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On August 13 2014 17:29 Mojito99 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote: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.
I agree, but you would need to get answer from the guy which post i quoted originally, since i am from start assuming that all 3 races tequire about same skill to play on that high level as KR pros are performing.
I simply cannot agree to any sort of elitism. What the evidence was provided was simply that in that game, Maru played better and won in the end, thats it. It doesnt show any sort of imbalance from my perspective.
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On August 13 2014 17:38 Svizcy wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:29 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote: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:
[quote]
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. I agree, but you would need to get answer from the guy which post i quoted originally, since i am from start assuming that all 3 races tequire about same skill to play on that high level as KR pros are performing. I simply cannot agree to any sort of elitism. What the evidence was provided was simply that in that game, Maru played better and won in the end, thats it. It doesnt show any sort of imbalance from my perspective.
Zest won two fights by performing less than half of Maru's mechanical actions.
Zest looked like he was doing great micro that no other Protoss bother to do against Terrans. If you watch the game, you'll see Zest doing cool stuff like Blinking in the nick of time to avoid WM damage, and using Storm Drops in combat - basically the equivalent of EMP drops. Very impressive stuff.
But when you take all of that into account, it's still less than half of what Maru is doing mechanically. Did Zest win? No. But that doesn't matter. We're not arguing about balance (right now), but mechanical requirement for playing the races. Terran can be more mechanically demanding and overpowered, or less mechanically demanding and underpowered, or any other combination of the four.
If you want me to believe that this game is an outlier, the burden of proof is now on you to point me to a game where, regardless of the outcome, win or lose, the Protoss was played with more mechanical skill than Zest's P in that game. Apart from maybe Rain and maybe Parting, you won't find one. This is as mechanically tough as Protoss gets. And it's less than half as tough as Terran by my count.
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Czech Republic12128 Posts
On August 13 2014 17:35 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote: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. Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:25 RaFox17 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 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.
That's not true at all. There was a time/period in WoL when the banebombing was cool and in. Almost every protoss managed to do "blink splitting" because otherwise they were dead(the meta was blink colo +3 timing when the hive was being made(I think timing on 16 minute, because 12 minute hive, 14 minute "super-spire"(don't remember the name :D) meaning at 16th minute it will be finished, but I am not sure, it is long time ago :D), once the zerg started to make the hive earlier, this meta shifted to immortal all-in).
Also you have to split with mass VR against storm(which is direct counter)/fungal, this was not so long ago cool as well in PvP(and still is in PvZ). Also phoenix splits against fungal, players do this.
So please, stop saying Protoss players don't split when they do. The problem is, Protoss player can NOT(!!!) split effectively, because most of the units feel not responsive and slow. How do you want to split tempests, carriers, templars, sentries? Pre split and hope, because they are so slow for spliting...
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On August 13 2014 17:35 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote: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. Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:25 RaFox17 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 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.
I find this a bit irritating because it reads as if
a) you imply that mechanics = skill
b) you suggest that apm = mechanics
both are undoubtedly related but arguably far from synonyms.
What about map vision, positioning, hitting timings, scouting, adapting unit compositions, harassment. All of these are not necessarily shown by high apm and are still mechanics of an RTS.
Essentially mechanics are the Real-time element of RTS. the Strategy aspect however is often overlooked as skill. Unrelated to balance - strategic diversity is also a skill element. The myth that every protoss can hit you with dts, oracle, blink, pressure plays, voidray all in, colossus builds etc - is exactly that, a myth. If you are up against a protoss player who is able to properly execute all these builds, that in itself is an incredible display of skill in an RTS.
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On August 13 2014 17:53 deacon.frost wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:35 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote: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:
[quote]
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: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. That's not true at all. There was a time/period in WoL when the banebombing was cool and in. Almost every protoss managed to do "blink splitting" because otherwise they were dead(the meta was blink colo +3 timing when the hive was being made(I think timing on 16 minute, because 12 minute hive, 14 minute "super-spire"(don't remember the name :D) meaning at 16th minute it will be finished, but I am not sure, it is long time ago :D), once the zerg started to make the hive earlier, this meta shifted to immortal all-in). Also you have to split with mass VR against storm(which is direct counter)/fungal, this was not so long ago cool as well in PvP(and still is in PvZ). Also phoenix splits against fungal, players do this. So please, stop saying Protoss players don't split when they do. The problem is, Protoss player can NOT(!!!) split effectively, because most of the units feel not responsive and slow. How do you want to split tempests, carriers, templars, sentries? Pre split and hope, because they are so slow for spliting...
It seems like you're offended on behalf of Protoss playes, which would be silly because I don't disagree with what you're saying.
It's not Zest's fault that his units are designed to work better as a deathblob, it's Blizzard's. I don't want Zest to change how he plays Protoss, I want Blizzard to change Protoss so that Zest can display the mechanical skill that he's capable of.
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Czech Republic12128 Posts
On August 13 2014 17:59 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:53 deacon.frost wrote:On August 13 2014 17:35 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote: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:
[quote]
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: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. That's not true at all. There was a time/period in WoL when the banebombing was cool and in. Almost every protoss managed to do "blink splitting" because otherwise they were dead(the meta was blink colo +3 timing when the hive was being made(I think timing on 16 minute, because 12 minute hive, 14 minute "super-spire"(don't remember the name :D) meaning at 16th minute it will be finished, but I am not sure, it is long time ago :D), once the zerg started to make the hive earlier, this meta shifted to immortal all-in). Also you have to split with mass VR against storm(which is direct counter)/fungal, this was not so long ago cool as well in PvP(and still is in PvZ). Also phoenix splits against fungal, players do this. So please, stop saying Protoss players don't split when they do. The problem is, Protoss player can NOT(!!!) split effectively, because most of the units feel not responsive and slow. How do you want to split tempests, carriers, templars, sentries? Pre split and hope, because they are so slow for spliting... It seems like you're offended on behalf of Protoss playes, which would be silly because I don't disagree with what you're saying. It's not Zest's fault that his units are designed to work better as a deathblob, it's Blizzard's. I don't want Zest to change how he plays Protoss, I want Blizzard to change Protoss so that Zest can display the mechanical skill that he's capable of.
Well, OK, this is a little bit different. Then we both agree on that point.
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On August 13 2014 17:38 Svizcy wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:29 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote: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:
[quote]
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. I agree, but you would need to get answer from the guy which post i quoted originally, since i am from start assuming that all 3 races tequire about same skill to play on that high level as KR pros are performing. I simply cannot agree to any sort of elitism. What the evidence was provided was simply that in that game, Maru played better and won in the end, thats it. It doesnt show any sort of imbalance from my perspective.
Yup. On that level they surely do. Everything else would just imply imbalance. Because why would ToD not "just learn" to play as good as Zest if it were that easy? The reason is simply that it is still out of reach for him the exact same way that Goody won't become Flash over night.
The only thing (I believe) that can really mess with how muc skill a race needs is when matchups become coinflippy. Even then better players will perform better, but I think there are some Prime examples that bit by bit show how a lesser play Has defeated a TRUE opponent.
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On August 13 2014 17:59 Mojito99 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:35 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote: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:
[quote]
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: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. I find this a bit irritating because it reads as if a) you imply that mechanics = skill b) you suggest that apm = mechanics both are undoubtedly related but arguably far from synonyms. What about map vision, positioning, hitting timings, scouting, adapting unit compositions, harassment. All of these are not necessarily shown by high apm and are still mechanics of an RTS. Essentially mechanics are the Real-time element of RTS. the Strategy aspect however is often overlooked as skill. Unrelated to balance - strategic diversity is also a skill element. The myth that every protoss can hit you with dts, oracle, blink, pressure plays, voidray all in, colossus builds etc - is exactly that, a myth. If you are up against a protoss player who is able to properly execute all these builds, that in itself is an incredible display of skill in an RTS.
It is NOT OK for one race to be significantly more mechanically demanding while another race is significantly more strategically demanding (whatever that is; I'm still convinced it means "I have the freedom to do basically anything" and is actually an advantage as opposed to a disadvantage). Every race should be equally demanding mechanically, tactically, strategically, and in terms of multi-tasking. Obviously having total parity is impossible, but the standards for what passes for "good enough" have to be MUCH, MUCH higher than what Blizzard have set for themselves.
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Czech Republic12128 Posts
On August 13 2014 18:10 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 17:59 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 17:35 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote: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:
[quote]
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: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. I find this a bit irritating because it reads as if a) you imply that mechanics = skill b) you suggest that apm = mechanics both are undoubtedly related but arguably far from synonyms. What about map vision, positioning, hitting timings, scouting, adapting unit compositions, harassment. All of these are not necessarily shown by high apm and are still mechanics of an RTS. Essentially mechanics are the Real-time element of RTS. the Strategy aspect however is often overlooked as skill. Unrelated to balance - strategic diversity is also a skill element. The myth that every protoss can hit you with dts, oracle, blink, pressure plays, voidray all in, colossus builds etc - is exactly that, a myth. If you are up against a protoss player who is able to properly execute all these builds, that in itself is an incredible display of skill in an RTS. It is NOT OK for one race to be significantly more mechanically demanding while another race is significantly more strategically demanding (whatever that is; I'm still convinced it means "I have the freedom to do basically anything" and is actually an advantage as opposed to a disadvantage). Every race should be equally demanding mechanically, tactically, strategically, and in terms of multi-tasking. Obviously having total parity is impossible, but the standards for what passes for "good enough" have to be MUCH, MUCH higher than what Blizzard have set for themselves.
I kind of agree, but I think we need a race which is more mechanically demanding and less strategically and vice versa and something in between. Not all the races the same, so players can choose their race according to their style(am I a robot or a more thinking player?) Though it should not be the state of the game now, because now the difference is simply too big. The gap should be smaller, but it should still remain. IMO 
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On August 13 2014 18:15 deacon.frost wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 18:10 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:59 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 17:35 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote: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:
[quote]
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: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:
[quote]
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. I find this a bit irritating because it reads as if a) you imply that mechanics = skill b) you suggest that apm = mechanics both are undoubtedly related but arguably far from synonyms. What about map vision, positioning, hitting timings, scouting, adapting unit compositions, harassment. All of these are not necessarily shown by high apm and are still mechanics of an RTS. Essentially mechanics are the Real-time element of RTS. the Strategy aspect however is often overlooked as skill. Unrelated to balance - strategic diversity is also a skill element. The myth that every protoss can hit you with dts, oracle, blink, pressure plays, voidray all in, colossus builds etc - is exactly that, a myth. If you are up against a protoss player who is able to properly execute all these builds, that in itself is an incredible display of skill in an RTS. It is NOT OK for one race to be significantly more mechanically demanding while another race is significantly more strategically demanding (whatever that is; I'm still convinced it means "I have the freedom to do basically anything" and is actually an advantage as opposed to a disadvantage). Every race should be equally demanding mechanically, tactically, strategically, and in terms of multi-tasking. Obviously having total parity is impossible, but the standards for what passes for "good enough" have to be MUCH, MUCH higher than what Blizzard have set for themselves. I kind of agree, but I think we need a race which is more mechanically demanding and less strategically and vice versa and something in between. Not all the races the same, so players can choose their race according to their style(am I a robot or a more thinking player?) Though it should not be the state of the game now, because now the difference is simply too big. The gap should be smaller, but it should still remain. IMO
Then let me reiterate the point i was trying to make:
You cannot equate apm to mechanical skill. Mechanics are more than just playing fast and pressing more buttons than the opponent. And when you start incorporating more than just apm into the definition of mechanics, then the difference in mechanics between races becomes a different story.
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On August 13 2014 18:41 Mojito99 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 18:15 deacon.frost wrote:On August 13 2014 18:10 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:59 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 17:35 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote: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:
[quote]
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: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:
[quote]
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. I find this a bit irritating because it reads as if a) you imply that mechanics = skill b) you suggest that apm = mechanics both are undoubtedly related but arguably far from synonyms. What about map vision, positioning, hitting timings, scouting, adapting unit compositions, harassment. All of these are not necessarily shown by high apm and are still mechanics of an RTS. Essentially mechanics are the Real-time element of RTS. the Strategy aspect however is often overlooked as skill. Unrelated to balance - strategic diversity is also a skill element. The myth that every protoss can hit you with dts, oracle, blink, pressure plays, voidray all in, colossus builds etc - is exactly that, a myth. If you are up against a protoss player who is able to properly execute all these builds, that in itself is an incredible display of skill in an RTS. It is NOT OK for one race to be significantly more mechanically demanding while another race is significantly more strategically demanding (whatever that is; I'm still convinced it means "I have the freedom to do basically anything" and is actually an advantage as opposed to a disadvantage). Every race should be equally demanding mechanically, tactically, strategically, and in terms of multi-tasking. Obviously having total parity is impossible, but the standards for what passes for "good enough" have to be MUCH, MUCH higher than what Blizzard have set for themselves. I kind of agree, but I think we need a race which is more mechanically demanding and less strategically and vice versa and something in between. Not all the races the same, so players can choose their race according to their style(am I a robot or a more thinking player?) Though it should not be the state of the game now, because now the difference is simply too big. The gap should be smaller, but it should still remain. IMO Then let me reiterate the point i was trying to make: You cannot equate apm to mechanical skill. Mechanics are more than just playing fast and pressing more buttons than the opponent. And when you start incorporating more than just apm into the definition of mechanics, then the difference in mechanics between races becomes a different story.
So what is mechanics if not playing fast and pressing more buttons efficiently?
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I thought that it was canon that terrans are better than the others  (Happy <3)
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+ Show Spoiler +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 played Protoss in Wings of Liberty. I started at the very bottom, and played until I reached Diamond league. Even took some games of masters players every once in a while  When heart of the swarm came out, I switched to terran.
I think if you talk about the required skill of any race, you have to be very specific. That means: Just saying terran is harder to play or more demanding than playing protoss is not correct. But if you say: Most of common strategies in silver league (e.g.) are harder to execute for terran than for protoss, you might have a point. (I am not saying that, it's just an example).
I feel like the macro mechanics of Protoss are the most forgiving in lower leagues. Zerg has to inject on a regular basis, otherwise they don't have larva. Missing mules is still pretty big. Missing chrono boost maybe not so much in your average Joe gold league macro game (ofcourse if you go for a specific timing it is).
And it certainly takes a little more effort to build several buildings at once, when playing terran or zerg. You have to select the amount of units you want to make, shift click to the location, shift build, shift back to mining (in the case of terran). Protoss can just use one probe to build 5 gateways next to each other.
Back in my protoss days I played at around 80 - 100 apm on avg, replay function and sc gears said my eapm was around 70 for diamond level play. Today I play at around 130 - 170 apm on avg., with around 90 eapm.
It's strange, because I really don't spam a whole lot, just in the first couple of minutes in the game, and not even that crazy. I think that's because terran units build really fast, while protoss units don't. So you have to check your production more often.
My Point is: I think the skillceiling for each race is pretty much even, all scenarios considered (e.g. perfect blink micro is pretty much impossible to do, as is perfect marine splitting or perfect baneling splitting). But this doesn't apply to all levels of play equally. I am sure it does apply to master league and above though.
fondest regards
your average joe diamond terran player
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As for the mechanical skill ceiling, Terran had also the highest in Broodwar. Additionally TvP was the hardest. So far nothing's changed ^^
I personally think Terran, Zerg > Protoss in terms of mechanics needed. I've seen many 100 APM protoss in Master league but rarely met a Terran or Zerg with 100 APM.
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Czech Republic12128 Posts
On August 13 2014 19:28 TurboMaN wrote:
As for the mechanical skill ceiling, Terran had also the highest in Broodwar. Additionally TvP was the hardest. So far nothing's changed ^^
I personally think Terran, Zerg > Protoss in terms of mechanics needed. I've seen many 100 APM protoss in Master league but rarely met a Terran or Zerg with 100 APM.
You mean in the ending screen or do you watch every replay?
Because I have on the ending screen 80 APM, do you know why? BEcause at the start I do not spam. I click 5 times at most for creation of probe, why spam? And then I have 0 APM waiting for the next moment to create a probe. If I have 200 supply, I have 20 APM, maybe less. Just chrono upgrades and watch map carefully.
And then the game ends, someone cries 'bout my APM and in the end I watch the replay and there I have in the battle higher eAPM(and sometimes even the APM!!) than my opponent(and the funny part, usually it's a terran player).
The ending screen is meaningless. My former teammates spammed at the beginning of the game up until 400 APM(hmm, say first 2 minutes) and in the end they had 120+ APM(usually around 140) for a long macro game(logically the longer game the lower the final APM), yeah, who cares I had better APM during the fights, I have better positioning, more precise storms etc., they were like "man, you cannot play with 80 APM, that's too low, you don't do everything you need to"(BTW I have beaten them all except the top master one and the meching one(cause I leave turtle mass raven style games)).
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On August 13 2014 19:28 TurboMaN wrote:
As for the mechanical skill ceiling, Terran had also the highest in Broodwar. Additionally TvP was the hardest. So far nothing's changed ^^
I personally think Terran, Zerg > Protoss in terms of mechanics needed. I've seen many 100 APM protoss in Master league but rarely met a Terran or Zerg with 100 APM.
Heh, you should play against me hahaha !
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On August 13 2014 18:50 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 18:41 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 18:15 deacon.frost wrote:On August 13 2014 18:10 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:59 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 17:35 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote: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:
[quote]
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: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:
[quote]
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. I find this a bit irritating because it reads as if a) you imply that mechanics = skill b) you suggest that apm = mechanics both are undoubtedly related but arguably far from synonyms. What about map vision, positioning, hitting timings, scouting, adapting unit compositions, harassment. All of these are not necessarily shown by high apm and are still mechanics of an RTS. Essentially mechanics are the Real-time element of RTS. the Strategy aspect however is often overlooked as skill. Unrelated to balance - strategic diversity is also a skill element. The myth that every protoss can hit you with dts, oracle, blink, pressure plays, voidray all in, colossus builds etc - is exactly that, a myth. If you are up against a protoss player who is able to properly execute all these builds, that in itself is an incredible display of skill in an RTS. It is NOT OK for one race to be significantly more mechanically demanding while another race is significantly more strategically demanding (whatever that is; I'm still convinced it means "I have the freedom to do basically anything" and is actually an advantage as opposed to a disadvantage). Every race should be equally demanding mechanically, tactically, strategically, and in terms of multi-tasking. Obviously having total parity is impossible, but the standards for what passes for "good enough" have to be MUCH, MUCH higher than what Blizzard have set for themselves. I kind of agree, but I think we need a race which is more mechanically demanding and less strategically and vice versa and something in between. Not all the races the same, so players can choose their race according to their style(am I a robot or a more thinking player?) Though it should not be the state of the game now, because now the difference is simply too big. The gap should be smaller, but it should still remain. IMO Then let me reiterate the point i was trying to make: You cannot equate apm to mechanical skill. Mechanics are more than just playing fast and pressing more buttons than the opponent. And when you start incorporating more than just apm into the definition of mechanics, then the difference in mechanics between races becomes a different story. So what is mechanics if not playing fast and pressing more buttons efficiently?
Pressing buttons more efficiently is a whole story all together.
But to answer your question what mechanics is other than apm. I do not know if there is an official definition. But here is an example of what is part of mechanics other than apm.
a) spellcasting
a regular pvt game usually sees: snipe, emp, sometimes nukes, medivac boost, stim for the terran and
force field, guardian shield, hallucination, blink, storm, feedback, revelation, pulsar beam,revelation, envision, pulsar beam, time warp, nexus canon, recall.
To use spellcasting efficiently and precisely is part of your mechanic skill. As you can see, there is quite a discrepancy in the number of spellcasters you need to control as protoss if you are going for the current popular strategies. And thats not including voidray busts etc.
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On August 13 2014 20:15 Faust852 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 19:28 TurboMaN wrote:
As for the mechanical skill ceiling, Terran had also the highest in Broodwar. Additionally TvP was the hardest. So far nothing's changed ^^
I personally think Terran, Zerg > Protoss in terms of mechanics needed. I've seen many 100 APM protoss in Master league but rarely met a Terran or Zerg with 100 APM. Heh, you should play against me hahaha !
If APM=Mechanics then yes this is true.
You control less units, are less active on the map, produce less units, build less bases etc etc. Very many reasons why protoss apm is significantly lower. For example there is no "filler" mechanics such as creep spread.
Keep in mind we are talking macro here. Obviously you can pull of an immortal all in with 50 apm. It might not be very good, but you may pull it off.
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On August 13 2014 22:13 Mojito99 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 18:50 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 18:41 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 18:15 deacon.frost wrote:On August 13 2014 18:10 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:59 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 17:35 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote:On August 13 2014 17:06 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:00 Svizcy wrote:
[quote]
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:On August 13 2014 16:11 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 14:11 Big J wrote:
[quote]
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. I find this a bit irritating because it reads as if a) you imply that mechanics = skill b) you suggest that apm = mechanics both are undoubtedly related but arguably far from synonyms. What about map vision, positioning, hitting timings, scouting, adapting unit compositions, harassment. All of these are not necessarily shown by high apm and are still mechanics of an RTS. Essentially mechanics are the Real-time element of RTS. the Strategy aspect however is often overlooked as skill. Unrelated to balance - strategic diversity is also a skill element. The myth that every protoss can hit you with dts, oracle, blink, pressure plays, voidray all in, colossus builds etc - is exactly that, a myth. If you are up against a protoss player who is able to properly execute all these builds, that in itself is an incredible display of skill in an RTS. It is NOT OK for one race to be significantly more mechanically demanding while another race is significantly more strategically demanding (whatever that is; I'm still convinced it means "I have the freedom to do basically anything" and is actually an advantage as opposed to a disadvantage). Every race should be equally demanding mechanically, tactically, strategically, and in terms of multi-tasking. Obviously having total parity is impossible, but the standards for what passes for "good enough" have to be MUCH, MUCH higher than what Blizzard have set for themselves. I kind of agree, but I think we need a race which is more mechanically demanding and less strategically and vice versa and something in between. Not all the races the same, so players can choose their race according to their style(am I a robot or a more thinking player?) Though it should not be the state of the game now, because now the difference is simply too big. The gap should be smaller, but it should still remain. IMO Then let me reiterate the point i was trying to make: You cannot equate apm to mechanical skill. Mechanics are more than just playing fast and pressing more buttons than the opponent. And when you start incorporating more than just apm into the definition of mechanics, then the difference in mechanics between races becomes a different story. So what is mechanics if not playing fast and pressing more buttons efficiently? Pressing buttons more efficiently is a whole story all together. But to answer your question what mechanics is other than apm. I do not know if there is an official definition. But here is an example of what is part of mechanics other than apm. a) spellcasting a regular pvt game usually sees: snipe, emp, sometimes nukes, medivac boost, stim for the terran and force field, guardian shield, hallucination, blink, storm, feedback, revelation, pulsar beam,revelation, envision, pulsar beam, time warp, nexus canon, recall. To use spellcasting efficiently and precisely is part of your mechanic skill. As you can see, there is quite a discrepancy in the number of spellcasters you need to control as protoss if you are going for the current popular strategies. And thats not including voidray busts etc.
Do you think that I didn't account for spellcasting when I did my tally of Maru vs Zest actions? Believe me, that 70 (Maru) vs 30 (Zest) included everything the HTs did, the MSC did, and the Stalkers did. Just because Protoss has all these different abilities doesn't mean they actually have to use them nearly as much as what Terrans have to do in battle. I suggest clicking on the link I provided a few posts back and reading through that post, because it accounts for everything you say. Or, if you think that the random game I chose isn't a fair representation of the races' mechanical demands, you're welcome to find another micro-intensive game, like something from Polt vs Classic at IEM and count up every one of their actions in battle. They're both GSL champions too, so that should be a telling result as well. Personally, I would be shocked if the result was different from what I got, but you're welcome to try and prove my analysis wrong.
From what I've analyzed, accounting for their spellcasting, Protoss mechanics is not demanding enough. Literally not by half.
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On August 13 2014 22:28 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 22:13 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 18:50 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 18:41 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 18:15 deacon.frost wrote:On August 13 2014 18:10 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:59 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 17:35 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:25 Svizcy wrote:On August 13 2014 17:06 pure.Wasted wrote:[quote] 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:On August 13 2014 16:11 pure.Wasted wrote:
[quote]
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. I find this a bit irritating because it reads as if a) you imply that mechanics = skill b) you suggest that apm = mechanics both are undoubtedly related but arguably far from synonyms. What about map vision, positioning, hitting timings, scouting, adapting unit compositions, harassment. All of these are not necessarily shown by high apm and are still mechanics of an RTS. Essentially mechanics are the Real-time element of RTS. the Strategy aspect however is often overlooked as skill. Unrelated to balance - strategic diversity is also a skill element. The myth that every protoss can hit you with dts, oracle, blink, pressure plays, voidray all in, colossus builds etc - is exactly that, a myth. If you are up against a protoss player who is able to properly execute all these builds, that in itself is an incredible display of skill in an RTS. It is NOT OK for one race to be significantly more mechanically demanding while another race is significantly more strategically demanding (whatever that is; I'm still convinced it means "I have the freedom to do basically anything" and is actually an advantage as opposed to a disadvantage). Every race should be equally demanding mechanically, tactically, strategically, and in terms of multi-tasking. Obviously having total parity is impossible, but the standards for what passes for "good enough" have to be MUCH, MUCH higher than what Blizzard have set for themselves. I kind of agree, but I think we need a race which is more mechanically demanding and less strategically and vice versa and something in between. Not all the races the same, so players can choose their race according to their style(am I a robot or a more thinking player?) Though it should not be the state of the game now, because now the difference is simply too big. The gap should be smaller, but it should still remain. IMO Then let me reiterate the point i was trying to make: You cannot equate apm to mechanical skill. Mechanics are more than just playing fast and pressing more buttons than the opponent. And when you start incorporating more than just apm into the definition of mechanics, then the difference in mechanics between races becomes a different story. So what is mechanics if not playing fast and pressing more buttons efficiently? Pressing buttons more efficiently is a whole story all together. But to answer your question what mechanics is other than apm. I do not know if there is an official definition. But here is an example of what is part of mechanics other than apm. a) spellcasting a regular pvt game usually sees: snipe, emp, sometimes nukes, medivac boost, stim for the terran and force field, guardian shield, hallucination, blink, storm, feedback, revelation, pulsar beam,revelation, envision, pulsar beam, time warp, nexus canon, recall. To use spellcasting efficiently and precisely is part of your mechanic skill. As you can see, there is quite a discrepancy in the number of spellcasters you need to control as protoss if you are going for the current popular strategies. And thats not including voidray busts etc. Do you think that I didn't account for spellcasting when I did my tally of Maru vs Zest actions? Believe me, that 70 (Maru) vs 30 (Zest) included everything the HTs did, the MSC did, and the Stalkers did. Just because Protoss has all these different abilities doesn't mean they actually have to use them nearly as much as what Terrans have to do in battle. I suggest clicking on the link I provided a few posts back and reading through that post, because it accounts for everything you say. Or, if you think that the random game I chose isn't a fair representation of the races' mechanical demands, you're welcome to find another micro-intensive game, like something from Polt vs Classic at IEM and count up every one of their actions in battle. They're both GSL champions too, so that should be a telling result as well. Personally, I would be shocked if the result was different from what I got, but you're welcome to try and prove my analysis wrong. From what I've analyzed, accounting for their spellcasting, Protoss mechanics is not demanding enough. Literally not by half.
Assuming the last sentence is correct. What is the conclusion?
That terran players are superior RTS players and the fact that the top 100 world wide does not consist of 75% terran speaks to the imbalance of the game?
That terran is more demanding in general and therefore people which play terran are handicapping themselves?
That terran needs to become less mechanical and/or Protoss needs to be more mechanically demanding? (The latter of which was hinted at by Blizz)
That the game is imbalanced in favour of terran because the top protosses cannot even show how good they are because the race does not allow for it?
That the game is imbalanced in favour of terran because despite being mechanically way more demanding and therefore offering more room for mistakes, win rates are level?
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