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On April 26 2011 02:20 Apolo wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote:
Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won. That's how MC has above 90% win rate in PvP, right?. For sure it isn't 50/50, the best player will have the upper hand. A good player must be good in all matchups, and you can't say that PvP win is based on luck. Even then it's only 1/3 of all the matchups, even if it puts the win ratio closer to 50% it shouldn't affect as much as we see. Protoss from being the most played race, yet having the least players in top.
Actually, that's exactly why he has such a high win rate. First, review any pro Protoss interview and see what they say about PvP. It is a rock/paper/scissors situation, but in MC's case, he knows how to do rock, paper, and scissors, and also knows often what his opponent is going to do. Someone who has such a high win % against people that are on par with him in a mirror can only suggest that there is more to the PvP mirror than just skill.
In TvT there are a few routes to take from the beginning of the game, making scouting information hints at what the opponent is doing. In ZvZ, there is still more than 1 option (from what I understand, you can bling or roach early game). In PvP, there is only 1 option: 4gate. Either you are 4gating, or you are defending it, and that makes it extremely easy to metagame against. So easy that it is possible, in a ladder where you play different players that you may or may not know, for a player to get a 90% or higher win rate because you know what the opponent is doing in every game. In every PvP I play mid-masters, I know what my opponent is doing. I can tell 2 minutes into the game if he is going to outright die to a 4gate or if I should continue on the next phase of the game because I know my timings. If you are late with an immortal, if you are late with your gates, if you lose a single stalker to an error in the beginning, you have a good chance of losing the game, and that's all it takes: 1 error. It doesn't mean that you are worse than your opponent, it is just the nature of the matchup. If you can play 100 games in which you don't make that 1 mistake (in MC's case) against people who make just 1, you will win those 100 games.
btw, if you're not at least in Masters, it still might not make sense to you so just take my word for it.
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On April 26 2011 02:58 Nerski wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 02:11 buldermar wrote:On April 26 2011 02:08 lilky wrote:
So basically...
Races in order of most played to least played:
Protoss, Terran, Zerg
Races in the Top (Insert any number here) in order of most to least:
Terran, Zerg, Protoss
TLDR: Protoss is underpowered..
WHAT?!?!?!!?!?!? Correct, that's my overall conclusion based on the observations I made and I'm open for expanding on those observations if anyone thinks I'm being biased. So what you're saying is this is a balance QQ with a clever 'statistical look' to it? Someone lock this sham of a thread, you're not even using statistics correctly just listing out the fact there is more terran on top then toss or zerg. For any statistic to be truly significant the deviance needs to be high enough. Not to mention GM doesn't even represent loads of the actual top players, just the top players who ladder a lot. So there is plenty of margin for error in any statistical breakdown of the GM league.
You can't have significant deviance in top 100.
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You should take out the stuff about the players who go random. You can't get enough statistical data to make any opinion off of like 5 people rolling hard random. It's too small of data set.
Love how this turned into a balance discussion.
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On April 26 2011 02:58 Nerski wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 02:11 buldermar wrote:On April 26 2011 02:08 lilky wrote:
So basically...
Races in order of most played to least played:
Protoss, Terran, Zerg
Races in the Top (Insert any number here) in order of most to least:
Terran, Zerg, Protoss
TLDR: Protoss is underpowered..
WHAT?!?!?!!?!?!? Correct, that's my overall conclusion based on the observations I made and I'm open for expanding on those observations if anyone thinks I'm being biased. So what you're saying is this is a balance QQ with a clever 'statistical look' to it? Someone lock this sham of a thread, you're not even using statistics correctly just listing out the fact there is more terran on top then toss or zerg. For any statistic to be truly significant the deviance needs to be high enough. Not to mention GM doesn't even represent loads of the actual top players, just the top players who ladder a lot. So there is plenty of margin for error in any statistical breakdown of the GM league.
Can you show me a top player that isnt in GM? Everything I have seen indicates that GM is purely the actual top players.
On April 26 2011 02:24 strongandbig wrote:
First, the sample size of [top10] or [top30] is not big enough that you would expect it to be equal in the absence of imbalance. Over a thousand players, you can safely assume that the distributions of skill and race choice are independent. However, with ten players it's not unreasonable that there are just more Terran players of high skill.
Additionally, this assumes that winning enough on ladder to get into the top ten is dependent only on skill and game balance, whereas I think that luck is also involved; it's easy to imagine a player whose skill is #3 losing a lot of points in a BO loss to a player whose skill is #150.
Honestly OP, I just don't think you have enough data to say anything here.
His sample size of 100 is more than enough, and the theory would be that outside factors such as luck will fade as more games are played. Unless you reasonably think somebody can be lucky for hundreds of games?
So based on this graph, over the course of the top 10 through top 100 players it actually seems fairly linear to me, the ratio of terran to protoss to zerg players at the top is consistent through these intervals which doesn't seem to suggest imbalance at all but would rather suggest that there are just more terran players.
I'm not sure why you're reading "more terran at every level" as "imbalanced" when its a linear progression at a relatively consistent ratio for all races through the top 100...
A linear progression is what should happen. However, it should theoretically be linear in terms of the number of players for each race. Assume there are 1000 players (300 P, 300 Z, 300 T, 100 R), if you have perfect balance and distribution of skill, you will have 3 P, 3 Z, 3 T, and 1 R in the top 10. Obviously there isnt a perfect distribution of skill, so that will change things. The question is, how much is balance effecting it? Why, even when there are more protoss in GM league, are there more terrans at the top at a significant margin? What is preventing the protoss from being at the top? Is it a difference in skill, or due to balance?
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Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
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On April 26 2011 02:25 dogmeatstew wrote:
In short I'm not sure how these numbers give you the impression that terran is dominating in every area, a 2% higher win ratio isn't statistically significant even across 1638 players and all in all this last set of data actually looks pretty even across the board to me.
As far as I understand this research it has been made on a population basis. which means that every sign of deviation is "statistically significant". Now, you might be right if the OP was doing a sample size research which he intended to generalize over a larger population. Then you'd have to test the result for significance at an appropriate confidence level.
If tht OP was doing a such an generalization he'd most likely run into pretty severe problems with his sample data since it only represents the "top tier" of gamers and would therefore be scewed for its intents and purposes.
Now, all I'm saying is that a 2% differance IS statistically significance IF you have a population sized data. I'm NOT saying that the OP's interpetation of the results is correct or incorrect 
On April 26 2011 02:26 TheBB wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 02:24 strongandbig wrote:
First, the sample size of [top10] or [top30] is not big enough that you would expect it to be equal in the absence of imbalance. Over a thousand players, you can safely assume that the distributions of skill and race choice are independent. However, with ten players it's not unreasonable that there are just more Terran players of high skill. Again, some genuine statistical analysis would quantify this for you. There's no need to go around guesstimating which sample sizes are big or small enough.
Same goes here. The sample size the OP uses is the size of the population intended to be examined: the GM league. Thus we don't need to test wether his data is large enough, since by nature of the study, it's all the data that exists.
T-, chi-, F-tests ect. are useful if we work with an incomplete set of data. But to my understanding, the data is not incomplete in this case.
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On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote:
Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
71,624 Random - 9.2%
269,316 Protoss - 34.6%
250,438 Terran - 32.2%
186,267 Zerg - 24%
Overall with all leagues combined, only using data from the start of S2.
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On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote:
Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
I think the closest we could get to that number is a full count of ladder accounts and the primary races played by each account.
The fact that a single player can have multiple accounts and that there is no way for us to link box serial numbers to accounts and then to races played makes it hard to be able to ever track this.
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On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote:
Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
I think this is a really good theory on why Protoss win rates and points on ladder are lower than expected (compared to opinions of pros and results of pro games).
I've noticed watching Grandmaster streams that the players often get pitted against high-masters players who they're super heavily favored against (even top players like Sheth). Dropping a game to someone so far below you will cause you to lose a whole lot of points. I imagine that top Protoss players would unfortunately lose to people that are worse than them more often in PvP due to the randomness of the matchup, hurting their scores in this way.
Terran would have this problem the least as I feel their matchups are somewhat best at enabling the better player to win. Zerg is somewhere in the middle IMO.
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On April 26 2011 03:26 tehemperorer wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote:
Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg. I think the closest we could get to that number is a full count of ladder accounts and the primary races played by each account. The fact that a single player can have multiple accounts and that there is no way for us to link box serial numbers to accounts and then to races played makes it hard to be able to ever track this.
The great thing about statistics is you dont need exact numbers to get a really good idea on percentages like that. What I posted should be extremely close to exact.
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On April 26 2011 02:40 KillerPlague wrote:
There currently is 1638 players listed in GM. The distribution is:
2.6% random
38% protoss
30.3% terran
29% zerg
being a protoss player myself, it's a little hard to ignore how many protoss actually made it in to GM. considering this is the top 200 cumulative for each region it feels like your statistics are biased to make terran seem worse than they are. however, this may be due to the simple fact that more people play protoss? as far as terran dominating the ladder, i think it is due to the relative safety they have. zerg players must scout like hell, protoss players must adapt their composition, terran players can do the same build over and over again vs either race with relative safety. things like salvageable bunkers add to this, as many good players will opt for them when they are not sure.
The point is under this 1638 players are players from all Servers and if you look at each server you will see Protoss is dominating the weaker Servers like China ( game was released only some weeks ago => obvious one of the weaker servers at the moment) or Latin America.. but in Europe and Korea terran takes the lead.
But this imbalance discussions are really funny. Like in the recent past everybody is saying toss is dominating the big tourneys and then I take a look on the CODE S and CODE A results or the GSL WC and it is not really looking good for toss.
And then comes always the quoting of the progamers, but if you haven't mentioned it yet, they are always saying their race is up. Look at guys like Idra, he would even say Zerg is up if they would have 10 Zergplayers in the Top Ten. For some of these guys it might be only the fact, that they are searching for a easy excuse. But I think the main reason is, Blizzard said on the Blizzcon, the opinion of the progamers would be one part of balancing the game. So ask yourself would you really tell the public, if you are thinking your race is op?
Even if we would have a p-value under 5% for this stats. This wouldn't mean Toss is up or Terran op. This game is still very young and the patch still new... the only thing we could say that certain strats are at the moment strong or not strong. And with this stats it seems like terrans have at the moment maybe the best working strats for these ladder maps. But nobody knows if this will change in the next weeks even without a patch.
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On April 26 2011 03:25 TheRabidDeer wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote:
Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg. 71,624 Random 269,316 Protoss 250,438 Terran 186,267 Zerg Overall with all leagues combined, only using data from the start of S2.
The problem with this is that it is not a real indicator of anything important... Isn't it feasible (and unverifiable), for instance, that the most time logged for a race in SC2 multiplayer is Zerg? What if Protoss and Terran players almost exclusively offrace as Zerg? That would make Zerg the least used main race but the most used race in terms of multiplayer hours, but no one would be able to verify that.
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On April 26 2011 03:30 tehemperorer wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 03:25 TheRabidDeer wrote:On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote:
Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg. 71,624 Random 269,316 Protoss 250,438 Terran 186,267 Zerg Overall with all leagues combined, only using data from the start of S2. The problem with this is that it is not a real indicator of anything important... Isn't it feasible (and unverifiable), for instance, that the most time logged for a race in SC2 multiplayer is Zerg? This would mean that although Protoss and Terran play mostly Protoss and Terran, they almost exclusively offrace Zerg, making Zerg the least used main race but the most used race in terms of multiplayer hours?
The odds of even many of these players exclusively using zerg offrace, particularly on ladder, is likely very slim. Sure, it is possible and even likely that these players could do that... but the odds are not good for a majority of them. The main thing it indicates is (roughly) how things should be structured at any given level in terms of rankings. You do have to make the assumption that the skill distribution will be relatively even, but that doesnt seem overly outrageous to me when you consider the sample size is nearly 800k people.
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On April 26 2011 03:29 4of8 wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 02:40 KillerPlague wrote:
There currently is 1638 players listed in GM. The distribution is:
2.6% random
38% protoss
30.3% terran
29% zerg
being a protoss player myself, it's a little hard to ignore how many protoss actually made it in to GM. considering this is the top 200 cumulative for each region it feels like your statistics are biased to make terran seem worse than they are. however, this may be due to the simple fact that more people play protoss? as far as terran dominating the ladder, i think it is due to the relative safety they have. zerg players must scout like hell, protoss players must adapt their composition, terran players can do the same build over and over again vs either race with relative safety. things like salvageable bunkers add to this, as many good players will opt for them when they are not sure. The point is under this 1638 players are players from all Servers and if you look at each server you will see Protoss is dominating the weaker Servers like China ( game was released only some weeks ago => obvious one of the weaker servers at the moment) or Latin America.. but in Europe and Korea terran takes the lead. But this imbalance discussions are really funny. Like in the recent past everybody is saying toss is dominating the big tourneys and then I take a look on the CODE S and CODE A results or the GSL WC and it is not really looking good for toss. And then comes always the quoting of the progamers, but if you haven't mentioned it yet, they are always saying their race is up. Look at guys like Idra, he would even say Zerg is up if they would have 10 Zergplayers in the Top Ten. For some of these guys it might be only the fact, that they are searching for a easy excuse. But I think the main reason is, Blizzard said on the Blizzcon, the opinion of the progamers would be one part of balancing the game. So ask yourself would you really tell the public, if you are thinking your race is op? Even if we would have a p-value under 5% for this stats. This wouldn't mean Toss is up or Terran op. This game is still very young and the patch still new... the only thing we could say that certain strats are at the moment strong or not strong. And with this stats it seems like terrans have at the moment maybe the best working strats for these ladder maps. But nobody knows if this will change in the next weeks even without a patch.
Yes Idra would say that. When has Idra been wrong about balance?
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On April 26 2011 03:33 TheRabidDeer wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 03:30 tehemperorer wrote:On April 26 2011 03:25 TheRabidDeer wrote:On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote:
Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg. 71,624 Random 269,316 Protoss 250,438 Terran 186,267 Zerg Overall with all leagues combined, only using data from the start of S2. The problem with this is that it is not a real indicator of anything important... Isn't it feasible (and unverifiable), for instance, that the most time logged for a race in SC2 multiplayer is Zerg? This would mean that although Protoss and Terran play mostly Protoss and Terran, they almost exclusively offrace Zerg, making Zerg the least used main race but the most used race in terms of multiplayer hours? The odds of even many of these players exclusively using zerg offrace, particularly on ladder, is likely very slim. Sure, it is possible and even likely that these players could do that... but the odds are not good for a majority of them. The main thing it indicates is (roughly) how things should be structured at any given level in terms of rankings. You do have to make the assumption that the skill distribution will be relatively even, but that doesnt seem overly outrageous to me when you consider the sample size is nearly 800k people.
I was mainly commenting on Day's line of thought and the responses that were directed towards it. Since there is no clear way of knowing the actual facts, the presence of possibilities like the one I outlined above make it impossible to tell for sure what is really going on. Zerg could be the most played race, but no-one can say for sure.
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On April 26 2011 03:41 tehemperorer wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 03:33 TheRabidDeer wrote:On April 26 2011 03:30 tehemperorer wrote:On April 26 2011 03:25 TheRabidDeer wrote:On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote:
Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg. 71,624 Random 269,316 Protoss 250,438 Terran 186,267 Zerg Overall with all leagues combined, only using data from the start of S2. The problem with this is that it is not a real indicator of anything important... Isn't it feasible (and unverifiable), for instance, that the most time logged for a race in SC2 multiplayer is Zerg? This would mean that although Protoss and Terran play mostly Protoss and Terran, they almost exclusively offrace Zerg, making Zerg the least used main race but the most used race in terms of multiplayer hours? The odds of even many of these players exclusively using zerg offrace, particularly on ladder, is likely very slim. Sure, it is possible and even likely that these players could do that... but the odds are not good for a majority of them. The main thing it indicates is (roughly) how things should be structured at any given level in terms of rankings. You do have to make the assumption that the skill distribution will be relatively even, but that doesnt seem overly outrageous to me when you consider the sample size is nearly 800k people. I was mainly commenting on Day's line of thought and the responses that were directed towards it. Since there is no clear way of knowing the actual facts, the presence of possibilities like the one I outlined above make it impossible to tell for sure what is really going on. Zerg could be the most played race, but no-one can say for sure.
I think we can definitively say that those percentages are close to accurate, certainly within like half a percent. It is also entirely possible that his line of thought is part of the situation, another factor could be that zerg has a higher learning curve to start with since other races can do the "probes and pylons" mentality while zerg has to choose. People decide they just want to take the easier route and thus fewer play zerg.
I am curious if the numbers will change much when HotS comes out though.
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On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote:
Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
That may be true for some very new players, but I'd wager competitive players in GM didn't pick their race based on the campaign. Also consider "zerg" has become a very popular term that people who haven't even played played starcraft will understand. There could even be people that pick zerg BECAUSE they didn't get a chance to play them in the campaign.
Why people play what race is baffling. Take World of Warcraft... when the game first launched almost every server HEAVILY alliance favored. And now? Most servers are horde favored. Why? There was minor racial balancing or whatever, but nothing that really explains the shift from a balance perspective. You could say that when people started out, they wanted to be more humanlike, but as the game evolved, the horde become the "cool" race. This is probably too much of a tangent, and mostly deals with the masses not the top gamers....
In my experience with games, the most top players play the (perceived) best race/character. There's always different reasons/justifications like "this race/character fits my playstyle" but what it really boils down to is that people play with the best chances of winning because that's what makes you feel good/justified in spending your time doing something.
For the masses, it's like picking a favorite color. There's no real "reason" to like orange or maroon. For top players, it's like picking a color to put on your product at the store. There's a very real, statistical impact this decision makes on your sales.
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If we accept the premise that Terran dominates the ladder (which I'm not completely convinced of), I'd chalk it up to the scrappy nature of Terran. Terran have many tools that allow them to catch up and overcome from a very bad position. Situations where Zerg and Protoss would have to "GG", a Terran may be able to bounce back. This is a great quality to have on the ladder.
So the question is why do Protoss seem to dominate tournaments instead of Terran? And is there any significance to the fact that Zerg don't seem to dominate anything?
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On April 26 2011 02:11 buldermar wrote:Show nested quote +On April 26 2011 02:08 lilky wrote:
So basically...
Races in order of most played to least played:
Protoss, Terran, Zerg
Races in the Top (Insert any number here) in order of most to least:
Terran, Zerg, Protoss
TLDR: Protoss is underpowered..
WHAT?!?!?!!?!?!? Correct, that's my overall conclusion based on the observations I made and I'm open for expanding on those observations if anyone thinks I'm being biased.
hey bulder, don't say that that is your overall conclusion, step one is to validate his claim.
his first premisse: "Races in order of most played to least played:
Protoss, Terran, Zerg"
correct, this is what his statistics show
his second premisse: "Races in the Top (Insert any number here) in order of most to least:
Terran, Zerg, Protoss"
correct only for top 10, 20, 40 and 50
in the case of top 30, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100 it is (from bulders statistics) Terran, Protoss, zerg.
his conclusion: "TLDR: Protoss is underpowered..
WHAT?!?!?!!?!?!?"
since the second premisse is false, no correct conclusion can be made using this information, to lilky I say: L2statistics.
edit: I am not saying lilky is wrong, I am not saying lilky is right, I am just saying that the above described line of logic that lilky used is invalid.
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On April 26 2011 03:29 4of8 wrote:
And then comes always the quoting of the progamers, but if you haven't mentioned it yet, they are always saying their race is up. Look at guys like Idra, he would even say Zerg is up if they would have 10 Zergplayers in the Top Ten. For some of these guys it might be only the fact, that they are searching for a easy excuse. But I think the main reason is, Blizzard said on the Blizzcon, the opinion of the progamers would be one part of balancing the game. So ask yourself would you really tell the public, if you are thinking your race is op?
that's a gross generalization. If Zerg was "buffed" tomorrow and after the "buff" you saw 10 Z's in the top 16 of a tournament for a couple tournaments then ofc IdrA wouldn't say that Z is up. Yes, you should tell the public if you think your race is op, if it makes the game better than why wouldn't you? Beign so selfish as to underplay your race to get more easy wins is bs.
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EPT
