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On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity.
Winrates tend to balance to close to 50 percent, tournament representation is usually a better metric.
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On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity.
The initial chess comparison is lacking one very distinct feature. At the end of the game, the other person gets white. At the end of a starcraft game, people don´t switch races.
NEW IDEA TO INSTANTLY BALANCE THE GAME:
every match you need to change your race! done, it is now 100% balanced.
With regards to win rates: There is an inherent flaw in this metric. If i tell you that 10000 games pvt can result in 50:50 win rates would it be balanced? A: yes
What if i told you that these win rates are the product of every protoss winning every game that ends before 12 min and terran winning every game longer than 12 min. Still balanced? - most likely you would disagree.
Next balance problem: Widow mines were extremely strong at the start of Hots. TvZ was very good for the terran. Then mines were nerfed.
Meanwhile zerg got extremely good at dealing with the mines. You are now buffing mines again. - Did you not just "balance" away the development in skill zerg players have undergone? What is the incentive to improve your play if loosing a lot and dragging down the win rates of your race will just provoke a patch to level win rates again?
Obviously this is an exaggeration. But i have yet to see an official definition of the term "balance". Considering 50:50 win rates as "balance" is an inherently flawed concept, not only mathematically.
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On August 13 2014 08:18 Mojito99 wrote:
With regards to win rates: There is an inherent flaw in this metric. If i tell you that 10000 games pvt can result in 50:50 win rates would it be balanced? A: yes
The answer is no. It depends on who is playing and what level of play you are trying to balance.
If these games were played on ladder, for example, then a 50:50 win rate is just a byproduct of the system matching up players who should pair well.
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On August 12 2014 02:57 Thieving Magpie wrote:
Before we continue this part of the discussion further--can we actually have a written out definition of timing attack vs all-in vs poke so that we don't have a confusion of what it is we're talking about?
And no, I'm not asking for a list of what build orders count as what. I'm talking about what parameters are needed to fit into each category.
I've always thought.
sacrificing econ for immediate, but temporary, advantage => all-in
slightly hindering tech/econ for a slight temporary advantage => timing attack
sending out units during a time when the opponent statistically doesn't have enough to defend => poke
The %chance each of those tactics have of winning should be irrelevant to the design of their use.
That is a little different from what I thought.
All-in -> Betting it all. You win right then and there or you lose.
Timing attack -> Attack at a specific timing that you have planned or when you perceive distinct advantage. e.g. Colossus attack, stim attack, +2 roach-ling, etc.
Poke -> Going to the opponent's base with your existing units to see if you can gain advantage by micro, scouting, opponent's mistakes, etc.
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On August 13 2014 08:18 Mojito99 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. The initial chess comparison is lacking one very distinct feature. At the end of the game, the other person gets white. At the end of a starcraft game, people don´t switch races. NEW IDEA TO INSTANTLY BALANCE THE GAME: every match you need to change your race! done, it is now 100% balanced. With regards to win rates: There is an inherent flaw in this metric. If i tell you that 10000 games pvt can result in 50:50 win rates would it be balanced? A: yes What if i told you that these win rates are the product of every protoss winning every game that ends before 12 min and terran winning every game longer than 12 min. Still balanced? - most likely you would disagree. Next balance problem: Widow mines were extremely strong at the start of Hots. TvZ was very good for the terran. Then mines were nerfed. Meanwhile zerg got extremely good at dealing with the mines. You are now buffing mines again. - Did you not just "balance" away the development in skill zerg players have undergone? What is the incentive to improve your play if loosing a lot and dragging down the win rates of your race will just provoke a patch to level win rates again? Obviously this is an exaggeration. But i have yet to see an official definition of the term "balance". Considering 50:50 win rates as "balance" is an inherently flawed concept, not only mathematically.
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/4838104108
Terran is supposed to be weak to protoss' late game. Its by design, although the asymmetricality of the races comes from their different units and advantages/disadvantages in fighting ability as well.
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On August 13 2014 05:18 Morbidius wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. Winrates tend to balance to close to 50 percent, tournament representation is usually a better metric.
Proof for that?
I have (at least) two counterexamples:
BL/Infestor, the winrates started to slowly drop further down in TvZ. (from values between 45-50 to values around 40)
PvT has been back and forth swinging between 20-50% for multiple months in Korea. The winrates didn't stabilize at all.
On August 13 2014 08:18 Mojito99 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. The initial chess comparison is lacking one very distinct feature. At the end of the game, the other person gets white. At the end of a starcraft game, people don´t switch races. NEW IDEA TO INSTANTLY BALANCE THE GAME: every match you need to change your race! done, it is now 100% balanced. With regards to win rates: There is an inherent flaw in this metric. If i tell you that 10000 games pvt can result in 50:50 win rates would it be balanced? A: yes What if i told you that these win rates are the product of every protoss winning every game that ends before 12 min and terran winning every game longer than 12 min. Still balanced? - most likely you would disagree. Next balance problem: Widow mines were extremely strong at the start of Hots. TvZ was very good for the terran. Then mines were nerfed. Meanwhile zerg got extremely good at dealing with the mines. You are now buffing mines again. - Did you not just "balance" away the development in skill zerg players have undergone? What is the incentive to improve your play if loosing a lot and dragging down the win rates of your race will just provoke a patch to level win rates again? Obviously this is an exaggeration. But i have yet to see an official definition of the term "balance". Considering 50:50 win rates as "balance" is an inherently flawed concept, not only mathematically.
The initial chess comparison is not lacking. It's focusing on a single game of chess, for which it holds. But if you want to argue that way, then I could also say that (at least in a lot of tournaments) you could just always mirror your opponents racepick, even in a single game. So anytime a tournament allows raceswitching, the game is immidiatly balanced under the asumption of taking the picking process into account as well.
As said, 50:50 winrates is a very restrictive metric. But it is an excellent metric mathematically. Every statistical test is held by these kinds of standards. Even physics since Heisenberg is more or less built upon the principle "what we can experience is true".
If Zerg wins 55% vs Terran, implying that this is the balance of the matchup at that particular point in time is a natural principle in science. The remaining questions are:
- Where to look at the winrates, with choices such as: ladder, tournaments, specific tournaments, examples...
- How restrictive are we with the term "balance": do we need 50:50 or is +/-5% still OK? Maybe we can still experience fairness with +/-10%? Or maybe 55:45 already puts us into a desastrous situation at the highest level and we rather want 52:48...
On August 13 2014 11:41 Socup wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 08:18 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. The initial chess comparison is lacking one very distinct feature. At the end of the game, the other person gets white. At the end of a starcraft game, people don´t switch races. NEW IDEA TO INSTANTLY BALANCE THE GAME: every match you need to change your race! done, it is now 100% balanced. With regards to win rates: There is an inherent flaw in this metric. If i tell you that 10000 games pvt can result in 50:50 win rates would it be balanced? A: yes What if i told you that these win rates are the product of every protoss winning every game that ends before 12 min and terran winning every game longer than 12 min. Still balanced? - most likely you would disagree. Next balance problem: Widow mines were extremely strong at the start of Hots. TvZ was very good for the terran. Then mines were nerfed. Meanwhile zerg got extremely good at dealing with the mines. You are now buffing mines again. - Did you not just "balance" away the development in skill zerg players have undergone? What is the incentive to improve your play if loosing a lot and dragging down the win rates of your race will just provoke a patch to level win rates again? Obviously this is an exaggeration. But i have yet to see an official definition of the term "balance". Considering 50:50 win rates as "balance" is an inherently flawed concept, not only mathematically. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/4838104108Terran is supposed to be weak to protoss' late game. Its by design, although the asymmetricality of the races comes from their different units and advantages/disadvantages in fighting ability as well.
Nope, that is not what they said. They said that Terran has the tools to play a fair game in the lategame.
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On August 13 2014 11:41 Socup wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 08:18 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. The initial chess comparison is lacking one very distinct feature. At the end of the game, the other person gets white. At the end of a starcraft game, people don´t switch races. NEW IDEA TO INSTANTLY BALANCE THE GAME: every match you need to change your race! done, it is now 100% balanced. With regards to win rates: There is an inherent flaw in this metric. If i tell you that 10000 games pvt can result in 50:50 win rates would it be balanced? A: yes What if i told you that these win rates are the product of every protoss winning every game that ends before 12 min and terran winning every game longer than 12 min. Still balanced? - most likely you would disagree. Next balance problem: Widow mines were extremely strong at the start of Hots. TvZ was very good for the terran. Then mines were nerfed. Meanwhile zerg got extremely good at dealing with the mines. You are now buffing mines again. - Did you not just "balance" away the development in skill zerg players have undergone? What is the incentive to improve your play if loosing a lot and dragging down the win rates of your race will just provoke a patch to level win rates again? Obviously this is an exaggeration. But i have yet to see an official definition of the term "balance". Considering 50:50 win rates as "balance" is an inherently flawed concept, not only mathematically. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/4838104108Terran is supposed to be weak to protoss' late game. Its by design, although the asymmetricality of the races comes from their different units and advantages/disadvantages in fighting ability as well.
This is one of the things that bugs me. I personally want an asymmetric game in terms of units and fighting tactics, not "x race has a disadvantage / advantage if the game lasts this long and both players defended harass well", which Blizz said with that post. Or at least, in the really late game, I would prefer to have each race have equal chances to win, while also having timings before the late game that can be powerful.
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Seems good to me, if they make all 3 races compleatly the same then it's no point to have 3 races at all and just make 1 race and we play mirror matchups all the time.
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On August 13 2014 14:11 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 05:18 Morbidius wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. Winrates tend to balance to close to 50 percent, tournament representation is usually a better metric. Proof for that? I have (at least) two counterexamples: BL/Infestor, the winrates started to slowly drop further down in TvZ. (from values between 45-50 to values around 40) PvT has been back and forth swinging between 20-50% for multiple months in Korea. The winrates didn't stabilize at all.
Let us enter for a moment into the realm of the hypothetical.
Imagine that we revert back to the previous patch, which just about everybody will agree was still a terrible place for Terrans. Now imagine on top of that that every single Terran except Maru simply stops playing. Taeja's wrists catch on fire and he suffers second-degree burns, Polt is too busy filming The Avengers 2, Bomber goes into the military where he becomes a four-star general, Innovation joins Byun on his pilgrimage in the mountains of China, and every other Terran just straight up quits in frustration. Maru is literally the only Terran left in existence. With me so far? Now imagine that Maru plays in every single premier tournament.
For every single loss "Terran" (Maru) suffers, they will win 10, maybe 20 times as much. He won't win every single tournament, but he'll place within the top 8 of anything loaded with Koreans and in the top 1 of everything that isn't.
Do you see the problem? Maru is so good that he was doing really, really, really well even when Terran was underpowered. Not only do the winrates not indicate imbalance, in this hypothetical they are actually outright lying and telling us that Terran is the best race in the history of all RTS games ever made, when in fact it's just Maru (or, in reality, a slew of top-tier Koreans) who are simply that damn good.
The hypothetical I drew is a gross exaggeration of the reality, but the fact that it's physically possible automatically dismisses your theory that winrates are a reliable source of information on balance. I'm not going to get into specifics of when they've misled us and to what degree and how and why, I'm just debunking the idea that just because they possibly lined up with our perceptions of balance at some times in SC2's history, that means they ALWAYS line up with ACTUAL balance.
Is it a mysterious, magical coincidence that top Terran players are that damn good? No. They've been honing their mechanical skills for years because they've had NO CHOICE. More often than not, Terrans have had no other reliable ways to win games. Zerg and Protoss regularly find ways to avoid engaging in 30-minute long, multitask/micro-heavy slugfests, or units enter the meta that make micro relatively irrelevant (Roach vs Roach instead of B/Ling vs B/Ling), and the inevitable happens. Those players don't push themselves as hard, either because they simply don't need to, or pushing themselves harder will yield diminishing returns (there's only so much micro you can do in Roach vs Roach. Maru wouldn't magically play it better). Could the best P/Zs be as mechanically good as the best Ts? Some of them, absolutely. (Parting and Zest are two immediate and easy choices for Protoss; of Zerg I'm sure some combination of soO, Soulkey, Life, DRG, and Jaedong would rise to the challenge.) Some of them (probably a longer list) would crash and burn if they had to split their units ten times in every single engagement. And that's awful.
Terran, Protoss, and Zerg can have different units, abilities, racial mechanics, strengths, and weaknesses, but the tactical, strategic, mechanical, and multitasking requirements of playing every race absolutely must be as close to equal as is humanly possible to design. It's not OK for PvT Protoss to be strategically harder but mechanically simpler. If that's the case right now, then Terran has to be made strategically harder (which sounds more like a buff than a nerf, honestly) and Protoss has to be made mechanically more demanding.
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On August 13 2014 16:11 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 14:11 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 05:18 Morbidius wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. Winrates tend to balance to close to 50 percent, tournament representation is usually a better metric. Proof for that? I have (at least) two counterexamples: BL/Infestor, the winrates started to slowly drop further down in TvZ. (from values between 45-50 to values around 40) PvT has been back and forth swinging between 20-50% for multiple months in Korea. The winrates didn't stabilize at all. Let us enter for a moment into the realm of the hypothetical. Imagine that we revert back to the previous patch, which just about everybody will agree was still a terrible place for Terrans. Now imagine on top of that that every single Terran except Maru simply stops playing. Taeja's wrists catch on fire and he suffers second-degree burns, Polt is too busy filming The Avengers 2, Bomber goes into the military where he becomes a four-star general, Innovation joins Byun on his pilgrimage in the mountains of China, and every other Terran just straight up quits in frustration. Maru is literally the only Terran left in existence. With me so far? Now imagine that Maru plays in every single premier tournament. For every single loss "Terran" (Maru) suffers, they will win 10, maybe 20 times as much. He won't win every single tournament, but he'll place within the top 8 of anything loaded with Koreans and in the top 1 of everything that isn't. Do you see the problem? Maru is so good that he was doing really, really, really well even when Terran was underpowered. Not only do the winrates not indicate imbalance, in this hypothetical they are actually outright lying and telling us that Terran is the best race in the history of all RTS games ever made, when in fact it's just Maru (or, in reality, a slew of top-tier Koreans) who are simply that damn good. The hypothetical I drew is a gross exaggeration of the reality, but the fact that it's physically possible automatically dismisses your theory that winrates are a reliable source of information on balance. I'm not going to get into specifics of when they've misled us and to what degree and how and why, I'm just debunking the idea that just because they possibly lined up with our perceptions of balance at some times in SC2's history, that means they ALWAYS line up with ACTUAL balance. Is it a mysterious, magical coincidence that top Terran players are that damn good? No. They've been honing their mechanical skills for years because they've had NO CHOICE. More often than not, Terrans have had no other reliable ways to win games. Zerg and Protoss regularly find ways to avoid engaging in 30-minute long, multitask/micro-heavy slugfests, or units enter the meta that make micro relatively irrelevant (Roach vs Roach instead of B/Ling vs B/Ling), and the inevitable happens. Those players don't push themselves as hard, either because they simply don't need to, or pushing themselves harder will yield diminishing returns (there's only so much micro you can do in Roach vs Roach. Maru wouldn't magically play it better). Could the best P/Zs be as mechanically good as the best Ts? Some of them, absolutely. (Parting and Zest are two immediate and easy choices for Protoss; of Zerg I'm sure some combination of soO, Soulkey, Life, DRG, and Jaedong would rise to the challenge.) Some of them (probably a longer list) would crash and burn if they had to split their units ten times in every single engagement. And that's awful.
Terran, Protoss, and Zerg can have different units, abilities, racial mechanics, strengths, and weaknesses, but the tactical, strategic, mechanical, and multitasking requirements of playing every race absolutely must be as close to equal as is humanly possible to design. It's not OK for PvT Protoss to be strategically harder but mechanically simpler. If that's the case right now, then Terran has to be made strategically harder (which sounds more like a buff than a nerf, honestly) and Protoss has to be made mechanically more demanding.
I'm not in the mood for a flamewar, so I'm going to leave the crossed out part away when answering.
If you go back a few pages in this thread (10-20?), you will find me doing research on that topic you described with a tournament simulator. At least under the following premises:
- talent is idendical distributed
- consecutive GSL style tournament (Code S) with a Qualifier Tournament (Code A)
- imbalance in a matchup
the theory that you describe (and which I believed in myself before doing those simulations) does not hold. What rather happens is:
1) a player that would be "easy" for Maru with 50:50 balance, can suddenly take games or even a series of him.
2) a player (like soO or Zest) that could threaten Maru at 50:50 balance, will now most likely win any longer series.
So in either case, Maru vs a weak opponent and Maru against a strong opponent, the winrates are (proportionally to the imbalance) lower than what they would be with 50:50 balance. And so even Maru suffers from the imbalance the same way any other player would.
What actually happens, is that the race distribution drops but the winrates still reflect the "true balance". In case of very few games, this reflection is obviously heavily influenced by the standard deviation error (e.g. 58% T>Z in the last Code S, compared to 45% T<Z with a similar sample in Code S season 1, 50% this Code A, 43% the Code A before that, ~60%(?) this Code A qualifier, 44% proleague R4...).
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On August 13 2014 16:11 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 14:11 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 05:18 Morbidius wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. Winrates tend to balance to close to 50 percent, tournament representation is usually a better metric. Proof for that? I have (at least) two counterexamples: BL/Infestor, the winrates started to slowly drop further down in TvZ. (from values between 45-50 to values around 40) PvT has been back and forth swinging between 20-50% for multiple months in Korea. The winrates didn't stabilize at all. Let us enter for a moment into the realm of the hypothetical. Imagine that we revert back to the previous patch, which just about everybody will agree was still a terrible place for Terrans. Now imagine on top of that that every single Terran except Maru simply stops playing. Taeja's wrists catch on fire and he suffers second-degree burns, Polt is too busy filming The Avengers 2, Bomber goes into the military where he becomes a four-star general, Innovation joins Byun on his pilgrimage in the mountains of China, and every other Terran just straight up quits in frustration. Maru is literally the only Terran left in existence. With me so far? Now imagine that Maru plays in every single premier tournament. For every single loss "Terran" (Maru) suffers, they will win 10, maybe 20 times as much. He won't win every single tournament, but he'll place within the top 8 of anything loaded with Koreans and in the top 1 of everything that isn't. Do you see the problem? Maru is so good that he was doing really, really, really well even when Terran was underpowered. Not only do the winrates not indicate imbalance, in this hypothetical they are actually outright lying and telling us that Terran is the best race in the history of all RTS games ever made, when in fact it's just Maru (or, in reality, a slew of top-tier Koreans) who are simply that damn good. The hypothetical I drew is a gross exaggeration of the reality, but the fact that it's physically possible automatically dismisses your theory that winrates are a reliable source of information on balance. I'm not going to get into specifics of when they've misled us and to what degree and how and why, I'm just debunking the idea that just because they possibly lined up with our perceptions of balance at some times in SC2's history, that means they ALWAYS line up with ACTUAL balance. Is it a mysterious, magical coincidence that top Terran players are that damn good? No. They've been honing their mechanical skills for years because they've had NO CHOICE. More often than not, Terrans have had no other reliable ways to win games. Zerg and Protoss regularly find ways to avoid engaging in 30-minute long, multitask/micro-heavy slugfests, or units enter the meta that make micro relatively irrelevant (Roach vs Roach instead of B/Ling vs B/Ling), and the inevitable happens. Those players don't push themselves as hard, either because they simply don't need to, or pushing themselves harder will yield diminishing returns (there's only so much micro you can do in Roach vs Roach. Maru wouldn't magically play it better). Could the best P/Zs be as mechanically good as the best Ts? Some of them, absolutely. (Parting and Zest are two immediate and easy choices for Protoss; of Zerg I'm sure some combination of soO, Soulkey, Life, DRG, and Jaedong would rise to the challenge.) Some of them (probably a longer list) would crash and burn if they had to split their units ten times in every single engagement. And that's awful.Terran, Protoss, and Zerg can have different units, abilities, racial mechanics, strengths, and weaknesses, but the tactical, strategic, mechanical, and multitasking requirements of playing every race absolutely must be as close to equal as is humanly possible to design. It's not OK for PvT Protoss to be strategically harder but mechanically simpler. If that's the case right now, then Terran has to be made strategically harder (which sounds more like a buff than a nerf, honestly) and Protoss has to be made mechanically more demanding.
I guess your are assuming that terran is in the first place the mechanically hardest race to play. I simply cannot agree to this point of view.
I used to play terran in WOL and now after big break(2 years), i am back and playing protoss. From my perspective it's about the same mechanic vise.
I am asking myself same "questions" durring the games, am i building workers -> am i close to suply block -> am i building army -> etc...
So, what i would like to hear from anyone that is claiming that terran is mechanically harder to play, or if anyone is claiming that any of the other 2 races is harder to play, to support this kind of statement with some kind of proof, othervise this is just another argument without evidence.
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On August 13 2014 17:00 Svizcy wrote:
I used to play terran in WOL and now after big break(2 years), i am back and playing protoss. From my perspective it's about the same mechanic vise.
I am asking myself same "questions" durring the games, am i building workers -> am i close to suply block -> am i building army -> etc...
So, what i would like to hear from anyone that is claiming that terran is mechanically harder to play, or if anyone is claiming that any of the other 2 races is harder to play, to support this kind of statement with some kind of proof, othervise this is just another argument without evidence.
If you are asking yourself those questions in a game, what league are you in?
I thought it was accepted at this point that terran needs to babysit their army in engagements more than P for the typical army compositions... (compare to TvZ, where zerg needs to be very careful against mines just as terran needs to avoid banelings, in either case you can lose everything instantly if not looking)
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On August 13 2014 17:00 Svizcy wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 16:11 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 14:11 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 05:18 Morbidius wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. Winrates tend to balance to close to 50 percent, tournament representation is usually a better metric. Proof for that? I have (at least) two counterexamples: BL/Infestor, the winrates started to slowly drop further down in TvZ. (from values between 45-50 to values around 40) PvT has been back and forth swinging between 20-50% for multiple months in Korea. The winrates didn't stabilize at all. Let us enter for a moment into the realm of the hypothetical. Imagine that we revert back to the previous patch, which just about everybody will agree was still a terrible place for Terrans. Now imagine on top of that that every single Terran except Maru simply stops playing. Taeja's wrists catch on fire and he suffers second-degree burns, Polt is too busy filming The Avengers 2, Bomber goes into the military where he becomes a four-star general, Innovation joins Byun on his pilgrimage in the mountains of China, and every other Terran just straight up quits in frustration. Maru is literally the only Terran left in existence. With me so far? Now imagine that Maru plays in every single premier tournament. For every single loss "Terran" (Maru) suffers, they will win 10, maybe 20 times as much. He won't win every single tournament, but he'll place within the top 8 of anything loaded with Koreans and in the top 1 of everything that isn't. Do you see the problem? Maru is so good that he was doing really, really, really well even when Terran was underpowered. Not only do the winrates not indicate imbalance, in this hypothetical they are actually outright lying and telling us that Terran is the best race in the history of all RTS games ever made, when in fact it's just Maru (or, in reality, a slew of top-tier Koreans) who are simply that damn good. The hypothetical I drew is a gross exaggeration of the reality, but the fact that it's physically possible automatically dismisses your theory that winrates are a reliable source of information on balance. I'm not going to get into specifics of when they've misled us and to what degree and how and why, I'm just debunking the idea that just because they possibly lined up with our perceptions of balance at some times in SC2's history, that means they ALWAYS line up with ACTUAL balance. Is it a mysterious, magical coincidence that top Terran players are that damn good? No. They've been honing their mechanical skills for years because they've had NO CHOICE. More often than not, Terrans have had no other reliable ways to win games. Zerg and Protoss regularly find ways to avoid engaging in 30-minute long, multitask/micro-heavy slugfests, or units enter the meta that make micro relatively irrelevant (Roach vs Roach instead of B/Ling vs B/Ling), and the inevitable happens. Those players don't push themselves as hard, either because they simply don't need to, or pushing themselves harder will yield diminishing returns (there's only so much micro you can do in Roach vs Roach. Maru wouldn't magically play it better). Could the best P/Zs be as mechanically good as the best Ts? Some of them, absolutely. (Parting and Zest are two immediate and easy choices for Protoss; of Zerg I'm sure some combination of soO, Soulkey, Life, DRG, and Jaedong would rise to the challenge.) Some of them (probably a longer list) would crash and burn if they had to split their units ten times in every single engagement. And that's awful.Terran, Protoss, and Zerg can have different units, abilities, racial mechanics, strengths, and weaknesses, but the tactical, strategic, mechanical, and multitasking requirements of playing every race absolutely must be as close to equal as is humanly possible to design. It's not OK for PvT Protoss to be strategically harder but mechanically simpler. If that's the case right now, then Terran has to be made strategically harder (which sounds more like a buff than a nerf, honestly) and Protoss has to be made mechanically more demanding. I guess your are assuming that terran is in the first place the mechanically hardest race to play. I simply cannot agree to this point of view. I used to play terran in WOL and now after big break(2 years), i am back and playing protoss. From my perspective it's about the same mechanic vise. I am asking myself same "questions" durring the games, am i building workers -> am i close to suply block -> am i building army -> etc... So, what i would like to hear from anyone that is claiming that terran is mechanically harder to play, or if anyone is claiming that any of the other 2 races is harder to play, to support this kind of statement with some kind of proof, othervise this is just another argument without evidence.
Would you agree that Zest is renowned for his mechanical prowess amongst Protoss? He's one of the most intensive battle microers around?
If so, I've already done what you ask. You can find it here. The TLDR version is that I took a random game of Maru vs Zest and counted up all of their mechanical actions during the pivotal, big engagements in the game. Although the game picked was random, Zest was obviously microing much harder than most Protoss would have in his situation, Blinking away from WMs and using Warp Prisms in combat. Being as generous as possible to Zest in my estimations, Maru still had over twice as many distinct, separate actions performed in the fights.
And, again, Zest is the guy to go to for impressive things happening in fights as far as Protoss players go.
I look forward to seeing what you think of my evidence, such as it is.
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I used to be in low masters/high diamond beffore i quited, now i am in top gold after starting 1 month ago in bronze, just because i was terrible at macro when i came back + race switch so new hotkeys etc...
We all have to babysit our armies, so this kinda moot point. Yes the more fragile the main army unit is the more carefull you have to be (so marine is fragile more so than stalker for example). However, if you are somewhere else on the map or badly possitioned and oponent managed to hit you at that exact time, your going to lose engagement no matter the race.
Collosi in front of army, cause he engaged you from your back side while you were just placing nexus to take 4th base or something like this comes to mind. This can happen, but you cant accept scenarios like this as imbalance in my opinion, cause any army would lose like this.
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On August 13 2014 17:15 Svizcy wrote:
We all have to babysit our armies, so this kinda moot point. Yes the more fragile the main army unit is the more carefull you have to be (so marine is fragile more so than stalker for example). However, if you are somewhere else on the map or badly possitioned and oponent managed to hit you at that exact time, your going to lose engagement no matter the race.
Collosi in front of army, cause he engaged you from your back side while you were just placing nexus to take 4th base or something like this comes to mind. This can happen, but you cant accept scenarios like this as imbalance in my opinion, cause any army would lose like this.
I should have clarified that I was talking about in-battle micro as well, not just getting caught with pants down.
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On August 13 2014 17:05 Genome852 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:00 Svizcy wrote:
I used to play terran in WOL and now after big break(2 years), i am back and playing protoss. From my perspective it's about the same mechanic vise.
I am asking myself same "questions" durring the games, am i building workers -> am i close to suply block -> am i building army -> etc...
So, what i would like to hear from anyone that is claiming that terran is mechanically harder to play, or if anyone is claiming that any of the other 2 races is harder to play, to support this kind of statement with some kind of proof, othervise this is just another argument without evidence.
If you are asking yourself those questions in a game, what league are you in? I thought it was accepted at this point that terran needs to babysit their army in engagements more than P for the typical army compositions... (compare to TvZ, where zerg needs to be very careful against mines just as terran needs to avoid banelings, in either case you can lose everything instantly if not looking)
Well the mechanical aspect of terran remains true in the same way that the strategic play remains lackluster. In my opinion this is manly due to the fact that a) terran is a midgame race and pressure is usually easier to defend than to put on whilst maintaining macro b) terran macro simply requires more clicks due to how fast they generate supply and the low cost of units c) splitting is essentially an impossible skill to master.
Keeping that in mind terran has recently (2-3 weeks) shown an incredible diversity in strategy - making me wonder why this was not the case for the past 6 months.
Your point about army control is true only for the lategame when both storm and mass colossus are on the field. The new mines and the threat of SCV pulls usually delay this scenario significantly (unitl 5-7 colossus) which may be 20 min+. This btw is in my opinion on of the most clever balancing scenario that blizzard has actually come up with in a long time.
Also keep in mind that all P strategies are designed to COUNTER the strength of terran bio. Because P tends to be on the defensive in a standard game, this means that they reach their HARDCOUNTER compositions earlier and in greater number. But this is just the accepted way of play. When scouting colossus there is actually no reason why terran should not just take a 3rd/4th and go 2 Starports before 4+5 rax. Its a risk and has to be played defensively and may not be viable in the long run - but it serves the point to illustrate how a protoss strategy works.
But then there are a variety of examples how protoss mechanics are demanding
a) taking free volleys on your colossus by vikings probably has a similar effect to bio taking a storm and only splitting reactively
b) SCV pulls - i think it is reasonable to assume that scv pulls are easier to execute than to hold as most protoss dont pull probes.
I would say that having sound mechanics improves your terran play significantly more than for other races - but thats not a reflection of the mechanical difficulty of a race.
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On August 13 2014 16:11 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 14:11 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 05:18 Morbidius wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. Winrates tend to balance to close to 50 percent, tournament representation is usually a better metric. Proof for that? I have (at least) two counterexamples: BL/Infestor, the winrates started to slowly drop further down in TvZ. (from values between 45-50 to values around 40) PvT has been back and forth swinging between 20-50% for multiple months in Korea. The winrates didn't stabilize at all. Let us enter for a moment into the realm of the hypothetical. Imagine that we revert back to the previous patch, which just about everybody will agree was still a terrible place for Terrans. Now imagine on top of that that every single Terran except Maru simply stops playing. Taeja's wrists catch on fire and he suffers second-degree burns, Polt is too busy filming The Avengers 2, Bomber goes into the military where he becomes a four-star general, Innovation joins Byun on his pilgrimage in the mountains of China, and every other Terran just straight up quits in frustration. Maru is literally the only Terran left in existence. With me so far? Now imagine that Maru plays in every single premier tournament. For every single loss "Terran" (Maru) suffers, they will win 10, maybe 20 times as much. He won't win every single tournament, but he'll place within the top 8 of anything loaded with Koreans and in the top 1 of everything that isn't. Do you see the problem? Maru is so good that he was doing really, really, really well even when Terran was underpowered. Not only do the winrates not indicate imbalance, in this hypothetical they are actually outright lying and telling us that Terran is the best race in the history of all RTS games ever made, when in fact it's just Maru (or, in reality, a slew of top-tier Koreans) who are simply that damn good. The hypothetical I drew is a gross exaggeration of the reality, but the fact that it's physically possible automatically dismisses your theory that winrates are a reliable source of information on balance. I'm not going to get into specifics of when they've misled us and to what degree and how and why, I'm just debunking the idea that just because they possibly lined up with our perceptions of balance at some times in SC2's history, that means they ALWAYS line up with ACTUAL balance. Is it a mysterious, magical coincidence that top Terran players are that damn good? No. They've been honing their mechanical skills for years because they've had NO CHOICE. More often than not, Terrans have had no other reliable ways to win games. Zerg and Protoss regularly find ways to avoid engaging in 30-minute long, multitask/micro-heavy slugfests, or units enter the meta that make micro relatively irrelevant (Roach vs Roach instead of B/Ling vs B/Ling), and the inevitable happens. Those players don't push themselves as hard, either because they simply don't need to, or pushing themselves harder will yield diminishing returns (there's only so much micro you can do in Roach vs Roach. Maru wouldn't magically play it better). Could the best P/Zs be as mechanically good as the best Ts? Some of them, absolutely. (Parting and Zest are two immediate and easy choices for Protoss; of Zerg I'm sure some combination of soO, Soulkey, Life, DRG, and Jaedong would rise to the challenge.) Some of them (probably a longer list) would crash and burn if they had to split their units ten times in every single engagement. And that's awful.Terran, Protoss, and Zerg can have different units, abilities, racial mechanics, strengths, and weaknesses, but the tactical, strategic, mechanical, and multitasking requirements of playing every race absolutely must be as close to equal as is humanly possible to design. It's not OK for PvT Protoss to be strategically harder but mechanically simpler. If that's the case right now, then Terran has to be made strategically harder (which sounds more like a buff than a nerf, honestly) and Protoss has to be made mechanically more demanding.
I just have to say that the idea you and many terrans seem to harbour that top terrans are simply better players than top players from other races is totally subjective and highly annoying. It also leads to equally frustrating arguments when terrans are dominating that there is no imbalance cause terrans are simply so good and talented and terran is so hard to play etc. Really hope this bullshit would stop someday.
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On August 13 2014 17:06 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:00 Svizcy wrote:On August 13 2014 16:11 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 14:11 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 05:18 Morbidius wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. Winrates tend to balance to close to 50 percent, tournament representation is usually a better metric. Proof for that? I have (at least) two counterexamples: BL/Infestor, the winrates started to slowly drop further down in TvZ. (from values between 45-50 to values around 40) PvT has been back and forth swinging between 20-50% for multiple months in Korea. The winrates didn't stabilize at all. Let us enter for a moment into the realm of the hypothetical. Imagine that we revert back to the previous patch, which just about everybody will agree was still a terrible place for Terrans. Now imagine on top of that that every single Terran except Maru simply stops playing. Taeja's wrists catch on fire and he suffers second-degree burns, Polt is too busy filming The Avengers 2, Bomber goes into the military where he becomes a four-star general, Innovation joins Byun on his pilgrimage in the mountains of China, and every other Terran just straight up quits in frustration. Maru is literally the only Terran left in existence. With me so far? Now imagine that Maru plays in every single premier tournament. For every single loss "Terran" (Maru) suffers, they will win 10, maybe 20 times as much. He won't win every single tournament, but he'll place within the top 8 of anything loaded with Koreans and in the top 1 of everything that isn't. Do you see the problem? Maru is so good that he was doing really, really, really well even when Terran was underpowered. Not only do the winrates not indicate imbalance, in this hypothetical they are actually outright lying and telling us that Terran is the best race in the history of all RTS games ever made, when in fact it's just Maru (or, in reality, a slew of top-tier Koreans) who are simply that damn good. The hypothetical I drew is a gross exaggeration of the reality, but the fact that it's physically possible automatically dismisses your theory that winrates are a reliable source of information on balance. I'm not going to get into specifics of when they've misled us and to what degree and how and why, I'm just debunking the idea that just because they possibly lined up with our perceptions of balance at some times in SC2's history, that means they ALWAYS line up with ACTUAL balance. Is it a mysterious, magical coincidence that top Terran players are that damn good? No. They've been honing their mechanical skills for years because they've had NO CHOICE. More often than not, Terrans have had no other reliable ways to win games. Zerg and Protoss regularly find ways to avoid engaging in 30-minute long, multitask/micro-heavy slugfests, or units enter the meta that make micro relatively irrelevant (Roach vs Roach instead of B/Ling vs B/Ling), and the inevitable happens. Those players don't push themselves as hard, either because they simply don't need to, or pushing themselves harder will yield diminishing returns (there's only so much micro you can do in Roach vs Roach. Maru wouldn't magically play it better). Could the best P/Zs be as mechanically good as the best Ts? Some of them, absolutely. (Parting and Zest are two immediate and easy choices for Protoss; of Zerg I'm sure some combination of soO, Soulkey, Life, DRG, and Jaedong would rise to the challenge.) Some of them (probably a longer list) would crash and burn if they had to split their units ten times in every single engagement. And that's awful.Terran, Protoss, and Zerg can have different units, abilities, racial mechanics, strengths, and weaknesses, but the tactical, strategic, mechanical, and multitasking requirements of playing every race absolutely must be as close to equal as is humanly possible to design. It's not OK for PvT Protoss to be strategically harder but mechanically simpler. If that's the case right now, then Terran has to be made strategically harder (which sounds more like a buff than a nerf, honestly) and Protoss has to be made mechanically more demanding. I guess your are assuming that terran is in the first place the mechanically hardest race to play. I simply cannot agree to this point of view. I used to play terran in WOL and now after big break(2 years), i am back and playing protoss. From my perspective it's about the same mechanic vise. I am asking myself same "questions" durring the games, am i building workers -> am i close to suply block -> am i building army -> etc... So, what i would like to hear from anyone that is claiming that terran is mechanically harder to play, or if anyone is claiming that any of the other 2 races is harder to play, to support this kind of statement with some kind of proof, othervise this is just another argument without evidence. Would you agree that Zest is renowned for his mechanical prowess amongst Protoss? He's one of the most intensive battle microers around? If so, I've already done what you ask. You can find it here. The TLDR version is that I took a random game of Maru vs Zest and counted up all of their mechanical actions during the pivotal, big engagements in the game. Although the game picked was random, Zest was obviously microing much harder than most Protoss would have in his situation, Blinking away from WMs and using Warp Prisms in combat. Being as generous as possible to Zest in my estimations, Maru still had over twice as many distinct, separate actions performed in the fights. And, again, Zest is the guy to go to for impressive things happening in fights as far as Protoss players go. I look forward to seeing what you think of my evidence, such as it is.
Yes, i agree with this compleatly, thats why Maru won in the end, cause when all this was happening, he was able to macro up at home durring this kind of micro intensive battle and zest wasnt able to.
So yea, Maru is better at macro than Zest i would then conclude from your post.
I didnt see the game so i am compleatly dependant on your post that you provided link to.
From your post i can read that bassicly in the end Maru won cause he did have more units, and while Zest did take the 2 engagements cause of maybe better unit compossition or better possition or w/e the reasson was, he had nothing at home produced to fall back to after the battles.
Am i correct?
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On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:06 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:00 Svizcy wrote:On August 13 2014 16:11 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 14:11 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 05:18 Morbidius wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. Winrates tend to balance to close to 50 percent, tournament representation is usually a better metric. Proof for that? I have (at least) two counterexamples: BL/Infestor, the winrates started to slowly drop further down in TvZ. (from values between 45-50 to values around 40) PvT has been back and forth swinging between 20-50% for multiple months in Korea. The winrates didn't stabilize at all. Let us enter for a moment into the realm of the hypothetical. Imagine that we revert back to the previous patch, which just about everybody will agree was still a terrible place for Terrans. Now imagine on top of that that every single Terran except Maru simply stops playing. Taeja's wrists catch on fire and he suffers second-degree burns, Polt is too busy filming The Avengers 2, Bomber goes into the military where he becomes a four-star general, Innovation joins Byun on his pilgrimage in the mountains of China, and every other Terran just straight up quits in frustration. Maru is literally the only Terran left in existence. With me so far? Now imagine that Maru plays in every single premier tournament. For every single loss "Terran" (Maru) suffers, they will win 10, maybe 20 times as much. He won't win every single tournament, but he'll place within the top 8 of anything loaded with Koreans and in the top 1 of everything that isn't. Do you see the problem? Maru is so good that he was doing really, really, really well even when Terran was underpowered. Not only do the winrates not indicate imbalance, in this hypothetical they are actually outright lying and telling us that Terran is the best race in the history of all RTS games ever made, when in fact it's just Maru (or, in reality, a slew of top-tier Koreans) who are simply that damn good. The hypothetical I drew is a gross exaggeration of the reality, but the fact that it's physically possible automatically dismisses your theory that winrates are a reliable source of information on balance. I'm not going to get into specifics of when they've misled us and to what degree and how and why, I'm just debunking the idea that just because they possibly lined up with our perceptions of balance at some times in SC2's history, that means they ALWAYS line up with ACTUAL balance. Is it a mysterious, magical coincidence that top Terran players are that damn good? No. They've been honing their mechanical skills for years because they've had NO CHOICE. More often than not, Terrans have had no other reliable ways to win games. Zerg and Protoss regularly find ways to avoid engaging in 30-minute long, multitask/micro-heavy slugfests, or units enter the meta that make micro relatively irrelevant (Roach vs Roach instead of B/Ling vs B/Ling), and the inevitable happens. Those players don't push themselves as hard, either because they simply don't need to, or pushing themselves harder will yield diminishing returns (there's only so much micro you can do in Roach vs Roach. Maru wouldn't magically play it better). Could the best P/Zs be as mechanically good as the best Ts? Some of them, absolutely. (Parting and Zest are two immediate and easy choices for Protoss; of Zerg I'm sure some combination of soO, Soulkey, Life, DRG, and Jaedong would rise to the challenge.) Some of them (probably a longer list) would crash and burn if they had to split their units ten times in every single engagement. And that's awful.Terran, Protoss, and Zerg can have different units, abilities, racial mechanics, strengths, and weaknesses, but the tactical, strategic, mechanical, and multitasking requirements of playing every race absolutely must be as close to equal as is humanly possible to design. It's not OK for PvT Protoss to be strategically harder but mechanically simpler. If that's the case right now, then Terran has to be made strategically harder (which sounds more like a buff than a nerf, honestly) and Protoss has to be made mechanically more demanding. I guess your are assuming that terran is in the first place the mechanically hardest race to play. I simply cannot agree to this point of view. I used to play terran in WOL and now after big break(2 years), i am back and playing protoss. From my perspective it's about the same mechanic vise. I am asking myself same "questions" durring the games, am i building workers -> am i close to suply block -> am i building army -> etc... So, what i would like to hear from anyone that is claiming that terran is mechanically harder to play, or if anyone is claiming that any of the other 2 races is harder to play, to support this kind of statement with some kind of proof, othervise this is just another argument without evidence. Would you agree that Zest is renowned for his mechanical prowess amongst Protoss? He's one of the most intensive battle microers around? If so, I've already done what you ask. You can find it here. The TLDR version is that I took a random game of Maru vs Zest and counted up all of their mechanical actions during the pivotal, big engagements in the game. Although the game picked was random, Zest was obviously microing much harder than most Protoss would have in his situation, Blinking away from WMs and using Warp Prisms in combat. Being as generous as possible to Zest in my estimations, Maru still had over twice as many distinct, separate actions performed in the fights. And, again, Zest is the guy to go to for impressive things happening in fights as far as Protoss players go. I look forward to seeing what you think of my evidence, such as it is. Yes, i agree with this compleatly, thats why Maru won in the end, cause when all this was happening, he was able to macro up at home durring this kind of micro intensive battle and zest wasnt able to. So yea, Maru is better at macro than Zest i would then conclude from your post. I didnt see the game so i am compleatly dependant on your post that you provided link to. From your post i can read that bassicly in the end Maru won cause he did have more units, and while Zest did take the 2 engagements cause of maybe better unit compossition or better possition or w/e the reasson was, he had nothing at home produced to fall back to after the battles. Am i correct?
But those extra actions are the result of (a) splitting and (b) kitting yes? or do they involve (c) macro during the fights as well. Because a and b are not even available to protoss and c will always be double for terran because they produce close to double the amount of units in general.
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On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:06 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:00 Svizcy wrote:On August 13 2014 16:11 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 14:11 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 05:18 Morbidius wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. Winrates tend to balance to close to 50 percent, tournament representation is usually a better metric. Proof for that? I have (at least) two counterexamples: BL/Infestor, the winrates started to slowly drop further down in TvZ. (from values between 45-50 to values around 40) PvT has been back and forth swinging between 20-50% for multiple months in Korea. The winrates didn't stabilize at all. Let us enter for a moment into the realm of the hypothetical. Imagine that we revert back to the previous patch, which just about everybody will agree was still a terrible place for Terrans. Now imagine on top of that that every single Terran except Maru simply stops playing. Taeja's wrists catch on fire and he suffers second-degree burns, Polt is too busy filming The Avengers 2, Bomber goes into the military where he becomes a four-star general, Innovation joins Byun on his pilgrimage in the mountains of China, and every other Terran just straight up quits in frustration. Maru is literally the only Terran left in existence. With me so far? Now imagine that Maru plays in every single premier tournament. For every single loss "Terran" (Maru) suffers, they will win 10, maybe 20 times as much. He won't win every single tournament, but he'll place within the top 8 of anything loaded with Koreans and in the top 1 of everything that isn't. Do you see the problem? Maru is so good that he was doing really, really, really well even when Terran was underpowered. Not only do the winrates not indicate imbalance, in this hypothetical they are actually outright lying and telling us that Terran is the best race in the history of all RTS games ever made, when in fact it's just Maru (or, in reality, a slew of top-tier Koreans) who are simply that damn good. The hypothetical I drew is a gross exaggeration of the reality, but the fact that it's physically possible automatically dismisses your theory that winrates are a reliable source of information on balance. I'm not going to get into specifics of when they've misled us and to what degree and how and why, I'm just debunking the idea that just because they possibly lined up with our perceptions of balance at some times in SC2's history, that means they ALWAYS line up with ACTUAL balance. Is it a mysterious, magical coincidence that top Terran players are that damn good? No. They've been honing their mechanical skills for years because they've had NO CHOICE. More often than not, Terrans have had no other reliable ways to win games. Zerg and Protoss regularly find ways to avoid engaging in 30-minute long, multitask/micro-heavy slugfests, or units enter the meta that make micro relatively irrelevant (Roach vs Roach instead of B/Ling vs B/Ling), and the inevitable happens. Those players don't push themselves as hard, either because they simply don't need to, or pushing themselves harder will yield diminishing returns (there's only so much micro you can do in Roach vs Roach. Maru wouldn't magically play it better). Could the best P/Zs be as mechanically good as the best Ts? Some of them, absolutely. (Parting and Zest are two immediate and easy choices for Protoss; of Zerg I'm sure some combination of soO, Soulkey, Life, DRG, and Jaedong would rise to the challenge.) Some of them (probably a longer list) would crash and burn if they had to split their units ten times in every single engagement. And that's awful.Terran, Protoss, and Zerg can have different units, abilities, racial mechanics, strengths, and weaknesses, but the tactical, strategic, mechanical, and multitasking requirements of playing every race absolutely must be as close to equal as is humanly possible to design. It's not OK for PvT Protoss to be strategically harder but mechanically simpler. If that's the case right now, then Terran has to be made strategically harder (which sounds more like a buff than a nerf, honestly) and Protoss has to be made mechanically more demanding. I guess your are assuming that terran is in the first place the mechanically hardest race to play. I simply cannot agree to this point of view. I used to play terran in WOL and now after big break(2 years), i am back and playing protoss. From my perspective it's about the same mechanic vise. I am asking myself same "questions" durring the games, am i building workers -> am i close to suply block -> am i building army -> etc... So, what i would like to hear from anyone that is claiming that terran is mechanically harder to play, or if anyone is claiming that any of the other 2 races is harder to play, to support this kind of statement with some kind of proof, othervise this is just another argument without evidence. Would you agree that Zest is renowned for his mechanical prowess amongst Protoss? He's one of the most intensive battle microers around? If so, I've already done what you ask. You can find it here. The TLDR version is that I took a random game of Maru vs Zest and counted up all of their mechanical actions during the pivotal, big engagements in the game. Although the game picked was random, Zest was obviously microing much harder than most Protoss would have in his situation, Blinking away from WMs and using Warp Prisms in combat. Being as generous as possible to Zest in my estimations, Maru still had over twice as many distinct, separate actions performed in the fights. And, again, Zest is the guy to go to for impressive things happening in fights as far as Protoss players go. I look forward to seeing what you think of my evidence, such as it is. Yes, i agree with this compleatly, thats why Maru won in the end, cause when all this was happening, he was able to macro up at home durring this kind of micro intensive battle and zest wasnt able to. So yea, Maru is better at macro than Zest i would then conclude from your post. I didnt see the game so i am compleatly dependant on your post that you provided link to. From your post i can read that bassicly in the end Maru won cause he did have more units, and while Zest did take the 2 engagements cause of maybe better unit compossition or better possition or w/e the reasson was, he had nothing at home produced to fall back to after the battles. Am i correct?
Absolutely. So my agenda here is pretty clear I think, not only am I outright saying that it takes less than half the mechanical skill of Terran to play Protoss in TvP, I'm also insinuating that Zest, GSL champion and a deservedly well-respected Protoss, wasn't even able to macro and multitask competently while doing less than half of what Maru was doing. (This isn't the only time Zest's macro has seemed to slip in recent memory.)
This would be fine if we were comparing Maru to Terminator, but we're talking about Zest, the guy who was lifting his Colossi in Warp Prisms against Rain during SPL to huge roars from the crowd. This is as mechanically demanding as Protoss ever gets.
On August 13 2014 17:25 RaFox17 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 16:11 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 14:11 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 05:18 Morbidius wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. Winrates tend to balance to close to 50 percent, tournament representation is usually a better metric. Proof for that? I have (at least) two counterexamples: BL/Infestor, the winrates started to slowly drop further down in TvZ. (from values between 45-50 to values around 40) PvT has been back and forth swinging between 20-50% for multiple months in Korea. The winrates didn't stabilize at all. Let us enter for a moment into the realm of the hypothetical. Imagine that we revert back to the previous patch, which just about everybody will agree was still a terrible place for Terrans. Now imagine on top of that that every single Terran except Maru simply stops playing. Taeja's wrists catch on fire and he suffers second-degree burns, Polt is too busy filming The Avengers 2, Bomber goes into the military where he becomes a four-star general, Innovation joins Byun on his pilgrimage in the mountains of China, and every other Terran just straight up quits in frustration. Maru is literally the only Terran left in existence. With me so far? Now imagine that Maru plays in every single premier tournament. For every single loss "Terran" (Maru) suffers, they will win 10, maybe 20 times as much. He won't win every single tournament, but he'll place within the top 8 of anything loaded with Koreans and in the top 1 of everything that isn't. Do you see the problem? Maru is so good that he was doing really, really, really well even when Terran was underpowered. Not only do the winrates not indicate imbalance, in this hypothetical they are actually outright lying and telling us that Terran is the best race in the history of all RTS games ever made, when in fact it's just Maru (or, in reality, a slew of top-tier Koreans) who are simply that damn good. The hypothetical I drew is a gross exaggeration of the reality, but the fact that it's physically possible automatically dismisses your theory that winrates are a reliable source of information on balance. I'm not going to get into specifics of when they've misled us and to what degree and how and why, I'm just debunking the idea that just because they possibly lined up with our perceptions of balance at some times in SC2's history, that means they ALWAYS line up with ACTUAL balance. Is it a mysterious, magical coincidence that top Terran players are that damn good? No. They've been honing their mechanical skills for years because they've had NO CHOICE. More often than not, Terrans have had no other reliable ways to win games. Zerg and Protoss regularly find ways to avoid engaging in 30-minute long, multitask/micro-heavy slugfests, or units enter the meta that make micro relatively irrelevant (Roach vs Roach instead of B/Ling vs B/Ling), and the inevitable happens. Those players don't push themselves as hard, either because they simply don't need to, or pushing themselves harder will yield diminishing returns (there's only so much micro you can do in Roach vs Roach. Maru wouldn't magically play it better). Could the best P/Zs be as mechanically good as the best Ts? Some of them, absolutely. (Parting and Zest are two immediate and easy choices for Protoss; of Zerg I'm sure some combination of soO, Soulkey, Life, DRG, and Jaedong would rise to the challenge.) Some of them (probably a longer list) would crash and burn if they had to split their units ten times in every single engagement. And that's awful.Terran, Protoss, and Zerg can have different units, abilities, racial mechanics, strengths, and weaknesses, but the tactical, strategic, mechanical, and multitasking requirements of playing every race absolutely must be as close to equal as is humanly possible to design. It's not OK for PvT Protoss to be strategically harder but mechanically simpler. If that's the case right now, then Terran has to be made strategically harder (which sounds more like a buff than a nerf, honestly) and Protoss has to be made mechanically more demanding. I just have to say that the idea you and many terrans seem to harbour that top terrans are simply better players than top players from other races is totally subjective and highly annoying. It also leads to equally frustrating arguments when terrans are dominating that there is no imbalance cause terrans are simply so good and talented and terran is so hard to play etc. Really hope this bullshit would stop someday.
I would appreciate you reading my post next time and not replying to me as though I'm some generic Terran supremacist.
I specifically addressed this point when I said that there's no coincidence as to why Terran players are so mechanically skilled. They have no choice. If Protoss units took as much mechanical skill to use, many top Protoss players would become good enough to use them that way over the course of years of practice.
No Terran got as good as Maru overnight. It took MKP to invent marine splits at all. Protoss doesn't reward "marine splits," or any similar equivalent, so they don't do it, so they don't develop those skills. Thus if the game were to suddenly become balanced (by my definition of balance), yes, Protoss would have a very, very hard time. For a while. Then the great Protoss players would adapt and the not-great Protoss players would stop edging their way into Code S Ro8 like they did last season.
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EPT
