Blizzard Blog: Balance Snapshot - Page 8

On September 23 2011 02:22 Liquid`Tyler wrote:
I'm kind of interested why Blizzard wants us to know this. As far as I know, there's no pressure on them to release these numbers. No one is waiting on them. And no one in the community is going to use them for anything. Blizzard simply wants us to know them... why?

On September 23 2011 01:56 Keula wrote:
I also want to point out that matchmaking makes all winrates tend toward 50%.

* The only case where this does not apply is tournaments, where matchmaking is not done algorithmically.

* The definition of balance means that, for 2 players of the same skill level, the game should be perfectly even. How do we isolate the skill level variable? We can't. But the closest we can do is make some assumptions: (1) There is less variability (lower std. deviation) in the highest tournaments and (2) The more up to date a given scene's metagame is, the more viable it is.

Thus, we really should be looking at GSL for the closest picture of balance that we can get, as it's the closest situation in terms of reflecting equal skill levels (tapering off on the high end, and thus not as highly variable as other tournaments/scenes), and metagame advancement.

On September 23 2011 02:54 Grummler wrote:


Try to read what is written above these numbers. Are you seriously thinking that Blizzard forgot about their own matchmaking system? That would make you look very stupid.

Actually i think this might be true, so i am going to quote the important part for you, in case you have trouble finding it:



Source: See OP.

On September 23 2011 02:42 headbus wrote:
7 Zergs, 5 Protoss in GSL code S. That should be enough to convince people that terran is stronger.

On September 23 2011 01:55 Brotocol wrote:



Well said.

I also want to point out that matchmaking makes all winrates tend toward 50%.

* The only case where this does not apply is tournaments, where matchmaking is not done algorithmically.

* The definition of balance means that, for 2 players of the same skill level, the game should be perfectly even. How do we isolate the skill level variable? We can't. But the closest we can do is make some assumptions: (1) There is less variability (lower std. deviation) in the highest tournaments and (2) The more up to date a given scene's metagame is, the more viable it is.

Thus, we really should be looking at GSL for the closest picture of balance that we can get, as it's the closest situation in terms of reflecting equal skill levels (tapering off on the high end, and thus not as highly variable as other tournaments/scenes), and metagame advancement.


PS. A common misconception of "balance for the highest levels" is that imbalance doesn't affect lower leagues. It affects any game with equal skill level players, where one has to work harder than the other to achieve the same result.

The entire "balance only affects the highest leagues" is wrong. It affects high leagues consistently, but can also happen, albeit inconsistently, at lower leagues.

Say, for instance, take 2 silver league players who are playing at skill levels 100 and 95, respectively (hypothetical values of course). Meaning that one is outplaying the other. And yet, the latter opponent wins. That is imbalance. Real life example: 1-1-1 happening at lower leagues. That is imbalanced if an inferior player beats a superior one.


Verdict: This looks like damage control, as it misrepresents these stats as "raw stats," whereas in reality, matchmaking has influenced them heavily.

On September 23 2011 02:18 SniXSniPe wrote:


If you are going to reference GSL, at least make an effort to note the race stats for Code A: 12 P 12 Z 8 T.

On September 23 2011 02:22 Liquid`Tyler wrote:
I'm kind of interested why Blizzard wants us to know this. As far as I know, there's no pressure on them to release these numbers. No one is waiting on them. And no one in the community is going to use them for anything. Blizzard simply wants us to know them... why?

On September 23 2011 03:07 Soulriser wrote:
I think the big point that people are making here sortof goes back to what Tyler said: that blizzard has no incentive to release these numbers. They released the numbers to make it appear to a massive audience that the game is fine, which is a business move that gets more players to buy the game and continue playing.(blizzard doesnt make all of their money from just pro players guys)

however, to people who actually know whats going on, these numbers just look like a pile of shit. because in reality, thats pretty much what they are. there is no point to revealing this, and without giving the math or other reasons for their 'balance' changes, then it just makes blizzard look stupid. :/ i mean, giving out these numbers say "zerg is fine, the NP was pointless", which makes everyone get pretty pissed at blizzard. however, if they released something like, "well we nerfed NP because..." then that would make them look more intelligent.

tldr; the OP blog is merely a financial move that makes the majority of players think the game it great. the rest of us are disgusted by the lack of information that this actually gives us.

On September 23 2011 02:52 Kazeyonoma wrote:
blizz gives info to help quell the masses, masses cry foul and pick it apart.

blizz doesn't give info to help quell the masses, masses cry foul and claim blizzard doesn't know what it's doing.

You can't go by just pure GM rankings. that's only 200 people per region, statistically it is too low to be able to balance upon, you have to include masters because at least in korea, lots of master level players are borderline pro or GM level but the 200 max system prevents them from being moved up until someone in GM falls out.

Take what you want away from this blog post, but to flame blizzard for even giving us any information is horseshit. You can be skeptical, or you can try to interpret it into other subsets of data, but you have to believe that blizzard has ALL of the numbers. Our stats, even from the best of our community, is based off of partial data mining utilizing tools like sc2ranks (love you!) to try to collect the best data we can, but blizzard literally has it ALL.

You have no clue why the neural parasite change happened. Maybe in their data, they can do a search where it says, in PvZ when games get past X time, and Infestors are out. Games with Neural parasite are won 90% of the time by zerg, games without are closer to 50%. See, a statistic like that, something that only blizzard can easily filter, would indicate there is some sort of disparity in PvZ when Neural is used. That's not to say they immediately made the change like the blog post said. It's possible this initial inference lead them to then further investigate the "possible problem" and look at it closer, looking further at variances of data, and upon their research and despite shifting meta game changes, the PvZ + Neural statistics have remained outside of the 55/45 win rate range they like to see. So they then hit the balance team to figure out a suitable fix, apply to PTR and test how that alters their data.

It's easy to look at JUST these overall win rates and see PvZ isn't lop sided why nerf NP blizz? and QQ heavily, but we don't have the data, and we will never have all of the data. They have spreadsheets that are probably so sophisticated we couldn't dream of imitating them. As a former theorycrafter for WoW we used to try to create simulation spreadsheets to mimic that of blizzard, and several times we came close, but even blizzard employees would post that while impressed upon our reverse engineering of data to create our own spreadsheets, ours were fundamentally flawed for an overall viewpoint, but useful for our specific needs. SC2 has probably more possible iterations and changes due to unit compositions and macro/micro than in WoW, so I can only imagine their findings to be even harder to balance and their spreadsheets even more sophisticated.

So please, while it's easy to try to judge blizzard upon this release and their recent patch changes, the blog itself says these numbers ARE NOT THE ONLY REASONING FOR CHANGES.

/rant off

On September 23 2011 02:54 Grummler wrote:


Try to read what is written above these numbers. Are you seriously thinking that Blizzard forgot about their own matchmaking system? That would make you look very stupid.

Actually i think this might be true, so i am going to quote the important part for you, in case you have trouble finding it:



Source: See OP.

On September 23 2011 03:09 cHaNg-sTa wrote:

That's cuz all the good Terrans are in Code S XD

On September 23 2011 03:07 tyrless wrote:


Anybody who is convinced by those most meaningless numbers is in fact ignorant and uneducated to basic statistical analysis. Which most of the whiners in this thread are, not to mention the terrible reading comprehension I'm seeing (there are actually people here bringing up the matchmaking system in their arguments).

Sometimes I forget that there are just a lot of uneducated/inexperienced kids posting here. Sorry haters but Blizzard does in fact have people who are much smarter/more experienced than you who work fulltime on this.