Designated Balance Discussion Thread - Page 611

On July 28 2013 19:07 xyzz wrote:

He made a pretty compelling argument with statistics that during the 'horribly broken bl/infestor' age the large sample size statistics were similarly in favour of Zerg as they are favoring Terran now. An argument which you decided to ignore because you can't argue against it, so naturally you just decided to say you can't take him seriously. Personally I find the whole situation hilarious when we have Zerg and Terran players fighting for dominance and demanding changes against eachother, while it's a foregone conclusion that Protoss just sucks and should continue to suck.

On July 28 2013 19:15 keglu wrote:



Infestors buff - december 2012, TvZ went from 45% in december to 43 % in January, seems legit.

On July 28 2013 10:53 TheRabidDeer wrote:
For those quoting only the most recent season of WCS:
Dont forget that Life, Roro, Kangho, DRG, True, and Effort were all in the RO48 of challenger league (9 of the zergs from code S dropped, while only 1 terran did...). They were going against Terrans like Skyhigh, Kop, Bang and other terrans which are "lesser".

On July 28 2013 19:18 keglu wrote:



So what you base you statement "it was post infestor nerf" on?

On July 28 2013 19:19 plogamer wrote:


No he didn't. He just quoted win-rates. Oh my. Did he note the downward slope in TvZ rate? Didn't think so. Statistics don't always reflect balance. Aligulac fucking says so himself/herself on the page.

Maybe keglu will drive the point home with this post.

On July 28 2013 19:23 willstertben wrote:


opinion. there is nothing else to base a statement on such an abstract question on.
also it's not even relevant. if terran is as imba, less imba or more imba than zerg was in the end of WOL doesn't matter.
we just need to look at the now.

On July 28 2013 19:30 Decendos wrote:


yeah statistics dont always reflect balance. thats another thing. winrates are T favored AND a lot of Z wins come from roach bane all ins since its very hard to win in a macro game. so thanks for agreeing there.

oh and lol@downward trend...its 2 months...now if it goes up to 54% july the trend is upwards? rofl.

@TheDwf: NO! for gods sake dont nerf T but buff useless Z stuff like ovidrop, nydus etc. which would also help non-muta comps to be able to harrass and therefore be more viable in both TvZ and ZvP.

On July 28 2013 20:02 plogamer wrote:
Roach bane against triple CC is a legit response to a proper scout. It's not a coin-flip.

On July 28 2013 20:04 TheDwf wrote:

Zergs usually do it blindly.

On July 28 2013 20:02 plogamer wrote:


Roach bane against triple CC is a legit response to a proper scout. It's not a coin-flip. From the Terran perspective, they feel forced to triple CC to keep up with Zerg on econ, and early enough that they can start pushing out MMM and mines to keep the Zerg engaged and spending gas on banes and mutas instead of tech.

So what, you quote statistics to argue that Terran is OP. And then you simply ignore the drop in winrate? If it goes up in July? Well, what if it goes down in August? This line of thinking is childish at best.

Again, you are claiming that TvZ is as imba in HotS as in WoL - when it was almost exclusively Zergs winning tournaments, and top foreign Zergs beating top korean non-Zergs consistently.

On July 28 2013 20:18 Rabiator wrote:
And the useless circlejerking about winrates continues ...


That has NOTHING to do with game balance because the sample size is not big enough to give valid statistics. The only thing you can do when looking at those tournament results is looking at individual games to see "IMBA tactics" which could not have been countered. Anyone can have a bad day though, so one game doesnt really make anything valid either.

Cmon people ... use some COMMON SENSE!

On July 28 2013 20:11 willstertben wrote:


it's not about that, it's about terrans ability to still hold it convincingly after going 3 oc when they prepare accordingly.
zerg has to do lots of damage with this attack, otherwise they'll just die to a marine rally push.

On July 28 2013 21:17 Big J wrote:


yes, that's why 3OC is a standard strategy. It can hold everything when adjusted accordingly.

Would you rather play a game that is solely decided by blind decisions that are 50:50? Because that is what it sounds like.
If Zerg doesn't go roach/baneling, yes, they may be ever-so-slightly behind with the standard responses right now. And yes, maybe there are not good enough responses out there (which we still have to wait and see; balance has been quite OK in most tournaments) and then either the game devolves too much into that coinflippy opening battle (which I hope would be adjusted), or blizzard has to adjust something due to imbalance.
But calling the strategy too strong because it is playable with good sucess under normal scouting conditions (aka, what we call standard play) just undermines the idea of figuring out standard play.

On July 28 2013 16:27 Sissors wrote:
Not to mention terran doesn't have less players overall than zerg. Actually very slightly more. However strangely all those players of that horribly OP race are in bronze, while the utterly broken zerg race is overrepresented in the higher leagues. But from gold up to GM zerg is better represented than terran.

On July 28 2013 22:31 GhostOwl wrote:


The hell? Why does it matter what race dominates what rank as long as we're not talking about progammer levels? Whatever happens in ladder is not relevant...we're talking progammer levels and even more, we need to look at the top of the progamer in order to balance the game. You DON'T balance the game from bottom up, you do it from top down, it's common sense dude, stop being so defensive with terrible logic.

On July 28 2013 23:08 Lt.Roosevelt wrote:


I hope Blizzard doesn't do this to a fault because quite frankly then we would have zero foreigner Terrans at a pro level.

On July 28 2013 23:44 willstertben wrote:
without foreign scene there pretty much would be no sc2 as a major esports title.

also that whole thought is based on the belief that terran is harder to play than the other races, which is just false.
you could make an argument that this is true in WOL, but it's simply not the case in hots.

before anyone asks: yes i have played terran quite a bit.

also nobody wants to make it harder, just less effective at some points that are deemed too good. those things, even when there are certain correlations, for the most part are two separate things.

On July 28 2013 21:54 willstertben wrote:


nono, don't missunderstand me. i was just clarifying why roach bling allin is somewhat coinflippy and isn't the most reliable way to punish 3 oc builds.
it's a good thing terran has builds that are safe vs everything making the right precautions. now zerg needs something like that too.
but i doubt that's going to happen without balance changes.

i said it somewhere before in this thread: the problem zerg has is surviving/not taking critical damage from the 65 scv constant rally push. you can't scout it cause up until that point everything is exactly the same for terran + it's not even close to allin, it gets 3-3 and 65 scv + 4m tech is all you need all game as terran. zerg NEEDS to have 4 base 5 hatch 80+ drones hive tech 3-3 carapace ultras infestors blings mass static defense 12 mutas to keep up with terran 4m lategame, so if they lose 4th base to that push the game is over.
because zerg needs to make so many drones and 65 scv rally will almost always kill the 4th and pretty much immediately win the game in an even game if terran doesn't mess up, regardless of how good zerg plays, as they will slowly drown in constant waves of ultra cost efficient 4m.
this is where the imbalance lies, and it's starting to turn out to be a pretty significant one.

i don't know how to fix this from a balance point without touching terran/zerg core units, or the mule and therefore possibly skewing lategame in zergs favor, but i really don't think metagame can solve this issue at this point, because zerg has no real choice but to get 4 bases 80+ drone and defend them with muta ling bling for reasons mentioned above.

roach bling is the obvious response but we discussed why it's an unreliable, coinflippy build that produces like 45% win rate at best and chances are that's only going to decrease when terran responses get more figured out.

On July 28 2013 23:57 Big J wrote:


Nope, in a game where the skillcap is unreachable it is exactly the same "how hard" a race is to play and "how strong" a race is. If a thing gets worse and a player can just equalize that by playing better (without actually getting better), he simply didn't use his full potential before the nerf.