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I was curious to see how MMR is distributed on the sc2 ladder. Here is the result (data are from rankedftw.com):
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/2RuRS3H.jpg)
I was expected a similar distribution for all races but it is not the case. The interpretation of this result would be adventurous and I personnaly don't want to speculate on it.
Method:
1. EU ladder only
2. Only players with at least 10 1v1 games in season 44 are taken into account
3. distribution was first computed using 25 regular bins for each race
4. distribution was then interpolated with a regular interval of 10 MMR
5. [edit] The percentage is computed with respect to the race population, not the entire population.
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Ohhh, love me some statistics! Could you also post a version with a logarithmic y axis? Would be cool to see the tail end behavior of the distributions
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Interesting stuff! Not surprised to see zerg has the highest on average, because I'm pretty sure it's the least popular race among casual/low level players
edit: ((i say this as a pretty low level player myself))
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On September 12 2020 00:39 Meadowlark wrote:
Interesting stuff! Not surprised to see zerg has the highest on average, because I'm pretty sure it's the least popular race among casual/low level players
edit: ((i say this as a pretty low level player myself))
where did you get this info from? It seems every young upcoming player on eu is zerg, based on your suggestion it should be terran..except...
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Where is the general cutoff for masters on here?
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Well done 99percent, not the least bit surprising to me. It's a straight up descriptive stat, and it's beautiful. I love the succinct no-fluff style of the post. Very brave of you to share.
On September 12 2020 00:39 Meadowlark wrote:
Interesting stuff! Not surprised to see zerg has the highest on average, because I'm pretty sure it's the least popular race among casual/low level players
edit: ((i say this as a pretty low level player myself))
From a stats perspective, the number of players is completely irrelevant to the MMR spread because this is looking at proportions. If it's true that Zerg is the least popular race, which it may or may not be, the argument would then be, "Players who choose the least popular option are more talented as a population." While this appeals to my hipster sensibilities, it's pretty laughable scientifically.
It'll be interesting to see how people spin this to protect their beliefs.
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Mexico2170 Posts
So this means that on average most of the population is on plat/diamond?
Before it used to be tat if you were in diamond you were top 10%, master top 2% and GM top 200.
Now I feel bad.
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This has been consistently true for all of LotV (and regardless of whether Protoss or Zerg was the least popular race. Terran has always been the most popular).
The obvious explanation is that when both players are bad and a-move their armies at each other with not much micro, zerg's the better race since it has a bigger macro focus.
On September 12 2020 01:50 [Phantom] wrote:
So this means that on average most of the population is on plat/diamond?
Before it used to be tat if you were in diamond you were top 10%, master top 2% and GM top 200.
Now I feel bad.
The average player in LotV is right on the border between gold and plat. Masters is top 4% and Diamond is the 23% after that.
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On September 12 2020 01:26 ThunderJunk wrote:Well done 99percent, not the least bit surprising to me. It's a straight up descriptive stat, and it's beautiful. I love the succinct no-fluff style of the post. Very brave of you to share. Show nested quote +On September 12 2020 00:39 Meadowlark wrote:
Interesting stuff! Not surprised to see zerg has the highest on average, because I'm pretty sure it's the least popular race among casual/low level players
edit: ((i say this as a pretty low level player myself)) From a stats perspective, the number of players is completely irrelevant to the MMR spread because this is looking at proportions. If it's true that Zerg is the least popular race, which it may or may not be, the argument would then be, "Players who choose the least popular option are more talented as a population." While this appeals to my hipster sensibilities, it's pretty laughable scientifically.
That's why I specified the low-level/casual demographic. If zerg is less popular than the other two races amongst casual players, but, say, equally popular amongst more hardcore players, then it will have a higher average mmr because the zerg playerbase will skew more towards the hardcore than the casual. The point has nothing to do with talent--mmr has much more to do with your approach the the game and how much time you allocate to play. It really wouldn't be surprising if people who allocate more time and consciously focus on improving in the game are a meaningfully different population with different preferences than people who like to mess around and have fun on ladder every so often (10 ladder games per season is a pretty low floor). I can't remember where I read this, and so maybe I'm full of it, but I do remember reading that zerg was overall less popular in the lower leagues. Obviously this is anecdotal, but my not-very-high mmr laddering experience definitely jives with this--I run into far fewer zergs than terran and protoss. I can't really prove this, but my intuition is that the mmr disparity is mostly caused by how different people who are looking for different experiences with the game may choose their races by different criteria. People more interested in game mechanics might find all three races equally interesting on account of their unique mechanics, whereas people less interested in game mechanics might on average prefer space marines and shiny aliens to bugs. That's my thought, at least. Again, definitely could be factually wrong bc I don't remember where I read this, but I really don't think it's logically implausible in the way you made it out to be.
edit: and to be clear I really don't think there is anything wrong with either approach
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On September 12 2020 00:07 99percent wrote:I was curious to see how MMR is distributed on the sc2 ladder. Here is the result (data are from rankedftw.com): I was expected a similar distribution for all races but it is not the case. The interpretation of this result would be adventurous and I personnaly don't want to speculate on it. Method: 1. EU ladder only 2. Only players with at least 10 1v1 games in season 44 are taken into account 3. distribution was first computed using 25 regular bins for each race 4. distribution was then interpolated with a regular interval of 10 MMR
If anyone can get the data as sheets (xls, csv, etc...), I can run some statistical analyses in order to see if there are statistically significant differences of MMR by race.  (I am curious to see the result)
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On September 12 2020 02:19 Meadowlark wrote:Show nested quote +On September 12 2020 01:26 ThunderJunk wrote:Well done 99percent, not the least bit surprising to me. It's a straight up descriptive stat, and it's beautiful. I love the succinct no-fluff style of the post. Very brave of you to share. On September 12 2020 00:39 Meadowlark wrote:
Interesting stuff! Not surprised to see zerg has the highest on average, because I'm pretty sure it's the least popular race among casual/low level players
edit: ((i say this as a pretty low level player myself)) From a stats perspective, the number of players is completely irrelevant to the MMR spread because this is looking at proportions. If it's true that Zerg is the least popular race, which it may or may not be, the argument would then be, "Players who choose the least popular option are more talented as a population." While this appeals to my hipster sensibilities, it's pretty laughable scientifically. That's why I specified the low-level/casual demographic. If zerg is less popular than the other two races amongst casual players, but, say, equally popular amongst more hardcore players, then it will have a higher average mmr because the zerg playerbase will skew more towards the hardcore than the casual. The point has nothing to do with talent--mmr has much more to do with your approach the the game and how much time you allocate to play. It really wouldn't be surprising if people who allocate more time and consciously focus on improving in the game are a meaningfully different population with different preferences than people who like to mess around and have fun on ladder every so often (10 ladder games per season is a pretty low floor). I can't remember where I read this, and so maybe I'm full of it, but I do remember reading that zerg was overall less popular in the lower leagues. Obviously this is anecdotal, but my not-very-high mmr laddering experience definitely jives with this--I run into far fewer zergs than terran and protoss. I can't really prove this, but my intuition is that the mmr disparity is mostly caused by how different people who are looking for different experiences with the game may choose their races by different criteria. People more interested in game mechanics might find all three races equally interesting on account of their unique mechanics, whereas people less interested in game mechanics might on average prefer space marines and shiny aliens to bugs. That's my thought, at least. Again, definitely could be factually wrong bc I don't remember where I read this, but I really don't think it's logically implausible in the way you made it out to be. edit: and to be clear I really don't think there is anything wrong with either approach
You don't have any evidence at all that Zerg players are more focused on improving or anything of the sort, so at some point you just have to use Occam's razor.
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On September 12 2020 01:50 [Phantom] wrote:
So this means that on average most of the population is on plat/diamond?
Before it used to be tat if you were in diamond you were top 10%, master top 2% and GM top 200.
Now I feel bad.
Yes, very disappointing  I am apparently right on the mean. I thought I was in the top quartile or something.
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On September 12 2020 02:19 Meadowlark wrote:Show nested quote +On September 12 2020 01:26 ThunderJunk wrote:Well done 99percent, not the least bit surprising to me. It's a straight up descriptive stat, and it's beautiful. I love the succinct no-fluff style of the post. Very brave of you to share. On September 12 2020 00:39 Meadowlark wrote:
Interesting stuff! Not surprised to see zerg has the highest on average, because I'm pretty sure it's the least popular race among casual/low level players
edit: ((i say this as a pretty low level player myself)) From a stats perspective, the number of players is completely irrelevant to the MMR spread because this is looking at proportions. If it's true that Zerg is the least popular race, which it may or may not be, the argument would then be, "Players who choose the least popular option are more talented as a population." While this appeals to my hipster sensibilities, it's pretty laughable scientifically. That's why I specified the low-level/casual demographic. If zerg is less popular than the other two races amongst casual players, but, say, equally popular amongst more hardcore players, then it will have a higher average mmr because the zerg playerbase will skew more towards the hardcore than the casual. The point has nothing to do with talent--mmr has much more to do with your approach the the game and how much time you allocate to play. It really wouldn't be surprising if people who allocate more time and consciously focus on improving in the game are a meaningfully different population with different preferences than people who like to mess around and have fun on ladder every so often (10 ladder games per season is a pretty low floor). I can't remember where I read this, and so maybe I'm full of it, but I do remember reading that zerg was overall less popular in the lower leagues. Obviously this is anecdotal, but my not-very-high mmr laddering experience definitely jives with this--I run into far fewer zergs than terran and protoss. I can't really prove this, but my intuition is that the mmr disparity is mostly caused by how different people who are looking for different experiences with the game may choose their races by different criteria. People more interested in game mechanics might find all three races equally interesting on account of their unique mechanics, whereas people less interested in game mechanics might on average prefer space marines and shiny aliens to bugs. That's my thought, at least. Again, definitely could be factually wrong bc I don't remember where I read this, but I really don't think it's logically implausible in the way you made it out to be. edit: and to be clear I really don't think there is anything wrong with either approach
The word Talent isn't the point. You can change the description to "Better", or "Harder Working", or "Morally Superior" lol It doesn't matter : The premise is fundamentally unsound because it leads to a limitless rabbit hole. Let's assume what you say is true: Then anyone could just as easily add another layer and say "Hardcore players choose zerg because they recognize it will be the easiest to get more MMR with."
Pretty funny that the mode (highest number in a single category) for both Protoss and Terran is silver league whereas for Zerg it's diamond league.
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Whew, just above average for toss. Could be worse.
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It should be pretty clear that Zerg is the more forgiving race at lower levels. I think the main reason is that you need to make fewer production buildings, and you can build an army in bursts rather than having to check if your production is running continuously. Injects and creep spread probably make more of a difference higher up.
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Czech Republic12129 Posts
On September 12 2020 05:04 Slydie wrote:
It should be pretty clear that Zerg is the more forgiving race at lower levels. I think the main reason is that you need to make fewer production buildings, and you can build an army in bursts rather than having to check if your production is running continuously. Injects and creep spread probably make more of a difference higher up.
You can work around the injects in the lategame, spawn 4 queens, create 4 hatcheries in main, inject once in a while with them. shit ton of larvae.
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On September 12 2020 01:50 [Phantom] wrote:
So this means that on average most of the population is on plat/diamond?
Before it used to be tat if you were in diamond you were top 10%, master top 2% and GM top 200.
Now I feel bad.
Correct. They changed the percentages around the beginning of LotV to artificially make players feel better about themselves in an effort to keep people playing ladder.
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![[image loading]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/382780801164771331/754174529198227456/unknown.png)
It's very interesting that there's an inflection point in the lower side of the zerg curve that's not present on the terran/toss curves. Is this the point where players learn to inject?
I also think this indicates the "just serral" theory is likely untrue. It definitely appears that zerg is the most successful race by a significant margin. We need more info to draw conclusions - would love to see sample size!
Also, is there no random statistics? As a random player, I want to know how my race is doing! 
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On September 12 2020 12:06 Monochromatic wrote:It's very interesting that there's an inflection point in the lower side of the zerg curve that's not present on the terran/toss curves. Is this the point where players learn to inject? I also think this indicates the "just serral" theory is likely untrue. It definitely appears that zerg is the most successful race by a significant margin. We need more info to draw conclusions - would love to see sample size! Also, is there no random statistics? As a random player, I want to know how my race is doing!
Of course its untrue, Serral can't carry zerg all by himself. As icing on the cake when he runs into fellow good zerg Reynor he loses a lot of series against him, but not versus other good terran/protoss EU players
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EPT
