality is for the game to be "balanced enough" - which I would define as there being no strategy that any one race can use that will win more than 50% of the time against another player of approx. equal skill that is prepared for it.
The problem with this definition is that it can only be proven by counterexample or by waiting 10 years to see if anything emerges. To Blizzard's credit, some blatant counterexamples (TvZ mass reaper anyone?) have been identified, and have been removed. No doubt we'll find more.
As long as the game ends up "balanced enough", the players can and should use their own innovation to resolve everything else. Just like they did with Brood War.
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nice post, very good to see that it is not a whine thread
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On January 20 2011 14:34 Angra wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 12:50 Redmark wrote:On January 20 2011 12:18 Angra wrote:
The game is never going to be balanced by simply changing numbers and stats on units. And this is the only thing that Blizzard is doing so far. The game needs actual core changes to the way it works (maps, unit sizes, macro mechanics, unit designs in general) to eventually be as balanced as BW. Is that why every matchup has been perceived as imbalanced in both ways, shifting left and right pretty much every week? Is that why when they give Roaches a +1 range people flip the fuck out? Please. The game will not be balanced by armchair designers playing God. The game will be balanced incrementally, more by the community than by Blizzard. Do you honestly believe that adding +10 health here, taking away -5 damage there is going to eventually make the game have absolutely perfect balance while at the same time keeping it a dynamic, interesting, competitive game?
No, he's advocating that Blizzard do nothing for a few months, so we can examine what happens to the game as it evolves untouched for a while. The most recent patch was merely a week ago, we don't need to change anything right now. I might be in support of additional maps, but that's not a gameplay change as much as it is necessary just to phase out maps that aren't being used or being considered seriously right now, such as Steppes, Delta, Jungle Basin, and Blistering Sands.
In the end, I have to agree with what he said. The game does NOT need core changes right now. It doesn't need changes to the statistics of units, either, but stat changes are more easy to predict than radical changes in how the game works on a fundamental level.
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On January 20 2011 14:43 wherebugsgo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 14:34 Angra wrote:On January 20 2011 12:50 Redmark wrote:On January 20 2011 12:18 Angra wrote:
The game is never going to be balanced by simply changing numbers and stats on units. And this is the only thing that Blizzard is doing so far. The game needs actual core changes to the way it works (maps, unit sizes, macro mechanics, unit designs in general) to eventually be as balanced as BW. Is that why every matchup has been perceived as imbalanced in both ways, shifting left and right pretty much every week? Is that why when they give Roaches a +1 range people flip the fuck out? Please. The game will not be balanced by armchair designers playing God. The game will be balanced incrementally, more by the community than by Blizzard. Do you honestly believe that adding +10 health here, taking away -5 damage there is going to eventually make the game have absolutely perfect balance while at the same time keeping it a dynamic, interesting, competitive game? No, he's advocating that Blizzard do nothing for a few months, so we can examine what happens to the game as it evolves untouched for a while. The most recent patch was merely a week ago, we don't need to change anything right now. I might be in support of additional maps, but that's not a gameplay change as much as it is necessary just to phase out maps that aren't being used or being considered seriously right now, such as Steppes, Delta, Jungle Basin, and Blistering Sands. In the end, I have to agree with what he said. The game does NOT need core changes right now. It doesn't need changes to the statistics of units, either, but stat changes are more easy to predict than radical changes in how the game works on a fundamental level.
I'm not saying to all of a sudden rush out core changes to the game, sorry if I implied that. What I mean is, eventually down the road, all of these number changes most likely aren't really going to do anything to make the game better as a whole. It just seems like a temporary fix to adjust problems that arise, but there's probably going to always be those problems no matter how many times you tweak the numbers on units and stuff because the actual problem lies deeper than stuff like "should marauders do 18, or 20 damage?"
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True balance is IMPOSSIBLE, but the goal should be to attain perfect balance so when you inevitably fall short you get as close as possible. To say the game is EVER balanced at any time is completely naive and a cop out. Right now the game is much more imbalanced than it will be once all the expansions hit. I personally dont like when people say to quit whining about imbalances, because it hinders any discussion or legitimate complaints about balance when a good sample of stats are gathered to support it. Right now map imbalance seems to be the biggest issue by far, which is a good thing, because that is very fixable. I eagerly await the larger maps simply to see how they change the game.
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On January 20 2011 14:34 Angra wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 12:50 Redmark wrote:On January 20 2011 12:18 Angra wrote:
The game is never going to be balanced by simply changing numbers and stats on units. And this is the only thing that Blizzard is doing so far. The game needs actual core changes to the way it works (maps, unit sizes, macro mechanics, unit designs in general) to eventually be as balanced as BW. Is that why every matchup has been perceived as imbalanced in both ways, shifting left and right pretty much every week? Is that why when they give Roaches a +1 range people flip the fuck out? Please. The game will not be balanced by armchair designers playing God. The game will be balanced incrementally, more by the community than by Blizzard. Do you honestly believe that adding +10 health here, taking away -5 damage there is going to eventually make the game have absolutely perfect balance while at the same time keeping it a dynamic, interesting, competitive game?
Yes. If there are imbalances at the moment, they are obviously so small that they do not spring to the eye at the first glimpse. The best way to try to fix a small problem is to change small stuff. The core game seems to be working just fine, and be at least nearly balanced. Why throw all that down the drain and start to go balls out bunkers changing everything, when the far better way to combat imbalances is to actually change numbers. Of course, if you have the impression that the game at the moment is boring and stupid, that might be different.
Also, people seem to have the strange impression that the people at blizzard are living on the northpole without any connection to the outside world at all. I am pretty sure that that is not the case. Generally, it is a much safer way to change stuff without blowing everything up by doing increasingly smaller steps until you reach the end, instead of jumping around like a beheaded kangaroo.
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I've learned that even when something seems imbalanced you're just probably playing it wrong. Think outside the box. Also being anger about it is just expending energy unnecessarily so now I just play and have fun and not worry about that stuff. If its truly imbalanced it will fix itself in time
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Tell me: do you think BW balanced or not? If it's balanced, then why WOL can not? It needs time.
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Speaking of random, I don't think dayvie is bad at late game even though he plays R. He kicks my ass every time he gets Z and I win every time he doesn't so far. Maybe my TvZ is just terrible, but that'd be a bummer because I've practiced it more than any of my other matchups.
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On January 20 2011 14:46 Angra wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 14:43 wherebugsgo wrote:On January 20 2011 14:34 Angra wrote:On January 20 2011 12:50 Redmark wrote:On January 20 2011 12:18 Angra wrote:
The game is never going to be balanced by simply changing numbers and stats on units. And this is the only thing that Blizzard is doing so far. The game needs actual core changes to the way it works (maps, unit sizes, macro mechanics, unit designs in general) to eventually be as balanced as BW. Is that why every matchup has been perceived as imbalanced in both ways, shifting left and right pretty much every week? Is that why when they give Roaches a +1 range people flip the fuck out? Please. The game will not be balanced by armchair designers playing God. The game will be balanced incrementally, more by the community than by Blizzard. Do you honestly believe that adding +10 health here, taking away -5 damage there is going to eventually make the game have absolutely perfect balance while at the same time keeping it a dynamic, interesting, competitive game? No, he's advocating that Blizzard do nothing for a few months, so we can examine what happens to the game as it evolves untouched for a while. The most recent patch was merely a week ago, we don't need to change anything right now. I might be in support of additional maps, but that's not a gameplay change as much as it is necessary just to phase out maps that aren't being used or being considered seriously right now, such as Steppes, Delta, Jungle Basin, and Blistering Sands. In the end, I have to agree with what he said. The game does NOT need core changes right now. It doesn't need changes to the statistics of units, either, but stat changes are more easy to predict than radical changes in how the game works on a fundamental level. I'm not saying to all of a sudden rush out core changes to the game, sorry if I implied that. What I mean is, eventually down the road, all of these number changes most likely aren't really going to do anything to make the game better as a whole. It just seems like a temporary fix to adjust problems that arise, but there's probably going to always be those problems no matter how many times you tweak the numbers on units and stuff because the actual problem lies deeper than stuff like "should marauders do 18, or 20 damage?"
There is nothing that suggests a core change is necessary, and there has never been, as far as I can remember, a time in any RTS (not just SC) where a core change to gameplay has ever been necessary to fix balance.
Back in SC1, the power of early pools was reduced by increasing the cost of the spawning pool. That simple "stat change" did SO much for the balance of the game.
Core changes to the behavior of units or the game itself has proven to be highly unpredictable and usually very bad for balance in past games. BW was balanced entirely with stat changes, just like WC3. In Age of empires 3, the developer tried to balance the game with each expansion by including core changes to the fundamentals of the game. The result was a disaster, and most players of AoE3 will consider vanilla to be the best balanced because it was the simplest.
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You said that your analysis ignores the role maps play, but that is a huge area to ignore. To me, an overall balance in SC2 is achieved if we can consistently create new and interesting maps with (relatively) fair win percentages at the pro level.
Also, here is an idea to measure balance:
Take a population of players, have them play games, and split the results of the games into two mutually exclusive sets, an in-sample set and an out-of-sample set.
We use the in-sample data to generate ratings, and use the ratings to predict the outcomes of the matches in the out-of-sample data. We generate the ratings in two ways: 1) by using only win/loss data, and 2) by win/loss data as well as race.
If we can significantly improve our predictions by incorporating race, then there may be imbalances.
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Makes me sarcasticly thing that balance in brood war was lucky rofl
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How do you write so much while still being so wrong...
Of course balance is possible. Balance is such that if both players play perfectly it is a tie or near tie.
Yah, you can't measure it, but you can look at how games play out, even at a lower than top teir level. It's pretty clear that, say, a 2 rax on DQ adjacent spawns will play out a certain way as opposed to a 2 rax on shakuras cross spawns. Even if you're not a pro, as long as you can produce reasonably similar games consistently, you can certainly comment on balance. In the end, close spawns metal is going to make taking a 3rd as zerg really really hard vs terran, and it's going to affect you at any reasonably high level of play. Any zerg in master's league knows they're boned if they spawn close on that map.
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perfect balance is impossible but SC2 will eventually have tolerable balance through maps if Blizzard allows for it (cough ladder map pool).
Brood War was and is balanced by its map pool and it can be completely imbalanced due to poor map creation. Battle Royal is a perfect example of complete imbalance occurring.
http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/maps/201_Battle_Royal
95 games played
14 TvZ matches
9 ZvP matches
71 ZvZ matches
1 PvP match
I wonder which race the Koreans thought was favored by Battle Royal.
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On January 20 2011 15:46 [Eternal]Phoenix wrote:
How do you write so much while still being so wrong...
Of course balance is possible. Balance is such that if both players play perfectly it is a tie or near tie.
No one has the ability to play perfectly. What if the game is such that "if both players play perfectly it is a tie or near tie." but if protoss makes a tiny mistake (missing a FF) he immediatly loses whereas terrans can recover from their mistake (for example). Still balanced ?
People in this thread talk about balance but have no clue about what it really is. Most people tend to think that mirror matchups are always balanced for example. What if next patch said :
- Tanks now do an additional +150 dammage to terran units
do you think TvT would be "balanced" ?
Bottomline is that this problem is even more complicated than just trying to get 50% W/L average on the ladder
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Really nice post Rodeo, for larger imbalances definitely a good enough approximation, but I think it's wrong because you make one wrong assumption:
The unbalance factor is bigger than the daily form factor.
By this I mean the fact that a better player, in a perfect game, will lose to a worse player, just because he has a bad day (in BW no player really had more than 80% winchance ever) given that the skill difference isn't to big.
On January 20 2011 11:39 Rodeo wrote:
Well, here's your answer: If T actually beat Z a little more than 50% of the time, Z players would have, on average, a little lower MMR than they should. That means they would, on average, be matched up against slightly weaker P players.
But this also means, considering the MMR sigma (under matchmaking):
T beats Z, the sigmas decrease, T's MMR increases, Z's MMR decreases.
The next day they're paired again (because sigma is not 0 at the initialization of the ladder), Z has better form, wins against T both sigma increase, Z's MMR inreases, T's MMR decreases.
If both players are close enough in the MMR to begin with (small imbalances) they will always be at equal level (the Z will not play weaker P), because the daily form factor would balance the imbalance.
So the question is - will the sigma ever reach 0?
Probably not, because even if it reaches 0 for some players, the other players with sigma > 0 could be matched against them, and because of daily form they could lose/win and both sigmas increase.
And even if the unlikely event has occured that at one point in time every player in the ladder has sigma 0:
I honestly dont know (probably hope that no player will every join with a sigma^^) 
Because the algorithm doesnt search outside MMR & sigma it would never match people of different MMRs together. So who's the "expected to win" player in that kind of match? None? Then that would mean one MMR will increase and the other will decrease but the sigma would remain unchanged?
Of course this whole "daily form" thing is leading me to the same conclusion you have:
Balance is an impossible goal, because we would need perfect, error free data to achieve balance. But the daily form factor prevents us having that kind of data 
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Wow, this is some pretty awesome analysis. I can't help but think back to how this might apply to BW as well. Historically, ZvP has always been in favor of the Z slightly, except in brief periods of metagame shift (i.e. Bisu's rise). The other two matchups, if you ask most people don't seem to be advantageous to either player when you watch a game.
However, if you look at the win %'s over all these years at the professional level, there's definitely a slight overall Z > P > T trend. I don't have the exact numbers, but I think it was something like ZvP 53%, PvT 53%, TvZ 51.5% (don't quote me on this), just slightly over 50% for the advantaged races. Maybe, the cause of these slight imbalances in PvT and TvZ are in fact due to the ZvP matchup. Now obviously the BW pro scene doesn't use MMR and map balance is a far larger contributor to balance, but your theory could still potentially apply at some level.
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On January 20 2011 16:12 Geiko wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 15:46 [Eternal]Phoenix wrote:
How do you write so much while still being so wrong...
Of course balance is possible. Balance is such that if both players play perfectly it is a tie or near tie.
No one has the ability to play perfectly. What if the game is such that "if both players play perfectly it is a tie or near tie." but if protoss makes a tiny mistake (missing a FF) he immediatly loses whereas terrans can recover from their mistake (for example). Still balanced ? People in this thread talk about balance but have no clue about what it really is. Most people tend to think that mirror matchups are always balanced for example. What if next patch said : - Tanks now do an additional +150 dammage to terran units do you think TvT would be "balanced" ? Bottomline is that this problem is even more complicated than just trying to get 50% W/L average on the ladder
That's not an issue of balance, that's an issue of creating interesting gameplay. Remember zvz in beta with 1 food 2 armor roach? There was only really 1 strategy on most maps, and it was 1 base roach. The matchup was very balanced, but it was really boring and stupid.
I think this forum is too full of people who never played broodwar. Have you ever played TvP at low level? It's really really hard for T, and really really easy for P. Even simple 2 gate goon pressure requires T to play really really well just to live. Just because something is easier for one side than the other doesn't make it imbalanced. What it does is make it imbalanced at a certain level of play.
The problem is that people can only play so fast and so well. If at the highest level of play things are still too easy for one side then it's clearly a balance issue.
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Balance is okay right now.
But in regards to gameplay some matchups suffer from some major design flaws that make the matchups just not very enjoyable, like PvT and PvP in my opinion.
PvP is pretty much all 4gate and PvT is horribly skewed to have no dynamic gameplay whatsoever.
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On January 20 2011 11:43 Pocketpurple wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 11:41 Skyze wrote:
balance is pretty damn close right now. Any race can win in almost any situation. Maps play a small part but definitely not as big as some people claim. Without idra there to say "i only lose because that map favors terran" and etc, no one would be talking about maps really.
This is probably the best we're gonna get til HotS comes out, then we start all over again with the balance of new units, yay. I disagree with your point about maps, I believe maps play a HUGE role in terms of balance. A game on steppes of war is completely different from a game on xel naga. Certain gameplay mechanics become much stronger such as slow tank pushes because on steppes of war slow tank pushes are actually quite fast.
Another aspect to consider is that a big reason why Brood War is perceived to be balanced is due to the awesomely creative and experienced map design community. Heck, even now, more than a decade after its release, maps are still regarded as slightly terran, zerg and/or protoss favoured. However, when the racial stats for a map becomes too skewed, it is quickly replaced. Furthermore, the entire map pool changes rather frequently anyways. At the same time, the map-making community is constantly learning from past mistakes, to eventually make the game seem as perfectly balanced as it is today.
So, imo it comes down to one simple thing: as long as the map pool stays stagnant and Blizzard maintains a stranglehold on its rotation, the races will continue to be perceived as imbalanced against each other. My 2 cents.
Edit:
On January 20 2011 16:26 MaD.pYrO wrote:
Balance is okay right now.
But in regards to gameplay some matchups suffer from some major design flaws that make the matchups just not very enjoyable, like PvT and PvP in my opinion.
PvP is pretty much all 4gate and PvT is horribly skewed to have no dynamic gameplay whatsoever.
Well said, sir. There is a huge distinction between balance issues and game design flaws. The latter is actually my biggest concern with sc2, and nigh unsolvable regardless of maps or patches in my worthless opinion, but I digress.
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There are three different explanations:
1. Good players play terran.
2. Game is imbalanced.
3. Since good players are smart, they easily see terran's potential and use it. Making it even worse and explode forums with whine/qq.
No way to know which one is true. All we can do is wait and enjoy what we have.
Remember how everybody thought Z>T right after patch 1.2? And how is TvZ now?
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On January 20 2011 16:23 [Eternal]Phoenix wrote:
Just because something is easier for one side than the other doesn't make it imbalanced. What it does is make it imbalanced at a certain level of play.
If a game is imbalanced at a certain level of play, then it is imbalanced, since player skill is widely distributed across all skill levels. For a game to be perfectly balanced, it has to be perfectly balanced at all levels, which is nigh impossible.
Now arguably, the best way of balancing a game is to focus on making it balanced at the highest level first, not only because it's important for E-Sports, but also as player skill across the board starts to increase over the years, the game will naturally become closer and closer to balance overall.
However, Blizzard being a company that makes most of its sales off people in the Bronze-Gold leagues, they in fact DO need to take into consideration the balance at those levels as well, which is why we saw multiple times changes in patch notes during the beta (e.g. gateway build time nerfed due to proxy gates being too hard to stop at low levels, etc). It's a pretty delicate tightrope for balancing, and honestly I think Blizzard has done an amazing job so far, even though there is always clear room for improvement.
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On January 20 2011 16:23 [Eternal]Phoenix wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 16:12 Geiko wrote:On January 20 2011 15:46 [Eternal]Phoenix wrote:
How do you write so much while still being so wrong...
Of course balance is possible. Balance is such that if both players play perfectly it is a tie or near tie.
No one has the ability to play perfectly. What if the game is such that "if both players play perfectly it is a tie or near tie." but if protoss makes a tiny mistake (missing a FF) he immediatly loses whereas terrans can recover from their mistake (for example). Still balanced ? People in this thread talk about balance but have no clue about what it really is. Most people tend to think that mirror matchups are always balanced for example. What if next patch said : - Tanks now do an additional +150 dammage to terran units do you think TvT would be "balanced" ? Bottomline is that this problem is even more complicated than just trying to get 50% W/L average on the ladder That's not an issue of balance, that's an issue of creating interesting gameplay. Remember zvz in beta with 1 food 2 armor roach? There was only really 1 strategy on most maps, and it was 1 base roach. The matchup was very balanced, but it was really boring and stupid. I think this forum is too full of people who never played broodwar. Have you ever played TvP at low level? It's really really hard for T, and really really easy for P. Even simple 2 gate goon pressure requires T to play really really well just to live. Just because something is easier for one side than the other doesn't make it imbalanced. What it does is make it imbalanced at a certain level of play. The problem is that people can only play so fast and so well. If at the highest level of play things are still too easy for one side then it's clearly a balance issue.
Balance isn't only about W/L balance between races, it's also about strategy balance. If one strategy dominates a certain matchup, then the game is not balanced (that strategy is said to be "imbalanced"). I really don't know why people would stop at races to define balance.
I can go even further and say, "the game is perfectly balanced, players just need to pick the best race and they will all have 50% W/L".
I understand this thread is more focused on race imbalance, but balance as a whole is affected by tweaks done by patches so its pointless to only consider this particular aspect of balance.
Maybe giving the roach +1 armor will balance all three matchups (it won't but lets say it does), but maybe it will also ruin the strategy balance in ZvZ.
Perfect game balance is impossible to measure with figures only, and therefor "perfect" balance is not a possible goal since there will always be a part of interpretation.
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....I feel like 60%(arbitrary number, the point is a good amount of people) of people posting on this thread did not even bother to read the full post, or perhaps just failed to understand his point. Anyways, very good post!
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But the whole introdution to OP is false ! It has been prooved that Blizz HATES zergs, you would know that if you were a Z player because every time you start a game on a Z favoured map it's close spot !! Oh wait....
Seriously speaking, I could definetely tell you were a scientist after the first paragraph where you defined the rules of your dissertation. Overall I think the topic of balance is complicated because there are subtopics : balance in pro game, balance in matchups, balance in race, balance in casual games, and the beloved "balance of my own race" topic.
You have options to make the game more balanced at pro level (or at least at high diamond level) because the players there have refined mechanics and can therefore focus on strategic aspect of the game. But those modifications will probably change nothing for platinum to bronze players, where (for example) a 4 gate push can decimate 90% of Z players. Where every units feels weaker, slower. Where mineral are often over 1K. Where timings are maybe known, but never (or so) respected (WHY THE F... DOES THIS 4-GATE PUSH COME 2 MIN LATE I'M DRONING MAN). I truly think there is little way to balance casual play so it should not be taken into account. And before the shitstorm, I am a casual player.
Racial balance is imo great if I'm objective. If I think about Z (you would known by now that I'm a Z player ) I think we lack proper anti-air solutions vs P, and also a DT-like unit, and banshees, and AoE, and that it's not fair that a ball of criminal with rifles can simply walk into my lair and destroy my mighty alien monsters. I hate you marines.
Balance in matchups is relatively close to balance in pro game. If I don't consider the conclusion of OP, and if I look to the 2 highest level tournament, what do I see ? 7/8 players on semi-finals are T. If I look generally, there are only 3 consistent Z players, and (I think) even less consistent P players. Now I have two way to think : 1) Well that IS a proof that T>>Z>P, T is overpowered, nerf it, I hate marines. 2) Well I have to take in account that there are matchup's specialists, and the map pool. I should probably look at the tactics that were used. But those parameters are heavily influenced by luck/randomness. This is were I begin to agree with OP's conclusion.
I may add that the game is quite new so we also have to take in account the "continuously shifting metagame" (...) There are no magical solutions, but atm my humble opinion is that the map play a way too big role in the reflexion over balance, but again, it's from a Z point of view. I don't remember hearing a T or P blaming the map for having lost (several time) against P or T.
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Interesting read. Balance is such a loosely defined idea, that you can never really reach it. I'd say though that the biggest issue between races is the tiers and the road to them.
Terran becomes incredibly strong early game partly because their tier has kicked in and/or their opponent tier hasn't. Lategame however, terran's tier units are not really that good compared to the other 2 races(since they are easier to get) and they have to make up for it with just more stuff in general. This I'd say is the pinnacle of the "balance issue". Ofcourse some maps are just ridiculous...
In general though, balance doesn't effect us much, that is to say, our shortcomings as players have by far bigger effect for the majority of gamers.
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Quick answer to a question and then two points to make:
"Would the problem be easier to analyze for Blizzard if we had separate MMR ratings for each match up?"
This would deconvolute things so that the "snowball" effect would cease to occur (which would be nice) but it wouldn't solve the problem. The ladder system would just readjust you to win 50% of the time, at which point you could argue that your race "should" be buffed because you are being matched against opponents who are worse than you but that your win rate is 50% against them due to the imbalance.
And the point: The idea of imbalance at different skill levels has come up. I think that's a slight misnomer. What that really reflects is not an imbalance per se, but a difference in learning curve. If it is very easy to learn Terran, as people seem to believe, then you can say there is a low level imbalance. But really what that means is that Terran players move up the curve faster. Skiing and snowboarding aren't imbalanced, it's just that you can learn not to fall on your @#$ more quickly doing one than the other. The word "balance" to me suggests play at high levels. The closer the best players get to optimal (or perhaps "humanly optimal") strategies the more their win/loss rates will actually mean something, whereas the win/loss rate at low levels won't ever necessarily mean anything.
Finally, the fact that maps affect balance has come up a couple times. I agree completely, but that fact doesn't change the analysis. Consider "the game" to be the mechanics plus the map pool. Or, alternatively, construct a whole pool of statistics for each map. The problem is the same.
I appreciate the constructive comments on this thread. I'm impressed by how many people rappelled all the way down that wall of text ^_^
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This thread is awesome, thanks OP!
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Balance is NOT static. By this I mean, we cannot think of any matchup as a scale with equal weight on both sides that represent perfect balance. The whole point is that it is dynamic. The scale is constantly tilting from one side to the other as a result of many variables. The reason balance is impossible to prefect is because it isn't really the objective. The real goal of Blizzard is to mitigate any glaring imbalance.
In addition, the fact that this is a game made by humans, played by humans, means that perfection is not even relevant. There is an advantage in the creativity of people though. As long as there is someone trying to squeak out the tiniest edge, that reveals an imbalance, there is room for improvement. Massive games played by top players WILL reveal these abuses if they exist. The scale of balance will always teeter because that creates the tension and stress we all enjoy from a match.
In the end, we have to remember that this is only one of three games, all with their own inevitable patches. That means that the real development of meta game has not even started.
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Wow this is a thought provoking great OP that is purely theoretical and mathematically accurate that describes how the MMR would mask any imbalances that might potentially exist and make players of each race perceive a different ordering of each match up.
Then in the discussion it turns out that 80% of the people who replied either didn't read the OP or didn't understand it but decided to treat it as some kind of balance whine or something.
@OP, I think that a possible test for balance, even with the MMR system, could be constructed as follows:
1) Assume that player skill is normally distributed
2) Assume that players of a high skill don't tend to play a specific race (this is a big assumption that may not be true but I don't see any way to ever make any mathematically valid predictions without assuming it. That is race A winning 100% of games could always be explained as "good players always choose to play race A). That is assume that the mean and variance of the skill of players of all races are equal or equivalently, that a players skill is independent of his choice of race
Under those assumptions you can do the following:
A) Based on the # of players of each race and the normal distribution calculate the expected racial distribution of the top 1000 (the 1000 is arbitrary and could be changed).
B) Compare that to the observed distribution
C) Do a likelihood ratio test where the null hypothesis is that the mapping from player skill to ranking is the same for all races vs the alternative hypothesis that the mapping from player skill to ranking is different for each race.
I think this should allow for a mathematical analysis of balance.
Thoughts? I think the data required for what I describe might actually be available through sc2 ranks, if what I am proposing seems valid.
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First, the OP was great. It was a very clear articulation of exactly what goes through my mind every time people start to analyze balance, and especially on the occasions where Blizz gives figures on win rates within leagues.
I have a general question and would be interested in peoples thoughts as to how it would change the situation.
Would the problem be easier to analyze for Blizzard if we had separate MMR ratings for each match up? This seems like it would be easy to implement (it is all behind the scenes) but may be able to separate balance issues.
This would work fine if there was some objective score (skill) to which you could compare the MMR for each matchup. There's really no way to quantify "skill," so that option is pretty much out. Additionally, using MMR depends on the ladder. I think most people will agree that ladder rankings are a pretty poor way of measuring balance.
Also, for high level players, specialization matters less than for players of lower skill. Players of lower skill can be good in one matchup but suck hard at another, and it's never consistent across the vast pool of players. In GSL 1 we saw, though, that the only exception to the hardship of Zergs was Fruitdealer, and even he had to be very lucky to actually do what he did.
Personally I think that balance is something that CAN be quantified, it just can't be quantified using the ladder system or most players' concerns. I think players should work on improving their game before actually claiming that something is imbalanced.
This is really part of the problem with trying to quantify balance. At this point, constant (i.e. weekly) shifts in the meta-game and occasional patches shift the balance equation pretty drastically from week to week. Assuming we want to only use the top players in the world to determine the game's balance, which is probably best, at any given time there is no statistically significant data set that can be analyzed to determine balance. The number of players/games are too small, and the conditions of those games, in terms of meta-game, patches, and setting (tournaments are more serious than ladder) vary too greatly to yield meaningful results. That is, of course, ignoring the fact that the best players from each region rarely play against one another, and that each region tends to have it's own meta-game.
It could eventually be possible to quantify balance, but only after all the expansions are out, all patches are complete, maps are consistent, and the meta-game is fairly settled (which may never happen). Under those conditions, you could get the best players from all over the world to play enough games to yield a useful data set, but that sounds unlikely...
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game is pretty close to balanced. even on crap maps, however i still think some races will always be harder to play than others...
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There'll always be someone who complains about balance, no matter what.
A big problem, imo, is that no-one is close to the skill ceiling, despite people originally saying that it would be much lower in SC2 than BW, and even if the game was perfectly balanced now, we don't know how the game will change in the future
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I think the core game is at the closest to balance it's ever been, but many of the official ladder maps have huge balance issues.
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Omg this logic in awful, or how to use the MMR system to return the zerg whine against them.
"Zerg play bad Protoss because they loose against Terran, which lower their MMR..."
Wut ?
"There is no way your personal experience can determine which matchups are balanced. You can't even do it with masses of data. "
Wut ?
Basically, you are telling us that no one can say anything about balance, using statistic or personal experience.
You are just hiding your own feeling behind your logic. No need to make all that theory, you can compare units to units, timing to timing, skill to skill. In social science, some people use the interview of 10 to 15 persons to make assumption on the whole society.
And every good sociologist could tell you, that when you add more and more people to your statistic, it does not gives you more "truth" in any way.
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Personally I think that "balance" is a totally ridiculous concept in a game where everyone has different abilities from other players. It can only ever be balanced 100% if people have the same potential of skills (like in an FPS without classes) and the only imbalance then is the spawn location (i.e. who spawns closer to the rocket launcher FIRST) ... even chess is balanced except for the "starting spawn location".
So why whine about "imbalance"? People should rather embrace the concept of racial advantages. The tough goal then is to create racial advantages for each race and give them the potential to use these advantages. For Starcraft 2 it is
- cliffs in important positions to drop siege tanks on or to abuse with blinking stalkers and colossi,
- large sized maps to abuse mobility advantages through unit speed, nydus worms and warp prism / pylon proxy-warp-ins.
Sadly Blizzard doesnt see this and only adjusts the numbers of the units and that is the frustrating thing about it. Balancing unit stats will never ever work, because you always have a different unit mix - even if you have built the same number of units there are most likely not the same number of your own opposing units in the same position, so the "balance of a fight" is different all the time.
So the real issue is giving equal opportunities to the three races. Zerg is lacking early game but they catch up later and no one has as easy a time to switch techs radically. Protoss and Terrans have options (plural for both races) to be very aggressive early on, but without a large number of production facilities and a sufficiently large economy they can not keep up with a Zerg who is throwing waves upon waves of units towards them and replaces casualties faster.
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fail. Sorry for double post
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On January 20 2011 19:04 Rabiator wrote:
Personally I think that "balance" is a totally ridiculous concept in a game where everyone has different abilities from other players. It can only ever be balanced 100% if people have the same potential of skills (like in an FPS without classes) and the only imbalance then is the spawn location (i.e. who spawns closer to the rocket launcher FIRST) ... even chess is balanced except for the "starting spawn location".
So why whine about "imbalance"? People should rather embrace the concept of racial advantages. The tough goal then is to create racial advantages for each race and give them the potential to use these advantages. For Starcraft 2 it is
- cliffs in important positions to drop siege tanks on or to abuse with blinking stalkers and colossi,
- large sized maps to abuse mobility advantages through unit speed, nydus worms and warp prism / pylon proxy-warp-ins.
Sadly Blizzard doesnt see this and only adjusts the numbers of the units and that is the frustrating thing about it. Balancing unit stats will never ever work, because you always have a different unit mix - even if you have built the same number of units there are most likely not the same number of your own opposing units in the same position, so the "balance of a fight" is different all the time.
So the real issue is giving equal opportunities to the three races. Zerg is lacking early game but they catch up later and no one has as easy a time to switch techs radically. Protoss and Terrans have options (plural for both races) to be very aggressive early on, but without a large number of production facilities and a sufficiently large economy they can not keep up with a Zerg who is throwing waves upon waves of units towards them and replaces casualties faster.
Your point of view seems biased. Zerg has easy time switching techs, but is the longer to tech. They can replace casualties faster, with weaker units and less cost effective units. That is balanced. (drone production on the other time can be discussed as it is way faster for zerg in end game).
All your post (talking about you and OP) are like logical ways to evade from reality, which is pretty simple : the game is not unbalanced, but zerg are having a hardest time in early game, and nobody really knows anything about end game because the maps as they are almost never allow a zerg to go for more than 1 or 2 expand.
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Well this is basically saying why you cannot use ladder for determining balance. Which I would agree with.
I like tournament performance personally because I'm more interested in balance at higher levels of play than myself and nearly every other mid-high diamond typical TLer, because I enjoy watching SC2 probably more than playing it. The data from that pretty much all points one way, and its pointed that way pretty much conclusively since SC2 released. But there are very notable outliers, and in the end you will never get complete agreement on balance and more importantly the reasons why one race appears to have more success than others. Maps, ease of use, macro mechanics, unit balance, specific timings et. al. Its complicated. And while I think tournament performance (weighted wins/second/third/fourth etc. places as well as overall distribution in tournaments that required qualifiers) is a pretty reliable indicator, others might not.
But I think its important to remember SC2 was released while they were still applying quite dramatic patches for it in the last stages of beta. It wasn't released because Blizzard necessarily thought it was close to balanced. It was released to meet the date they had set at whatever level of balance they had achieved. If it had of had another two months of beta it would most likely have significant differencs. Post-release we are getting quite minor adjustments - as they should be cautious - , but that is not to say that there wont be dramatic changes needed to SC2 between SC2 now and a day before HoTS is released.
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Omg this logic in awful, or how to use the MMR system to return the zerg whine against them.
"Zerg play bad Protoss because they loose against Terran, which lower their MMR..."
Wut ?
I'm tempted to not even respond to this post, as it looks like an attempted troll. The point being made here, in the simplest terms possible, is that quantifying balance based on ladder rankings is impossible. This is both because the skills of ladder players aren't the kind of skills you want to balance the game around, and because of the way MMR and the matchmaking system work. I can't explain it any more clearly that the OP, so I wont even try. But I assure you, he's not trying to complain about imbalance.
"There is no way your personal experience can determine which matchups are balanced. You can't even do it with masses of data. "
Wut ?
Personal experience is a notoriously unreliable way of identifying objective facts. Worse still, you're perception of each matchup is based on your experiences on ladder, which uses the self-correcting MMR system. You have no way of knowing whether the player who beat you yesterday is actually better, his race is imbalanced, or there was some fluke. In other words, your perceptions of a given matchup's balance are both prejudicial and based on a fundamentally flawed system.
Data is unreliable in this case because the pertinent data sets are either too small in number or cover too large a period of time (during which there have been patches, map changes, and major meta-game shifts). That is, there aren't enough high ranking games played at any given time, and players are essentially playing a different game now than they were 4 months ago.
In social science, some people use the interview of 10 to 15 persons to make assumption on the whole society.
This is patently false. You might find some random person calling themselves a "social scientist" doing this, and you might read very specific case studies that only cover 10-15 people, but 10-15 people is not a representative sample for "the whole society" (unless it's like a 60 person "society").
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While balance is quite a challenging concept to quantify, I think it can be achieved when perfect AIs play to a draw on every match-up on every map. In my opinion, computers are the only way to control the skill factor. Mission impossible, I suppose  . The perfect AIs should win against humans in all occasions and conditions, of course. Flawless macro should be relatively easy to code. Decision making, on the other hand, can take a while...
EDIT: Not to mention the coding for force fields... Nightmare, indeed .
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On January 20 2011 19:17 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 19:04 Rabiator wrote:
Personally I think that "balance" is a totally ridiculous concept in a game where everyone has different abilities from other players. It can only ever be balanced 100% if people have the same potential of skills (like in an FPS without classes) and the only imbalance then is the spawn location (i.e. who spawns closer to the rocket launcher FIRST) ... even chess is balanced except for the "starting spawn location".
So why whine about "imbalance"? People should rather embrace the concept of racial advantages. The tough goal then is to create racial advantages for each race and give them the potential to use these advantages. For Starcraft 2 it is
- cliffs in important positions to drop siege tanks on or to abuse with blinking stalkers and colossi,
- large sized maps to abuse mobility advantages through unit speed, nydus worms and warp prism / pylon proxy-warp-ins.
Sadly Blizzard doesnt see this and only adjusts the numbers of the units and that is the frustrating thing about it. Balancing unit stats will never ever work, because you always have a different unit mix - even if you have built the same number of units there are most likely not the same number of your own opposing units in the same position, so the "balance of a fight" is different all the time.
So the real issue is giving equal opportunities to the three races. Zerg is lacking early game but they catch up later and no one has as easy a time to switch techs radically. Protoss and Terrans have options (plural for both races) to be very aggressive early on, but without a large number of production facilities and a sufficiently large economy they can not keep up with a Zerg who is throwing waves upon waves of units towards them and replaces casualties faster. Your point of view seems biased. Zerg has easy time switching techs, but is the longer to tech. They can replace casualties faster, with weaker units and less cost effective units. That is balanced. (drone production on the other time can be discussed as it is way faster for zerg in end game). All your post (talking about you and OP) are like logical ways to evade from reality, which is pretty simple : the game is not unbalanced, but zerg are having a hardest time in early game, and nobody really knows anything about end game because the maps as they are almost never allow a zerg to go for more than 1 or 2 expand.
I highlighted something which I totally agree with and which is the reason for many many nerfs which would not have been necessary if we had had larger maps. There are two ways to kill fast Reaper and Zealot Warp Gate rushes:
1. nerf the units (but that affects early AND late game) OR
2. make maps larger so the opponent gets scouted later and units need to walk more to get to the enemy.
Larger maps for instance make even cannon rushes obsolete, if every Zerg comfortably has a few Zerglings by the time the Drone could have scouted their main base. Losing to that is rather unsatisfactory IMO because there is not much skill involved on the part of the Protoss.
P.S.: I am not playing Zerg but Terran, but I do want equal opportunities for all races and the nerf to Siege Tank damage kinda nerfed mech in a big way IMO. Trying to be "fair" I think that the tanks need to be spread out more and the one way to accomplish that is giving the player a bigger area to defend / attack (*1). So basically I want less danger for Zerg in the early game, BUT there needs to be an adjustment for the Terran for late game, because he cant really keep up with the Zerg production and thus the efficiency of the units needs to be reverted to what we had earlier. Currently the stats of the units are adjusted for small maps with two 200 food armies facing each other on one screen ... and then the Zerg wins because he can replenish faster. Personally I find that boring, because even though you can do a lot with micro and correct decisions it doesnt involve as much strategy as I would like.
(*1) Containment matches in Starcraft 2 are pretty much nonexistent because the 200 food army is just too powerful and there is no real defenses against big balls (Tanks, Thors and Psi Storm have had their damage / area nerfed, right?) of units to discourage that.
@Omnipresent
It might be helpful if you left the name of the person in which you quote ...
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On January 20 2011 11:39 Rodeo wrote:
So this brings me to the conclusion. I'll put it in bold. There is no way your personal experience can determine which matchups are balanced. You can't even do it with masses of data. May be Blizzard already secretly records different MMRs for each match-up and even for each map.
But thanks to your posting I now understand why I have an easy time to beat Protoss: Because I lose too much versus Terran.
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I think a balance that does not exceed say 55% for each matchup is good enough. Although in this case i'd more prefer a "triangle" of imbalance than absolute imbalance of one race or underpoweredness of one race
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There are many MMOs out there, but the success of WoW is partly due to the fact that many classes feel different and arent just "reskinned versions of other classes". Warriors use rage to power skills, Rogues have their energy, Hunters now use focus and casters have mana. Other MMOs are "totally symmetrical" (Everquest 2 for example and Rift seems to be so as well), but they are probably more boring, because switching a class will not give you a totally new feeling in the game but only a reskin ... sort of.
The attraction of Starcraft over other RTS is in part due to the real difference between the races and thus there needs to be a large degree of "races not being the same as others". Too many people do not acknowledge that fact and call it imbalance and whine about it. Personally I think it is necessary to keep the game interesting and challenging.
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On January 20 2011 11:39 Rodeo wrote:
The faster the metagame is mapped out, the faster the statistics at the top levels of play will actually matter.
I don't agree with this. BW is ~12 years old now and you still see shifts in the metagame. It's obviously stabilized a lot more than SC2 is currently, but that doesn't mean you should just disregard the data.
You should probably also treat the rating for each race as meaning something different. Your argument seems like an infinite cycle.
I also don't know why you'd want to ignore using more balanced maps in favor of the current map pool for this argument, when it seems to be a consensus that the existing map pool is not balanced (and therefore is skewing data in and of itself). GSL is even replacing half of its map pool with custom maps for that reason.
Is perfect racial balance achievable? No. It's going to always come back to the maps once you get things close enough.
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On January 20 2011 20:46 Craton wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 11:39 Rodeo wrote:
The faster the metagame is mapped out, the faster the statistics at the top levels of play will actually matter.
I don't agree with this. BW is ~12 years old now and you still see shifts in the metagame. It's obviously stabilized a lot more than SC2 is currently, but that doesn't mean you should just disregard the data. You should probably also treat the rating for each race as meaning something different. Your argument seems like an infinite cycle. I also don't know why you'd want to ignore using more balanced maps in favor of the current map pool for this argument, when it seems to be a consensus that the existing map pool is not balanced (and therefore is skewing data in and of itself). GSL is even replacing half of its map pool with custom maps for that reason. Is perfect racial balance achievable? No. It's going to always come back to the maps once you get things close enough.
Yeah replacing the map pool may not result in balance (or may), but in any case it would most likely improve balance, which is always a good thing. Improvement is always good. Once that is done to a degree we can then make any racial balance changes if necessary.
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On January 20 2011 14:01 oxxo wrote:
All I know is I like Blizzard's approach with SC2. The way they balanced WC3 was laughable. They'd change multiple variables on multiple units at a time and just hope it'd work. Speculation or fact?
Blizzard is doing a lot of inhouse testing before releasing a patch, including actual matches and numeric simulations. They don't just change something and bring it out. WC3 balance is not too bad, but the stream of tears due to the whining never stopped.
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Perfect balance is an impossible goal, freedom of opinion ensures that much.
General balance that most can agree with is difficult, but not impossible to achieve.
As far as RTS balance goes, SC2 is amazingly well balanced when compared to the rest of the market.
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That was an interesting read, but I have two objections.
First, I think your assumption that there is some kind of true skill level is problematic:
Because decent Z players are losing to slightly less skilled T players, those Z players have a lower MMR than they ought to.
"Ought to" implies that there is a true skill level behind their actual performance as Zerg which doesn't fully show because Zerg is underpowered. But let's assume for a moment that the given player has never played anything but Zerg, so that if he switched to T or P he would drop down rapidly and lose to players with lower rankings for a while. Where's his true skill level then?
My point is, you can't dismiss multi-racers and randomers as you do, because without the assumption that if a Z player switched to T, he would win more (in your scenario of Z being underpowered vs T), the concept of a true skill that should ideally translate into MMR is empty. If a player never switches and we don't consider the possibility of a switch, there's no empirical reality to the assumption of a true skill behind his performance as Z, there's only his performance as Z.
Second, your bold printed conclusion misses the fact that we subjectivey not only experience wins and losses, we also experience how we win or lose. Take a drastic example: Zealots are given 10 armor. Zealots now march over everything, even if Zs and Ts defend brilliantly and even if the attacking P makes every mistake possible, is late on his buildings, forgets pylons, sends his Zealots the wrong way at first etc.
It is possible to differentiate why a game was won or lost. There are lots of criteria that can be used for analyzing replays; were the build orders smooth and clean, were the decisions justified and sound, was the micro accurate, scouting, building placement, expansion choice and timing etc. If someone performs poorer than his opponent in many of these respects but still wins because he just a-moves a powerful unit, that might be an imbalance. There is more information to consider than just the naked binary win/lose criterion. I think we all know the difference between losing to a better player who outplays us, and losing to a weaker player because of a dumb mistake. It feels quite differently.
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oh balance is impossible to achive. The more balanced the game is the more boring it is to watch. (impossible to balance that haha) only if something imbalanced happens the crowed goes wild, its purrfection though if the games allows to stop these imbalances or make them hard to execute.
sc2 is faster then broodwar and the mechaniks are better so you need to be even faster then in bw to deal with a banshee or to deal with a hellion or baneling drop into your eco. But i think people will learn to deal with this stuff and games will get cooler. Saw some bio vs storms, first it suprised the terran and he lost a huge fight terribly and everyone said its over, then the terran simply danced around 5 storms because the protoss didn't wanted to just spam his last storms. And he kept dancing around those storms and all the time destroyed the toss until he could take the toss down.
I am quiet positiv but a bit sad about blizzard fan service balancing to make people stay. (buffing zerg for example)
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Balance is not possible when blizzard wants the game to be balanced for all skill levels.
The only way that would be possible is if every single unit and strat for each race scaled the exact same way as skill increased.
Also I wouldn't say that the game is close to balanced right now, what we have though are people using certain strats that give other races a chance at the late game, instead of just blatantly abusing the imbalances their race(s) may possess.
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You make really nice point.
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Very well written!
How long did Blizzard continue balance patching BW after release though? ;/ I think there will be plenty of changes to create far more balance. It's OK, they got math people on it and shit.
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I admit I haven't read all the comments, but the opening thread misses one very big factor. How many percentage that play each race. If 1/3 played Terran, Zerg and Protoss your theory would work. But it's not like that, and thus your entire foundation upon which you build your assumptions crumble.
If for instance 50% play T and 25% play Z and P, the Zerg players would face more of the match-up where they have the highest lose-percentage. Similar the protoss players would face terran players more and thus win more.
In the end this system would end up with all the P players in top, the T players in the middle and the Z players in the buttom.
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[QUOTE]On January 20 2011 12:08 pwnsftw wrote:
[QUOTE]On January 20 2011 11:39 Rodeo wrote:
Is balance an impossible goal? Or, why losing to really means is weak to .
"I lose to all the time. Blizzard loves and hates . I quit forever."
you do realize that in the early years of starcraft (original) Terran was considered to be vastly in-superior race so ya, they were trying to even out the teams[/QUOTE]
in-superior?
Your post is confusing me.
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I think he may have meant 'inferior'.
*gets out red pen, disapproving look*
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I think that the game can possibly be balanced, but there will always be people complaining about the smallest things. Also, it mights not always be that a race is imbalanced, but one players knowledge or skill might be greater than the others, which might make the game seem more imbalanced than it is.
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Very good post, well thought.
I would also like to add something very important: it is impossible to know when the game gets balanced. Maybe a little thing in a match up is important to do to make it balanced, and it is not impossible that NO ONE on earth EVER finds out what it is, in the end we all think it's imbalance but we're all in a thick fog. Maybe at some point blizzard will PERFECTLY balance SC2, and someone will find a tricky thing to do, everyone will say X race is imbalance and no one will find the answer before blizzard patches it (even if there really is an answer to that but no one, not even blizz finds it) then we'll go into a state of "post-balance". Where something got patched (nerfed) while it shouldn't, now making that race underpowered, and since this little problem got kicked out of the way, no one thinks about it. Many attempt at re-balancing the game will happen but nothing good will come out of it because we were all too busy whining about it instead of finding the answer to it, which would automatically balance the game in a "natural" way.
Also, it could be hard to believe, yet not mathematically impossible that for some reason, the vast majority(like99%) of X race is just less skilled, not because of game balance or mechanics, simply weaker players than the other 2 races. Don't get me wrong I'm not saying it's the case right now (then again, no one knows). We judge players and races by their performance in tournaments and on ladder. If all races are perfectly balanced but the overall X race players are weaker than Y and W race, it means that X race is overpowered but since the majority of its users are weaker, it evens out and looks balanced. Take the same player distribution but in a perfectly balanced SC2, then X race would lose more because its users are weaker. Now these players need to get better to play on equal ground with the other 2 races. Kind of like what happened in GSL1, just an unspecific example to illustrate.
TL;DR
Balance is not something measurable, it's a feeling that depends on many, very biased, criterias and no human being will ever be able to identify true balance.
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Nice idea that an imbalance in tvz mu can cause the imba in zvp and pvt.
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One great player at the pro level can also make a difference at all levels.
I mean, terran was already percieved as good, but just think of terran after MKP came in. Suddenly every terran did his 2rax opening and it worked darn well.
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Good points all round OP, especially pointing out how Blizzard doesn't really have reliable ways of measuring balance (yet claim to be able to, through their "adjusted win percentages").
The remainder of this GSL is going to be pretty much all versus . Terrans have dominated all GSLs, but somehow haven't been able to win. I can't explain this dynamic, but there's no doubt that Terrans have a more stable grip of the later rounds than the other races. The lowest Terran percentage in GSL RO4, was in GSL3 (50% terrans; ).
Now, I don't believe the game can be balanced more than a shuffled deck of cards is balanced for poker. And this is what Blizzard needs to take to heart; give all races equal amount of "hidden threats", just like a poker table, so the game is balanced through mindgames. By means of mindgames, even a complete underdog can win in Starcraft.
But right now, the only race that really has a wide range of mindgames, is Terran.
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It can't really ever be proven or measured, but it can be assumed. The issue is which information you choose to base your assumption off of. If you take the twisted blizzard ranks then your information may be skewed. If you take the GSL results or amount of X race in Code S and Code A then your information may be skewed. What it comes down to is that there are too many factors especially this early to determine what will be imbalanced. Players skill level, skill level vs X race, their opponents skill level and race, strategy choice, map pool, tournament position landing, ect ect ect ect will all lead to skewed results, but when the meta game evolved and Code S has only 100% solid players and the map pool evolves (or players actually learn how to defend on smaller maps), then you can begin to infer an imbalance if X race is 80% of RO16 90% of RO8 and 100% of RO4. Perhaps it might still be due to other reasons, but it would be more reasonable to assume something then rather than now where so much is left uncertain.
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Switching between Pubmed and TL.net is getting stranger now that threads on this site may, in fact, begin with an abstract.
Good post. Excellent points. I think all we can do is hope that Blizzard knows what they are doing and has some collection of metrics that we are not aware of that controls for these confounding aspects of the matchmaking system.
They seem to be doing a pretty good job, overall, so I'm willing to assume they have something(s) that we don't hear about in terms of their balance metrics.
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Everyone complaining about map imbalance, is just complaining.
You should be able to win EVERY matchup on EVERY position of EVERY map in this early stage of SC2.. this isnt friggin BW, where theres 10 years of experimentation/metagame shifts.. This game is fresh, and if you think "you lose 90% if you are close position on metalopis as terran" or anything like that, like some people has mentioned, then make a new strat that totally counters why you are losing. Simple as that.
Basically; the more people complain rather than trying to figure out a new way to play, is just a waste of time. In beta, everyone thought Terran was weak right? then TLO brought that 1/1/1 and look where we are now. Then zerg was super weak, but Fruitdealer won the GSL and suddenly hundreds of zergs rise up.
Stop complaining, and learn how to play better. Complaining about balance wont help you, and if you think the balance is so bad, switch races so you can see how "easy" the other races are.
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On January 21 2011 00:53 Skyze wrote:
Everyone complaining about map imbalance, is just complaining.
So you are saying there is no map imbalance and that no map favours any race?
Dont you think there is enough evidence to suggest otherwise?
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Let's balance ourselves first. You can't say that there is no such thing as imba and it's just a matter of exploring the gameplay, just as you can't say some elements of the game or even a whole race is entirely OP, just because it's hard to stand against in a particular scenario that could be avoided if no major (or minor, but meaningful) mistakes were made on your side. You also can't say everything is soooo damn hard to balance and requires professors of statistics to deal with it, just as you can't say something should be nerfed or removed just like that to solve the problem.
Some things indeed are really hard to determine and need complex science to be perfected, but some are clearly imba, like the recently patched repairing SCVs threat priority or blocking the ramp with two 2x2 buildings for example. Sure, you could deal with both if you played it out well enough (which often.. too often meant: got lucky), but it doesn't mean it wasn't OP.
The ultimate purpose of balancing the game is not to cause 100% draw matches between players of the same level of skill, but to keep the game free of cheap tricks / catches / methods / features / units very hard to stop and / or almost always leading to victory (either in a battle or the war), no matter how good the other player's response is.
I'm a law grad among other things and my analogy to what imba is would be just bad regulations. Just because something's legal (is in the game) doesn't mean it's fair. Some things come out by very rare occasions, some are common, but controversial due to variety of reasons and some are so obvious our dear legislators not only fix them relatively quick, but there's common agreement in the parliament that it's the right thing to do. Simple as it is.
I'd like to learn 'bout what the most experienced and pro players honestly think is OP, especially 'bout their own races. In case they talk of another, look for the points they agree with each other the most.
Just my few cents.
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i don't see your main question answered in the essay. You do not conclude if balance is possible to achieve, you only state that it cannot be done on personal experience. Balance could perhaps be achieved one day, but not by means of analysing given data.
You do not take into account that some people have a very high understanding of the game. People can judge what is possible to do for a race at any given time. We can identify the limitations and weaknesses for each race. We can compare these and discover any abnormalities.
Last, matchup inbalance and racial inbalance is the same. Any change to a race can affect any match up.
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OP: Thanks for the food for thought. An interesting perspective i hadnt considered.
I imagine some people would be more affected by this than others. No doubt about it that not everyone gets the same matchups. Some Terran play more Toss than other Terran etc etc. Just gets more complicated. lol
I didnt read all the apparent whining about map imbalance so im not saying this to add to that but i think everyone wants to see different maps. Maps are just far to important to ignore.
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I do think balance is something we can strive for but never really achieve 100%. That margin of error I think is made up by the players, and tbh Sc2 is one of those games that changes so much during play ( early, mid, late game) that all races have an equal chance, and it's pretty well balanced for such a new game.
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i have often wondered, why dont they have separate MMRs for each of your matchups, like maybe im really good at ZvZ, but not at ZvT, so im facing terrans that just rofl stomp me, but zergs that i continually roflstomp
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Balance is a fine line to walk, just because something is strong, doesn't mean it's not balanced. Just because it's hard to counter, does not mean it's not balanced. People flail the word "balance" around like this is WoW. Unbalanced is: RNG on a ret paladin in WoW. Unbalanced is not: a glass cannon like a void ray. Broken/bugged is Frost Mage lvl 10 having a pet shoot 700dmg frost bolts. Broken/bugged is: a position you could completely hide a pylon on shak's plat due to a map glitch, creep spread issue on official maps, previously 0agro scv repairing a thor.
SC2 for the most part is balanced AT THE MOMENT, something could be discovered this evening as "broken" and thus imbalanced, but nothing is, otherwise you might see the guys playing for $60000 taking advantage of it. Some play is strong, and could be borderline imbalanced, but most of the time it's the person not being prepared for it, scouting, or doing both of those and still herpderping doing the same thing and not swapping. Throwing the word balance around is like throwing "Tier units" this again, is not WoW armor sets or raids. You have low gas units and high gas units. Low tech and high tech. Bunker rush, spine crawler rush, 2rax scv+rine all in, 6 pool 8 pool, cannon rush, 4 gate - it's all cheese. It's not broken or unbalanced. You can counter every single one of those with scouting as any of the 3 races.
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On January 21 2011 01:19 terence158 wrote:
i have often wondered, why dont they have separate MMRs for each of your matchups, like maybe im really good at ZvZ, but not at ZvT, so im facing terrans that just rofl stomp me, but zergs that i continually roflstomp
After reading your post, I thought, well, some players adopt strategies or tactics atypical of their respective races, that might be why some vs Zerg openings work against Terran players, for instance.
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On January 21 2011 00:37 SpaceYeti wrote:Switching between Pubmed and TL.net is getting stranger now that threads on this site may, in fact, begin with an abstract. Good post. Excellent points. I think all we can do is hope that Blizzard knows what they are doing and has some collection of metrics that we are not aware of that controls for these confounding aspects of the matchmaking system. They seem to be doing a pretty good job, overall, so I'm willing to assume they have something(s) that we don't hear about in terms of their balance metrics.
Cheers, we're having the same feelings.
I think balance is intangible, and should be treated with a social science approach rather than natural science approach. I can't form a conclusion on whether balance can be achieved or not, there can always be balance if we go to the early C&C style, but that wouldn't be a lot of fun, would it?
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the concern with players of a lower level, low-masters and below, tend to lose to a race or a certain composition, and deem it "imba" instead of working to find a reason for their loss and adjusting, which leads to a cycle of continuing to lose as a composition gets more important, while still trying to funnel the same strategy down the zerg players throat
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On January 21 2011 00:53 Skyze wrote:
Everyone complaining about map imbalance, is just complaining.
You should be able to win EVERY matchup on EVERY position of EVERY map in this early stage of SC2.. this isnt friggin BW, where theres 10 years of experimentation/metagame shifts.. This game is fresh, and if you think "you lose 90% if you are close position on metalopis as terran" or anything like that, like some people has mentioned, then make a new strat that totally counters why you are losing. Simple as that.
Basically; the more people complain rather than trying to figure out a new way to play, is just a waste of time. In beta, everyone thought Terran was weak right? then TLO brought that 1/1/1 and look where we are now. Then zerg was super weak, but Fruitdealer won the GSL and suddenly hundreds of zergs rise up.
Stop complaining, and learn how to play better. Complaining about balance wont help you, and if you think the balance is so bad, switch races so you can see how "easy" the other races are.
Do you not think that since SC2 is so new that the maps very may well be very imbalanced, but there just isn't enough data to show that yet? There is no data to prove that the maps are balanced OR imbalanced. Nobody has done the large number crunching to show which spawn positions favor which race on different maps.
Terran could very well be winning like 70% of their games on Steppes of War, but we don't have the data to show it yet. It sure feels like they do but I can't back it up with cold hard data, making my opinion just an opinion. A lot of people share it, but I guess that doesn't make it true. Not until someone checks like 1000 games and determines the win/loss ratio. If one race has is favored on a map it doesn't mean that the other can't win, they're just at a disadvantage. Not every build has been discovered, not by a long shot,
If Steppes wasn't terran favoured in TvZ, why has pretty much every single zerg in the GSL vetoed it against T? Why do the best zergs in the world refuse to play on it vs terran? Maybe because it's freaking hard to beat a terran player on it. The close positions make it hard to stop a 2rax bunker rush or an all in, and the double high ground makes it very tough to break in later.
Making a strat to counter what you lose to is not as simple as that. If T gets 2 barracks out early Steppes, you need to get a fast army out. When T scouts and sees the fast army, they'll wall in, make a factory and then seige tanks and bunkers and seal you out of their base. Now what? Your army can't break in, you've sacrificed your economy to defend against the 2rax push that isn't coming. The two barracks they made are now just walls keeping you out. So, whats the "simple as that" counter to defending against the threat of both a 2rax and turtle. A few marines out will stop you from scouting so it's up to you to do a strat that can beat very fast pressure and a later timing push.
I guess I haven't played enough, and I'm certainly not pro, but I've never figured out how to reliably play against T on Steppes with a 50% win/loss ratio. If there is someone out there who does know how, I'd sure love to know too.
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On January 20 2011 11:39 Rodeo wrote:
Did you predict that? Liar!
As a fellow scientist, I totally want to sneak that line into the conclusions of my next paper
Anyway, extremely well-written post. You make a good point about not being able to make balance claims based on personal experience if we can't even do it with large data sets.
On January 21 2011 00:37 SpaceYeti wrote:Switching between Pubmed and TL.net is getting stranger now that threads on this site may, in fact, begin with an abstract.
Ha! Doing the same exact thing!
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I really like the approach this thread takes to not directly implicate specific scenarios of perceived imbalance and rather simply discuss the topic in more generalized manner. However, I do not agree with the OP that balance is unattainable, even on the current map pool. I firmly believe that some minor tweaks to all three races would eliminate most if not all of the match-up imbalances we are currently observing. Terran vs Zerg is always the most talked about match-up of perceived imbalance, and I believe that there really is some imbalance in it, however, contrary to popular belief the imbalance is not caused by any of the Terran combat units, or their stats.
The imbalance comes from the MULE, the MULE in Terran vs Zerg allows Terran rushes to ALWAYS contain a larger troop count, in a shorter period of time than Zerg can produce. Zerg needs to be up one base or if the Terran has 3 Orbitals dropping MULEs, 2 bases ahead, in order to match the income of the Terran. This is also seen to some extent in Terran vs Protoss as well where even with an ultra aggressive 4, or the Choya style 5 Warpgate and Stargate rush the Terran is still matching troop counts, and once Stim hits simply steam-rolls the Protoss attack. This is not an imbalance as a result of Stim, but rather the MULE. (These are sample numbers, just a ball park idea) Adjusting the MULE to cast twice as often, at 60% less resources brought in than the current level would reduce the income overall by roughly 15-25%, and furthermore with it only costing 25 energy over 50, it would require a Terran to be much more involved in their macro mechanics. This brings me to the final issue with the MULE - the amount of APM and focus required to properly execute Terran macro mechanics is quite simply non existent. You have energy? You don't need scans? Drop a mule, go back to your rush/push/all-in/tech/turtle or whatever you happen to be doing.
By increasing the amount of effort that Terrans have to put into their macro mechanics (bringing it on par with having to come back to your base and spawn units from Warpgates, and send them to your army, and also on par with injecting and spreading creep with multiple Queens) it will in turn further reduce the potency of their early game timing attacks because the Terran will not be able to dedicate the full level of their APM to their army with little to no sacrifice to macro (as they can now).
With the MULE change suggested here Terrans would have to make the same decision that Zerg and Protoss have to make: Should I all-in, strong timing (and so on) and sacrifice my economy or should I not? Zerg and Protoss have to make a firm choice when they all-in or do a very specific timing attack, and that is to do the attack and throw away any chance of a late game, or not. Unless a Terran brings all of its SCVs to the attack, the MULE will allow a one-base Terran to match production with a 2-base Zerg or Protoss until such time that the Terran is mined out. Obviously this can only work with low tier units because a player on 2-base will have far more gas than the Terran.
This is the key problem with ANY of the perceived MU imbalances in T v Z, P - a Terran with little to no effort can execute its macro mechanic perfectly, at the highest level. Meanwhile Zerg and Protoss in order to use their mechanics at the highest level actually require the highest level APM and timing. Terran macro mechanics do not. If Terrans couldn't simply ignore macro entirely during an all-in or timing attack, drop two MULEs, and catch up in under a minute, the imbalances we are seeing would melt away.
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On January 20 2011 15:13 iEchoic wrote:
Speaking of random, I don't think dayvie is bad at late game even though he plays R. He kicks my ass every time he gets Z and I win every time he doesn't so far. Maybe my TvZ is just terrible, but that'd be a bummer because I've practiced it more than any of my other matchups.
From what i've seen he doesn't understand the game as well as people think he does. I don't think i've ever lost to him, because his game just doesn't seem crisp or knowledgeable or refined in any way whatsoever.
He's rolled Z against me twice or three times now, and I win in 5 minutes or less with bunkers...he's prob writing on the blizz drawing board "bunkers imba" when really he's just bad lol. I always make sure to type in chat "fix tanks tvp, you broke them" b4 the game starts too when I get him in automatch.
As for the balance of this game imo, it's very balanced so far, except now PvT is completely broken. I don't know if people have seen phoenix builds, or phoenix collosus builds now, but they are pretty lol. There's even a build out now, where you can go 1 stargate phoenix directly into high templar amulet. ...
yeah...I don't really get the OP of this thread though, the game is pretty well balanced for an RTS. If this were another company balancing the game, or another group of devs, we'd still have 1 supply roaches and there'd be massive flame wars on the forums. So be happy with balance so far
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On January 21 2011 01:04 Rabiator wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2011 00:53 Skyze wrote:
Everyone complaining about map imbalance, is just complaining. So you are saying there is no map imbalance and that no map favours any race? Dont you think there is enough evidence to suggest otherwise?
The amount of "map imbalance" is very VERY small right now, when the game is so new that no one has possibly figured the 100% perfect buildorder/timing like it is in BW.
I think map imbalance really only takes place after 5+ years, when the game is exhausted of its timings/strats/etc like BW is.. Right now, the game is so new that you should be able to defend anything on any map, or alternately find different ways to take advantage of the map for your race.
I played random over 200 games at 2800+ diamond level right before masters came out, and I never felt anything was impossible on any map. No matchup ever felt "impossible" on certain maps, any loss/win was solely the fact of the player, not the map.
Now there may be SMALL map issues, like the thor being able to hit a hatch on one cliff on LT where it wouldnt on the other bases.. but until things like that are being abused/used every single game and proving to largely influence the games (which I dont see anything like that happening right now), these maps are fine right now. the only reason maps make such a difference in BW is because the races/buildorders/timings are 99.9% perfected. SC2 is at least 5 years away from that being the case, with 2 more expansions coming out.
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On January 20 2011 12:00 ReketSomething wrote:
even international chess isnt balanced
the greatest thing about sc balance is maps. maps affect balance and therefore the game can be perfect, they just need better maps. just look at sc1...maps are soooo important and you can control which race is strong
So true! White IMBA!
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On January 21 2011 04:21 Skyze wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2011 01:04 Rabiator wrote:On January 21 2011 00:53 Skyze wrote:
Everyone complaining about map imbalance, is just complaining. So you are saying there is no map imbalance and that no map favours any race? Dont you think there is enough evidence to suggest otherwise? The amount of "map imbalance" is very VERY small right now, when the game is so new that no one has possibly figured the 100% perfect buildorder/timing like it is in BW. I think map imbalance really only takes place after 5+ years, when the game is exhausted of its timings/strats/etc like BW is.. Right now, the game is so new that you should be able to defend anything on any map, or alternately find different ways to take advantage of the map for your race. I played random over 200 games at 2800+ diamond level right before masters came out, and I never felt anything was impossible on any map. No matchup ever felt "impossible" on certain maps, any loss/win was solely the fact of the player, not the map. Now there may be SMALL map issues, like the thor being able to hit a hatch on one cliff on LT where it wouldnt on the other bases.. but until things like that are being abused/used every single game and proving to largely influence the games (which I dont see anything like that happening right now), these maps are fine right now. the only reason maps make such a difference in BW is because the races/buildorders/timings are 99.9% perfected. SC2 is at least 5 years away from that being the case, with 2 more expansions coming out.
Steppes of War PvZ is massively imbalanced. It's not "very VERY small." I've beaten moonglade on SoW despite getting raped on any other map, and my win rate against other good zerg players (rigid, titan, vibe, catz (if you want to count beating a wacky 7 pool), etc.) is much higher on that map than versus the same people on other maps. There's a reason most of the good zergs just do a 2 base hydra/spine crawler push and GG when the opponent has colossi in time.
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Well, one thing that I've taken away from this thread is that if there are imbalances at this point, there's no easy cure.
I'd also posit that most imbalances (however minor) are probably map related, making it even harder to pinpoint where the issues are. And even then... how could you with confidence?
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Balance is such a broad term given that most people don't have enough skill to be considered experts. I don't, so I don't go around complaining about balance, but instead attempt to improve.
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On January 20 2011 11:41 Skyze wrote:
balance is pretty damn close right now. Any race can win in almost any situation. Maps play a small part but definitely not as big as some people claim. Without idra there to say "i only lose because that map favors terran" and etc, no one would be talking about maps really.
This is probably the best we're gonna get til HotS comes out, then we start all over again with the balance of new units, yay.
Sorry sir, but you're wrong.
How can you possibly say maps only play a small part?
How the game is played is dependent on the map.
Although IdrA is a whiney bad mannered player, it doesn't make him wrong.
I think everyone can agree that a map like jungle basin, delta quadrant, or steppes of war is blatantly imbalanced and gives certain races huge advantages.
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On January 20 2011 11:58 Lennon wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 11:51 Amui wrote:
Thanks for the analysis. I've thought about this, but I never realized that a single imbalance would have such a snowball effect.
So this is why blizzard has such a hard time balancing... They have a hard time balancing because they're too busy deep underground in their testing laboratories completely oblivious to what's happening in the real world aka the pro scene. That's why they come out with ideas like "hmm I wonder what would happen if we reduced the build time of a Bunker by 10 seconds" when Zergs are having an unbelievable amount of difficulty already versus Marine Bunker rushes.
Did you even read the OP? Say blizzard data says that Protoss beat terran 60% of the time. What is the current metagame of tvp? MMM +viking/ghost vs warpgate army +collosus/templar. Hmmm well since protoss are winning too much lets make marines shoot faster while stimmed.
What is the metagame of zvt right now? Marine/medivac/tank vs zling/bling/muta (with other support units added possibly in the late game on both sides).
The change that i mentioned above say it completely balanced tvp but now we have a problem in tvz especially if it were t favored before this change. So blizzard steps in and says that mutas move 50% faster. And this now balances tvz. Then the metagame shifts in tvp because now toss can't beat mass muta.
Just like the OP said matchup imbalances are very hard to fix any balancing by blizzard should be done slow. If you rush into balancing all you do is create more problems. Who could of predicted that once upon a time when the reaper speed was decreased in buildtime (and I believe cost as well) that it would completely throw off the metagame of zvt with the 5rax reaper. This was just a very small change that was done. Give it some time eventually the metagame will settle down a bit thats when balancing things becomes easier. And as always wait for HOTS to come out in BW every race seemed to have gotten exactly what they needed. You can argue all you want that zerg requires alot more apm at the low levels to play good (just an example) but BW has problems like this as well sure everything was as closed to balanced as you can get at the tip top level. But at C+ and below some races take significantly more apm to play well. Is this bad? Not really if gives you something to work for. It is absolutely impossible to balance the game for all players.
On January 20 2011 12:11 Dragar wrote:
I think the matchmaker aims for 50% win ratio against all races, not just in general. This may mean there is a seperate MMR for each matchup.
If this were the case that would be awesome but for some reason I'm not quite so sure on that. If it isn't the case where your MMR is matchup specific than I think it should be adopted because this I think would give blizzard alot more useful data.
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The most important lesson from this very good OP for me is the matchup part. It shows that even if I think that one of my matchups are favored towards my opponent, I cannot say which matchup in the triangle is truly weak. It might even be that my other non mirror is favored.
very eye opening
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On January 20 2011 11:39 Rodeo wrote:
So this brings me to the conclusion. I'll put it in bold. There is no way your personal experience can determine which matchups are balanced. You can't even do it with masses of data.
Here's where i think you got it wrong. We can probably never determine perfect balance, i.e. prove that the game is balanced. That, as you explained, has too many variables to solve. However, even though we can't prove it, we can go with the next best thing, that you, as a fellow scientist should know, since it's used in science all the time: Inductive reasoning.
We can get suspicious of where the game is probably imbalanced by looking at several statistics and using our heads a little. We also can't prove there will be gravity tomorrow, but based on our observations for the last thousands of years, we should believe there will be. Also, based on several specific observations on SC2, can we draw general conclusions for the game.
Perfect balance will probably never be achieved, but good enough so that most people will fail to attribute to imbalance the reason why they lost a game should be a more realistic objective.
Keep the work going Blizzard.
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On January 21 2011 15:18 Apolo wrote:
Here's where i think you got it wrong. We can probably never determine perfect balance, i.e. prove that the game is balanced. That, as you explained, has too many variables to solve. However, even though we can't prove it, we can go with the next best thing, that you, as a fellow scientist should know, since it's used in science all the time: Inductive reasoning.
I don't quite follow. Inductive reasoning is generalizing results that hold for a small set to a larger set, as you explain with the gravity example. But what are the small and large sets in SC2?
For gravity the variable is the attractive force between two massive objects, the small set is all past observations of that force, and the large set is all observations of that force past and future.
In SC the variable would be the win % between the races between players of equal skill? I suppose the small set would be the win percentage in all games played under one patch. I'm not clear how you would generalize that to a new balance patch, as you would expect the %s to change.
I'm not sure the term "inductive reasoning" gets your point across, but either way you still have the problem of defining equal skill. There is no good way to do that.
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As long as there are a healthy number of pros for all 3 races -- the game is balanced enough for me
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On January 21 2011 04:21 Skyze wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2011 01:04 Rabiator wrote:On January 21 2011 00:53 Skyze wrote:
Everyone complaining about map imbalance, is just complaining. So you are saying there is no map imbalance and that no map favours any race? Dont you think there is enough evidence to suggest otherwise? The amount of "map imbalance" is very VERY small right now, when the game is so new that no one has possibly figured the 100% perfect buildorder/timing like it is in BW.
ROFL
Lets take Metalopolis ... close ground position spawn ... ZvT. So what "timing / buildorder" will prevent a Protoss cannon blockade at the bottom of the ramp?
I am sure the map is perfectly balanced for that and that Blizzard doesnt have to change the ramp mapping so it cant be blocked with two buildings ... oh wait, thats just what they are doing, right? So in a sense Blizzard admits that the map screws up Zerg and you are saying there is no imbalance in the map? I think only one of you two can be right ...
Just in case it was missed: Read the above and expect sarcasm.
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When brood war came out, the units they added, were they meant to help re-design the balance? Or were they just like "these sound cool as shit, lets put them in?
What do you think their current plan will be with he implementation of new stuff in the coming ex-pack?
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There is no way your personal experience can determine which matchups are balanced. You can't even do it with masses of data
This needs to be in the TL commandments. I see so many people crying imba because their mid-diamond strategies are failing against other mid-diamond players over a series of <100 games. *shakes head*
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On January 21 2011 17:01 Uncultured wrote:
When brood war came out, the units they added, were they meant to help re-design the balance? Or were they just like "these sound cool as shit, lets put them in?
What do you think their current plan will be with he implementation of new stuff in the coming ex-pack?
They were like and still will be like" let's put in those cool as shit units in, derp herp"
I never played BW, but SC2 feels like; the bigger and cooler ur shit is the better chance of winning you have.
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On January 21 2011 17:01 Uncultured wrote:
When brood war came out, the units they added, were they meant to help re-design the balance? Or were they just like "these sound cool as shit, lets put them in?
What do you think their current plan will be with he implementation of new stuff in the coming ex-pack?
I'm pretty sure the corsair and the valkyre were added to help players vs Muta (can't remember which daily it was). DT's were added when they found a way to balance them in the game.
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On January 21 2011 09:37 Smigi wrote:
Sorry sir, but you're wrong.
How can you possibly say maps only play a small part?
How the game is played is dependent on the map.
Although IdrA is a whiney bad mannered player, it doesn't make him wrong.
I think everyone can agree that a map like jungle basin, delta quadrant, or steppes of war is blatantly imbalanced and gives certain races huge advantages.
You forgot to mention blistering sands! Also, I agree that maps play a huge part in balance, if they remove blistering sands, steppes, delta, and jungle = greatest day ever...
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As long as people know how to whine, and terran isn't the only race you can pick making every matchup TvT. This game will never be "balanced"
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On January 21 2011 17:01 Uncultured wrote:
When brood war came out, the units they added, were they meant to help re-design the balance? Or were they just like "these sound cool as shit, lets put them in?
What do you think their current plan will be with he implementation of new stuff in the coming ex-pack?
They were added in for balance. All three races got a new air-to-air unit that dealt splash damage because mutas were fucking bullshit back then. Medics were added in because of the marine's reliance on stim and how they had no regen. Even though Terran got Valkyries, MM became the standard composition to fight off mutas.
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On January 20 2011 11:39 Rodeo wrote:What happens in the case of a racial imbalance, where, say, A is equally weaker than *both* B and C, which are balanced with respect to each other? This case is a little simpler, though no less infuriating. An A player will win 50% of his/her games against each race and look for all the world to be perfectly balanced. Why you say? Well because the imbalance will lead him to face weaker B and C players on average. He will be lower in the ladder than he should be, but there's no way for him to know (except by the brilliant intuition that he should be higher in the ladder than he is because he is so pro). As long is the imbalance isn't so severe as to cripple the top of the ladder, it is invisible.
I've said this in threads where people point out that winrates are very close. AMM means it will be, but a player of a hypothetical weaker race will be lower ranked than he should be. The standard response has always been "play better" :-/
you bring up very interesting points about the difficulty of measuring any imbalance. I think it's taken as a bit of an aphorism that Blizzard accidentally the awesome balance in BW. Hopefully they can do it again.
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On January 20 2011 19:34 Omnipresent wrote:Show nested quote +In social science, some people use the interview of 10 to 15 persons to make assumption on the whole society. This is patently false. You might find some random person calling themselves a "social scientist" doing this, and you might read very specific case studies that only cover 10-15 people, but 10-15 people is not a representative sample for "the whole society" (unless it's like a 60 person "society").
Well, it's off topic, but you are not understanding anything about what is and what is not a fact in social science. You can tell fact based on the interview of 10-15. "Representative sample" is not always a good way to make research in social science. Many social scientist (for exemple Bourdieu, who is a well known one) sometime use the interview of 10 to 15 people: they know it is not representativ but still they can find some truth in their discurse that they will not find in a sample of 5000 individual simply because they can ask way more question and go deeper into a topic in a long interview.
I will add that, yes, 10-15 is not representativ but do you think a sample of 500 or even 1000 (which is the commun sample a sociologist use nowadays) is representativ to study a society of 300 millions people like the US ? There is "perfect" sample in social (i want to say "human") science.
Personnal experience is a perspective on something, so you can use it to judge a situation, even if it is biased. Every point of view are biased, there is only blind people like you who have faith in "science" who still think that the more stats you have, the more close to some "truth" you are.
Basically, what I'm saying is: you can judge a situation based on personnal experience, in fact it's not "you can" it's more "you always" judge a situation based on personnal experience.
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On January 21 2011 04:38 Sbrubbles wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2011 12:00 ReketSomething wrote:
even international chess isnt balanced
the greatest thing about sc balance is maps. maps affect balance and therefore the game can be perfect, they just need better maps. just look at sc1...maps are soooo important and you can control which race is strong So true! White IMBA!
Black is OK, l2p.
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As it was already pointed out, I'm sure the few balance tweaks that need to be done will come with the next extensions, so no worries.
But right now I think it's a huge lack of respect from Blizzard towards the esport community. They wanted SC2 to be a tip top esport game from the very beginning, but it's clear it lacks qualities compared to BW, and it's sad a lots of people complain about most games from gsl & other big tournaments being boring and/or pointless.
I feel very sorry for pro gamers who didn't choose to play T as it's the most represented race in the last round of every tournaments, and the pain it must be to train very hard daily knowing you're probably going to lose. I also feel very sorry for people who pay to watch stupid allins and cheesy games, and pointless tournaments ending with 7 T and 1 Z 
GG Blizzard
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On January 21 2011 15:43 Rodeo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2011 15:18 Apolo wrote:
Here's where i think you got it wrong. We can probably never determine perfect balance, i.e. prove that the game is balanced. That, as you explained, has too many variables to solve. However, even though we can't prove it, we can go with the next best thing, that you, as a fellow scientist should know, since it's used in science all the time: Inductive reasoning. I don't quite follow. Inductive reasoning is generalizing results that hold for a small set to a larger set, as you explain with the gravity example. But what are the small and large sets in SC2? For gravity the variable is the attractive force between two massive objects, the small set is all past observations of that force, and the large set is all observations of that force past and future. In SC the variable would be the win % between the races between players of equal skill? I suppose the small set would be the win percentage in all games played under one patch. I'm not clear how you would generalize that to a new balance patch, as you would expect the %s to change. I'm not sure the term "inductive reasoning" gets your point across, but either way you still have the problem of defining equal skill. There is no good way to do that.
We can't use equal skill, because as you said correctly, we can't define equal skill as we have no way to define skill to begin with if we don't know the game is balanced. Except in two cases: top and bottom players of each race. The limit to which the skill of the players will tend is the same at those levels, that is, bottom and top players of each race will tend to have very similar skills. So if the top has some fancy characteritics such as 60% winning rate for terran, we can get suspicious that something is going on. Also, the % of players of each race that play in big (that is, a lot of players participate, and a lot of selection occurs) tournaments and the % of them that go to finals and semis, should tend to be the same over time. If that's not happening, something is wrong.
The small sample are the games played so far for the top players of each race during a patch.
Just something to add to the OP: People commenting that Terran simply has more better players. How do you know it's them that are good, and not also the race that helps just a little? Perhaps if protoss was better, you'd see other good protoss dominate, and people say protoss simply has better players. Shouldn't it cross our minds, that perhaps one of the reasons some of them appear so much better is because of map / matchup imbalance?
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Interesting post Rodeo. I agree with much of what you said in the post. Thanks for the insight.
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Great read, and great first post!
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I think there were a lot of great points in the OP. I think there were also a lot of great points made in the comments and follow up posts.
While not at a high level, when I watch the high high levels I generally feel like this game is balanced pretty damned well. I'm quite happy with it at my level I can win if outplay my opponent strategically which is exactly how I feel it should be.
The only time I feel like there is imbalance in the game is with some of the early "all-ins" and as it's been said before these put people behind on economy, but fit the broad balance definition of.. if it's easy to pull off and very hard to defend it's probably imbalanced.
Overall, I just like how this post makes you think more critically about the entire situation as a whole instead of losing the forest for the trees on one specific aspect of one specific matchup.
I wish more people understood and read the TL.Net rules, it's pretty clear some people didn't read through the discussion that has built up, let alone original post in it's entirety.
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On January 20 2011 16:22 teamsolid wrote:
Wow, this is some pretty awesome analysis. I can't help but think back to how this might apply to BW as well. Historically, ZvP has always been in favor of the Z slightly, except in brief periods of metagame shift (i.e. Bisu's rise). The other two matchups, if you ask most people don't seem to be advantageous to either player when you watch a game.
However, if you look at the win %'s over all these years at the professional level, there's definitely a slight overall Z > P > T trend. I don't have the exact numbers, but I think it was something like ZvP 53%, PvT 53%, TvZ 51.5% (don't quote me on this), just slightly over 50% for the advantaged races. Maybe, the cause of these slight imbalances in PvT and TvZ are in fact due to the ZvP matchup. Now obviously the BW pro scene doesn't use MMR and map balance is a far larger contributor to balance, but your theory could still potentially apply at some level.
This has no application to BW because Broodwar doesn't have a ladder system.
Also, Broodwar has a VERY established pro-scene, and the stats you're using are the stats for professionals. There's a ranking system for the professionals, but they don't actually play games against each other according to the ranking system. It's just tournament play, there's no ladder. Thus, you can't get "matched up" to players according to skill, because there's no correlation between matchmaking and the point system like there is in SC2.
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I enjoyed reading this article. The snowballing of imbalance was something I had not thought of. I can see why it is so hard to balance a game that is constantly changing, it feels like months ago I knew how to play pvt and now its already so different. Anyway this was really refreshing so thanks again.
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On January 22 2011 01:16 Apolo wrote:
The limit to which the skill of the players will tend is the same at those levels, that is, bottom and top players of each race will tend to have very similar skills. So if the top has some fancy characteritics such as 60% winning rate for terran, we can get suspicious that something is going on. Also, the % of players of each race that play in big (that is, a lot of players participate, and a lot of selection occurs) tournaments and the % of them that go to finals and semis, should tend to be the same over time. If that's not happening, something is wrong.
The small sample are the games played so far for the top players of each race during a patch.
I see what you mean, and I generally agree. I allude to this near the end of my post as the one way I think balance could, at least to some approximation, be measured once the metagame has become more advanced. The question is one of whether the statistics are sound. It would be interesting to see what a statistician could make given the results a a bunch of major tourneys in one patch. Lots of interesting questions beyond balance might arise. Is there one matchup in which a less skillful player has a better chance of an upset (this could include the mirrors as well)? If so, that tells you what race you might want to play if you are hoping to affect or avoid an upset.
I see what you meant by inductive reasoning and I agree that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
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Big problem with the whole idea of balance is also in metagame changes and flavours of the month. MKP: bunker rush 2 rax. Fruitdealer: flood of zerg players.
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Make hellions cost an extra 15 gas, then the game is balanced.
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It's pretty much impossible to balance the game exactly until the metagame is refined.
The metagame changes, at least partially, due to the fact that there are imbalances waiting to exploited. But until they're exploited, we don't notice them.
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The game is never going to be balanced, because you can't really compare apples with oranges and say which one is better. A trio of sieged tanks will always beat a bunch of zerglings because that is their purpose, but a single Mutalisk can get rid of those tanks without any danger to itself.
So the challenge for the game designers is not to spread equal stats among the races and give each race their own version of siege tank and zergling, but rather to make them different enough and give each race ways to defend against every kind of attack the opponent can throw at him. This is the only reason why things get changed ... the inability to defend against things.
Sadly most of the whining on forums is about "imba siege tanks" or "hellions" or "banelings" or "forcefields" when they are used in an advantageous position or rather: the defender didnt prepare for them. Sieged tanks on a cliff are invulnerable to melee or short range units and you need a spotter as well. Are they "imbalanced" because of this? No, they are just doing what their purpose is and you just need to get the right units to defeat them. The problem only arises when you could have built the right stuff to defend but didnt do it. Doing the right thing involves scouting and a lot of game knowledge about good tactics an opponent could use.
The bottom lines are:- Dont whine about sieged tanks when all you do is run masses of zerglings into them (and other equally braindead stuff).
- Maps are a key part of racial balance or there would never ever be a need to downvote a map or remove it from the pool, but it is easier to whine about "60 splash damage" or "13 range" than a terrain feature.
- Early problems (which have been the reason for most major changes) can at least in part be solved by adjusting the map size without changing the stats of units.
- And lastly: This game will never ever be balanced.
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On January 22 2011 17:35 febreze wrote:
Make hellions cost an extra 15 gas, then the game is balanced.
Swap marines with hellions. ^^
On January 22 2011 11:20 wherebugsgo wrote:
This has no application to BW because Broodwar doesn't have a ladder system.
Also, Broodwar has a VERY established pro-scene, and the stats you're using are the stats for professionals. There's a ranking system for the professionals, but they don't actually play games against each other according to the ranking system. It's just tournament play, there's no ladder. Thus, you can't get "matched up" to players according to skill, because there's no correlation between matchmaking and the point system like there is in SC2.
Isn't ICCUP the BW ladder? Where most of the pro teams and even individual pros have accounts?
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I would like to add another point to your analysis here.
Lets say that race A has some sort of slight imbalance vs race B, but nothing gamebreaking as such, just an advantage. The players of race A , will of course, abuse this strategy to the fullest, its only natural to use strong tactics when this is possible.
And in this time , most of them will stagnate. They have this seemingly unstoppable strategy, so why on earth should they focus on anything else?
This however won't be the case for a lot of the players of race B.
Sure there will be a lot of whining Omg race A>B but they will have the motivation to train more.
And eventually a suitable solution is found. Now suddenly players of Race A, who have not been developing their play at all, sit there without their beautiful strategy and have to adapt as well.
This will lead to a time where there is equality or even advantage for race B, not because race B is stronger but because one race developed and one did not.
And this is also where a patch can seemingly screw over race B.
Lets move back to the time before race B found a final solution, but are starting to figure out ways around this strategy. Remember , there was a slight imbalance. And now Blizzard fixes it . Suddenly the players who have been doing their unbeatable strategy are left with no experience outside of it. They naturally dont have a clue what to do now, beacause they never got into this situation. A nerfed race A who has been stagnating now has to figure out new solutions and will get smashed by race B overall giving them , again, a feeling of imbalance.
Another time of adapting will come, Race A will adapt and Race B will get weaker compared to race A
Just one quick example of what i am talking about (and please dont see this as an argument of Imbalance if you read what i said you should see what i am talking about )
Remember the huge terran nerf? before that terrans could do a lot of things in ZvT they can not do anymore. for a while that left zerg very strong , i remember boxer saying he would switch races if terran does not get "fixed" TLO got flamed for always chosing the "strongest race".
Now the zerg are back in the "figuring out" phase of the matchup and its their time to whine again.
But its cerainly too early to tell for sure if this or any matchup is imbalanced or not.
Last example : broodwar. The game was not patched at all after a certain point and it would be foolish to think there were not some noticable or unnoticable imbalances that just got overwhelmed by enough minds trying to fins solutions
(wow this got longer than i thought it would i hope its understandable enough-> im very tired)
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On January 21 2011 04:21 Skyze wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2011 01:04 Rabiator wrote:On January 21 2011 00:53 Skyze wrote:
Everyone complaining about map imbalance, is just complaining. So you are saying there is no map imbalance and that no map favours any race? Dont you think there is enough evidence to suggest otherwise? The amount of "map imbalance" is very VERY small right now, when the game is so new that no one has possibly figured the 100% perfect buildorder/timing like it is in BW. I think map imbalance really only takes place after 5+ years, when the game is exhausted of its timings/strats/etc like BW is.. Right now, the game is so new that you should be able to defend anything on any map, or alternately find different ways to take advantage of the map for your race. I played random over 200 games at 2800+ diamond level right before masters came out, and I never felt anything was impossible on any map. No matchup ever felt "impossible" on certain maps, any loss/win was solely the fact of the player, not the map. Now there may be SMALL map issues, like the thor being able to hit a hatch on one cliff on LT where it wouldnt on the other bases.. but until things like that are being abused/used every single game and proving to largely influence the games (which I dont see anything like that happening right now), these maps are fine right now. the only reason maps make such a difference in BW is because the races/buildorders/timings are 99.9% perfected. SC2 is at least 5 years away from that being the case, with 2 more expansions coming out.
Every map in the pool is too small and/or favors a rushy style of play. Therefore every map is massively imbalanced. How you can rationalize your statements here is really beyond my understanding because for there to be 'only very small map issues' the size, and layout of every map must be appropriate for the type of play going on. And for high level 1v1 play, the current map pool in its entirety is a failure. 'Map imbalance only really takes 5+ years to come into effect' - I love the arbitrary number of 5 years you just pulled out of a hat when you wrote that sentence, really do. The only reason it took 5 years in Brood War was because everyone was still learning what StarCraft in general is all about. We know that now, the maps Blizzard made suck compared to the long history of KeSPA and ICCUP maps which have been perfected for Brood War. I agree it may take several years to flush out the meta-game properly, but I cannot agree whatsoever that map imbalance will take five years to be figured out. Map imbalances were figured out in the Beta. Now lets make sure that unlike Brood War we fix them instead of ignorantly touting that 'x arbitrary length of time is required to figure out map imbalance'.
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Very well thought and written, Rodeo!!
But when it comes to starcraft (or any RTS) balancing doesn´t necessarily mean attempting to make the game fair for every race. Though most of the times it does, the use of the term "balance" is often meant to refer to the excessive use of a unit over another.
For instance, you can, with no difficulty whatsoever, find on these foruns topics about increasing hydralisks speed off the creep or decreasing roaches life or speed, all for the so called balancing purpose. But what makes people discuss that is the fact that roaches are much more used than hydras, even in mid-late game. People who make those claims don´t necessarily analyse each match-up but do so because they would like to see zerg players (since i´m using hydras and roaches as examples) to vary a bit more and use something else than mass roaches on every stage of the game.
Just to clear something out, i´m not sugesting that roaches and hydras serve the same purpose. What i´m saying is that people take the "potentially excessive" use of a unit rather than another as reason for sugesting a balancing change. And THAT is worth of serious consideration when planning for a balance change.
Peace!!
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On February 02 2011 18:23 LuDGeR BriNk wrote:
But when it comes to starcraft (or any RTS) balancing doesn´t necessarily mean attempting to make the game fair for every race. Though most of the times it does, the use of the term "balance" is often meant to refer to the excessive use of a unit over another.
Personally I think the game can be made "fair" but never "balanced", because fair means that everyone has advantages over the other one time or another and balanced more or less means that every side is equal. Maybe my personal definitions of these terms are different from others, but I think it is important to have precise definitions so everyone talks about the same thing in the same terms. (see my signature)
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Blizzard have always created games close to perfection and constantly working on them, even years after their release, balance-wise. When SCII first came out, I was amazed with how good and refined this game was and how in my mind actually surpassed its predecessor (an almost impossible task as the first SC was for me the best game ever made).
The thing is though that the term 'PERFECT BALANCE' is not a valid term. Its not that it cannot be achieved, its that it doesnt exist and the reason for that is that the game features THREE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT RACES. 3 sets of advantages, 3 sets of disandvantages, 3 sets of mechanics, 3 of everything. All Blizzard can do is to make it as close as it gets, and then comes in the creativity of the individual and how he manages the advantages and disadvantages of his race. When people are bored to use their race as effective as they can and they just seek easy wins doing the same things over and over again, then the terms imbalanced, OP etc come into play.
I play Protoss (which some of you consider the ''strongest'' race) in mid-high diamond and you'll be impressed if i told you that it frequently crosses my mind the idea of switching to Zerg (the ''weak race'') because protoss has some disadvantages (as the other races as well) which when exploited, create unwinable situations for the race. This is not whining, i dont do that and no one else should in my opinion as i explained above that ''perfect balance'' isnt something achievable no matter how many years pass. The only achievable thing for SCII, is to come as close to balanced as it gets, and then let the individualism play its role giving us great matches to watch.
Quit whining, get better!
Much love to the community.
PS. Two things that could change in my humple opinion:
1). Somehow make the Z late game stronger. I think Z strangles vs P and T when it comes to two maxed armies colliding. The change however should NOT affect early game units and mechanics because that could cause the other races to lose quite easily to Z early on.
2). Make observers beefier or give Protoss another way to detect.
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Perfect balance can only be established with mathematical simulation. I imagine very close to perfect balance could be ascertained by simulating the game, although it would be tricky defining rules which would sufficiently narrow the range of the game, and the radical variation in boundary conditions (ie, different maps) would be the principal difficulty.
Blizzard should really hire some specialists to code such a program and then get supercomputing time to generate all the data. Blizzards current method of balancing unit compositions (ie, using a special map that repeatedly simulates a battle) is a complete joke, even micromanagement is ignored.
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On February 02 2011 23:38 Hypatio wrote:
Perfect balance can only be established with mathematical simulation. I imagine very close to perfect balance could be ascertained by simulating the game, although it would be tricky defining rules which would sufficiently narrow the range of the game, and the radical variation in boundary conditions (ie, different maps) would be the principal difficulty.
Blizzard should really hire some specialists to code such a program and then get supercomputing time to generate all the data. Blizzards current method of balancing unit compositions (ie, using a special map that repeatedly simulates a battle) is a complete joke, even micromanagement is ignored.
... plus you have a trillion-bazillion ways to weigh each factor into the equasion of balance, which makes the whole thing ridiculous AND impossible to accomplish. Just face (and accept) it: Starcraft 2 can NEVER be balanced (on your mathematical scale) ... only made fair for all sides involved by giving each race opportunities to abuse their own racial specials ... and that involves the actual unit abilities, the terrain features and especially the map size.
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Looking at TLPD map stats since the reaper nerf patch came out, the only matchup that's more imbalanced than anything in BW (about 55%) is TvZ on maps with short rush distances, which has something like 60% T win rates. That's actually pretty good, so I see why Blizzard doesn't want to rush balance patches.
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i think at low level it´s impossible
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Perfect balance is not possible. Even BW is not perfectly balanced. To do this you'd have to have the same units for each race/etc.
Realistic balance where the game is so close that it will almost never decide a game is possible, see BW.
Is SC2 there? Idk yet
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This is why larger maps are so important to balance. Larger maps produce longer games, and longer macro oriented games favor the more skilled player who makes better decisions, as longer games have more opportunities for the superior player to make more good decisions, and the inferior player to make more bad ones. Larger maps provide a buffer against imbalance, giving the superior player more chances to overcome any imbalances that may exist.
They also make the game far less volatile, where the outcome of a single battle is not as likely to determine the outcome of the game, thus giving a superior player a better opportunity to recover from cheeses or all-in rushes.
Larger maps also allow for more profound positional and tactical strategies, as there are simply more viable strategic and positional options available.
TL;DR Large maps make the game easier to balance, as player skill more heavily influences the outcome of the game.
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Only PvZ isnt balance rignt now on game
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The reason balance is so hard to achieve is partly because of how much people are concerned with their own interest. So many people, including a large majority of pros, prioritize their self interest over the state of the game and it just leads to everyone mindlessly supporting the race they play rather than taking an unbiased approach. No Terran is going to admit his wins are partly due to the strength of his race rather than his own skill, and no Zerg wants to admit he lost because of his own failures rather than an inherent flaw in the matchup. Blizzard relies heavily on the opinions of pros who know the game better than them for balance patches but its so hard to recieve unbiased suggestions. In GSL 1 before the roach range buff Boxer was complaining about TvZ was almost impossible while every single Zerg player was complaining otherwise.
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On January 20 2011 11:41 Skyze wrote:
balance is pretty damn close right now. Any race can win in almost any situation. Maps play a small part but definitely not as big as some people claim. Without idra there to say "i only lose because that map favors terran" and etc, no one would be talking about maps really.
This is probably the best we're gonna get til HotS comes out, then we start all over again with the balance of new units, yay.
Not really. Maps are probably the main defining thing in your strategy. Close bases tend to favor Terran a lot more since its more difficult for zerg to take a second expansion, whereas far bases favor zerg because of the long rush distances, making an expo easy to secure. Zerg strategy practically relies entirely on their economy, whereas for Terran and Protoss, they have better low-tier units.
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Cant see why not. Every single aspect of the game is changeable and able to be redesigned.
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What a fantastic and educational post! I love it :D
I never really thought about the whole MMR aspect of the "unfair" wins that you get in unbalanced MU, so thought provoking...
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The game in its current state is possible to balance by altering the map pools.
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This game evolves and that is why it is the best game ever created and why it will.never be perfectly balanced
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Very awesome post Rodeo! I never thought to look past the subject of unit balance into the domain of matchmaking balance. You present the idea that mirror matches are exempt from your thesis several times and you are extremely correct to do so. I have read many balance threads concerning race inequality due to units. Many people say, very reasonably, that the races are meant to be unequal, yet until now I haven't read anything that could so clearly explain what this meant. Once again, congratulations on your awesome post!
-ToxicToast
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EPT
