Designated Balance Discussion Thread - Page 1078
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Nebuchad
Switzerland11917 Posts
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Hider
Denmark9342 Posts
On August 29 2014 00:15 Awin wrote: "Except there are roughly the same amount of active protoss, terran and zerg players." I d like to see sources for this sentence nios.kr But you're putting the cart before the horse. Race distribution doesn't prove anything other than the population subset of an arbitrary crosscut of the total census. When zerg and protoss was the main race winning GSL in 2010 => 2011 was that a sign of underpowered terrans? Was it a sign that terran sucked when only MKP, MVP, and MMA would consistently do well amongst terran players only to have MC/Nestea/Fruitdealer get all the trophies? No, because making arbitrary population cross cuts proves nothing. Well arbitrary population cost can suffer heavily from variance. Thus, that's why you will never see my comment on balance based on 1 or 2 tournaments. Rather, I believe the best estimate of balance is through correct usage of Aliguac statistics. I just repsonded to your Chinese comment, which doens't make sense here. | ||
r691175002
249 Posts
On August 29 2014 08:40 Hider wrote:Well arbitrary population cost can suffer heavily from variance. Thus, that's why you will never see my comment on balance based on 1 or 2 tournaments. Rather, I believe the best estimate of balance is through correct usage of Aliguac statistics. The definition of a population is a complete set of data. A population statistic does not have variance, it is a simple fact. A sample is a randomly* chosen subset of a population, and a sample statistic is an attempt to guess the population statistic. For example, the ratio of men and women in the USA has a single, factual value. If you perform a comprehensive census on the entire population, then you know that number. If you take ten people off the street and extrapolate from that sample, then your guess will have a known error distribution. | ||
bo1b
Australia12814 Posts
On August 28 2014 22:50 Hider wrote: Except there are roughly the same amount of active protoss, terran and zerg players. In terms of how well they perform, that has historically dependant on balance on the game with too many terrans gettting too far in 2010/2011, too many zergs in 2013 and too many protosses over the last year. Too many zergs in 2012 really, when hots came out there was an exodus of zerg | ||
usethis2
2164 Posts
On August 29 2014 08:10 Nebuchad wrote: It's still important to remember we had more protoss than terran players in aligulac in october 2011 during the 1-1-1 peak... I think it's pretty clear that in periods where races are favored, people of these races are going to go deeper in tournaments, that makes a ton of sense. But if after this patch population of terran goes back to an equal number with the other races and in the same time terran starts to win everything (this is hypothetical, I don't claim this will happen), I don't want people to say everything looks fine because there's no overrepresentation of terrans. Well, then tell us what you think of. Do not wait until a new fad catches on. It is unfair to players and concerned observers alike that some people get too jealous of others' success. I will spell out what I think shortly. But I wanted to point out how disingenuous and passive-aggressive your stance is. I think everyone else who participate in this thread should also reveal their positions now that there seem to be uneasy peace for the moment among the factions. Do not wait until something pops up then tell us "I knew it was broken," or some such. Your time is NOW. | ||
FabledIntegral
United States9232 Posts
Perhaps increase cast range of the ghost by 1 (or maybe even 2), increase the damage and splash radius by 25%, let each ghost academy build 2 nukes instead of 1... It's a little gimmicky of an ability to start with, but helps a lot with positional based play and could buff the Terran lategame. Also, an APM sink for the other player... and isn't that the main complaint? Terran needs so much APM? | ||
brickrd
United States4894 Posts
On August 31 2014 02:27 FabledIntegral wrote: I'd really like to see the nuke buffed, quite substantially. Just feels silly right now, in my opinion. Perhaps increase cast range of the ghost by 1 (or maybe even 2), increase the damage and splash radius by 25%, let each ghost academy build 2 nukes instead of 1... It's a little gimmicky of an ability to start with, but helps a lot with positional based play and could buff the Terran lategame. Also, an APM sink for the other player... and isn't that the main complaint? Terran needs so much APM? nuke falls under the same category as things like nydus, neural parasite, capital ships and the mothership where if it's buffed even slightly it could quickly get out of hand and become insanely OP | ||
FabledIntegral
United States9232 Posts
On August 31 2014 02:47 brickrd wrote: nuke falls under the same category as things like nydus, neural parasite, capital ships and the mothership where if it's buffed even slightly it could quickly get out of hand and become insanely OP There's potential, but I still think the above changes are still viable^^. | ||
Nebuchad
Switzerland11917 Posts
On August 30 2014 14:49 usethis2 wrote: Well, then tell us what you think of. Do not wait until a new fad catches on. It is unfair to players and concerned observers alike that some people get too jealous of others' success. I will spell out what I think shortly. But I wanted to point out how disingenuous and passive-aggressive your stance is. I think everyone else who participate in this thread should also reveal their positions now that there seem to be uneasy peace for the moment among the factions. Do not wait until something pops up then tell us "I knew it was broken," or some such. Your time is NOW. That's just a terrible post. How am I disingenuous or passive-aggressive? I said straight up what I think about population number arguments, and I don't see how any of what I said is unfair, nor do you show it in any way. It's kind of epic that I'm arguing that population numbers can only be looked at in conjunction to winrates, and your answer is that I'm jealous about players' success... Says much about your own agenda. | ||
Hider
Denmark9342 Posts
On August 30 2014 03:07 r691175002 wrote: The definition of a population is a complete set of data. A population statistic does not have variance, it is a simple fact. A sample is a randomly* chosen subset of a population, and a sample statistic is an attempt to guess the population statistic. For example, the ratio of men and women in the USA has a single, factual value. If you perform a comprehensive census on the entire population, then you know that number. If you take ten people off the street and extrapolate from that sample, then your guess will have a known error distribution. Sorry, what I mean was arbitrarily choosing which tournaments you pick data from. Population = total amount of active players which can be found from nios.kr | ||
Maniak_
France305 Posts
August stats are in. So... I'm guessing everything is back where it should be? Terrans simply play better and the other races should just learn to adapt? *sigh* | ||
Deleted User 137586
7859 Posts
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Maniak_
France305 Posts
On September 02 2014 04:58 Ghanburighan wrote: Obligatory `please look at population numbers' instead of 1 month worth of data. Which means you should look at least look at Aligulac lists, not the balance report. I haven't seen anything indicating that this month data has no relevance whatsoever. Maybe you could enlighten me? Of course, this is in the context of Note that this yields information about metagame balance near the top of the skill ladder, and is not to be confused with (although likely correlated to) actual game balance throughout the whole player population. It's obviously not a global "truth" applicable to everyone everywhere, but it should still be a good indicator of what's been happening over the last few weeks. No more no less. Besides, the correlation between this graph and actual overall game balance has been pretty good thus far. But yes, it's only one month. I'm curious to see what this will look like next month. Though I'm guessing that since it's currently back in the terrans' favor, we can go back to discarding everything based on population/taeja/whatever. And it's probably just a big coincidence anyway. Not like during the months where this very same graph was used to justify whining about Terran needing buffs. | ||
Nebuchad
Switzerland11917 Posts
On September 02 2014 05:50 Maniak_ wrote: Though I'm guessing that since it's currently back in the terrans' favor, we can go back to discarding everything based on population/taeja/whatever. And it's probably just a big coincidence anyway. Not like during the months where this very same graph was used to justify whining about Terran needing buffs. If you were so annoyed with this attitude, why take back the torch? | ||
Deleted User 137586
7859 Posts
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Tyrhanius
France947 Posts
I just think we can't really say nothing about the recent winrates, specially during holidays, and need to wait and see the next month. | ||
Maniak_
France305 Posts
On September 02 2014 06:00 Nebuchad wrote: If you were so annoyed with this attitude, why take back the torch? Have you seen me asking for protoss and zerg buffs because of how OP terran is? I'm happy waiting for next month to see if the trend continues. There have been far too many unnecessary balance changes lately in response to whining. I'd love to see the mines go back to their non-randomly-game-changing state, but I'd love even more if Blizzard stopped messing with the game unless there's a *real* problem, or to fix actual design issues. Where was the need for the last balance patch, except *maybe* for Time Warp? The game was already getting better on its own before it, and now back to square one, waiting for an indefinite amount of time to see if the latest changes can stabilize or cause more problems. | ||
Hider
Denmark9342 Posts
In the middle of 2011, it's also clear to see that terrans were winning too much vs protoss due to the 1/1/1, but at the end of 2011, matchup was close to 50/50 due to EMP nerfs, new maps and Immortal at 6 range. During the patch-zerg era, ZvP and ZvT were both zerg favored, however terran suffered more than protoss - probably due to Immortal allins helping protosses. An ignored element in this period was that protoss actually was a bit favored vs terran as well. Given the fact that more terrans were eliminated from tournaments than protossses, we would expect that win/rates of terrans should be over 50% in 2012 vs protoss. Since win/rates were slightly below 50% instead, terran was actually underperforming during this period. I believe this is a likely consequence of protoss learning to defend terran drop play during this phase of the game. As I remember it, dropplay was a big part of the midgame in 2011, but evenutally just got figured out in 2012, and protoss late game has always been considered a bit toss favored (post EMP nerf). Going into HOTS, adjusted win/rates were quite balanced for the initial months. After a while, terrans new options were figured out and they received some small nerfs. They especially started suffering vs protoss. When Widow Mine patch hits, zerg was actually having adjusted win/rates above that of terran. This is supported by the development in the recent meta, where terrans prefer to go Hellbat/Thors than Widow Mines vs zerg. In early 2014, adjusted win-rates improved somewhat vs toss, but became worse vs zerg. The average w/r of the 4 months prior to the Widow Mine buff was 46% in TvZ and 44% the 4 months after. However, win/rates continued to decline after those 4 months, which indicates that the Widow-Mine nerf in it self didn't have a huge direct effect on balance, but rather that zergs were more efficient at figuring the matchups out than terrans were. My theory is that this is likely a consequence of zergs learning the importance of not engaging off-creeps, something they did too often the first couple of months in HOTS. As of August, the win/rates points to a statistically balanced game - similar to that of early HOTS. The fact that terran has (unadjusted) win/rates over 50%, is a completely expected result of the buffs of the patch, and will over time go downwwards to 50%. As a percentage of total non-mirror matchups, there was a terran in 58% of the games, which is up from 56% in the most recent month. Having studied the historical data, you see this type of trend almost every single time (win/rates adjust first, then games played by competitive players afterwards) It can also be seen that protoss players improved their results vs zerg in August, which actually has been statistically zerg favored in 2014. ![]() | ||
Deleted User 137586
7859 Posts
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Nebuchad
Switzerland11917 Posts
On September 02 2014 08:26 Hider wrote: An ignored element in this period was that protoss actually was a bit favored vs terran as well. Given the fact that more terrans were eliminated from tournaments than protossses, we would expect that win/rates of terrans should be over 50% in 2012 vs protoss. Since win/rates were slightly below 50% instead, terran was actually underperforming during this period. Your whole post is interesting but this is particularly interesting to me because I wouldn't think that's true, my memory of TvP at the end of WoL was that it was pretty good for terran in general, with ghost viking performing really well against the lategame toss army (I remember surprised reactions when it turned out at the start of HotS that protoss could handle ghost viking really well, if not even too well). Did you take into account that there weren't a ton of protosses in GSL at the end of WoL? 2 out of the first 20 qualified players were protoss, at some point. So even though terrans lost more badly to zergs, I'm not sure protosses qualified a ton more (I don't remember the rest of the events well enough, but I also remember that some of the good results of protoss came from the wcs event, which held qualifiers at an earlier time when protoss was doing really well in Korea). | ||
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