The qualifiers for the first GSL Super Tournament of 2019 concluded with fourteen players earning spots alongside Maru and Classic, who have been seeded as the current Code S finalists. The single-elimination Super Tournament will be held between April 18-21, with ₩10,000,000 KRW and 1,500 WCS Korea points going to the champion.
Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
I was gonna post something to this effect on one of the other recent tournament threads—Maru does good because Maru is a tried & true beast, whose only weakness may be that he needs slightly more prep time than some of his fellow players.
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
Never pass up on an opportunity to ask for Terran buffs, it seems.
Possible 4 in a row GSL wins not enough for you? (Where TvP is 55%, btw).
And now we are asked to exclude Maru's achievements from balance discussions as an outlier?
Imagine if Protoss or Zerg players spoke like this...but to be honest, it seems to work in influencing Blizzard....so why stop now?
This racial distribution does point to there being a real balance problem at the highest level. If you look at the actual brackets it looks even more grim. Somehow 12 protoss, 13 terrans and 11 zerg ended up like this.
If we disregard kas, special and Bratok (whom funnily enough were all knocked out by Z or T) the only zerg to disqualify a terran was soO that went through both Fantasy and Keen. Only one T was knocked out TvT (Bunny by TY).
On the other hand, TY knocked out by Hurricane, Dream knocked out by Trust, Innovation knocked out by Parting, Top knocked out by herO, Cure knocked out by Zest and Alive knocked out by Stats.
I mean sure the stats are padded by there being three foreigner terrans and most of protoss players being in form right now but still. In that qualifier terrans went 15-35 in TvP, that is worrying.
On April 09 2019 06:44 SharkStarcraft wrote: Gonna be in SK for this event. Lifelong dream fulfilled I tell ya
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
Never pass up on an opportunity to ask for Terran buffs, it seems.
Possible 4 in a row GSL wins not enough for you? (Where TvP is 55%, btw).
And now we are asked to exclude Maru's achievements from balance discussions as an outlier?
Imagine if Protoss or Zerg players spoke like this...but to be honest, it seems to work in influencing Blizzard....so why stop now?
You seem to believe that the argument that T is underpowered is disproved by the fact that one terran player won several tournaments last year?
Just because a terran player wins that doesn't mean the game is balanced, imagine if theoretically Maru would be the only player in GSL RO 16, would you still be able to make the same argument?
I think not, the race the champion plays can actually be UP, that is in no way contradiction.
Just for the sake of the discussion I will add that Innovation (whom actually won a championship this year) won it through playing only one single protoss player during the whole tournament, that was Rail.
On April 09 2019 07:23 Shuffleblade wrote: This racial distribution does point to there being a real balance problem at the highest level. If you look at the actual brackets it looks even more grim. Somehow 12 protoss, 13 terrans and 11 zerg ended up like this.
If we disregard kas, special and Bratok (whom funnily enough were all knocked out by Z or T) the only zerg to disqualify a terran was soO that went through both Fantasy and Keen. Only one T was knocked out TvT (Bunny by TY).
On the other hand, TY knocked out by Hurricane, Dream knocked out by Trust, Innovation knocked out by Parting, Top knocked out by herO, Cure knocked out by Zest and Alive knocked out by Stats.
I mean sure the stats are padded by there being three foreigner terrans and most of protoss players being in form right now but still. In that qualifier terrans went 15-35 in TvP, that is worrying.
On April 09 2019 06:44 SharkStarcraft wrote: Gonna be in SK for this event. Lifelong dream fulfilled I tell ya
So happy for you, and quite a bit jealous =D
Now, I realize that there are always explanations for individual matches, and and overall race score can be indicative of certain balance problems, but here's the thing.
Of those matchups you mentioned, the only real upsets are TY and Innovation. And in a bo3, even in multiple bo3, there's so many different issues that can occur, such as the player's form from day to day, the other player's form, the specific preparation, and so on and so forth.
Again, none of this proves that there isn't an imbalance, but pointing out specific match results doesn't necessarily prove imbalance either.
On April 09 2019 07:23 Shuffleblade wrote: This racial distribution does point to there being a real balance problem at the highest level. If you look at the actual brackets it looks even more grim. Somehow 12 protoss, 13 terrans and 11 zerg ended up like this.
If we disregard kas, special and Bratok (whom funnily enough were all knocked out by Z or T) the only zerg to disqualify a terran was soO that went through both Fantasy and Keen. Only one T was knocked out TvT (Bunny by TY).
On the other hand, TY knocked out by Hurricane, Dream knocked out by Trust, Innovation knocked out by Parting, Top knocked out by herO, Cure knocked out by Zest and Alive knocked out by Stats.
I mean sure the stats are padded by there being three foreigner terrans and most of protoss players being in form right now but still. In that qualifier terrans went 15-35 in TvP, that is worrying.
On April 09 2019 06:44 SharkStarcraft wrote: Gonna be in SK for this event. Lifelong dream fulfilled I tell ya
So happy for you, and quite a bit jealous =D
Now, I realize that there are always explanations for individual matches, and and overall race score can be indicative of certain balance problems, but here's the thing.
Of those matchups you mentioned, the only real upsets are TY and Innovation. And in a bo3, even in multiple bo3, there's so many different issues that can occur, such as the player's form from day to day, the other player's form, the specific preparation, and so on and so forth.
Again, none of this proves that there isn't an imbalance, but pointing out specific match results doesn't necessarily prove imbalance either.
Yeah I agree with you, I was just curious and looked into it. It obviously doesn't prove anything, however its not like I'm looking at this tournament in a vacuum,
Look at IEM and WESG racial distribution and there's the reason I even bring it up here, because its not the first time. I'm starting to see a pattern here.
On a sidenote kinda funny to see Dear get wrecked by Maru and then come into this qualifier smashing Fantasy and Keen 4-0. Dear definitely hasn't lost his mojo =P
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
Never pass up on an opportunity to ask for Terran buffs, it seems.
Possible 4 in a row GSL wins not enough for you? (Where TvP is 55%, btw).
And now we are asked to exclude Maru's achievements from balance discussions as an outlier?
Imagine if Protoss or Zerg players spoke like this...but to be honest, it seems to work in influencing Blizzard....so why stop now?
Terran has won the last 5 GSL's in a row actually. Gunning for 6.
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
Never pass up on an opportunity to ask for Terran buffs, it seems.
Possible 4 in a row GSL wins not enough for you? (Where TvP is 55%, btw).
And now we are asked to exclude Maru's achievements from balance discussions as an outlier?
Imagine if Protoss or Zerg players spoke like this...but to be honest, it seems to work in influencing Blizzard....so why stop now?
Please, don't pretend that Protoss or Zerg players wouldn't be losing their shit if they'd had IEM and ST qualifier results like these.
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
Never pass up on an opportunity to ask for Terran buffs, it seems.
Possible 4 in a row GSL wins not enough for you? (Where TvP is 55%, btw).
And now we are asked to exclude Maru's achievements from balance discussions as an outlier?
Imagine if Protoss or Zerg players spoke like this...but to be honest, it seems to work in influencing Blizzard....so why stop now?
Terran has won the last 5 GSL's in a row actually. Gunning for 6.
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
Never pass up on an opportunity to ask for Terran buffs, it seems.
Possible 4 in a row GSL wins not enough for you? (Where TvP is 55%, btw).
And now we are asked to exclude Maru's achievements from balance discussions as an outlier?
Imagine if Protoss or Zerg players spoke like this...but to be honest, it seems to work in influencing Blizzard....so why stop now?
Zerg players did that all of 2018. Serral is the bestest ever, so his wins aren't due to imbalance! Rogue is a world champion, so him winning is expected! Scarlett always plays Koreans tough (conveniently ignoring the entirety of LotV), so her winning isn't a surprise!
There's a reason that Maru is called the 4th race. I'm not about to embark on a balance whine because Maru has clearly shown what his race is capable of. Only it seems strange that so many of his compatriots are seemingly falling behind in the highest arenas, especially in TvP it seems.
A statistician would be very rouge indeed to let one outlier justify the notion that a trend indicative in the rest of their dataset shows that one group is significantly below the mean. That is to say, at this point, is there any doubt that Maru is an outlier? I mean, how probable are three GSL victorties in a row, let alone four?
That said, I still assert that it's best to wait for a few more results to come in, before making any further changes.
One thing to realize is that Terran in SC2 is mechanically very demanding and there is always something for the the player with a bit of extra multitasking to do to get ahead, even more than the other races. This means that while the average Pro will struggle because they can’t manage every unit effectively or harass and macro perfectly all the time, the one who can do that will dominate everything.
This is apparent form the recent Maru games where he got full value out of every unit. Other players would probably use the Raven for a couple of disables or AA missiles but Maru just keeps it alive a lot longer and get more use out of it. He constantly used all of the Raven’s skills in engagements. Similarly his positioning of tanks, mines and how he would engage was great. He would also always be somehow able to deflect harass attempts without taking disastrous damage. My guess is all these need a lot of time and preparation to get it just right, which probably explains his poor results in tournaments with less preparation.
This is also what makes balancing Terran hard. Due to this any small buff can make Terran extremely overpowered. I’m betting that if SC2 had the same amount of coaching and training like SC1 had in its prime, people would regard Terran as the OP race. I’ve tried to think of buffs to units or nerfs to other Protoss units but its hard doing that without it significantly titling the balance in the other direction. It probably explains Blizzard stumbling around in their patches also. I think a larger redesign might be needed to get it correct at this point... Till then people might have to be satisfied with either 1 or 2 terrrans qualifying or it being mostly Terrans!
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
Never pass up on an opportunity to ask for Terran buffs, it seems.
Possible 4 in a row GSL wins not enough for you? (Where TvP is 55%, btw).
And now we are asked to exclude Maru's achievements from balance discussions as an outlier?
Imagine if Protoss or Zerg players spoke like this...but to be honest, it seems to work in influencing Blizzard....so why stop now?
I play BW but in SC2 I main protoss. When it comes to looking at the strength of a race, it's not as good to look at who won what tournament imo as it is to look at tournament race distributions. By the first measure, Terran is doing very well but by the second, it's doing really poorly. If Rogue, Dark and soO are getting knocked out of every ro16 or ro32 but Serral wins everything, I don't think it's fair to say Zerg is doing well.
Edit: And tbf, TY made some ro8s and Inno won WESG but they also had some pretty big upsets and Gumiho is not doing very well atm, so I think it's fair to say terran is pretty underpowered right now. Maybe they shouldn't buff terran because I don't think the imbalance is way worse than in 2018 (although I feel like terran was pretty weak in 2018 as well imo).
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
I agree with this. Only Maru is doing well. But even Maru did poorly at IEM. Actually, all the Terran did poorly at IEM too. Terran seems to be struggling right now.
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
Never pass up on an opportunity to ask for Terran buffs, it seems.
Possible 4 in a row GSL wins not enough for you? (Where TvP is 55%, btw).
And now we are asked to exclude Maru's achievements from balance discussions as an outlier?
Imagine if Protoss or Zerg players spoke like this...but to be honest, it seems to work in influencing Blizzard....so why stop now?
Please, don't pretend that Protoss or Zerg players wouldn't be losing their shit if they'd had IEM and ST qualifier results like these.
If anything the response here is pretty calm.
I don't think anyone would bat an eye if the only Zergs to qualify were Dark and Rogue.
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
Never pass up on an opportunity to ask for Terran buffs, it seems.
Possible 4 in a row GSL wins not enough for you? (Where TvP is 55%, btw).
And now we are asked to exclude Maru's achievements from balance discussions as an outlier?
Imagine if Protoss or Zerg players spoke like this...but to be honest, it seems to work in influencing Blizzard....so why stop now?
I play BW but in SC2 I main protoss. When it comes to looking at the strength of a race, it's not as good to look at who won what tournament imo as it is to look at tournament race distributions. By the first measure, Terran is doing very well but by the second, it's doing really poorly. If Rogue, Dark and soO are getting knocked out of every ro16 or ro32 but Serral wins everything, I don't think it's fair to say Zerg is doing well.
Edit: And tbf, TY made some ro8s and Inno won WESG but they also had some pretty big upsets and Gumiho is not doing very well atm, so I think it's fair to say terran is pretty underpowered right now. Maybe they shouldn't buff terran because I don't think the imbalance is way worse than in 2018 (although I feel like terran was pretty weak in 2018 as well imo).
and the OP object too.like buyn winning blizzcon has nothing to do with 8 armors ultralisk but nerfing protoss "ultralisk" aint easy as many people would think and that requires many changes like the first 2019 patch its not like zvp aint bad enough already for blizz to continue nerfing protoss moar
In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
not really innovation just won a big tournament and now had bad luck while aslo kicking out other terrans before ...
there were nothing that made terran worse between the last terran tournament win vs SERRAL and now
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I see, Terrans winning tournaments or placing top 3 doesnt matter, because there are other tournaments that they dont win or place top 3. Your logic is flawless.
The efficiency of terran whiners is just next level, there's a qualifiers which most people couldnt even watch, terrans end up having just 2 spots, and suddenly it's the end of the world. For all we know Terran will win the supertournament after this.
I'm indifferent in regards to TvP, it's a bad mu, i dont watch it a lot, so by all means, shake it up. I just enjoy the terran tears too much.
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I see, Terrans winning tournaments or placing top 3 doesnt matter, because there are other tournaments that they dont win or place top 3. Your logic is flawless.
The efficiency of terran whiners is just next level, there's a qualifiers which most people couldnt even watch, terrans end up having just 2 spots, and suddenly it's the end of the world. For all we know Terran will win the supertournament after this.
I'm indifferent in regards to TvP, it's a bad mu, i dont watch it a lot, so by all means, shake it up. I just enjoy the terran tears too much.
Compared to our results we are the less whiny race I'd say
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
not really innovation just won a big tournament and now had bad luck while aslo kicking out other terrans before ...
there were nothing that made terran worse between the last terran tournament win vs SERRAL and now
WESG had these good players: Scarlett, Dark, Maru, Neeb, Serral, Innovation. Out of these 6 players only 4 players(at that time) could be considered top - Neeb, Maru, Serral & Dark(considering Neeb's PvT/PvZ as there was no serious Protoss contender). Innovation surprised everyone with his TvT(Maru included ) and won it. But seriously, out of these 6 players if none Terran is in the finals it would be weird. I believe that if Maru and Inno were on different sides of the bracket we would have had TvT finals.
But OK, you're using WESG as an example.
Look at WCS and how underrepresented Terrans are and how bad results they have! Out of all the 4 WCS finals NONE of them had any Terran! (Raynor, Has, Mana, Showtime IIRC). How can you tell it's fine! And usually it's only 1 or 2 Terrans in RO8!!! If that's not a clear sign of issues then I don't know what! (similar issue of using flawed group to make statistics, IEM and GSL ST is more representative as it has bigger scale of both good Terrans and not good Terrans)
Edit> Just realized Blizzcon has WCS in the name too. 5 finals and NO TERRAN!@#! Hurr durr. If you include recent gauntlets(or w/e it was named) it gets even worse. Tell me, where have all the Terrans gone?
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I see, Terrans winning tournaments or placing top 3 doesnt matter, because there are other tournaments that they dont win or place top 3. Your logic is flawless.
The efficiency of terran whiners is just next level, there's a qualifiers which most people couldnt even watch, terrans end up having just 2 spots, and suddenly it's the end of the world. For all we know Terran will win the supertournament after this.
I'm indifferent in regards to TvP, it's a bad mu, i dont watch it a lot, so by all means, shake it up. I just enjoy the terran tears too much.
Compared to our results we are the less whiny race I'd say
You would say that, of course. Yet it wouldnt make it any more true.
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
not really innovation just won a big tournament and now had bad luck while aslo kicking out other terrans before ...
there were nothing that made terran worse between the last terran tournament win vs SERRAL and now
WESG had these good players: Scarlett, Dark, Maru, Neeb, Serral, Innovation. Out of these 6 players only 4 players(at that time) could be considered top - Neeb, Maru, Serral & Dark(considering Neeb's PvT/PvZ as there was no serious Protoss contender). Innovation surprised everyone with his TvT(Maru included ) and won it. But seriously, out of these 6 players if none Terran is in the finals it would be weird. I believe that if Maru and Inno were on different sides of the bracket we would have had TvT finals.
But OK, you're using WESG as an example.
Look at WCS and how underrepresented Terrans are and how bad results they have! Out of all the 4 WCS finals NONE of them had any Terran! (Raynor, Has, Mana, Showtime IIRC). How can you tell it's fine! And usually it's only 1 or 2 Terrans in RO8!!! If that's not a clear sign of issues then I don't know what! (similar issue of using flawed group to make statistics, IEM and GSL ST is more representative as it has bigger scale of both good Terrans and not good Terrans)
Edit> Just realized Blizzcon has WCS in the name too. 5 finals and NO TERRAN!@#! Hurr durr. If you include recent gauntlets(or w/e it was named) it gets even worse. Tell me, where have all the Terrans gone?
Funny when it comes to player's strength like, say, Serral, winning WCS doesnt mean jackshit for you and all the other terran fans, but when it comes to balance, it trumps GSL in an instant.
Btw, if we're at WCS, both EU and NA had terran 3rd place, which compared to the relative strength of the players would be considered an over-performance.
But ok, Terran hasnt been in a WCS finals for ages. Fair enough. Coincidently Zerg hasnt been in a GSL finals for i dont know, like 6-7 seasons in a row. + Show Spoiler +
Edit: looked it up, it was june 2017 last time zerg got into a final (soo 2nd palce)
Please throw a tantrum about that, if you're just concerned with balance and trends. Oh, no, that's fine, that s explainable and natural, and it's Maru, and it s the format and it s all the other things. That's fine.
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
not really innovation just won a big tournament and now had bad luck while aslo kicking out other terrans before ...
there were nothing that made terran worse between the last terran tournament win vs SERRAL and now
WESG had these good players: Scarlett, Dark, Maru, Neeb, Serral, Innovation. Out of these 6 players only 4 players(at that time) could be considered top - Neeb, Maru, Serral & Dark(considering Neeb's PvT/PvZ as there was no serious Protoss contender). Innovation surprised everyone with his TvT(Maru included ) and won it. But seriously, out of these 6 players if none Terran is in the finals it would be weird. I believe that if Maru and Inno were on different sides of the bracket we would have had TvT finals.
But OK, you're using WESG as an example.
Look at WCS and how underrepresented Terrans are and how bad results they have! Out of all the 4 WCS finals NONE of them had any Terran! (Raynor, Has, Mana, Showtime IIRC). How can you tell it's fine! And usually it's only 1 or 2 Terrans in RO8!!! If that's not a clear sign of issues then I don't know what! (similar issue of using flawed group to make statistics, IEM and GSL ST is more representative as it has bigger scale of both good Terrans and not good Terrans)
Edit> Just realized Blizzcon has WCS in the name too. 5 finals and NO TERRAN!@#! Hurr durr. If you include recent gauntlets(or w/e it was named) it gets even worse. Tell me, where have all the Terrans gone?
Funny when it comes to player's strength like, say, Serral, winning WCS doesnt mean jackshit for you and all the other terran fans, but when it comes to balance, it trumps GSL in an instant.
Btw, if we're at WCS, both EU and NA had terran 3rd place, which compared to the relative strength of the players would be considered an over-performance.
But ok, Terran hasnt been in a WCS finals for ages. Fair enough. Coincidently Zerg hasnt been in a GSL finals for i dont know, like 6-7 seasons in a row. Please throw a tantrum about that, if you're just concerned with balance and trends. Oh, no, that's fine, that s explainable and natural, and it's Maru, and it s the format and it s all the other things. That's fine.
Uhm, not enough smileys I guess.
Don't get me into "Serral doesn't mean jackshit", I said multiple times he's top4 and probably best zerg during his 2018.
All I wanted was to show that you cannot use WESG as it's simply bad example. Also multiple times in history I used "you cannot use finals as a representation", if you want to use it and nit pick, then you're in a lot of troubles as across all the LotV finals the Terran is the most underrepresented race, the more deep in LotV we are the worse it is. (and if you remove statistical weirdos like Maru & Serral you're in serious deep shit as Maru has huge representation in Terran finals while we can safely ignore Serral)
Edit> And it's certainly just a coincidence that the Terrans are most representative in finals of the only preparational tournaments we have(and had)
On April 09 2019 18:27 Harris1st wrote: This is gonna be hell of a task. Blizzard would need to somehow make Terran easier to play. If they do a flatout buff, Maru will be unstoppable.
That's the issue, I see this as a design flaw that was made significant with LotV changes. And how they gonna fix this with the usual buffs/nerfs, oh boy. I'm not envy them the task.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I think balance discussions should focus on GSL. It's the highest level of play, in the most rigorous competition, without jet lagged players. And in GSL Terrans are doing just fine.
IEM was some crappy play from Terrans (Maru for one, Innovation for another). I really don't care about WCS EU or AM. The curious thing is that Terrans seem to always do poorly in Super Tournament for some reason. WESG is another meh tournament too - not a single top Korean Protoss.
And no, this is nothing like the Blink Era. Three Terrans made it into GSL RO32 when that was going on...vs nine in this season. No need for the hyperbole.
Why is it up to Blizzard to 'solve' this perceived imbalance? What happened to Terrans actually trying to change what they do? Terrans are the first use the words 'broken' or 'unplayable' to describe a matchup all too readily.
Maybe it's a lack of community leadership - if Nathanias and Demuslim are your least whiny streamers, maybe you're in trouble. I'm not seeing the innovative and creative leadership that we are lucky to have in some parts of the Protoss community (at least comparatively). The whining just creates a loop of learned helplessness that keeps you from innovating.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I think balance discussions should focus on GSL. It's the highest level of play, in the most rigorous competition, without jet lagged players. And in GSL Terrans are doing just fine.
IEM was some crappy play from Terrans (Maru for one, Innovation for another). I really don't care about WCS EU or AM. The curious thing is that Terrans seem to always do poorly in Super Tournament for some reason. WESG is another meh tournament too - not a single top Korean Protoss.
And no, this is nothing like the Blink Era. Three Terrans made it into GSL RO32 when that was going on...vs nine in this season. No need for the hyperbole.
Why is it up to Blizzard to 'solve' this perceived imbalance? What happened to Terrans actually trying to change what they do? Terrans are the first use the words 'broken' or 'unplayable' to describe a matchup all too readily.
Maybe it's a lack of community leadership - if Nathanias and Demuslim are your least whiny streamers, maybe you're in trouble. I'm not seeing the innovative and creative leadership that we are lucky to have in some parts of the Protoss community (at least comparatively). The whining just creates a loop of learned helplessness that keeps you from innovating.
Out of 3 tournaments with the highest skill available we have 2 without proper Terran representation and you say everything is fine because of Code S.
FIne. Then let's change every tournament to Code S format so it's fine everywhere, how about that?
Edit> I'm not a Terran player myself, I play ZErg/Protoss
Edit 2> Blaming Nate and Demuslims is low blow, I am surprised you didn;t take Avilo out of the hat.
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I see, Terrans winning tournaments or placing top 3 doesnt matter, because there are other tournaments that they dont win or place top 3. Your logic is flawless.
The efficiency of terran whiners is just next level, there's a qualifiers which most people couldnt even watch, terrans end up having just 2 spots, and suddenly it's the end of the world. For all we know Terran will win the supertournament after this.
I'm indifferent in regards to TvP, it's a bad mu, i dont watch it a lot, so by all means, shake it up. I just enjoy the terran tears too much.
Terran not terrans. As in Maru. Because Inno winning at WESG last month was the only premier tournament won by a terran not named Maru since August of 2017.
On April 09 2019 18:01 Agh wrote: If a race is clearly better or broken then play it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Otherwise, shut up and git gud.
That would be quite stupid since there are regular patches and stuff that might change the balance, so the time you waste learning properly another race can mean this race is now the UP one. I don't imagine how depressing it is to be INno or TY and lose to the like of 2019 PartinG or Hurricane though
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
And no, this is nothing like the Blink Era. Three Terrans made it into GSL RO32 when that was going on...vs nine in this season. No need for the hyperbole.
You realize that back then there were a lot of players, so getting to code S ro32 was difficult, whereas right now there are barely enough good koreans left to make 32 players, so basically every player qualifies for this GSL no matter his race. Right?
So using GSL ro32 representation to say: "hey it's fine guys!! look, 9 terrans in code S ro32z" is naive at best.
It's better to use GSL + IEM + WESG + GSL ST + WCS (qualifiers included) if we want to have a realistic idea of what the balance / design looks like.
It seems to be more design problems rather than balance (because balance issues can be hacked with maps and stuff) but contrary to the past, it is not limited to foreign terrans anymore, so we should probably act on it.
On April 09 2019 18:27 Harris1st wrote: This is gonna be hell of a task. Blizzard would need to somehow make Terran easier to play. If they do a flatout buff, Maru will be unstoppable.
That's the issue, I see this as a design flaw that was made significant with LotV changes. And how they gonna fix this with the usual buffs/nerfs, oh boy. I'm not envy them the task.
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I see, Terrans winning tournaments or placing top 3 doesnt matter, because there are other tournaments that they dont win or place top 3. Your logic is flawless.
The efficiency of terran whiners is just next level, there's a qualifiers which most people couldnt even watch, terrans end up having just 2 spots, and suddenly it's the end of the world. For all we know Terran will win the supertournament after this.
I'm indifferent in regards to TvP, it's a bad mu, i dont watch it a lot, so by all means, shake it up. I just enjoy the terran tears too much.
Terran not terrans. As in Maru. Because Inno winning at WESG last month was the only premier tournament won by a terran not named Maru since August of 2017.
That's true and all, but Inno did win, and it is the most recent Premier event title. Won by a terran not named Maru. The next one gonna be GSL S1, which is gonna be won by Maru or Classic, with Maru being heavily favored by most (me at the least).
So how can you justify the current state of the game being imbalanced against terran, with pointing out how in the period between september 2017 - february 2019 Terrans not named Maru didnt win anything? There have been several patches since, the game and the meta is completely different from 1+ year ago.
Ok, i get, the Supertournament already looks bad for Terrans, 2 out of 16. But cant we at least wait with the terran-whine until (and if) they finally manage to not win the tournament?
You guys really dont understand the game do you? As TvP goes, Maru is an anomaly. The matchup is clearly broken since the last big revamp, but Maru found a way how to win. The problem with this is that:
a) Not everyone can do it. The way how maru approaches TvP requires insane mechanics, aggressive macro and multitasking. TY when on form can match this style, but other players cant b) Its boring and dull. The basis of the style is, lets throw weird shi...t at the toss to disrupt his eco to the point when he cant counter attack, and cannot get economically too ahead. Then kill him in the mid-game with a super-aggressive push where Terran is at its strongest. c) If b does not work, Terran automatically comes into the late game with a disadvantage, and therefore is screwed unless the protoss makes several big mistakes (like in Maru vs Neeb. Neeb had abysmal control and not very good positioning in the late game fights so Maru won. If he played that against a better protoos, there is just no way...)
The matchup is just effd up. Boring for the viewers, annoying for the players and only 1 terran can consistently find a way to be successful in it. If this does not indicate that a big revamp is required then I dont know what does. Tell you what the Blink era and HOTS Collossus era were a treat compared to this. I still remember Polts hidden bio pushes or Marus no vikings Collosi snipes with MARUders. That was at least fun to watch, right?
On April 09 2019 20:48 MarianoSC2 wrote: You guys really dont understand the game do you? As TvP goes, Maru is an anomaly. The matchup is clearly broken since the last big revamp, but Maru found a way how to win. The problem with this is that:
a) Not everyone can do it. The way how maru approaches TvP requires insane mechanics, aggressive macro and multitasking. TY when on form can match this style, but other players cant b) Its boring and dull. The basis of the style is, lets throw weird shi...t at the toss to disrupt his eco to the point when he cant counter attack, and cannot get economically too ahead. Then kill him in the mid-game with a super-aggressive push where Terran is at its strongest. c) If b does not work, Terran automatically comes into the late game with a disadvantage, and therefore is screwed unless the protoss makes several big mistakes (like in Maru vs Neeb. Neeb had abysmal control and not very good positioning in the late game fights so Maru won. If he played that against a better protoos, there is just no way...)
The matchup is just effd up. Boring for the viewers, annoying for the players and only 1 terran can consistently find a way to be successful in it. If this does not indicate that a big revamp is required then I dont know what does. Tell you what the Blink era and HOTS Collossus era were a treat compared to this. I still remember Polts hidden bio pushes or Marus no vikings Collosi snipes with MARUders. That was at least fun to watch, right?
I mean, I thought that Maru V. Neeb on Yero Zero in WESG was a pretty fantastic game, definitely not as boring as you’re making it out to be.
Can’t even fathom how intense a late game match like that would be to play...
On April 09 2019 20:48 MarianoSC2 wrote: You guys really dont understand the game do you? As TvP goes, Maru is an anomaly. The matchup is clearly broken since the last big revamp, but Maru found a way how to win. The problem with this is that:
a) Not everyone can do it. The way how maru approaches TvP requires insane mechanics, aggressive macro and multitasking. TY when on form can match this style, but other players cant b) Its boring and dull. The basis of the style is, lets throw weird shi...t at the toss to disrupt his eco to the point when he cant counter attack, and cannot get economically too ahead. Then kill him in the mid-game with a super-aggressive push where Terran is at its strongest. c) If b does not work, Terran automatically comes into the late game with a disadvantage, and therefore is screwed unless the protoss makes several big mistakes (like in Maru vs Neeb. Neeb had abysmal control and not very good positioning in the late game fights so Maru won. If he played that against a better protoos, there is just no way...)
The matchup is just effd up. Boring for the viewers, annoying for the players and only 1 terran can consistently find a way to be successful in it. If this does not indicate that a big revamp is required then I dont know what does. Tell you what the Blink era and HOTS Collossus era were a treat compared to this. I still remember Polts hidden bio pushes or Marus no vikings Collosi snipes with MARUders. That was at least fun to watch, right?
I mean, I thought that Maru V. Neeb on Yero Zero in WESG was a pretty fantastic game, definitely not as boring as you’re making it out to be.
Can’t even fathom how intense a late game match like that would be to play...
Artosis and NoRegret did a really long breakdown of that game, definitely worth a watch, VoDs are up think it’s the first episode of his new series.
On April 09 2019 20:48 MarianoSC2 wrote: You guys really dont understand the game do you? As TvP goes, Maru is an anomaly. The matchup is clearly broken since the last big revamp, but Maru found a way how to win. The problem with this is that:
a) Not everyone can do it. The way how maru approaches TvP requires insane mechanics, aggressive macro and multitasking. TY when on form can match this style, but other players cant b) Its boring and dull. The basis of the style is, lets throw weird shi...t at the toss to disrupt his eco to the point when he cant counter attack, and cannot get economically too ahead. Then kill him in the mid-game with a super-aggressive push where Terran is at its strongest. c) If b does not work, Terran automatically comes into the late game with a disadvantage, and therefore is screwed unless the protoss makes several big mistakes (like in Maru vs Neeb. Neeb had abysmal control and not very good positioning in the late game fights so Maru won. If he played that against a better protoos, there is just no way...)
The matchup is just effd up. Boring for the viewers, annoying for the players and only 1 terran can consistently find a way to be successful in it. If this does not indicate that a big revamp is required then I dont know what does. Tell you what the Blink era and HOTS Collossus era were a treat compared to this. I still remember Polts hidden bio pushes or Marus no vikings Collosi snipes with MARUders. That was at least fun to watch, right?
I mean, I thought that Maru V. Neeb on Yero Zero in WESG was a pretty fantastic game, definitely not as boring as you’re making it out to be.
Can’t even fathom how intense a late game match like that would be to play...
And how often do we get games like that? 1 in a 100? Maybe not even...
the funniest thing about these conversations is that they're being held exclusively between people who are anywhere from 1000-4000 MMR below the players they're talking about. absolutely ludicrous, monumental gap.
when you're higher than 6K MMR and up to pro level your results are personalized to your individual skill, because the only people playing at that level are working with 0.1% talent and an encyclopedic knowledge of how the game is played. so yes, play like maru. play like serral. how you think balance works for these players is irrelevant because they are not even playing the same game as you. they would destroy players who would destroy players who would destroy you
also another reality check: there aren't even enough players or enough leagues or enough championships in this scene for any short term numerical analysis to be scientifically significant. it's literally not even unlikely that at any given time there can be a skewed amount of top players who play a certain race simply because of random variation.
On April 09 2019 22:05 brickrd wrote: the funniest thing about these conversations is that they're being held exclusively between people who are anywhere from 1000-4000 MMR below the players they're talking about. absolutely ludicrous, monumental gap.
when you're higher than 6K MMR and up to pro level your results are personalized to your individual skill, because the only people playing at that level are working with 0.1% talent and an encyclopedic knowledge of how the game is played. so yes, play like maru. play like serral. how you think balance works for these players is irrelevant because they are not even playing the same game as you
You're wrong on two counts. 1. All people from all MMR ranges whine about balance, including GSL pros, and top foreign players (over 6k mmr) 2. The people who are most engaged in these conversations dont play much at all (or not anymore). Take any sport, the biggest, most devoted fans are never those who are semi-pros or play the game vocationally, but observers who get really invested in following the scene, know all the results, watch most of the games.
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I see, Terrans winning tournaments or placing top 3 doesnt matter, because there are other tournaments that they dont win or place top 3. Your logic is flawless.
The efficiency of terran whiners is just next level, there's a qualifiers which most people couldnt even watch, terrans end up having just 2 spots, and suddenly it's the end of the world. For all we know Terran will win the supertournament after this.
I'm indifferent in regards to TvP, it's a bad mu, i dont watch it a lot, so by all means, shake it up. I just enjoy the terran tears too much.
Terran not terrans. As in Maru. Because Inno winning at WESG last month was the only premier tournament won by a terran not named Maru since August of 2017.
That's true and all, but Inno did win, and it is the most recent Premier event title. Won by a terran not named Maru. The next one gonna be GSL S1, which is gonna be won by Maru or Classic, with Maru being heavily favored by most (me at the least).
So how can you justify the current state of the game being imbalanced against terran, with pointing out how in the period between september 2017 - february 2019 Terrans not named Maru didnt win anything? There have been several patches since, the game and the meta is completely different from 1+ year ago.
Ok, i get, the Supertournament already looks bad for Terrans, 2 out of 16. But cant we at least wait with the terran-whine until (and if) they finally manage to not win the tournament?
What. The. Hell?
IEM - 0 Terrans at RO8. GSL ST - unless Maru pulls his Code S style we're going for 0 too. You want to ignore this because Code S - a different type of tournament(the only preparational tournament) and because of WESG, because WESG had so many good and awesome players. When I look at the roster ANYONE could have won.
We can say IEM was just an anomaly, but now we're having 2 anomalies? Really?
Using WESG is wrong similarly to using WCS. But if you insist of doing this I will use WCS again. WCS has low number of Terrans for years, obviously the race is broken and need repairs. /s
On April 09 2019 22:05 brickrd wrote: the funniest thing about these conversations is that they're being held exclusively between people who are anywhere from 1000-4000 MMR below the players they're talking about. absolutely ludicrous, monumental gap.
when you're higher than 6K MMR and up to pro level your results are personalized to your individual skill, because the only people playing at that level are working with 0.1% talent and an encyclopedic knowledge of how the game is played. so yes, play like maru. play like serral. how you think balance works for these players is irrelevant because they are not even playing the same game as you. they would destroy players who would destroy players who would destroy you
also another reality check: there aren't even enough players or enough leagues or enough championships in this scene for any short term numerical analysis to be scientifically significant. it's literally not even unlikely that at any given time there can be a skewed amount of top players who play a certain race simply because of random variation.
So the low rate of Terrans has nothing to do with balance or the game, they're simply not good. Good to know.
Also I can't cook but I can tell when the food is bad. I don't know how to play in GM but I can tell that having 2 weekenders with top players and having low Terran rate isn't normal for "a balanced game". Balanced means it should aim at equal ratio. While on such low numbers the scale can move a little bit, we're talking about a huge shift which should be alarming(at least).
And we're talking about 2 huge shifts in a row, the probability is way too low. If we scratch MAru from the equation(as he's statistical anomaly same as Serral) we get horrendous numbers for Terran in the 18 months or so.
We have to work what we have now and it doesn't look good.
Does anyone know who the casters will be for this event? I'd imagine that Tastosis will be there, but I wonder if they'll bring on anyone else, and if so, who.
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I see, Terrans winning tournaments or placing top 3 doesnt matter, because there are other tournaments that they dont win or place top 3. Your logic is flawless.
The efficiency of terran whiners is just next level, there's a qualifiers which most people couldnt even watch, terrans end up having just 2 spots, and suddenly it's the end of the world. For all we know Terran will win the supertournament after this.
I'm indifferent in regards to TvP, it's a bad mu, i dont watch it a lot, so by all means, shake it up. I just enjoy the terran tears too much.
Terran not terrans. As in Maru. Because Inno winning at WESG last month was the only premier tournament won by a terran not named Maru since August of 2017.
That's true and all, but Inno did win, and it is the most recent Premier event title. Won by a terran not named Maru. The next one gonna be GSL S1, which is gonna be won by Maru or Classic, with Maru being heavily favored by most (me at the least).
So how can you justify the current state of the game being imbalanced against terran, with pointing out how in the period between september 2017 - february 2019 Terrans not named Maru didnt win anything? There have been several patches since, the game and the meta is completely different from 1+ year ago.
Ok, i get, the Supertournament already looks bad for Terrans, 2 out of 16. But cant we at least wait with the terran-whine until (and if) they finally manage to not win the tournament?
Terran as a race has a better chance in tournaments with long preparation against 1 opponent than it has in a weekender kind of tournament format. Therefore when we discuss balance on the pro level we need to distinguish which balance we are talking about, are we talking GSL balance, weekender balance or ladder balance. Obviously terran is doing slightly better in GSL than in weekenders and therefore using terrans results in GSL to argue that weekender or ladder is balanced is a bad argument.
You make a couple of mistakes, for one Innovation winning WESG says absolutely nothing about TvP balance. In that tournament Innovation only played a single protoss player, that was Rail which he defeated 3-1. The second mistake you make is when you say that 2 out of 16 terrans look bad, when we look at the result of the weekender style qualifier we actually have the result of 1 terran out of 14 slots. Marus seed says nothing about weekender balance. It doesn't look bad it looks horrendous.
Edit: In answer to brickrd's comment, immagine having gsl round 32 be 16 protoss and 16 zergs for three seasons in a row. We as fans couldn't possible have an opinion on that, we are way underqualified because we are not professionals.
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I see, Terrans winning tournaments or placing top 3 doesnt matter, because there are other tournaments that they dont win or place top 3. Your logic is flawless.
The efficiency of terran whiners is just next level, there's a qualifiers which most people couldnt even watch, terrans end up having just 2 spots, and suddenly it's the end of the world. For all we know Terran will win the supertournament after this.
I'm indifferent in regards to TvP, it's a bad mu, i dont watch it a lot, so by all means, shake it up. I just enjoy the terran tears too much.
Terran not terrans. As in Maru. Because Inno winning at WESG last month was the only premier tournament won by a terran not named Maru since August of 2017.
That's true and all, but Inno did win, and it is the most recent Premier event title. Won by a terran not named Maru. The next one gonna be GSL S1, which is gonna be won by Maru or Classic, with Maru being heavily favored by most (me at the least).
So how can you justify the current state of the game being imbalanced against terran, with pointing out how in the period between september 2017 - february 2019 Terrans not named Maru didnt win anything? There have been several patches since, the game and the meta is completely different from 1+ year ago.
Ok, i get, the Supertournament already looks bad for Terrans, 2 out of 16. But cant we at least wait with the terran-whine until (and if) they finally manage to not win the tournament?
What. The. Hell?
IEM - 0 Terrans at RO8. GSL ST - unless Maru pulls his Code S style we're going for 0 too. You want to ignore this because Code S - a different type of tournament(the only preparational tournament) and because of WESG, because WESG had so many good and awesome players. When I look at the roster ANYONE could have won.
We can say IEM was just an anomaly, but now we're having 2 anomalies? Really?
Using WESG is wrong similarly to using WCS. But if you insist of doing this I will use WCS again. WCS has low number of Terrans for years, obviously the race is broken and need repairs. /s
the problem is we have 1 IEM and 1 Blizzcon, tournaments that are super stacked, super anticipated, big payoff. And they re about half a year apart. So basically you have 1 of these tournaments per semester, definetly 1 per patch at most. If you want to draw any conclusions about the state of the game based on results, you simply cannot rely on a data set of 1 (or 2).
The rest of the tournaments are these special cases. Either not good enough lineup, or a different format, or only foreigners etc....
At the end of the day, it's impossible to draw clear conclusions, cuz most of the results we have can be explained as anomalies or format.
And yeah, sure, you can argue with terrans doing badly at WCS and supertournaments, and I can point out they won WESG and code S. Neither dataset is really enough to draw a good, solid conclusion. The difference is, some here scream Terran underpowered, while i'm not screaming overpowered, im just poking at the whiners.
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I see, Terrans winning tournaments or placing top 3 doesnt matter, because there are other tournaments that they dont win or place top 3. Your logic is flawless.
The efficiency of terran whiners is just next level, there's a qualifiers which most people couldnt even watch, terrans end up having just 2 spots, and suddenly it's the end of the world. For all we know Terran will win the supertournament after this.
I'm indifferent in regards to TvP, it's a bad mu, i dont watch it a lot, so by all means, shake it up. I just enjoy the terran tears too much.
Terran not terrans. As in Maru. Because Inno winning at WESG last month was the only premier tournament won by a terran not named Maru since August of 2017.
That's true and all, but Inno did win, and it is the most recent Premier event title. Won by a terran not named Maru. The next one gonna be GSL S1, which is gonna be won by Maru or Classic, with Maru being heavily favored by most (me at the least).
So how can you justify the current state of the game being imbalanced against terran, with pointing out how in the period between september 2017 - february 2019 Terrans not named Maru didnt win anything? There have been several patches since, the game and the meta is completely different from 1+ year ago.
Ok, i get, the Supertournament already looks bad for Terrans, 2 out of 16. But cant we at least wait with the terran-whine until (and if) they finally manage to not win the tournament?
What. The. Hell?
IEM - 0 Terrans at RO8. GSL ST - unless Maru pulls his Code S style we're going for 0 too. You want to ignore this because Code S - a different type of tournament(the only preparational tournament) and because of WESG, because WESG had so many good and awesome players. When I look at the roster ANYONE could have won.
We can say IEM was just an anomaly, but now we're having 2 anomalies? Really?
Using WESG is wrong similarly to using WCS. But if you insist of doing this I will use WCS again. WCS has low number of Terrans for years, obviously the race is broken and need repairs. /s
On April 09 2019 22:05 brickrd wrote: the funniest thing about these conversations is that they're being held exclusively between people who are anywhere from 1000-4000 MMR below the players they're talking about. absolutely ludicrous, monumental gap.
when you're higher than 6K MMR and up to pro level your results are personalized to your individual skill, because the only people playing at that level are working with 0.1% talent and an encyclopedic knowledge of how the game is played. so yes, play like maru. play like serral. how you think balance works for these players is irrelevant because they are not even playing the same game as you. they would destroy players who would destroy players who would destroy you
also another reality check: there aren't even enough players or enough leagues or enough championships in this scene for any short term numerical analysis to be scientifically significant. it's literally not even unlikely that at any given time there can be a skewed amount of top players who play a certain race simply because of random variation.
So the low rate of Terrans has nothing to do with balance or the game, they're simply not good. Good to know.
Also I can't cook but I can tell when the food is bad. I don't know how to play in GM but I can tell that having 2 weekenders with top players and having low Terran rate isn't normal for "a balanced game". Balanced means it should aim at equal ratio. While on such low numbers the scale can move a little bit, we're talking about a huge shift which should be alarming(at least).
And we're talking about 2 huge shifts in a row, the probability is way too low. If we scratch MAru from the equation(as he's statistical anomaly same as Serral) we get horrendous numbers for Terran in the 18 months or so.
We have to work what we have now and it doesn't look good.
Terrans, even excluding Maru, had a quite balanced showing in GSL, which I have been assured is the only tournament that counts. Can't risk unbalancing GSL for some silly weekenders!
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I see, Terrans winning tournaments or placing top 3 doesnt matter, because there are other tournaments that they dont win or place top 3. Your logic is flawless.
The efficiency of terran whiners is just next level, there's a qualifiers which most people couldnt even watch, terrans end up having just 2 spots, and suddenly it's the end of the world. For all we know Terran will win the supertournament after this.
I'm indifferent in regards to TvP, it's a bad mu, i dont watch it a lot, so by all means, shake it up. I just enjoy the terran tears too much.
Terran not terrans. As in Maru. Because Inno winning at WESG last month was the only premier tournament won by a terran not named Maru since August of 2017.
That's true and all, but Inno did win, and it is the most recent Premier event title. Won by a terran not named Maru. The next one gonna be GSL S1, which is gonna be won by Maru or Classic, with Maru being heavily favored by most (me at the least).
So how can you justify the current state of the game being imbalanced against terran, with pointing out how in the period between september 2017 - february 2019 Terrans not named Maru didnt win anything? There have been several patches since, the game and the meta is completely different from 1+ year ago.
Ok, i get, the Supertournament already looks bad for Terrans, 2 out of 16. But cant we at least wait with the terran-whine until (and if) they finally manage to not win the tournament?
What. The. Hell?
IEM - 0 Terrans at RO8. GSL ST - unless Maru pulls his Code S style we're going for 0 too. You want to ignore this because Code S - a different type of tournament(the only preparational tournament) and because of WESG, because WESG had so many good and awesome players. When I look at the roster ANYONE could have won.
We can say IEM was just an anomaly, but now we're having 2 anomalies? Really?
Using WESG is wrong similarly to using WCS. But if you insist of doing this I will use WCS again. WCS has low number of Terrans for years, obviously the race is broken and need repairs. /s
On April 09 2019 22:05 brickrd wrote: the funniest thing about these conversations is that they're being held exclusively between people who are anywhere from 1000-4000 MMR below the players they're talking about. absolutely ludicrous, monumental gap.
when you're higher than 6K MMR and up to pro level your results are personalized to your individual skill, because the only people playing at that level are working with 0.1% talent and an encyclopedic knowledge of how the game is played. so yes, play like maru. play like serral. how you think balance works for these players is irrelevant because they are not even playing the same game as you. they would destroy players who would destroy players who would destroy you
also another reality check: there aren't even enough players or enough leagues or enough championships in this scene for any short term numerical analysis to be scientifically significant. it's literally not even unlikely that at any given time there can be a skewed amount of top players who play a certain race simply because of random variation.
So the low rate of Terrans has nothing to do with balance or the game, they're simply not good. Good to know.
Also I can't cook but I can tell when the food is bad. I don't know how to play in GM but I can tell that having 2 weekenders with top players and having low Terran rate isn't normal for "a balanced game". Balanced means it should aim at equal ratio. While on such low numbers the scale can move a little bit, we're talking about a huge shift which should be alarming(at least).
And we're talking about 2 huge shifts in a row, the probability is way too low. If we scratch MAru from the equation(as he's statistical anomaly same as Serral) we get horrendous numbers for Terran in the 18 months or so.
We have to work what we have now and it doesn't look good.
Terrans, even excluding Maru, had a quite balanced showing in GSL, which I have been assured is the only tournament that counts. Can't risk unbalancing GSL for some silly weekenders!
Also let's not forget Innovation just won WESG. That just happened. Terran is still doing better than Protoss but people have a mental block that Protoss is supposedly too strong so they ignore its lack of tournament wins.
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I see, Terrans winning tournaments or placing top 3 doesnt matter, because there are other tournaments that they dont win or place top 3. Your logic is flawless.
The efficiency of terran whiners is just next level, there's a qualifiers which most people couldnt even watch, terrans end up having just 2 spots, and suddenly it's the end of the world. For all we know Terran will win the supertournament after this.
I'm indifferent in regards to TvP, it's a bad mu, i dont watch it a lot, so by all means, shake it up. I just enjoy the terran tears too much.
Terran not terrans. As in Maru. Because Inno winning at WESG last month was the only premier tournament won by a terran not named Maru since August of 2017.
That's true and all, but Inno did win, and it is the most recent Premier event title. Won by a terran not named Maru. The next one gonna be GSL S1, which is gonna be won by Maru or Classic, with Maru being heavily favored by most (me at the least).
So how can you justify the current state of the game being imbalanced against terran, with pointing out how in the period between september 2017 - february 2019 Terrans not named Maru didnt win anything? There have been several patches since, the game and the meta is completely different from 1+ year ago.
Ok, i get, the Supertournament already looks bad for Terrans, 2 out of 16. But cant we at least wait with the terran-whine until (and if) they finally manage to not win the tournament?
What. The. Hell?
IEM - 0 Terrans at RO8. GSL ST - unless Maru pulls his Code S style we're going for 0 too. You want to ignore this because Code S - a different type of tournament(the only preparational tournament) and because of WESG, because WESG had so many good and awesome players. When I look at the roster ANYONE could have won.
We can say IEM was just an anomaly, but now we're having 2 anomalies? Really?
Using WESG is wrong similarly to using WCS. But if you insist of doing this I will use WCS again. WCS has low number of Terrans for years, obviously the race is broken and need repairs. /s
On April 09 2019 22:05 brickrd wrote: the funniest thing about these conversations is that they're being held exclusively between people who are anywhere from 1000-4000 MMR below the players they're talking about. absolutely ludicrous, monumental gap.
when you're higher than 6K MMR and up to pro level your results are personalized to your individual skill, because the only people playing at that level are working with 0.1% talent and an encyclopedic knowledge of how the game is played. so yes, play like maru. play like serral. how you think balance works for these players is irrelevant because they are not even playing the same game as you. they would destroy players who would destroy players who would destroy you
also another reality check: there aren't even enough players or enough leagues or enough championships in this scene for any short term numerical analysis to be scientifically significant. it's literally not even unlikely that at any given time there can be a skewed amount of top players who play a certain race simply because of random variation.
So the low rate of Terrans has nothing to do with balance or the game, they're simply not good. Good to know.
Also I can't cook but I can tell when the food is bad. I don't know how to play in GM but I can tell that having 2 weekenders with top players and having low Terran rate isn't normal for "a balanced game". Balanced means it should aim at equal ratio. While on such low numbers the scale can move a little bit, we're talking about a huge shift which should be alarming(at least).
And we're talking about 2 huge shifts in a row, the probability is way too low. If we scratch MAru from the equation(as he's statistical anomaly same as Serral) we get horrendous numbers for Terran in the 18 months or so.
We have to work what we have now and it doesn't look good.
Terrans, even excluding Maru, had a quite balanced showing in GSL, which I have been assured is the only tournament that counts. Can't risk unbalancing GSL for some silly weekenders!
Also let's not forget Innovation just won WESG. That just happened. Terran is still doing better than Protoss but people have a mental block that Protoss is supposedly too strong so they ignore its lack of tournament wins.
If GSL is the only tournament that counts Zerg needs help Protoss is doing fine then
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I see, Terrans winning tournaments or placing top 3 doesnt matter, because there are other tournaments that they dont win or place top 3. Your logic is flawless.
The efficiency of terran whiners is just next level, there's a qualifiers which most people couldnt even watch, terrans end up having just 2 spots, and suddenly it's the end of the world. For all we know Terran will win the supertournament after this.
I'm indifferent in regards to TvP, it's a bad mu, i dont watch it a lot, so by all means, shake it up. I just enjoy the terran tears too much.
Terran not terrans. As in Maru. Because Inno winning at WESG last month was the only premier tournament won by a terran not named Maru since August of 2017.
That's true and all, but Inno did win, and it is the most recent Premier event title. Won by a terran not named Maru. The next one gonna be GSL S1, which is gonna be won by Maru or Classic, with Maru being heavily favored by most (me at the least).
So how can you justify the current state of the game being imbalanced against terran, with pointing out how in the period between september 2017 - february 2019 Terrans not named Maru didnt win anything? There have been several patches since, the game and the meta is completely different from 1+ year ago.
Ok, i get, the Supertournament already looks bad for Terrans, 2 out of 16. But cant we at least wait with the terran-whine until (and if) they finally manage to not win the tournament?
What. The. Hell?
IEM - 0 Terrans at RO8. GSL ST - unless Maru pulls his Code S style we're going for 0 too. You want to ignore this because Code S - a different type of tournament(the only preparational tournament) and because of WESG, because WESG had so many good and awesome players. When I look at the roster ANYONE could have won.
We can say IEM was just an anomaly, but now we're having 2 anomalies? Really?
Using WESG is wrong similarly to using WCS. But if you insist of doing this I will use WCS again. WCS has low number of Terrans for years, obviously the race is broken and need repairs. /s
the problem is we have 1 IEM and 1 Blizzcon, tournaments that are super stacked, super anticipated, big payoff. And they re about half a year apart. So basically you have 1 of these tournaments per semester, definetly 1 per patch at most. If you want to draw any conclusions about the state of the game based on results, you simply cannot rely on a data set of 1 (or 2).
The rest of the tournaments are these special cases. Either not good enough lineup, or a different format, or only foreigners etc....
At the end of the day, it's impossible to draw clear conclusions, cuz most of the results we have can be explained as anomalies or format.
And yeah, sure, you can argue with terrans doing badly at WCS and supertournaments, and I can point out they won WESG and code S. Neither dataset is really enough to draw a good, solid conclusion. The difference is, some here scream Terran underpowered, while i'm not screaming overpowered, im just poking at the whiners.
We. Just. Had. 2. Stacked. Tournaments.
Why do you mix Blizzcon into it? On the recent major patch with we just had 2 stacked tournaments. IEM - 0 Terrans. GSL ST - 2 Terrans(one of whom invited) from 16 contestants. Don't evade from this, we have 2 weekenders with serious participation and it appears all Terrans are saving their builds for Code S.
I'd argue to give Terran more time to figure stuff out/ play like Maru. It seems Terran is not underpowered, just TvP has a slight problem. We had these before. It is not as broken as BL/ Infestor was, so there is no need to jump the gun IMO
On April 09 2019 22:58 Harris1st wrote: There are some fine points in this thread.
I'd argue to give Terran more time to figure stuff out/ play like Maru. It seems Terran is not underpowered, just TvP has a slight problem. We had these before. It is not as broken as BL/ Infestor was, so there is no need to jump the gun IMO
Yeah, why worry, there are other tournaments to get the money to make the living for the players. Like, uh, like... (now's the time you step in and show how this is not an issue missing 2 or 3 big tournaments because you "lack" in PvT)
I would like to emphasis Maru fucked up IEM too and if he's anything like in the past year he will fuck up GSL ST either, which is not exactly what you especially should be looking for with these arguments(Maru knows, everyone else need to get on his level, it's fine).
BTW did you think about the fact that Maru can be figured out instead and then this argument will be even more invalid?
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I see, Terrans winning tournaments or placing top 3 doesnt matter, because there are other tournaments that they dont win or place top 3. Your logic is flawless.
The efficiency of terran whiners is just next level, there's a qualifiers which most people couldnt even watch, terrans end up having just 2 spots, and suddenly it's the end of the world. For all we know Terran will win the supertournament after this.
I'm indifferent in regards to TvP, it's a bad mu, i dont watch it a lot, so by all means, shake it up. I just enjoy the terran tears too much.
Terran not terrans. As in Maru. Because Inno winning at WESG last month was the only premier tournament won by a terran not named Maru since August of 2017.
That's true and all, but Inno did win, and it is the most recent Premier event title. Won by a terran not named Maru. The next one gonna be GSL S1, which is gonna be won by Maru or Classic, with Maru being heavily favored by most (me at the least).
So how can you justify the current state of the game being imbalanced against terran, with pointing out how in the period between september 2017 - february 2019 Terrans not named Maru didnt win anything? There have been several patches since, the game and the meta is completely different from 1+ year ago.
Ok, i get, the Supertournament already looks bad for Terrans, 2 out of 16. But cant we at least wait with the terran-whine until (and if) they finally manage to not win the tournament?
What. The. Hell?
IEM - 0 Terrans at RO8. GSL ST - unless Maru pulls his Code S style we're going for 0 too. You want to ignore this because Code S - a different type of tournament(the only preparational tournament) and because of WESG, because WESG had so many good and awesome players. When I look at the roster ANYONE could have won.
We can say IEM was just an anomaly, but now we're having 2 anomalies? Really?
Using WESG is wrong similarly to using WCS. But if you insist of doing this I will use WCS again. WCS has low number of Terrans for years, obviously the race is broken and need repairs. /s
On April 09 2019 22:05 brickrd wrote: the funniest thing about these conversations is that they're being held exclusively between people who are anywhere from 1000-4000 MMR below the players they're talking about. absolutely ludicrous, monumental gap.
when you're higher than 6K MMR and up to pro level your results are personalized to your individual skill, because the only people playing at that level are working with 0.1% talent and an encyclopedic knowledge of how the game is played. so yes, play like maru. play like serral. how you think balance works for these players is irrelevant because they are not even playing the same game as you. they would destroy players who would destroy players who would destroy you
also another reality check: there aren't even enough players or enough leagues or enough championships in this scene for any short term numerical analysis to be scientifically significant. it's literally not even unlikely that at any given time there can be a skewed amount of top players who play a certain race simply because of random variation.
So the low rate of Terrans has nothing to do with balance or the game, they're simply not good. Good to know.
Also I can't cook but I can tell when the food is bad. I don't know how to play in GM but I can tell that having 2 weekenders with top players and having low Terran rate isn't normal for "a balanced game". Balanced means it should aim at equal ratio. While on such low numbers the scale can move a little bit, we're talking about a huge shift which should be alarming(at least).
And we're talking about 2 huge shifts in a row, the probability is way too low. If we scratch MAru from the equation(as he's statistical anomaly same as Serral) we get horrendous numbers for Terran in the 18 months or so.
We have to work what we have now and it doesn't look good.
Terrans, even excluding Maru, had a quite balanced showing in GSL, which I have been assured is the only tournament that counts. Can't risk unbalancing GSL for some silly weekenders!
Also let's not forget Innovation just won WESG. That just happened. Terran is still doing better than Protoss but people have a mental block that Protoss is supposedly too strong so they ignore its lack of tournament wins.
If GSL is the only tournament that counts Zerg needs help Protoss is doing fine then
On April 09 2019 16:49 Harris1st wrote: In GSL, everytime Maru gets to Ghosts, Protoss is dead. So much so that I almost considered making a statement with increasing the range of Feedback.
Now I haven't seen any of these qualifier games, but there surely have to be some macro games among them. It seems like, other Terrans underestimate the game changing capabilities ONE EMP can have
IMO it's more about that Raven and turning off high impact units like Colossus/Immortal.
To the balance discussion - IEM - 1 terran in RO12, 0T in RO8, GSL ST - 2 Terrans in RO16.
No offense to anyone, but if you think that this is fine because Maru is doing fine in GSL and because of WESG where both Terrans had only 2 realistic opponents(Dark, Serral), then I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, now I know. If you gonna use WESG, I'm gonna use WCS in how bad shape Terran is! Oooh, genious!
The last time we saw such numbers it was during the blink era and it was very easy to spot(maps, balance, MSC vision), now it appears as more of a design issue and I am very interested on how this gonna be solved by Blizzard(if ...)
I see, Terrans winning tournaments or placing top 3 doesnt matter, because there are other tournaments that they dont win or place top 3. Your logic is flawless.
The efficiency of terran whiners is just next level, there's a qualifiers which most people couldnt even watch, terrans end up having just 2 spots, and suddenly it's the end of the world. For all we know Terran will win the supertournament after this.
I'm indifferent in regards to TvP, it's a bad mu, i dont watch it a lot, so by all means, shake it up. I just enjoy the terran tears too much.
Terran not terrans. As in Maru. Because Inno winning at WESG last month was the only premier tournament won by a terran not named Maru since August of 2017.
That's true and all, but Inno did win, and it is the most recent Premier event title. Won by a terran not named Maru. The next one gonna be GSL S1, which is gonna be won by Maru or Classic, with Maru being heavily favored by most (me at the least).
So how can you justify the current state of the game being imbalanced against terran, with pointing out how in the period between september 2017 - february 2019 Terrans not named Maru didnt win anything? There have been several patches since, the game and the meta is completely different from 1+ year ago.
Ok, i get, the Supertournament already looks bad for Terrans, 2 out of 16. But cant we at least wait with the terran-whine until (and if) they finally manage to not win the tournament?
What. The. Hell?
IEM - 0 Terrans at RO8. GSL ST - unless Maru pulls his Code S style we're going for 0 too. You want to ignore this because Code S - a different type of tournament(the only preparational tournament) and because of WESG, because WESG had so many good and awesome players. When I look at the roster ANYONE could have won.
We can say IEM was just an anomaly, but now we're having 2 anomalies? Really?
Using WESG is wrong similarly to using WCS. But if you insist of doing this I will use WCS again. WCS has low number of Terrans for years, obviously the race is broken and need repairs. /s
the problem is we have 1 IEM and 1 Blizzcon, tournaments that are super stacked, super anticipated, big payoff. And they re about half a year apart. So basically you have 1 of these tournaments per semester, definetly 1 per patch at most. If you want to draw any conclusions about the state of the game based on results, you simply cannot rely on a data set of 1 (or 2).
The rest of the tournaments are these special cases. Either not good enough lineup, or a different format, or only foreigners etc....
At the end of the day, it's impossible to draw clear conclusions, cuz most of the results we have can be explained as anomalies or format.
And yeah, sure, you can argue with terrans doing badly at WCS and supertournaments, and I can point out they won WESG and code S. Neither dataset is really enough to draw a good, solid conclusion. The difference is, some here scream Terran underpowered, while i'm not screaming overpowered, im just poking at the whiners.
We. Just. Had. 2. Stacked. Tournaments.
Why do you mix Blizzcon into it? On the recent major patch with we just had 2 stacked tournaments. IEM - 0 Terrans. GSL ST - 2 Terrans(one of whom invited) from 16 contestants. Don't evade from this, we have 2 weekenders with serious participation and it appears all Terrans are saving their builds for Code S.
we most definitely did not just have 2 stacked tournaments. We had a one day long qualifier for the supertournament, where a couple of best of 3s decided who s gonna participate in the main event, aside from the direct invites. Protoss wiped the floor with terran in those best of 3s, true. But let s just try to stay somewhat close to the realm of reason, please.
That's quite a few Terrans On a serious note it's quite surprising to see TY and INno knocked out in the qualis. Second in a row for INno and even TY lost in the first round last year to Creator
We don’t really have enough offline tournaments these days to have much to go on.
How do the numbers stack up if we factor in say, Korean online tournaments like Olimoleague?
Is Protoss imba? I don’t really know. They have a ton of flexibility and different styles and builds they can use.
Most of the top tier Protoss players play differently from each other, both in their builds but also their general styles from hyper aggressive to passive and defensive reactive macro.
Terran unless you’re Gumiho being weird feels like ‘play this way, but better.’
So in a weekend tournament, or an online qualifier you’re basically semi-locked in to being predictable, vs players basically as good as you, who can be less predictable and play differently from each other anyway.
In a shorter series length like Bo3, or god forbid Bo1 you have to continually make the right strategic reads every time and play extremely well mechanically to make it through a bracket where you’re running into S class Protoss players.
Terran can be tricky too, but those builds tend to be technical, risky and real map dependent too, or tailored to a particular style so they’re hard to pull out in a weekender and execute to perfection.
When you do get the time to prep for one specific Protoss player, we’ve seen how that can go, but as we know there’s only one tournament that really has a format where you can prep.
What I don’t believe we’re seeing these days (and we have seen this in SC2’s history) is obviously worse Protoss beating way better Terrans all over the place.
I’ll have to go look up some general win-rates but I don’t tho k there are players who are leagues better at vT than vZ and vP. Of vT specialists, they’re still S class overall as players.
On April 09 2019 22:58 Harris1st wrote: There are some fine points in this thread.
I'd argue to give Terran more time to figure stuff out/ play like Maru. It seems Terran is not underpowered, just TvP has a slight problem. We had these before. It is not as broken as BL/ Infestor was, so there is no need to jump the gun IMO
Yeah, why worry, there are other tournaments to get the money to make the living for the players. Like, uh, like... (now's the time you step in and show how this is not an issue missing 2 or 3 big tournaments because you "lack" in PvT)
I would like to emphasis Maru fucked up IEM too and if he's anything like in the past year he will fuck up GSL ST either, which is not exactly what you especially should be looking for with these arguments(Maru knows, everyone else need to get on his level, it's fine).
BTW did you think about the fact that Maru can be figured out instead and then this argument will be even more invalid?
So you would rather jump the gun, give Terran a buff and break the game completely? Good job! So proud of you!
I see it more like the recent ZvZ changes we've seen. Lurker ling is a thing now. The Muta Meta, which was dead for years, is relevant again. Give Terrans more time. And if it really is the case that Maru gets figured out, I think we are all on the same page that it's time for changes
Not sure what the "you especially" part is about so I chose to ignore it
PvT winrate on the current ladder map pool (which will probably go into the Super Tournament unchanged) as per Liquipedia:
Cyber Forest - 104-58, 64.4% Automaton - 140-100, 58.3% Year Zero - 50-38, 56.8% Port Aleksander - 179-150, 54.4% Yeonsu - 229-192, 54.4% Kairos Junction - 211-195, 52.0% King's Cove - 67-79, 46.9% New Repugnancy - 45-53, 45.9%
Added Yeonsu as reference for a map that was considered genuinely broken (not just in 1 match-up either). If we're really gonna advocate for changes, this should be the first thing we look into as a short term measure.
So I had a look at the last 2 Olimoleagues. The stats:
9 TvP matches. 1 Terran win, and that was Inno vs Creator today.
I discounted matches such as Zest vs Kas or TY vs Durant, where there was an overwhelming favorite to win.
Intresting thing is that before the Olimoleagues were quite even. Both TY and Inno beat some good protosses in February/mid March.
It just seems like tough times for all terrans except Maru in this matchup. And that again goes to what I already mentioned. No Terran has the skill to pull of the style which is so effective against protoss (and TY is just not in form)
On April 09 2019 07:23 Shuffleblade wrote: This racial distribution does point to there being a real balance problem at the highest level.
You mean a balance problem at the second highest level
The balance problem at the highest level (which only one person is playing at) is that T is over powered.
The balance problem at the second highest level (all the pros who aren’t Maru) is that T is underpowered.
It kinda feels like Terran right now is Fox from back in the first golden age of melee. You see glimpses of brokenness, but in the hands of every actually player he’s just too hard to use and so he’s functionaly underpowered and gets beaten by the Marths and Shieks of the world. As time passes and player level goes up, that will change.
On April 09 2019 23:35 Elentos wrote: Quoting myself from the qualifier thread:
PvT winrate on the current ladder map pool (which will probably go into the Super Tournament unchanged) as per Liquipedia:
Cyber Forest - 104-58, 64.4% Automaton - 140-100, 58.3% Year Zero - 50-38, 56.8% Port Aleksander - 179-150, 54.4% Yeonsu - 229-192, 54.4% Kairos Junction - 211-195, 52.0% King's Cove - 67-79, 46.9% New Repugnancy - 45-53, 45.9%
Added Yeonsu as reference for a map that was considered genuinely broken (not just in 1 match-up either). If we're really gonna advocate for changes, this should be the first thing we look into as a short term measure.
Looking at maps is interesting but I think the most important question we need to ask ourselves is why is kings cove and new repugnancy terran favored? I don't know but if for example it is because early game aggression and mid game all-inish pushes are stronger there then I'm skeptical if the mixing the map pool up is really the right way to fix this. If we change to maps that makes those strategies more effective will just make the game(matchup) more boring and stale while hiding how imbalanced the matchup really is.
In regards to the Olimoleague results, as I've said before if you look at the actual PvT results it paints a dark picture. Terran isn't necessarily doing bad in general, they are just doing bad against protoss in particular. Sure it could be that almost every korean protoss all of a sudden is in the best PvT form of their lives or it is a P favored matchup.
My personal guess is that its going to get worse, the reason terran has had decent winrates is because of early game aggression and mid game all in pushes. The reason terran has had decent success with it is because P hasn't found the middle ground between economy/expansion and investing in army/defense. The longer the terran aggression continues the better P will get at defending it, it is the natural evolution of the meta, the defending race will get more and more favored as time passes unless some terran genius figures out some late game strat/composition that actually works.
Edit: General winter you are spot on, I meant on the second highest level =P As I wrote above I disagree with you about Terran getting it easier with time, I think we will see the opposite.
On April 09 2019 07:23 Shuffleblade wrote: This racial distribution does point to there being a real balance problem at the highest level.
You mean a balance problem at the second highest level
The balance problem at the highest level (which only one person is playing at) is that T is over powered.
The balance problem at the second highest level (all the pros who aren’t Maru) is that T is underpowered.
It kinda feels like Terran right now is Fox from back in the first golden age of melee. You see glimpses of brokenness, but in the hands of every actually player he’s just too hard to use and so he’s functionaly underpowered and gets beaten by the Marths and Shieks of the world. As time passes and player level goes up, that will change.
You realize Melee is a game that wasn't patched times and times again whereas we are dealing with a game that is patched regularly?
And that it's normal in fighting games with 15+ characters to have tiers, whereas in a 3races RTS You wanna have as much balance as you can?
On April 09 2019 23:35 Elentos wrote: Quoting myself from the qualifier thread:
PvT winrate on the current ladder map pool (which will probably go into the Super Tournament unchanged) as per Liquipedia:
Cyber Forest - 104-58, 64.4% Automaton - 140-100, 58.3% Year Zero - 50-38, 56.8% Port Aleksander - 179-150, 54.4% Yeonsu - 229-192, 54.4% Kairos Junction - 211-195, 52.0% King's Cove - 67-79, 46.9% New Repugnancy - 45-53, 45.9%
Added Yeonsu as reference for a map that was considered genuinely broken (not just in 1 match-up either). If we're really gonna advocate for changes, this should be the first thing we look into as a short term measure.
Looking at maps is interesting but I think the most important question we need to ask ourselves is why is kings cove and new repugnancy terran favored?
New Repugnancy because the Terran pushes and timings are stronger there than on any other map. King's Cove I think is merely a matter of sample size. This isn't included in the stats above (since they're pulled from Liquipedia), but it was the 3rd map in every match in the Super Tournament qualifiers, where it was played 8 times in PvT and Protoss won 7 of those times.
And really the only reason I did look at this was a short term idea. In the long term, design (and balance) adjustments will have to be made that improve the TvP/PvT match-up as a whole without aversely affecting PvZ. But changing the maps first while you think of good "real" changes to do seems like the safe way to go about things.
On April 09 2019 07:23 Shuffleblade wrote: This racial distribution does point to there being a real balance problem at the highest level.
You mean a balance problem at the second highest level
The balance problem at the highest level (which only one person is playing at) is that T is over powered.
The balance problem at the second highest level (all the pros who aren’t Maru) is that T is underpowered.
It kinda feels like Terran right now is Fox from back in the first golden age of melee. You see glimpses of brokenness, but in the hands of every actually player he’s just too hard to use and so he’s functionaly underpowered and gets beaten by the Marths and Shieks of the world. As time passes and player level goes up, that will change.
I disagree with this. Maru is not an allmighty god and all other Terrans are not scrubs. This is solely about playstyle. You need specific skills to play like Maru does, and other T seem to lack that. But should we really force everyone to try to adapt to a particular playstyle? The beauty of the game is that each one likes to play it a bit differently. We have TY who is clearly a level above everyone else in multitasking, then we have Gumi who is really good at strategy and mech play (but lacks the top level mechanical capabilities in execution), Inno who is the best defensive macro player and Maru is the best offensive macro player with arguably best mechanics in the world.
So the only way to beat protoss right now seems to be to play like Maru. But what is you dont have the skills to copy his style effectively? How do you learn that? I dont like that and I think the game should be decently playable and balanced with different style of play.
Also on the other note, its the T that are relying on weird wonky strats, cheese and aggressive pushes to win. So if it will get better, that will be only for Protoss players, who can adjust and learn to defend this. But we'll see I suppose...
It's too bad that Terran did so poorly in the GSL Super Tournament qualifiers. It seems that Terran is pigeon holed into a certain playing style (ie. 2 base all in) and if Terran tries any other play style, they just can't seem to win with it. Hopefully, Blizzard has further changes down the road.
- If terran doesn't create an economic advatange VERY early on he's behind, if he doesn't go for a strategy capable of doing that damage, instead opting for a more economically focused opener there is very little that they can do to do a risky tech boost (think broods / multiple AoE toss) that will actually give them an army capable of attacking and winning if they hold their oponents agression. This always leads to proxies, all-in eco damage and timings being the best strategy, notice how maru is playing lategame on maps where he knows there is no way to kill his oponent because they are huge (year zero, king's cove) and goes for timings on pretty much every other map. This is terrible design for playing without weeks of preparation to find your oponents weaknesses and bad habbits.
Why does this happen?
- You can't out greed zerg because of their worker production mechanics. - You can't out greed protoss because of their map control and agressive capabilities when terran is trying to secure 3rd and 4th.
Your high gas units are not very asymmetric towards any other units right as they leave the factory or starport, instead requiring a heavy upgrade investment in +vehicle and/or +air weapons and in some cases like hellbats a tech lab on a 2nd factory. The power of 8 to 10 +3 tanks is ridiculous, but we never get to see it, +2 libs demolish everything on the ground but you need like 8 of them to not get picked off as they siege should you ever be caught in the open or by a flank once sieged, thor single target scales insanely well with upgrades... you get the picture.
Imho, the best change that terran could have would be to make vehicle weapons universal to air, and leave the armor separate so terran compositions can be a bit more flexible as the game evolves, leaving the necessary infrastructure as the limiting factor, not the upgrades. Without the early game mechanics or base acquisition speed being affected too much.
On April 10 2019 00:31 Doko wrote: For me the biggest issue is always:
- If terran doesn't create an economic advatange VERY early on he's behind, if he doesn't go for a strategy capable of doing that damage, instead opting for a more economically focused opener there is very little that they can do to do a risky tech boost (think broods / multiple AoE toss) that will actually give them an army capable of attacking and winning if they hold their oponents agression. This always leads to proxies, all-in eco damage and timings being the best strategy, notice how maru is playing lategame on maps where he knows there is no way to kill his oponent because they are huge (year zero, king's cove) and goes for timings on pretty much every other map. This is terrible design for playing without weeks of preparation to find your oponents weaknesses and bad habbits.
Why does this happen?
- You can't out greed zerg because of their worker production mechanics. - You can't out greed protoss because of their map control and agressive capabilities when terran is trying to secure 3rd and 4th.
Your high gas units are not very asymmetric towards any other units right as they leave the factory or starport, instead requiring a heavy upgrade investment in +vehicle and/or +air weapons and in some cases like hellbats a tech lab on a 2nd factory. The power of 8 to 10 +3 tanks is ridiculous, but we never get to see it, +2 libs demolish everything on the ground but you need like 8 of them to not get picked off as they siege should you ever be caught in the open or by a flank once sieged, thor single target scales insanely well with upgrades... you get the picture.
Imho, the best change that terran could have would be to make vehicle weapons universal to air, and leave the armor separate so terran compositions can be a bit more flexible as the game evolves, leaving the necessary infrastructure as the limiting factor, not the upgrades. Without the early game mechanics or base acquisition speed being affected too much.
I wouldn't mind that being at least, tried.
Perhaps it's not the best possible change necessarily, but it does seem a very good candidate to give Terran some more compositional flexibility by tweaking something that as you say, kicks in far too late to be abused in any kind of weird all-in kind of build. Cyclones being an example of the opposite, have perpetually bounced between changes as tweaks end up making them too potent in proxy builds, so they get pulled back a bit, then Terran have fewer options.
On April 09 2019 07:23 Shuffleblade wrote: This racial distribution does point to there being a real balance problem at the highest level.
You mean a balance problem at the second highest level
The balance problem at the highest level (which only one person is playing at) is that T is over powered.
The balance problem at the second highest level (all the pros who aren’t Maru) is that T is underpowered.
It kinda feels like Terran right now is Fox from back in the first golden age of melee. You see glimpses of brokenness, but in the hands of every actually player he’s just too hard to use and so he’s functionaly underpowered and gets beaten by the Marths and Shieks of the world. As time passes and player level goes up, that will change.
I disagree with this. Maru is not an allmighty god and all other Terrans are not scrubs. This is solely about playstyle. You need specific skills to play like Maru does, and other T seem to lack that. But should we really force everyone to try to adapt to a particular playstyle? The beauty of the game is that each one likes to play it a bit differently. We have TY who is clearly a level above everyone else in multitasking, then we have Gumi who is really good at strategy and mech play (but lacks the top level mechanical capabilities in execution), Inno who is the best defensive macro player and Maru is the best offensive macro player with arguably best mechanics in the world.
So the only way to beat protoss right now seems to be to play like Maru. But what is you dont have the skills to copy his style effectively? How do you learn that? I dont like that and I think the game should be decently playable and balanced with different style of play.
Also on the other note, its the T that are relying on weird wonky strats, cheese and aggressive pushes to win. So if it will get better, that will be only for Protoss players, who can adjust and learn to defend this. But we'll see I suppose...
While I agree with you on the fact that a change is needed I disagree in other areas. Maru is a god, he doesn't really have a "unique" style that other terrans doesn't play. He is just so damn good at macro and micro that he gets more value with the same builds as other terran players uses.
Seeing Maru micro diverse armies with for example bio, liberators, raven and ghosts blows my mind. The actual army control he has done at times in very intense moments blows my mind that it is even possible. Yeah I'm a fanboy but I really don't think its about playstyle, Maru is just playing better period. The times Maru bombs out it tends to be more because of stupid BO or decisionmaking mistake than pure execution. I don't think its about other terran players being scrubs and needing to get better though I feel there are few terran players that can ever reach Marus level, its not a fluke Maru and TY are the best ones (and Inno ofc) look at the age at when they started playing starcraft and how long they have played.
due to balance or not, i dont really care, but a tournament with only 2 terrans is less interesting to watch so this is really unfortunate as a spectator.
I think a lot of the whining and frustration comes from viewers. As a Terran player it does kind of take the hype out of an event like this where there are going to be so few Terran games being played, same as Katowice turned into.
I've never been a fan of every tournament being scrutinized for perfect racial distribution but when you see something like this trending across multiple events it does start to become worrying. We can wait and let the meta settle some more, but I think it is a tough situation because this is how these players make money so it is important to not let imbalance sit for too long.
I honestly think the game is impossible to balance. The issue is that even with Maru - who has gotten literally as close as humanly possible - to perfect Terran play - we haven't seen the skill ceiling for Terran. Not to say we have "literally" seen the ceiling hit @ the other races but the margin of how far away Terran is comparatively is the issue. Life/Rogue/Serral even Dark has shown consistent play near the ceiling as Zerg - Rain/Zest/Sos/Stats as Toss - but literally only Maru and for a short time Byun maybe has gotten anywhere near the ceiling. As long as players like Maru exist - you can't really mess with the balance too much otherwise at the pro level he'll never lose? I still do think he'll get figured out by Protoss again this year and probably a lot faster - and then we'll see another round of buff/nerfs - but until then you really can't even ask for it.
One thing I noticed with Maru in his recent play is he opens 1/1/1 literally every game with some kind of port/fac aggro - seems like DT tech would be good vs that? Haven't seen it used in openings too much vs him yet. Last year the proxy thing took Sos like 6 months to figure out - once he did though it was hilariously bad. It's only when literally no amount of extra multi/micro/strategy can get him the win vs a certain Toss style that we're going to see another change imo. It's tough for casual Terran players because you just literally won't ever be that good - so it feels like you are playing better / doing more / than your opponent and you still lose - but Maru is doing that at an inhuman level and showing some wins with it. My solution was to stop playing Terran after almost 8 years and peaking out around 5.6K - Zerg is fun and hard for a whole different host of reasons - but being a mechanical god is not one of them. I can also imagine conversely at the pro level it's probably very frustrating for Zerg and Protoss players facing a guy like him - thinking no amount of things I can do better will help me win lol.
On April 09 2019 22:57 deacon.frost wrote: If GSL is the only tournament that counts Zerg needs help Protoss is doing fine then
This is the conclusion that logic has driven us to, it must therefore be correct .
By the way, why is everyone talking about Maru as a unique exception? Maru didn't qualify for this tournament, he was seeded. Gumiho's the one you need to play like. But really, as pointed out in that earlier joke, non-Maru terrans performed fine in GSL, where Maru is excelling, and Maru has not been doing better in weekenders than other Terrans. His performance isn't contradicting the greater Terran trend.
On April 09 2019 07:23 Shuffleblade wrote: This racial distribution does point to there being a real balance problem at the highest level.
You mean a balance problem at the second highest level
The balance problem at the highest level (which only one person is playing at) is that T is over powered.
The balance problem at the second highest level (all the pros who aren’t Maru) is that T is underpowered.
It kinda feels like Terran right now is Fox from back in the first golden age of melee. You see glimpses of brokenness, but in the hands of every actually player he’s just too hard to use and so he’s functionaly underpowered and gets beaten by the Marths and Shieks of the world. As time passes and player level goes up, that will change.
I disagree with this. Maru is not an allmighty god and all other Terrans are not scrubs. This is solely about playstyle. You need specific skills to play like Maru does, and other T seem to lack that. But should we really force everyone to try to adapt to a particular playstyle? The beauty of the game is that each one likes to play it a bit differently. We have TY who is clearly a level above everyone else in multitasking, then we have Gumi who is really good at strategy and mech play (but lacks the top level mechanical capabilities in execution), Inno who is the best defensive macro player and Maru is the best offensive macro player with arguably best mechanics in the world.
So the only way to beat protoss right now seems to be to play like Maru. But what is you dont have the skills to copy his style effectively? How do you learn that? I dont like that and I think the game should be decently playable and balanced with different style of play.
Also on the other note, its the T that are relying on weird wonky strats, cheese and aggressive pushes to win. So if it will get better, that will be only for Protoss players, who can adjust and learn to defend this. But we'll see I suppose...
While I agree with you on the fact that a change is needed I disagree in other areas. Maru is a god, he doesn't really have a "unique" style that other terrans doesn't play. He is just so damn good at macro and micro that he gets more value with the same builds as other terran players uses.
Seeing Maru micro diverse armies with for example bio, liberators, raven and ghosts blows my mind. The actual army control he has done at times in very intense moments blows my mind that it is even possible. Yeah I'm a fanboy but I really don't think its about playstyle, Maru is just playing better period. The times Maru bombs out it tends to be more because of stupid BO or decisionmaking mistake than pure execution. I don't think its about other terran players being scrubs and needing to get better though I feel there are few terran players that can ever reach Marus level, its not a fluke Maru and TY are the best ones (and Inno ofc) look at the age at when they started playing starcraft and how long they have played.
I don’t think it’s mechanical, it’s decision-making just on a minute, too fast to consciously process level.
If you’ve been playing (roughly) the same style for years and years, you end up just innately knowing all the little calculations, ranges ‘can x amount of units snipe this and retreat back if I go for it?’ and all of that kind of thing.
Maru seems better at this vP, you can watch an Inno game or a Ty game and it’s basically indistinguishable, but Maru is making those decisions correctly all the time in a way that ultimately adds up to bigger advantages over the length of a game.
Ty is really bloody good at controlling lategame armies because he’s been consistently doing it for quite a while. Inno is Inno of course.
It’s a shame that TvT is barely even that pertinent a factor anymore either, with its different engagements and demands than vZ or vP, which themselves differ in those respects as well.
On April 10 2019 03:19 DomeGetta wrote: I honestly think the game is impossible to balance. The issue is that even with Maru - who has gotten literally as close as humanly possible - to perfect Terran play - we haven't seen the skill ceiling for Terran. Not to say we have "literally" seen the ceiling hit @ the other races but the margin of how far away Terran is comparatively is the issue. Life/Rogue/Serral even Dark has shown consistent play near the ceiling as Zerg - Rain/Zest/Sos/Stats as Toss - but literally only Maru and for a short time Byun maybe has gotten anywhere near the ceiling. As long as players like Maru exist - you can't really mess with the balance too much otherwise at the pro level he'll never lose? I still do think he'll get figured out by Protoss again this year and probably a lot faster - and then we'll see another round of buff/nerfs - but until then you really can't even ask for it.
One thing I noticed with Maru in his recent play is he opens 1/1/1 literally every game with some kind of port/fac aggro - seems like DT tech would be good vs that? Haven't seen it used in openings too much vs him yet. Last year the proxy thing took Sos like 6 months to figure out - once he did though it was hilariously bad. It's only when literally no amount of extra multi/micro/strategy can get him the win vs a certain Toss style that we're going to see another change imo. It's tough for casual Terran players because you just literally won't ever be that good - so it feels like you are playing better / doing more / than your opponent and you still lose - but Maru is doing that at an inhuman level and showing some wins with it. My solution was to stop playing Terran after almost 8 years and peaking out around 5.6K - Zerg is fun and hard for a whole different host of reasons - but being a mechanical god is not one of them. I can also imagine conversely at the pro level it's probably very frustrating for Zerg and Protoss players facing a guy like him - thinking no amount of things I can do better will help me win lol.
On April 10 2019 03:19 DomeGetta wrote: I honestly think the game is impossible to balance. The issue is that even with Maru - who has gotten literally as close as humanly possible - to perfect Terran play - we haven't seen the skill ceiling for Terran. Not to say we have "literally" seen the ceiling hit @ the other races but the margin of how far away Terran is comparatively is the issue. Life/Rogue/Serral even Dark has shown consistent play near the ceiling as Zerg - Rain/Zest/Sos/Stats as Toss - but literally only Maru and for a short time Byun maybe has gotten anywhere near the ceiling. As long as players like Maru exist - you can't really mess with the balance too much otherwise at the pro level he'll never lose? I still do think he'll get figured out by Protoss again this year and probably a lot faster - and then we'll see another round of buff/nerfs - but until then you really can't even ask for it.
One thing I noticed with Maru in his recent play is he opens 1/1/1 literally every game with some kind of port/fac aggro - seems like DT tech would be good vs that? Haven't seen it used in openings too much vs him yet. Last year the proxy thing took Sos like 6 months to figure out - once he did though it was hilariously bad. It's only when literally no amount of extra multi/micro/strategy can get him the win vs a certain Toss style that we're going to see another change imo. It's tough for casual Terran players because you just literally won't ever be that good - so it feels like you are playing better / doing more / than your opponent and you still lose - but Maru is doing that at an inhuman level and showing some wins with it. My solution was to stop playing Terran after almost 8 years and peaking out around 5.6K - Zerg is fun and hard for a whole different host of reasons - but being a mechanical god is not one of them. I can also imagine conversely at the pro level it's probably very frustrating for Zerg and Protoss players facing a guy like him - thinking no amount of things I can do better will help me win lol.
Maru gets a raven almost every game tho.
Eventually yeah but last few series I've watched he's going hard on the 1-1-1 aggro stuff till waay after you can have DTs - he doesn't even have an Ebay on time normally - He must just be confident in his scouting
And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
I see a heated debate about T vP and Maru's performance.
From my experience, T v P is not balanced since 2018 regardless of Maru's success and the noise that it creates when analyzing the scene. He is an outlier but it is also true that 2 out of his 3 GSLS were against two mentally broken down Protoss (Zest and Stats played horrible those days). However, I value his wins against Dark (WESG) and TY (GSL), since his contenders did not lose their minds. Both finals were spectacular and ended up 4-3.
Having said this, with independence of Maru, to fix T v P, one option is to think about ''epic balanced matches'' and look at the state of the game at that time. For example, the IEM 2017 T v P finals of TY vs Stats, was won strategically, by mind games and slightly better decision making. But that was a very well played and balanced finals: two players of the same level, same team, that know perfectly each other. I enjoyed a lot watching the other day that series and it made me think that some changes like bringing back the old widow mines could help to balance the thing. It will not involve changes in Z or P and therefore will not affect the existing situation in Z v P.
I guess this is better than undertaking a radical change in the race as some people suggested in this thread.
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Not just contenders, also people who actually won things as well, who actually took those steps.
Taeja without wrist problems? Who knows? People forget that Maru has been gradually getting better throughout the entirety of SC2 up to now where he hit god tier. People forget that Maru has been playing for a very, very long time, kind of like Serral. Both have been ever-improving for basically all of SC3 and they are were they are now. So the idea that a Healrgt Taeja wouldn’t be up there I think is wrong. Maru is as much a veteran as he would hypothetically be today
Byun did incredible things on his own and without the team structure too.
It’s just such a shame that these guys aren’t around today. I’m not a Terran player myself but I think the game benefits from relative racial parity at the highest level anyway, there’s more variation in games and it’s just generally more interesting.
On April 10 2019 09:33 Vincenzo wrote: I see a heated debate about T vP and Maru's performance.
From my experience, T v P is not balanced since 2018 regardless of Maru's success and the noise that it creates when analyzing the scene. He is an outlier but it is also true that 2 out of his 3 GSLS were against two mentally broken down Protoss (Zest and Stats played horrible those days). However, I value his wins against Dark (WESG) and TY (GSL), since his contenders did not lose their minds. Both finals were spectacular and ended up 4-3.
Having said this, with independence of Maru, to fix T v P, one option is to think about ''epic balanced matches'' and look at the state of the game at that time. For example, the IEM 2017 T v P finals of TY vs Stats, was won strategically, by mind games and slightly better decision making. But that was a very well played and balanced finals: two players of the same level, same team, that know perfectly each other. I enjoyed a lot watching the other day that series and it made me think that some changes like bringing back the old widow mines could help to balance the thing. It will not involve changes in Z or P and therefore will not affect the existing situation in Z v P.
I guess this is better than undertaking a radical change in the race as some people suggested in this thread.
I feel like the old widow mines made it so that P had to open with either Oracle or quick robo in order to protect yourself from the incoming mine drop. Both of those openings have pretty easy mid-games to abuse as Terran making the matchup that much harder for P.
I don't mind the upgrade, in order to make Widow Mines really useful, but it also gives the unit a pretty narrow use case.
Biggest problem is still an inflexible tier-3 late game (imo). Anyone tried Thors in late game TvP with any success?
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Most of these were lost already in HotS and they had no impact on LotV, if you check the start of LotV everything looks fine. (not necessary meaning it was fine )
The only 2 big losses in the Terran department for LotV are Dream and ByuN. But maybe there's an issue with Terran if even Korea struggles to find them Maybe Blizzard needs to pay Classic to return to Terran
On April 10 2019 09:33 Vincenzo wrote: I see a heated debate about T vP and Maru's performance.
From my experience, T v P is not balanced since 2018 regardless of Maru's success and the noise that it creates when analyzing the scene. He is an outlier but it is also true that 2 out of his 3 GSLS were against two mentally broken down Protoss (Zest and Stats played horrible those days). However, I value his wins against Dark (WESG) and TY (GSL), since his contenders did not lose their minds. Both finals were spectacular and ended up 4-3.
Having said this, with independence of Maru, to fix T v P, one option is to think about ''epic balanced matches'' and look at the state of the game at that time. For example, the IEM 2017 T v P finals of TY vs Stats, was won strategically, by mind games and slightly better decision making. But that was a very well played and balanced finals: two players of the same level, same team, that know perfectly each other. I enjoyed a lot watching the other day that series and it made me think that some changes like bringing back the old widow mines could help to balance the thing. It will not involve changes in Z or P and therefore will not affect the existing situation in Z v P.
I guess this is better than undertaking a radical change in the race as some people suggested in this thread.
I feel like the old widow mines made it so that P had to open with either Oracle or quick robo in order to protect yourself from the incoming mine drop. Both of those openings have pretty easy mid-games to abuse as Terran making the matchup that much harder for P.
I don't mind the upgrade, in order to make Widow Mines really useful, but it also gives the unit a pretty narrow use case.
Biggest problem is still an inflexible tier-3 late game (imo). Anyone tried Thors in late game TvP with any success?
P still has Immortals. What about Cattlebruisers? Everyone loves Cattlebruiser and you have the tech setup anyway with ranged Libs. Maybe some changes to Yamato only so it can't be abused in the early game. Higher range (Tempest range) or AoE damage? Or another upgrade entirely which also needs a fusion core, like +1 range
I don’t think HoTs/Legacy is that important a cutoff point, the main point of transition was when the Kespa players got to grips with the switch
Then the best players already in the scene plus the best of the new arrivals constituted the top players with an even higher level of play, which pushed players who couldn’t quite keep up out of championship relevancy.
It has been the same players for really quite some time, across all 3 races. The best HoTs players either left the scene or were still the best players in Legacy
Sure Dream was a loss to his race too, but so was Flash. He got so irritatingly hyped sometimes in a way that wasn’t his fault that there’s a tendency to underrate him if anything for the player he actually was, especially as he was getting better.
Mvp is legit too long ago to speculate too much, although it’s fun anyway. He’s only a year older than Classic after all. Plus a smarter player than most (or at least good at following a plan, I’m not privy to how he prepped his builds and gameplans).
Taeja was a beast in his day, quite conceivably would have got better. Who doesn’t love Bomber and Polt?
Interesting tidbit from Ty’s trivia. I knew it was true when I read it but, one of those that you double take on initially - He is the second Terran player to reach the GSL finals since Mvp in 2012, the first being INnoVation.
Which was some 4 years? In the less than 4 years since then we’ve had Byun win a GSL, Gumigod win one, Inno win another and Maru do a three-peat.
Tournament racial splits are something else, as a viewer I care now about that than if a particular race ultimately wins it, if it’s a weekend tournament anyway. In that respect looking back at least over GSLs even then it’s not that horrific by that metric either.
And still, none of that particular matters regarding matchup balance as it currently stands today.
I don’t think HoTs/Legacy is that important a cutoff point, the main point of transition was when the Kespa players got to grips with the switch
Then the best players already in the scene plus the best of the new arrivals constituted the top players with an even higher level of play, which pushed players who couldn’t quite keep up out of championship relevancy.
It has been the same players for really quite some time, across all 3 races. The best HoTs players either left the scene or were still the best players in Legacy
Sure Dream was a loss to his race too, but so was Flash. He got so irritatingly hyped sometimes in a way that wasn’t his fault that there’s a tendency to underrate him if anything for the player he actually was, especially as he was getting better.
Mvp is legit too long ago to speculate too much, although it’s fun anyway. He’s only a year older than Classic after all. Plus a smarter player than most (or at least good at following a plan, I’m not privy to how he prepped his builds and gameplans).
Taeja was a beast in his day, quite conceivably would have got better. Who doesn’t love Bomber and Polt?
Interesting tidbit from Ty’s trivia. I knew it was true when I read it but, one of those that you double take on initially - He is the second Terran player to reach the GSL finals since Mvp in 2012, the first being INnoVation.
Which was some 4 years? In the less than 4 years since then we’ve had Byun win a GSL, Gumigod win one, Inno win another and Maru do a three-peat.
Tournament racial splits are something else, as a viewer I care now about that than if a particular race ultimately wins it, if it’s a weekend tournament anyway. In that respect looking back at least over GSLs even then it’s not that horrific by that metric either.
And still, none of that particular matters regarding matchup balance as it currently stands today.
Well, the point is that I believe the balance is fine, it's a design issue of Terran and LotV. That's why I ignore HotS Terrans. I don't like SC2 Flash but he was a good Terran we lost, yes, KeSPA going away was a bad move and we lost some good Terrans, but it didn't seem as an impact until 2017-ish and 2018 is a disaster if you remove Maru and Serral as both are statistically anomalies(don't remember the term and removing Serral is just to be fair, it doesn't have much impact on the Zerg side of things IMO).
On April 10 2019 09:33 Vincenzo wrote: I see a heated debate about T vP and Maru's performance.
From my experience, T v P is not balanced since 2018 regardless of Maru's success and the noise that it creates when analyzing the scene. He is an outlier but it is also true that 2 out of his 3 GSLS were against two mentally broken down Protoss (Zest and Stats played horrible those days). However, I value his wins against Dark (WESG) and TY (GSL), since his contenders did not lose their minds. Both finals were spectacular and ended up 4-3.
Having said this, with independence of Maru, to fix T v P, one option is to think about ''epic balanced matches'' and look at the state of the game at that time. For example, the IEM 2017 T v P finals of TY vs Stats, was won strategically, by mind games and slightly better decision making. But that was a very well played and balanced finals: two players of the same level, same team, that know perfectly each other. I enjoyed a lot watching the other day that series and it made me think that some changes like bringing back the old widow mines could help to balance the thing. It will not involve changes in Z or P and therefore will not affect the existing situation in Z v P.
I guess this is better than undertaking a radical change in the race as some people suggested in this thread.
I feel like the old widow mines made it so that P had to open with either Oracle or quick robo in order to protect yourself from the incoming mine drop. Both of those openings have pretty easy mid-games to abuse as Terran making the matchup that much harder for P.
I don't mind the upgrade, in order to make Widow Mines really useful, but it also gives the unit a pretty narrow use case.
Biggest problem is still an inflexible tier-3 late game (imo). Anyone tried Thors in late game TvP with any success?
P still has Immortals. What about Cattlebruisers? Everyone loves Cattlebruiser and you have the tech setup anyway with ranged Libs. Maybe some changes to Yamato only so it can't be abused in the early game. Higher range (Tempest range) or AoE damage? Or another upgrade entirely which also needs a fusion core, like +1 range
I hate Battlecruisers outside of novelty, likewise Carriers. They just lack micro potential, Carriers could have it if they worked more like in BW, but they don’t alas.
I generally hate airballs vs airballs in SC2 because they circumvent terrain for one, and just generally suck.
A Yamato with that range, combined with scans is 100% uncounterable by Zerg if you get to those super lategame scenarios. Tempests you can soft counter by denying vision at least. Scan, Yamato Broods or vipers, retreat back, repeat.
A Yamato with splash will just melt everything unless the splash is really quite low, in which case it doesn’t really fill any useful holes in the Terran arsenal.
Terran has, in totality the best and most well-designed units in the game. Unfortunately you can’t use them, it’s not possible. Outside of being hard as hell to control them all, it’s relative production inflexibility added to gameflow as well.
The risk/reward flips the longer a game goes in terms of offensive options in being out on the map, which doesn’t help either, which I think brings problems.
An early nydus build that’s aggressive is risky and basically has to do a lot of damage, likewise a big warp prism pressure (as in, actually warps units in, not your variant where it carries a few units and you lift micro and poke).
Later in games Terran has to commit more and more to get anything done, and Protoss and Zerg have to commit very little.
You get to fly a warp prism in and decide based on what you see whether to warp in tons of zealots, or you can fly away and not do that. Likewise a Zerg can just run back through a nydus if it’s not looking a good idea.
I wouldn’t give Terran similar tools, probably nerf those a bit and, indirectly that gives Terran more offensive options by default. If you can’t get backstabbed quite as hardcore, you can move out more aggressively.
You can’t nerf too much about the prism without breaking PvZ though. Zergs are too good, creep spread is too far out to push with pylon warpins. You shouldn’t be able to cancel warpins without cost as you can currently, that’s my real issue with it vs T in a risk/reward sense. A cancel generally only occurs when you’ve miscalculated or your opponent has reacted really well, which is a mistake IMO and there should be some cost, say 50%. Sniping a warp prism you should lose 100% of the cost.
Protoss are generally mineral dumping and have a lot to spare when they’re doing this. As it stands their economic commitment is say, 1000 minerals and 10 zealots wrecking your production/workers, 0 for an ‘oh shit’ cancel and fly your Prism away, or the cost of a prism if it gets sniped. A failed attempt should cost more, when a success has you warping units right into an enemy base.
I think Zerg players are severely underusing nydus canals in the late game, after enthusiastically adopting them in other phases. I think we’ll see them being too strong when this changes.
With the latter half of your post I have to partially disagree though. 1 Ghost can be enough, Nukes and EMP's are extremely powerful with almost no cost! And they are invisible FFS. There is so little APM wasted on the Terran side and a LOOOOOT on the other side.
Also 2 Medivacs full of bio can kill Protoss production or Zerg tech quite easily and is not a big commitment at all in the late game. You can even scan where / if it's safe to go in
On April 10 2019 20:36 Harris1st wrote: Some fair points about Yamato changes, I agree
With the latter half of your post I have to partially disagree though. 1 Ghost can be enough, Nukes and EMP's are extremely powerful with almost no cost! And they are invisible FFS. There is so little APM wasted on the Terran side and a LOOOOOT on the other side.
Also 2 Medivacs full of bio can kill Protoss production or Zerg tech quite easily and is not a big commitment at all in the late game. You can even scan where / if it's safe to go in
They can, the danger period isn’t really the late game though, it’s the mid-game.
You’re teching, relatively unit thin and spread out across 3 bases. Throughout all of SC2, through all the various all-ins Terran have come up with this has always, always been the consistent period where Protoss is vulnerable (albeit 2 basss instead of 3 back in the day.
Late game not so much, your eco has kicked in, you have tons of warpgates to reactively warp-in, and you have better observer coverage, you’ve got money for cannons
Zerg too. There are phases of the game where you have to be super aware, split units properly to defend drops. Later in games you have enough money to plug quite a few holes, also your creep spread tends to give you more general map vision by then.
The other risk of dropping and one I don’t think is talked about as much, is it either makes your main bio army worse the fewer vacs you have, or makes your liberator/air transition harder.
Any medivac lost is either lost, or if replaced cuts into the production time of your Starports
Protoss need one warp prism to ferry tons of usually zealots to wherever you can find a safe spot. If you do lose it you lose a lot of potential aggressively, replacing one prism isn’t a massive deal in locking down your robo.
On April 10 2019 21:32 Geo.Rion wrote: Maru would have a much better chance for this tournament, if he ends up 2nd in GSL. Top half of the bracket is stacked
That makes sense: Get second in a tournament that pays 150.000 $ and 25K WCS points to have a chance in a tournament thats pays 25% of that
More serious: ST is not Maru's tournament anyway. This will the "comeback" of Stats! Upper bracket is stacked nicely!
On April 10 2019 21:32 Geo.Rion wrote: Maru would have a much better chance for this tournament, if he ends up 2nd in GSL. Top half of the bracket is stacked
That makes sense: Get second in a tournament that pays 150.000 $ and 25K WCS points to have a chance in a tournament thats pays 25% of that
More serious: ST is not Maru's tournament anyway. This will the "comeback" of Stats! Upper bracket is stacked nicely!
wasnt suggesting that Maru should throw the code S finals :D just saying, upper half looks sick
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
it's not only "feels like" since long time it's like save call... and blizzard don't get it at all... terran is not playable against protoss, it's so obvious... every match where same level of pro vs ter pro will win, showed in all EU, US and especially KOR matches... maru is just like the exception proves the rule! so sad, one cannot watch this game anymore due to imbalance..
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Agree...and I've been on here for years, I only just realized your name wasn't "chairosaur". TIL I'm dyslexic...
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Hm, that's 49 Premier tournaments for those Terran players opposed to 23 for those Zerg(even if I guess you only look at GSL victories so they are pretty equivalent to you).
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Hm, that's 49 Premier tournaments for those Terran players opposed to 23 for those Zerg(even if I guess you only look at GSL victories so they are pretty equivalent to you).
Only looking at GSL victories is more representive than treating every tournament the same.
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Agree...and I've been on here for years, I only just realized your name wasn't "chairosaur". TIL I'm dyslexic...
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Hm, that's 49 Premier tournaments for those Terran players opposed to 23 for those Zerg(even if I guess you only look at GSL victories so they are pretty equivalent to you).
Only looking at GSL victories is more representive than treating every tournament the same.
Representative of what, exactly? This obsession for considering korean leagues only immensely narrows the perspective; TaeJa and Symbol are not players of the same caliber.
The Terran who were listed shaped Starcraft 2, they were overall way more relevant than those Zerg.
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
One I don’t think they have, really. Also when I first injected this angle to the thread I also added ‘and didn’t have new players step up.’
So for Zergs, Serral has stepped up to the plate, Rogue went from a talent to a tournament winning player, etc.
Basically all of those players were either really good players who didn’t win anything, or players who did but fell out of competitive relevancy. And by that I mean Nestea. Life would be one of the best players in the world today but we know what happened there.
We’re not comparing like with like here, as Terrans love to do, especially when they’re being hipster. ‘Cure is as good as Flash so he’s no loss to the race’ etc
I’ll always include strong wristed Taeja despite being speculative. Byun peaked to be a monster and is Gomez
I haven’t 100% checked, I think if you exclude Life, Taeja alone has more Premiers than your entire list of players, or it’s at least close.
So yes Terran has been unlucky in both an injury sense and a military service in who it has afflicted.
This isn’t to justify Terran balance whining, which tbh I’m sick of, but to mitigate it. They’ve been unlucky in more of their very best players have left the scene for various reasons.
This is no different for other races, they’ve just not been as unfortunate in how these issues have fallen.
Take Classic, Zest and Stats out of Protoss and see how they do, or Dark Rogue and soO from Zerg
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Hm, that's 49 Premier tournaments for those Terran players opposed to 23 for those Zerg(even if I guess you only look at GSL victories so they are pretty equivalent to you).
Only looking at GSL victories is more representive than treating every tournament the same.
Representative of what, exactly? This obsession for considering korean leagues only immensely narrows the perspective; TaeJa and Symbol are not players of the same caliber.
The Terran who were listed shaped Starcraft 2, they were overall way more relevant than those Zerg.
Yes. Taeja may not have won a GSL, both in reality and in a hypothetical sense. Agree with you
Could he have without the wrist problems? Obviously, come on. He did ridiculous things in the game in his era. I mean preposterous things at times.
At the time maybe people went overboard, maybe his GSL relative failures were relevant. He seems to be underrated nowadays, tbh.
Level of play was different sure, there’s probably never been a better player in blind play than Taeja at his peak relative to his peers in SC2 history. Which is, IMO kinda important. Preparation skill is seen as more ‘true’ but that’s just because the GSL is a prep tournament, and it’s the most prestigious tournament. A strategy game should reward both prep and adaptation.
Maru has literally been playing since the first GSL and it took him a long time to become the Maru of today. The idea that Taeja couldn’t be at LEAST competitive without health issues is silly IMO
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Agree...and I've been on here for years, I only just realized your name wasn't "chairosaur". TIL I'm dyslexic...
Wth it's not Chairosaur?
Oh wtf yes, I was a 100% sure it was a "chair" - "dinosaur" pun haha
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Hm, that's 49 Premier tournaments for those Terran players opposed to 23 for those Zerg(even if I guess you only look at GSL victories so they are pretty equivalent to you).
Only looking at GSL victories is more representive than treating every tournament the same.
Representative of what, exactly? This obsession for considering korean leagues only immensely narrows the perspective; TaeJa and Symbol are not players of the same caliber.
The Terran who were listed shaped Starcraft 2, they were overall way more relevant than those Zerg.
Yes. Taeja may not have won a GSL, both in reality and in a hypothetical sense. Agree with you
Could he have without the wrist problems? Obviously, come on. He did ridiculous things in the game in his era. I mean preposterous things at times.
At the time maybe people went overboard, maybe his GSL relative failures were relevant. He seems to be underrated nowadays, tbh.
Level of play was different sure, there’s probably never been a better player in blind play than Taeja at his peak relative to his peers in SC2 history. Which is, IMO kinda important. Preparation skill is seen as more ‘true’ but that’s just because the GSL is a prep tournament, and it’s the most prestigious tournament. A strategy game should reward both prep and adaptation.
Maru has literally been playing since the first GSL and it took him a long time to become the Maru of today. The idea that Taeja couldn’t be at LEAST competitive without health issues is silly IMO
I agree that being prepared and being adaptive are both great skills. One is not necessarily harder than the other.
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Agree...and I've been on here for years, I only just realized your name wasn't "chairosaur". TIL I'm dyslexic...
Wth it's not Chairosaur?
Oh wtf yes, I was a 100% sure it was a "chair" - "dinosaur" pun haha
I was too, I'm glad at least 2 people were as challenged as I was :p
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
Never pass up on an opportunity to ask for Terran buffs, it seems.
Possible 4 in a row GSL wins not enough for you? (Where TvP is 55%, btw).
And now we are asked to exclude Maru's achievements from balance discussions as an outlier?
Imagine if Protoss or Zerg players spoke like this...but to be honest, it seems to work in influencing Blizzard....so why stop now?
What happens to those statistics if you remove Maru from them?
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
I was gonna post something to this effect on one of the other recent tournament threads—Maru does good because Maru is a tried & true beast, whose only weakness may be that he needs slightly more prep time than some of his fellow players.
He's also a Prime Terran which means that he is his own worst enemy.
His loss to sOs @ Blizzcon last season was the most Prime Terran thing that any Prime Terran has ever done.
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
I was gonna post something to this effect on one of the other recent tournament threads—Maru does good because Maru is a tried & true beast, whose only weakness may be that he needs slightly more prep time than some of his fellow players.
He's also a Prime Terran which means that he is his own worst enemy.
His loss to sOs @ Blizzcon last season was the most Prime Terran thing that any Prime Terran has ever done.
I think the only Prime Terran that avoided prime Terran things was Polt
On April 09 2019 06:32 Anc13nt wrote: Feels like it's becoming more and more clear that terran is underpowered tbh. Just because Maru is doing well doesn't mean terran is doing fine, especially since Maru seems to thrive whenever terran is weak.
I was gonna post something to this effect on one of the other recent tournament threads—Maru does good because Maru is a tried & true beast, whose only weakness may be that he needs slightly more prep time than some of his fellow players.
He's also a Prime Terran which means that he is his own worst enemy.
His loss to sOs @ Blizzcon last season was the most Prime Terran thing that any Prime Terran has ever done.
I think the only Prime Terran that avoided prime Terran things was Polt
Nah man, I've defintely seen Polt lose way more than he should stubbornly insisting on killing a Nexus or Hatchery.
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Hm, that's 49 Premier tournaments for those Terran players opposed to 23 for those Zerg(even if I guess you only look at GSL victories so they are pretty equivalent to you).
Polt & Bomber dominated mostly WCS where the big part of their victories come from. Talking about Mvp at 2019 as a loss to the scene is kinda weird when his prime was 2012. I don't know, that's like 7 years difference and 2 game releases later? MKP Prime(intended ) time was what, 2011? Can we also mention Terrans lost iloveoov? (who would be more related to LotV than Mvp because he was the head coach in SKT T1). While I love all these Terrans and still miss them - let's be fair
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Agree...and I've been on here for years, I only just realized your name wasn't "chairosaur". TIL I'm dyslexic...
Wth it's not Chairosaur?
Oh wtf yes, I was a 100% sure it was a "chair" - "dinosaur" pun haha
I was too, I'm glad at least 2 people were as challenged as I was :p
Holy shit
Now that you guys mentioned it O.O I always read it Chairosaur in my mind ^^'
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Hm, that's 49 Premier tournaments for those Terran players opposed to 23 for those Zerg(even if I guess you only look at GSL victories so they are pretty equivalent to you).
Polt & Bomber dominated mostly WCS where the big part of their victories come from. Talking about Mvp at 2019 as a loss to the scene is kinda weird when his prime was 2012. I don't know, that's like 7 years difference and 2 game releases later? MKP Prime(intended ) time was what, 2011? Can we also mention Terrans lost iloveoov? (who would be more related to LotV than Mvp because he was the head coach in SKT T1). While I love all these Terrans and still miss them - let's be fair
Both Bomber and Polt won a GSL title and they mostly beat koreans to win their other trophies.
Also, Sniper and RorO won their only Premier Tournament before Mvp won his last while MKP reached HotSix final in December 2014; your point either doesn't hit the mark or affects players from both lists equally.
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Hm, that's 49 Premier tournaments for those Terran players opposed to 23 for those Zerg(even if I guess you only look at GSL victories so they are pretty equivalent to you).
Polt & Bomber dominated mostly WCS where the big part of their victories come from. Talking about Mvp at 2019 as a loss to the scene is kinda weird when his prime was 2012. I don't know, that's like 7 years difference and 2 game releases later? MKP Prime(intended ) time was what, 2011? Can we also mention Terrans lost iloveoov? (who would be more related to LotV than Mvp because he was the head coach in SKT T1). While I love all these Terrans and still miss them - let's be fair
Both Bomber and Polt won a GSL title and they mostly beat koreans to win their other trophies.
Also, Sniper and RorO won their only Premier Tournament before Mvp won his last while MKP reached HotSix final in December 2014; your point either doesn't hit the mark or affects players from both lists equally.
Same applies to the Zergs. MKP in 2k14 wasn't the top Terran, I'm not denying he was good Terran, but his top time was 2k11. They(Bomber & Polt) mostly won against lower tier Koreans in WCS, let's not pretend those were top tier Koreans.
Which GSL Bomber won? He won WCS Global tournament, IIRC he has never won GSL Code S. Maybe I'm blind(as my memory is bad) because I can't see it in Liquipedia either. Polt won Souper Tournament in 2k11 and we can discuss if it's a full-size GSL, from the race distribution it appears as GomTvT era
Anyway, I didn't say they have never done anything against top Koreans, but the biggest part of their victories is from WCS so it's not like Korean scene is losing that many victories/titles. Taeja/ByuN/MMA are a totally different discussion. And I am still huge Bomber fanboy, I love him more than Maru.
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Hm, that's 49 Premier tournaments for those Terran players opposed to 23 for those Zerg(even if I guess you only look at GSL victories so they are pretty equivalent to you).
Polt & Bomber dominated mostly WCS where the big part of their victories come from. Talking about Mvp at 2019 as a loss to the scene is kinda weird when his prime was 2012. I don't know, that's like 7 years difference and 2 game releases later? MKP Prime(intended ) time was what, 2011? Can we also mention Terrans lost iloveoov? (who would be more related to LotV than Mvp because he was the head coach in SKT T1). While I love all these Terrans and still miss them - let's be fair
Both Bomber and Polt won a GSL title and they mostly beat koreans to win their other trophies.
Also, Sniper and RorO won their only Premier Tournament before Mvp won his last while MKP reached HotSix final in December 2014; your point either doesn't hit the mark or affects players from both lists equally.
Same applies to the Zergs. MKP in 2k14 wasn't the top Terran, I'm not denying he was good Terran, but his top time was 2k11. They(Bomber & Polt) mostly won against lower tier Koreans in WCS, let's not pretend those were top tier Koreans.
Which GSL Bomber won? He won WCS Global tournament, IIRC he has never won GSL Code S. Maybe I'm blind(as my memory is bad) because I can't see it in Liquipedia either. Polt won Souper Tournament in 2k11 and we can discuss if it's a full-size GSL, from the race distribution it appears as GomTvT era
Anyway, I didn't say they have never done anything against top Koreans, but the biggest part of their victories is from WCS so it's not like Korean scene is losing that many victories/titles. Taeja/ByuN/MMA are a totally different discussion. And I am still huge Bomber fanboy, I love him more than Maru.
With those criteria, both Sniper's and RorO's victories in Code S shouldn't be valued since they happened during BLInfestor era.
The main point here is that Terran lost many more top players than Zerg(and Protoss) or that they were not replaced by new players of the same caliber.
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Hm, that's 49 Premier tournaments for those Terran players opposed to 23 for those Zerg(even if I guess you only look at GSL victories so they are pretty equivalent to you).
Polt & Bomber dominated mostly WCS where the big part of their victories come from. Talking about Mvp at 2019 as a loss to the scene is kinda weird when his prime was 2012. I don't know, that's like 7 years difference and 2 game releases later? MKP Prime(intended ) time was what, 2011? Can we also mention Terrans lost iloveoov? (who would be more related to LotV than Mvp because he was the head coach in SKT T1). While I love all these Terrans and still miss them - let's be fair
Both Bomber and Polt won a GSL title and they mostly beat koreans to win their other trophies.
Also, Sniper and RorO won their only Premier Tournament before Mvp won his last while MKP reached HotSix final in December 2014; your point either doesn't hit the mark or affects players from both lists equally.
Same applies to the Zergs. MKP in 2k14 wasn't the top Terran, I'm not denying he was good Terran, but his top time was 2k11. They(Bomber & Polt) mostly won against lower tier Koreans in WCS, let's not pretend those were top tier Koreans.
Which GSL Bomber won? He won WCS Global tournament, IIRC he has never won GSL Code S. Maybe I'm blind(as my memory is bad) because I can't see it in Liquipedia either. Polt won Souper Tournament in 2k11 and we can discuss if it's a full-size GSL, from the race distribution it appears as GomTvT era
Anyway, I didn't say they have never done anything against top Koreans, but the biggest part of their victories is from WCS so it's not like Korean scene is losing that many victories/titles. Taeja/ByuN/MMA are a totally different discussion. And I am still huge Bomber fanboy, I love him more than Maru.
With those criteria, both Sniper's and RorO's victories in Code S shouldn't be valued since they happened during BLInfestor era.
The main point here is that Terran lost many more top players than Zerg(and Protoss) or that they were not replaced by new players of the same caliber.
The main reason I replied is that Terrans didn't lost that mnay premier tournaments in quality of the wins when talking about Polt/Bomber. Yes, they won some stacked tournaments but no, winning WCS NA shouldn't count as that was the "B tier" Korean tournament, we can call it Code B
FFS even ForGG had bigger impact than Mvp or MKP in the past 5 years as he won a tournament over a damn Life!
We have at least 3 top Terrans now - Maru, Innovation and TY, 2 good - Bunny and Gumi. Then we have Cure, Keen, aLive. And probably some more.
And out of all this players only 1 qualified because he's a Code S monster and 1 managed to qualify through qualifications. Hurricane, Parting(the current one), Patience over Inno/TY/Bunny? With THOSE map PvT numbers?
I just don't accept the "we lost terrans" argument.
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Hm, that's 49 Premier tournaments for those Terran players opposed to 23 for those Zerg(even if I guess you only look at GSL victories so they are pretty equivalent to you).
Polt & Bomber dominated mostly WCS where the big part of their victories come from. Talking about Mvp at 2019 as a loss to the scene is kinda weird when his prime was 2012. I don't know, that's like 7 years difference and 2 game releases later? MKP Prime(intended ) time was what, 2011? Can we also mention Terrans lost iloveoov? (who would be more related to LotV than Mvp because he was the head coach in SKT T1). While I love all these Terrans and still miss them - let's be fair
Both Bomber and Polt won a GSL title and they mostly beat koreans to win their other trophies.
Also, Sniper and RorO won their only Premier Tournament before Mvp won his last while MKP reached HotSix final in December 2014; your point either doesn't hit the mark or affects players from both lists equally.
Same applies to the Zergs. MKP in 2k14 wasn't the top Terran, I'm not denying he was good Terran, but his top time was 2k11. They(Bomber & Polt) mostly won against lower tier Koreans in WCS, let's not pretend those were top tier Koreans.
Which GSL Bomber won? He won WCS Global tournament, IIRC he has never won GSL Code S. Maybe I'm blind(as my memory is bad) because I can't see it in Liquipedia either. Polt won Souper Tournament in 2k11 and we can discuss if it's a full-size GSL, from the race distribution it appears as GomTvT era
Anyway, I didn't say they have never done anything against top Koreans, but the biggest part of their victories is from WCS so it's not like Korean scene is losing that many victories/titles. Taeja/ByuN/MMA are a totally different discussion. And I am still huge Bomber fanboy, I love him more than Maru.
With those criteria, both Sniper's and RorO's victories in Code S shouldn't be valued since they happened during BLInfestor era.
The main point here is that Terran lost many more top players than Zerg(and Protoss) or that they were not replaced by new players of the same caliber.
The main reason I replied is that Terrans didn't lost that mnay premier tournaments in quality of the wins when talking about Polt/Bomber. Yes, they won some stacked tournaments but no, winning WCS NA shouldn't count as that was the "B tier" Korean tournament, we can call it Code B
FFS even ForGG had bigger impact than Mvp or MKP in the past 5 years as he won a tournament over a damn Life!
We have at least 3 top Terrans now - Maru, Innovation and TY, 2 good - Bunny and Gumi. Then we have Cure, Keen, aLive. And probably some more.
And out of all this players only 1 qualified because he's a Code S monster and 1 managed to qualify through qualifications. Hurricane, Parting(the current one), Patience over Inno/TY/Bunny? With THOSE map PvT numbers?
I just don't accept the "we lost terrans" argument.
Wait a second, I am not saying these last results in Super Tournament were due to the fact Mvp and MKP aren't playing anymore; there is indeed a trend for Protoss to win over Terran in korean qualifiers in 2019(I wouldn't personally go further into claims of Terran being underpowered).
On the other hand, denying Terran is the race that lost the highest amount of unreplaced players of high caliber seems delusional. Winning non korean WCS isn't necessarily a requisite for being a lower korean player; Duckdeok and Pigbaby weren't top players, Polt and Bomber were, I see no possible discussions here. New Zerg rose to replace the ones who left(the notable exception being Life) while the majority of the best Protoss players are still around(and they can't do much more than dominating qualifiers, isn't it weird?).
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Hm, that's 49 Premier tournaments for those Terran players opposed to 23 for those Zerg(even if I guess you only look at GSL victories so they are pretty equivalent to you).
Only looking at GSL victories is more representive than treating every tournament the same.
Representative of what, exactly? This obsession for considering korean leagues only immensely narrows the perspective; TaeJa and Symbol are not players of the same caliber.
The Terran who were listed shaped Starcraft 2, they were overall way more relevant than those Zerg.
I didn't say you should only consider korean leagues. It's a bad way to go about it. But only looking at the number of championship and treating them all the same like you did is even less representative. TaeJa has won 11 championships. Soulkey has won 1. But I'd argue they were both equally important for their race. Out of those terran players listed more competed in foreign tournaments compared to Zerg players so they naturally have more championship. You're just cherry-picking a statistic that fits your narrative.
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Hm, that's 49 Premier tournaments for those Terran players opposed to 23 for those Zerg(even if I guess you only look at GSL victories so they are pretty equivalent to you).
Only looking at GSL victories is more representive than treating every tournament the same.
Representative of what, exactly? This obsession for considering korean leagues only immensely narrows the perspective; TaeJa and Symbol are not players of the same caliber.
The Terran who were listed shaped Starcraft 2, they were overall way more relevant than those Zerg.
I didn't say you should only consider korean leagues. It's a bad way to go about it. But only looking at the number of championship and treating them all the same like you did is even less representative. TaeJa has won 11 championships. Soulkey has won 1. But I'd argue they were both equally important for their race. Out of those terran players listed more competed in foreign tournaments compared to Zerg players so they naturally have more championship. You're just cherry-picking a statistic that fits your narrative.
It's actually the overall amount of Premier tournaments won by those players, if you call it cherrypicking… I disagree, Soulkey was a preminent Zerg, the best of his race at times, but TaeJa occupies a higher spot in the history of Sc2.
On April 10 2019 07:27 Wombat_NI wrote: And tangentially on balance, Terran has lost more of its top players and not really had replacements step up. They’ve been hit doubly here, they’ve lost more players of that clas than the other races, and they’ve had less either burst through from nowhere, or gradually improve to the very, very top of the game.
Mvp and Taeja to wrists, although the former would have had military service to factor in even without that. Byun to military service, Flash departed when he was on a consistent upward curve. It’s hypothetical land of course, it assumes not just maintaining skill but improving with everyone else, but if you had some of those guys fit and motivated and still in the scene does the Terran landscape look as bad?
As per what GSL tiers I think exist and how I kind of rank players. Players may slightly deviate, plus bracket luck but generally.
Qualifiers - Still obviously very bloody good players, good enough to make it into the main tournament out of qualifying, an achievement in itself. Generally then get dumped out there in the Ro32
Ro8ers - A step above the qualifiers, can be relied upon to generally get out of groups and beyond, maybe Ro4 with a miracle run or bracket luck but they generally fall short once they face one of the next tier in longer series.
Championship contenders - They won’t necessarily do it, they might be slumping or have a bad day, but players that are just that little better. They’ll be consistently there, or thereabouts and while they may not be favoured in every particular match necessarily, they’re all the players when you look at the field and mentally tick off who could win it.
When I consider each race’s players in this crude fashion, there really aren’t that many egregious upsets all that frequently. The very best Protoss players consistently outperform those below them, likewise the Zergs, likewise the Terrans only there are fewer of them at the very top of their race.
This isn’t to say there aren’t also issues balance wise either necessarily.
This is something to note. Protoss have lost MC, Rain, PartinG (till he came back) and maybe LiquidHerO with the likes of Stats stepping up while Zest, Classic, sOs etc. have remained.
I struggle to think of too many Zergs that have left besides Life of course and DongRaeGu with Rogue, Dark and Serral stepping up while soO has remained.
Meanwhile Terran has lost MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking, Bomber with no one really stepping up too replace them. That's a lot of players to lose with no replacement.
That's a huge amount of championship contenders that have been lost for terran
Zerg has lost Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. That's pretty much the same amount of top tier players that terran lost.
Hm, that's 49 Premier tournaments for those Terran players opposed to 23 for those Zerg(even if I guess you only look at GSL victories so they are pretty equivalent to you).
Only looking at GSL victories is more representive than treating every tournament the same.
Representative of what, exactly? This obsession for considering korean leagues only immensely narrows the perspective; TaeJa and Symbol are not players of the same caliber.
The Terran who were listed shaped Starcraft 2, they were overall way more relevant than those Zerg.
I didn't say you should only consider korean leagues. It's a bad way to go about it. But only looking at the number of championship and treating them all the same like you did is even less representative. TaeJa has won 11 championships. Soulkey has won 1. But I'd argue they were both equally important for their race. Out of those terran players listed more competed in foreign tournaments compared to Zerg players so they naturally have more championship. You're just cherry-picking a statistic that fits your narrative.
It's actually the overall amount of Premier tournaments won by those players, if you call it cherrypicking… I disagree, Soulkey was a preminent Zerg, the best of his race at times, but TaeJa occupies a higher spot in the history of Sc2.
I don't know if you actually "cherry picked" the statistic but its a very skewed way to compare both groups.
If we decide to pick premier tournaments and use that as basis for comparison that should mean that all the players mentioned or at least both groups have had an equal number of opportunities to win tournaments.
Disregarding that foreign events like WCS are much easier to win (which kind of makes the comparison unfair too as others have mentioned) how many events are in korea and possible for most kespa players to take part in compared to koreans players signed to foreign teams playing internationally.
Lets look at the players mentioned. Zerg: Life, DRG, Symbol, Sniper, RorO, Nestea, Hyun, ByuL, Soulkey and Jaedong. Terran: MVP, Taeja, Polt, Byun, Flash, MMA, Marineking and Bomber.
If we remove the players that were signed to kespa(for the majority of their career) and thus unable to participate in most foreign tourneys and the players that just didn't travel outside of korea how would it look?
Zerg: Hyun and Jaedong. Terran: Taeja, Polt, Byun, MMA, and Bomber.
Yes The terran players above have more championships than the zerg players. There are a lot of korean terrans that farmed WCS and foreign weekender tournaments that have left yes, they have a lot of victories but just like other posters have said that doesn't mean that Polt is greater than Soulkey just because of number of premier victories.