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On February 28 2022 09:45 honorablemacroterran wrote:
Yep guys it's normal for there to be four players of one race that are favored against the best players of the other races who have been playing on the big stage since they were 13 years old.
Didn't Reynor also start with 13? What is your point again?
So apparently we now focus balance on S-Tier winning players only. Fine. There are four Zerg who win World Championships - Serral, Dark, Rogue and Reynor. There are obviously other good zerg players like Solar, but lets work these dominant four.
For the other races lets say Trap and maybe Zest are on that list for protoss and Maru for terran, with Cure/Heromarine/Clem following close behind. But again, lets just say only Trap and Maru are in that elite S-Tier.
Please tell me three other players of each race that have fallen out of that Tier over the last years, not factoring in inactivity/lack of motivation/military. Which six players (three terran, three protoss) should be in that S-Tier, but can't reach it because of balance? And ONLY because of balance?
The realitiy is: Tournament winnings don't say anything about balance, because you can't assume there is a perfect balance between the players. Skill, dedication and sometimes even pure luck are far more important.
Take Kattowice: Zerg was actually the least represented race (even if you take out Ryung/uThermal and take in Armani/Ragnarok). But because Zerg has the luxury of having four phenomenal players, who are dominanting the game for years by now, there were still five zergs in the playoffs and in the end, three in semis. But if Zerg was THAT much better than any other race, why were there no upsets? Why didn't Lambo and Scalett make it out of their groups? They are definetly not S-Tier, but I don't think they are that much worse than Dream or Zoun, so why didn't they easily sweep everyone else except the zergs? Why didn't DRG manage to take a single map in the Play-Ins? Should have been easy for him with a clearly dominant race?
And how come Maru, the greatest player who ever touched the game and is 10x better than everyone else, isn't just switching race? Sure, he would need a bit of time, but at the end of the year he should be at a top level with Zerg (because again, he is a god and can only stopped through balance, everyone knows that). Or is he concerned his pure dominance would ruin the competition? Who knows...
On a serious note: Zerg isn't overpowered, it just has the luck to have four world champion caliber players left. But actually, outside of those four, Zerg is kind of struggeling (or was). Since you people love to look at tourney results: Just look at GSL alone. Do you know who the last Zerg was who won a GSL that wasn't Dark/Rogue? It was Life in 2015.
In the same timespan five different terrans (Maru, Cure, Innovation, TY, Gumiho) won a GSL. And while Protoss has serious problems winning a GSL since forever, lots of different Protoss atleast made Runner-Up. Do you know, how many Zergs were in GSL finals since Life won, not counting Dark/Solar? One (soO). Only three zerg players managed to reach a GSL final since 2015. Sorry, but that doesn't sound very imbalanced to me...
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On February 28 2022 12:06 Pandain wrote:Show nested quote +On February 28 2022 11:46 JJH777 wrote:On February 28 2022 10:53 WombaT wrote:
On the flip side, Zergs outside the big 4 haven’t really done a huge amount in the past few years, those players are clearly amazing at the game. How do you nerf Zerg that 1/2% to make them less dominant while not having that trickle down to basically every other Zerg pro?
Plenty of Zergs outside of the top 4 have made finals runs or even won the occasional tournament in the last few years. Why would you expect anymore than that for the 5th best player of a race? Players like soO, Solar, Elazer, and Lambo have all done a hell of a lot more than the 5th best T/P players. But this brings us back to the same problem as before - the reason you have a quick drop off in player level for T/P is that most of the retirees over the past few years have been T/P. I think that's pretty undisputed. And once you acknowledge that and instead try to think "how are A-tier Terrans/Protosses doing compared to A-tier Zergs" - I don't think it's true at all that Solar/Elazer/Lambo perform better, relatively speaking, than Zoun/Byun/Cure. And in fact, even the opposite, because Byun and Cure have both won things.
It was true before the recent retirements too though. Taking 2018- 2020 as a whole the 5th best Zerg did better than the 5th best T/P of those 3 years and that was mostly before the classic/Stats/TY/Inno retirements. Remove Maru/TY/Inno/Cure and T had no successful players in that era. Remove Stats, Classic, Trap, Zest and once again no success. Not even second places. After discounting the top 4, Zerg still had soO winning TSL and IEM, Scarlett winning a smaller IEM, Elazer 2nd in GSL vs the World, Solar 2nd places. I would also argue that during certain tournaments of 2019 and 2020 their were some ZvZ eliminations that had they not happened or the result was reversed could have resulted in some bigger performances from the 5th and on best Z players. Their were occasionally TvT and PvPs that could have done the same but they feel much rarer.
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Guys, if Rogue, Dark, Serral, and Reynor all retired tomorrow, Zerg would never win a single premier tournament :^)
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On February 28 2022 11:52 xelnaga_empire wrote:Show nested quote +On February 28 2022 11:45 AzAlexZ wrote:On February 28 2022 07:31 honorablemacroterran wrote:
Terran is actually the worst if you got rid of just Maru it would be extremely obvious that Terran is the weakest race at the pro level. Best Terran player is underdog against top 4 zergs. no they're not, if you get rid of Maru then it's only fair that Protoss gets rid of Trap. AT LEAST Cure won GSL and Clem won EU P= Zest winning 1 tourney (and Neeb winning NA which is negligible) But you can't also discount the number of time Zest and Zoun came in 2nd place, and were within striking distance of winning a Premier tournament in 2021/2022: Premier Tournaments. For Zoun, he came in 2nd place twice in the GSL Super Tournament, albeit, he was stopped by Trap in the finals. For Zest, he got the the finals of IEM Katowice in 2021, and he also got to the finals of GSL Season 3 in 2021.
Clem, Cure, Maru have gotten 2nd place more recently.
Cure in Last chance against Maru; Clem against Serral in DH EU; Maru against Reynor in the DH Summer Finals and against Rogue in both the 1st GSL Finals and ST Finals.
Zest was the last person to go to a final and win for Protoss and before that no Protoss has been in a final since Neeb vs Scarlett in DH NA Winter where Neeb lost, and if we don't count that then it would be Trap in Fall.
So the last time a Protoss entered a non-NA final and won was in January this year. the time when a Protoss was in a final, period (regardless of wins or losses), was in September
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France12909 Posts
The most fun thing about this is how Reynor performed relatively bad but as soon as there is big money on the line he can just practice and reach the finals easily.
When the stakes were low Maru was able to beat the zergs on the new map pool, but in GSL:ST and IEM he could not do anything.
Similarly to the future of Protoss thread, all we can hope is that there will indeed be a future balance patch, and that maps are carefully crafted for better balance.
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Thanks for this post. I needed a laugh.
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Czech Republic12129 Posts
Zergs are just better like Terran was at 2010, nothing to see, move on and enjoy your Zergcraft.
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On February 28 2022 09:59 honorablemacroterran wrote:Show nested quote +On February 28 2022 09:48 Pandain wrote:On February 28 2022 09:45 honorablemacroterran wrote:
Yep guys it's normal for there to be four players of one race that are favored against the best players of the other races who have been playing on the big stage since they were 13 years old. I mean now this conversation on your end just devolved into Maru fanboy-ism. At least engage in the conversation like Athenau. tell me any player that is equal or better odds against the top 4 zergs that win every IEM and world championship since 2017?
Maru in KR.
E: and yes, the mappool is currently awful. Pride of Altaris has to go. Remove Glittering Sands and Blackburn for maps that give protoss better opportunities in ZvP, and imho the whole issue is fixed.
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It's been almost 4 years since zerg started winning the most, there has to be a point where people stop trying to say it's because of the military as a justification, that lasts less than 2 years.
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Instead of race balance, we are just in cycle in which top Zerg players are really strong.
In Korea, the end of Proleague stopped the attraction of new players. The current top KR players are still the same minus the ones going to military. So every year, there is a decline for them.
On the contrary, in EU scene, we had the rise of Serral to god level but also new players like Reynor, Clem, Skillous... which benefit to improve overall level of all EU players.
A balance patch would still be good not to nerf/buff one race, but to force new strategies and renew interest of players in general.
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StarCraft probably just needs SC3 tbh. Renew interest, make fundamental changes, etc.
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Had absolutely zero interest in watching the playoffs of iem since I knew it was gonna be another zerg victory. It kinda ruins the fun of competitive games when the result is known beforehand and the only thing to find out which of the zergs is better at zvz that day.
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On February 28 2022 21:07 TheCheapSkate wrote:
Had absolutely zero interest in watching the playoffs of iem since I knew it was gonna be another zerg victory. It kinda ruins the fun of competitive games when the result is known beforehand and the only thing to find out which of the zergs is better at zvz that day.
Yeah, same for me. Once the Ro12 was done, I knew it was going to be a Zerg champion. It's just the format and the map pool that favours Zerg. Katowice is also at the end of a long season when all the maps were figured out, which always favours Zerg. I like Rotti's suggestion of bringing back all the best maps of the year for Katowice, instead of the current map pool. This tournament is very reminiscent of Blizzcon 2019 - all Zergs... (Solar would have been in semis if he didn't throw against HM).
I also think they need to spread out to more days, because I can tell that the players got tired towards the end of the day, and their play suffered.
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Northern Ireland26265 Posts
On February 28 2022 11:46 JJH777 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 28 2022 10:53 WombaT wrote:
On the flip side, Zergs outside the big 4 haven’t really done a huge amount in the past few years, those players are clearly amazing at the game. How do you nerf Zerg that 1/2% to make them less dominant while not having that trickle down to basically every other Zerg pro?
Plenty of Zergs outside of the top 4 have made finals runs or even won the occasional tournament in the last few years. Why would you expect anymore than that for the 5th best player of a race? Players like soO, Solar, Elazer, and Lambo have all done a hell of a lot more than the 5th best T/P players.
You minus soO who wasn’t himself right in the last stretch of his career, but one of the all-time greats and you’re left with 4/5 of the best Zergs of the last span, probably 3+ years, maybe longer. Also probably a decent chunk of their GOAT list
Zerg’s actual best players are still playing and in very good form.
My point was unlike the clearly broken WoL BL/Infestor era, Zerg isn’t that broken now. Good, solid pros like Elazer or Lambo or a DRG make an occasional run, they’re not consistently beating players of other races above them in the pecking order, nor consistently stomping on those of their level.
They’re performing basically to expectation as 5th plus best Zerg, A-tier players, who are still really good.
If balance is an issue, it’s that element of balance pertaining to what the big 4 can do that the others cannot, and is it even a balance thing or are they just that good? I don’t know, but I don’t really buy ‘Zerg is broken because World Champs’ by itself.
I think Zoun is a very good player and he’s been on an upward curve. If we’re looking a similar span to the Zergs he’s probably been the 5th best Protoss on accomplishments
Depending on how Classic/herO get back to shape, how quickly Trap departs to military etc we could likely be seeing a scenario where a best Protoss vs best Zerg fixture is Zoun vs one of those top 4 Zergy lads
Which is almost a de facto 5th vs best in real terms, and my expectations are realistic as to how that goes
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On February 28 2022 09:18 xelnaga_empire wrote:Show nested quote +On February 28 2022 09:13 Pandain wrote:
Cherry-picking isn't related to picking what's available, it's about picking increasingly arbitrary statistics. I've never seen anyone else on this forum ever lump together first and second places, and by far the dominant metric this forum uses in balance discussions is first-place results.
IMO, only looking at 1st place wins and excluding everything else is a terrible metric for balancing.
RO8 is probably a good thing to look at, since you're probably looking at the top 8 players, rather than the best player. Gives a better idea what the top-end of the playerbase looks like, compared to just who the best player is.
For example, zerg winning 10 tournament is one way to look at it, but if 100% of top 8 of those tournaments was zerg, that would be _way_ worse. Likeiwse, if 1 out of 8 for 100% of those tournament was zerg, it would highlight it's probably just 1 person.
Realistically, it's probably more like 4/8 zerg, 2/8 terran, 2/8 protoss, which still highlights something, but kind of broadens the horizons.
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i never write anything but if you think about all the players that retired it was mostly terrans at least in my mind. i always thought terrans were harder to play and had to micro so much more than other races and after medi drops got figured out like there isnt much therrans can do to win.. at least thats why i stopped playing. and yeah if you take maru out and no innovation it doesnt look that great for terrans. plus the maps kept getting bigger which is worse for terrans and if you make them small maps people will cheese and rush. so you cant really win when you play terran . plus you get scouted so easily when you play terran you cant hide anything.
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On March 01 2022 01:13 InfCereal wrote:Show nested quote +On February 28 2022 09:18 xelnaga_empire wrote:On February 28 2022 09:13 Pandain wrote:
Cherry-picking isn't related to picking what's available, it's about picking increasingly arbitrary statistics. I've never seen anyone else on this forum ever lump together first and second places, and by far the dominant metric this forum uses in balance discussions is first-place results.
IMO, only looking at 1st place wins and excluding everything else is a terrible metric for balancing. RO8 is probably a good thing to look at, since you're probably looking at the top 8 players, rather than the best player. Gives a better idea what the top-end of the playerbase looks like, compared to just who the best player is. For example, zerg winning 10 tournament is one way to look at it, but if 100% of top 8 of those tournaments was zerg, that would be _way_ worse. Likeiwse, if 1 out of 8 for 100% of those tournament was zerg, it would highlight it's probably just 1 person. Realistically, it's probably more like 4/8 zerg, 2/8 terran, 2/8 protoss, which still highlights something, but kind of broadens the horizons.
It's also a bit tricky, because Code S only really has 2 top zerg, and counts as a premium tournament, whereas WCS Europe has the other 2, but doesn't count as premium (for good reason). Meanwhile international tournaments have all 4 top zerg compete, and is therefore heavily biased towards zerg.
Code S in 2021:
Season 1: 1/8 zerg.
Season 2: 3/8 zerg.
Season 3: 2/8 zerg.
Super tournaments:
1: 0/8 zerg.
2: 1/8 zerg.
2022: 1/8 zerg.
The only non-Rogue, non-Dark zerg to make a single GSL Ro8 appearance is DRG once. However, you look at *wins* and 2/3 Code S was won by Zerg.
In KR at least, it seems Zerg other than Rogue and Dark is kinda sadly underpowered. It's just that both Rogue and Dark are S-tier players.
WCS EU is a bit different story, as Lambo and Elazer are generally top-8-adjacent players in EU:
Summer: 4/8
Fall: 2/8
Winter: 3/8
But it still doesn't look awfully unbalanced. It's just that at the end of the day, Reynor and Serral dominate even moreso than Rogue and Dark do in KR. Sure, Clem and Maxpax take the odd tournament, but really the only question in EU tournaments has been whether Reynor or Serral will win it for the last 2 years.
Now it's possible that *at* S-tier, Zerg is too good, and that makes it so players like Maru and Trap don't win what they *deserve*. But if that were the case in 2018, as some people here seem to be claiming, how come that was the year of Maru?
It seems far more likely to be down to the map pool. And I will agree that in TvZ the current mappool favors zerg (Pride of Altaris disgustingly so). I feel maps are less the problem in PvZ, it's just a broken matchup (and has been since WoL).
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Northern Ireland26265 Posts
On March 01 2022 01:50 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On March 01 2022 01:13 InfCereal wrote:On February 28 2022 09:18 xelnaga_empire wrote:On February 28 2022 09:13 Pandain wrote:
Cherry-picking isn't related to picking what's available, it's about picking increasingly arbitrary statistics. I've never seen anyone else on this forum ever lump together first and second places, and by far the dominant metric this forum uses in balance discussions is first-place results.
IMO, only looking at 1st place wins and excluding everything else is a terrible metric for balancing. RO8 is probably a good thing to look at, since you're probably looking at the top 8 players, rather than the best player. Gives a better idea what the top-end of the playerbase looks like, compared to just who the best player is. For example, zerg winning 10 tournament is one way to look at it, but if 100% of top 8 of those tournaments was zerg, that would be _way_ worse. Likeiwse, if 1 out of 8 for 100% of those tournament was zerg, it would highlight it's probably just 1 person. Realistically, it's probably more like 4/8 zerg, 2/8 terran, 2/8 protoss, which still highlights something, but kind of broadens the horizons. It's also a bit tricky, because Code S only really has 2 top zerg, and counts as a premium tournament, whereas WCS Europe has the other 2, but doesn't count as premium (for good reason). Meanwhile international tournaments have all 4 top zerg compete, and is therefore heavily biased towards zerg. Code S in 2021: Season 1: 1/8 zerg. Season 2: 3/8 zerg. Season 3: 2/8 zerg. Super tournaments: 1: 0/8 zerg. 2: 1/8 zerg. 2022: 1/8 zerg. The only non-Rogue, non-Dark zerg to make a single GSL Ro8 appearance is DRG once. However, you look at *wins* and 2/3 Code S was won by Zerg. In KR at least, it seems Zerg other than Rogue and Dark is kinda sadly underpowered. It's just that both Rogue and Dark are S-tier players. WCS EU is a bit different story, as Lambo and Elazer are generally top-8-adjacent players in EU: Summer: 4/8 Fall: 2/8 Winter: 3/8 But it still doesn't look awfully unbalanced. It's just that at the end of the day, Reynor and Serral dominate even moreso than Rogue and Dark do in KR. Sure, Clem and Maxpax take the odd tournament, but really the only question in EU tournaments has been whether Reynor or Serral will win it for the last 2 years. Now it's possible that *at* S-tier, Zerg is too good, and that makes it so players like Maru and Trap don't win what they *deserve*. But if that were the case in 2018, as some people here seem to be claiming, how come that was the year of Maru? It seems far more likely to be down to the map pool. And I will agree that in TvZ the current mappool favors zerg (Pride of Altaris disgustingly so). I feel maps are less the problem in PvZ, it's just a broken matchup (and has been since WoL).
Nothing I really disagree with there!
If Maru, to take one example was to win Katowice he would have had to take out Serral, Rogue in back to back Bo5s, and Reynor in a Bo7 which would be quite the feat. Especially when he’d have to play Pride of Altaris in a final (also why did he not veto it against Serral?!)
The World Championship bring almost every non-balance Zerg benefit into play too. You bring the big 4, super motivated for one. You also bring a format that both benefits better players and consistency.
GSL you can misread builds twice, lose two Bo3s and a better player can exit in groups. Happens less nowadays as I think the gaps are bigger than they used to, but you can’t slip up.
Then when GSL goes to playoffs you’ve got the prep time to come up with some bespoke plans to snipe your opponent.
Katowice you’ve got a format where it’s almost guaranteed all the Zerg big 4 make it out to Ro12 at worst, and then we’re into a Bo5+ gauntlet.
Zerg, by virtue of it having a lot of defensive reactive capacity is absolutely the best race for such a gauntlet. The more sets the better, a Serral may botch a read in a Bo3 and be snipeable. Bo5+ that shifts from being a potentially eliminating set to being a set he drops in a Bo5, Zergs of that calibre don’t tend to make that many mistakes, or be bamboozled easily.
If your opponent has previously sniped some of your Zerg brethren you can see how they did it, make those adjustments and go in feeling ok.
Prior to this we’ve seen this over and over in Katowice, soO stomped on Stat’s and his cool style he had success with in a final. Zest could only eliminate so many Zergs with his new pocket build before he got smacked in finals, Serral eviscerated Classic after he’d eliminated Rogue with that ballsy Shadow Strike build. Etc etc
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very representative statics mate Kappa
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EPT
ESL Pro Tour/2020/21
