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On August 14 2014 07:14 DinoMight wrote:Show nested quote +On August 14 2014 07:10 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 14 2014 05:41 Thieving Magpie wrote:On August 13 2014 17:50 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:38 Svizcy wrote: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:
[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? 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. If in-combat micro is all you care about then I think we're talking about two different game genres. How did you get "in-combat micro is the only thing that matters" from statements like: 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. And this: 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 disagree with you completely. I think it's fine for the races to emphasize different kinds of skill. Besides it's not like one race is playing Contra 2 and the others are playing Mario 64... all three races at the pro level require an insane amount of mechanical skill.
What are the reasons that it's fine for the races to emphasize different kinds of skill? "It's cool"? Here are some reasons why it's not fine - it makes balancing the game extremely difficult for Blizzard, because true balance is harder to perceive; it fractures the fanbase further because some people will simply never accept that coin flip wins are A-OK, leading some viewers to conclude that even fantastic players like Zest are "patch Toss"; it creates games/series (PvPs, ZvPs) that are universally panned by the majority of the spectators (almost never make it into Best Games lists) because even if this kind of competition is fair, it's not fun to watch for many; it delegitimizes results when nobodies topple giants (Has vs Jaedong, I'm looking at you). I could go on, but I think these are some pretty serious issues already.
I think you overestimate how much mehcanical skill Terran requires (you and almost every other Terran on here).
I refer you to this post of mine (which will refer you to another post). I'm not guessing or estimating how much mechanical skill Terran requires, I've actually sat down and counted it up by hand. I took a micro-intensive PvT where both players were obviously playing at a high mechanical level and analyzed all of their observable actions. The degree to which the Terran outmicroed Protoss (while still losing the engagements) is staggering.
You can disagree with how I counted actions in that analysis or which actions I counted and which ones I didn't, you can disagree that that game is representative of the mechanical skill floor of high-level TvPs and bring up another that you think is more telling, but please don't dismiss me as though I'm talking out of my ass.
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On August 14 2014 04:19 Socup wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2014 14:11 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 05:18 Morbidius wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. Winrates tend to balance to close to 50 percent, tournament representation is usually a better metric. Proof for that? I have (at least) two counterexamples: BL/Infestor, the winrates started to slowly drop further down in TvZ. (from values between 45-50 to values around 40) PvT has been back and forth swinging between 20-50% for multiple months in Korea. The winrates didn't stabilize at all. On August 13 2014 08:18 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. The initial chess comparison is lacking one very distinct feature. At the end of the game, the other person gets white. At the end of a starcraft game, people don´t switch races. NEW IDEA TO INSTANTLY BALANCE THE GAME: every match you need to change your race! done, it is now 100% balanced. With regards to win rates: There is an inherent flaw in this metric. If i tell you that 10000 games pvt can result in 50:50 win rates would it be balanced? A: yes What if i told you that these win rates are the product of every protoss winning every game that ends before 12 min and terran winning every game longer than 12 min. Still balanced? - most likely you would disagree. Next balance problem: Widow mines were extremely strong at the start of Hots. TvZ was very good for the terran. Then mines were nerfed. Meanwhile zerg got extremely good at dealing with the mines. You are now buffing mines again. - Did you not just "balance" away the development in skill zerg players have undergone? What is the incentive to improve your play if loosing a lot and dragging down the win rates of your race will just provoke a patch to level win rates again? Obviously this is an exaggeration. But i have yet to see an official definition of the term "balance". Considering 50:50 win rates as "balance" is an inherently flawed concept, not only mathematically. The initial chess comparison is not lacking. It's focusing on a single game of chess, for which it holds. But if you want to argue that way, then I could also say that (at least in a lot of tournaments) you could just always mirror your opponents racepick, even in a single game. So anytime a tournament allows raceswitching, the game is immidiatly balanced under the asumption of taking the picking process into account as well. As said, 50:50 winrates is a very restrictive metric. But it is an excellent metric mathematically. Every statistical test is held by these kinds of standards. Even physics since Heisenberg is more or less built upon the principle "what we can experience is true". If Zerg wins 55% vs Terran, implying that this is the balance of the matchup at that particular point in time is a natural principle in science. The remaining questions are: - Where to look at the winrates, with choices such as: ladder, tournaments, specific tournaments, examples... - How restrictive are we with the term "balance": do we need 50:50 or is +/-5% still OK? Maybe we can still experience fairness with +/-10%? Or maybe 55:45 already puts us into a desastrous situation at the highest level and we rather want 52:48... On August 13 2014 11:41 Socup wrote:On August 13 2014 08:18 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. The initial chess comparison is lacking one very distinct feature. At the end of the game, the other person gets white. At the end of a starcraft game, people don´t switch races. NEW IDEA TO INSTANTLY BALANCE THE GAME: every match you need to change your race! done, it is now 100% balanced. With regards to win rates: There is an inherent flaw in this metric. If i tell you that 10000 games pvt can result in 50:50 win rates would it be balanced? A: yes What if i told you that these win rates are the product of every protoss winning every game that ends before 12 min and terran winning every game longer than 12 min. Still balanced? - most likely you would disagree. Next balance problem: Widow mines were extremely strong at the start of Hots. TvZ was very good for the terran. Then mines were nerfed. Meanwhile zerg got extremely good at dealing with the mines. You are now buffing mines again. - Did you not just "balance" away the development in skill zerg players have undergone? What is the incentive to improve your play if loosing a lot and dragging down the win rates of your race will just provoke a patch to level win rates again? Obviously this is an exaggeration. But i have yet to see an official definition of the term "balance". Considering 50:50 win rates as "balance" is an inherently flawed concept, not only mathematically. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/4838104108Terran is supposed to be weak to protoss' late game. Its by design, although the asymmetricality of the races comes from their different units and advantages/disadvantages in fighting ability as well. Nope, that is not what they said. They said that Terran has the tools to play a fair game in the lategame. I'm sorry that you can't read. Show nested quote +
After reading the responses to the recently posted balance update, we’ve seen that a lot of players wanted us to elaborate on the current state of the terran versus protoss late game
We do agree that if both sides take few to no losses going into the late game, protoss can have an advantage. That said, we also know that terran players have a lot of offensive capability and harassment options at their fingertips in the mid-game. If terran players press that mid-game advantage, then protoss can’t necessarily get into the late game at their full potential, which can nullify any advantage they might have had. So, pressing that mid-game advantage is important (just as it would be important for protoss players to mitigate mid-game damage so they can to move into the late game in the strongest possible position). Ultimately, each game plays out differently, and depending on how the two races enter the late game, each side has a fair chance to win.
. That does mean that at different stages of the game, one race might have tools which represent an advantage against the others
Show nested quote +On August 14 2014 03:50 Whitewing wrote:On August 14 2014 03:44 DinoMight wrote:On August 14 2014 03:40 Wombat_NI wrote:I don't really feel it's an issue with any of the races in particular, but SC2 as a whole. The feeling that you play extremely well for a long game and just melt through one mistake with no subsequent chance to recover. It's not limited to SC2 mind, probably a natural thing when you're playing vs evenly skilled players who know what they're doing, doesn't stop being annoying though  Agree, but I think a lot of Terran players think that it's something just limited to them. Protoss and, to a lesser extent, Zerg experience that too. I played a game the other day where I forgot my Lair for about 10-15 seconds and Banshees showed up and killed everything immediately before my Overseers spawned. This is a result of the "terrible terrible damage" motto blizzard used when designing the game. It happens to all races, quite frequently in fact. Protoss can lose to being half a second late on a forcefield, and has no choice but to look away to warp in more units. Look away for a moment, and bam EMP on your whole army, or a key fungal hits your phoenix. Terran looks away for half a second and banelings roll in or storms land. Zerg looks away for half a second and their army gets trapped with forcefields. The damage output and speed at which damage is dealt is extremely high. Something to agree with. After all, Dustin Browder wanted to make the game "exciting back and forth like football with huge upsets possible". Show nested quote +On August 14 2014 03:50 Whitewing wrote:On August 14 2014 03:44 DinoMight wrote:On August 14 2014 03:40 Wombat_NI wrote:I don't really feel it's an issue with any of the races in particular, but SC2 as a whole. The feeling that you play extremely well for a long game and just melt through one mistake with no subsequent chance to recover. It's not limited to SC2 mind, probably a natural thing when you're playing vs evenly skilled players who know what they're doing, doesn't stop being annoying though Agree, but I think a lot of Terran players think that it's something just limited to them. Protoss and, to a lesser extent, Zerg experience that too. I played a game the other day where I forgot my Lair for about 10-15 seconds and Banshees showed up and killed everything immediately before my Overseers spawned. This is a result of the "terrible terrible damage" motto blizzard used when designing the game. It happens to all races, quite frequently in fact. Protoss can lose to being half a second late on a forcefield, and has no choice but to look away to warp in more units. Look away for a moment, and bam EMP on your whole army, or a key fungal hits your phoenix. Terran looks away for half a second and banelings roll in or storms land. Zerg looks away for half a second and their army gets trapped with forcefields. The damage output and speed at which damage is dealt is extremely high. Something to agree with. After all, Dustin Browder wanted to make the game "exciting back and forth like football with huge upsets possible". Show nested quote +On August 14 2014 03:50 Whitewing wrote:On August 14 2014 03:44 DinoMight wrote:On August 14 2014 03:40 Wombat_NI wrote:I don't really feel it's an issue with any of the races in particular, but SC2 as a whole. The feeling that you play extremely well for a long game and just melt through one mistake with no subsequent chance to recover. It's not limited to SC2 mind, probably a natural thing when you're playing vs evenly skilled players who know what they're doing, doesn't stop being annoying though Agree, but I think a lot of Terran players think that it's something just limited to them. Protoss and, to a lesser extent, Zerg experience that too. I played a game the other day where I forgot my Lair for about 10-15 seconds and Banshees showed up and killed everything immediately before my Overseers spawned. This is a result of the "terrible terrible damage" motto blizzard used when designing the game. It happens to all races, quite frequently in fact. Protoss can lose to being half a second late on a forcefield, and has no choice but to look away to warp in more units. Look away for a moment, and bam EMP on your whole army, or a key fungal hits your phoenix. Terran looks away for half a second and banelings roll in or storms land. Zerg looks away for half a second and their army gets trapped with forcefields. The damage output and speed at which damage is dealt is extremely high. Something to agree with. After all, Dustin Browder wanted to make the game "exciting back and forth like football with huge upsets possible". http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014488/The-Game-Design-of-STARCRAFTVideo link to the design philosophy behind why Timings and Terrible terrible damage exist based on inherent game mechanics rather than player strategizing (e.g. hard timings for banes or colossus, etc). http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2010/04/08/an-extensive-interview-with-starcraft-ii-design-director.aspx
The comment contents an if condition and later on says that Terrans do have the strategies to negate said if-condition. You dont need a masters degree in math to combine 1 and 1.
Furthermore it's not that hard to think of scenarios that fullfill said if-condition in other matchups:
"If a 2rax proxy doesnt do heavy damage to a 3hatch before pool zerg, terran can be in trouble in the lategame". (This actually happened)
The important word here is "can" which implies that scenarios can be one way (2rax dropa failing) or another (3CC going through unpunished). And then add said "easy-to-fullfill"-if clause to make it even uncessery to talk about Protoss advantages even happening.
At the end of the day, DK said nothing more than "popular Teran strategies are great at doing damage
If they fail this purpose, they have a disadvantage later on".
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On August 11 2014 20:04 jojos11 wrote:good job david kim.keep listening to gold league whiners,maybe the game will officially died soon ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/DmHxcyL.jpg) User was warned for this post
easily the worst imbalanced in HotS history
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/8qwv74j.jpg)
User was temp banned for this post.
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On August 14 2014 11:54 jojos11 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 11 2014 20:04 jojos11 wrote:good job david kim.keep listening to gold league whiners,maybe the game will officially died soon User was warned for this post easily the worst imbalanced in HotS history
Can't believe I'm responding to this.
It's just the tournament system weeding out the players who can not handle the widow mine changes. Look at the mirror match-up count. It's still not balanced on that front.
Win-rates will even out in the long run. As long as Terran isn't over-represented (and the number of mirrors are a good way to gauge this), I think it's too early to start complaining.
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On August 14 2014 06:46 opisska wrote:
I think that many people here are ignoring the fact that the mechanical requirements are differently "hard" at different levels and that the trend is not even monotonous.
I am a terrible player (never got past platinum, mostly because I am lazy to really practice and just mass games if I feel like it, also because I am just a terrible human being and a piece of shit, I know) and I consider Zerg by far the easiest. At my level, the crucial thing is making more workers and more units and that is just light years simpler to do as Zerg than any other race. If I slack on injects, I just built more hatches, 300 minerals is not gamebreaking price for a redemption of bad mechanics in gold league. Even when I mained Protoss, I used to go 50:50 with twice my APM (no matter their race) and it's even more prononouced when I play Zerg - I just beat people who are mechanically on completely different level just because I know when to drone and when to build army. On the other hand, I never managed to get anywhere near that level with Terran just because the sheer amount of attention needed to build and use infrastructure, leaving me with too little actions to do anything with the army.
Now when I watch pro games, I see a completely different pattern. On the top level, everyone is supposed to be able to macro no matter what. Yes, we still see players floating money during fights and doing BO mistakes, but on the very top level, that's quite rare and readily punished. If this level was achieved perfectly, it shouldn't matter which race has the hardest "macro" . Yet, if we include more than just building stuff, we see obvious differences - the easiest to see is creep spread, where some players are just better and it's clearly visible, but there are more subtle differences for all the races. Anyway, when the macro is close, the mechanics gets more focused on 1. battle micro and 2. multitasking (harass, dealing with harass). My impression from watching loads of games at the top level is that it is pretty hard on any race and that it is pretty difficult to tell, which one is easier and which is harder, but I would be slightly inclined to say the Zerg is either the easiest or maybe rather the least developed in the mechanical sense (if this conjecture is true, we may see a period of Zerg dominance, if some players take it really far).
And then there is the "middle" level of masters and around, where you can't win just by building stuff and running it butthead into the other guy, but the players don't have near-flawless macro. On this level, for Zerg, injects and creepspread and general base management take significant amount of attention while any micro mistakes partiuclarly for ZvT with mines) can be gameending - I can see that Zerg could be actually the hardest race here. If this assesment is correct, then Zerg goes from easy, to hard and back to "maybe a little easier" over a large span of skill levels, illustrating how flawed the idea of "easy/hard" races is.
You can't call things BO mistakes at high level. You can't just blindly follow a precise BO every game long and win. What you're probably seeing is that they're rearranging their BO's parts in response to needing something sooner to deal with an imminent problem.
On August 14 2014 07:57 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On August 14 2014 04:19 Socup 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. On August 13 2014 08:18 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. The initial chess comparison is lacking one very distinct feature. At the end of the game, the other person gets white. At the end of a starcraft game, people don´t switch races. NEW IDEA TO INSTANTLY BALANCE THE GAME: every match you need to change your race! done, it is now 100% balanced. With regards to win rates: There is an inherent flaw in this metric. If i tell you that 10000 games pvt can result in 50:50 win rates would it be balanced? A: yes What if i told you that these win rates are the product of every protoss winning every game that ends before 12 min and terran winning every game longer than 12 min. Still balanced? - most likely you would disagree. Next balance problem: Widow mines were extremely strong at the start of Hots. TvZ was very good for the terran. Then mines were nerfed. Meanwhile zerg got extremely good at dealing with the mines. You are now buffing mines again. - Did you not just "balance" away the development in skill zerg players have undergone? What is the incentive to improve your play if loosing a lot and dragging down the win rates of your race will just provoke a patch to level win rates again? Obviously this is an exaggeration. But i have yet to see an official definition of the term "balance". Considering 50:50 win rates as "balance" is an inherently flawed concept, not only mathematically. The initial chess comparison is not lacking. It's focusing on a single game of chess, for which it holds. But if you want to argue that way, then I could also say that (at least in a lot of tournaments) you could just always mirror your opponents racepick, even in a single game. So anytime a tournament allows raceswitching, the game is immidiatly balanced under the asumption of taking the picking process into account as well. As said, 50:50 winrates is a very restrictive metric. But it is an excellent metric mathematically. Every statistical test is held by these kinds of standards. Even physics since Heisenberg is more or less built upon the principle "what we can experience is true". If Zerg wins 55% vs Terran, implying that this is the balance of the matchup at that particular point in time is a natural principle in science. The remaining questions are: - Where to look at the winrates, with choices such as: ladder, tournaments, specific tournaments, examples... - How restrictive are we with the term "balance": do we need 50:50 or is +/-5% still OK? Maybe we can still experience fairness with +/-10%? Or maybe 55:45 already puts us into a desastrous situation at the highest level and we rather want 52:48... On August 13 2014 11:41 Socup wrote:On August 13 2014 08:18 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. The initial chess comparison is lacking one very distinct feature. At the end of the game, the other person gets white. At the end of a starcraft game, people don´t switch races. NEW IDEA TO INSTANTLY BALANCE THE GAME: every match you need to change your race! done, it is now 100% balanced. With regards to win rates: There is an inherent flaw in this metric. If i tell you that 10000 games pvt can result in 50:50 win rates would it be balanced? A: yes What if i told you that these win rates are the product of every protoss winning every game that ends before 12 min and terran winning every game longer than 12 min. Still balanced? - most likely you would disagree. Next balance problem: Widow mines were extremely strong at the start of Hots. TvZ was very good for the terran. Then mines were nerfed. Meanwhile zerg got extremely good at dealing with the mines. You are now buffing mines again. - Did you not just "balance" away the development in skill zerg players have undergone? What is the incentive to improve your play if loosing a lot and dragging down the win rates of your race will just provoke a patch to level win rates again? Obviously this is an exaggeration. But i have yet to see an official definition of the term "balance". Considering 50:50 win rates as "balance" is an inherently flawed concept, not only mathematically. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/4838104108Terran is supposed to be weak to protoss' late game. Its by design, although the asymmetricality of the races comes from their different units and advantages/disadvantages in fighting ability as well. Nope, that is not what they said. They said that Terran has the tools to play a fair game in the lategame. I'm sorry that you can't read.
After reading the responses to the recently posted balance update, we’ve seen that a lot of players wanted us to elaborate on the current state of the terran versus protoss late game
We do agree that if both sides take few to no losses going into the late game, protoss can have an advantage. That said, we also know that terran players have a lot of offensive capability and harassment options at their fingertips in the mid-game. If terran players press that mid-game advantage, then protoss can’t necessarily get into the late game at their full potential, which can nullify any advantage they might have had. So, pressing that mid-game advantage is important (just as it would be important for protoss players to mitigate mid-game damage so they can to move into the late game in the strongest possible position). Ultimately, each game plays out differently, and depending on how the two races enter the late game, each side has a fair chance to win.
. That does mean that at different stages of the game, one race might have tools which represent an advantage against the others
On August 14 2014 03:50 Whitewing wrote:On August 14 2014 03:44 DinoMight wrote:On August 14 2014 03:40 Wombat_NI wrote:I don't really feel it's an issue with any of the races in particular, but SC2 as a whole. The feeling that you play extremely well for a long game and just melt through one mistake with no subsequent chance to recover. It's not limited to SC2 mind, probably a natural thing when you're playing vs evenly skilled players who know what they're doing, doesn't stop being annoying though Agree, but I think a lot of Terran players think that it's something just limited to them. Protoss and, to a lesser extent, Zerg experience that too. I played a game the other day where I forgot my Lair for about 10-15 seconds and Banshees showed up and killed everything immediately before my Overseers spawned. This is a result of the "terrible terrible damage" motto blizzard used when designing the game. It happens to all races, quite frequently in fact. Protoss can lose to being half a second late on a forcefield, and has no choice but to look away to warp in more units. Look away for a moment, and bam EMP on your whole army, or a key fungal hits your phoenix. Terran looks away for half a second and banelings roll in or storms land. Zerg looks away for half a second and their army gets trapped with forcefields. The damage output and speed at which damage is dealt is extremely high. Something to agree with. After all, Dustin Browder wanted to make the game "exciting back and forth like football with huge upsets possible". On August 14 2014 03:50 Whitewing wrote:On August 14 2014 03:44 DinoMight wrote:On August 14 2014 03:40 Wombat_NI wrote:I don't really feel it's an issue with any of the races in particular, but SC2 as a whole. The feeling that you play extremely well for a long game and just melt through one mistake with no subsequent chance to recover. It's not limited to SC2 mind, probably a natural thing when you're playing vs evenly skilled players who know what they're doing, doesn't stop being annoying though Agree, but I think a lot of Terran players think that it's something just limited to them. Protoss and, to a lesser extent, Zerg experience that too. I played a game the other day where I forgot my Lair for about 10-15 seconds and Banshees showed up and killed everything immediately before my Overseers spawned. This is a result of the "terrible terrible damage" motto blizzard used when designing the game. It happens to all races, quite frequently in fact. Protoss can lose to being half a second late on a forcefield, and has no choice but to look away to warp in more units. Look away for a moment, and bam EMP on your whole army, or a key fungal hits your phoenix. Terran looks away for half a second and banelings roll in or storms land. Zerg looks away for half a second and their army gets trapped with forcefields. The damage output and speed at which damage is dealt is extremely high. Something to agree with. After all, Dustin Browder wanted to make the game "exciting back and forth like football with huge upsets possible". On August 14 2014 03:50 Whitewing wrote:On August 14 2014 03:44 DinoMight wrote:On August 14 2014 03:40 Wombat_NI wrote:I don't really feel it's an issue with any of the races in particular, but SC2 as a whole. The feeling that you play extremely well for a long game and just melt through one mistake with no subsequent chance to recover. It's not limited to SC2 mind, probably a natural thing when you're playing vs evenly skilled players who know what they're doing, doesn't stop being annoying though Agree, but I think a lot of Terran players think that it's something just limited to them. Protoss and, to a lesser extent, Zerg experience that too. I played a game the other day where I forgot my Lair for about 10-15 seconds and Banshees showed up and killed everything immediately before my Overseers spawned. This is a result of the "terrible terrible damage" motto blizzard used when designing the game. It happens to all races, quite frequently in fact. Protoss can lose to being half a second late on a forcefield, and has no choice but to look away to warp in more units. Look away for a moment, and bam EMP on your whole army, or a key fungal hits your phoenix. Terran looks away for half a second and banelings roll in or storms land. Zerg looks away for half a second and their army gets trapped with forcefields. The damage output and speed at which damage is dealt is extremely high. Something to agree with. After all, Dustin Browder wanted to make the game "exciting back and forth like football with huge upsets possible". http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014488/The-Game-Design-of-STARCRAFTVideo link to the design philosophy behind why Timings and Terrible terrible damage exist based on inherent game mechanics rather than player strategizing (e.g. hard timings for banes or colossus, etc). http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2010/04/08/an-extensive-interview-with-starcraft-ii-design-director.aspx The comment contents an if condition and later on says that Terrans do have the strategies to negate said if-condition. You dont need a masters degree in math to combine 1 and 1. Furthermore it's not that hard to think of scenarios that fullfill said if-condition in other matchups: "If a 2rax proxy doesnt do heavy damage to a 3hatch before pool zerg, terran can be in trouble in the lategame". (This actually happened) The important word here is "can" which implies that scenarios can be one way (2rax dropa failing) or another (3CC going through unpunished). And then add said "easy-to-fullfill"-if clause to make it even uncessery to talk about Protoss advantages even happening. At the end of the day, DK said nothing more than "popular Teran strategies are great at doing damage If they fail this purpose, they have a disadvantage later on".
You did NOT read the post, which specifically states they believe Terran has midgame advantages, and if Terran does not make USE of those advantages, Protoss has the advantage in late game. It's not that hard to put 2 and 2 together. If Terran CHOOSES not to use any midgame advantages (playing passive), then Protoss has late game advantage. Advantages are things like contains and aggressive pushes.
It says absolutely NOTHING about Terran choosing to go for an aggressive strategy and failing which allows Protoss to be at a late game advantage.
I'll put it in the form of If statements if that makes you happy.
IF Terran has advantages to contain or harass midgame.
AND Terran uses those advantages
AND those advantages cause damage
THEN Protoss does not have it's full late game potential
AND races are balanced
IF those advantages fail to cause damage
THEN Protoss has it's full late game potential
AND races are unbalanced late game
IF those advantages are not used
THEN Protoss has it's full late game potential
AND races are unbalanced late game
The wording of that post was very clear for anyone with a brain: The conditions of Terran and Protoss going into the late game rest on Terran using the "tools" they have to gain an advantage midgame, which makes the race equal late game.
If you force stalkers, immortals, w/e, early on, they dont have money to go full 3-3 with mass colossus by 18-20 minutes. This is especially due to chrono, which can accelerate any early to mid game growth because Protoss doesn't have to spend chrono OR resources on defense units.
You know this, I know this, everyone else knows this and understands this.
We do agree that if both sides take few to no losses going into the late game, protoss can have an advantage. That said, we also know that terran players have a lot of offensive capability and harassment options at their fingertips in the mid-game. If terran players press that mid-game advantage, then protoss can’t necessarily get into the late game at their full potential
Few to no losses (playing passive, going macro game). BOTH SIDES. As in, Terran isn't attacking and being repelled.
Terran has a lot of offensive capability and harassment options mid-game.
Terrans press that mid-game advantage.
Then protoss cant NECESSARILY get into the late game at full potential.
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On August 14 2014 07:49 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 14 2014 07:14 DinoMight wrote:On August 14 2014 07:10 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 14 2014 05:41 Thieving Magpie wrote:On August 13 2014 17:50 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 13 2014 17:38 Svizcy wrote: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:
[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? 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. If in-combat micro is all you care about then I think we're talking about two different game genres. How did you get "in-combat micro is the only thing that matters" from statements like: 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. And this: 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 disagree with you completely. I think it's fine for the races to emphasize different kinds of skill. Besides it's not like one race is playing Contra 2 and the others are playing Mario 64... all three races at the pro level require an insane amount of mechanical skill. What are the reasons that it's fine for the races to emphasize different kinds of skill? "It's cool"? Here are some reasons why it's not fine - it makes balancing the game extremely difficult for Blizzard, because true balance is harder to perceive; it fractures the fanbase further because some people will simply never accept that coin flip wins are A-OK, leading some viewers to conclude that even fantastic players like Zest are "patch Toss"; it creates games/series (PvPs, ZvPs) that are universally panned by the majority of the spectators (almost never make it into Best Games lists) because even if this kind of competition is fair, it's not fun to watch for many; it delegitimizes results when nobodies topple giants (Has vs Jaedong, I'm looking at you). I could go on, but I think these are some pretty serious issues already. Show nested quote +I think you overestimate how much mehcanical skill Terran requires (you and almost every other Terran on here). I refer you to this post of mine (which will refer you to another post). I'm not guessing or estimating how much mechanical skill Terran requires, I've actually sat down and counted it up by hand. I took a micro-intensive PvT where both players were obviously playing at a high mechanical level and analyzed all of their observable actions. The degree to which the Terran outmicroed Protoss (while still losing the engagements) is staggering. You can disagree with how I counted actions in that analysis or which actions I counted and which ones I didn't, you can disagree that that game is representative of the mechanical skill floor of high-level TvPs and bring up another that you think is more telling, but please don't dismiss me as though I'm talking out of my ass.
Disagree. You just sound a bit salty from losing to Protoss, that's all. ZvP is a great matchup and PvP is better than it's been for a long time.
Why don't you suggest ways to make Protoss more mechanically challenging that you think would be fair, then?
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Match up with terrans are better anyway. And it's not a personnal feeling, but a general trend.
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On August 15 2014 00:06 Faust852 wrote:
Match up with terrans are better anyway. And it's not a personnal feeling, but a general trend.
Except it is a personal feeling.
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What are the reasons that it's fine for the races to emphasize different kinds of skill? "It's cool"? Here are some reasons why it's not fine - it makes balancing the game extremely difficult for Blizzard, because true balance is harder to perceive; it fractures the fanbase further because some people will simply never accept that coin flip wins are A-OK, leading some viewers to conclude that even fantastic players like Zest are "patch Toss"; it creates games/series (PvPs, ZvPs) that are universally panned by the majority of the spectators (almost never make it into Best Games lists) because even if this kind of competition is fair, it's not fun to watch for many; it delegitimizes results when nobodies topple giants (Has vs Jaedong, I'm looking at you). I could go on, but I think these are some pretty serious issues already.
It's a game that emphasize very different races, how are you gonna not have them require different skill sets?
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@ Socup: You are completely overgeneralizing what that post said:
We do agree that if both sides take few to no losses going into the late game, protoss can have an advantage.
Can have an advantage is what you are continuously not mentioning. It can happen. It also cannot happen. Now you gotta ask yourself, why it can also not happen. Well, that is when the players don't play the "popular" way. But when they do, the second part of the quote comes into play:
That said, we also know that terran players have a lot of offensive capability and harassment options at their fingertips in the mid-game. If terran players press that mid-game advantage, then protoss can’t necessarily get into the late game at their full potential
Again, you overgeneralize what he said here. He did not say "Terran has THE advantage in the midgame." He said, that Terran have AN advantage (terran players press that mid-game advantage) in the form of having the offensive capability to inflict damage. Nowhere did he say that Terran has an overall midgame advantage, or that regardless of how the Terran plays, he must do damage. That's just exaggerating the content of the quote.
If you don't believe me, watch Squirtle 2base Colossusing his way through GSL IN THE MIDGAME or Demuslim beating Korean Protoss players with mass Ghost/Viking IN THE LATEGAME. These were playable styles. If you rather 5rax 2based, then it was not the matchup's fault that you had to do damage.
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On August 15 2014 00:24 Big J wrote:
These were playable styles. If you rather 5rax 2based, then it was not the matchup's fault that you had to do damage.
Oh my God, this so much.
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It takes a special kind of person to tell me that I'm wrong about what I enjoy to watch in my video games.
Also you should man up to your opinions. If terran match-ups are better than the others, we don't want a balanced game, we want a game where terran is favored, so that it's seen more often than the others. That should make everyone happy right?
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On August 14 2014 21:18 Socup wrote:Show nested quote +On August 14 2014 06:46 opisska wrote:
I think that many people here are ignoring the fact that the mechanical requirements are differently "hard" at different levels and that the trend is not even monotonous.
I am a terrible player (never got past platinum, mostly because I am lazy to really practice and just mass games if I feel like it, also because I am just a terrible human being and a piece of shit, I know) and I consider Zerg by far the easiest. At my level, the crucial thing is making more workers and more units and that is just light years simpler to do as Zerg than any other race. If I slack on injects, I just built more hatches, 300 minerals is not gamebreaking price for a redemption of bad mechanics in gold league. Even when I mained Protoss, I used to go 50:50 with twice my APM (no matter their race) and it's even more prononouced when I play Zerg - I just beat people who are mechanically on completely different level just because I know when to drone and when to build army. On the other hand, I never managed to get anywhere near that level with Terran just because the sheer amount of attention needed to build and use infrastructure, leaving me with too little actions to do anything with the army.
Now when I watch pro games, I see a completely different pattern. On the top level, everyone is supposed to be able to macro no matter what. Yes, we still see players floating money during fights and doing BO mistakes, but on the very top level, that's quite rare and readily punished. If this level was achieved perfectly, it shouldn't matter which race has the hardest "macro" . Yet, if we include more than just building stuff, we see obvious differences - the easiest to see is creep spread, where some players are just better and it's clearly visible, but there are more subtle differences for all the races. Anyway, when the macro is close, the mechanics gets more focused on 1. battle micro and 2. multitasking (harass, dealing with harass). My impression from watching loads of games at the top level is that it is pretty hard on any race and that it is pretty difficult to tell, which one is easier and which is harder, but I would be slightly inclined to say the Zerg is either the easiest or maybe rather the least developed in the mechanical sense (if this conjecture is true, we may see a period of Zerg dominance, if some players take it really far).
And then there is the "middle" level of masters and around, where you can't win just by building stuff and running it butthead into the other guy, but the players don't have near-flawless macro. On this level, for Zerg, injects and creepspread and general base management take significant amount of attention while any micro mistakes partiuclarly for ZvT with mines) can be gameending - I can see that Zerg could be actually the hardest race here. If this assesment is correct, then Zerg goes from easy, to hard and back to "maybe a little easier" over a large span of skill levels, illustrating how flawed the idea of "easy/hard" races is. You can't call things BO mistakes at high level. You can't just blindly follow a precise BO every game long and win. What you're probably seeing is that they're rearranging their BO's parts in response to needing something sooner to deal with an imminent problem. Show nested quote +On August 14 2014 07:57 Big J wrote:On August 14 2014 04:19 Socup 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. On August 13 2014 08:18 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. The initial chess comparison is lacking one very distinct feature. At the end of the game, the other person gets white. At the end of a starcraft game, people don´t switch races. NEW IDEA TO INSTANTLY BALANCE THE GAME: every match you need to change your race! done, it is now 100% balanced. With regards to win rates: There is an inherent flaw in this metric. If i tell you that 10000 games pvt can result in 50:50 win rates would it be balanced? A: yes What if i told you that these win rates are the product of every protoss winning every game that ends before 12 min and terran winning every game longer than 12 min. Still balanced? - most likely you would disagree. Next balance problem: Widow mines were extremely strong at the start of Hots. TvZ was very good for the terran. Then mines were nerfed. Meanwhile zerg got extremely good at dealing with the mines. You are now buffing mines again. - Did you not just "balance" away the development in skill zerg players have undergone? What is the incentive to improve your play if loosing a lot and dragging down the win rates of your race will just provoke a patch to level win rates again? Obviously this is an exaggeration. But i have yet to see an official definition of the term "balance". Considering 50:50 win rates as "balance" is an inherently flawed concept, not only mathematically. The initial chess comparison is not lacking. It's focusing on a single game of chess, for which it holds. But if you want to argue that way, then I could also say that (at least in a lot of tournaments) you could just always mirror your opponents racepick, even in a single game. So anytime a tournament allows raceswitching, the game is immidiatly balanced under the asumption of taking the picking process into account as well. As said, 50:50 winrates is a very restrictive metric. But it is an excellent metric mathematically. Every statistical test is held by these kinds of standards. Even physics since Heisenberg is more or less built upon the principle "what we can experience is true". If Zerg wins 55% vs Terran, implying that this is the balance of the matchup at that particular point in time is a natural principle in science. The remaining questions are: - Where to look at the winrates, with choices such as: ladder, tournaments, specific tournaments, examples... - How restrictive are we with the term "balance": do we need 50:50 or is +/-5% still OK? Maybe we can still experience fairness with +/-10%? Or maybe 55:45 already puts us into a desastrous situation at the highest level and we rather want 52:48... On August 13 2014 11:41 Socup wrote:On August 13 2014 08:18 Mojito99 wrote:On August 13 2014 05:07 Big J wrote:On August 13 2014 04:49 Salient wrote:On August 13 2014 04:31 Reaper9 wrote:
I don't usually post in this section of here forums, but Flash with his Golden Mouse begs to differ. He's not a patch Terran. Did he win that in SC2? If not, it's just as irrelevant as Grubby's victories in WC3. Anyway, I'm not saying Flash or TY is a Patch Terran. Sorry and Reality might be. The goal of the patch was to buff Terrans. I would say it succeeded. Blizzard can dial it back if it becomes apparent that they went overboard. But, even then, I really wonder if it is even theoretically possible to balance a game with 3 distinct factions when that game has professional teams and coaches trying to solve it. Even Chess isn't perfectly balanced, and both players have the exact same pieces. At the higher levels, Black typically hopes for a tie game and white plays for a win, and that's in a game with identical pieces and only a 1 tempo difference. I'm pretty confident that it is actually impossible to balance SC2. Depends on how restrictive you define balance. ;-) As far as you ask me, the game has been balanced (or close to) in the last 3years (end WoL TvZ being the exception, when the winrates really went down the toilet). The winrates were rarely outside of a 45-55 window at the highest level and all races have shown that they can win tournaments in those periods of time. That's good enough for me to call the game fair. That does however not imply that there cannot be changes and improvements. A superrestrictive 50:50 criterium will obviously never be fullfilled in a game with such complexity. The initial chess comparison is lacking one very distinct feature. At the end of the game, the other person gets white. At the end of a starcraft game, people don´t switch races. NEW IDEA TO INSTANTLY BALANCE THE GAME: every match you need to change your race! done, it is now 100% balanced. With regards to win rates: There is an inherent flaw in this metric. If i tell you that 10000 games pvt can result in 50:50 win rates would it be balanced? A: yes What if i told you that these win rates are the product of every protoss winning every game that ends before 12 min and terran winning every game longer than 12 min. Still balanced? - most likely you would disagree. Next balance problem: Widow mines were extremely strong at the start of Hots. TvZ was very good for the terran. Then mines were nerfed. Meanwhile zerg got extremely good at dealing with the mines. You are now buffing mines again. - Did you not just "balance" away the development in skill zerg players have undergone? What is the incentive to improve your play if loosing a lot and dragging down the win rates of your race will just provoke a patch to level win rates again? Obviously this is an exaggeration. But i have yet to see an official definition of the term "balance". Considering 50:50 win rates as "balance" is an inherently flawed concept, not only mathematically. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/4838104108Terran is supposed to be weak to protoss' late game. Its by design, although the asymmetricality of the races comes from their different units and advantages/disadvantages in fighting ability as well. Nope, that is not what they said. They said that Terran has the tools to play a fair game in the lategame. I'm sorry that you can't read.
After reading the responses to the recently posted balance update, we’ve seen that a lot of players wanted us to elaborate on the current state of the terran versus protoss late game
We do agree that if both sides take few to no losses going into the late game, protoss can have an advantage. That said, we also know that terran players have a lot of offensive capability and harassment options at their fingertips in the mid-game. If terran players press that mid-game advantage, then protoss can’t necessarily get into the late game at their full potential, which can nullify any advantage they might have had. So, pressing that mid-game advantage is important (just as it would be important for protoss players to mitigate mid-game damage so they can to move into the late game in the strongest possible position). Ultimately, each game plays out differently, and depending on how the two races enter the late game, each side has a fair chance to win.
. That does mean that at different stages of the game, one race might have tools which represent an advantage against the others
On August 14 2014 03:50 Whitewing wrote:On August 14 2014 03:44 DinoMight wrote:On August 14 2014 03:40 Wombat_NI wrote:I don't really feel it's an issue with any of the races in particular, but SC2 as a whole. The feeling that you play extremely well for a long game and just melt through one mistake with no subsequent chance to recover. It's not limited to SC2 mind, probably a natural thing when you're playing vs evenly skilled players who know what they're doing, doesn't stop being annoying though Agree, but I think a lot of Terran players think that it's something just limited to them. Protoss and, to a lesser extent, Zerg experience that too. I played a game the other day where I forgot my Lair for about 10-15 seconds and Banshees showed up and killed everything immediately before my Overseers spawned. This is a result of the "terrible terrible damage" motto blizzard used when designing the game. It happens to all races, quite frequently in fact. Protoss can lose to being half a second late on a forcefield, and has no choice but to look away to warp in more units. Look away for a moment, and bam EMP on your whole army, or a key fungal hits your phoenix. Terran looks away for half a second and banelings roll in or storms land. Zerg looks away for half a second and their army gets trapped with forcefields. The damage output and speed at which damage is dealt is extremely high. Something to agree with. After all, Dustin Browder wanted to make the game "exciting back and forth like football with huge upsets possible". On August 14 2014 03:50 Whitewing wrote:On August 14 2014 03:44 DinoMight wrote:On August 14 2014 03:40 Wombat_NI wrote:I don't really feel it's an issue with any of the races in particular, but SC2 as a whole. The feeling that you play extremely well for a long game and just melt through one mistake with no subsequent chance to recover. It's not limited to SC2 mind, probably a natural thing when you're playing vs evenly skilled players who know what they're doing, doesn't stop being annoying though Agree, but I think a lot of Terran players think that it's something just limited to them. Protoss and, to a lesser extent, Zerg experience that too. I played a game the other day where I forgot my Lair for about 10-15 seconds and Banshees showed up and killed everything immediately before my Overseers spawned. This is a result of the "terrible terrible damage" motto blizzard used when designing the game. It happens to all races, quite frequently in fact. Protoss can lose to being half a second late on a forcefield, and has no choice but to look away to warp in more units. Look away for a moment, and bam EMP on your whole army, or a key fungal hits your phoenix. Terran looks away for half a second and banelings roll in or storms land. Zerg looks away for half a second and their army gets trapped with forcefields. The damage output and speed at which damage is dealt is extremely high. Something to agree with. After all, Dustin Browder wanted to make the game "exciting back and forth like football with huge upsets possible". On August 14 2014 03:50 Whitewing wrote:On August 14 2014 03:44 DinoMight wrote:On August 14 2014 03:40 Wombat_NI wrote:I don't really feel it's an issue with any of the races in particular, but SC2 as a whole. The feeling that you play extremely well for a long game and just melt through one mistake with no subsequent chance to recover. It's not limited to SC2 mind, probably a natural thing when you're playing vs evenly skilled players who know what they're doing, doesn't stop being annoying though Agree, but I think a lot of Terran players think that it's something just limited to them. Protoss and, to a lesser extent, Zerg experience that too. I played a game the other day where I forgot my Lair for about 10-15 seconds and Banshees showed up and killed everything immediately before my Overseers spawned. This is a result of the "terrible terrible damage" motto blizzard used when designing the game. It happens to all races, quite frequently in fact. Protoss can lose to being half a second late on a forcefield, and has no choice but to look away to warp in more units. Look away for a moment, and bam EMP on your whole army, or a key fungal hits your phoenix. Terran looks away for half a second and banelings roll in or storms land. Zerg looks away for half a second and their army gets trapped with forcefields. The damage output and speed at which damage is dealt is extremely high. Something to agree with. After all, Dustin Browder wanted to make the game "exciting back and forth like football with huge upsets possible". http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014488/The-Game-Design-of-STARCRAFTVideo link to the design philosophy behind why Timings and Terrible terrible damage exist based on inherent game mechanics rather than player strategizing (e.g. hard timings for banes or colossus, etc). http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2010/04/08/an-extensive-interview-with-starcraft-ii-design-director.aspx The comment contents an if condition and later on says that Terrans do have the strategies to negate said if-condition. You dont need a masters degree in math to combine 1 and 1. Furthermore it's not that hard to think of scenarios that fullfill said if-condition in other matchups: "If a 2rax proxy doesnt do heavy damage to a 3hatch before pool zerg, terran can be in trouble in the lategame". (This actually happened) The important word here is "can" which implies that scenarios can be one way (2rax dropa failing) or another (3CC going through unpunished). And then add said "easy-to-fullfill"-if clause to make it even uncessery to talk about Protoss advantages even happening. At the end of the day, DK said nothing more than "popular Teran strategies are great at doing damage If they fail this purpose, they have a disadvantage later on". You did NOT read the post, which specifically states they believe Terran has midgame advantages, and if Terran does not make USE of those advantages, Protoss has the advantage in late game. It's not that hard to put 2 and 2 together. If Terran CHOOSES not to use any midgame advantages (playing passive), then Protoss has late game advantage. Advantages are things like contains and aggressive pushes. It says absolutely NOTHING about Terran choosing to go for an aggressive strategy and failing which allows Protoss to be at a late game advantage. I'll put it in the form of If statements if that makes you happy. IF Terran has advantages to contain or harass midgame. AND Terran uses those advantages AND those advantages cause damage THEN Protoss does not have it's full late game potential AND races are balanced IF those advantages fail to cause damage THEN Protoss has it's full late game potential AND races are unbalanced late game IF those advantages are not used THEN Protoss has it's full late game potential AND races are unbalanced late game The wording of that post was very clear for anyone with a brain: The conditions of Terran and Protoss going into the late game rest on Terran using the "tools" they have to gain an advantage midgame, which makes the race equal late game. If you force stalkers, immortals, w/e, early on, they dont have money to go full 3-3 with mass colossus by 18-20 minutes. This is especially due to chrono, which can accelerate any early to mid game growth because Protoss doesn't have to spend chrono OR resources on defense units. You know this, I know this, everyone else knows this and understands this. Show nested quote +We do agree that if both sides take few to no losses going into the late game, protoss can have an advantage. That said, we also know that terran players have a lot of offensive capability and harassment options at their fingertips in the mid-game. If terran players press that mid-game advantage, then protoss can’t necessarily get into the late game at their full potential Few to no losses (playing passive, going macro game). BOTH SIDES. As in, Terran isn't attacking and being repelled. Terran has a lot of offensive capability and harassment options mid-game. Terrans press that mid-game advantage. Then protoss cant NECESSARILY get into the late game at full potential.
You are right in what you say in regards to terran creating an advantage in the midgame to balance out the lategame.
But i feel like the treat of SCV pulls alone does this:
SCV pulls punish tech transitions. Previously with HT openings or 3 C into HT builds, you could enter the lategame at 15-16 min with C and HT on the field. Nowadays, in order to stay safe against SCV pulls, the midgame phase of colossus only is severely prolonged. Sometimes up to 20 min and 5-7 Colossus.
So i agree with your statements. Only i believe that by forcing mass colossus builds for a long time. Damage is already being done.
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On August 15 2014 00:32 Nebuchad wrote:It takes a special kind of person to tell me that I'm wrong about what I enjoy to watch in my video games. Also you should man up to your opinions. If terran match-ups are better than the others, we don't want a balanced game, we want a game where terran is favored, so that it's seen more often than the others. That should make everyone happy right?
You not being on the trend doesn't make it less true. People tend to prefer match up terrans. And if terran becomes imbalanced, the match up will lose its flavor.
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On August 15 2014 00:43 Faust852 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2014 00:32 Nebuchad wrote:It takes a special kind of person to tell me that I'm wrong about what I enjoy to watch in my video games. Also you should man up to your opinions. If terran match-ups are better than the others, we don't want a balanced game, we want a game where terran is favored, so that it's seen more often than the others. That should make everyone happy right? You not being on the trend doesn't make it less true. People tend to prefer match up terrans. And if terran becomes imbalanced, the match up will lose its flavor.
I don't have a problem with people prefering terran match-ups. I have a problem with you deducing terran match-ups are better because of that.
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On August 15 2014 00:32 Nebuchad wrote:
It takes a special kind of person to tell me that I'm wrong about what I enjoy to watch in my video games.
Also you should man up to your opinions. If terran match-ups are better than the others, we don't want a balanced game, we want a game where terran is favored, so that it's seen more often than the others. That should make everyone happy right?
We could also ask how we can improve the other races.
The most entertaining matchup is almost universally considered to be TvZ. Battles are often long and positional. Skirmishes can occur all over the map. Losing a single battle is rarely game-ending as Terran can retreat to a defensive position, and zerg has their next wave of units popping out. There are numerous viable strategies for both parties, and either one can take the initiative and force the other player to react.
The protoss matchups are generally defined by a single large game-ending fight. Protoss almost always has the initiative and their opponent needs to identify what is coming or die.
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On August 15 2014 00:48 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2014 00:43 Faust852 wrote:On August 15 2014 00:32 Nebuchad wrote:It takes a special kind of person to tell me that I'm wrong about what I enjoy to watch in my video games. Also you should man up to your opinions. If terran match-ups are better than the others, we don't want a balanced game, we want a game where terran is favored, so that it's seen more often than the others. That should make everyone happy right? You not being on the trend doesn't make it less true. People tend to prefer match up terrans. And if terran becomes imbalanced, the match up will lose its flavor. I don't have a problem with people prefering terran match-ups. I have a problem with you deducing terran match-ups are better because of that.
The overall trend shows that people tend to prefere match up with terran in it.
It's better formulated this way ? 
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On August 15 2014 00:51 r691175002 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2014 00:32 Nebuchad wrote:
It takes a special kind of person to tell me that I'm wrong about what I enjoy to watch in my video games.
Also you should man up to your opinions. If terran match-ups are better than the others, we don't want a balanced game, we want a game where terran is favored, so that it's seen more often than the others. That should make everyone happy right? We could also ask how we can improve the other races. The most entertaining matchup is almost universally considered to be TvZ. Battles are often long and positional. Skirmishes can occur all over the map. Losing a single battle is rarely game-ending as Terran can retreat to a defensive position, and zerg has their next wave of units popping out. There are numerous viable strategies for both parties, and either one can take the initiative and force the other player to react. The protoss matchups are generally defined by a single large game-ending fight. Protoss almost always has the initiative and their opponent needs to identify what is coming or die.
Yes, games with protoss have always seemed to be much more snowbally, with a single engagement deciding the game more than in other MUs. No surprise people love pulling scvs. TvT and TvZ probably have the most back and forth slugfest games.
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Protoss match-ups are more esoteric and probably require that you have a degree of familiarity with the meta and that you care about subtle strategic finesses. I think terran can be more readily enjoyed by most people. Protoss is a failure in the sense that it preaches to those already converted, you already have to have an appreciation for the timings in order to be marveled by their play.
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