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I see a lot of discussion about which race is the easiest, and which is the hardest.
The truth is that it depends on the skill level. Since I have played all races at various skill levels, I have experience in this matter.
At very low levels, Protoss is the easiest. I experienced this myself when I started playing the game.
But, what many people don't understand, is that eventually, Zerg becomes the easiest. I believe that this is why Zerg users win most foreign tournaments. In the past, when foreigners were worse than they are now, Protoss would usually win. This is because foreigners were still at the level at which Protoss is the easiest.
This does not mean that Zerg champions deserve less respect - the blame is to be put on foreign Terran and Protoss users for not being good enough. With more skill, they would win. Also, Sziky, for example, was simply a superior player. His results against Koreans compared to other foreigners prove this. So the excuse of him using Zerg is not valid.
I have experienced the ease of Zerg, too. At around B / B+ (old system), I had an easier time playing ZvP and ZvT than I did TvZ and PvZ.
I speculate that at the level above the one on which Zerg is easier, Terran becomes the easiest. I say this because once you have the mechanics to out macro Zergs, it's easier for Terran to avoid messing up than it is for the Zerg to avoid making one mistake in the mid game and dying because of it.
As for the the level above that: who knows? Players are generally only at that level with one race, so they wouldn't know.
Maybe the difficulties are all the same at the top level.Maybe it's all about which race the map favours, and player skill, and which player's style is good against an other player's style.
What do you think?
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no love for random  , is best race!
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United States24483 Posts
It's been quite a long time since I discussed this topic or give it any thought. However, I have the same misgivings.
What does it mean for one race to be easier than another at a given skill level? Obviously, you are referring to ability to win 1:1 matches. However, let's say I'm pretty good with my T and P and not so good with my Z. I seem to be doing better with my P than my T in matches/events, so I want to say P is better than T at my skill level. However, how do I know that my skill level in P is not higher than my skill level in T to begin with? Perhaps, P isn't easier for me. I'm just better at it.
In other words, how do you compare two races when there's no objective way to say "the skill levels are the same, now let's see which has better performance." You could just see how the best T's compare to the best P's at the highest level of competition, but perhaps today's P's are better than today's T's for other reasons, confounding the experiment. You could see, for a given rank on ICCUP, what percentage of the players are P vs T, but that also could be due to multiple factors... not just which race is 'easier' to win with. You can try to objectively describe what it is about each race that makes it easier or harder to win, but that will become very subjective and arbitrary due to the complexity of playing BW.
I don't see how you can come to a conclusion that one race is easier. For me, protoss is easier than zerg because my skill level is much better with protoss than with zerg (I mean, I've practiced P much more). If I were to start practicing my zerg, I could keep improving until my success rate with zerg matched my success rate with protoss on ladder, but I can't think of any benchmark to tell me that my skill level in zerg now rivals my skill level in protoss...
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On March 07 2016 20:21 micronesia wrote:
It's been quite a long time since I discussed this topic or give it any thought. However, I have the same misgivings.
What does it mean for one race to be easier than another at a given skill level? Obviously, you are referring to ability to win 1:1 matches. However, let's say I'm pretty good with my T and P and not so good with my Z. I seem to be doing better with my P than my T in matches/events, so I want to say P is better than T at my skill level. However, how do I know that my skill level in P is not higher than my skill level in T to begin with? Perhaps, P isn't easier for me. I'm just better at it.
In other words, how do you compare two races when there's no objective way to say "the skill levels are the same, now let's see which has better performance." You could just see how the best T's compare to the best P's at the highest level of competition, but perhaps today's P's are better than today's T's for other reasons, confounding the experiment. You could see, for a given rank on ICCUP, what percentage of the players are P vs T, but that also could be due to multiple factors... not just which race is 'easier' to win with. You can try to objectively describe what it is about each race that makes it easier or harder to win, but that will become very subjective and arbitrary due to the complexity of playing BW.
I don't see how you can come to a conclusion that one race is easier. For me, protoss is easier than zerg because my skill level is much better with protoss than with zerg (I mean, I've practiced P much more). If I were to start practicing my zerg, I could keep improving until my success rate with zerg matched my success rate with protoss on ladder, but I can't think of any benchmark to tell me that my skill level in zerg now rivals my skill level in protoss...
You can tell by spending equal amounts of time and effort in two things, and comparing your results and experiences.
Then you talk to other people who did the same thing.
This is how we compare difficulty in all things. This is how we know that picking up cooking is easier than theoretical physics, although there are outliers - those who are gifted in physics but naturally terrible at cooking. This can happen with Brood War races, too, but it's rare.
It's a phenomenon in lots of games - a match up is imbalanced at low level, but balanced ( or imbalanced in an other direction ) at higher levels.
Take Sol Badguy in Guilty Gear, for example. He was "top tier" among noobs, but never at high level. There, he was just mid tier.
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Guess it's a thing of personal preference. At the start I played random only and thought it was something like
Z>P>T>Z
Z>P initially, because once you could block Zealots to some extent you had it easier by simply turtling with lurker/spore. On low level, mind you.
P>T needs no explanation, Terran units seem so fragile to newbs, whereas Protoss can waltz 1a2a3a the easiest on beginner levels
T>Z due to Marines eating through any kind of army.
with more experience most of the above shifted, because you learned how to compensate strategically. Overall, I'd say all races are difficult, it comes down where your problems lie. If you struggle with mechanics Terran is the hardest, Zerg and Protoss both don't need nearly as much attention on low levels. If you learn faster with strict guidelines, Terran strategy resources offer easier-to-see timings; at least for me, while the other two races are harder to figure out, both in mirror and against each other.
however, I thought Zerg was the natural race for those crying the loudest. Don't know why, but it just was.
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toss is the easiest when it's being played by a 300 ping peruvian proxy 2gating
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Pre ladder change it took me very little effort at all to get my Protoss to C rank playing standard styles. Zerg I never got past C- because I kept dieing to all these strange build orders...
Also I think low level PvZ is a really easy match-up. It's like TvZ but you don't have to click fast!
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United States1433 Posts
I'd say using the classic scientific method would have to be used. I feel an obstacle to overcome in the first place is how to ask if certain levels of skill favor certain races. Variables like opponents, playstyle might interfere. How do we define what skill level a person is at, the skill level where T>Z or P>T? If a Zerg has a higher skill level than a Terran who nears the T>Z benchmark, and they trade evenly in games, can we truly measure if Zerg has the higher skill level?I think the matchups are wildly different too so maybe they are far away from each other in approach like cooking and theoretical physics. I think you'd have to get a player who has never played brood war to apply this approach, otherwise, I'd say all of the years of playing a single race, all unrecorded data would impact the results. There's a lot of unquantifiable data I feel like to get some good, solid answers to somehow measure skill level.
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The only way you could get data on this is if you had like 10,000 people new to StarCraft start playing using highly regulated hours and couching, and assigned them their race randomly instead of letting them choose. And even then there's lots of factors that could throw things off significantly in your results.
Among players who use all three races, their skills are naturally going to favour the skills that spread across the most matchups. So they are not particularly good examples of unbiased results. ZvZ ZvP ZvT all require good muta control, muta control is transferable to wraith and corsair control and has some skills that transfer to other types of air units. Army control for Z and P and TvZ are all pretty similar. TvP requires a quite different way of thinking about controlling your army. TvT some things transfer from TvP, but not everything. This is not an exhaustive list of things, but it's a pretty good reason to see why players who are used to things that are similar in every other matchup, have trouble with TvP, including Terrans who are seduced by TvZ and don't play much else. So you might theorise that Terran should be hardest, but there's things that a dedicated Terran can transfer between the Terran matchups, and the different between TvP and TvZ is only a threshold you have to pass. But if you play all races, you may never pass that threshold because not enough skills are transferring to TvP that seem to help you more in your other matchups.
I feel the fairly even race distribution and the fairly even distribution of champions in the pro scene was always a good reason to believe that skill and game understanding are more important than perceived race imbalance. We remember a few more Terran champions than other races, but the other races still have lots of champs. For Protoss being the 'weakest' at pro level, our list of S-class protoss is pretty long. We were never short of strong foreigners from each of the three races when lots of foreigners were playing.
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On March 08 2016 03:19 Chef wrote:
The only way you could get data on this is if you had like 10,000 people new to StarCraft start playing using highly regulated hours and couching, and assigned them their race randomly instead of letting them choose. And even then there's lots of factors that could throw things off significantly in your results.
Among players who use all three races, their skills are naturally going to favour the skills that spread across the most matchups. So they are not particularly good examples of unbiased results. ZvZ ZvP ZvT all require good muta control, muta control is transferable to wraith and corsair control and has some skills that transfer to other types of air units. Army control for Z and P and TvZ are all pretty similar. TvP requires a quite different way of thinking about controlling your army. TvT some things transfer from TvP, but not everything. This is not an exhaustive list of things, but it's a pretty good reason to see why players who are used to things that are similar in every other matchup, have trouble with TvP, including Terrans who are seduced by TvZ and don't play much else. So you might theorise that Terran should be hardest, but there's things that a dedicated Terran can transfer between the Terran matchups, and the different between TvP and TvZ is only a threshold you have to pass. But if you play all races, you may never pass that threshold because not enough skills are transferring to TvP that seem to help you more in your other matchups.
I feel the fairly even race distribution and the fairly even distribution of champions in the pro scene was always a good reason to believe that skill and game understanding are more important than perceived race imbalance. We remember a few more Terran champions than other races, but the other races still have lots of champs. For Protoss being the 'weakest' at pro level, our list of S-class protoss is pretty long. We were never short of strong foreigners from each of the three races when lots of foreigners were playing.
protoss hits a hard wall right where nony was at the top of his career, once the other races start having perfect macro... it takes a very skilled player to make protoss work against a good zerg or terran
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On March 08 2016 03:46 Endymion wrote:Show nested quote +On March 08 2016 03:19 Chef wrote:
The only way you could get data on this is if you had like 10,000 people new to StarCraft start playing using highly regulated hours and couching, and assigned them their race randomly instead of letting them choose. And even then there's lots of factors that could throw things off significantly in your results.
Among players who use all three races, their skills are naturally going to favour the skills that spread across the most matchups. So they are not particularly good examples of unbiased results. ZvZ ZvP ZvT all require good muta control, muta control is transferable to wraith and corsair control and has some skills that transfer to other types of air units. Army control for Z and P and TvZ are all pretty similar. TvP requires a quite different way of thinking about controlling your army. TvT some things transfer from TvP, but not everything. This is not an exhaustive list of things, but it's a pretty good reason to see why players who are used to things that are similar in every other matchup, have trouble with TvP, including Terrans who are seduced by TvZ and don't play much else. So you might theorise that Terran should be hardest, but there's things that a dedicated Terran can transfer between the Terran matchups, and the different between TvP and TvZ is only a threshold you have to pass. But if you play all races, you may never pass that threshold because not enough skills are transferring to TvP that seem to help you more in your other matchups.
I feel the fairly even race distribution and the fairly even distribution of champions in the pro scene was always a good reason to believe that skill and game understanding are more important than perceived race imbalance. We remember a few more Terran champions than other races, but the other races still have lots of champs. For Protoss being the 'weakest' at pro level, our list of S-class protoss is pretty long. We were never short of strong foreigners from each of the three races when lots of foreigners were playing. protoss hits a hard wall right where nony was at the top of his career, once the other races start having perfect macro... it takes a very skilled player to make protoss work against a good zerg or terran
seems like a vague statement and hard to quantify, anyone as good as nony or better is a very skilled player
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On March 08 2016 05:01 Slayer91 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 08 2016 03:46 Endymion wrote:On March 08 2016 03:19 Chef wrote:
The only way you could get data on this is if you had like 10,000 people new to StarCraft start playing using highly regulated hours and couching, and assigned them their race randomly instead of letting them choose. And even then there's lots of factors that could throw things off significantly in your results.
Among players who use all three races, their skills are naturally going to favour the skills that spread across the most matchups. So they are not particularly good examples of unbiased results. ZvZ ZvP ZvT all require good muta control, muta control is transferable to wraith and corsair control and has some skills that transfer to other types of air units. Army control for Z and P and TvZ are all pretty similar. TvP requires a quite different way of thinking about controlling your army. TvT some things transfer from TvP, but not everything. This is not an exhaustive list of things, but it's a pretty good reason to see why players who are used to things that are similar in every other matchup, have trouble with TvP, including Terrans who are seduced by TvZ and don't play much else. So you might theorise that Terran should be hardest, but there's things that a dedicated Terran can transfer between the Terran matchups, and the different between TvP and TvZ is only a threshold you have to pass. But if you play all races, you may never pass that threshold because not enough skills are transferring to TvP that seem to help you more in your other matchups.
I feel the fairly even race distribution and the fairly even distribution of champions in the pro scene was always a good reason to believe that skill and game understanding are more important than perceived race imbalance. We remember a few more Terran champions than other races, but the other races still have lots of champs. For Protoss being the 'weakest' at pro level, our list of S-class protoss is pretty long. We were never short of strong foreigners from each of the three races when lots of foreigners were playing. protoss hits a hard wall right where nony was at the top of his career, once the other races start having perfect macro... it takes a very skilled player to make protoss work against a good zerg or terran seems like a vague statement and hard to quantify, anyone as good as nony or better is a very skilled player
im not saying he isn't a very strong player, i'm saying playing toss at and above that level is much harder than it is at lower levels, and possibly even harder than zerg/terran given the disadvantages the race faces
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do you have any quantifiable evidence or reasoning for that though?
at least voddy seems to have anecdotal evidence which is worth something as well as the large amount of foreign zergs
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On March 08 2016 06:04 Slayer91 wrote:
do you have any quantifiable evidence or reasoning for that though?
at least voddy seems to have anecdotal evidence which is worth something as well as the large amount of foreign zergs
nah, it's just the feeling i get playing on fish, i run into a lot more terrans and zergs than tosses and i believe that's the justification for it, where as i run into a lot more protosses per game if i play lower on the ladder or on iccup. i combine that with everyone saying that toss is underpowered at the pro level and i come to the conclusion that toss is super hard at high levels
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It seems to me that protoss has always been much less popular in korea, though, but maybe for that reason who knows.
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United States24483 Posts
On March 07 2016 20:38 vOdToasT wrote:Show nested quote +On March 07 2016 20:21 micronesia wrote:
It's been quite a long time since I discussed this topic or give it any thought. However, I have the same misgivings.
What does it mean for one race to be easier than another at a given skill level? Obviously, you are referring to ability to win 1:1 matches. However, let's say I'm pretty good with my T and P and not so good with my Z. I seem to be doing better with my P than my T in matches/events, so I want to say P is better than T at my skill level. However, how do I know that my skill level in P is not higher than my skill level in T to begin with? Perhaps, P isn't easier for me. I'm just better at it.
In other words, how do you compare two races when there's no objective way to say "the skill levels are the same, now let's see which has better performance." You could just see how the best T's compare to the best P's at the highest level of competition, but perhaps today's P's are better than today's T's for other reasons, confounding the experiment. You could see, for a given rank on ICCUP, what percentage of the players are P vs T, but that also could be due to multiple factors... not just which race is 'easier' to win with. You can try to objectively describe what it is about each race that makes it easier or harder to win, but that will become very subjective and arbitrary due to the complexity of playing BW.
I don't see how you can come to a conclusion that one race is easier. For me, protoss is easier than zerg because my skill level is much better with protoss than with zerg (I mean, I've practiced P much more). If I were to start practicing my zerg, I could keep improving until my success rate with zerg matched my success rate with protoss on ladder, but I can't think of any benchmark to tell me that my skill level in zerg now rivals my skill level in protoss... You can tell by spending equal amounts of time and effort in two things, and comparing your results and experiences. Then you talk to other people who did the same thing. This is how we compare difficulty in all things. This is how we know that picking up cooking is easier than theoretical physics, although there are outliers - those who are gifted in physics but naturally terrible at cooking. This can happen with Brood War races, too, but it's rare. It's a phenomenon in lots of games - a match up is imbalanced at low level, but balanced ( or imbalanced in an other direction ) at higher levels. Take Sol Badguy in Guilty Gear, for example. He was "top tier" among noobs, but never at high level. There, he was just mid tier. I don't think this is as easy to accomplish as you make it sound, but in theory you can set up a scenario where people train for certain amounts of time in given races and then see how they all perform against one another. It would be very hard to factor out every variable except for race, though. I don't think there has been any rigorous effort to this effect, even though every other player will claim they have firsthand experience.
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To take it one step further...can we really be sure that classic T>Z>P>T isn't just inherent to map balance, at least at top levels of play.
The fact that post 07' TvZ sits at 54%,PvT at 52%, and ZvP at 54% could in theory be a result of inherent features of map-making playing into that. How do we rule this out?
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On March 08 2016 12:43 L_Master wrote:
To take it one step further...can we really be sure that classic T>Z>P>T isn't just inherent to map balance, at least at top levels of play.
The fact that post 07' TvZ sits at 54%,PvT at 52%, and ZvP at 54% could in theory be a result of inherent features of map-making playing into that. How do we rule this out?
We know that balance is based on maps.
I can prove it logically.
Every match up has to be played on a map, and the map can favour either side.
So it can not be said that a match up is imbalanced in general. It has to be specified on which map it is imbalanced.
For example, PvZ is 50% on fighting spirit. It is protoss favoured on Blue Storm and Bloody Ridge, and Zerg favoured on Electric Circuit.
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On March 07 2016 18:13 vOdToasT wrote:
I see a lot of discussion about which race is the easiest, and which is the hardest.
The truth is that it depends on the skill level. Since I have played all races at various skill levels, I have experience in this matter.
At very low levels, Protoss is the easiest. I experienced this myself when I started playing the game.
But, what many people don't understand, is that eventually, Zerg becomes the easiest. I believe that this is why Zerg users win most foreign tournaments.
What do you think?
i agree.
i spend more time playing Terran than the other races. And yet, Zerg is my best race. I've just accepted that I'll not be as good with Terran.
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i thought protoss was weak against zerg then jangbi won i think 2 osl in a row and i was super impressed how he killed all zergs in his way. Its obviously really difficult but he made it work
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EPT
