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4713 Posts
On July 07 2014 13:19 Macbex wrote:I think OP has very good understanding of current meta and very solid understanding of Terran, but not so much about Protoss and Zerg. I'll point out one. I agree with most of arguments, especially widowmine nerf part and blink menace part. However, Show nested quote +
Losing at the lottery is one thing; an utterly inferior lategame is another; but for Terran, the most depressing aspect of the match-up is probably the massive contrast in control needed to handle a Protoss and a Terran army in large engagements.
this is not simply not true. Amount of micro required for late-game Protoss army is about the same as late-game Terran army. In ultimate Protoss deathball vs Terran Bio Deathball, Terran have to do: 1. Split to minimize AoE damage. This is pretty hard, especially to dodge storm, but unless you caught off guard, you can always pre-split before the battle. 2. Kiting zealots. As fancy as it may looks, this is not hard at all. 3. Viking snipe colossi. Difficulty of this depends on upgrades and numbers. When there are at least 3 viking for one colossi, this is as simple as right click. 4. Ghost snipe and EMP HTs and rest of Protoss army. This, in my opinion, is the hardest part. Ghost does have longer range compare to HT (Snipe and EMP are both range 10, where Feedback and Storm are both range 9) and cloak, but Terran player have to remove majority, if not most, of HTs in time. Even a few storm can produce a devastating effect to Terran army. You thought that was hard? Well, it is. Harder than Protoss? Not quite. Well, let's look at Protoss part. Many Protoss micro are simply ignored because it's doesn't appear in screen. Here we go: 1. Positioning and engagement timing. Majority of people watching late-game Protoss army thinks all Protoss player have to do is group and a-move and drop few storms. This is simply wrong. If that's all you do, you hardly make above Plat. If positioned incorrectly, more than half of late game Protoss death-ball won't shooting at all. Also, if you placed all your zealot in front (wait? aren't we suppose to do so? well...not quite), all of them will hit by EMP and instantly lose near half of your tank and possible you lose your game as well. Ideally, you want to portion of your archon and zealots to go in first to get EMPed. Of course, you have to move back your colossi so stalkers can deal with the viking, protect immortals/MSC/sentries, etc. This can be as difficult as split, but since it's not so fancy on screen, most people won't even notice the difference. Also, like split, you can do most of work before the engagement. 2. Blink and target fire vikings with stalkers. This is about the same difficulty as kiting zealots. 3. Guardian shield. No-brainer. 4. Time warp. Half no-brainer. 5. Forcefield. Difficulty depends of actual scenario. Forcefield can be really no-brainer or it can be the hardest thing in SC2. 6. Avoiding Ghosts and drop storm. This is as difficult as Ghost EMP/Sniping HT, if not more difficult. But as mentioned above, a few good storm will wreck Terran bio ball, so Ghost vs HTs usually won't end well for Terran. However, skill required is about the same. Different micros are required for different race. OP simply presenting what he knows and understand, ignoring what he doesn't know or pretend like it doesn't exist. For example, for Jjakji vs Elfi game. OP said that Show nested quote +jjakji controls every part of his army: bio, Vikings, Ghosts; elfi doesn't even try to protect his Colossi from free shots and focuses nothing particular with his Stalkers. The superiority of Protoss' design..; I'm pretty sure "superiority of Protoss design" gives Protoss player free upgrade advantage and army supply as well. Elfi completed 3/3 near 5 minutes before the engagement and was working on shield upgrade. Jjakji, on the other hand, had only 2/2 and 3/3 was not even half way done. Not mentioning that Elfi had near 30 more army supply up. That's why zealots are not dying...they outnumbered and out-upgraded Terran bio. OP mentioned none of these.
That's simply not true.
Half of what you said regarding protoss battle micro is fire and forget, like casting FF, storm, guardian shield and blinking stalkers to target fire stuff isn't hard when half your damage is automated anyway, charge, colossus aoeing etc.
Meanwhile terran requires constant input to not only survive but do damage. Constantly kiting, constantly splitting and storm dodging, constantly cycling trough its army to keep ghosts and vikings alive all the while having to queue up those attacks on the colossus and EMP templar.
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Czech Republic12133 Posts
On July 07 2014 18:43 Godwrath wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2014 17:50 Gwavajuice wrote:On July 07 2014 16:53 ZenithM wrote:On July 07 2014 16:49 klup wrote:
ERRATUM :
can we fix the title and rewrite it as : "Welcome to Parcraft 2"
On a serious note, how can David Kim can state : "In terms of recent tournament wins, the three races are performing quite evenly."
Is there secret tournaments we didn't heard of where terran and zergs has won as many as protoss ? David Kim is probably talking about Zerg, Protoss and Hybrid (what Scarlett plays, obviously). Season 2 numbers (code S + AM premier + EU premier) PvT win ratio : 50.5 (97 games) PvZ win ratio : 53.0 (181 games) TvZ win ratio : 51.5 (99 games) that's the kind of figures we should be talking about and not this kind of charts that means absolutely nothing at all : + Show Spoiler + Meh nevermind.
Though it's partially right. That graph is just a correlation, not a causality.(from the view of balance)
Thing about this - based on female tourneys almost every female out there plays zerg(at least that's what I get from viewing the female tourneys from time to time). Similar graph with females would end in ZvX highly outnumbering others MU.
EU players are strongly into P from the beginning of SC2(when protoss certainly wasn't one button defense easy mode, as some of terran biased writers want to persuade me), then zergs and the least represented race is T(though at the beginning of SC2 T was the strongest race). So that graph is representing what is expected - the biggest part of "foreigners" consists from P, therefore the biggest part of wins consists of PvX. Shock, "foreigners" can beat koreans in PvX most often. How is this possible!? SORCERY!!!!!!
It's not about the balance or "protoss easy", it's about the most represented race from the beginning outside of Korea.
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On July 07 2014 17:50 Gwavajuice wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2014 16:53 ZenithM wrote:On July 07 2014 16:49 klup wrote:
ERRATUM :
can we fix the title and rewrite it as : "Welcome to Parcraft 2"
On a serious note, how can David Kim can state : "In terms of recent tournament wins, the three races are performing quite evenly."
Is there secret tournaments we didn't heard of where terran and zergs has won as many as protoss ? David Kim is probably talking about Zerg, Protoss and Hybrid (what Scarlett plays, obviously). Season 2 numbers (code S + AM premier + EU premier) PvT win ratio : 50.5 (97 games) PvZ win ratio : 53.0 (181 games) TvZ win ratio : 51.5 (99 games) that's the kind of figures we should be talking about and not this kind of charts that means absolutely nothing at all : + Show Spoiler +
Well the latest graph is very indicative, while your figures means strictly nothing. It's astounding that 4 years into the game we have still this complete non-sense comprehension of statistics, lol.
Why WCS premier win-ratio means nothing ? Because in a competition with a strong entry barrier/selection, we got players with same level of results despite any race imbalance.
In practice this means If T is under-powered and P,Z even, Code S will get the 2 or 3 best terrans in the world for the top 15 P and top 15 Z. So yeah with this type of selection, we get in average best player in the world Maru vs a random regular code-A level Protoss, and despite imbalance this MU tends to go 50 per cent, of course.
In short a strong entry selection works nearly the same as the ladder MMR system : win-ratio always tends near 50. But if T is UP a lot, all the terrans shift down in rankings, and this means a low number of Terrans in GM. Same with GSL : the good indicator is the race presence in code S. (thus number of mirror mu too)
If you want an indicator by win-ratio, you should go on some open Korean qualifier (no entry selection to a certain level)
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Czech Republic12133 Posts
On July 07 2014 18:49 Destructicon wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2014 13:19 Macbex wrote:I think OP has very good understanding of current meta and very solid understanding of Terran, but not so much about Protoss and Zerg. I'll point out one. I agree with most of arguments, especially widowmine nerf part and blink menace part. However,
Losing at the lottery is one thing; an utterly inferior lategame is another; but for Terran, the most depressing aspect of the match-up is probably the massive contrast in control needed to handle a Protoss and a Terran army in large engagements.
this is not simply not true. Amount of micro required for late-game Protoss army is about the same as late-game Terran army. In ultimate Protoss deathball vs Terran Bio Deathball, Terran have to do: 1. Split to minimize AoE damage. This is pretty hard, especially to dodge storm, but unless you caught off guard, you can always pre-split before the battle. 2. Kiting zealots. As fancy as it may looks, this is not hard at all. 3. Viking snipe colossi. Difficulty of this depends on upgrades and numbers. When there are at least 3 viking for one colossi, this is as simple as right click. 4. Ghost snipe and EMP HTs and rest of Protoss army. This, in my opinion, is the hardest part. Ghost does have longer range compare to HT (Snipe and EMP are both range 10, where Feedback and Storm are both range 9) and cloak, but Terran player have to remove majority, if not most, of HTs in time. Even a few storm can produce a devastating effect to Terran army. You thought that was hard? Well, it is. Harder than Protoss? Not quite. Well, let's look at Protoss part. Many Protoss micro are simply ignored because it's doesn't appear in screen. Here we go: 1. Positioning and engagement timing. Majority of people watching late-game Protoss army thinks all Protoss player have to do is group and a-move and drop few storms. This is simply wrong. If that's all you do, you hardly make above Plat. If positioned incorrectly, more than half of late game Protoss death-ball won't shooting at all. Also, if you placed all your zealot in front (wait? aren't we suppose to do so? well...not quite), all of them will hit by EMP and instantly lose near half of your tank and possible you lose your game as well. Ideally, you want to portion of your archon and zealots to go in first to get EMPed. Of course, you have to move back your colossi so stalkers can deal with the viking, protect immortals/MSC/sentries, etc. This can be as difficult as split, but since it's not so fancy on screen, most people won't even notice the difference. Also, like split, you can do most of work before the engagement. 2. Blink and target fire vikings with stalkers. This is about the same difficulty as kiting zealots. 3. Guardian shield. No-brainer. 4. Time warp. Half no-brainer. 5. Forcefield. Difficulty depends of actual scenario. Forcefield can be really no-brainer or it can be the hardest thing in SC2. 6. Avoiding Ghosts and drop storm. This is as difficult as Ghost EMP/Sniping HT, if not more difficult. But as mentioned above, a few good storm will wreck Terran bio ball, so Ghost vs HTs usually won't end well for Terran. However, skill required is about the same. Different micros are required for different race. OP simply presenting what he knows and understand, ignoring what he doesn't know or pretend like it doesn't exist. For example, for Jjakji vs Elfi game. OP said that jjakji controls every part of his army: bio, Vikings, Ghosts; elfi doesn't even try to protect his Colossi from free shots and focuses nothing particular with his Stalkers. The superiority of Protoss' design..; I'm pretty sure "superiority of Protoss design" gives Protoss player free upgrade advantage and army supply as well. Elfi completed 3/3 near 5 minutes before the engagement and was working on shield upgrade. Jjakji, on the other hand, had only 2/2 and 3/3 was not even half way done. Not mentioning that Elfi had near 30 more army supply up. That's why zealots are not dying...they outnumbered and out-upgraded Terran bio. OP mentioned none of these. That's simply not true. Half of what you said regarding protoss battle micro is fire and forget, like casting FF, storm, guardian shield and blinking stalkers to target fire stuff isn't hard when half your damage is automated anyway, charge, colossus aoeing etc. Meanwhile terran requires constant input to not only survive but do damage. Constantly kiting, constantly splitting and storm dodging, constantly cycling trough its army to keep ghosts and vikings alive all the while having to queue up those attacks on the colossus and EMP templar.
Well, yeah. Protoss is less mechanically requiring. That's true. The most microable unit P has is blink stalker, though, for some reason, Terran complains about this, weird, tststs ,-)
Though I don't think P is easier, it is just differently demanding. And that's correct, it should be different since you have 3 DIFFERENT races.
The problem is late game, where on some maps you can literally a-move with guardian shield and storm the way through. And if, for some reason, your opponent doesn't play with ghosts, it's even more a-move no matter what T does. Of course, you cannot do this on pro level, but it looks still the same as my low level play, which isn't correct. It should look differently, because it is different but you cannot see it.
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There were lots of good Terrans in EU. Where have they gone?
Wherever Terrans go.
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On July 07 2014 19:12 zimms wrote:
There were lots of good Terrans in EU. Where have they gone?
Wherever Terrans go.
Lucifron retired, the rest is still in Premier League. No clue what that comment should be, just watch the highest level of EU Starcraft and you will see most of them.
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On July 07 2014 19:32 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2014 19:12 zimms wrote:
There were lots of good Terrans in EU. Where have they gone?
Wherever Terrans go. Lucifron retired, the rest is still in Premier League. No clue what that comment should be, just watch the highest level of EU Starcraft and you will see most of them.
Dayshi, Bunny, Major, qxc, Neeb and Happy come to my mind for foreigner Terrans which is not as much as protoss and zerg foreigners.
Dayshi, Major and Bunny are the one with a lot of potential for me !
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Racial distribution and winrates can always be passed off as people naturally being less likely to play Terran and Terran players being less talented. Problem is, that's exactly what we said of other races when they were at their weakest, and as it turned out, maybe it was because the game was imbalanced.
I like to think those kind of arguments are ridiculous. It's more likely that people split themselves more or less equally between the 3 races, and that they're equally talented at playing Starcraft and equally hard-working. Yet, GM distribution and high level tournament distributions don't reflect that.
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Reading that Terran late game army micro is equal to Protoss made my eyes bleed badly. I disagree with most part of this article, but that post is ridiculous. Even if Protoss can mix hybrids on his army they mainly spam few FF and Storm on late game while Aclicking the rest. The player should be reaalllyy bad to not put the Zeas and Archons in front.
While Terran need to constantly micro to stop it and kill it, realize how hard it becomes when the Protoss is also microing the whole army too with Templars on Prisms and using Feedbacks, Phoenix too, targeting units, etc etc.
And the problem isn't that anyway, the problem is that Protoss usually can get to that point easy because they have free macro the whole early game just getting MotherCore.
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4713 Posts
On July 07 2014 19:08 deacon.frost wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2014 18:49 Destructicon wrote:On July 07 2014 13:19 Macbex wrote:I think OP has very good understanding of current meta and very solid understanding of Terran, but not so much about Protoss and Zerg. I'll point out one. I agree with most of arguments, especially widowmine nerf part and blink menace part. However,
Losing at the lottery is one thing; an utterly inferior lategame is another; but for Terran, the most depressing aspect of the match-up is probably the massive contrast in control needed to handle a Protoss and a Terran army in large engagements.
this is not simply not true. Amount of micro required for late-game Protoss army is about the same as late-game Terran army. In ultimate Protoss deathball vs Terran Bio Deathball, Terran have to do: 1. Split to minimize AoE damage. This is pretty hard, especially to dodge storm, but unless you caught off guard, you can always pre-split before the battle. 2. Kiting zealots. As fancy as it may looks, this is not hard at all. 3. Viking snipe colossi. Difficulty of this depends on upgrades and numbers. When there are at least 3 viking for one colossi, this is as simple as right click. 4. Ghost snipe and EMP HTs and rest of Protoss army. This, in my opinion, is the hardest part. Ghost does have longer range compare to HT (Snipe and EMP are both range 10, where Feedback and Storm are both range 9) and cloak, but Terran player have to remove majority, if not most, of HTs in time. Even a few storm can produce a devastating effect to Terran army. You thought that was hard? Well, it is. Harder than Protoss? Not quite. Well, let's look at Protoss part. Many Protoss micro are simply ignored because it's doesn't appear in screen. Here we go: 1. Positioning and engagement timing. Majority of people watching late-game Protoss army thinks all Protoss player have to do is group and a-move and drop few storms. This is simply wrong. If that's all you do, you hardly make above Plat. If positioned incorrectly, more than half of late game Protoss death-ball won't shooting at all. Also, if you placed all your zealot in front (wait? aren't we suppose to do so? well...not quite), all of them will hit by EMP and instantly lose near half of your tank and possible you lose your game as well. Ideally, you want to portion of your archon and zealots to go in first to get EMPed. Of course, you have to move back your colossi so stalkers can deal with the viking, protect immortals/MSC/sentries, etc. This can be as difficult as split, but since it's not so fancy on screen, most people won't even notice the difference. Also, like split, you can do most of work before the engagement. 2. Blink and target fire vikings with stalkers. This is about the same difficulty as kiting zealots. 3. Guardian shield. No-brainer. 4. Time warp. Half no-brainer. 5. Forcefield. Difficulty depends of actual scenario. Forcefield can be really no-brainer or it can be the hardest thing in SC2. 6. Avoiding Ghosts and drop storm. This is as difficult as Ghost EMP/Sniping HT, if not more difficult. But as mentioned above, a few good storm will wreck Terran bio ball, so Ghost vs HTs usually won't end well for Terran. However, skill required is about the same. Different micros are required for different race. OP simply presenting what he knows and understand, ignoring what he doesn't know or pretend like it doesn't exist. For example, for Jjakji vs Elfi game. OP said that jjakji controls every part of his army: bio, Vikings, Ghosts; elfi doesn't even try to protect his Colossi from free shots and focuses nothing particular with his Stalkers. The superiority of Protoss' design..; I'm pretty sure "superiority of Protoss design" gives Protoss player free upgrade advantage and army supply as well. Elfi completed 3/3 near 5 minutes before the engagement and was working on shield upgrade. Jjakji, on the other hand, had only 2/2 and 3/3 was not even half way done. Not mentioning that Elfi had near 30 more army supply up. That's why zealots are not dying...they outnumbered and out-upgraded Terran bio. OP mentioned none of these. That's simply not true. Half of what you said regarding protoss battle micro is fire and forget, like casting FF, storm, guardian shield and blinking stalkers to target fire stuff isn't hard when half your damage is automated anyway, charge, colossus aoeing etc. Meanwhile terran requires constant input to not only survive but do damage. Constantly kiting, constantly splitting and storm dodging, constantly cycling trough its army to keep ghosts and vikings alive all the while having to queue up those attacks on the colossus and EMP templar. Well, yeah. Protoss is less mechanically requiring. That's true. The most microable unit P has is blink stalker, though, for some reason, Terran complains about this, weird, tststs ,-) Though I don't think P is easier, it is just differently demanding. And that's correct, it should be different since you have 3 DIFFERENT races. The problem is late game, where on some maps you can literally a-move with guardian shield and storm the way through. And if, for some reason, your opponent doesn't play with ghosts, it's even more a-move no matter what T does. Of course, you cannot do this on pro level, but it looks still the same as my low level play, which isn't correct. It should look differently, because it is different but you cannot see it.
I disagree with your definition of "DIFFERENT" for the races. I'm ok to a certain extent with the asymmetric design of macro mechanics, production mechanics and certain unit designs. However, designing one race's units to be just as cost efficient as another races but with significantly less mechanical requirements is just flat out wrong and goes against the core principles of good unit design.
It leads to scenarios where the learning curve and player distribution for a certain race is much steeper because its a lot harder and more punishing for players of that race to play.
It also creates the possibility for players of inferior skill level to just take wins of better players, and this happens all the way from the lower leagues to the highest theirs at the moment.
Lastly it makes it so only the very best representatives of the race can achieve good win rates, but their lesser skilled brethren suffer abysmally, and trying to buff the race for the lesser skilled players makes the pros just that much stronger.
Zerg maybe not as much, but Protoss for sure needs a massive rework on several of their units to make them a lot more micro intensive and to make them scale with micro, things like removing autocast from charge, things like Hardenet shields not being automatic, but requiring you to hit a button each time you want the shields to absorb a shot, things like Colossus lasers being less efficient/doing friendly fire, to force the toss to micro them more.
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Protoss late game PvT is centered around retreating from the Terran army while performing a complicated set of tasks revolving around whittling the Terran army down. It involves flanking Templars from every potential direction, Blink Stalkers to snipe off Vikings, Medivacs and Ghosts. The Protoss army tries to find a favourable engagement against the Terran, but it is extremely stressful. Getting EMPed, or having your Colossus bunch up and lose one or two volleys as they get shot by Vikings often means the end of the game.
In battle you have to make sure that Stalkers and Archons fight off vikings, that you storm, use 5+ abilities, that Colossus don't bunch up, that Templars don't all get EMPed or sniped, etc.
So no, it's not fucking a-move.
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On July 08 2014 01:46 Destructicon wrote:
Zerg maybe not as much, but Protoss for sure needs a massive rework on several of their units to make them a lot more micro intensive and to make them scale with micro, things like removing autocast from charge, things like Hardenet shields not being automatic, but requiring you to hit a button each time you want the shields to absorb a shot, things like Colossus lasers being less efficient/doing friendly fire, to force the toss to micro them more.
Dustin Browder thinks that colossi can be used as mobile harassment, raiding worker lines with their cliff-walking mechanic, so clearly you are wrong.
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On July 07 2014 19:08 xongnox wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2014 17:50 Gwavajuice wrote:On July 07 2014 16:53 ZenithM wrote:On July 07 2014 16:49 klup wrote:
ERRATUM :
can we fix the title and rewrite it as : "Welcome to Parcraft 2"
On a serious note, how can David Kim can state : "In terms of recent tournament wins, the three races are performing quite evenly."
Is there secret tournaments we didn't heard of where terran and zergs has won as many as protoss ? David Kim is probably talking about Zerg, Protoss and Hybrid (what Scarlett plays, obviously). Season 2 numbers (code S + AM premier + EU premier) PvT win ratio : 50.5 (97 games) PvZ win ratio : 53.0 (181 games) TvZ win ratio : 51.5 (99 games) that's the kind of figures we should be talking about and not this kind of charts that means absolutely nothing at all : + Show Spoiler + Well the latest graph is very indicative, while your figures means strictly nothing. It's astounding that 4 years into the game we have still this complete non-sense comprehension of statistics, lol. Why WCS premier win-ratio means nothing ? Because in a competition with a strong entry barrier/selection, we got players with same level of results despite any race imbalance. In practice this means If T is under-powered and P,Z even, Code S will get the 2 or 3 best terrans in the world for the top 15 P and top 15 Z. So yeah with this type of selection, we get in average best player in the world Maru vs a random regular code-A level Protoss, and despite imbalance this MU tends to go 50 per cent, of course. In short a strong entry selection works nearly the same as the ladder MMR system : win-ratio always tends near 50. But if T is UP a lot, all the terrans shift down in rankings, and this means a low number of Terrans in GM. Same with GSL : the good indicator is the race presence in code S. (thus number of mirror mu too) If you want an indicator by win-ratio, you should go on some open Korean qualifier (no entry selection to a certain level)
First, these graphs means nothing, because : number of time I beat my little brother at sc2 = 100, number of times taeja beat my brother = 0, in conclusion ME >> Taeja.
Sorry but he reasoning behing the graph is not smarter than this. (plus removing the mirrors from the couting create a huge bias)
Second, I didn't take code A and qualifiers because they were all held way before the latest patch and including data from older patches obvioulsly gets you a bias.
Third, the race breakdown is directly impacted by the results of the last season, so it's a consequence of the past imbalance in general, and of the terrrible season 1 map pool in particular.
Last if you gather al the premier league and code S you have 23 terrans which is enough to have consistent ratio analysis. If you think maru, taeja and bomber shouldn't be taken into account, fine, but you ll need to also remove the resulsts of classic, stardust, pigbaby, soo, true, and huyn (it's an example) and you ll see it doesn't change ratio by a big margin.
But all in all if you do this you'll start to do what I wanted to : talk about actual statistics and tests assumptions , i.e. do a real statistical analysis thay may prove that there is in imbalance or not but which will in every case make sense, which this graph doesn't 
Go to wikipedia, check ANOVA, and chi² tests and the statistical page in general, it'll enlighten you. NOt only in Sc2 discussions, but also in economics and politics
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the mistake you're making is that you're taking leagues like WCS EU and WCS AM into your statistics
They really don't matter compared to code S
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On July 07 2014 19:08 deacon.frost wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2014 18:49 Destructicon wrote:On July 07 2014 13:19 Macbex wrote:I think OP has very good understanding of current meta and very solid understanding of Terran, but not so much about Protoss and Zerg. I'll point out one. I agree with most of arguments, especially widowmine nerf part and blink menace part. However,
Losing at the lottery is one thing; an utterly inferior lategame is another; but for Terran, the most depressing aspect of the match-up is probably the massive contrast in control needed to handle a Protoss and a Terran army in large engagements.
this is not simply not true. Amount of micro required for late-game Protoss army is about the same as late-game Terran army. In ultimate Protoss deathball vs Terran Bio Deathball, Terran have to do: 1. Split to minimize AoE damage. This is pretty hard, especially to dodge storm, but unless you caught off guard, you can always pre-split before the battle. 2. Kiting zealots. As fancy as it may looks, this is not hard at all. 3. Viking snipe colossi. Difficulty of this depends on upgrades and numbers. When there are at least 3 viking for one colossi, this is as simple as right click. 4. Ghost snipe and EMP HTs and rest of Protoss army. This, in my opinion, is the hardest part. Ghost does have longer range compare to HT (Snipe and EMP are both range 10, where Feedback and Storm are both range 9) and cloak, but Terran player have to remove majority, if not most, of HTs in time. Even a few storm can produce a devastating effect to Terran army. You thought that was hard? Well, it is. Harder than Protoss? Not quite. Well, let's look at Protoss part. Many Protoss micro are simply ignored because it's doesn't appear in screen. Here we go: 1. Positioning and engagement timing. Majority of people watching late-game Protoss army thinks all Protoss player have to do is group and a-move and drop few storms. This is simply wrong. If that's all you do, you hardly make above Plat. If positioned incorrectly, more than half of late game Protoss death-ball won't shooting at all. Also, if you placed all your zealot in front (wait? aren't we suppose to do so? well...not quite), all of them will hit by EMP and instantly lose near half of your tank and possible you lose your game as well. Ideally, you want to portion of your archon and zealots to go in first to get EMPed. Of course, you have to move back your colossi so stalkers can deal with the viking, protect immortals/MSC/sentries, etc. This can be as difficult as split, but since it's not so fancy on screen, most people won't even notice the difference. Also, like split, you can do most of work before the engagement. 2. Blink and target fire vikings with stalkers. This is about the same difficulty as kiting zealots. 3. Guardian shield. No-brainer. 4. Time warp. Half no-brainer. 5. Forcefield. Difficulty depends of actual scenario. Forcefield can be really no-brainer or it can be the hardest thing in SC2. 6. Avoiding Ghosts and drop storm. This is as difficult as Ghost EMP/Sniping HT, if not more difficult. But as mentioned above, a few good storm will wreck Terran bio ball, so Ghost vs HTs usually won't end well for Terran. However, skill required is about the same. Different micros are required for different race. OP simply presenting what he knows and understand, ignoring what he doesn't know or pretend like it doesn't exist. For example, for Jjakji vs Elfi game. OP said that jjakji controls every part of his army: bio, Vikings, Ghosts; elfi doesn't even try to protect his Colossi from free shots and focuses nothing particular with his Stalkers. The superiority of Protoss' design..; I'm pretty sure "superiority of Protoss design" gives Protoss player free upgrade advantage and army supply as well. Elfi completed 3/3 near 5 minutes before the engagement and was working on shield upgrade. Jjakji, on the other hand, had only 2/2 and 3/3 was not even half way done. Not mentioning that Elfi had near 30 more army supply up. That's why zealots are not dying...they outnumbered and out-upgraded Terran bio. OP mentioned none of these. That's simply not true. Half of what you said regarding protoss battle micro is fire and forget, like casting FF, storm, guardian shield and blinking stalkers to target fire stuff isn't hard when half your damage is automated anyway, charge, colossus aoeing etc. Meanwhile terran requires constant input to not only survive but do damage. Constantly kiting, constantly splitting and storm dodging, constantly cycling trough its army to keep ghosts and vikings alive all the while having to queue up those attacks on the colossus and EMP templar. Though I don't think P is easier, it is just differently demanding. And that's correct, it should be different since you have 3 DIFFERENT races.
This is such a cop-out. It's not just different. It's easier. Not easy, but easier.
The problem is late game, where on some maps you can literally a-move with guardian shield and storm the way through. And if, for some reason, your opponent doesn't play with ghosts, it's even more a-move no matter what T does. Of course, you cannot do this on pro level, but it looks still the same as my low level play, which isn't correct. It should look differently, because it is different but you cannot see it.
You're right here. There is more to Protoss micro than we see relative to the other races, but it doesn't look that way to spectators. This perception is bad for the game as a sport. Those who react to this post by berating people for whining miss the point: all that matters is perception. If a lot of people find it off-putting or unsatisfying, if not imba, to watch a Protoss deathball walk into a choke and decimate anything that comes near it, who's to say they are wrong for feeling that way?
You can be right all you want about the state of balance, and in the end it won't matter because these design (or call them aesthetic if you don't like that connotation) "problems" will still have the effect of driving a decent number of people away.
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On July 08 2014 02:43 Heartland wrote:
Protoss late game PvT is centered around retreating from the Terran army while performing a complicated set of tasks revolving around whittling the Terran army down. It involves flanking Templars from every potential direction, Blink Stalkers to snipe off Vikings, Medivacs and Ghosts. The Protoss army tries to find a favourable engagement against the Terran, but it is extremely stressful. Getting EMPed, or having your Colossus bunch up and lose one or two volleys as they get shot by Vikings often means the end of the game.
In battle you have to make sure that Stalkers and Archons fight off vikings, that you storm, use 5+ abilities, that Colossus don't bunch up, that Templars don't all get EMPed or sniped, etc.
So no, it's not fucking a-move.
And then Protoss get Tempests. I can't really call that an A-move victory, because the game is already over before a tempest fires its first shot. I think the true problem of lategame TvP is the sheer possibility of tempests. Anything else is manageable if you're better than the Protoss. Lategame TvP battles (outside of tempests) can even be "fun".
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On July 08 2014 05:12 ZenithM wrote:Show nested quote +On July 08 2014 02:43 Heartland wrote:
Protoss late game PvT is centered around retreating from the Terran army while performing a complicated set of tasks revolving around whittling the Terran army down. It involves flanking Templars from every potential direction, Blink Stalkers to snipe off Vikings, Medivacs and Ghosts. The Protoss army tries to find a favourable engagement against the Terran, but it is extremely stressful. Getting EMPed, or having your Colossus bunch up and lose one or two volleys as they get shot by Vikings often means the end of the game.
In battle you have to make sure that Stalkers and Archons fight off vikings, that you storm, use 5+ abilities, that Colossus don't bunch up, that Templars don't all get EMPed or sniped, etc.
So no, it's not fucking a-move. And then Protoss get Tempests. I can't really call that an A-move victory, because the game is already over before a tempest fires its first shot. I think the true problem of lategame TvP is the sheer possibility of tempests. Anything else is manageable if you're better than the Protoss. Lategame TvP battles (outside of tempests) can even be "fun".
My argument here is simply that Protoss late-game army control isn't "a move" or close to it.
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I just did some quick number-crunching while scanning through the Liquipedia pages for each premier tournament. I did my best to pull stats from the round of 32 of each tournament, but for some that data wasn't available, in which case I had to defer to round of 16 data.
I counted 183 Protoss players, 152 Zerg, and 113 Terran. On average, there have been about 13 Protoss, 11 Zerg and 8 Terran in the round of 32 of each premier tournament. This correlates with what we have been commonly seeing on aguilac recently, where there have been higher percentages of PvP and ZvZ mirrors, but a low amount of TvTs.
What seems odd to me is that, while it's easy to draw a connection between the low representation of Terran with their lack of tournament wins, it's more difficult to see why there haven't been more Zerg victories.
It seems that while few Terrans manage to enter a Premier tournament, the few that make it do fairly well. While more Zerg players make it, few of them comparatively ever make a deep run. Protoss, on the other hand, has many who make it and many who succeed, compared to the others.
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On July 08 2014 02:43 Heartland wrote:
Protoss late game PvT is centered around retreating from the Terran army while performing a complicated set of tasks revolving around whittling the Terran army down. It involves flanking Templars from every potential direction, Blink Stalkers to snipe off Vikings, Medivacs and Ghosts. The Protoss army tries to find a favourable engagement against the Terran, but it is extremely stressful. Getting EMPed, or having your Colossus bunch up and lose one or two volleys as they get shot by Vikings often means the end of the game.
In battle you have to make sure that Stalkers and Archons fight off vikings, that you storm, use 5+ abilities, that Colossus don't bunch up, that Templars don't all get EMPed or sniped, etc.
So no, it's not fucking a-move.
I wrote up a very large post, but before I post it, I'd like to be sure...
Are you just pissed off that people are saying that engaging as Protoss takes absolutely no skill? Or are you implying (as I thought when I started my writeup) that Protoss is as, or close to as, mechanically demanding as Terran?
Cuz if it's just the former, then I agree completely and I just wasted 20 minutes. :D
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EPT![[image loading]](/staff/ZeromuS/Strategy/ZPcraft/10.jpg)
