1. Fail at undertstanding quantum mechanics.
2. ?
3. Make post claiming quantum mechanics is related to balance.

Seriously, can someone fill the 2 in for me, here?

IPA

United States3206 Posts

January 21 2011 02:52 GMT

#42

jdseemoreglass always get so whiny when people disagree with him in his posts. He gets very sarcastic and huffy. It's kind've adorable.

ChickenLips

2912 Posts

January 21 2011 02:54 GMT

#43

On January 21 2011 11:32 sofawall wrote:

Show nested quote +

People who play random aren't necessarily equally skilled at all races.

but since you have a bajillion random players their playtime around all races should equal out.

so if you have 10000 random players that have all spent comparable amounts of games with each race show distinguishable winrates with one race of one specific matchup you might have reason to believe something is wrong in that matchup.

Azzur

Australia6260 Posts

January 21 2011 02:56 GMT

#44

On January 21 2011 02:55 jdseemoreglass wrote:
The pair of inequalities in this situation is "skill" and "game balance." Blizzard is failing to recognize that it is simply impossible to determine one mathematically without also knowing the other in advance. You cannot determine the skill of a player using winrate statistics, without FIRST knowing the degree of balance in the game being tested. Likewise, it is impossible to determine the balance of a game using winrate statistics with FIRST knowing the relative skill of the players. The two variables are mutually dependent upon eachother, making it impossible to determine one without the other.

You're making a lot of assumptions by saying that it's impossible. Well, in those series of videos, they actually posted up a mathematical formula which they used to remove skill from game balance. If you were serious about it, you would've looked at that equation and tried to find flaws with it rather than just speculate. The Uncertainty Principle is not a useful analogy at all.

What Blizzard did acknowledge is that while their stats show a reasonable level of balance, there were a few issues:
- The win % of the various races are different across leagues and regions. For example, protoss is very highly represented in ladder.
- There appears to be some "time imbalance". There was the famous quote where the TvP matchup needs to be won by terran in the first 12 minutes. Thus, while the % percentages were roughly equal (making it appear balanced), but they felt that having a race stronger at a particular time is not ideal.

Captain Peabody

United States3125 Posts

January 21 2011 02:57 GMT

#45

No, no, no, no, no...
These words do not mean what you think they mean.

Skill and balance are interrelated, meaning the more one is fine-tuned, the better the other can be.

Now, the thing is, WITHOUT recourse to mathematics, relative skill can be determined within a certain margin of error. Now that that margin is established, we can now find balance to within a fairly reasonable margin. And now that we have done that, we can finetune our relative skill rankings to within an even better margin. And so on.

Because the thing is, exact balance is impossible; and skill is highly malleable, and changes rapidly. Thus, given this, and given that the two are based on one another, it's true that EXACT CALCULATIONS can never be 100% accurate.
Thus, if there were really nothing at all between 'perfectly balanced' and '100% imbalanced,' then you would be absolutely right.

But the thing is, in the middle between these two extremes is where all reality lies. Because, balance CAN be known to a certain (very rough) level of precision simply by common sense and actual playing of the game; and so can player skill. However, once these two rough estimates are created, both can be used together with math to more and more carefully finetune these margins over time. Thus balance is born.

You're making a very simplistic point without considering the actual meanings of the things you're talking about. It simply doesn't work that way.

Tektos

Australia1321 Posts

January 21 2011 03:15 GMT

#46

On January 21 2011 11:49 SharkSpider wrote:
1. Fail at undertstanding quantum mechanics.
2. ?
3. Make post claiming quantum mechanics is related to balance.

Seriously, can someone fill the 2 in for me, here?

2. Get hit in the head with a shovel.

SharkSpider

Canada606 Posts

January 21 2011 03:34 GMT

#47

Seriously, though.

One way to go about talking balance is by making the assumption of relatively equal skills over a distributed group. If you assume independence between skill and race played in say, the top 3000 players, you can "rank" them, and then use a floating variance to get a deviation and increasing margin of error. If the deviation passes outside the error "cone" then there's a problem. Basically, take the porportion of palyers in the top X, then make a function as X goes to zero, and plot that on top of a function that's basically a cone of error emanating from very small error at a large sample to 100% error at 0. The only issue is that in SC2, there arent enough good players yet, and there may never be, given the nature of the game. Its still a good exercise to perform, though. This one will eliminate the "skill" issue by assuming that the player distribution at X should represent that at values of X as they get small. Typically this will give mixed results as you alter your study point, you're looking for a trend, though.

Another method is to apply the fencer's dilemma to assume that over time, the top X (say 1000) of each race represent the top 3X (say 3000) players in the world. You then perform a similar cone analysis as above, but with reduced error, and you do it for multiple values of X. (You need a supercomputer or a cloud to perform this kind of analysis, anyways.) And then graph the "balance" results according to X. In SC2's case you'd assume they got worse over time and figure that out.

Either way, statistical proof theory can be applied to this situation, but obviously it has a lot of error.

TehForce

1072 Posts

January 21 2011 05:00 GMT

#48

This is just an op with a lot of misinformation. First of all your analogy is out of place and has nothing to do with your subject. And second, Blizzard doesn't base skill only on winrate. There are bronze players with 100-80 winrate and master players with 100-80 winrate. Still Blizzard recognized the big difference in skill and placed them in other lagues...