I haven't seen a thread for this yet, but I figured it would be a good topic for discussion. Stumbled upon this as I was browsing reddit, all credit goes to ChaosTerran.
It includes: All Premier Tournaments All Major Tournaments All Direct Qualifiers to Premier Tournaments (this does not include Qualifiers for Qualifiers) All Premier Teamleagues (GSTL, ATC and PL) All Monthly Finals (Go4SC2 and Zotac Top 16) The parameters he used served to minimize the amount of amateur games and maximize the amount of professional games. - CT
My first thought with looking at the statistics would be that zerg is in a pretty terrible place ZvT at the moment, and ZvP isn't in the best place either. TvP on the other hand looks to be very close.
ZvP is pretty balanced according to the stats 48% vs. 52% - pretty much even. If anything, I hope Blizzard doesn't nerf Terran but buff Z a slight bit - or just wait it out awhile longer. HOTS is still new, and the pro's still win with Zerg.
Huh, didn't think Z was that bad, numbers aint that great though. However i thought protoss was in a worse place, guess I watch WCS korea to much and not much else.
Pretty solid statistics, actually. While Zerg are a bit low, I think it has to do with them all being so used to WoL ezmode still (joke). I feel like Blizzard needs to change Mutalisks (nerf in some way) and buff some of the other Zerg units. In fact, I'd like to see a Nydus worm change (buff). I also think reducing the energy cost on Contaminate would open a lot more builds and well-thought out timings for Zerg.
It's interesting how the least played matchup was TvZ but the stats are 56/44 (roughly). Quality > Quantity!!
pretty balanced looking and the ZvT while looking skewed also has the lowest number of games recorded thus far, so the sample size is smaller, therefore allowing for a greater Delta imo. Interesting.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Please point out why the methodology is flawed; I don't see any inherent selection/etc. bias in the samples. I also don't see your reasoning about the sample size. Sample sizes of 1,000 are often used to properly represent the national population - they're usually seen as accurate as well. The problem is they need to be representative of the population. If this is supposed to reflect the pro scene, it does so well.
You don't actually want a large sample size. If the sample size gets too large, you actually increase your error. Smaller samples are almost always better as long as you get past the initial 50-100 sample size road block.
On May 02 2013 02:47 Blezza wrote: Tbh that ZvP stat looks fine, only ZvT is a problem right now
This issue currently is that Zerg's haven't adapted to the new meta game. Terrans and Protoss have only had slight changes to their vZ matchups while Zerg has completely changed. I'd say we give it another month or two before balance changes related to vZ matchups are released.
As far as non-mirror matchups go, PvZ has seen the largest amount of change. 1gas gateway openings are becoming viable and with the addition of new harassment, protoss is opting for heavy gas gateway openings as well. Also with zerg playing with new strategies such as early swarm host busts, I just don't see how we should try to conclude anything until the metagame can stabilize a little more. That being said, I think the new voidrays feel a little too strong, but we still need more time to know for sure.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
What reason do you have not to trust them? They seem fairly legitimate, however they could be zerg bias, but I personally doubt it.
Anyone can maake statistics with whatever sample size. However there was one guy who actually made a statistics with proofs about his data gathering. He had an actual sample size with very detailed info that even exceeded into winrate per specific tournament. I prefer to wait for that destined one who makes the 'right' statistics instead of trust a random guy.
On May 02 2013 02:47 Blezza wrote: Tbh that ZvP stat looks fine, only ZvT is a problem right now
This issue currently is that Zerg's haven't adapted to the new meta game. Terrans and Protoss have only had slight changes to their vZ matchups while Zerg has completely changed. I'd say we give it another month or two before balance changes related to vZ matchups are released.
Ye that's a fair point, hard not to let the bias creep in
On May 02 2013 02:54 Faust852 wrote: Without WCS EU Qualifers, TvZ would be much more even I think.
Well the EU quals are in there becuase they actaully happened? That's like saying Hitler was a nice guy if it wasn't for the holocaust.
Lot of very strong terrans (Happy, Strelok, etc..) played theses qualifers while no good Zergs played them because they were already quilified. And it's a shitton of games but it's not very relevent.
Qualifier games (especially western ones) in my opinion should not be included. Balancing the game around the level of second tier westerners would indeed be a horrible idea.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm or reject the statistics.
These kinds of threads always have the same issues.
Your N is too small. You drew N from a pool that includes a VERY WIDE SKILL GAP between the very best and the very worst. There are many people for example that played in WCS qualifiers that aren't capable of playing a macro game without floating 3k minerals in the same data set as innovation.
Data like this needs to be weighted based on player skill and that's complex and would lead to much debate on. Some players regardless of race are just better than others. By weighing skill you isolate down to map and race which is still not perfect, but far better than comparing some dipshit 600 masters player to a guy that makes a living playing sc2.
I'm not saying your data doesn't say anything at all, but it says very little, and what it does say may or may not be relevant to anything at all.
And yet, Zerg has the most HoTS tournament wins so far.
Also, TvZ WAS imbalanced in the first half of the ladder season, but it seems to have evened out much more lately. I think May will be more balanced, especially if you include only premier and major tournaments (WCS qualifiers are NOT places to determine balance).
On May 02 2013 02:52 Alryk wrote: 52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
Nice job of saying absolutely nothing =)
If the sample size is large enough, then 52/48 could be a significant difference.
Not really. We weren't given the margin of error, so nobody can be 100% sure, but unless this is a perfect sample (it isn't), 2% is within MoE 95% of the time. So it's a pretty reasonable assumption to make. I'm just not acting like I know everything, lol.
I think the numbers look pretty good. It's so early in the games life span and the meta is so volatile right now that trying to read anything from these numbers is foolish. Hopefully we don't slip back into the WoL days of making hasty nerfs. Focus on making the game fun and if there are glaringly bad balance isues you can deal with them.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm or reject the statistics.
That sc2 statistics guy did the exact same thing for about 2 years and nobody complained. And obviously we aren't looking at gold etc. statistics because it takes too much work. The majority of people however are interested in balancing the game at the pro level, not for bronze players. And while you don't want it to be impossible for a bronze zerg to win, it doesn't make sense to make changes FOR them.
Badly designed maps are a fact of life - there's no way around them. The statistics aren't trying to show that. They're simply showing game balance as is. If you notice, the OP didn't actually bring his opinions into the actual statistics. For what they're intended to represent, they work well. Are they perfect? no not really. But pointing out the things you did makes no sense; the survey doesn't aim to address map balance.
Also, the low vs high latency games are so few and far between that they're drowned out by normal games. Things like that. I don't really feel like explaining all of statistics though lol. You point out bias, but it isn't relevant bias. It's not something they can prevent. How would you gather statistics that determined how good a map was? That's almost entirely subjective.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm reject the statistics.
There is a very simple argument for only using professional games and ignoring ladder. Ladder automatically correct win rates to 50%. Thus if the game favors Zerg, a medicore Zerg player will play a good Terran, yet the ladder win rates will not show this entirely.
Using professional games shows how the game is played at the highest level. While a 4 Gate might seem overpowered in Gold, a Platinum player might have the skills to hold it easy. And a Gold player could learn those skills, and then the 4 Gate doesn't seem overpowered. Thus the only way to balance the game is at the top, everyone below simply needs to learn the skills necessary to get to the top before they can complain about balance.
Map balance is related to racial balance. The statistics show that with the current balance and maps, Terran has an advantage over Zerg. Perhaps it is balance, perhaps it is the map. Unfortunately, these two variables are intertwined and can be difficult to seperate. In other words, since Starcraft games have to be played on a map, and strategies are developed based on the map and the strengths and weaknesses of each race the go hand in hand. Remember the Stephano 200 Roach push in PvZ? It lead to the creation of a map pool where thirds were easy to defend because it was easy to deny a Protoss third with that push on some maps.
Furthermore because strategies are developed over a period of time, you can't just use random maps as the independent in determining balance unless tournaments began using random maps (meaning people wouldn't be able to plan strategies for maps and would have adjust on the fly).
Finally, the methodology used is fine. Looking at the win percentages of each race in professional tournaments and comparing them is very useful. Are there uncontrolled variables? Of course. Player skill and latency are huge problems that would be very difficult to control for (though we did control for player skill by picking from tournament games). Also differing map pools between tournaments might lead to different win rates. However, with a large enough sample size, latency and player skill be should evenly effect all races and it is probably worth controlling l for the map pool to some extent.
Honestly Sc2 feels the most balanced as it has even been in my opinion. The only thing I really think needs a looking at is Hellbat drops. As for the percentages it really does look about right. Zerg feels like they need help but they rarely use any of the new tools given to them. Yet they are still winning on the pro level. So give them time to play, I think within a few months Zerg Win Rate should jump.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm or reject the statistics.
That sc2 statistics guy did the exact same thing for about 2 years and nobody complained. And obviously we aren't looking at gold etc. statistics because it takes too much work. The majority of people however are interested in balancing the game at the pro level, not for bronze players. And while you don't want it to be impossible for a bronze zerg to win, it doesn't make sense to make changes FOR them.
Badly designed maps are a fact of life - there's no way around them. The statistics aren't trying to show that. They're simply showing game balance as is. If you notice, the OP didn't actually bring his opinions into the actual statistics. For what they're intended to represent, they work well. Are they perfect? no not really. But pointing out the things you did makes no sense; the survey doesn't aim to address map balance.
Also, the low vs high latency games are so few and far between that they're drowned out by normal games. Things like that. I don't really feel like explaining all of statistics though lol. You point out bias, but it isn't relevant bias. It's not something they can prevent. How would you gather statistics that determined how good a map was? That's almost entirely subjective.
So by other words, it could mean ANYTHING, and thus is just useless statitsics with no real intent or clear focus or aim.
@BronzeKnee; thank you for proving my point regarding speculation and making their own shit up regarding what it it could mean.
On May 02 2013 02:52 Alryk wrote: 52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
Nice job of saying absolutely nothing =)
If the sample size is large enough, then 52/48 could be a significant difference.
Well, 52/48 even with 1000 games would not be considered significant. Many of the games will not be completely independent from each other because it will be the same player playing. If you have 5 Korean Code S Terrans and 5 American Zergs play 200 matches each, then the statistics do not mean much at all ^_^. (Obvious extreme example).
Statistics in SC2 are very hard to do "properly" due to how many factors there are and how hard it is to get "good data". The general statistics are about as good as we can get, I'm afraid.
I actually think Bo1's (ladder matches) should be ignored. If you count a Bo3 as 1 win for whatever race, then you will likely get better statistics. You will obviously have a smaller sample size to use, but as we all know a Bo3 is a better representation than a Bo1. And a Bo5 > Bo3, and Bo7 > Bo5!
Maybe zerg players need to use new units, I am sure there are undiscovered builds/army compositions. Remember when no one used the infestor then when Stephano popularized it, people were whining that zerg was imba?
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm reject the statistics.
There is a very simple argument for only using professional games and ignoring ladder. Ladder automatically correct win rates to 50%. Thus if the game favors Zerg, a medicore Zerg player will play a good Terran, yet the ladder win rates will not show this entirely.
Using professional games shows how the game is played at the highest level. While a 4 Gate might seem overpowered in Gold, a Platinum player might have the skills to hold it easy. And a Gold player could learn those skills, and then the 4 Gate doesn't seem overpowered. Thus the only way to balance the game is at the top, everyone below simply needs to learn the skills necessary to get to the top before they can complain about balance.
Map balance is related to racial balance. The statistics show that with the current balance and maps, Terran has an advantage over Zerg. Perhaps it is balance, perhaps it is the map. Unfortunately, these two variables are intertwined and can be difficult to seperate. In other words, since Starcraft games have to be played on a map, and strategies are developed based on the map and the strengths and weaknesses of each race the go hand in hand. Remember the Stephano 200 Roach push in PvZ? It lead to the creation of a map pool where thirds were easy to defend because it was easy to deny a Protoss third with that push on some maps.
Furthermore because strategies are developed over a period of time, you can't just use random maps as the independent in determining balance unless tournaments began using random maps (meaning people wouldn't be able to plan strategies for maps and would have adjust on the fly).
Finally, the methodology used is fine. Looking at the win percentages of each race in professional tournaments and comparing them is very useful. Are there uncontrolled variables? Of course. Player skill and latency are huge problems that would be very difficult to control for (though we did control for player skill by picking from tournament games). Also differing map pools between tournaments might lead to different win rates. However, with a large enough sample size, latency and player skill be should evenly effect all races and it is probably worth controlling l for the map pool to some extent.
My methods knowledge is't great but I think there might be a way to run the data in an improved fashion. You use a probit model with the dependent variable as Winning and the independent variable as say being terran (0 if zerg, 1 if terran). I'm not sure how you can control for player skill. I don't know if there are a few individuals that play enough games such that you can run a fixed effects model to take out the individual level characteristics. But you might be able to do something along the lines of using a skill gap, that is the difference in overall win percentage between the players. I'm not sure how best to implement that. Then you control for map, use a dummy variable for each map to take out the map effect. Then control for game length.
What you're trying to do is take the effect of everything else out of the impact of being terran on winning in a TvZ format. If someone wants to provide me the data set, I'll run the model.
Again, my methods aren't great, still learning, but if anyone has any ideas on improvement, that would be good. Then if we can get the data we can improve on our understanding of the match up.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm reject the statistics.
There is a very simple argument for only using professional games and ignoring ladder. Ladder automatically correct win rates to 50%. Thus if the game favors Zerg, a medicore Zerg player will play a good Terran, yet the ladder win rates will not show this entirely.
Using professional games shows how the game is played at the highest level. While a 4 Gate might seem overpowered in Gold, a Platinum player might have the skills to hold it easy. And a Gold player could learn those skills, and then the 4 Gate doesn't seem overpowered. Thus the only way to balance the game is at the top, everyone below simply needs to learn the skills necessary to get to the top before they can complain about balance.
Map balance is related to racial balance. The statistics show that with the current balance and maps, Terran has an advantage over Zerg. Perhaps it is balance, perhaps it is the map. Unfortunately, these two variables are intertwined and can be difficult to seperate. In other words, since Starcraft games have to be played on a map, and strategies are developed based on the map and the strengths and weaknesses of each race the go hand in hand. Remember the Stephano 200 Roach push in PvZ? It lead to the creation of a map pool where thirds were easy to defend because it was easy to deny a Protoss third with that push on some maps.
Furthermore because strategies are developed over a period of time, you can't just use random maps as the independent in determining balance unless tournaments began using random maps (meaning people wouldn't be able to plan strategies for maps and would have adjust on the fly).
Finally, the methodology used is fine. Looking at the win percentages of each race in professional tournaments and comparing them is very useful. Are there uncontrolled variables? Of course. Player skill and latency are huge problems that would be very difficult to control for (though we did control for player skill by picking from tournament games). Also differing map pools between tournaments might lead to different win rates. However, with a large enough sample size, latency and player skill be should evenly effect all races and it is probably worth controlling l for the map pool to some extent.
My methods knowledge is't great but I think there might be a way to run the data in an improved fashion. You use a probit model with the dependent variable as Winning and the independent variable as say being terran (0 if zerg, 1 if terran). I'm not sure how you can control for player skill. I don't know if there are a few individuals that play enough games such that you can run a fixed effects model to take out the individual level characteristics. But you might be able to do something along the lines of using a skill gap, that is the difference in overall win percentage between the players. I'm not sure how best to implement that. Then you control for map, use a dummy variable for each map to take out the map effect. Then control for game length.
What you're trying to do is take the effect of everything else out of the impact of being terran on winning in a TvZ format. If someone wants to provide me the data set, I'll run the model.
Again, my methods aren't great, still learning, but if anyone has any ideas on improvement, that would be good. Then if we can get the data we can improve on our understanding of the match up.
It's doable actually, You simply perform some qualitive based research and find a very clear link between skill factors and run them as criteria against a current pool of players and rank them skillwise then just pair up players against each other with the closest skill cap and run some quantative (statistical) research on those groups only. That would actually mean something.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm or reject the statistics.
That sc2 statistics guy did the exact same thing for about 2 years and nobody complained. And obviously we aren't looking at gold etc. statistics because it takes too much work. The majority of people however are interested in balancing the game at the pro level, not for bronze players. And while you don't want it to be impossible for a bronze zerg to win, it doesn't make sense to make changes FOR them.
Badly designed maps are a fact of life - there's no way around them. The statistics aren't trying to show that. They're simply showing game balance as is. If you notice, the OP didn't actually bring his opinions into the actual statistics. For what they're intended to represent, they work well. Are they perfect? no not really. But pointing out the things you did makes no sense; the survey doesn't aim to address map balance.
Also, the low vs high latency games are so few and far between that they're drowned out by normal games. Things like that. I don't really feel like explaining all of statistics though lol. You point out bias, but it isn't relevant bias. It's not something they can prevent. How would you gather statistics that determined how good a map was? That's almost entirely subjective.
So by other words, it could mean ANYTHING, and thus is just useless statitsics with no real intent or clear focus or aim.
@BronzeKnee; thank you for proving my point regarding speculation and making their own shit up regarding what it it could mean.
Actually, what they literally mean is simple: zergs are the least winning race right now. Period. Do we know why? No, but that doesn't matter right now. The important thing is to watch and see if this trend continues or changes. If win rates are different next month or 6 months from now, then there is no cause for alarm. However, if this trend keeps up, THEN we need to look for explanations.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm or reject the statistics.
That sc2 statistics guy did the exact same thing for about 2 years and nobody complained. And obviously we aren't looking at gold etc. statistics because it takes too much work. The majority of people however are interested in balancing the game at the pro level, not for bronze players. And while you don't want it to be impossible for a bronze zerg to win, it doesn't make sense to make changes FOR them.
Badly designed maps are a fact of life - there's no way around them. The statistics aren't trying to show that. They're simply showing game balance as is. If you notice, the OP didn't actually bring his opinions into the actual statistics. For what they're intended to represent, they work well. Are they perfect? no not really. But pointing out the things you did makes no sense; the survey doesn't aim to address map balance.
Also, the low vs high latency games are so few and far between that they're drowned out by normal games. Things like that. I don't really feel like explaining all of statistics though lol. You point out bias, but it isn't relevant bias. It's not something they can prevent. How would you gather statistics that determined how good a map was? That's almost entirely subjective.
So by other words, it could mean ANYTHING, and thus is just useless statitsics with no real intent or clear focus or aim.
@BronzeKnee; thank you for proving my point regarding speculation and making their own shit up regarding what it it could mean.
Actually, what they literally mean is simple: zergs are the least winning race right now. Period. Do we know why? No, but that doesn't matter right now. The important thing is to watch and see if this trend continues or changes. If win rates are different next month or 6 months from now, then there is no cause for alarm. However, if this trend keeps up, THEN we need to look for explanations.
OR until somene gives us another size or context sample, the manipulation of the data alone is enough to change the outcome of the statistics.
Id say buff the swarmhost a bit since it's underused and then sit back and wait. Possibly some buff that makes it more viable vs terran so it wont tip the scale vs toss.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm reject the statistics.
There is a very simple argument for only using professional games and ignoring ladder. Ladder automatically correct win rates to 50%. Thus if the game favors Zerg, a medicore Zerg player will play a good Terran, yet the ladder win rates will not show this entirely.
Using professional games shows how the game is played at the highest level. While a 4 Gate might seem overpowered in Gold, a Platinum player might have the skills to hold it easy. And a Gold player could learn those skills, and then the 4 Gate doesn't seem overpowered. Thus the only way to balance the game is at the top, everyone below simply needs to learn the skills necessary to get to the top before they can complain about balance.
Map balance is related to racial balance. The statistics show that with the current balance and maps, Terran has an advantage over Zerg. Perhaps it is balance, perhaps it is the map. Unfortunately, these two variables are intertwined and can be difficult to seperate. In other words, since Starcraft games have to be played on a map, and strategies are developed based on the map and the strengths and weaknesses of each race the go hand in hand. Remember the Stephano 200 Roach push in PvZ? It lead to the creation of a map pool where thirds were easy to defend because it was easy to deny a Protoss third with that push on some maps.
Furthermore because strategies are developed over a period of time, you can't just use random maps as the independent in determining balance unless tournaments began using random maps (meaning people wouldn't be able to plan strategies for maps and would have adjust on the fly).
Finally, the methodology used is fine. Looking at the win percentages of each race in professional tournaments and comparing them is very useful. Are there uncontrolled variables? Of course. Player skill and latency are huge problems that would be very difficult to control for (though we did control for player skill by picking from tournament games). Also differing map pools between tournaments might lead to different win rates. However, with a large enough sample size, latency and player skill be should evenly effect all races and it is probably worth controlling l for the map pool to some extent.
My methods knowledge is't great but I think there might be a way to run the data in an improved fashion. You use a probit model with the dependent variable as Winning and the independent variable as say being terran (0 if zerg, 1 if terran). I'm not sure how you can control for player skill. I don't know if there are a few individuals that play enough games such that you can run a fixed effects model to take out the individual level characteristics. But you might be able to do something along the lines of using a skill gap, that is the difference in overall win percentage between the players. I'm not sure how best to implement that. Then you control for map, use a dummy variable for each map to take out the map effect. Then control for game length.
What you're trying to do is take the effect of everything else out of the impact of being terran on winning in a TvZ format. If someone wants to provide me the data set, I'll run the model.
Again, my methods aren't great, still learning, but if anyone has any ideas on improvement, that would be good. Then if we can get the data we can improve on our understanding of the match up.
It's doable actually, You simply perform some qualitive based research and find a very clear link between skill factors and run them as criteria against a current pool of players and rank them skillwise then just pair up players against each other with the closest skill cap and run some quantative (statistical) research on those groups only. That would actually mean something.
My fear in that scenario is sample size. It's not even difficult to rank them, we can use the TL ranking systems to do so. But if we constrain our sample to say only the top 5 T and Z players, I don't know if we'll have large amount of samples, especially given the degrees of freedom I want to use to up control for maps. Again, it's all conjecture without seeing the data.
Continuing with thinking process, I think using the close skill level, we'll quickly jump down on the actual skill. It's easier to find a similarly skilled players at lower levels of competition. There is a possibility that different races have different skill caps. Potentially, this method could be more vulnerable to challenges than a less than perfect skill gap measurement.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm reject the statistics.
There is a very simple argument for only using professional games and ignoring ladder. Ladder automatically correct win rates to 50%. Thus if the game favors Zerg, a medicore Zerg player will play a good Terran, yet the ladder win rates will not show this entirely.
Using professional games shows how the game is played at the highest level. While a 4 Gate might seem overpowered in Gold, a Platinum player might have the skills to hold it easy. And a Gold player could learn those skills, and then the 4 Gate doesn't seem overpowered. Thus the only way to balance the game is at the top, everyone below simply needs to learn the skills necessary to get to the top before they can complain about balance.
Map balance is related to racial balance. The statistics show that with the current balance and maps, Terran has an advantage over Zerg. Perhaps it is balance, perhaps it is the map. Unfortunately, these two variables are intertwined and can be difficult to seperate. In other words, since Starcraft games have to be played on a map, and strategies are developed based on the map and the strengths and weaknesses of each race the go hand in hand. Remember the Stephano 200 Roach push in PvZ? It lead to the creation of a map pool where thirds were easy to defend because it was easy to deny a Protoss third with that push on some maps.
Furthermore because strategies are developed over a period of time, you can't just use random maps as the independent in determining balance unless tournaments began using random maps (meaning people wouldn't be able to plan strategies for maps and would have adjust on the fly).
Finally, the methodology used is fine. Looking at the win percentages of each race in professional tournaments and comparing them is very useful. Are there uncontrolled variables? Of course. Player skill and latency are huge problems that would be very difficult to control for (though we did control for player skill by picking from tournament games). Also differing map pools between tournaments might lead to different win rates. However, with a large enough sample size, latency and player skill be should evenly effect all races and it is probably worth controlling l for the map pool to some extent.
My methods knowledge is't great but I think there might be a way to run the data in an improved fashion. You use a probit model with the dependent variable as Winning and the independent variable as say being terran (0 if zerg, 1 if terran). I'm not sure how you can control for player skill. I don't know if there are a few individuals that play enough games such that you can run a fixed effects model to take out the individual level characteristics. But you might be able to do something along the lines of using a skill gap, that is the difference in overall win percentage between the players. I'm not sure how best to implement that. Then you control for map, use a dummy variable for each map to take out the map effect. Then control for game length.
What you're trying to do is take the effect of everything else out of the impact of being terran on winning in a TvZ format. If someone wants to provide me the data set, I'll run the model.
Again, my methods aren't great, still learning, but if anyone has any ideas on improvement, that would be good. Then if we can get the data we can improve on our understanding of the match up.
It's doable actually, You simply perform some qualitive based research and find a very clear link between skill factors and run them as criteria against a current pool of players and rank them skillwise then just pair up players against each other with the closest skill cap and run some quantative (statistical) research on those groups only. That would actually mean something.
My fear in that scenario is sample size. It's not even difficult to rank them, we can use the TL ranking systems to do so. But if we constrain our sample to say only the top 5 T and Z players, I don't know if we'll have large amount of samples, especially given the degrees of freedom I want to use to up control for maps. Again, it's all conjecture without seeing the data.
Continuing with thinking process, I think using the close skill level, we'll quickly jump down on the actual skill. It's easier to find a similarly skilled players at lower levels of competition. There is a possibility that different races have different skill caps. Potentially, this method could be more vulnerable to challenges than a less than perfect skill gap measurement.
no it is doable. What I was talking about is a proven metholodgy to measure performance in sports and its very reilable, even from small samples given the research is done properly,
And regarding skill cap for various races: simply do mirror games for starters and then do comparative analysis with mixed MU's, find the differences, explain them, find way to quanitifie and map them out, should not be a problem either.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm reject the statistics.
There is a very simple argument for only using professional games and ignoring ladder. Ladder automatically correct win rates to 50%. Thus if the game favors Zerg, a medicore Zerg player will play a good Terran, yet the ladder win rates will not show this entirely.
Using professional games shows how the game is played at the highest level. While a 4 Gate might seem overpowered in Gold, a Platinum player might have the skills to hold it easy. And a Gold player could learn those skills, and then the 4 Gate doesn't seem overpowered. Thus the only way to balance the game is at the top, everyone below simply needs to learn the skills necessary to get to the top before they can complain about balance.
Map balance is related to racial balance. The statistics show that with the current balance and maps, Terran has an advantage over Zerg. Perhaps it is balance, perhaps it is the map. Unfortunately, these two variables are intertwined and can be difficult to seperate. In other words, since Starcraft games have to be played on a map, and strategies are developed based on the map and the strengths and weaknesses of each race the go hand in hand. Remember the Stephano 200 Roach push in PvZ? It lead to the creation of a map pool where thirds were easy to defend because it was easy to deny a Protoss third with that push on some maps.
Furthermore because strategies are developed over a period of time, you can't just use random maps as the independent in determining balance unless tournaments began using random maps (meaning people wouldn't be able to plan strategies for maps and would have adjust on the fly).
Finally, the methodology used is fine. Looking at the win percentages of each race in professional tournaments and comparing them is very useful. Are there uncontrolled variables? Of course. Player skill and latency are huge problems that would be very difficult to control for (though we did control for player skill by picking from tournament games). Also differing map pools between tournaments might lead to different win rates. However, with a large enough sample size, latency and player skill be should evenly effect all races and it is probably worth controlling l for the map pool to some extent.
My methods knowledge is't great but I think there might be a way to run the data in an improved fashion. You use a probit model with the dependent variable as Winning and the independent variable as say being terran (0 if zerg, 1 if terran). I'm not sure how you can control for player skill. I don't know if there are a few individuals that play enough games such that you can run a fixed effects model to take out the individual level characteristics. But you might be able to do something along the lines of using a skill gap, that is the difference in overall win percentage between the players. I'm not sure how best to implement that. Then you control for map, use a dummy variable for each map to take out the map effect. Then control for game length.
What you're trying to do is take the effect of everything else out of the impact of being terran on winning in a TvZ format. If someone wants to provide me the data set, I'll run the model.
Again, my methods aren't great, still learning, but if anyone has any ideas on improvement, that would be good. Then if we can get the data we can improve on our understanding of the match up.
It's doable actually, You simply perform some qualitive based research and find a very clear link between skill factors and run them as criteria against a current pool of players and rank them skillwise then just pair up players against each other with the closest skill cap and run some quantative (statistical) research on those groups only. That would actually mean something.
My fear in that scenario is sample size. It's not even difficult to rank them, we can use the TL ranking systems to do so. But if we constrain our sample to say only the top 5 T and Z players, I don't know if we'll have large amount of samples, especially given the degrees of freedom I want to use to up control for maps. Again, it's all conjecture without seeing the data.
Continuing with thinking process, I think using the close skill level, we'll quickly jump down on the actual skill. It's easier to find a similarly skilled players at lower levels of competition. There is a possibility that different races have different skill caps. Potentially, this method could be more vulnerable to challenges than a less than perfect skill gap measurement.
no it is doable. What I was talking about is a proven metholodgy to measure performance in sports and its very reilable, even from small samples given the research is done properly,
And regarding skill cap for various races: simply do mirror games for starters and then do comparative analysis with mixed MU's, find the differences, explain them, find way to quanitifie and map them out, should not be a problem either.
Okay. I don't know the methodology to do that... So I'm just sounding out concerns without knowing what that model would do.
Pie charts are probably the least efficient and lease useful method of presenting information.
Regardless, I have a hard time believing these statistics simply because of he lack of references or major tournaments that went into this calculation. Sample size feels small to me too, but I don't know whether it actually is or not as I am not a statistician.
On May 02 2013 04:17 Butterednuts wrote: Pie charts are probably the least efficient and lease useful method of presenting information.
Regardless, I have a hard time believing these statistics simply because of he lack of references or major tournaments that went into this calculation. Sample size feels small to me too, but I don't know whether it actually is or not as I am not a statistician.
Given the number of tournaments that were said to be included in the data set (I don't know what other tournament you would add into the model), we're more likely looking at the results of the population data instead of a sample drawn from the population. In that case, there's no reason to be concerned with sample size.
Also, if we can consider the data set to be the entire population, we shouldn't even worry about a confidence interval, the results are the results. Though, given that it's constrained to one month, you can make the legitimate argument that it's not the population set.
I noticed some vital matchup information was missing in the opening post. I took the liberty of creating some extra pie charts to further our understanding of the MU balance within HotS. Please add it to the OP.
Using the google spreadsheet posted in some places I also looked at that data. While the TvZ winrate isn't completely off-center due to WCS europe, it does have a very significant influence. After deleting that row it suddenly was alot more even (and result was that you should nerf toss).
And WCS europe qualifiers (same for NA btw) is a bit hard to justify to use imo, since a larger number of zerg players than terran players were already invited. But regardless if you should use it or not, if a single tournament can make such a large shift the main conclusion is that sample size is too low to make accurate observations. Aditionally all races are still experimenting with the new units, so for sure you don't want large balance changes.
Finally while ladder is in principle always 50% win rate due to matchmaking, it is also true that in every game the strongest items, race, weapon, etc always seems to attract alot of people. And looking at SC2ranks is it absolutely not that terran has the most players, actually the opposite, it has the least players. While zerg in general for gold and higher leagues has most players.
On May 02 2013 03:22 Eventine wrote: always nice to see people with demands and complaints on the data and a lack of commitment to actually provide "better" data or analysis.
Probably because:
"all pro data" = too small sample size "all ladder data" = way too noob "all tourny data" = korea vs foreign skew "all top ladder" = too noob/cross region issues "all top korea" = terran-culture/too small sample/(variable complaint here)
In short, I don't think the SC2 community will ever agree on any statistical analysis.
"I have never taken a university level statistics course."
Didn't your university level statistics course teach you how rare people who take university level statistics courses are?
No, since all engineers/CS students in my school are required to take the entry level course. I don't know about his school though.
No, there's nothing wrong with the sample size. On the other hand, this is in no way indicative of balance neither. It merely states that "among these tournaments, X race has Y win percentage against Z", nothing more, nothing less.
On May 02 2013 03:22 Eventine wrote: always nice to see people with demands and complaints on the data and a lack of commitment to actually provide "better" data or analysis.
Probably because:
"all pro data" = too small sample size "all ladder data" = way too noob "all tourny data" = korea vs foreign skew "all top ladder" = too noob/cross region issues "all top korea" = terran-culture/too small sample/(variable complaint here)
In short, I don't think the SC2 community will ever agree on any statistical analysis.
This is how I feel. Or like now. people are like well zerg just won the last tournament, while others argue that they were the only zerg and much better than their opponents. Same with when taeja was winning and some said terran is fine, terran just won. then people argued that one terran won and was better than their opponents.
Peeple will use or ignore statistics based on their belief.
These stats are only representative to timing imbalances within the units. Each race has really imbalanced shit, Zerg's stuff all comes really later. Protoss and Terran stuff come really earlier.
Widow mine range needs decrease. Void ray prismatic alignment needs it's buff/debuff timers drastically modified. (possiblly 4-5 seconds buff, 10-30 seconds recharge) Hellbats could use a nerf or two. HP, Armor, but more importantly the way the damage and unit type modifier is layed out. (they need to do less to all and big boost to small/bio) Ravens - not sure on these yet, but I rarely lose a game where I get a nice ball of them added up. Especially in TvT Swarm Hosts with proper dichotomy of AA and creep seem really hard for protoss to deal with. (possible nerf of locust range, damage, or hp with increase in spawn time.)
I won't discuss all those ideas since there are other topics for that (I will say I disagree with most), but really, nerfing hellbat armor? Hellbat should be the first SC2 unit ever with a negative armor? I guess you didnt really think that through.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm or reject the statistics.
That sc2 statistics guy did the exact same thing for about 2 years and nobody complained. And obviously we aren't looking at gold etc. statistics because it takes too much work. The majority of people however are interested in balancing the game at the pro level, not for bronze players. And while you don't want it to be impossible for a bronze zerg to win, it doesn't make sense to make changes FOR them.
Badly designed maps are a fact of life - there's no way around them. The statistics aren't trying to show that. They're simply showing game balance as is. If you notice, the OP didn't actually bring his opinions into the actual statistics. For what they're intended to represent, they work well. Are they perfect? no not really. But pointing out the things you did makes no sense; the survey doesn't aim to address map balance.
Also, the low vs high latency games are so few and far between that they're drowned out by normal games. Things like that. I don't really feel like explaining all of statistics though lol. You point out bias, but it isn't relevant bias. It's not something they can prevent. How would you gather statistics that determined how good a map was? That's almost entirely subjective.
So by other words, it could mean ANYTHING, and thus is just useless statitsics with no real intent or clear focus or aim.
@BronzeKnee; thank you for proving my point regarding speculation and making their own shit up regarding what it it could mean.
Yes by systemically disagreeing with you and showing why you were wrong I proved my point... Every statistical discussion on this website turns out like this. People rant and rave and don't think anyone can be objective, that everyone has some hidden agenda...
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm or reject the statistics.
That sc2 statistics guy did the exact same thing for about 2 years and nobody complained. And obviously we aren't looking at gold etc. statistics because it takes too much work. The majority of people however are interested in balancing the game at the pro level, not for bronze players. And while you don't want it to be impossible for a bronze zerg to win, it doesn't make sense to make changes FOR them.
Badly designed maps are a fact of life - there's no way around them. The statistics aren't trying to show that. They're simply showing game balance as is. If you notice, the OP didn't actually bring his opinions into the actual statistics. For what they're intended to represent, they work well. Are they perfect? no not really. But pointing out the things you did makes no sense; the survey doesn't aim to address map balance.
Also, the low vs high latency games are so few and far between that they're drowned out by normal games. Things like that. I don't really feel like explaining all of statistics though lol. You point out bias, but it isn't relevant bias. It's not something they can prevent. How would you gather statistics that determined how good a map was? That's almost entirely subjective.
So by other words, it could mean ANYTHING, and thus is just useless statitsics with no real intent or clear focus or aim.
@BronzeKnee; thank you for proving my point regarding speculation and making their own shit up regarding what it it could mean.
Actually, what they literally mean is simple: zergs are the least winning race right now. Period. Do we know why? No, but that doesn't matter right now. The important thing is to watch and see if this trend continues or changes. If win rates are different next month or 6 months from now, then there is no cause for alarm. However, if this trend keeps up, THEN we need to look for explanations.
Though I think waiting 6 months is way too long. If feasible we should find out now why the winning percentages look the way they do and work to correct them if indeed there is a significant difference based on the sample size.
Why are people pointing to samples of a few dozen results as if that is skewing the results of thousands of games particularly strongly in one way or another? It isn't.
@Spiral Actually if this is based on the same spreadsheet that also circulated in other topics that is the case. First of all because we aren't talking here about thousands of games. Second if a single tournament has a very 'unbalanced' win rate that can have a significant influence. Case in point WCS europe qualifiers. Removing that from the list didn't make everything magically at 50%, but it did have a significant influence on the stats. Since there more zergs were invited than terran for example, you can also debate if it should be included.
@Bronze, Lovebuzz has it almost correct:
Actually, what they literally mean is simple: zergs are the least winning race right now in the games included in these statistics. Period
@Luepert, since I am disagreeing with everyone I also disagree with you, for consistency. Two reasons. First of all it is nice if it is balanced for the top 10 worldwide, but also the millions of others like it balanced at their level. And of course at lower levels you can accept larger balance differences, but that doesn't mean it isn't relevant at all. Probably more import for you is reason 2: If you only look at code S the sample size is simply too small to have any relevant data. Then if Life decides to play LoL tomorrow we should boost zerg? And if he then returns 2 months later nerf zerg again?
On May 02 2013 06:07 Sissors wrote: @Spiral Actually if this is based on the same spreadsheet that also circulated in other topics that is the case. First of all because we aren't talking here about thousands of games. Second if a single tournament has a very 'unbalanced' win rate that can have a significant influence. Case in point WCS europe qualifiers. Removing that from the list didn't make everything magically at 50%, but it did have a significant influence on the stats. Since there more zergs were invited than terran for example, you can also debate if it should be included.
On May 02 2013 06:02 _SpiRaL_ wrote: Why are people pointing to samples of a few dozen results as if that is skewing the results of thousands of games particularly strongly in one way or another? It isn't.
~126,000,000 people voted in the 2012 election. Reuters polls polled an average of less than 5000 voters, and were within 2% of the final results.
On May 02 2013 06:07 Sissors wrote: @Spiral Actually if this is based on the same spreadsheet that also circulated in other topics that is the case. First of all because we aren't talking here about thousands of games. Second if a single tournament has a very 'unbalanced' win rate that can have a significant influence. Case in point WCS europe qualifiers. Removing that from the list didn't make everything magically at 50%, but it did have a significant influence on the stats. Since there more zergs were invited than terran for example, you can also debate if it should be included.
Actually, what they literally mean is simple: zergs are the least winning race right now in the games included in these statistics. Period
@Luepert, since I am disagreeing with everyone I also disagree with you, for consistency. Two reasons. First of all it is nice if it is balanced for the top 10 worldwide, but also the millions of others like it balanced at their level. And of course at lower levels you can accept larger balance differences, but that doesn't mean it isn't relevant at all. Probably more import for you is reason 2: If you only look at code S the sample size is simply too small to have any relevant data. Then if Life decides to play LoL tomorrow we should boost zerg? And if he then returns 2 months later nerf zerg again?
You're right. However, adding such a qualification might be weaker than you think, assuming those tournaments represent nearly all high level play as is stated.
We need a lot more information regarding the sample size and tournaments that were used, and how far back this goes... ChaosTerran didn't seem to release much in the Reddit thread.
On May 02 2013 06:10 Sandermatt wrote: With this sample size the standard deviation is about 2% (If I calculated properly). So only the TvZ matchup is statistically significant.
On May 02 2013 06:07 Sissors wrote: @Spiral Actually if this is based on the same spreadsheet that also circulated in other topics that is the case. First of all because we aren't talking here about thousands of games. Second if a single tournament has a very 'unbalanced' win rate that can have a significant influence. Case in point WCS europe qualifiers. Removing that from the list didn't make everything magically at 50%, but it did have a significant influence on the stats. Since there more zergs were invited than terran for example, you can also debate if it should be included.
@Bronze, Lovebuzz has it almost correct:
Actually, what they literally mean is simple: zergs are the least winning race right now in the games included in these statistics. Period
@Luepert, since I am disagreeing with everyone I also disagree with you, for consistency. Two reasons. First of all it is nice if it is balanced for the top 10 worldwide, but also the millions of others like it balanced at their level. And of course at lower levels you can accept larger balance differences, but that doesn't mean it isn't relevant at all. Probably more import for you is reason 2: If you only look at code S the sample size is simply too small to have any relevant data. Then if Life decides to play LoL tomorrow we should boost zerg? And if he then returns 2 months later nerf zerg again?
You're right. However, adding such a qualification might be weaker than you think, assuming those tournaments represent nearly all high level play as is stated.
We need a lot more information regarding the sample size and tournaments that were used, and how far back this goes... ChaosTerran didn't seem to release much in the Reddit thread.
On May 02 2013 06:10 Sandermatt wrote: With this sample size the standard deviation is about 2% (If I calculated properly). So only the TvZ matchup is statistically significant.
How did you find out the sample size?
The 6th chart says the sample size. I have to say though I have not seen many matchups go a way different than expected or at least different enough than expected to be considered an upset and that's usually first light.
On May 02 2013 06:07 Sissors wrote: @Spiral Actually if this is based on the same spreadsheet that also circulated in other topics that is the case. First of all because we aren't talking here about thousands of games. Second if a single tournament has a very 'unbalanced' win rate that can have a significant influence. Case in point WCS europe qualifiers. Removing that from the list didn't make everything magically at 50%, but it did have a significant influence on the stats. Since there more zergs were invited than terran for example, you can also debate if it should be included.
@Bronze, Lovebuzz has it almost correct:
Actually, what they literally mean is simple: zergs are the least winning race right now in the games included in these statistics. Period
@Luepert, since I am disagreeing with everyone I also disagree with you, for consistency. Two reasons. First of all it is nice if it is balanced for the top 10 worldwide, but also the millions of others like it balanced at their level. And of course at lower levels you can accept larger balance differences, but that doesn't mean it isn't relevant at all. Probably more import for you is reason 2: If you only look at code S the sample size is simply too small to have any relevant data. Then if Life decides to play LoL tomorrow we should boost zerg? And if he then returns 2 months later nerf zerg again?
You're right. However, adding such a qualification might be weaker than you think, assuming those tournaments represent nearly all high level play as is stated.
We need a lot more information regarding the sample size and tournaments that were used, and how far back this goes... ChaosTerran didn't seem to release much in the Reddit thread.
On May 02 2013 06:10 Sandermatt wrote: With this sample size the standard deviation is about 2% (If I calculated properly). So only the TvZ matchup is statistically significant.
How did you find out the sample size?
The 6th chart says the sample size. I have to say though I have not seen many matchups go a way different than expected or at least different enough than expected to be considered an upset and that's usually first light.
Yeah it is really hard to get it exact though. I found it in the Reddit thread:
415 TvZ games 483 TvP games 555 ZvP games
I also found this:
Chaos Terran wrote:
I had the same problem when working on these statistics. I realized that some tournaments had alot of amateur players in their brackets (Dreamhack, WCS NA Qualifiers, etc..) so I decided to set the parameters for any given tournament in a way that would allow me to sidestep this problem. WCS EU: Ro32+ WCS NA: Round 5+ Dreamhack: Groupstage 2+ All other tournaments either had no amateur players participating or very, very few, so WCS EU, NA and Dreamhack were the only tournaments in which some rounds or group stages did not influence these statistics. edit: Of course, there will always be a skill gap that I cannot account for, but I did my best to sidestep the problem.
That is some pretty good work Certainly the data isn't perfect, but it is revealing and the sample size is large enough to warrant more investigation.
On May 02 2013 06:07 Sissors wrote: @Spiral Actually if this is based on the same spreadsheet that also circulated in other topics that is the case. First of all because we aren't talking here about thousands of games. Second if a single tournament has a very 'unbalanced' win rate that can have a significant influence. Case in point WCS europe qualifiers. Removing that from the list didn't make everything magically at 50%, but it did have a significant influence on the stats. Since there more zergs were invited than terran for example, you can also debate if it should be included.
@Bronze, Lovebuzz has it almost correct:
Actually, what they literally mean is simple: zergs are the least winning race right now in the games included in these statistics. Period
Can you point me to the spreadsheet? Or better yet, is there spreadsheets for each months results by tournament?
Main thing to notice imo: If you delete the WCS qualifiers (so EU + NA), then suddenly you get (overall): 49.7% win rate for terran, 48.8% for zerg and 51.5% for toss. So those qualifiers have a huge impact. Not strange since both have TvZ rates at roughly 70%!
So yeah I stick to my conclusions that I wouldnt conclude too much from these stats.
Edit: It indeeds seems that those stats are from that spreadsheet. So would be nice if the link to the sheet was included in the OP, and in general it is alot more informative than only the pictures
On May 02 2013 06:07 Sissors wrote: @Spiral Actually if this is based on the same spreadsheet that also circulated in other topics that is the case. First of all because we aren't talking here about thousands of games. Second if a single tournament has a very 'unbalanced' win rate that can have a significant influence. Case in point WCS europe qualifiers. Removing that from the list didn't make everything magically at 50%, but it did have a significant influence on the stats. Since there more zergs were invited than terran for example, you can also debate if it should be included.
@Bronze, Lovebuzz has it almost correct:
Actually, what they literally mean is simple: zergs are the least winning race right now in the games included in these statistics. Period
Can you point me to the spreadsheet? Or better yet, is there spreadsheets for each months results by tournament?
Main thing to notice imo: If you delete the WCS qualifiers (so EU + NA), then suddenly you get (overall): 49.7% win rate for terran, 48.8% for zerg and 51.5% for toss. So those qualifiers have a huge impact. Not strange since both have TvZ rates at roughly 70%!
So yeah I stick to my conclusions that I wouldnt conclude too much from these stats.
Edit: It indeeds seems that those stats are from that spreadsheet. So would be nice if the link to the sheet was included in the OP, and in general it is alot more informative than only the pictures
Thanks. Damn, I was hoping for more detail. I looked into the data itself, if you want to do a more rigorous statistical analysis, someone has to individually code in the games. The counts aggregated too much of the information, whereas in a proposed analysis, I would want it to be map by map... I don't have the time to code that in. Oh well.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm or reject the statistics.
That sc2 statistics guy did the exact same thing for about 2 years and nobody complained. And obviously we aren't looking at gold etc. statistics because it takes too much work. The majority of people however are interested in balancing the game at the pro level, not for bronze players. And while you don't want it to be impossible for a bronze zerg to win, it doesn't make sense to make changes FOR them.
Badly designed maps are a fact of life - there's no way around them. The statistics aren't trying to show that. They're simply showing game balance as is. If you notice, the OP didn't actually bring his opinions into the actual statistics. For what they're intended to represent, they work well. Are they perfect? no not really. But pointing out the things you did makes no sense; the survey doesn't aim to address map balance.
Also, the low vs high latency games are so few and far between that they're drowned out by normal games. Things like that. I don't really feel like explaining all of statistics though lol. You point out bias, but it isn't relevant bias. It's not something they can prevent. How would you gather statistics that determined how good a map was? That's almost entirely subjective.
So by other words, it could mean ANYTHING, and thus is just useless statitsics with no real intent or clear focus or aim.
@BronzeKnee; thank you for proving my point regarding speculation and making their own shit up regarding what it it could mean.
Yes by systemically disagreeing with you and showing why you were wrong I proved my point... Every statistical discussion on this website turns out like this. People rant and rave and don't think anyone can be objective, that everyone has some hidden agenda...
I do think that, actually. There's this thing called the law of very large numbers. That is to say, if you make enough samples, at least one will skew towards your view. The only way you can make a reasonably objective statistic is to choose your sample first, then find out about the result. ie. We discard this month's data, and look at next month using the same selection criteria, and see whether the trend continues.
On May 02 2013 06:07 Sissors wrote: @Spiral Actually if this is based on the same spreadsheet that also circulated in other topics that is the case. First of all because we aren't talking here about thousands of games. Second if a single tournament has a very 'unbalanced' win rate that can have a significant influence. Case in point WCS europe qualifiers. Removing that from the list didn't make everything magically at 50%, but it did have a significant influence on the stats. Since there more zergs were invited than terran for example, you can also debate if it should be included.
@Bronze, Lovebuzz has it almost correct:
Actually, what they literally mean is simple: zergs are the least winning race right now in the games included in these statistics. Period
Can you point me to the spreadsheet? Or better yet, is there spreadsheets for each months results by tournament?
Main thing to notice imo: If you delete the WCS qualifiers (so EU + NA), then suddenly you get (overall): 49.7% win rate for terran, 48.8% for zerg and 51.5% for toss. So those qualifiers have a huge impact. Not strange since both have TvZ rates at roughly 70%!
So yeah I stick to my conclusions that I wouldnt conclude too much from these stats.
Nice thank you. He never should have made graphs from it, or at least he should have included all the information on the spreadsheet on the graphs.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm or reject the statistics.
That sc2 statistics guy did the exact same thing for about 2 years and nobody complained. And obviously we aren't looking at gold etc. statistics because it takes too much work. The majority of people however are interested in balancing the game at the pro level, not for bronze players. And while you don't want it to be impossible for a bronze zerg to win, it doesn't make sense to make changes FOR them.
Badly designed maps are a fact of life - there's no way around them. The statistics aren't trying to show that. They're simply showing game balance as is. If you notice, the OP didn't actually bring his opinions into the actual statistics. For what they're intended to represent, they work well. Are they perfect? no not really. But pointing out the things you did makes no sense; the survey doesn't aim to address map balance.
Also, the low vs high latency games are so few and far between that they're drowned out by normal games. Things like that. I don't really feel like explaining all of statistics though lol. You point out bias, but it isn't relevant bias. It's not something they can prevent. How would you gather statistics that determined how good a map was? That's almost entirely subjective.
So by other words, it could mean ANYTHING, and thus is just useless statitsics with no real intent or clear focus or aim.
@BronzeKnee; thank you for proving my point regarding speculation and making their own shit up regarding what it it could mean.
Yes by systemically disagreeing with you and showing why you were wrong I proved my point... Every statistical discussion on this website turns out like this. People rant and rave and don't think anyone can be objective, that everyone has some hidden agenda...
I do think that, actually. There's this thing called the law of very large numbers. That is to say, if you make enough samples, at least one will skew towards your view. The only way you can make a reasonably objective statistic is to choose your sample first, then find out about the result. ie. We discard this month's data, and look at next month using the same selection criteria, and see whether the trend continues.
You are completely misusing the law of truly large numbers and taking it out of context. It has nothing to do with a small sample size of games.
The law seeks to debunk one element of supposed supernatural phenomenology. For instance, some theologians will argue that the chances that the Earth was created by chance and not by intelligent design are absurdly small. Thus in there eyes, Earth could have only been created by God.
However, when we consider the size of the universe, and the very large number of planets, you'll realize that the Earth being created by chance wasn't exactly that unlikely. In fact, for it not occur would be unlikely! See the math below.
For a simplified example of the law, assume that a given event happens with a probability of 0.1% in one trial. Then the probability that this unlikely event does not happen in a single trial is 99.9% = 0.999. In a sample of 1000 independent trials, the probability that the event does not happen in any of them is , or 36.8%. The probability that the event happens at least once in 1000 trials is then 1 − 0.368 = 0.632 or 63.2%. The probability that it happens at least once in 10,000 trials is . This means that this "unlikely event" has a probability of 63.2% of happening if 1000 chances are given, or over 99.9% for 10,000 chances. In other words, a highly unlikely event, given enough tries, is even more unlikely to not occur. [edit]
On May 02 2013 05:43 MarlieChurphy wrote: These stats are only representative to timing imbalances within the units. Each race has really imbalanced shit, Zerg's stuff all comes really later. Protoss and Terran stuff come really earlier.
Widow mine range needs decrease. Void ray prismatic alignment needs it's buff/debuff timers drastically modified. (possiblly 4-5 seconds buff, 10-30 seconds recharge) Hellbats could use a nerf or two. HP, Armor, but more importantly the way the damage and unit type modifier is layed out. (they need to do less to all and big boost to small/bio) Ravens - not sure on these yet, but I rarely lose a game where I get a nice ball of them added up. Especially in TvT Swarm Hosts with proper dichotomy of AA and creep seem really hard for protoss to deal with. (possible nerf of locust range, damage, or hp with increase in spawn time.)
Perhaps you would also like some nerfs to the marine, the medivac and the siegetank? What are you smoking man? Did you know that TvZ was pretty balanced and FUN to watch in WOL before the queennerf (remember DRG vs MKP @ mlg)? Then blizzard buffed the queen a tiny bit and BOOM, we got a long time of zerg dominance.
TvZ in HOTS is fun to watch. Topzergs have no problem beating terrans. Both races have to put a serious amount of practice into the game, and both sides have to micro & macro as hard. The days where zergs could 1a into broodlord infestor are over, and lazy zergs will indeed lose a lot more now, I agree.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm or reject the statistics.
That sc2 statistics guy did the exact same thing for about 2 years and nobody complained. And obviously we aren't looking at gold etc. statistics because it takes too much work. The majority of people however are interested in balancing the game at the pro level, not for bronze players. And while you don't want it to be impossible for a bronze zerg to win, it doesn't make sense to make changes FOR them.
Badly designed maps are a fact of life - there's no way around them. The statistics aren't trying to show that. They're simply showing game balance as is. If you notice, the OP didn't actually bring his opinions into the actual statistics. For what they're intended to represent, they work well. Are they perfect? no not really. But pointing out the things you did makes no sense; the survey doesn't aim to address map balance.
Also, the low vs high latency games are so few and far between that they're drowned out by normal games. Things like that. I don't really feel like explaining all of statistics though lol. You point out bias, but it isn't relevant bias. It's not something they can prevent. How would you gather statistics that determined how good a map was? That's almost entirely subjective.
So by other words, it could mean ANYTHING, and thus is just useless statitsics with no real intent or clear focus or aim.
@BronzeKnee; thank you for proving my point regarding speculation and making their own shit up regarding what it it could mean.
Yes by systemically disagreeing with you and showing why you were wrong I proved my point... Every statistical discussion on this website turns out like this. People rant and rave and don't think anyone can be objective, that everyone has some hidden agenda...
I do think that, actually. There's this thing called the law of very large numbers. That is to say, if you make enough samples, at least one will skew towards your view. The only way you can make a reasonably objective statistic is to choose your sample first, then find out about the result. ie. We discard this month's data, and look at next month using the same selection criteria, and see whether the trend continues.
On May 02 2013 06:07 Sissors wrote: @Spiral Actually if this is based on the same spreadsheet that also circulated in other topics that is the case. First of all because we aren't talking here about thousands of games. Second if a single tournament has a very 'unbalanced' win rate that can have a significant influence. Case in point WCS europe qualifiers. Removing that from the list didn't make everything magically at 50%, but it did have a significant influence on the stats. Since there more zergs were invited than terran for example, you can also debate if it should be included.
@Bronze, Lovebuzz has it almost correct:
Actually, what they literally mean is simple: zergs are the least winning race right now in the games included in these statistics. Period
Can you point me to the spreadsheet? Or better yet, is there spreadsheets for each months results by tournament?
Main thing to notice imo: If you delete the WCS qualifiers (so EU + NA), then suddenly you get (overall): 49.7% win rate for terran, 48.8% for zerg and 51.5% for toss. So those qualifiers have a huge impact. Not strange since both have TvZ rates at roughly 70%!
So yeah I stick to my conclusions that I wouldnt conclude too much from these stats.
Nice thank you. He never should have made graphs from it, or at least he should have included all the information on the spreadsheet on the graphs.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm or reject the statistics.
That sc2 statistics guy did the exact same thing for about 2 years and nobody complained. And obviously we aren't looking at gold etc. statistics because it takes too much work. The majority of people however are interested in balancing the game at the pro level, not for bronze players. And while you don't want it to be impossible for a bronze zerg to win, it doesn't make sense to make changes FOR them.
Badly designed maps are a fact of life - there's no way around them. The statistics aren't trying to show that. They're simply showing game balance as is. If you notice, the OP didn't actually bring his opinions into the actual statistics. For what they're intended to represent, they work well. Are they perfect? no not really. But pointing out the things you did makes no sense; the survey doesn't aim to address map balance.
Also, the low vs high latency games are so few and far between that they're drowned out by normal games. Things like that. I don't really feel like explaining all of statistics though lol. You point out bias, but it isn't relevant bias. It's not something they can prevent. How would you gather statistics that determined how good a map was? That's almost entirely subjective.
So by other words, it could mean ANYTHING, and thus is just useless statitsics with no real intent or clear focus or aim.
@BronzeKnee; thank you for proving my point regarding speculation and making their own shit up regarding what it it could mean.
Yes by systemically disagreeing with you and showing why you were wrong I proved my point... Every statistical discussion on this website turns out like this. People rant and rave and don't think anyone can be objective, that everyone has some hidden agenda...
I do think that, actually. There's this thing called the law of very large numbers. That is to say, if you make enough samples, at least one will skew towards your view. The only way you can make a reasonably objective statistic is to choose your sample first, then find out about the result. ie. We discard this month's data, and look at next month using the same selection criteria, and see whether the trend continues.
You are completely misusing the law of truly large numbers and taking it out of context. It has nothing to do with a small sample size of games.
The law seeks to debunk one element of supposed supernatural phenomenology. For instance, some theologians will argue that the chances that the Earth was created by chance and not by intelligent design are absurdly small. Thus in there eyes, Earth could have only been created by God.
However, when we consider the size of the universe, and the very large number of planets, you'll realize that the Earth being created by chance wasn't exactly that unlikely. In fact, for it not occur would be unlikely! See the math below.
For a simplified example of the law, assume that a given event happens with a probability of 0.1% in one trial. Then the probability that this unlikely event does not happen in a single trial is 99.9% = 0.999. In a sample of 1000 independent trials, the probability that the event does not happen in any of them is , or 36.8%. The probability that the event happens at least once in 1000 trials is then 1 − 0.368 = 0.632 or 63.2%. The probability that it happens at least once in 10,000 trials is . This means that this "unlikely event" has a probability of 63.2% of happening if 1000 chances are given, or over 99.9% for 10,000 chances. In other words, a highly unlikely event, given enough tries, is even more unlikely to not occur. [edit]
I did not say his sample size is small. I say his choice of the selection of tournaments to include/not include can be questioned. Yes, I would admit that I am pushing it, since he didn't really try hard to pick and choose which tournaments to include.
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm or reject the statistics.
That sc2 statistics guy did the exact same thing for about 2 years and nobody complained. And obviously we aren't looking at gold etc. statistics because it takes too much work. The majority of people however are interested in balancing the game at the pro level, not for bronze players. And while you don't want it to be impossible for a bronze zerg to win, it doesn't make sense to make changes FOR them.
Badly designed maps are a fact of life - there's no way around them. The statistics aren't trying to show that. They're simply showing game balance as is. If you notice, the OP didn't actually bring his opinions into the actual statistics. For what they're intended to represent, they work well. Are they perfect? no not really. But pointing out the things you did makes no sense; the survey doesn't aim to address map balance.
Also, the low vs high latency games are so few and far between that they're drowned out by normal games. Things like that. I don't really feel like explaining all of statistics though lol. You point out bias, but it isn't relevant bias. It's not something they can prevent. How would you gather statistics that determined how good a map was? That's almost entirely subjective.
So by other words, it could mean ANYTHING, and thus is just useless statitsics with no real intent or clear focus or aim.
@BronzeKnee; thank you for proving my point regarding speculation and making their own shit up regarding what it it could mean.
Yes by systemically disagreeing with you and showing why you were wrong I proved my point... Every statistical discussion on this website turns out like this. People rant and rave and don't think anyone can be objective, that everyone has some hidden agenda...
You missed the entire point of my post. The statistics is not backed up by a method regarding how it should be interpreted as of context and use. I exemplified this by statements which questions it's validity that are easily answered with a proper methodology in place. as it is now we can't tell for certain if my concerns are correct or if your "systemic disagreement" is correct, if they are both wrong or both right, this is also why people tend to speculate and come to various conclusions, as you pointed out, because we don't know. We are just making shit up what it could mean. This is not actually based on anything that can be considered as accurate.
On May 02 2013 06:07 Sissors wrote: @Spiral Actually if this is based on the same spreadsheet that also circulated in other topics that is the case. First of all because we aren't talking here about thousands of games. Second if a single tournament has a very 'unbalanced' win rate that can have a significant influence. Case in point WCS europe qualifiers. Removing that from the list didn't make everything magically at 50%, but it did have a significant influence on the stats. Since there more zergs were invited than terran for example, you can also debate if it should be included.
@Bronze, Lovebuzz has it almost correct:
Actually, what they literally mean is simple: zergs are the least winning race right now in the games included in these statistics. Period
Can you point me to the spreadsheet? Or better yet, is there spreadsheets for each months results by tournament?
Main thing to notice imo: If you delete the WCS qualifiers (so EU + NA), then suddenly you get (overall): 49.7% win rate for terran, 48.8% for zerg and 51.5% for toss. So those qualifiers have a huge impact. Not strange since both have TvZ rates at roughly 70%!
So yeah I stick to my conclusions that I wouldnt conclude too much from these stats.
Nice thank you. He never should have made graphs from it, or at least he should have included all the information on the spreadsheet on the graphs.
On May 02 2013 06:29 achan1058 wrote:
On May 02 2013 06:01 BronzeKnee wrote:
On May 02 2013 03:27 Integra wrote:
On May 02 2013 03:22 Alryk wrote:
On May 02 2013 03:05 Integra wrote:
On May 02 2013 02:52 Alryk wrote:
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm or reject the statistics.
That sc2 statistics guy did the exact same thing for about 2 years and nobody complained. And obviously we aren't looking at gold etc. statistics because it takes too much work. The majority of people however are interested in balancing the game at the pro level, not for bronze players. And while you don't want it to be impossible for a bronze zerg to win, it doesn't make sense to make changes FOR them.
Badly designed maps are a fact of life - there's no way around them. The statistics aren't trying to show that. They're simply showing game balance as is. If you notice, the OP didn't actually bring his opinions into the actual statistics. For what they're intended to represent, they work well. Are they perfect? no not really. But pointing out the things you did makes no sense; the survey doesn't aim to address map balance.
Also, the low vs high latency games are so few and far between that they're drowned out by normal games. Things like that. I don't really feel like explaining all of statistics though lol. You point out bias, but it isn't relevant bias. It's not something they can prevent. How would you gather statistics that determined how good a map was? That's almost entirely subjective.
So by other words, it could mean ANYTHING, and thus is just useless statitsics with no real intent or clear focus or aim.
@BronzeKnee; thank you for proving my point regarding speculation and making their own shit up regarding what it it could mean.
Yes by systemically disagreeing with you and showing why you were wrong I proved my point... Every statistical discussion on this website turns out like this. People rant and rave and don't think anyone can be objective, that everyone has some hidden agenda...
I do think that, actually. There's this thing called the law of very large numbers. That is to say, if you make enough samples, at least one will skew towards your view. The only way you can make a reasonably objective statistic is to choose your sample first, then find out about the result. ie. We discard this month's data, and look at next month using the same selection criteria, and see whether the trend continues.
You are completely misusing the law of truly large numbers and taking it out of context. It has nothing to do with a small sample size of games.
The law seeks to debunk one element of supposed supernatural phenomenology. For instance, some theologians will argue that the chances that the Earth was created by chance and not by intelligent design are absurdly small. Thus in there eyes, Earth could have only been created by God.
However, when we consider the size of the universe, and the very large number of planets, you'll realize that the Earth being created by chance wasn't exactly that unlikely. In fact, for it not occur would be unlikely! See the math below.
For a simplified example of the law, assume that a given event happens with a probability of 0.1% in one trial. Then the probability that this unlikely event does not happen in a single trial is 99.9% = 0.999. In a sample of 1000 independent trials, the probability that the event does not happen in any of them is , or 36.8%. The probability that the event happens at least once in 1000 trials is then 1 − 0.368 = 0.632 or 63.2%. The probability that it happens at least once in 10,000 trials is . This means that this "unlikely event" has a probability of 63.2% of happening if 1000 chances are given, or over 99.9% for 10,000 chances. In other words, a highly unlikely event, given enough tries, is even more unlikely to not occur. [edit]
I did not say his sample size is small. I say his choice of the selection of tournaments to include/not include can be questioned.
There's this thing called the law of very large numbers. That is to say, if you make enough samples, at least one will skew towards your view.
This law does not exist. If you mean the law of truly large numbers (which I assumed), then you are completely misusing it. The data was not derived from a truly large number, so arguing that it is invalid because of that is senseless. That was my point.
Anyway, what is the problem with his selection of tournaments? What do you think he should have added or excluded? He included all major professional tournaments recently from what I can see, but I could very well be wrong.
well it almost looks like the WoL start, so if we don't buff Zerg now the game will be balanced before LotV release. If we buff Zerg now it will be balanced now and Zerg will be OP again in 2 years. I just hope Tanks get stomped even in TvT at some point, so we get more awesome Tanks !
Tbh he is right that even if the selection is perfectly valid, the problem is that there are really many perfectly valid selections. As example excluding the WCS quals would be no problem, you can give a good reason why you do it, and it suddenly gives a totally different result. You can set the bar higher of which games you include, or lower. You can only look at Korean games, and there you also have different levels.
So in the end there are quite some valid tournament selections that can yield different results. Which is why you always should be careful with statistics: statistics are definately useful, but you really have to watch closely what is included and how significant the result is.
On May 02 2013 06:07 Sissors wrote: @Spiral Actually if this is based on the same spreadsheet that also circulated in other topics that is the case. First of all because we aren't talking here about thousands of games. Second if a single tournament has a very 'unbalanced' win rate that can have a significant influence. Case in point WCS europe qualifiers. Removing that from the list didn't make everything magically at 50%, but it did have a significant influence on the stats. Since there more zergs were invited than terran for example, you can also debate if it should be included.
@Bronze, Lovebuzz has it almost correct:
Actually, what they literally mean is simple: zergs are the least winning race right now in the games included in these statistics. Period
Can you point me to the spreadsheet? Or better yet, is there spreadsheets for each months results by tournament?
Main thing to notice imo: If you delete the WCS qualifiers (so EU + NA), then suddenly you get (overall): 49.7% win rate for terran, 48.8% for zerg and 51.5% for toss. So those qualifiers have a huge impact. Not strange since both have TvZ rates at roughly 70%!
So yeah I stick to my conclusions that I wouldnt conclude too much from these stats.
Nice thank you. He never should have made graphs from it, or at least he should have included all the information on the spreadsheet on the graphs.
On May 02 2013 06:29 achan1058 wrote:
On May 02 2013 06:01 BronzeKnee wrote:
On May 02 2013 03:27 Integra wrote:
On May 02 2013 03:22 Alryk wrote:
On May 02 2013 03:05 Integra wrote:
On May 02 2013 02:52 Alryk wrote:
On May 02 2013 02:45 synd wrote: I don't trust this statistics at all
Any reasoning for that lol?
52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
I don't know if including qualifiers was a good idea because of the potential for amateur vs pro matches, but there should be so few of them included that they get drowned out in the sample anyways. Kind of interesting statistics, and I'm not too too surprised by what I see.
Even 55/45 is potentially close to margin of error, although in this case it's unlikely. I hope we see buffs to zerg and not nerfs to whatever is necessary - it's usually a much more entertaining way of doing the game.
Because it's bullshit, nor sample size, how relevant the sample size or that the numbers actually are showing "balance" are determined or properly explained.
How do we know that the sample size is represental for the game a a whole, how accurate does it reflect the MU's on other leagues such as gold, plat, diamond etc, How does it compare to different regions, like EU, NA and KR etc.
How do we know that these numbers only relate to race balance issues, it could just as well showing bad designed maps, people with actual lower skill meeting other players with better skill or just the fact that certain players are better at playing on high latency and that just happens to be Terran players, or maybe Terran players ARE easier to play during latency compared to the other races.
No methodlogy for data collecting has been determined and no attempt has been made to actually isolate the important variables for proving if one race is better than another, we don't even know what those variables are People will only start to speculate and make their own shit up as of why this has happened, and depeding of their personal bias they will either confirm or reject the statistics.
That sc2 statistics guy did the exact same thing for about 2 years and nobody complained. And obviously we aren't looking at gold etc. statistics because it takes too much work. The majority of people however are interested in balancing the game at the pro level, not for bronze players. And while you don't want it to be impossible for a bronze zerg to win, it doesn't make sense to make changes FOR them.
Badly designed maps are a fact of life - there's no way around them. The statistics aren't trying to show that. They're simply showing game balance as is. If you notice, the OP didn't actually bring his opinions into the actual statistics. For what they're intended to represent, they work well. Are they perfect? no not really. But pointing out the things you did makes no sense; the survey doesn't aim to address map balance.
Also, the low vs high latency games are so few and far between that they're drowned out by normal games. Things like that. I don't really feel like explaining all of statistics though lol. You point out bias, but it isn't relevant bias. It's not something they can prevent. How would you gather statistics that determined how good a map was? That's almost entirely subjective.
So by other words, it could mean ANYTHING, and thus is just useless statitsics with no real intent or clear focus or aim.
@BronzeKnee; thank you for proving my point regarding speculation and making their own shit up regarding what it it could mean.
Yes by systemically disagreeing with you and showing why you were wrong I proved my point... Every statistical discussion on this website turns out like this. People rant and rave and don't think anyone can be objective, that everyone has some hidden agenda...
I do think that, actually. There's this thing called the law of very large numbers. That is to say, if you make enough samples, at least one will skew towards your view. The only way you can make a reasonably objective statistic is to choose your sample first, then find out about the result. ie. We discard this month's data, and look at next month using the same selection criteria, and see whether the trend continues.
You are completely misusing the law of truly large numbers and taking it out of context. It has nothing to do with a small sample size of games.
The law seeks to debunk one element of supposed supernatural phenomenology. For instance, some theologians will argue that the chances that the Earth was created by chance and not by intelligent design are absurdly small. Thus in there eyes, Earth could have only been created by God.
However, when we consider the size of the universe, and the very large number of planets, you'll realize that the Earth being created by chance wasn't exactly that unlikely. In fact, for it not occur would be unlikely! See the math below.
For a simplified example of the law, assume that a given event happens with a probability of 0.1% in one trial. Then the probability that this unlikely event does not happen in a single trial is 99.9% = 0.999. In a sample of 1000 independent trials, the probability that the event does not happen in any of them is , or 36.8%. The probability that the event happens at least once in 1000 trials is then 1 − 0.368 = 0.632 or 63.2%. The probability that it happens at least once in 10,000 trials is . This means that this "unlikely event" has a probability of 63.2% of happening if 1000 chances are given, or over 99.9% for 10,000 chances. In other words, a highly unlikely event, given enough tries, is even more unlikely to not occur. [edit]
I did not say his sample size is small. I say his choice of the selection of tournaments to include/not include can be questioned.
There's this thing called the law of very large numbers. That is to say, if you make enough samples, at least one will skew towards your view.
This law does not exist. If you mean the law of truly large numbers (which I assumed), then you are completely misusing it. The data was not derived from a truly large number, so arguing that it is invalid because of that is senseless. That was my point.
Anyway, what is the problem with his selection of tournaments? What do you think he should have added or excluded? He included all major professional tournaments recently from what I can see, but I could very well be wrong.
As I understand it, it does not describe the data itself. Rather, it says that given enough samples or criteria selections, there is very likely one that appears abnormal. Assuming that the provider of the data is malicious, he could pick to see which tournaments/cut off to skew towards a certain win rate and include those. Yes, I will admit I am pushing it a bit since he didn't really pick at which kind of tournaments to include/exclude, and the number of natural cut-offs for tournament tiers is somewhat limited.
On May 02 2013 03:25 Danners933 wrote: Honestly Sc2 feels the most balanced as it has even been in my opinion. The only thing I really think needs a looking at is Hellbat drops. As for the percentages it really does look about right. Zerg feels like they need help but they rarely use any of the new tools given to them. Yet they are still winning on the pro level. So give them time to play, I think within a few months Zerg Win Rate should jump.
Yeah I agree. The game is mostly balanced besides hellbats and widow mines drops (which are really silly IMO).
Widow Mines should have cap on the amount of units it can hit (you can set it in the "Search" field, and set "Maximum Count" to any #).
The game where 1 widow mine took out 14 probes (sOs) and he lost just because of 1 WM was crazy.
Widow Mine blast should cap at like maybe 10 units or so.
Even as a mostly Terran player (playing random the other time), I don't like Widow Mines or Hellbats that much.
In BW, nothing was as random or could change the entire course of the game as a Widow Mine (for example).
Reaver scarab blasts were predictable and slow (both opponents could micro against it easily). The scarabs would dud and do no damage sometimes but that was only if the scarab traveled some crazy pathing (like trying to travel around a structure or something, as scarabs had ground pathing and could be blocked by ground units).
Plus, it's rare that 1 or 2 scarabs changed the outcome of the entire game (mainly because units didn't really clump as much) like Widow Mines do.
I say a cap of like 10 units max (again, it can be set in the search field of the data editor under "Max Count" or "Max Target").
Anything that makes the game end (or decides the entire game) due to 1 or 2 things (especially if they are random as widow mines) should be nerfed somewhat.
Randomness isn't a problem itself. I mean WarCraft 3 and Dota have randomness, but nothing in WC3 or Dota have randomness enough that you lose the game outright due to 1-2 bad rolls (there have been plenty of times in Dota where the entire team gets taken out due to something "unlucky", like being caught out of position but they still were able to make a comeback... in SC2 this rarely happens as much due to how 1 or 2 unlucky things, like a Widow Mine taking out 14 or your workers early game, can put you far behind that you probably won't make a comeback).
(Also it's not just Widow Mines either. I think Protoss in general has that problem where the whole investment is on one big Protoss army, and if they lose or win 1 big battle with that Protoss army, the game is decided there. That's why I dislike watching anything involving Protoss. TvZ is more back and forth and more gradual.)
While the game with sOs where 1 Widow Mine destroyed 14 probes is rare, something like that shouldn't be in the game.
tl;rd - Widow Mines should have a "Maximum Count" (editable in the "Search" effect) of 10 or less (rather than unlimited like it is now).
Hmmm, the odd part seems to be the EU winrates in TvZ specifically. I wonder if it's some sort of rubberbanding effect from EU Zerg domination in WoL, kind of like a bubble bursting.
On May 02 2013 03:22 Eventine wrote: always nice to see people with demands and complaints on the data and a lack of commitment to actually provide "better" data or analysis.
Agreed. These data sets are interesting as always, and something can be garnered from them regardless of a better set of data existing.
Mentioning GSL tournament results is a nice contrast because that is another very specific set of data.
I think the game is quite balanced other than ZvT for now. The biggest problem is that there is almost only one style from the terran, bio mine whole game long. Even if the game is completely balanced, I would love bio mine style to get a small nerf so mech would get used and viper/swarm hosts can make some appearance
On May 02 2013 05:43 MarlieChurphy wrote: These stats are only representative to timing imbalances within the units. Each race has really imbalanced shit, Zerg's stuff all comes really later. Protoss and Terran stuff come really earlier.
Widow mine range needs decrease. Void ray prismatic alignment needs it's buff/debuff timers drastically modified. (possiblly 4-5 seconds buff, 10-30 seconds recharge) Hellbats could use a nerf or two. HP, Armor, but more importantly the way the damage and unit type modifier is layed out. (they need to do less to all and big boost to small/bio) Ravens - not sure on these yet, but I rarely lose a game where I get a nice ball of them added up. Especially in TvT Swarm Hosts with proper dichotomy of AA and creep seem really hard for protoss to deal with. (possible nerf of locust range, damage, or hp with increase in spawn time.)
Perhaps you would also like some nerfs to the marine, the medivac and the siegetank? What are you smoking man? Did you know that TvZ was pretty balanced and FUN to watch in WOL before the queennerf (remember DRG vs MKP @ mlg)? Then blizzard buffed the queen a tiny bit and BOOM, we got a long time of zerg dominance.
TvZ in HOTS is fun to watch. Topzergs have no problem beating terrans. Both races have to put a serious amount of practice into the game, and both sides have to micro & macro as hard. The days where zergs could 1a into broodlord infestor are over, and lazy zergs will indeed lose a lot more now, I agree.
Actually TvZ is shit to watch at the moment, every game is the same. Zerg defends until Muta. Terran build cheap mineral only units and pushes up the map complete with a further 10 min death animation .Getting bored of it already tbh and i suspect in the next 3 months many others will too.
PvT is the only matchup worth watching these days, at least the first 10 mins of the game has some variety with different openings and units.
Blizzard gonna be taking out that nerf-hammer again upon the Terran.
TvZ is already getting stagnant with every Terran going bio+mine. A nerf must come to WM and then a slight buff to Siege Tank. It's stupid how WM can be cost effective than Tanks.
I want to see more variety. Not Bio+Mine 24/7.
And SH needs a buff in burrow-reburrow time and slight movement speed increase.
All of this is moot because 99.9% of people reading this simply need to improve their skill. Balance isn't what is causing you to lose. If there are top KRs winning with your race, then you can too (though you have to put in 12+ hour training days).
Once you start beating top KRs (ie. you are pushing on the limits of what your race can do), then you can start considering if balance is holding you back and make silly threads like this.
On May 02 2013 03:25 Danners933 wrote: Honestly Sc2 feels the most balanced as it has even been in my opinion. The only thing I really think needs a looking at is Hellbat drops. As for the percentages it really does look about right. Zerg feels like they need help but they rarely use any of the new tools given to them. Yet they are still winning on the pro level. So give them time to play, I think within a few months Zerg Win Rate should jump.
Yeah I agree. The game is mostly balanced besides hellbats and widow mines drops (which are really silly IMO).
Widow Mines should have cap on the amount of units it can hit (you can set it in the "Search" field, and set "Maximum Count" to any #).
The game where 1 widow mine took out 14 probes (sOs) and he lost just because of 1 WM was crazy.
Widow Mine blast should cap at like maybe 10 units or so.
Even as a mostly Terran player (playing random the other time), I don't like Widow Mines or Hellbats that much.
In BW, nothing was as random or could change the entire course of the game as a Widow Mine (for example).
Reaver scarab blasts were predictable and slow (both opponents could micro against it easily). The scarabs would dud and do no damage sometimes but that was only if the scarab traveled some crazy pathing (like trying to travel around a structure or something, as scarabs had ground pathing and could be blocked by ground units).
Plus, it's rare that 1 or 2 scarabs changed the outcome of the entire game (mainly because units didn't really clump as much) like Widow Mines do.
I say a cap of like 10 units max (again, it can be set in the search field of the data editor under "Max Count" or "Max Target").
Anything that makes the game end (or decides the entire game) due to 1 or 2 things (especially if they are random as widow mines) should be nerfed somewhat.
Randomness isn't a problem itself. I mean WarCraft 3 and Dota have randomness, but nothing in WC3 or Dota have randomness enough that you lose the game outright due to 1-2 bad rolls (there have been plenty of times in Dota where the entire team gets taken out due to something "unlucky", like being caught out of position but they still were able to make a comeback... in SC2 this rarely happens as much due to how 1 or 2 unlucky things, like a Widow Mine taking out 14 or your workers early game, can put you far behind that you probably won't make a comeback).
(Also it's not just Widow Mines either. I think Protoss in general has that problem where the whole investment is on one big Protoss army, and if they lose or win 1 big battle with that Protoss army, the game is decided there. That's why I dislike watching anything involving Protoss. TvZ is more back and forth and more gradual.)
While the game with sOs where 1 Widow Mine destroyed 14 probes is rare, something like that shouldn't be in the game.
tl;rd - Widow Mines should have a "Maximum Count" (editable in the "Search" effect) of 10 or less (rather than unlimited like it is now).
widow mines should never get 14 worker kills on there own unless you try and kill the mine with the workers or you just don't see it happening.
Also, in BW spider mines could kill 10-15+ workers if someone made a mistake. There was one game where probes were transferring down a ramp and a dragoon triggered a spider mine as he was crossing the probe's path. Roughly 20 probes died to one mine that comes for free on a cooler version of the hellion.
EDIT
@Jinky: That's a really dumb argument, because balance affects players no matter how bad they are. If i'm in bronze, and there's another guy in bronze, and protoss has a 99% winrate vs terran and he's playing protoss, it's very likely he beats me because we're at the same skill level and balance favors the protoss. Sure, I can just get better and win, but throwing the casual players under the bus isn't exactly the way to go about making star2 super popular
As people have already said for a few times Zergs having a bit lower winrate, especially vs Terran, will very likely correct itself soon enough. Zerg being the race that gains most advantage of extreme greed, due to "saving" of production cycles, has to wait and find a solution to aggression of other races. If Zerg is buffed now I think WoL will happen and we'll have something very similar to BL+infestor at the end of 2012.
I think its still too early for this discussion. Most of the zergs on ladder are still stuck in this get 80 drones or die mentality. I think its still no different for many pros. The meta game hasn't had a chance to evolve yet. We are still playing on many WoL maps that were designed with different meta in mind. Widow mines are also probably a big cause of the ZvT winrates, many players still don't know how to deal with them - we may start to see new ways of doing this (using changelings for example). Lets see what happens in the WCS.
On May 03 2013 00:23 Mortal wrote: Small sample makes statistics this close irrelevant.
The samples seem quite large to me there are 400 tvz games in the data. Correct me if I'm wrong but I;m almost certain the 45/55 distribution found would lead us to reject the null hypothesis that each race has an equal chance of winning. That alone makes this pretty interesting
On May 03 2013 01:03 Oukka wrote: As people have already said for a few times Zergs having a bit lower winrate, especially vs Terran, will very likely correct itself soon enough. Zerg being the race that gains most advantage of extreme greed, due to "saving" of production cycles, has to wait and find a solution to aggression of other races. If Zerg is buffed now I think WoL will happen and we'll have something very similar to BL+infestor at the end of 2012.
This is the problem, Zerg are even more so on the back step now in ZvT then WoL or in the history of SC2. The Zerg's advantage has always been greed and the ability to remax quickly. However now with all the horas units Terran has zerg is just constantly having to stay back and defend and try to get drones out, if he drones a little to hard a few hell bats of widow mines can end the game. So Zerg really has a hard time being greedy and even in the event that we do manage to prevent any damage and get our 3 base 70 drones out fast, armies can disappear in a second or wrong click due to widow mines.
Much like many other people have said the ZvT matchup is getting really old really fast. Every game is the same story, either the zerg all-in's or tries to hold 3 base and prevent the plethora of ways Terran can now cost effectively hurt your drone line until muta or tier 3. Zerg just can't move out or put pressure on Terran till tier 3 now more so then ever it makes for very boring games.
Please point out why the methodology is flawed; I don't see any inherent selection/etc. bias in the samples. I also don't see your reasoning about the sample size. Sample sizes of 1,000 are often used to properly represent the national population - they're usually seen as accurate as well. The problem is they need to be representative of the population. If this is supposed to reflect the pro scene, it does so well.
You don't actually want a large sample size. If the sample size gets too large, you actually increase your error. Smaller samples are almost always better as long as you get past the initial 50-100 sample size road block.
Second paragraph is hilarious
Methodology is flawed because it takes no account of relative standards of players, perceived map imbalances, formats potentially influencing results (team leagues with winners league format exaggerating map imbalances, the same allowing for abuse of poor individual matchups, longer series with uneven opponents counting for more than shorter series with even matches etc).
I guess if you had a random 2700 chess player take white against Carlsen over 500 games, you'd come to the conclusion that in chess Black is OP?
On May 03 2013 00:23 Mortal wrote: Small sample makes statistics this close irrelevant.
The samples seem quite large to me there are 400 tvz games in the data. Correct me if I'm wrong but I;m almost certain the 45/55 distribution found would lead us to reject the null hypothesis that each race has an equal chance of winning. That alone makes this pretty interesting
Since you asked nicely, I will correct you.
The data found can be used to reject the null hypothesis that in the ZvT games the zergs had on average a 50% chance to win. Thats an important difference, lets say I play 100 games with terran vs life. Result is 100 wins for him, but you also cannot use that to reject the hypothesis that each race has an equal chance to win.
As said before, if you remove the WCS qualifier results everything falls within the uncertainty.
These stats mean nothing, the game is very new right now. Also it takes Zerg the longest time to adapt to new strategies due to the larva mechanic and their new units come into play later in games than the T/P equivalents.
People will probably jump on me for saying this, but it's actually a good sign that Zerg is slightly behind in these statistics because of aforementioned...it takes longer for Zerg reactionary play to develop compared to T/P play.
In a month or two we'll see Zerg winrates rise quite a bit because the game is more figured out. Zerg is the most reactionary race. Same thing occurred with wings of liberty, in which Terran was nerfed into the ground and Zerg was overbuffed at the same time.
So hopefully blizzard learned from wings and waits. Also, statistics have nothing to do with metagame/maps being involved with balance.
On May 03 2013 02:24 avilo wrote: These stats mean nothing, the game is very new right now. Also it takes Zerg the longest time to adapt to new strategies due to the larva mechanic and their new units come into play later in games than the T/P equivalents.
People will probably jump on me for saying this, but it's actually a good sign that Zerg is slightly behind in these statistics because of aforementioned...it takes longer for Zerg reactionary play to develop compared to T/P play.
In a month or two we'll see Zerg winrates rise quite a bit because the game is more figured out. Zerg is the most reactionary race. Same thing occurred with wings of liberty, in which Terran was nerfed into the ground and Zerg was overbuffed at the same time.
So hopefully blizzard learned from wings and waits. Also, statistics have nothing to do with metagame/maps being involved with balance.
I dont get those people saying we already need a balance patch. We waited 7 ~ 8 months to get a tiny balance change after the dumbest patch on earth (aka 1.4.3 queen + overlord buff). Cant we just hang on a bit more after an expansion is released?
The win-rates need to be adjusted and weighed. Assuming equal salience throughout the entirety of data is misleading. It is generally accepted that balance at top-tiers is more important than balance at lower skill-levels. Then why should lower level (matches with foreign players) TvZ games be counted the same towards GSL code S TvZ rates?
Then there's the issue of shifting meta. TvZ games when widow-mines were newly being used will not be representative of games currently.
This is a lot like Zergs presenting stats that include games from the start of WoL to justify win-rates in late WoL (broodlord/infestor LOL). Each patch should be reflected in the data - and ideally (though likely impossible), each shift in the meta should be reflected.
As a statistician, seeing the number of mindless "sample size too small" comments makes me shake my head. Here is my 2 cents.
My main beef is that standard errors were not presented. That's fine, considering how they are actually difficult to obtain so I don't blame the person who put this together. They weren't claiming anything and simply gathering data, so no one should be throwing any stones.
Let's take a look at the ZvT data. Supposing each game was independent this would be a binomial proportion with standard error ~0.024. In reality, the data are far from independent as I imagine many individuals are involved in multiple observed results. This added dependence will increase the variability leading to a larger standard error. That being said, the 0.024 I mentioned is likely too small. It is difficult to correct for this dependency, but one way would be to bootstrap the data to estimate the standard errors estimates. I don't feel like getting deeper into the data and coding that up, but to be honest I think the difference in win rate from 50% will still be outside the standard error. From my experience I cannot imagine that we would see even close to a 2-fold increase in the standard errors above the 0.024 we observed in the independent case.
Also, please people, stop complaining about the source of the data. If you think people should look at KR only for balance, then obviously this dataset is not appropriate, but it doesn't claim to be anymore than it is, so please calm down in that regard. On the other side of things, let's not go crazy in interpreting these numbers. As many people have already pointed out, the reason for significant discrepancies could possibly have to do with things other than balance. Who knows if balance is to blame, that cannot be discerned from this dataset. That doesn't make this dataset useless though, far from it. It shows there exists a discrepancy, it is up to us to figure out why.
We can do a Z test vs. a hypothetical mean of 0.50
z = (55.66% - 50%) / 0.63% z = 8.95
We can reject the null hypothesis that the value we get is not different from 50%.
There might be people who have issues with that, so if we only look at games from GSL, GSTL, PL, and GSL Qualifiers, we'd still get a significant result.
On May 03 2013 00:23 Mortal wrote: Small sample makes statistics this close irrelevant.
The samples seem quite large to me there are 400 tvz games in the data. Correct me if I'm wrong but I;m almost certain the 45/55 distribution found would lead us to reject the null hypothesis that each race has an equal chance of winning. That alone makes this pretty interesting
Since you asked nicely, I will correct you.
The data found can be used to reject the null hypothesis that in the ZvT games the zergs had on average a 50% chance to win. Thats an important difference, lets say I play 100 games with terran vs life. Result is 100 wins for him, but you also cannot use that to reject the hypothesis that each race has an equal chance to win.
As said before, if you remove the WCS qualifier results everything falls within the uncertainty.
I read this post again and again and I can't figure out where i have been corrected. Also as the kind person above me has shown, a significant result is still obtained with the WCS qualifier removed. Thanks for that btw :D
nice to see such nearly balanced stats, ty! Would have thought TvP to be quite off after the 60-65% Terran winrate in GSL. Seems like it's just a GSL-slump and Protoss are doing well everywhere else.
Because I was curious, I did the same analysis on the other races... splitting each time, overall vs korean tournaments only. It's all in the spreadsheet.
z = -1.08, fail to reject null that this is same as 50%
TvP Korean Only T wins 43.02% of the time z = -23.02, reject the null
Note that this is heavily influenced by GSL qualifiers where T loses far more often, take this out of the equation, you'd get a similar a fail to reject the null
PvZ Overall Zerg wins 47.93% oft the time, z = -3.41, you can reject the null here
PvZ Korean Only Zerg wins 49.46% of the time, z = -1.72, fail to reject the null
I updated my spreadsheet with that information (sheet 4), you still see significant results. But TvZ is closer than the other data sample. It does bring into question the quality of data here.
On May 03 2013 00:24 FakeDeath wrote: And SH needs a buff in burrow-reburrow time and slight movement speed increase.
The Swarmhost absolutely does not need a buff in any shape or form if you've seen it used properly.
yea in the burrow times are buffed you would never be able to get to them lol, with proper SH micro you can retreat them pretty fast while spawning scarabs.
Apparently Terran is a little bit strong in Win Percentage among three races. I guess it's due to the mines & boosters that could deal a great damage to other 2 races. But only Korean terrans may play that well and it contributed a lot.
On May 03 2013 05:14 Eventine wrote: Because I was curious, I did the same analysis on the other races... splitting each time, overall vs korean tournaments only. It's all in the spreadsheet.
It matters which percentage you are using to decide if you reject the null hypophesis.
But the problem remains it is hard to say if you got enough data. Sure if it would be a nice binomial distribution it would be easy to calculate and you would have definately enough, but it isn't a binomial distribution, and as shown that just deleting WCS quals made an enormous difference, I think for sure right now there is not enough data to just use statistics to proof possible imbalances.
On May 03 2013 05:14 Eventine wrote: Because I was curious, I did the same analysis on the other races... splitting each time, overall vs korean tournaments only. It's all in the spreadsheet.
It matters which percentage you are using to decide if you reject the null hypophesis.
However the main problem is that you are testing it is a binominal distribution with a certain chance (50%), and that isn't the case, and will never be the case. Simply because that would also assume that each player is equal: So it would mean that Life has an equal chance on a win with Zerg vs Innovation as the chance he beats Snute, which obviously is not the case: For a binominal distribution the chance for each 'experiment' should be equal, which is not the case.
And there you get the question how significant the data is: if it was a binominal distribution it would be significant, no doubt whatsoever about it. But it isn't, so you need enough games to make sure you can approximate it with a binominal distribution, which quite obviously isn't the case yet, otherwise just deleting WCS quals shouldn't have such a large impact.
Edit: at least I assumed you used a binominal distribution, but not sure after looking at the sheets
hm, you're right, I didn't use binomial distribution. That is probably the wrong method I used, I was doing it too quickly without thinking. i need to think on this as it's been a while since i've looked into binomial distributions.
i'm making the assumption that aggregating the data together will take out the influence of skill on the matchup. we have no reason to believe that all the "skilled players" play terran and the "lesser skilled" players play zerg. instead, i'm assuming that there's an equal balance of skill within the races and within the games played. I think that's a fair assumption as we get into larger sample size
I think this is especially true when we start restricting the sample to only the koreans leagues where theoretically the best players play. there will still be variances in player skills, but honestly i think high level results are enough, if someone wants to make this a dissertation, go forth and conquer.
I agree it is a fair assumption with a larger sample size, but the question is when do we get to the larger sample size exactly. We do have a few hunderd games for each match-up, but it is a not a few hunderd uncorrelated games. The winner of an average tournament plays quite some games, which are all correlated games, so they don't count as much as uncorrelated games would count. But well I leave it for math students to look at that, I always disliked statistics, and luckily for my work I can just stick to normal distributions
On May 03 2013 05:14 Eventine wrote: Because I was curious, I did the same analysis on the other races... splitting each time, overall vs korean tournaments only. It's all in the spreadsheet.
It matters which percentage you are using to decide if you reject the null hypophesis.
However the main problem is that you are testing it is a binominal distribution with a certain chance (50%), and that isn't the case, and will never be the case. Simply because that would also assume that each player is equal: So it would mean that Life has an equal chance on a win with Zerg vs Innovation as the chance he beats Snute, which obviously is not the case: For a binominal distribution the chance for each 'experiment' should be equal, which is not the case.
And there you get the question how significant the data is: if it was a binominal distribution it would be significant, no doubt whatsoever about it. But it isn't, so you need enough games to make sure you can approximate it with a binominal distribution, which quite obviously isn't the case yet, otherwise just deleting WCS quals shouldn't have such a large impact.
Edit: at least I assumed you used a binominal distribution, but not sure after looking at the sheets
hm, you're right, I didn't use binomial distribution. That is probably the wrong method I used, I was doing it too quickly without thinking. i need to think on this as it's been a while since i've looked into binomial distributions.
i'm making the assumption that aggregating the data together will take out the influence of skill on the matchup. we have no reason to believe that all the "skilled players" play terran and the "lesser skilled" players play zerg. instead, i'm assuming that there's an equal balance of skill within the races and within the games played. I think that's a fair assumption as we get into larger sample size
I think this is especially true when we start restricting the sample to only the koreans leagues where theoretically the best players play. there will still be variances in player skills, but honestly i think high level results are enough, if someone wants to make this a dissertation, go forth and conquer.
Yes all races are equally skilled, but not all players are equally skilled. If you have 100 matches of which 50 are absolutely loopsided, this means your statistics appears more reliable than it is. Of course this factor cannot be calculated and we have to ignore it for making the calculations. But just keep in mind, that the confidence inerval of the final result is probably slightly larger than what it appears to be. Also correlated results (same players playing multiple games) increase this trend. Go for a bit a larger standard deviation until you say it is statistically significant than you would if you had statistically perfect data.
On May 03 2013 06:17 Sissors wrote: I agree it is a fair assumption with a larger sample size, but the question is when do we get to the larger sample size exactly. We do have a few hunderd games for each match-up, but it is a not a few hunderd uncorrelated games. The winner of an average tournament plays quite some games, which are all correlated games, so they don't count as much as uncorrelated games would count. But well I leave it for math students to look at that, I always disliked statistics, and luckily for my work I can just stick to normal distributions
Very true. The winning player does play far more games and has a far greater influence on the match up results. Not much we can do about this except try to wait and gather more data, or perhaps we go down towards leagues that are a bit more skill equivalent, maybe Code A only.
On May 03 2013 06:20 Sandermatt wrote: Yes all races are equally skilled, but not all players are equally skilled. If you have 100 matches of which 50 are absolutely loopsided, this means your statistics appears more reliable than it is. Of course this factor cannot be calculated and we have to ignore it for making the calculations. But just keep in mind, that the confidence inerval of the final result is probably slightly larger than what it appears to be. Also correlated results (same players playing multiple games) increase this trend. Go for a bit a larger standard deviation until you say it is statistically significant than you would if you had statistically perfect data.
Again as above, we should make the assumption that there is a random distribution of skill among races.
Btw, I appreciate all the comments about the statistics, I'm trying to build up better knowledge on my methods so it's a cool exercise.
On May 03 2013 00:30 Jinky wrote: All of this is moot because 99.9% of people reading this simply need to improve their skill. Balance isn't what is causing you to lose. If there are top KRs winning with your race, then you can to (though you have to put in 12+ hour training days).
Once you start beating top KRs (ie. you are pushing on the limits of what your race can do), then you can start considering if balance is holding you back and make silly threads like this.
This is terrible logic. Lets say for example there is Race A,B and C which are all perfectly balanced. Lets also say race A is buffed to become much better then Race B and C.
Then were three players of equal skill (lets say mid masters) who were all in exactly the same spot. When this buff happens the player of Race A moves far ahead of the other two.
Is the race not holding them back? Yes, of course it is possible to move ahead but that would mean they have to also move ahead of the player of Race A in skill to get just as far.
I am not saying any of this is the case but saying that balance does not effect non pro players is just ignorant imo.
Yea, it's bias, but incompetence is even more bias. There's fewer and fewer ways to do something right, and many more ways to fuck it up. So while there is theoretical balance shift at every player skill (and style and unit composition and stage of the game) it just doesn't seem worthwhile to investigate unless it's otherwise obvious, or it coincides with the more prominent games (pros).
On May 03 2013 00:30 GTPGlitch wrote: @Jinky: That's a really dumb argument, because balance affects players no matter how bad they are. If i'm in bronze, and there's another guy in bronze, and protoss has a 99% winrate vs terran and he's playing protoss, it's very likely he beats me because we're at the same skill level and balance favors the protoss. Sure, I can just get better and win, but throwing the casual players under the bus isn't exactly the way to go about making star2 super popular
First of all, there is no 99% win rate in SC2 now or ever in the past. That is an asinine way to argue.
But even if there was a 99% win rate, if that win rate includes weaker players then it doesn't matter too much (as far as balance goes). The only win rates that matter are those with players who are so good that they push the limits of what the races can do (ie. top Koreans). Why is this? Because weaker players still aren't hitting their injects or setting up depot wall-offs or placing good force fields, and so they lose because they beat themselves, because they don't use their tools properly. It's only when a race is using all of its tools and still can't win that balance should be talked about.
All of this is moot because 99.9% of people reading this simply need to improve their skill. Balance isn't what is causing you to lose. If there are top KRs winning with your race, then you can to (though you have to put in 12+ hour training days).
Once you start beating top KRs (ie. you are pushing on the limits of what your race can do), then you can start considering if balance is holding you back and make silly threads like this.
This is terrible logic. Lets say for example there is Race A,B and C which are all perfectly balanced. Lets also say race A is buffed to become much better then Race B and C.
Then were three players of equal skill (lets say mid masters) who were all in exactly the same spot. When this buff happens the player of Race A moves far ahead of the other two.
Is the race not holding them back? Yes, of course it is possible to move ahead but that would mean they have to also move ahead of the player of Race A in skill to get just as far.
I am not saying any of this is the case but saying that balance does not effect non pro players is just ignorant imo.
In your example, how can you say that the buffed/superior Race A is imbalanced compared to Races B and C even though the best players in the world (top Koreans) are winning vs Race A in a relatively 50:50 ratio? If other human beings are adapting to that "buff" and winning against it, those mid masters in your example should be able to also. Weaker players simply do not matter in terms of balance. The only realm where weaker players (and all players) matter is in terms of fun and desirable gameplay.
My point in saying all this is that people need to stop fixating so much on balance and should instead practice more to improve and win. The game is way too complex (the possibilities of unit compositions, timings, army positioning, economic relationships, resource relationships, scouting knowledge or lack thereof, hidden costs, unit value per supply, unit per-hit cost from each specific enemy unit, etc. etc. etc.) for "balance discussions" to revolve around specific units/strategies that seem OP even though there are many other things that can be done to counter these (things that the top Koreans are probably doing, because they are winning versus those units/strategies). The only people that should be concerned with balance are the game developers and the very best players.
There were some gaping holes in WoL that I think Blizzard addressed well in HotS. The game is in a much better place than in WoL, and HotS opened many more options for different play styles (thus, more fun for different people).
Statistics threads like this don't matter in regards to game balance if the data is not exclusively about top Koreans.
I agree this approach is lacking, but there are lots of good suggestions in here so that if the OP was committed to this cause they could work towards something more substantial.
In my opinion zerg got shat on for an expansion that is supposed to be about zerg.
On May 03 2013 00:30 GTPGlitch wrote: @Jinky: That's a really dumb argument, because balance affects players no matter how bad they are. If i'm in bronze, and there's another guy in bronze, and protoss has a 99% winrate vs terran and he's playing protoss, it's very likely he beats me because we're at the same skill level and balance favors the protoss. Sure, I can just get better and win, but throwing the casual players under the bus isn't exactly the way to go about making star2 super popular
First of all, there is no 99% win rate in SC2 now or ever in the past. That is an asinine way to argue.
But even if there was a 99% win rate, if that win rate includes weaker players then it doesn't matter too much (as far as balance goes). The only win rates that matter are those with players who are so good that they push the limits of what the races can do (ie. top Koreans). Why is this? Because weaker players still aren't hitting their injects or setting up depot wall-offs or placing good force fields, and so they lose because they beat themselves, because they don't use their tools properly. It's only when a race is using all of its tools and still can't win that balance should be talked about.
Sorry but thats besides horrible for blizzard sales also just not how it works.
If at bronze level an average player who shifts from race X to race Y suddenly alot better, than race Y is too strong at bronze level. Now because of what you describe you can accept higher level of imbalance at bronze level than at code S level. However that doesn't mean it is irrelevant what the balance is at those levels. They are also paying customers, and if they have to play a horribly imbalanced game at their level they soon won't be paying customers anymore (not to mention they also simply deserve a balanced game for them).
But to follow your logic, why should we then use the completely arbitrary line of top Koreans for balancing? Why not actually use a situation where those races can actually use all their tools instead of being limitted by our puny humans? So get the top players with best decission making, and let them play via something like automaton 2000 bot. Then the races truly aren't limitted anymore and used properly.
And I now know already you aren't in favor of it, apparently you also agree that it should be balanced for regular use by Korean pro's. Then why shouldn't it be balanced for regular use of other players?
It is a different game, zerg micro requirements are raised compared to TvZ in WoL. This will no doubt cause problems to many zergs that were considered very good before. I think TvZ is now much closer in terms of skill required on both parts and only the best of each race will do good.
Just look Innovation vs. Life. I dont remember watching such good TvZ in a long time. Just hope Blizzard doesn't interfere too soon and make it a "no rush 20min into deathball vs. deathball" matchup again.
As far as TvP goes, protoss seems a bit too strong in my opinion. Their early game is considerably stronger than in WoL and their lategame is still as good as ever before, if not better.
On May 03 2013 21:29 Qwerty85 wrote: It is a different game, zerg micro requirements are raised compared to TvZ in WoL. This will no doubt cause problems to many zergs that were considered very good before. I think TvZ is now much closer in terms of skill required on both parts and only the best of each race will do good.
Just look Innovation vs. Life. I dont remember watching such good TvZ in a long time. Just hope Blizzard doesn't interfere too soon and make it a "no rush 20min into deathball vs. deathball" matchup again.
As far as TvP goes, protoss seems a bit too strong in my opinion. Their early game is considerably stronger than in WoL and their lategame is still as good as ever before, if not better.
TvP matchup is almost perfectly balanced at the moment according to these figures and you think that's a bad thing? What do you want? 60-40 terran favored, 80-20? What's going to make you happy?
On May 03 2013 21:29 Qwerty85 wrote: It is a different game, zerg micro requirements are raised compared to TvZ in WoL. This will no doubt cause problems to many zergs that were considered very good before. I think TvZ is now much closer in terms of skill required on both parts and only the best of each race will do good.
Just look Innovation vs. Life. I dont remember watching such good TvZ in a long time. Just hope Blizzard doesn't interfere too soon and make it a "no rush 20min into deathball vs. deathball" matchup again.
As far as TvP goes, protoss seems a bit too strong in my opinion. Their early game is considerably stronger than in WoL and their lategame is still as good as ever before, if not better.
TvP matchup is almost perfectly balanced at the moment according to these figures and you think that's a bad thing? What do you want? 60-40 terran favored, 80-20? What's going to make you happy?
I am talking about my impressions about the matchup. It is still too early in my opinion to look too much into those stats. And you need to chill out a bit dude... There is frustration and anger all over your post. I dont see a reason for it.
On May 03 2013 21:29 Qwerty85 wrote: It is a different game, zerg micro requirements are raised compared to TvZ in WoL. This will no doubt cause problems to many zergs that were considered very good before. I think TvZ is now much closer in terms of skill required on both parts and only the best of each race will do good.
Just look Innovation vs. Life. I dont remember watching such good TvZ in a long time. Just hope Blizzard doesn't interfere too soon and make it a "no rush 20min into deathball vs. deathball" matchup again.
As far as TvP goes, protoss seems a bit too strong in my opinion. Their early game is considerably stronger than in WoL and their lategame is still as good as ever before, if not better.
TvP matchup is almost perfectly balanced at the moment according to these figures and you think that's a bad thing? What do you want? 60-40 terran favored, 80-20? What's going to make you happy?
I am talking about my impressions about the matchup. It is still too early in my opinion to look too much into those stats. And you need to chill out a bit dude... There is frustration and anger all over your post. I dont see a reason for it.
This is a thread about win rates. If you're not interested in discussing that you can post here instead:
And I do get annoyed with the amount of whining I see from terran players on this web site, when at the moment they're the most winningest race at tournament level.
On May 03 2013 21:29 Qwerty85 wrote: It is a different game, zerg micro requirements are raised compared to TvZ in WoL. This will no doubt cause problems to many zergs that were considered very good before. I think TvZ is now much closer in terms of skill required on both parts and only the best of each race will do good.
Just look Innovation vs. Life. I dont remember watching such good TvZ in a long time. Just hope Blizzard doesn't interfere too soon and make it a "no rush 20min into deathball vs. deathball" matchup again.
As far as TvP goes, protoss seems a bit too strong in my opinion. Their early game is considerably stronger than in WoL and their lategame is still as good as ever before, if not better.
TvP matchup is almost perfectly balanced at the moment according to these figures and you think that's a bad thing? What do you want? 60-40 terran favored, 80-20? What's going to make you happy?
I am talking about my impressions about the matchup. It is still too early in my opinion to look too much into those stats. And you need to chill out a bit dude... There is frustration and anger all over your post. I dont see a reason for it.
This is a thread about win rates. If you're not interested in discussing that you can post here instead:
And I do get annoyed with the amount of whining I see from terran players on this web site, when at the moment they're the most winningest race at tournament level.
be aware of posting facts about T these days. it can get you banned in a blink of an eye
the winrates tell us TvP and PvZ is very balanced especially for a new game while ZvT is very T favored right now. so with a little thinking and seeing how the games play out its pretty obv the WM is too strong and the main factor for that since thats the only unit that doesnt affect TvP which is pretty balanced right now. we will see if blizz starts to nerf the WM a bit or if they buff Z a bit against it (for example faster overlordspeed, 6 baserange hydras etc.). maybe even the burrow buff will be enough so that Z is able to pressure again on hatchtech ZvT. we will see.
There is literally nothing that indicates TvZ atm is very T favored. These statistics (as said a million times before) are skewed due to WCS quals. Remove them and TvZ is roughly 50/50. That tells you at the very least the statistics lack significance. And for the pure Korean stats, if you are into that, it was also pretty close to 50/50.
And burrow mainly prevents terran from pressuring (which is the reason I am not a big fan of it, I like in general early pressure), well and roach all-in becomes stronger.
On May 03 2013 22:23 Sissors wrote: There is literally nothing that indicates TvZ atm is very T favored. These statistics (as said a million times before) are skewed due to WCS quals. Remove them and TvZ is roughly 50/50. That tells you at the very least the statistics lack significance. And for the pure Korean stats, if you are into that, it was also pretty close to 50/50.
And burrow mainly prevents terran from pressuring (which is the reason I am not a big fan of it, I like in general early pressure), well and roach all-in becomes stronger.
GSL is 56% TvZ favored. dont know why you have to talk about WCS EU etc. just look at highest level.
and well they WANT roach all ins or pressure to be stronger. thats the whole point from burrow buff. right now Z cant pressure vs reaper into fac at all.
I doubt roach pressure will become much stronger, roach all-in will. And at the same time it will really hurt terran pressure if quick burrow becomes popular, since there can always be burrowed banelings that can decimate your army. And no that isn't the same as widow mines since I can't send one marine ahead as suicide scout.
And oh the fun part about statistics, you can always find some which agree with your opinion. WCS Korea Challenger are zerg favored in ZvT, nerf zerg!11!!1!!1.
Add to that the fact that zerg needs longer to adapt to new metagames and there is no statistical reason to start nerfing races. (Reason for that is zerg production. Lets say we have a toss opponent. As terran I need to know roughly when he can have DTs out, and from when I should start watching for colossi, etc. But that all isn't very problematic. Now ZvP. The zerg will want to use pretty much all his larva's on drones + a few lings to sit outside the toss base. But they do need to switch in time to army production. So for a zerg it is much more important to know when exactly to switch to army production. As a terran I have to constantly produce army anyway to make optimal use of my production facilities. The result is that zerg is more affected by timings of the opponent than other races, so in a changing metagame they are behind).
On May 03 2013 22:39 Sissors wrote: I doubt roach pressure will become much stronger, roach all-in will. And at the same time it will really hurt terran pressure if quick burrow becomes popular, since there can always be burrowed banelings that can decimate your army. And no that isn't the same as widow mines since I can't send one marine ahead as suicide scout.
And oh the fun part about statistics, you can always find some which agree with your opinion. WCS Korea Challenger are zerg favored in ZvT, nerf zerg!11!!1!!1.
Add to that the fact that zerg needs longer to adapt to new metagames and there is no statistical reason to start nerfing races. (Reason for that is zerg production. Lets say we have a toss opponent. As terran I need to know roughly when he can have DTs out, and from when I should start watching for colossi, etc. But that all isn't very problematic. Now ZvP. The zerg will want to use pretty much all his larva's on drones + a few lings to sit outside the toss base. But they do need to switch in time to army production. So for a zerg it is much more important to know when exactly to switch to army production. As a terran I have to constantly produce army anyway to make optimal use of my production facilities. The result is that zerg is more affected by timings of the opponent than other races, so in a changing metagame they are behind).
in your sheet if you take the top level code s and proleague its 59% winrate TvZ. so on the highest level there definetly is something wrong. its too early to tell if that will continue but if may looks the same its definetly time to nerf T, especially WMs since TvP is in a good shape.
On May 03 2013 22:39 Sissors wrote: I doubt roach pressure will become much stronger, roach all-in will. And at the same time it will really hurt terran pressure if quick burrow becomes popular, since there can always be burrowed banelings that can decimate your army. And no that isn't the same as widow mines since I can't send one marine ahead as suicide scout.
And oh the fun part about statistics, you can always find some which agree with your opinion. WCS Korea Challenger are zerg favored in ZvT, nerf zerg!11!!1!!1.
Add to that the fact that zerg needs longer to adapt to new metagames and there is no statistical reason to start nerfing races. (Reason for that is zerg production. Lets say we have a toss opponent. As terran I need to know roughly when he can have DTs out, and from when I should start watching for colossi, etc. But that all isn't very problematic. Now ZvP. The zerg will want to use pretty much all his larva's on drones + a few lings to sit outside the toss base. But they do need to switch in time to army production. So for a zerg it is much more important to know when exactly to switch to army production. As a terran I have to constantly produce army anyway to make optimal use of my production facilities. The result is that zerg is more affected by timings of the opponent than other races, so in a changing metagame they are behind).
in your sheet if you take the top level code s and proleague its 59% winrate TvZ. so on the highest level there definetly is something wrong. its too early to tell if that will continue but if may looks the same its definetly time to nerf T, especially WMs since TvP is in a good shape.
It's a really small sample size. Plus some of it may be down to player skill discrepancies rather than balance.
On May 03 2013 22:39 Sissors wrote: I doubt roach pressure will become much stronger, roach all-in will. And at the same time it will really hurt terran pressure if quick burrow becomes popular, since there can always be burrowed banelings that can decimate your army. And no that isn't the same as widow mines since I can't send one marine ahead as suicide scout.
And oh the fun part about statistics, you can always find some which agree with your opinion. WCS Korea Challenger are zerg favored in ZvT, nerf zerg!11!!1!!1.
Add to that the fact that zerg needs longer to adapt to new metagames and there is no statistical reason to start nerfing races. (Reason for that is zerg production. Lets say we have a toss opponent. As terran I need to know roughly when he can have DTs out, and from when I should start watching for colossi, etc. But that all isn't very problematic. Now ZvP. The zerg will want to use pretty much all his larva's on drones + a few lings to sit outside the toss base. But they do need to switch in time to army production. So for a zerg it is much more important to know when exactly to switch to army production. As a terran I have to constantly produce army anyway to make optimal use of my production facilities. The result is that zerg is more affected by timings of the opponent than other races, so in a changing metagame they are behind).
in your sheet if you take the top level code s and proleague its 59% winrate TvZ. so on the highest level there definetly is something wrong. its too early to tell if that will continue but if may looks the same its definetly time to nerf T, especially WMs since TvP is in a good shape.
You literally want to base balance around the statistics around the top 30 players, and already the 30 players below that are considered irrelevant because they aren't good enough? Besides that it is kinda ridiculous to only balance for a few players, it also lacks any kind of statistical significance. If Life switches to WoT we should boost zerg and when he returns nerf zerg again?
why did these threads vanish when zerg was heavily favored across all regions only to now magically reappear?
I hope it evens out in the GSL, elsewhere it is too dependant on who is actually participating i guess, and if it does not, blizzard will surely and slowly work on it, according to their new patch mentality, though i don't mind if innovation takes some titles until then, because he probably would do so anyways with minor balance adjustments.
On May 03 2013 22:39 Sissors wrote: I doubt roach pressure will become much stronger, roach all-in will. And at the same time it will really hurt terran pressure if quick burrow becomes popular, since there can always be burrowed banelings that can decimate your army. And no that isn't the same as widow mines since I can't send one marine ahead as suicide scout.
And oh the fun part about statistics, you can always find some which agree with your opinion. WCS Korea Challenger are zerg favored in ZvT, nerf zerg!11!!1!!1.
Add to that the fact that zerg needs longer to adapt to new metagames and there is no statistical reason to start nerfing races. (Reason for that is zerg production. Lets say we have a toss opponent. As terran I need to know roughly when he can have DTs out, and from when I should start watching for colossi, etc. But that all isn't very problematic. Now ZvP. The zerg will want to use pretty much all his larva's on drones + a few lings to sit outside the toss base. But they do need to switch in time to army production. So for a zerg it is much more important to know when exactly to switch to army production. As a terran I have to constantly produce army anyway to make optimal use of my production facilities. The result is that zerg is more affected by timings of the opponent than other races, so in a changing metagame they are behind).
in your sheet if you take the top level code s and proleague its 59% winrate TvZ. so on the highest level there definetly is something wrong. its too early to tell if that will continue but if may looks the same its definetly time to nerf T, especially WMs since TvP is in a good shape.
You literally want to base balance around the statistics around the top 30 players, and already the 30 players below that are considered irrelevant because they aren't good enough? Besides that it is kinda ridiculous to only balance for a few players, it also lacks any kind of statistical significance. If Life switches to WoT we should boost zerg and when he returns nerf zerg again?
like i said we need to wait for may winrates. but obv if you take in the 31. to 60. korean you also have to take in some of the foreigners and it gets complicated. something needs to be imba over 2-3 months to let people try everything against it and if nothing works then its broken and needs to be fixed. imo WM are broken since 5 months now but since we only have stats for 6 weeks we need to wait some more. its just hard to wait as a Z player since its no fun to play ZvT since months now
oh and i think cheaper burrow will finally bring early game Z aggression back which is awesome
The problem is that even if you have win rates over a year of code S it doesn't say anything stats wise. Your sample group is just too low. Yes then you have more games, but those are heavily correlated games. It definately could be that they all converge nicely to 50%, but if they don't then that does not necesarily mean it is due to balance reason.
And I assume with your last sentence you are referring to widow mines. They might of course be slightly changed, but if I were you I wouldnt hold your breath for any large changes, then you probably die of suffocation. Especially at the highest level the zergs seem to be dealing fine with them. It is fairly similar to terran vs storm, fungal, banelings, etc: You have to take them into account otherwise they really ruin your day, but if you do they are well counterable. Especially since widow mines have this nasty habbit of blowing up the terran army if you don't watch out. Only when the top zergs are simply overtaxed with multitasking they start making mistakes again vs widow mines, for example Innovation vs Life. And I think that is intended behavior.
On May 03 2013 22:23 Sissors wrote: There is literally nothing that indicates TvZ atm is very T favored. These statistics (as said a million times before) are skewed due to WCS quals. Remove them and TvZ is roughly 50/50. That tells you at the very least the statistics lack significance. And for the pure Korean stats, if you are into that, it was also pretty close to 50/50.
And burrow mainly prevents terran from pressuring (which is the reason I am not a big fan of it, I like in general early pressure), well and roach all-in becomes stronger.
Besides that it lacks any kind of statistical significance (seriously people), WCS Korea Challenger shows we should nerf zerg. It is quite easy to cherrypick stuff until it shows what you want to show.
On May 03 2013 23:26 Sissors wrote: Besides that it lacks any kind of statistical significance (seriously people), WCS Korea Challenger shows we should nerf zerg. It is quite easy to cherrypick stuff until it shows what you want to show.
?
You said that if you took only the korean data, the results are 50/50. That is factually wrong. It has nothing to do with cherrypicking, nor statistical significance, nor nerfing anything.
I referred to spreadsheet I linked earlier (someone elses, not mine): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B76Yjrn8DAmfeWdpY0F0b1ByOEU/edit?pli=1. I don't follow all Korean stuff so if it is missing important ones I was indeed mistaken. In that spreadsheet it was pretty much 50/50 for TvZ. But as I said, if it is missing stuff I stand corrected.
I see. I just used the spreadsheet from the original post. The document you link and that one seem inconsistent in some places so who knows what the real statistics are... not interested enough to add it up all myself :p
It's not that confusing... All of the patch zergs are finally being removed from the game so of course there's going to be a huge drop in zerg play because the infestor BL combo is no longer the worst thing in SC2 to spectate as it would win games no one deserved won.
Also someone mentioned this earlier that Korean Terran's dominating foreign zergs means nothing on balance since foreign zergs are generally rather bad at the game (with exceptions of course in a few players)
I have just about a 100% winrate against zergs that haven't adopted a new strategy, but I haven't won a game against someone that goes roach hydra, so I think they just need to adapt a bit.
On May 03 2013 23:56 9-BiT wrote: I have just about a 100% winrate against zergs that haven't adopted a new strategy, but I haven't won a game against someone that goes roach hydra, so I think they just need to adapt a bit.
DISCLAIMER: This post means nothing regarding balance, he just made up a random percentage and placed it as so.
Link that 100% winrate please and why this would matter to a balance discussion : D
I think TvZ is the match up which needs fixing. When I look at TvZ match ups, sometimes I think what would have zerg have done to win? And then it just seems hopeless. The widow mine bio composition behind a solid terran macro is just so deadly and cost effective.
If you use only the data from the top players, the "sample size isn't big enough." If you use data from all sorts of players, the "skill gaps are too large."
Will statistics and Starcraft ever pull an archon morph?
On May 04 2013 00:50 The_Pacifist wrote: Catch 22:
If you use only the data from the top players, the "sample size isn't big enough." If you use data from all sorts of players, the "skill gaps are too large."
Will statistics and Starcraft ever pull an archon morph?
Nah, problem is statistics are only used by people to back up their current beliefs on balance. If it supports your view, you embrace it; if not... well yeah you'll find any way to discredit it.
On May 03 2013 21:29 Qwerty85 wrote: It is a different game, zerg micro requirements are raised compared to TvZ in WoL. This will no doubt cause problems to many zergs that were considered very good before. I think TvZ is now much closer in terms of skill required on both parts and only the best of each race will do good.
Just look Innovation vs. Life. I dont remember watching such good TvZ in a long time. Just hope Blizzard doesn't interfere too soon and make it a "no rush 20min into deathball vs. deathball" matchup again.
As far as TvP goes, protoss seems a bit too strong in my opinion. Their early game is considerably stronger than in WoL and their lategame is still as good as ever before, if not better.
TvP matchup is almost perfectly balanced at the moment according to these figures and you think that's a bad thing? What do you want? 60-40 terran favored, 80-20? What's going to make you happy?
I am talking about my impressions about the matchup. It is still too early in my opinion to look too much into those stats. And you need to chill out a bit dude... There is frustration and anger all over your post. I dont see a reason for it.
This is a thread about win rates. If you're not interested in discussing that you can post here instead:
And I do get annoyed with the amount of whining I see from terran players on this web site, when at the moment they're the most winningest race at tournament level.
edit- posted wrong link
At the moment, only whining comes from you. I was merely saying my opinion...
And Wol TvZ was zerg favored for months and months before Blizzard even admitted a problem with the infestor and tried to come up with a solution. And that was in a game that was already out for 2 years with basically all builds and timings figured out.
All I am saying is, these statistics are hardly reliable at the moment because game is so new that a lot of problems simply comes from players not being able to adapt to new circumstances.
If Blizzard took the sit and wait approach for the end of WoL, they should also wait a bit before making any bigger changes in Hots.
Right now, we can see much more about balance by actually watching the games. I suggest you watch/rewatch this season of GSL and see how TvP's played out.
Protoss has tons of options in the early game now, and it is very hard for terran to scout which build protoss will go for. At the same time, terran early game is much weaker due to the canon, msc etc..
Midgame is still good for terran and medivacs are certainly not easy to deal with, but late game again forces terran into same old high dps but low health bio that needs superb micro to withstand all protoss aoe in the late game...
Overal, yes I think it is slightly protoss favored even if it does not show on stats right now.
On May 02 2013 02:52 Alryk wrote: 52/48 is almost definitely within margin of error, although we don't know exactly what the margin of error is.
Nice job of saying absolutely nothing =)
If the sample size is large enough, then 52/48 could be a significant difference.
Yes, it's not within margin of error of statistics. There is 2% difference. But fluctuations in this size are expected due to changing metagame and similar stuff. It doesn't really mean anything unless the matchup will stay the same for years at 52/48.
On May 03 2013 00:30 GTPGlitch wrote: @Jinky: That's a really dumb argument, because balance affects players no matter how bad they are. If i'm in bronze, and there's another guy in bronze, and protoss has a 99% winrate vs terran and he's playing protoss, it's very likely he beats me because we're at the same skill level and balance favors the protoss. Sure, I can just get better and win, but throwing the casual players under the bus isn't exactly the way to go about making star2 super popular
First of all, there is no 99% win rate in SC2 now or ever in the past. That is an asinine way to argue.
But even if there was a 99% win rate, if that win rate includes weaker players then it doesn't matter too much (as far as balance goes). The only win rates that matter are those with players who are so good that they push the limits of what the races can do (ie. top Koreans). Why is this? Because weaker players still aren't hitting their injects or setting up depot wall-offs or placing good force fields, and so they lose because they beat themselves, because they don't use their tools properly. It's only when a race is using all of its tools and still can't win that balance should be talked about.
Sorry but thats besides horrible for blizzard sales also just not how it works.
If at bronze level an average player who shifts from race X to race Y suddenly alot better, than race Y is too strong at bronze level. Now because of what you describe you can accept higher level of imbalance at bronze level than at code S level. However that doesn't mean it is irrelevant what the balance is at those levels. They are also paying customers, and if they have to play a horribly imbalanced game at their level they soon won't be paying customers anymore (not to mention they also simply deserve a balanced game for them).
But to follow your logic, why should we then use the completely arbitrary line of top Koreans for balancing? Why not actually use a situation where those races can actually use all their tools instead of being limitted by our puny humans? So get the top players with best decission making, and let them play via something like automaton 2000 bot. Then the races truly aren't limitted anymore and used properly.
And I now know already you aren't in favor of it, apparently you also agree that it should be balanced for regular use by Korean pro's. Then why shouldn't it be balanced for regular use of other players?
Imbalance at different levels? Haha, you can't be serious! Please explain to me how you can balance a game around a lower level of skill. There are hundreds of specific and varying reasons why someone isn't skilled at the game, and there might be hundreds of different reasons why another person of "equally low skill" also isn't skilled at the game. How can you balance for the plethora of people's widely various faults? If it's not a balance problem for the very best players, then it shouldn't be a problem for lesser-skilled players also because the tools are there for them to deal with the problem; they just need to improve their skill.
"Paying customers" does not factor in to pure balance. Regardless of how well the developer does with sales, balance is a separate issue. If people don't like the game, then that is just a design problem, not a balance problem.
I love your suggestion to use computer AI (ie. "automaton 2000 bot") to test balance vs top players. This would certainly be ideal... if it were possible. It is impossible because the game is so so so complex that no current computer AI can handle it as good as even a half-decent player can. (Seriously, the "Elite" AI in HotS is a joke.) The best that SC2 AI can do right now is, in general, follow a build order and A-move at certain timings. Maybe if someone invested a lot of time and money into something like IBM's Watson AI (which is able to learn and adapt) then this could be possible.
But SC2 is so complex, with so many variables that cannot be disregarded. Like I said in a previous post:
On May 03 2013 07:25 Jinky wrote: The game is way too complex (the possibilities of unit compositions, timings, army positioning, economic relationships, resource relationships, scouting knowledge or lack thereof, hidden costs, unit value per supply, unit per-hit cost from each specific enemy unit, etc. etc. etc.) for "balance discussions" to revolve around specific units/strategies that seem OP even though there are many other things that can be done to counter these (things that the top Koreans are probably doing, because they are winning versus those units/strategies).
So again, statistics threads like this one are irrelevant unless the data is about the very very best players in the world.
On May 03 2013 23:47 Sissors wrote: I referred to spreadsheet I linked earlier (someone elses, not mine): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B76Yjrn8DAmfeWdpY0F0b1ByOEU/edit?pli=1. I don't follow all Korean stuff so if it is missing important ones I was indeed mistaken. In that spreadsheet it was pretty much 50/50 for TvZ. But as I said, if it is missing stuff I stand corrected.
GSTL is missing. The title is "Korea only" so WCS Challenger outside Korea shouldn't be counted. It is very misleading.
This set of data includes matches from March, not just from April. If you want to see win rates since HotS released I posted a more detailed collection categorized by tournaments here.
On May 03 2013 23:47 Sissors wrote: I referred to spreadsheet I linked earlier (someone elses, not mine): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B76Yjrn8DAmfeWdpY0F0b1ByOEU/edit?pli=1. I don't follow all Korean stuff so if it is missing important ones I was indeed mistaken. In that spreadsheet it was pretty much 50/50 for TvZ. But as I said, if it is missing stuff I stand corrected.
Your missing GSTL. Terran is still dominating Zerg in the three highest level tournaments. WCS Korea, Proleague and GSTL.
This isn't me commentating on balance, but a problem in my eyes with different races and looking at certain tournaments is that terran is such a good race in these tournaments where you can practice for the games, since in both MUs terran is the playmaker unless terran gets allin'd. That just gives terran such an advantage in the prep work. That's why I feel zerg especially(which is for the most part reactionary race) has it a lot easier in live tournaments and a lot harder in... scheduled tournaments. I'm not trying to say terran is balanced, I have no idea quite frankly, just food for thought.
EPT
it makes for very boring games.
and why this would matter to a balance discussion : D
