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At the risk of fanning the flames of an already controversial topic...
I've been playing around a little with Shadowed's new SC2 stats website. If you haven't already seen it, I highly suggest taking a looking at it: http://sc2ranks.com.
In particular, I've been studying the data on the stats tab of the website. It seems to me that over the course of millions of games, the win rate seems fairly well balanced across all three races. No matter whether you filter by region or by player division, the difference between the top-winning race and the bottom-winning race is always < 2%. (the only discrepancy I've been able to find to this is in the Latin America region, where the difference between high/low is < 3%)
I'm no statistician, but a win-rate difference of < 2% between the races sounds like a pretty damn well-balanced game. Then again, given that the sample size is millions of games, maybe 2% is statistically significant.
Now, one piece of information that's missing is the race matchup percentages. Overall, each race seems to be winning the same percentage of games, but there's no information currently on that website to determine if each race matchup shows the same percentage. Hypothetically speaking, it's possible that Zerg wins 100% of the time vs Protoss, and loses 100% of the time vs Terran, but the stats page will still show an overall win rate of 50% for Zerg, which would seem to indicate balance (which is obviously not the case in this example).
Anyway, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that, given the statistics from this website, it's hard for me to reconcile all these reports of race imbalance (even from well-respected players) when the numbers just don't seem to support this.
Am I missing something here? Are the numbers just misleading, and not telling the whole story?
EDIT: Okay, some people have provided me with a good explanation of what I was missing. The long and the short of it is that win percentage isn't a measurement of race balancing or skill level, it's a measurement of how well Blizzard's matchmaking works. Thank you to those who provided a very reasonable answer to my very serious question.
Incidentally, there are stats that support the claims of race imbalance at high-level play: http://www.sc2ranks.com/stats/race/all/1. Note that very highly ranked Terran players are squeezing out both Zerg and Protoss players. If the races were balanced correctly, one would expect to see roughly 30% for each race at every ranking score -- but that's not the case at very high levels.
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Am I missing something here? Are the numbers just misleading, and not telling the whole story?
Isn't it obvious?
or do you really believe there's a zerg conspiracy of miserable pro gamers trying to make easy money?
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The numbers don't indicate any imbalances, and everyone who is impartial will recognize that, people still try to twist it. That's not to say the game is perfectly balanced, but numbers don't support a Z imbalance.
People will say that it's the same because the system tries to keep you at the same win%, but if that were the case with Zerg, there would be less representation in the diamond league than other leagues due to matchmaker pairing up with lower-skilled opponents. This isn't the case.
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Actually, no it's not obvious to me. How is it that, across millions of games, the difference between top and bottom race is < 2%, regardless of region or division?
No, I don't think there's a Zerg conspiracy, but how do you explain the numbers?
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Any chance you can filter that by diamond-league only and run the numbers again? Never used the site so I have no idea.
And yes, I've heard the age old argument that, one, stats don't matter, and two, that diamond-league-play can't be the only factor in selling a game to millions of people to have fun with. I'm just curious is all.
Edit: I'm really bad at math-- I dropped out of high school and I'm an art major, damn it! Can someone explain to me how every race can have a ~55% win ratio? Maybe I'm missing something, but if you average the winning ratio of ALL players in the world and its above 50 (which would be one winner and one loser for each match) then you're missing the statistics for games somehow?
I'm filtering by "all players in north america". If the average win:loss ratio is 55:100, that means that 5% is fucked up somewhere. If 5% is fucked up, I have trouble believing the other 95% is completely accurate :X Unless, of course, my math-badness is not understanding something very basic.
Also, obligatory "stats don't mean a whole lot in regards to balance" comment goes here.
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That's not a good basis for this kind of argument.
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Don't you understand that the AMM works like that? The average player's ratio is 1win/1lose.
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In other news, matchmaking works on battlenet 2.0. At least they got something right.
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On August 17 2010 06:12 Kelberot wrote:Show nested quote +Am I missing something here? Are the numbers just misleading, and not telling the whole story? Isn't it obvious? or do you really believe there's a zerg conspiracy of miserable pro gamers trying to make easy money?
What? I mean, seriously, what? What does this post mean?
I think that most people are in agreement that Zerg is OK at mid-diamond and below levels, and claim that there's only an imbalance in pro play. Specifically, the most common complaint seems to be that Terran especially have too many viable strategies against Zerg, and it's hard to reliably scout and defend against all of them, and that's a problem that only shows up at a very high level of play; the level at which you start saying "My opponent can be doing X, Y, or Z, so here's my plan to distinguish between X, Y, and Z and appropriately handle each possibility." At lower levels, just plain execution and mechanics is much more important.
Also, I'm not convinced that the racial statistics found like this are meaningful; if all the Zerg players had poor results, and Terran and Protoss had some good players, some with poor results, then the Zerg players would tend to match up with other Zerg players & with the worse Terran and Protoss players to maintain a reasonable win/loss ratio, right?
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2% is going to be statistically significant at n~10m, but as any student of statistics knows, the t-test doesn't say how much the populations are different, just that they are. The differences are minute ate best.
Then again, this doesn't preclude a T>Z>P>T rock-paper-scissors dynamic, which many people believe is the case.
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It's been mentioned several times already that the ladder is designed to have ~50% win rate among all players. However those stats are meaningless since balance can only be aptly judged at the very top.
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On August 17 2010 06:17 catamorphist wrote:
I think that most people are in agreement that Zerg is OK at mid-diamond and below levels, and claim that there's only an imbalance in pro play.
But the stats don't even support this claim. If you look at the Top 100 players in each region, the difference is still < 2% for each race: http://sc2ranks.com/stats/region/diamond/1/100
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another one going on about the winratios without regarding the mm...
again.
you could just read a bit in the forum and save yourself the work of making a new thread. close plz...
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No really, everyone needs to keep making more of these posts. I just really don't see enough of them.
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That information is useless and yes you are missing quite a bit.
If anyone thinks that the information on sc2ranks in its current state can provide insight to imbalance is dense.
This has been discussed countless times i suggest you read some other threads before posting another one of the exact same thing.
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On August 17 2010 06:14 iEchoic wrote:
The numbers don't indicate any imbalances, and everyone who is impartial will recognize that, people still try to twist it. That's not to say the game is perfectly balanced, but numbers don't support a Z imbalance.
People will say that it's the same because the system tries to keep you at the same win%, but if that were the case with Zerg, there would be less representation in the diamond league than other leagues due to matchmaker pairing up with lower-skilled opponents. This isn't the case.
This is exactly what is happening. The diamond league is huge, and there is much variation of player skill within the diamond league. Plenty of zerg's can get into diamond league, because doing so is not particularly difficult. It could still be--and I firmly believe is--the case that the close win-rate percentages are strictly proof that Blizzard's AMM system is working as intended. Zerg players' win-rates are similar to those of other races because on the margin, zerg players in each division are being matched up with "less skilled" terrans, for example. All of this can happen within each division without statistically skewing the race representation stats too far one way or the other, and this would certainly enable (by a large margin) enough margin of error to cast a high degree of suspicion on the validity of conclusions drawn from win-rate percentage comparisons.
tl;dr Seriously, please stop trying to use this data as statistical evidence in support of either argument (Terran OP/Terran not OP), it is just plain not a valid source of data.
edit: typo
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![[image loading]](http://rts-sanctuary.com/images/racewin.jpg)
That is the win ratio summary for diamond league. I have the analysis cut by a slightly different level of detail on Sanctuary Stats. Actually shows a higher average ratio and probably not much more variance.
Don't forget that the only race info we have is favourite race so the matching of that to games played by actual race is not exact. If you play 99 games as zerg and 100 as protoss you will be shown as protoss for your favourite race
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On August 17 2010 06:14 iEchoic wrote:
[...] if that were the case with Zerg, there would be less representation in the diamond league than other leagues due to matchmaker pairing up with lower-skilled opponents. This isn't the case.
That doesn't really make sense to me. How can you just outright say, 'this is what we would see' when there are so many variables. Lets say it were the case, you can clearly see that there are a lot less Zs overall, perhaps the only ones who stick with Z are just much better at it. Or perhaps there would be more representation in the other leagues than diamond, its just that the majority of that 'representation' has now switched to a different race. Basically, the idea that win rates are relatively even because of the matchmaking system, I would say is true. This supports niether imbalance nor balance, it simply supports the fact that the matchmaking system works. If Z were imbalanced, there are other stats to look at, win rate wouldn't be the best thing to look at.
Simply look at the win rate of random. Ooooh look at that! Its the same as the other 3 races! The Random players must be just as good as players of the other 3 races!
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On August 17 2010 06:21 suckerfish wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2010 06:17 catamorphist wrote:
I think that most people are in agreement that Zerg is OK at mid-diamond and below levels, and claim that there's only an imbalance in pro play. But the stats don't even support this claim. If you look at the Top 100 players in each region, the difference is still < 2% for each race: http://sc2ranks.com/stats/region/diamond/1/100
This whole premise is flawed. What you're trying to say is that since zerg players win 50% of the time, there is no imbalance for zerg. What you don't take into account is the fact that Blizzard's matchmaking system is specifically designed so that you come out with a 50% win/loss record. Battle net will match you up against a player of equal skill so to speak, and reevaluate your skill based on whether you win or lose. With this mechanic you can have pro level zergs getting matched with plat/gold level terrans, simply because the zerg player is losing more to higher level terrans. Then when they beat the lower level players, it balances out their win/loss to 50%.
tl;dr- all this proves is that battlenet matchmaking actually works.
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EPT
