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On January 10 2014 12:14 wiseman2024 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 10 2014 12:06 Zanzabarr wrote:
Protoss has been savagely brutalized this week in proleague..... they went 1-15 in non mirrors in a best of 1 format.... the supposedly strongest format for protoss. To all the non-pro players out there.... no... your perceived strength of protoss isn't holding you back... you are. I'm pretty sure 80%+ of the player base doesn't use their army mobility advantage properly, if at all, and go through this three step magical process.
1) A-move mobile army
2) Take bad engagement and lose said engagement
3) Cry imbalance and demand buffs/nerfs 1 week of Proleague automatically solves all the issues both T and Z have had with Protoss? Wut? Also, top Korean pros such as Polt and Bomber have been complaining as well. I'm sure they don't follow that 3-step path to chobo that you posted.
Pro player complains race he doesn't play is too strong? OMG! /s
Bomber has been complaining about Protoss since WoL and Polt has complained before also.
I'm not saying Protoss isn't strong (or that they are), just the opinions of somebody who plays the game for a living maybe shouldn't be taken at face value.
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On January 10 2014 13:56 Jarree wrote:
I don't tell you how I got the data but everything is 50-50.
- David Kim 2010-2014
hahah oh man I laughed harder then I should have on that one
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On January 10 2014 14:09 MysticaL wrote:Show nested quote +On January 10 2014 13:45 RampancyTW wrote:On January 10 2014 13:29 MysticaL wrote:On January 10 2014 11:55 CutTheEnemy wrote:
On EU, 24% of masters players are terran now compared with 35% and 38% for zerg and protoss. How can he say its balanced considering this? His appeal to win percentages within leagues is highly misleading.
He's also been speaking for years as though he's ignorant of our main complaint- its isn't balance per se, its how hard and stressful it is to play terran and win. We know terrans can win once they go pro, but most of us aren't capable of sustaining the serious damage to our personal relationships, grades, hands and paychecks it takes in order to play the race competitively. ^ I think this is the point It's reflected everywhere that while there may be balance among the skilled players, people hate playing terran because it's too frustrating and hard. Although this sounds like QQ, it's shown by how many Terrans are still competing. Some examples: - Terran being under-represented in GM for several seasons in a row now - Terran being under-represented in Proleague (source: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/2014_Proleague/Statistics)8/41 players that played in Proleague so far are Terran. Once again, the same counter-argument is there, "it's a small sample size." Well, it's going to continue being a small sample size. While I understand this small sample size argument... the truth is the entire SC2 pro-scene is a small sample size of the select few hundred players, and Terran is definitely under-represented in the pro scene. Whether win rates back it up or not, not many like playing Terran at the pro-level. Like I said, it's fine if you're extremely good at the game (shown by the god-mode skilled terrans like Maru, Flash, TY all doing well). The reason why we're seeing a lot of 50% in general is because you are matched with people your MMR. If one race struggles, the only impact this makes is every player of that race has lower MMR. It has nothing to do with "who is the better player" - in the game's perspective, the better player is the one with higher MMR, but we all know that's not true. The MMR system automatically adjusts your opponent so that you have a roughly ~50% win ratio. Ladder win ratios are a misleading indicator of balance. I'll repeat this as much as necessary to as many people as necessary: The ladder matches you up to win 50% of your games, right? Great! So it thus follows that your matchups will all approximate 50%, right? ...Not even remotely. Most people have strong and weak matchups, so they may have a 50% overall, but a 60% TvZ, a 50% TvT, and a 40% TvP. So even if they win 50% of their games, they won't win 50% of their games in every matchup. This actually makes it EXTREMELY easy to tell if there is an overall racial imbalance, because what you'll find is that even though there is a 50% winrate for the total populations, the matchup winrates will be more or less than 50% for the non-mirrors, as a population. Protoss appears to be (extremely slightly) overpowered vs. T at the moment, having just above 50% PvT winrates across region, skill level, and at the pro level. But it's nothing like the huge imbalance it's been claimed to be. TL;DR: The matchmaking system's desire to put you at 50% winrate makes it extremely easy to spot racial imbalances across a population, because a Terran population-wide problem in TvP would require an increase in TvZ winrates to keep the population at 50%. Yes that's okay only if you assume that the total population = 33% Terran, 33% Toss, 33% Zerg, but we know that's not true...
Hmm. We do know that's true?
http://www.sc2ranks.com/stats/race
Now look at the league-separated distributions. Here are the ratio #Protoss / #Terran, per league:
Bronze: 0.915
Silver: 1.043
Gold: 1.076
Platinum: 1.074
Diamond: 1.166
Master: 1.489
Grandmaster: The numbers aren't out yet, but you know it's pretty close to 2 (:D)
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On January 10 2014 14:13 ArTiFaKs wrote:Show nested quote +On January 10 2014 12:34 IncubusSC wrote:
lol uses a 6 day statistic sample to support his argument, then says that one tournament is too small of a sample size.
What a fucking goon, it's hilarious how he hasn't been fired for his incompetence.
User was warned for this post Ya because 30 games in Proleague equals 1 week of EVERY GAME played on B.net ladder on EVERY SERVER. That makes a lot of sense right? Everyone needs to chill out a little and think logically and clearly before ranting and getting all pissed off, patience people jesus christ.
Sound logic.
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So...really disappointed and reading his recent post is quite depressing and not a good sign for SC2 imo =/
On January 10 2014 12:03 Aquila- wrote:
Statistics cover range: Jan. 3-9th, 2013.
Nice try David Kim, nice try.
He's apparently willing to ignore the last 8 months of "data." The sad thing is, he only looks at statistics and win rates, instead of how games are being played.
I'll try to refrain from my own personal ranting here, but I'll say imo not a lot of people are too happy reading this last Dkim post.
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I consistently wonder how David Kim still has a job "balancing" the game when he clearly has no grasp of it (oh right, ActivisionBlizzard). It only disheartens me more to see his "balance thoughts," confirming my dread that SC2 may not survive much longer.
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On January 10 2014 14:13 ArTiFaKs wrote:Show nested quote +On January 10 2014 12:34 IncubusSC wrote:
lol uses a 6 day statistic sample to support his argument, then says that one tournament is too small of a sample size.
What a fucking goon, it's hilarious how he hasn't been fired for his incompetence.
User was warned for this post Ya because 30 games in Proleague equals 1 week of EVERY GAME played on B.net ladder on EVERY SERVER. That makes a lot of sense right? Everyone is so bent out of shape and dead set on proving David Kim wrong or finding some mistake in his wording that the things they are saying doesn't even make any sense. He never said he wasn't going to tweak the matchup even? All he said was that he wanted to wait longer to see how things play out. How come that's so hard for people to understand? And everyone saying that PvT is somehow all of a sudden a "stale" matchup, either hasn't been playing, or hasn't been watching any PvT recently. I've been getting all kinds of different strategies thrown at me from both sides, I think it's actually one of the more exciting matchups at this time. Blink all-in is only strong on certain maps, and even then we are seeing Terran's able to defend it. Part of the reason it's so good is because of the strategy most Terran's have been using i.e. MMA, Innovation, open up Reaper and 1 rax Reactor, 1 rax Tech Lab, which pretty much guarantee's the Terran won't have enough marauders or units in general to stop the all-in. Not to mention the resources to get 1-2 more barracks. Which is exactly why we aren't seeing that as much, or the Terran's are recognizing the weakness of this on Blink favored maps. Everyone needs to chill out a little and think logically and clearly before ranting and getting all pissed off, patience people jesus christ.
Thing is, people (including myself) arent patient anymore, looking how he dealt with problems since WoL, and its been like this for 3(?) years. Vomiting statistics to justify his actions pisses everyone off..
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Fiddler's Green42661 Posts
On January 10 2014 14:15 Roman666 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 10 2014 14:06 stuchiu wrote:On January 10 2014 13:25 Plansix wrote:On January 10 2014 13:22 itsjustatank wrote:On January 10 2014 13:20 Plansix wrote:On January 10 2014 13:16 itsjustatank wrote:On January 10 2014 12:52 T.O.P. wrote:On January 10 2014 12:18 itsjustatank wrote:Please keep in mind these are not straight-up win percentages. They’re win percentages with player skill factored out. When we grab win/loss data for balance purposes, we categorize each game with 2 different variables per side: one being player skill and other being race strength. So by factoring the player skill out, we are able to more accurately check how each race is doing at each skill level. Without an explanation as to what this actually means, statistically speaking, this sounds like like linguistic flourish justifying cherrypicking one's data to one's advantage, a component of lying with statistics. Elucidation would be greatly appreciated, because I have to assume this isn't the case. Perhaps because good players play more games, if you just present the data unaltered good players would make influence the winrates more than their proportion in the population. Here's the thing though: all they do is present win-rates, and they already break down the win-rates by tier. Ignoring or weighting data based on their stated filters in this context is only done assuming you want to shape the data to your advantage. That assumes that your goal is to mislead the people you are presenting the data to, which David and Blizzard have almost no reason to do. In fact, they have numerous reasons to provide us with the most accurate information possible. Unless you believe that DKim is trying to mislead us and sell us on the idea that the game is balance when he knows that one race is over powers. I question all use of statistics, and it leads me to question people's motives when I sense bad methodology. I don't make the assumption that all data and interpretations of data presented to me are kosher, precisely because I know how easy it is to shape any data set to say whatever it is I want it to say and phrase it in such a way that few people will question it. Ok, but I am going to ask you the same question, why would they do that? You don't just imply that their data is incorrectly gathered, but they do so with purpose with the intent to mislead. Do you really think they want an imbalanced game? I don't really see any good reason for them to "cook the numbers" to make the game appear balanced. I don't think they would purposely mislead anyone. But it's easy to mislead yourself into just looking at the numbers. There was a reason BL/infestor wasn't touched for the last 6-8 months of WoL and it was because the numbers were balanced. It's easy to mislead yourself into thinking winrates are the problem rather than the design or function of the matchups. There are just too few people with too much information and too many objectives to comprehensively cover all paths and solutions to everything the want. From what I've seen in the last few years they want: 1) A balanced game across all levels of play (to attract more casual players. I can understand the sentiment, but you won't be attracting casuals to play more through ladder imho.) 2) They want it to be fun and dynamic. 3) They want to increase the skill cap. 4) They want less deathball matchups. 5) They want Zerg to be "Zergy" 6) The bunker must be changed. 7) They want to all races to have multiple options per matchup. But a lot of those objectives are contradictory. They felt Protoss was too weak early so they gave them photon cannon. That helped balance but increased the amount of deathball matchups and fun and dynamic gameplay (Nothing is more deflating than watching a TvP about to ramp up in speed to only be stopped cold by a photon cannon.) They want the game to be more fun and dynamic so they increase the speed of mutas, medivacs and oracles. But at the same time it decreases tension and awe of the game. Mass drops are now a standard play capable of being done by every solid Terran instead of a hard earned specialty way to play that was only done by MMA and Gumiho. Mutas became faster and gained regen increasing the "Multitasking" of Zerg players but in the end all it really did was let weaker players play like Soulkey/DRG/Leenook at the end of WoL without the extreme control, intuition and practice as it was much more forgiving. They wanted to give Protoss more options in the early game against both Zerg and Terran so they gave them the MSC, cheaper dts and an oracle. While Zerg can still play a variety of opening builds, Terran has been pigeonholed into going reaper cc every game unless they want to just randomly gamble on a cc or double proxy rax compared to Protoss' 4-5 solid openings that all transition well into mid-late (And this doesn't include obscure builds like First's double forge robo immortal build.) Which is why I assume they read all of the balance threads on here and other places. Even if they never release how they are reaching those numbers, even being critical of the methodology is still an important point to bring up so that both spectators and the dev.team don't take the numbers as the only truth. I doubt very much that they will ever comprehensively tell us how they came to these numbers and honestly they shouldn't. It only opens them to more criticism and takes away from actual balance discussion but its always important to not take these numbers at face value either. But what would be the point of releasing these numbers? To back their point, to have the unsinkable argument when some one would question their thinking? Without saying how they came up with these numbers, it even more sinkable argument, because everyone can question it. Seriously, what they were thinking?
They just wanted something concrete to show why they think Protoss isn't as much of a problem as the community is making it out to be? Maybe they just wanted to show some of their reasoning and keep us as informed as they can without violating company policy? Who knows.
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On January 10 2014 14:19 avilo wrote:So...really disappointed and reading his recent post is quite depressing and not a good sign for SC2 imo =/ Show nested quote +On January 10 2014 12:03 Aquila- wrote:
Statistics cover range: Jan. 3-9th, 2013.
Nice try David Kim, nice try. instead of how games are being played.
If that were the case, the changes to infestor, blue flame helion, mech / air armor, oversear speed, oracle speed, etc etc would never of happened.
I feel the community (not saying you personally) Wants instant changes to META rather than BALANCE?
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On January 10 2014 14:19 ZenithM wrote:Show nested quote +On January 10 2014 14:09 MysticaL wrote:On January 10 2014 13:45 RampancyTW wrote:On January 10 2014 13:29 MysticaL wrote:On January 10 2014 11:55 CutTheEnemy wrote:
On EU, 24% of masters players are terran now compared with 35% and 38% for zerg and protoss. How can he say its balanced considering this? His appeal to win percentages within leagues is highly misleading.
He's also been speaking for years as though he's ignorant of our main complaint- its isn't balance per se, its how hard and stressful it is to play terran and win. We know terrans can win once they go pro, but most of us aren't capable of sustaining the serious damage to our personal relationships, grades, hands and paychecks it takes in order to play the race competitively. ^ I think this is the point It's reflected everywhere that while there may be balance among the skilled players, people hate playing terran because it's too frustrating and hard. Although this sounds like QQ, it's shown by how many Terrans are still competing. Some examples: - Terran being under-represented in GM for several seasons in a row now - Terran being under-represented in Proleague (source: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/2014_Proleague/Statistics)8/41 players that played in Proleague so far are Terran. Once again, the same counter-argument is there, "it's a small sample size." Well, it's going to continue being a small sample size. While I understand this small sample size argument... the truth is the entire SC2 pro-scene is a small sample size of the select few hundred players, and Terran is definitely under-represented in the pro scene. Whether win rates back it up or not, not many like playing Terran at the pro-level. Like I said, it's fine if you're extremely good at the game (shown by the god-mode skilled terrans like Maru, Flash, TY all doing well). The reason why we're seeing a lot of 50% in general is because you are matched with people your MMR. If one race struggles, the only impact this makes is every player of that race has lower MMR. It has nothing to do with "who is the better player" - in the game's perspective, the better player is the one with higher MMR, but we all know that's not true. The MMR system automatically adjusts your opponent so that you have a roughly ~50% win ratio. Ladder win ratios are a misleading indicator of balance. I'll repeat this as much as necessary to as many people as necessary: The ladder matches you up to win 50% of your games, right? Great! So it thus follows that your matchups will all approximate 50%, right? ...Not even remotely. Most people have strong and weak matchups, so they may have a 50% overall, but a 60% TvZ, a 50% TvT, and a 40% TvP. So even if they win 50% of their games, they won't win 50% of their games in every matchup. This actually makes it EXTREMELY easy to tell if there is an overall racial imbalance, because what you'll find is that even though there is a 50% winrate for the total populations, the matchup winrates will be more or less than 50% for the non-mirrors, as a population. Protoss appears to be (extremely slightly) overpowered vs. T at the moment, having just above 50% PvT winrates across region, skill level, and at the pro level. But it's nothing like the huge imbalance it's been claimed to be. TL;DR: The matchmaking system's desire to put you at 50% winrate makes it extremely easy to spot racial imbalances across a population, because a Terran population-wide problem in TvP would require an increase in TvZ winrates to keep the population at 50%. Yes that's okay only if you assume that the total population = 33% Terran, 33% Toss, 33% Zerg, but we know that's not true... Hmm. We do know that's true? http://www.sc2ranks.com/stats/raceNow look at the league-separated distributions. Here are the ratio #Protoss / #Terran, per league: Bronze: 0.915 Silver: 1.043 Gold: 1.076 Platinum: 1.074 Diamond: 1.166 Master: 1.489 Grandmaster: The numbers aren't out yet, but you know it's pretty close to 2 (:D)
Pretty much. 1.5x as many toss in masters league, and it keeps dropping down for every single league. You're showing clear evidence that as you get better at the game, there are less and less Terrans. Thanks for that
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On January 10 2014 14:25 fruity. wrote:Show nested quote +On January 10 2014 14:19 avilo wrote:So...really disappointed and reading his recent post is quite depressing and not a good sign for SC2 imo =/ On January 10 2014 12:03 Aquila- wrote:
Statistics cover range: Jan. 3-9th, 2013.
Nice try David Kim, nice try. instead of how games are being played. If that were the case, the changes to infestor, blue flame helion, mech / air armor, oversear speed, oracle speed, etc etc would never of happened. I feel the community (not saying you personally) Wants instant changes to META rather than BALANCE?
"Instant" is an interesting word to use when the issues people are talking about (MSC opening versatility, Oracles) have not only been discussed since HOTS Beta, but have actually worsened over time.
But if you mean "instant" in the sense of "one year later," that's certainly preferable to "when LOTV gets here." Yes.
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I guess people are just fucking biased and blind as they seem to pretend Protoss is doing ok vs Zerg but is OP in PvT.
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the popular belief that Terran almost never wins vs. Protoss can be put to rest
Should be posted in the Designated Balance Whine Discussion Thread, just like every other time it's announced.
Anyways, I'm of the (hopeful) impression that if Terran mech would be viable in TvP, Terrans wouldn't complain as much. I think it's more about the lack of versatility in their race rather than them having a problem with their actual win percentage. So hopefully some changes can be implemented to help solve that problem, without destroying the balanced match-ups... some time before LotV ^^
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On January 10 2014 14:06 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On January 10 2014 13:45 RampancyTW wrote:On January 10 2014 13:29 MysticaL wrote:On January 10 2014 11:55 CutTheEnemy wrote:
On EU, 24% of masters players are terran now compared with 35% and 38% for zerg and protoss. How can he say its balanced considering this? His appeal to win percentages within leagues is highly misleading.
He's also been speaking for years as though he's ignorant of our main complaint- its isn't balance per se, its how hard and stressful it is to play terran and win. We know terrans can win once they go pro, but most of us aren't capable of sustaining the serious damage to our personal relationships, grades, hands and paychecks it takes in order to play the race competitively. ^ I think this is the point It's reflected everywhere that while there may be balance among the skilled players, people hate playing terran because it's too frustrating and hard. Although this sounds like QQ, it's shown by how many Terrans are still competing. Some examples: - Terran being under-represented in GM for several seasons in a row now - Terran being under-represented in Proleague (source: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/2014_Proleague/Statistics)8/41 players that played in Proleague so far are Terran. Once again, the same counter-argument is there, "it's a small sample size." Well, it's going to continue being a small sample size. While I understand this small sample size argument... the truth is the entire SC2 pro-scene is a small sample size of the select few hundred players, and Terran is definitely under-represented in the pro scene. Whether win rates back it up or not, not many like playing Terran at the pro-level. Like I said, it's fine if you're extremely good at the game (shown by the god-mode skilled terrans like Maru, Flash, TY all doing well). The reason why we're seeing a lot of 50% in general is because you are matched with people your MMR. If one race struggles, the only impact this makes is every player of that race has lower MMR. It has nothing to do with "who is the better player" - in the game's perspective, the better player is the one with higher MMR, but we all know that's not true. The MMR system automatically adjusts your opponent so that you have a roughly ~50% win ratio. Ladder win ratios are a misleading indicator of balance. I'll repeat this as much as necessary to as many people as necessary: The ladder matches you up to win 50% of your games, right? Great! So it thus follows that your matchups will all approximate 50%, right? ...Not even remotely. Most people have strong and weak matchups, so they may have a 50% overall, but a 60% TvZ, a 50% TvT, and a 40% TvP. So even if they win 50% of their games, they won't win 50% of their games in every matchup. This actually makes it EXTREMELY easy to tell if there is an overall racial imbalance, because what you'll find is that even though there is a 50% winrate for the total populations, the matchup winrates will be more or less than 50% for the non-mirrors, as a population. Protoss appears to be (extremely slightly) overpowered vs. T at the moment, having just above 50% PvT winrates across region, skill level, and at the pro level. But it's nothing like the huge imbalance it's been claimed to be. TL;DR: The matchmaking system's desire to put you at 50% winrate makes it extremely easy to spot racial imbalances across a population, because a Terran population-wide problem in TvP would require an increase in TvZ winrates to keep the population at 50%. And towards the end of WOL, at the height of Broodlord/Infestor bullshit when Patchzergs took games off of clearly superior Terrans and Protoss, Blizzard's stats were 49.8% PvZ and 48.8% ZvT. So either Terrans were (extremely slightly) overpowered vs. Zerg... or results-oriented statistics can be completely meaningless when there are balance factors inside of games that frustrate players and spectators. I'd believe it, for the ladder results. The game was pretty clearly imbalanced on the pro level where the Zerg players were good enough to play the BL-infestor style with very little holes. That doesn't mean the same was true for for the ladder-level players. And I'd be curious what the full breakdown by league would look like. I imagine the closer you got to the top, the better the ZvT winrate would be.
I honestly can't really imagine what balance factors inside of games you would be upset about with for TvP, that you wouldn't have been equally upset about from the other direction in WoL (hint-- you weren't). As players get better at scouting and inferring from minimal info, and figuring out where they need to place their units in defense, most of the the Protoss aggression options will lose their OP stigma. We've seen this time and time again in every single matchup throughout SC2's history. This storm (har), too, shall pass.
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As of this writing, they’ve recorded only 11 wins in 35 non-mirror matchups.
But we have 7 times more PvP than any other mirrors. That's like 14 potential protoss games not included in the sample data.
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United Kingdom31935 Posts
It might be more balanced than many terrans claim but fact is TvP is no fun and frustrating as fuck to play with all the weird abusive shit toss gan pull.
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Really disappointing to see DK brush off concerns from the community again with his magical stats book.
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On January 10 2014 14:20 ishida66 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 10 2014 14:13 ArTiFaKs wrote:On January 10 2014 12:34 IncubusSC wrote:
lol uses a 6 day statistic sample to support his argument, then says that one tournament is too small of a sample size.
What a fucking goon, it's hilarious how he hasn't been fired for his incompetence.
User was warned for this post Ya because 30 games in Proleague equals 1 week of EVERY GAME played on B.net ladder on EVERY SERVER. That makes a lot of sense right? Everyone is so bent out of shape and dead set on proving David Kim wrong or finding some mistake in his wording that the things they are saying doesn't even make any sense. He never said he wasn't going to tweak the matchup even? All he said was that he wanted to wait longer to see how things play out. How come that's so hard for people to understand? And everyone saying that PvT is somehow all of a sudden a "stale" matchup, either hasn't been playing, or hasn't been watching any PvT recently. I've been getting all kinds of different strategies thrown at me from both sides, I think it's actually one of the more exciting matchups at this time. Blink all-in is only strong on certain maps, and even then we are seeing Terran's able to defend it. Part of the reason it's so good is because of the strategy most Terran's have been using i.e. MMA, Innovation, open up Reaper and 1 rax Reactor, 1 rax Tech Lab, which pretty much guarantee's the Terran won't have enough marauders or units in general to stop the all-in. Not to mention the resources to get 1-2 more barracks. Which is exactly why we aren't seeing that as much, or the Terran's are recognizing the weakness of this on Blink favored maps. Everyone needs to chill out a little and think logically and clearly before ranting and getting all pissed off, patience people jesus christ. Thing is, people (including myself) arent patient anymore, looking how he dealt with problems since WoL, and its been like this for 3(?) years. Vomiting statistics to justify his actions pisses everyone off..
Lol his job isn't to please every bronze-silver-gold league player who complains about losing a fucking ladder game, you aren't an expert on game balance and he's not going to ruin the game because for 1 month people are upset about a certain match-up or strategy being deployed in said matchup. That's probably the WORST thing he could do, ever. There's so many variables and so many little nuances in the game that for 1 week while 1 matchup is favored slightly one way, the next month a whole new set of strategies and nuances in said strategies can completely change therefor making the "balance" in the matchup swing the other way. So listening to emotionally charged below average players about balance isn't whats going to happen, there's people who play this game as a fucking job and if the results of those matches doesn't show any imbalance then he's not going to fuck it up. why is this hard to understand?
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I want to cry anytime win % is used in balance discussions. Imo, win% is more about how skilled a player is in a particular matchup and there is the human variable that can have an effect on your matchups in general.
For the most part when people discuss balance or what is wrong with the game, it is around a particular unit or army comp. For example the popular discussion right now with PvT is either the proxy oracle or Photon overcharge. Anytime they have done balance in the past it is because a particular unit is to strong and they nerf it or a certain comp is difficult to beat and they buff units to try and deal with that unit.
So I guess what I'm saying is, instead of focusing on win% we should look at how easy or hard it is to deal with particular situations. Is this unit to efficient? Can this comp be beaten? These are the things I think that should be thought about and looked at.
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On January 10 2014 14:24 stuchiu wrote:Show nested quote +On January 10 2014 14:15 Roman666 wrote:On January 10 2014 14:06 stuchiu wrote:On January 10 2014 13:25 Plansix wrote:On January 10 2014 13:22 itsjustatank wrote:On January 10 2014 13:20 Plansix wrote:On January 10 2014 13:16 itsjustatank wrote:On January 10 2014 12:52 T.O.P. wrote:On January 10 2014 12:18 itsjustatank wrote:Please keep in mind these are not straight-up win percentages. They’re win percentages with player skill factored out. When we grab win/loss data for balance purposes, we categorize each game with 2 different variables per side: one being player skill and other being race strength. So by factoring the player skill out, we are able to more accurately check how each race is doing at each skill level. Without an explanation as to what this actually means, statistically speaking, this sounds like like linguistic flourish justifying cherrypicking one's data to one's advantage, a component of lying with statistics. Elucidation would be greatly appreciated, because I have to assume this isn't the case. Perhaps because good players play more games, if you just present the data unaltered good players would make influence the winrates more than their proportion in the population. Here's the thing though: all they do is present win-rates, and they already break down the win-rates by tier. Ignoring or weighting data based on their stated filters in this context is only done assuming you want to shape the data to your advantage. That assumes that your goal is to mislead the people you are presenting the data to, which David and Blizzard have almost no reason to do. In fact, they have numerous reasons to provide us with the most accurate information possible. Unless you believe that DKim is trying to mislead us and sell us on the idea that the game is balance when he knows that one race is over powers. I question all use of statistics, and it leads me to question people's motives when I sense bad methodology. I don't make the assumption that all data and interpretations of data presented to me are kosher, precisely because I know how easy it is to shape any data set to say whatever it is I want it to say and phrase it in such a way that few people will question it. Ok, but I am going to ask you the same question, why would they do that? You don't just imply that their data is incorrectly gathered, but they do so with purpose with the intent to mislead. Do you really think they want an imbalanced game? I don't really see any good reason for them to "cook the numbers" to make the game appear balanced. I don't think they would purposely mislead anyone. But it's easy to mislead yourself into just looking at the numbers. There was a reason BL/infestor wasn't touched for the last 6-8 months of WoL and it was because the numbers were balanced. It's easy to mislead yourself into thinking winrates are the problem rather than the design or function of the matchups. There are just too few people with too much information and too many objectives to comprehensively cover all paths and solutions to everything the want. From what I've seen in the last few years they want: 1) A balanced game across all levels of play (to attract more casual players. I can understand the sentiment, but you won't be attracting casuals to play more through ladder imho.) 2) They want it to be fun and dynamic. 3) They want to increase the skill cap. 4) They want less deathball matchups. 5) They want Zerg to be "Zergy" 6) The bunker must be changed. 7) They want to all races to have multiple options per matchup. But a lot of those objectives are contradictory. They felt Protoss was too weak early so they gave them photon cannon. That helped balance but increased the amount of deathball matchups and fun and dynamic gameplay (Nothing is more deflating than watching a TvP about to ramp up in speed to only be stopped cold by a photon cannon.) They want the game to be more fun and dynamic so they increase the speed of mutas, medivacs and oracles. But at the same time it decreases tension and awe of the game. Mass drops are now a standard play capable of being done by every solid Terran instead of a hard earned specialty way to play that was only done by MMA and Gumiho. Mutas became faster and gained regen increasing the "Multitasking" of Zerg players but in the end all it really did was let weaker players play like Soulkey/DRG/Leenook at the end of WoL without the extreme control, intuition and practice as it was much more forgiving. They wanted to give Protoss more options in the early game against both Zerg and Terran so they gave them the MSC, cheaper dts and an oracle. While Zerg can still play a variety of opening builds, Terran has been pigeonholed into going reaper cc every game unless they want to just randomly gamble on a cc or double proxy rax compared to Protoss' 4-5 solid openings that all transition well into mid-late (And this doesn't include obscure builds like First's double forge robo immortal build.) Which is why I assume they read all of the balance threads on here and other places. Even if they never release how they are reaching those numbers, even being critical of the methodology is still an important point to bring up so that both spectators and the dev.team don't take the numbers as the only truth. I doubt very much that they will ever comprehensively tell us how they came to these numbers and honestly they shouldn't. It only opens them to more criticism and takes away from actual balance discussion but its always important to not take these numbers at face value either. But what would be the point of releasing these numbers? To back their point, to have the unsinkable argument when some one would question their thinking? Without saying how they came up with these numbers, it even more sinkable argument, because everyone can question it. Seriously, what they were thinking? They just wanted something concrete to show why they think Protoss isn't as much of a problem as the community is making it out to be? Maybe they just wanted to show some of their reasoning and keep us as informed as they can without violating company policy? Who knows.
In any case, I am glad that they keep their methods in-house and do not publicise. Nor should they (especially to a community as over-represented in armchair experts as SC2). It's a pity he felt he had to share it, even if partially. A more blatant fuck you to the community would have been a lot better. I'm sure it would have been a lot more cathartic for him too. Next time, maybe.
Slow and steady as she goes from Blizzard suits me just fine.
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