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Brood War is one of the most balanced games ever created. In fact, it may be the most balanced competitive game ever created, an amazing feat given the fact that the three races of Brood War are about as different from each other as they could possibly be. Indeed, the game is very well-balanced, and it's very hard to tell which race is superior when just starting to play. Yet, although it is hard to admit it for many fans of the game, there is one race which is clearly superior to them all. Meet Brood War's favorite child: Terran.
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
In this post, I will give and explain my findings on this issue, and attempt to show that Terran has an upper hand in both general play, and especially in the creation of bonjwa players. I won't deny that I'm pretty biased on this subject, but I will try to avoid bias and justify my position through facts and numbers, not bias. It's as easy to say "tank imba, vulture imba" as it is to say "zealot imba, ultralisk imba" without any proof. In truth, I believe that no one unit makes Terran superior, but simply the presence of many options and outs in any given situation. However, let's consider facts rather than opinions. For those of you familiar with statistics, this should be pretty straightforward. For those of you who aren't, I'll explain as well as I can.
My analysis will be based off the aggregate scores of all pro games played from the start of 2002 until present day that are listed in the TLPD. A few notes: 1. There can be no complaints of a lucky season or an outlier player. The Six Dragons era is statistically insignificant. Swarm Season is statistically insignificant. Flash, Boxer, Oov, and Nada are also all statistically insignificant. Maps are also statistically insignificant as an aggregate. All these factors balance out into a value that would be very hard to refute. 2. Over ANY 3-4 year period, these numbers are about equal. Savior's innovations, Nal_rA's innovations, etc. are all insignificant over time because all the other races are, in the long term, able to compensate for these differences. These statistics are not a relic of a pre-Savior past. 3. 2002 is the logical starting point because it is after the release of patch 1.08, the last significant balance patch. It would make sense to start as early as possible, but not to evaluate a game with a different set of rules. 4. It would be neither viable nor useful to look at non-pro games. At any level other than pro, the balance is irrelevant because players simply aren't good enough. If you're not a pro, you pretty much lose only because the opponent played better. Balance is more significant at a higher level, in general (the same rule applies for chess, where white is imba). 5. "If terran is imba, why don't terrans win EVERYTHING?" Because terran is only slightly imbalanced. But as I will demonstrate, a little is enough. 6. It really doesn't matter whether the league victories are concentrated in a single player or spread around many because it's important to realize that if one player wins, then every other player cannot. It only makes sense that better>worse and will win more often than not. 7. Semifinalists and silver winners are completely irrelevant. There are dozens of mediocre and outright bad players who have made semifinals and even finals. Yet you'll be hard-pressed to justify that ANY of the starleague winners certainly didn't deserve to win. There are a few to argue, but even ones like July or Casy aren't even certainly unworthy. Too many non-winners who got close are, though.
Let's start by looking at the MSL and OSL winrates by race. MSL Terran: 12 Zerg: 10 Protoss: 4 Total: 26
OSL Terran: 14 Zerg: 10 Protoss: 9 Total: 33 There really isn't much difference between the MSL and the OSL that would affect this experiment, so we can merge the two and set the winrates in terms of percentages.
MSL+OSL Terran: 26/59 = 44.1% Zerg: 20/59 = 33.9% Protoss: 13/59 = 22% There's also no need to differentiate between Zerg and Protoss in this test, so we can simply make this in terms of Terran vs. non-Terran.
Terran: 26/59 = 44.1% Non-Terran: 33/59 = 55.9% And now, we're ready to conduct a test.
For anyone familiar with statistics, one helpful tool is to test a statistic. It involves an assumed, null, value for a statistic, and a test to see whether or not a statistic of a sample(of a population) obtained is likely to appear by chance if the null is correct. In this case, the sample is all leagues to date and the population is all leagues played and unplayed. Since we do not know the standard deviation(spread) of the population(because it is impossible to acquire in this situation), we will use a t-test with all leagues played as the sample.
Our hypotheses are: H0: μ=.33 (null hypothesis: the population mean is .33, or a fair 1/3 chance for Terran to win) Ha: μ>.33 (alternative hypothesis: the population mean is larger than .33, so Terran has a larger than even chance of league victory).
The easiest way to conduct this test is to create a table with the values. It would be long and pointless to list, but it consists of 26 1's to indicate 26 Terran league wins, and 33 0's to indicate Terran losses in leagues. So we run the test: n(number of sample points): 59 SE (standard error, t-test spread): .501 T value (test statistic measures distance from mean): 1.698 p value: .0475 or 4.75% Sample Mean: .441 or 44.1%(this was calculated earlier)
Now, most of these values are pretty inconsequential, and are only listed for the purpose of noting statistics. The important thing here is the p value, which is the chance that such a sample mean would appear in a population with a mean as stated in the null hypothesis. As a rule of thumb, if the p value is less than .05 (5%), there is pretty strong evidence against the null hypothesis and in favor of the alternative one. It's not so strong that it's beyond a shadow of a doubt, but this test shows that we have pretty good evidence that Terran does indeed have a higher than fair chance of MSL/OSL victory.
This begs the question: how much higher? Well, let's run a test to create a new model. To do this, we'll need a winrate for all matchups. I added up all the games from 2002 onward (patch 1.08), and here is the result: TvZ: 6549-5490 (54.40%) ZvP: 5162-4280 (54.67%) PvT: 4782-4317 (52.56%) For anyone involved in BW, this T>Z>P>T trend is not at all surprising. Nor should the ZvP>TvZ>PvT trend be unexpected. At a quick glance, it's obvious that these results are ever so slightly favorable for Terran. If we were to equally weigh the percentages of each matchup (with the mirror being 50%):
Terran: 54.40*(1/3) + 47.44*(1/3) + 50*(1/3) = 50.61% Zerg: 54.67*(1/3) + 45.6*(1/3) + 50*(1/3) = 50.09% Protoss: 52.56*(1/3) + 45.33*(1/3) + 50*(1/3) = 49.30% These are essentially the odds that a player faces in Proleague. So basically, a probable Terran is slightly more likely to win a given game than a probable Zerg or probably Protoss. However, by all means, even over a large period of time this isn't going to make results that are especially telling. Terran will have a higher winrate, but not by much. The imbalance truly comes out in the individual leagues. So let's look at a starleague.
Welcome to the Lightwip Hypothetical Starleague!
The Starleague proper consists of 36 players: 13 Terran, 13 Zerg, and 10 Protoss. Starleagues, unlike Proleague, are not race-balanced; the lower total winrate of Protoss actually hurts the chances of qualifying. If you look at every league in history, Protoss usually qualifies less than Terran and Zerg.
While I could average results from hundreds of simulations to find out the winrate, it would be too difficult to account for all factors and honestly not much more accurate. Therefore, the Lightwip HSL shall have a different set of rules: Victory is winning 16 of 20 games. This is pretty comparable to winning a Starleague proper, even if not exactly the same. By all means, it's a good proxy variable. Let's calculate the win percentages by race and player count (mirrors are again 50%): Terran: 54.40*(13/35) + 47.44*(10/35) + 50*(12/35) = 50.9% Zerg: 54.67*(10/35) + 45.6*(13/35) + 50*(12/35) = 49.7% Protoss: 52.56*(13/35) + 45.33*(13/35) + 50*(9/35) = 49.2% This becomes slightly more Terran-favored. By binomial distribution(a situation in which there is a win/lose with a known percentage for each, as here), the chance for a hypothetical player of each race to reach 16 is (really low because 16/20 is an insane record): Terran: .738% Zerg: .548% Protoss: .483%
Scaled, Terran: 41.7% Zerg: 31.0% Protoss: 27.3% For the most part, these statistics mirror actual SL results, reposted below.
Terran: 26/59 = 44.1% Zerg: 20/59 = 33.9% Protoss: 13/59 = 22% Zerg actually has a slightly higher winrate while Protoss has a smaller one, but predictions are not perfect. It's close enough, at any rate. We could conduct another t-test to see whether 44.1% is far from 41.7%, but I think it's obvious that the new model is a good enough fit for all three races.
Like any statistical analysis, this one is not perfect. I'll outline a few things that ought to be considered below. There are two things that should be considered: bias and confounding variables.
Let's start with bias. Quite simply, there is none. We're not using any data that could be skewed by any form of human tendencies because all these numbers are a fact.
Now as far as confounding variables, there actually is something to consider. The first is a simple problem: scaling up to 1. We did this to form our model above. This is not necessarily going to ruin anything, but admittedly it's not exactly 100% reliable. While it could generate meaningless data, I think it's not a problem. I could be wrong though, and the model is certainly imperfect.
The second is a bit more tricky: mirror matchups. Zerg and Protoss mirrors often devolve into a coinflip, which allows good players to be defeated by worse players. One consequence of this is that zerg and protoss titles are less concentrated in a few key players, but rather in a bunch of weaker ones. Terran, on the other hand, features numerous key players holding a good number of the titles. As I mentioned before, for one player to win, all others must lose(and the best is most likely to not lose), so simply chalking this up to skilled players is not enough. And on top of that, skilled players are more likely than unskilled players to win against all races, subject to the same conditions. So when a Terran key player advances from a TvT, he'll have more chance than any other Terran of winning his next game against Zerg or Protoss. Now, this problem would not cause our experiment to incorrectly conclude that Terran has an unfair advantage; on the contrary, if anything it would cause us to underestimate Terran imbalance. But it also brings up an interesting topic: bonjwas. It seems that it is indeed easier for Terran to make bonjwas, simply because not only do Terrans have an advantage inherent in winrates, but they also have a mirror matchup that favors stronger players over weaker players to an extent higher than a coinflip. This certainly does help to explain why Terran spawns bonjwas so readily while Zerg and especially Protoss are hard-pressed to get one out.
I'd like to hear your thoughts and criticisms. Perhaps my logic, analysis, or numbers are somehow wrong. Please, point this out.
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Good stuff. The general idea that Terrans are better rewarded for their skill is harder to see in non-professional games, but is absolutely true for the pros. Yea the 16/20 is perhaps a poor reflection of how starleagues are actually won, but seems okay based on the large data set. My main problem might be the typical "eye-test" complaint, as the reasons for people winning a starleague often have little to do with the basic premise of race-balance. But I will certainly accept that Terrans are more likely to be in a position of semi-finals/finals because of their racial "imbalance." It'd be tough to say that Bonjwas are created because of this though.
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There are several potential points to object your analysis on. I will name only a few of them.
Firstly, you are taking historical data from the beginning of Brood War. This is simply not fair. Pre-savior ZvT is in no resemblance to post-savior ZvT. The same can be said for mutalisk micro and stacking. Or the popularization of forge fast expansion builds against Zerg. These changes revolutionized a matchup that before this, was heavily favoured towards one race. These older changes add skew to the %s and distribution.
The second point I want to make, is that just because the best players have been Terran, does not mean that Terran is the best race. The players growing up idolize and want to be like BoxeR, like NaDa, like oov. This causes a heavier skew on the ladder towards these races. It also causes there to be very good coaching for those respected races, from some of these players (I'm looking at you, oov).
Finally, how much skew is there, really? Winning 16 in a row is ridiculous, and is not a fair judge of a players ability. A player with 70% across all matchups would not only be S class, they would be as good as Flash. This means a player can do WWLWWLWWLW, repeat, for their entire career, and always win Bo3s and have a great win rate in proleague. Why is it necessary to have such ridiculous streaks? I feel that you have some selection bias here, you are selecting a statistic that will of course heavily favour Terran, due to the volatility of PvP and ZvZ maches.
Overall, I think this is "see great Terran players, infer Terran bias, find a way to make statistics work to my conclusion." 1) Terran destroyed for a long time before players figured out different things, adds skew. 2) The %s we are talking about are very, very minute. Compare these to a game like WC3, and you will see what I mean (a couple of races come out clearly better). 3) Your criteria of large win streak is not the characteristic of a bonjwa. Someone with a consistent 70-75% winrate would simply completely dominate the game.
I will re-evaluate my #1 if you can prove the validity of this statement:
1. There can be no complaints of a lucky season or an outlier player. The Six Dragons era is statistically insignificant. Swarm Season is statistically insignificant. Flash, Boxer, Oov, and Nada are also all statistically insignificant.
Over ANY 3-4 year period, these numbers are about equal. Savior's innovations, Nal_rA's innovations, etc. are all insignificant over time because all the other races are, in the long term, able to compensate for these differences. These statistics are not a relic of a pre-Savior past.
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The percentage of wins each race has over each other here is within the realm of being statistically insignificant since groups of players can certainly skew that statistic. I think that the terran mirror match up is the most noteworthy reason for a bonjwa having an edge over his counterparts of other races.
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Truth.
Given all things equal, between three equally superlatively skilled Terran, Zerg, or Protoss, the Terran will have much strategy and specific units/abilities he can exploit to gain the advantage and win. Moreover, Terran allows for better recovery, defense, and adjustment in gameplay.
More than a decade of game statistics and "bonjwa" record testify to this. I suspect that non-terran progamers feel an evil childlike pleasure everytime they beat a Terran.
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While I agree that on the ~32k games you aggregated "anomalies" like Flash do not impact on the race statistics figures, you cannot keep this assumption at your next step, it's like 1. Flash, Bisu, NaDa incredible win rates do not impact on 32k games. Ok. 2. Let's keep this assumption when we only have 36 players and 20 games for each player. You can't keep this assumption at all.
When someone like Flash has a 70% win rate in any matchup with great bo3/5 skills, he is way more imbalanced than the 50.9% race advantage. Even if we suppose that at higher stages of Starleagues he will also face players who also have a higher win rate, the odd of Flash winning is still way more than 50%.
And since this is about statistics and bonjwas, it also happens that during their strongest domination era (by that I mean ignore NaDa winning an OSL in late 2006, etc) bonjwas all had a 70%+ winrate. Maybe only sAviOr didn't because he often dropped games during series.
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Winning 16/20 is indeed ridiculous. But the point isn't that that is expected of them. The point is to estimate relative probability of achieving this result, which puts Terran ahead by a sizeable margin. 12/20 or 14/20 would have similar results, but it's more apparent at 16/20. No single player is significant enough to influence the results. This analysis incorporates well over 25,000 games, and it doesn't even include mirrors. No player's career, and no 3-6 month period will make a sizeable difference in these results. As for the numbers themselves, it's simply that they do not fluctuate that much. There is a difference of at most 1% betwen eras, which is certainly not enough to reverse trends. An aggregate of the eras compensates for all new developments. Having Boxer as a hero hardly makes anyone better than having Savior or Nal_rA as a hero. Keep in mind, the analysis may not be perfect, but I fail to see how my methods would give a contrary-to-fact result.
The bonjwa point is that terrans have to be x better than their peers while P/Z have to be y, where x<y by enough to allow for quite a few more T bonjwas. If we were doing standard deviations, it would be 2.5 terran, 2.9 zerg, 3.4 protoss or something because 2.5 standard deviations above the probable terran is far enough to reach the bonjwa threshold.
On March 29 2012 12:18 1a2a3aPro wrote: Finally, how much skew is there, really? Winning 16 in a row is ridiculous, and is not a fair judge of a players ability. A player with 70% across all matchups would not only be S class, they would be as good as Flash. This means a player can do WWLWWLWWLW, repeat, for their entire career, and always win Bo3s and have a great win rate in proleague. Why is it necessary to have such ridiculous streaks? I feel that you have some selection bias here, you are selecting a statistic that will of course heavily favour Terran, due to the volatility of PvP and ZvZ maches.
If anything, this experiment severely understates the Terran balance advantage since all 3 mirrors are given the value of 50%.
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Ahhh. The dreaded Starcraft Statistics. This is like me hate eating a bitter melon and the only available donuts around are bitter melon flavored donuts.
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From a stats point of view ur reasoning with the 16/20 wins makes no sense. You can take the slightest difference in any 2 percentages, take them to some ridiculous power and then conclude that they're far apart...when they're not. Then you rescaled it out of 100%??! This is really disingenuous.
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On March 29 2012 12:55 L3gendary wrote: From a stats point of view ur reasoning with the 16/20 wins makes no sense. You can take the slightest difference in any 2 percentages, take them to some ridiculous power and then conclude that they're far apart...when they're not. Then you rescaled it out of 100%??! This is really disingenuous. You're right. Bonjwas are decided over the course of a single game, so taking a win rate over a large stretch of time is disingenuous. I should have scaled it out of a single game.
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I agree that the reduced luck factor in TvT contributes to more good terrans progressing and hindering the success of great players in other races. Similar to how PvP in sc2 can be detrimental to great players progressing.
The starleague figures are pretty interesting, alot of the low toss rate has to do with the historical difficulties toss has had with zerg making a 16/20 run extraordinarily difficult. Same with historical problems in ZvT. I feel the game and maps today are far more balanced than it was in Boxer/Nada's era. Extrapolating base race winrates over such a long period and so many different map pools to the chance of a race winning a starleague (when it's more player dependent) doesn't seem that reliable but i'm surprised how the numbers line up.
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What im saying is you cant take some percentages that are very close, raise it to some arbitrary power and make conclusions from it. Are the differences in percentages even statistically significant? Where did the 10 protosses come from? Because that's really the only reason terran has the higher percentage in ur scenario because PvT is its worst mu and there are fewer P so that automatically makes it terran favoured.
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On March 29 2012 12:58 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 12:55 L3gendary wrote: From a stats point of view ur reasoning with the 16/20 wins makes no sense. You can take the slightest difference in any 2 percentages, take them to some ridiculous power and then conclude that they're far apart...when they're not. Then you rescaled it out of 100%??! This is really disingenuous. You're right. Bonjwas are decided over the course of a single game, so taking a win rate over a large stretch of time is disingenuous. I should have scaled it out of a single game.
No but your methods are not correct statistically. Just conduct a simple p-test over the 32k games and you can see how insignificant the differences between TZP are.
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Honestly it's all Boxer's fault
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On March 29 2012 13:16 etrensce wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 12:58 Lightwip wrote:On March 29 2012 12:55 L3gendary wrote: From a stats point of view ur reasoning with the 16/20 wins makes no sense. You can take the slightest difference in any 2 percentages, take them to some ridiculous power and then conclude that they're far apart...when they're not. Then you rescaled it out of 100%??! This is really disingenuous. You're right. Bonjwas are decided over the course of a single game, so taking a win rate over a large stretch of time is disingenuous. I should have scaled it out of a single game. No but your methods are not correct statistically. Just conduct a simple p-test over the 32k games and you can see how insignificant the differences between TZP are. Unless I'm thinking of something else, the significance tests would be pointless since the values are parameters. 32k games = game population.
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16/20 wins for a Starleague seems kinda arbitrary. Wouldn't it be better to average the % games won out of games played for each Starleague winner on their starleague run, and use that %?
Your point about Terrans being more dominant becasue TvT is more skill based than ZvZ and PvP is quite interesting though, although Zergs and Protosses might find this offensive lol
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On March 29 2012 13:24 oldgregg wrote: 16/20 wins for a Starleague seems kinda arbitrary. Wouldn't it be better to average the % games won out of games played for each Starleague winner on their starleague run, and use that %?
Your point about Terrans being more dominant becasue TvT is more skill based than ZvZ and PvP is quite interesting though, although Zergs and Protosses might find this offensive lol 16/20 is arbitrary, but an accurate simulation is a coding nightmare. At the same time, I don't see how 16/20 would differ too much in results from a standard probable starleague.
I think it's universally accepted that PvP and especially ZvZ can be coinflips.
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honestly
if you had time to think hard about this and to write up this entire post
you have too much time on your hands...
go read a book kiss a girl play starcraft SOMETHING other than just trying to do math to say terran is imbalanced. "you shouldn't tell me what to do" okay, then heed them as suggestions... but seriously, you clearly stated that it is completely irrelevant outside of the pro scene. not one person on these forums is a pro, therefore you merely just told everyone a cool story bro.
User was warned for this post
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My thoughts: Marine's when stim DPS is ridiculous.. esp against zerg Seige tanks range of 12
How does a zerg counter seige tank/bio mid game before defliers. I think thats where zergs problem is.
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On March 29 2012 13:28 1004 wrote: honestly
if you had time to think hard about this and to write up this entire post
you have too much time on your hands...
go read a book kiss a girl play starcraft SOMETHING other than just trying to do math to say terran is imbalanced. "you shouldn't tell me what to do" okay, then heed them as suggestions... but seriously, you clearly stated that it is completely irrelevant outside of the pro scene. not one person on these forums is a pro, therefore you merely just told everyone a cool story bro.
At least he's contributing something, you on the other hand are not.
OT i still wanna know why there are only 10 P? I feel like im missing sometihn.
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Well, you know what we've always said. Terran is the hardest to master at the top, but if you do. You are a menace.
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If you are going to argue about balance then ideally you should eliminate any game where the loser lost because of his own poor play. Now obviously this is difficult to accurately judge and not possible to weed out perfectly. However I do think you need to account for changes throughout BW's history. For example, you are including TvZ games when Nada and iloveoov were rolling over zergs who didn't even know how to stack mutalisks or use defilers and ZvP games where Protoss players went 2 gate. These losses weren't because of imbalance but because of suboptimal strategies, and hence will skew the data resulting in a larger perceived TvZ and ZvP imbalance then what it actually is right now.
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writer, you cannot do that lol.
That would abolish everything. We have to include the good, the bad and the downright ugly. No one will argue about the shitty maps let alone the different eras of play. That's what makes it so much fun. ;o
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On your statistics: An observation I will make is that you only included 10 Protosses compared to 13/13 TZ, therefore you make T% a bit higher by reducing the amount of un favored matches he is playing by 2 and the P % a bit lower by reduing the favored matches he is playing by 2. My opinion: As I havent been followed BW for only recently (yes i regret), i think it is important that you consider the changes in playstyle over time. Pre-Savior, a lot terrans had an insane vZ record, and before Bisu, zerg was heavily favored against protoss. I think the switch in playstyle has balanced a little bit. Maybe Terran wasnt affected because there was not a heavily imbalanced matchup against them? ( I dont know)
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Cool thread, always fun to theorycraft on these sorts of discussions.
One of the pro players (I forget who) stated in an interview around six months ago, that when you have significant time to prepare for an individual match, being able to study a map, a player, a match-up, etc is MOST beneficial to Terran and LEAST beneficial to Protoss. I think it would be really cool to see what the statistical breakdown for win% looks like in individual leagues ro16 v ro8 vs ro4 vs ro2 looks like. Of course, the sample size is less significant here, but it might show an interesting dynamic! (in my own skewed/biased mind, I think TvZ finals might be like ~60%+ favoured T)
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On March 29 2012 13:39 Obelisco wrote: On your statistics: An observation I will make is that you only included 10 Protosses compared to 13/13 TZ, therefore you make T% a bit higher by reducing the amount of un favored matches he is playing by 2 and the P % a bit lower by reduing the favored matches he is playing by 2. My opinion: As I havent been followed BW for only recently (yes i regret), i think it is important that you consider the changes in playstyle over time. Pre-Savior, a lot terrans had an insane vZ record, and before Bisu, zerg was heavily favored against protoss. I think the switch in playstyle has balanced a little bit. Maybe Terran wasnt affected because there was not a heavily imbalanced matchup against them? ( I dont know) 1. That's the point. Protoss is actually less in most SL's, which further supports terran victory. 2. As an aggregate, changes in playstyles become irrelevant. Every innovation Bisu or Savior made is compensated for by another event, or just the general trend. It's similar to aggregate supplies in relation to inflation in macroeconomic theory.
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So much of this was already talked about in the other thread and largely ignored it seems.
1) Individual league performance post-Savior does not support this. Even with Flash at the helm, Terran is behind Zerg.
2) As has been pointed out numerous times, winning a boX is not the same as bo1 records. If player A wins against player B 2/3 of the time, then the chance that player A wins a bo3 against player B is 74%. Much, much higher.
3) Historical X-factors cannot be ignored. Pre-Boxer, Terran sucked. Post Boxer, many players were converted to Terran including the random player NaDa and the Zerg player Oov. Maybe they wouldn't have been as dominant with other races, but there's no denying the impact these players had on Terran and on Starcraft and its development. A player doesn't just produce a win rate... he influences other players!
4) If you browse this forum, a long time ago someone made a thread explaining why Z > P being the least balanced match up indicates Terran dominance. See here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=61932
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On March 29 2012 13:27 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 13:24 oldgregg wrote: 16/20 wins for a Starleague seems kinda arbitrary. Wouldn't it be better to average the % games won out of games played for each Starleague winner on their starleague run, and use that %?
Your point about Terrans being more dominant becasue TvT is more skill based than ZvZ and PvP is quite interesting though, although Zergs and Protosses might find this offensive lol 16/20 is arbitrary, but an accurate simulation is a coding nightmare. At the same time, I don't see how 16/20 would differ too much in results from a standard probable starleague. I think it's universally accepted that PvP and especially ZvZ can be coinflips.
Yep fair enough, average MSL winner played 15.5 games and won 12.1, which is 78%,roughly the same % as 16/20. For OSL the average winner played 15.96 games and won 11.76, which is 73%.
And yea by ELO peak and current ELO, TvT is higher than PvP and ZvZ so that kinda backs up that TvT is more skill based. What's interesting is that (at least for top 5), ZvZ ELO is higher than PvP ELO, so it would appear than PvP is more of a coinflip!
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It all comes down to the fact that terran has more ways to win and less ways to lose assuming equal skill at top level. Terran's aren't really subject to small mistakes like Protoss and Zerg are and that really makes all the difference.
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On March 29 2012 13:49 Mortality wrote:So much of this was already talked about in the other thread and largely ignored it seems. 1) Individual league performance post-Savior does not support this. Even with Flash at the helm, Terran is behind Zerg. 2) As has been pointed out numerous times, winning a boX is not the same as bo1 records. If player A wins against player B 2/3 of the time, then the chance that player A wins a bo3 against player B is 74%. Much, much higher. 3) Historical X-factors cannot be ignored. Pre-Boxer, Terran sucked. Post Boxer, many players were converted to Terran including the random player NaDa and the Zerg player Oov. Maybe they wouldn't have been as dominant with other races, but there's no denying the impact these players had on Terran and on Starcraft and its development. A player doesn't just produce a win rate... he influences other players! 4) If you browse this forum, a long time ago someone made a thread explaining why Z > P being the least balanced match up indicates Terran dominance. See here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=61932 1. Not by much. Post-Savior could honestly be considered an arbitrary cutoff point to justify cherry-picking, because it's not like there weren't other significant innovations in terran's favor as well throughout BW history. 2. True, but why is this relevant? It just stacks terran's advantage even more. 3. Pre-Boxer was pretty much pre-1.08. Terran was aided quite a bit by 1.08. Over time, Boxer's influence becomes less relevant. 4. Implicitly, my post addressed this issue. It further aids bonjwa-creation.
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On March 29 2012 13:47 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 13:39 Obelisco wrote: On your statistics: An observation I will make is that you only included 10 Protosses compared to 13/13 TZ, therefore you make T% a bit higher by reducing the amount of un favored matches he is playing by 2 and the P % a bit lower by reduing the favored matches he is playing by 2. My opinion: As I havent been followed BW for only recently (yes i regret), i think it is important that you consider the changes in playstyle over time. Pre-Savior, a lot terrans had an insane vZ record, and before Bisu, zerg was heavily favored against protoss. I think the switch in playstyle has balanced a little bit. Maybe Terran wasnt affected because there was not a heavily imbalanced matchup against them? ( I dont know) 1. That's the point. Protoss is actually less in most SL's, which further supports terran victory. 2. As an aggregate, changes in playstyles become irrelevant. Every innovation Bisu or Savior made is compensated for by another event, or just the general trend. It's similar to aggregate supplies in relation to inflation in macroeconomic theory.
1. The thing is that you are trying to prove that terran has a higher percentage by actually giving them a higher percentage from the beginning, i am just pointing that out.
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Doesn't help that maps completely fucking blew until like 2008.
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Essentially it's a really longwinded attempt to explain why bisu isn't a bonjwa
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On March 29 2012 14:27 Scarecrow wrote: Essentially it's a really longwinded attempt to explain why bisu isn't a bonjwa so fucking true :D
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I am a statistics major, and Lightwip, your statistics are suspect and flawed. Though I somewhat agree with your topic, I don't think your reasoning is very sound. Here's a long-winded explanation of why:
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1. Specific Starleague Sample Your stats are heavily based on your (13/13/10) race distribution of Terran/Zerg/Protoss.
How about a different example, say Incruit OSL 2008? Their race distribution (T/Z/P) was (13/10/17). Here are the new numbers:
Terran: 54.40*(10/35) + 47.44*(17/35) + 50*(12/35) = 55.73% Zerg: 54.67*(17/35) + 45.6*(13/35) + 50*(9/35) = 56.35% Protoss: 52.56*(13/35) + 45.33*(10/35) + 50*(16/35) = 55.33%
Also, I have a question here: how did you get your numbers? Because with a true binomial distribution P(X >= 16), you shouldn't get those values. Not necessary in my argument, but I don't understand your math, you should go and check, I've included what they should be in spoiler below.
+ Show Spoiler + Your values should be:
T: 0.007378994 (AKA .738%) Z: 0.005479762 (AKA .548%) P: 0.004825193 (AKA .483%)
Perhaps you forgot that you should not just do the binomial of P(X = 16), which I believe you did. For example, a StarLeague winner might have won all 20 of his matches. This doesn't have any effect on my argument, I'm just letting you know that you probably made a mistake here.
Anyway, the new probabilities for winning:
T: 0.02202714 Z: 0.02505878 P: 0.02024176
Scaled & Sorted (Highest to Lowest):
Zerg: 37.2% T: 32.7% P: 30.1%
Well what do we have here. Zerg comes out on top by nearly 5%. Not as shocking as your 13% T>Z, but I just wanted to show you how the sample set you use affects your result.
2. Questionable Abuse of Statistics
A questionable part is your system of scaling your binomial distributed results.
I believe is actually inappropriate given how .166%*13 + .118%*13 + .102%*13 = 5% of ANYONE winning an OSL lol. For your argument to be valid, this should equal 1. Scaling is dangerous: why?
I understand your want of scaling, but it's like saying an ant has a 20% better chance of killing an elephant than a gnat, which is abusing statistics. For the statistical test to be sound, the total value must equal to 1; scaling to 1, especially from such a low percentage, is sketch and often leads to untrue answers. Of course, I don't know if that's the case here simply based off the stats, but one thing is for sure; it's not enough to base a conclusion on. To be honest, all this statistical stuff gives us is a completely different conclusion, and that conclusion would be:
The winner of the starleague is likely the race that has a lot of its best matchup, and least of its worst matchup.
... No shit, right? Essentially I'm saying that your use of statistics here cannot be used to help your "Terran" argument.
3. Number in Races
Another important point is the number of people playing a race. If we use your statistics (I don't know how to look up the real numbers):
TvZ: 6549-5490 (54.40%) ZvP: 5162-4280 (54.67%) PvT: 4782-4317 (52.56%)
Zerg has played the most matches (~12000 TvZs & ~9400 ZvPs = ~21400 games), with Terran in second, and Protoss in third (in non-mirror matches). This is obviously lacking due to the mirror matches...
However, it is common knowledge in Korea that Zerg and Terran are the most popular races there. Do you see where I'm going? The conclusion we reached earlier was: The winner of the starleague is likely the race that has a lot of its best matchup, and least of its worst matchup.
The point is that there are simply more Zerg and Terran players than there are Protoss players. This has a lot of ramifications.
As before, your stats system shows that the winner of the SL is the race which has the most of its ideal matchup, and least of its worst matchup.
Therefore, Terran starts out with an already obvious advantage: the lack of Protoss + the popularity of Zergs. This, I believe, is the real driving reason of why Terrans have been so dominant over SCBW's history.
4. Your Valid Points
However, this isn't a post just to trash your points. You made several good and valid points. Namely, TvT and mirror matchups. This is very true and a very good reason why elite Z & P players get knocked out so early due to a measure of luck. Jaedong was most definitely an exception in the most volatile of MUs; however, TvT seems to be a more stable mirror, perhaps simply due to the length of the games (thus allowing more skill to matter in the game). To this point, I don't have any real qualms, and I agree that it must play a big factor in the establishment of "Bonjwas". Coupled with the conclusion in Part 3, I can see how Terrans have become so dominant.
5. Conclusion
According to my argument, this statement by you: "Because terran is only slightly imbalanced. But as i will demonstrate, a little is enough." is not proven by your statistics. All it has shown is that Terrans have better chances of winning SLs, but not that they are OP or imbalanced in any way.
However you raise the good point about the mirror matchups that could be interesting if studied closer; however, I really don't feel like doing that, and the argument you presented is definitely not enough to get Terran forever labeled as an "imba race".
-----------------------------------------
I hope you'll view this post objectively and not subjectively. Thanks! I'll edit for mistakes later, but I think this pretty much shows why your statistics are misleading, yet it leads to reasoning that agrees with your general conclusion.
edit: wow... why did I waste time writing this long thing lol? I definitely have other work to do. going to do that now.
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Ok probably not relevant and maybe no one cares but I just did some averages and for the top 10 peak and current ELO of ZvZ and PvP, ZvZ got higher scores for both, so PvP is more of a coinflip matchup!
ZvZ peak average (for top 10): 2223.9 PvP peak avg: 2194.5 ZvZ current avg : 2125.3 PvP current avg: 2109.8
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On March 29 2012 14:37 Keone wrote:I am a statistics major, and Lightwip, your statistics are suspect and flawed. Though I somewhat agree with your topic, I don't think your reasoning is very sound. Here's a long-winded explanation of why: --------------------------------------- 1. Specific Starleague SampleYour stats are heavily based on your (13/13/10) race distribution of Terran/Zerg/Protoss. How about a different example, say Incruit OSL 2008? Their race distribution (T/Z/P) was (13/10/17). Here are the new numbers: Terran: 54.40*(10/35) + 47.44*(17/35) + 50*(12/35) = 55.73% Zerg: 54.67*(17/35) + 45.6*(13/35) + 50*(9/35) = 56.35% Protoss: 52.56*(13/35) + 45.33*(10/35) + 50*(16/35) = 55.33% Also, I have a question here: how did you get your numbers? Because with a true binomial distribution P(X >= 16), you shouldn't get those values. Not necessary in my argument, but I don't understand your math, you should go and check, I've included what they should be in spoiler below. + Show Spoiler + Your values should be:
T: 0.007378994 (AKA .738%) Z: 0.005479762 (AKA .548%) P: 0.004825193 (AKA .483%)
Perhaps you forgot that you should not just do the binomial of P(X = 16), which I believe you did. For example, a StarLeague winner might have won all 20 of his matches. This doesn't have any effect on my argument, I'm just letting you know that you probably made a mistake here.
Anyway, the new probabilities for winning: T: 0.02202714 Z: 0.02505878 P: 0.02024176 Scaled & Sorted (Highest to Lowest): Zerg: 37.2%T: 32.7% P: 30.1% Well what do we have here. Zerg comes out on top by nearly 5%. Not as shocking as your 13% T>Z, but I just wanted to show you how the sample set you use affects your result. 2. Questionable Abuse of StatisticsA questionable part is your system of scaling your binomial distributed results. I believe is actually inappropriate given how .166%*13 + .118%*13 + .102%*13 = 5% of ANYONE winning an OSL lol. For your argument to be valid, this should equal 1. Scaling is dangerous: why? I understand your want of scaling, but it's like saying an ant has a 20% better chance of killing an elephant than a gnat, which is abusing statistics. For the statistical test to be sound, the total value must equal to 1; scaling to 1, especially from such a low percentage, is sketch and often leads to untrue answers. Of course, I don't know if that's the case here simply based off the stats, but one thing is for sure; it's not enough to base a conclusion on. To be honest, all this statistical stuff gives us is a completely different conclusion, and that conclusion would be: The winner of the starleague is likely the race that has a lot of its best matchup, and least of its worst matchup. ... No shit, right? Essentially I'm saying that your use of statistics here cannot be used to help your "Terran" argument. 3. Number in RacesAnother important point is the number of people playing a race. If we use your statistics (I don't know how to look up the real numbers): TvZ: 6549-5490 (54.40%) ZvP: 5162-4280 (54.67%) PvT: 4782-4317 (52.56%) Zerg has played the most matches (~12000 TvZs & ~9400 ZvPs = ~21400 games), with Terran in second, and Protoss in third (in non-mirror matches). This is obviously lacking due to the mirror matches... However, it is common knowledge in Korea that Zerg and Terran are the most popular races there. Do you see where I'm going? The conclusion we reached earlier was: The winner of the starleague is likely the race that has a lot of its best matchup, and least of its worst matchup. The point is that there are simply more Zerg and Terran players than there are Protoss players. This has a lot of ramifications. As before, your stats system shows that the winner of the SL is the race which has the most of its ideal matchup, and least of its worst matchup. Therefore, Terran starts out with an already obvious advantage: the lack of Protoss + the popularity of Zergs. This, I believe, is the real driving reason of why Terrans have been so dominant over SCBW's history. 4. Your Valid PointsHowever, this isn't a post just to trash your points. You made several good and valid points. Namely, TvT and mirror matchups. This is very true and a very good reason why elite Z & P players get knocked out so early due to a measure of luck. Jaedong was most definitely an exception in the most volatile of MUs; however, TvT seems to be a more stable mirror, perhaps simply due to the length of the games (thus allowing more skill to matter in the game). To this point, I don't have any real qualms, and I agree that it must play a big factor in the establishment of "Bonjwas". Coupled with the conclusion in Part 3, I can see how Terrans have become so dominant.----------------------------------------- I hope you'll view this post objectively and not subjectively. Thanks! I'll edit for mistakes later, but I think this pretty much shows why your statistics are misleading, yet it leads to reasoning that agrees with your general conclusion. If you could add this to your OP in spoiler tags, people can read both sides to the statistics part; but of course that's up to you =) Of course they aren't perfect. I made this in about 1-2 hours, so I could have made a mistake. 1. generally, P are not as highly represented throughout the SLs. Incruit is pretty much one of the few counter-examples. 2. A 1 - binomcdf(n,p,x). Actually I made a mistake here(16 instead of 15 for x), but that doesn't change the results much. T: 41.7% Z: 31.0% P: 27.3% That doesn't change my point, but thanks. I didn't put enough time into this to re-check my math. I understand I'm doing bad practice here, but it doesn't change the result. The alternative would be to run a few thousand samples, which would be hard given how much effort coding that would take. Also, while it is bad maths, it happens to be pretty consistent with actual titles. T>Z>>P. 3. All of these other factors are true in the pro-scene, and they are further meant to prove my point about bonjwas. Yet even before those, terran has a slight advantage. 4. There's a pretty good spread of races played by pros. Z>T>P but they're all in the 300's, according to TLPD. 5. Your Incruit counterexample actually explains the random Z wins pretty well, actually. While a normal SL favors terran, a situation can heavily influence the statistics, suddenly favoring Z for that SL. However, that does not contradict the general trend.
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4. It would be neither viable nor useful to look at non-pro games. At any level other than pro, the balance is irrelevant because players simply aren't good enough. If you're not a pro, you pretty much lose only because the opponent played better. Balance is more significant at a higher level, in general (the same rule applies for chess, where white is imba).
Could you please develop this point a bit further as it seems quite compact. Especially the second and third sentences could use more thorough analysis. Is the pros a homogeneous group and if not how is that taken into consideration, To what degree does macro and strategy constitute the wins within and below the pro scene and how is a good player defined?
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On March 29 2012 15:07 archonOOid wrote:Show nested quote +4. It would be neither viable nor useful to look at non-pro games. At any level other than pro, the balance is irrelevant because players simply aren't good enough. If you're not a pro, you pretty much lose only because the opponent played better. Balance is more significant at a higher level, in general (the same rule applies for chess, where white is imba).
Could you please develop this point a bit further as it seems quite compact. Especially the second and third sentences could use more thorough analysis. Is the pros a homogeneous group and if not how is that taken into consideration, To what degree does macro and strategy constitute the wins within and below the pro scene and how is a good player defined? A pro is good enough for balance to actually matter. At an Iccup level, a C player will beat a D player with or without imbalance. At that level, play is far, far more important than balance.
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hahaha Lightwip
+ Show Spoiler +but props for putting in the effort to back up your theories. Now I'm gonna go read it
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On March 29 2012 14:56 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 14:37 Keone wrote:I am a statistics major, and Lightwip, your statistics are suspect and flawed. Though I somewhat agree with your topic, I don't think your reasoning is very sound. Here's a long-winded explanation of why: --------------------------------------- 1. Specific Starleague SampleYour stats are heavily based on your (13/13/10) race distribution of Terran/Zerg/Protoss. How about a different example, say Incruit OSL 2008? Their race distribution (T/Z/P) was (13/10/17). Here are the new numbers: Terran: 54.40*(10/35) + 47.44*(17/35) + 50*(12/35) = 55.73% Zerg: 54.67*(17/35) + 45.6*(13/35) + 50*(9/35) = 56.35% Protoss: 52.56*(13/35) + 45.33*(10/35) + 50*(16/35) = 55.33% Also, I have a question here: how did you get your numbers? Because with a true binomial distribution P(X >= 16), you shouldn't get those values. Not necessary in my argument, but I don't understand your math, you should go and check, I've included what they should be in spoiler below. + Show Spoiler + Your values should be:
T: 0.007378994 (AKA .738%) Z: 0.005479762 (AKA .548%) P: 0.004825193 (AKA .483%)
Perhaps you forgot that you should not just do the binomial of P(X = 16), which I believe you did. For example, a StarLeague winner might have won all 20 of his matches. This doesn't have any effect on my argument, I'm just letting you know that you probably made a mistake here.
Anyway, the new probabilities for winning: T: 0.02202714 Z: 0.02505878 P: 0.02024176 Scaled & Sorted (Highest to Lowest): Zerg: 37.2%T: 32.7% P: 30.1% Well what do we have here. Zerg comes out on top by nearly 5%. Not as shocking as your 13% T>Z, but I just wanted to show you how the sample set you use affects your result. 2. Questionable Abuse of StatisticsA questionable part is your system of scaling your binomial distributed results. I believe is actually inappropriate given how .166%*13 + .118%*13 + .102%*13 = 5% of ANYONE winning an OSL lol. For your argument to be valid, this should equal 1. Scaling is dangerous: why? I understand your want of scaling, but it's like saying an ant has a 20% better chance of killing an elephant than a gnat, which is abusing statistics. For the statistical test to be sound, the total value must equal to 1; scaling to 1, especially from such a low percentage, is sketch and often leads to untrue answers. Of course, I don't know if that's the case here simply based off the stats, but one thing is for sure; it's not enough to base a conclusion on. To be honest, all this statistical stuff gives us is a completely different conclusion, and that conclusion would be: The winner of the starleague is likely the race that has a lot of its best matchup, and least of its worst matchup. ... No shit, right? Essentially I'm saying that your use of statistics here cannot be used to help your "Terran" argument. 3. Number in RacesAnother important point is the number of people playing a race. If we use your statistics (I don't know how to look up the real numbers): TvZ: 6549-5490 (54.40%) ZvP: 5162-4280 (54.67%) PvT: 4782-4317 (52.56%) Zerg has played the most matches (~12000 TvZs & ~9400 ZvPs = ~21400 games), with Terran in second, and Protoss in third (in non-mirror matches). This is obviously lacking due to the mirror matches... However, it is common knowledge in Korea that Zerg and Terran are the most popular races there. Do you see where I'm going? The conclusion we reached earlier was: The winner of the starleague is likely the race that has a lot of its best matchup, and least of its worst matchup. The point is that there are simply more Zerg and Terran players than there are Protoss players. This has a lot of ramifications. As before, your stats system shows that the winner of the SL is the race which has the most of its ideal matchup, and least of its worst matchup. Therefore, Terran starts out with an already obvious advantage: the lack of Protoss + the popularity of Zergs. This, I believe, is the real driving reason of why Terrans have been so dominant over SCBW's history. 4. Your Valid PointsHowever, this isn't a post just to trash your points. You made several good and valid points. Namely, TvT and mirror matchups. This is very true and a very good reason why elite Z & P players get knocked out so early due to a measure of luck. Jaedong was most definitely an exception in the most volatile of MUs; however, TvT seems to be a more stable mirror, perhaps simply due to the length of the games (thus allowing more skill to matter in the game). To this point, I don't have any real qualms, and I agree that it must play a big factor in the establishment of "Bonjwas". Coupled with the conclusion in Part 3, I can see how Terrans have become so dominant.----------------------------------------- I hope you'll view this post objectively and not subjectively. Thanks! I'll edit for mistakes later, but I think this pretty much shows why your statistics are misleading, yet it leads to reasoning that agrees with your general conclusion. If you could add this to your OP in spoiler tags, people can read both sides to the statistics part; but of course that's up to you =) Of course they aren't perfect. I made this in about 1-2 hours, so I could have made a mistake. 1. generally, P are not as highly represented throughout the SLs. Incruit is pretty much one of the few counter-examples. 2. A 1 - binomcdf(n,p,x). Actually I made a mistake here(16 instead of 15 for x), but that doesn't change the results much. T: 41.7% Z: 31.0% P: 27.3% That doesn't change my point, but thanks. I didn't put enough time into this to re-check my math. I understand I'm doing bad practice here, but it doesn't change the result. The alternative would be to run a few thousand samples, which would be hard given how much effort coding that would take. Also, while it is bad maths, it happens to be pretty consistent with actual titles. T>Z>>P. 3. All of these other factors are true in the pro-scene, and they are further meant to prove my point about bonjwas. Yet even before those, terran has a slight advantage.4. There's a pretty good spread of races played by pros. Z>T>P but they're all in the 300's, according to TLPD. 5. Your Incruit counterexample actually explains the random Z wins pretty well, actually. While a normal SL favors terran, a situation can heavily influence the statistics, suddenly favoring Z for that SL. However, that does not contradict the general trend. ^ That bolded part is what I'm saying isn't proven in your argument. But I could easily believe that.
And I think you've missed the point of my post. I'm not picking on your mistakes. I'm saying your approach is impossible because the simple fact that there are more Zergs & Terrans with fewer Toss makes Terran's situation always more favorable, so if Terran is indeed imba, you can't use those numbers because they have a big advantage already, so your statistical approach doesn't show anything imba about Terran, and instead proves that your argument does not prove imba-ness.
As for the titles; my entire argument is in support of that. Yet it's interesting, doesn't it? How did Zergs get so many titles/runner-ups despite the obvious lack of protoss? Another topic worth looking into... but that I won't look into lol.
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Man. I was reading your post, really getting into it... and then it was over
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On March 29 2012 15:17 Keone wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 14:56 Lightwip wrote:On March 29 2012 14:37 Keone wrote:I am a statistics major, and Lightwip, your statistics are suspect and flawed. Though I somewhat agree with your topic, I don't think your reasoning is very sound. Here's a long-winded explanation of why: --------------------------------------- 1. Specific Starleague SampleYour stats are heavily based on your (13/13/10) race distribution of Terran/Zerg/Protoss. How about a different example, say Incruit OSL 2008? Their race distribution (T/Z/P) was (13/10/17). Here are the new numbers: Terran: 54.40*(10/35) + 47.44*(17/35) + 50*(12/35) = 55.73% Zerg: 54.67*(17/35) + 45.6*(13/35) + 50*(9/35) = 56.35% Protoss: 52.56*(13/35) + 45.33*(10/35) + 50*(16/35) = 55.33% Also, I have a question here: how did you get your numbers? Because with a true binomial distribution P(X >= 16), you shouldn't get those values. Not necessary in my argument, but I don't understand your math, you should go and check, I've included what they should be in spoiler below. + Show Spoiler + Your values should be:
T: 0.007378994 (AKA .738%) Z: 0.005479762 (AKA .548%) P: 0.004825193 (AKA .483%)
Perhaps you forgot that you should not just do the binomial of P(X = 16), which I believe you did. For example, a StarLeague winner might have won all 20 of his matches. This doesn't have any effect on my argument, I'm just letting you know that you probably made a mistake here.
Anyway, the new probabilities for winning: T: 0.02202714 Z: 0.02505878 P: 0.02024176 Scaled & Sorted (Highest to Lowest): Zerg: 37.2%T: 32.7% P: 30.1% Well what do we have here. Zerg comes out on top by nearly 5%. Not as shocking as your 13% T>Z, but I just wanted to show you how the sample set you use affects your result. 2. Questionable Abuse of StatisticsA questionable part is your system of scaling your binomial distributed results. I believe is actually inappropriate given how .166%*13 + .118%*13 + .102%*13 = 5% of ANYONE winning an OSL lol. For your argument to be valid, this should equal 1. Scaling is dangerous: why? I understand your want of scaling, but it's like saying an ant has a 20% better chance of killing an elephant than a gnat, which is abusing statistics. For the statistical test to be sound, the total value must equal to 1; scaling to 1, especially from such a low percentage, is sketch and often leads to untrue answers. Of course, I don't know if that's the case here simply based off the stats, but one thing is for sure; it's not enough to base a conclusion on. To be honest, all this statistical stuff gives us is a completely different conclusion, and that conclusion would be: The winner of the starleague is likely the race that has a lot of its best matchup, and least of its worst matchup. ... No shit, right? Essentially I'm saying that your use of statistics here cannot be used to help your "Terran" argument. 3. Number in RacesAnother important point is the number of people playing a race. If we use your statistics (I don't know how to look up the real numbers): TvZ: 6549-5490 (54.40%) ZvP: 5162-4280 (54.67%) PvT: 4782-4317 (52.56%) Zerg has played the most matches (~12000 TvZs & ~9400 ZvPs = ~21400 games), with Terran in second, and Protoss in third (in non-mirror matches). This is obviously lacking due to the mirror matches... However, it is common knowledge in Korea that Zerg and Terran are the most popular races there. Do you see where I'm going? The conclusion we reached earlier was: The winner of the starleague is likely the race that has a lot of its best matchup, and least of its worst matchup. The point is that there are simply more Zerg and Terran players than there are Protoss players. This has a lot of ramifications. As before, your stats system shows that the winner of the SL is the race which has the most of its ideal matchup, and least of its worst matchup. Therefore, Terran starts out with an already obvious advantage: the lack of Protoss + the popularity of Zergs. This, I believe, is the real driving reason of why Terrans have been so dominant over SCBW's history. 4. Your Valid PointsHowever, this isn't a post just to trash your points. You made several good and valid points. Namely, TvT and mirror matchups. This is very true and a very good reason why elite Z & P players get knocked out so early due to a measure of luck. Jaedong was most definitely an exception in the most volatile of MUs; however, TvT seems to be a more stable mirror, perhaps simply due to the length of the games (thus allowing more skill to matter in the game). To this point, I don't have any real qualms, and I agree that it must play a big factor in the establishment of "Bonjwas". Coupled with the conclusion in Part 3, I can see how Terrans have become so dominant.----------------------------------------- I hope you'll view this post objectively and not subjectively. Thanks! I'll edit for mistakes later, but I think this pretty much shows why your statistics are misleading, yet it leads to reasoning that agrees with your general conclusion. If you could add this to your OP in spoiler tags, people can read both sides to the statistics part; but of course that's up to you =) Of course they aren't perfect. I made this in about 1-2 hours, so I could have made a mistake. 1. generally, P are not as highly represented throughout the SLs. Incruit is pretty much one of the few counter-examples. 2. A 1 - binomcdf(n,p,x). Actually I made a mistake here(16 instead of 15 for x), but that doesn't change the results much. T: 41.7% Z: 31.0% P: 27.3% That doesn't change my point, but thanks. I didn't put enough time into this to re-check my math. I understand I'm doing bad practice here, but it doesn't change the result. The alternative would be to run a few thousand samples, which would be hard given how much effort coding that would take. Also, while it is bad maths, it happens to be pretty consistent with actual titles. T>Z>>P. 3. All of these other factors are true in the pro-scene, and they are further meant to prove my point about bonjwas. Yet even before those, terran has a slight advantage.4. There's a pretty good spread of races played by pros. Z>T>P but they're all in the 300's, according to TLPD. 5. Your Incruit counterexample actually explains the random Z wins pretty well, actually. While a normal SL favors terran, a situation can heavily influence the statistics, suddenly favoring Z for that SL. However, that does not contradict the general trend. ^ That bolded part is what I'm saying isn't proven in your argument. But I could easily believe that. And I think you've missed the point of my post. I'm not picking on your mistakes. I'm saying your approach is impossible because the simple fact that there are more Zergs & Terrans with fewer Toss makes Terran's situation always more favorable, so if Terran is indeed imba, you can't use those numbers because they have a big advantage already, so your statistical approach doesn't show anything imba about Terran, and instead proves that your argument does not prove imba-ness. I think the parameters themselves are proof of it, really. ~1% isn't large, but I'd say it's pretty statistically significant. In a fairly weighted contest, the hypothetical terran is the best. But, to be fair, by not all that much. The slight imbalance really adds up with the circumstances of SL's and the mirror to make more bonjwas. As for runner-ups: meh. Too many runner-ups are fluke players. There are very few fluke wins, and I'd say July is the only really important one. There's more than one fluke runner-up. I haven't seen any reason to believe that less P in the scene total has any measurable effect on their performance. It's mostly that they have a harder time qualifying. The P-less situation is simply further in T's favor. It alone doesn't make T the best.
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I haven't thought this through very deeply, but I'm afraid it might be a bit difficult to attribute small differences to game balance, as external factors may provide a similar result. General player population (more terran players than protoss players), for example, can cause the difference in winrates I'd think. Elimination type tournaments can cause some distortions as well (I think that has traditionally been the format?).
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Seems like we need a better proof of the most statistically likely breakdown of a SL's participation numbers by race given its importance to the other results. A simple average of the SL's to date maybe?
It might also be interesting to see the correlation between terran players' proficiency in other matchups and their win-rate in TvT.
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On March 29 2012 13:49 Mortality wrote: 2) As has been pointed out numerous times, winning a boX is not the same as bo1 records. If player A wins against player B 2/3 of the time, then the chance that player A wins a bo3 against player B is 74%. Much, much higher.
How'd you calculate that? If A has 2/3 win ratio vs B, doesn't A have a 89% chance (8/9) to win a bo3? (This would be either 2-0 or 2-1, it doesn't change the odds)
Chance of B to win is 1/3, and B has to win 2 games to win the bo3, so (1/3)^2 is 1/9.
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On March 29 2012 15:44 Demonhunter04 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 13:49 Mortality wrote: 2) As has been pointed out numerous times, winning a boX is not the same as bo1 records. If player A wins against player B 2/3 of the time, then the chance that player A wins a bo3 against player B is 74%. Much, much higher.
How'd you calculate that? If A has 2/3 win ratio vs B, doesn't A have a 89% chance (8/9) to win a bo3? (This would be either 2-0 or 2-1, it doesn't change the odds) Chance of B to win is 1/3, and B has to win 2 games to win the bo3, so (1/3)^2 is 1/9. Mortality is right. It's a binomial distribution scenario. Given 2/3 winrate, you have a 74.1% chance of not getting less than 2 wins.
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On March 29 2012 15:44 Demonhunter04 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 13:49 Mortality wrote: 2) As has been pointed out numerous times, winning a boX is not the same as bo1 records. If player A wins against player B 2/3 of the time, then the chance that player A wins a bo3 against player B is 74%. Much, much higher.
How'd you calculate that? If A has 2/3 win ratio vs B, doesn't A have a 89% chance (8/9) to win a bo3? (This would be either 2-0 or 2-1, it doesn't change the odds) Chance of B to win is 1/3, and B has to win 2 games to win the bo3, so (1/3)^2 is 1/9.
But B can win 2-0 or 2-1, so B's chance is > 1/9
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Your mirror matchup explanation for why there are more terran bonjwas than zerg/protoss bonjwas is legitimate for Jaedong, but not Bisu. Whereas Jaedong would have at least 2 more OSL/MSL wins if ZvZ were skill based like TvT, almost all of Bisu's eliminations were at the hands non protoss. Ever since Bisu came to prominence in 2007 he has been eliminated by a protoss only 5 times. 3 of those times were by Stork, a comparably talented player. Thus, only twice has Bisu been eliminated by inferior players due to bad luck, and that's assuming he actually was unlucky and not just having a bad day.
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Very interesting post, i had never thought of that. Even tho i don't trust those statistics too much, you do raise a good point : in mirror matchups, the best player comes out on top more often in TvT than ZvZ or PvP, which " filters " the lesser players. While a good Zerg or Protoss player will can more easily drop games to a lesser player, the better player is more likely to win the game in a terran mirror. This theory can be applied to everyone, not only the very best players of each race.
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hooray, another opportunity for me to link to this :<
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tanks man. seriously if you think about it, the tank is arguably what makes the terran so menacing and impenetrable. yeah sure dark swarm is really OP too! But it is much more difficult to use, it is tech 3 and it is a spellcaster with no auto attack.
every unit in this game is vital, but anyone who has played BW fears the tank. whether you are P, T or Z.
The tank is holy fking sweet by itself, but in the hands of someone like Flash, you will surely shed much blood or blue goo trying to kill one. He will complement the weakness of the mighty tank with a defense of vultures, mines and goliaths. He will have them on high ground, he will kite, he will never leave a tank out of supporting range of other tanks. The tank puts pressure on the enemy and forces you to kill it or lose your expo. But you better have a beautiful counter ready to get past the bunker and minefield that awaits you ahead.
come on you know u guys all have nightmares of getting terran steeled by flash. scariest army in the game..and it aint cuz of the goliaths.
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United Kingdom1658 Posts
On March 29 2012 13:28 1004 wrote: honestly
if you had time to think hard about this and to write up this entire post
you have too much time on your hands...
go read a book kiss a girl play starcraft SOMETHING other than just trying to do math to say terran is imbalanced. "you shouldn't tell me what to do" okay, then heed them as suggestions... but seriously, you clearly stated that it is completely irrelevant outside of the pro scene. not one person on these forums is a pro, therefore you merely just told everyone a cool story bro.
User was warned for this post It's called a theory, and discussion, which is interesting to many people. Don't see any value in intelligent thinking+discussion? You won't make it very far in life.
OP- I'm not educated enough in statistics etc to have any meaningful input on your methods, but the responses of others will interest me.
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Keone did an excellent job describing a few of the fallacies of the statistics (that are nonetheless interesting and somewhat fair, I'm shocked Lightwip, shocked).
The one thing I think you are missing though is map balance. The thing is BW is a horribly unbalanced game at its core to take a clear example from the release:
Blood Bath
Essentially any of the original blizzard maps would result in horrible imbalances and 90+% win rates at the pro level. Just going back a few years and using maps that haven't been made in response to new strategies such as enabling Forge expand, an easily blockable choke, or bad mineral placement for muta harass would completely throw the current balance in tatters.
So What is essentially happening is that map makers are trying to use map features to correct the slight imbalances that exist, sometimes successfully; Fighting Spirit and sometimes unsuccessfully; Central Plains
Any map can be constructed to be favourable for any race and I think any imbalances can be discovered there.
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On March 29 2012 12:18 1a2a3aPro wrote: Finally, how much skew is there, really? Winning 16 in a row is ridiculous, and is not a fair judge of a players ability. A player with 70% across all matchups would not only be S class, they would be as good as Flash. This means a player can do WWLWWLWWLW, repeat, for their entire career, and always win Bo3s and have a great win rate in proleague. Why is it necessary to have such ridiculous streaks? I feel that you have some selection bias here, you are selecting a statistic that will of course heavily favour Terran, due to the volatility of PvP and ZvZ maches.
Sorry, but from mathematical point of view, if you have winning chance 70%, it is extremely likely (if you play enough games) that you will have a long winning streak (and pretty short lose streak). I am too lazy to calculate it now .
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Why do you use dropships to get to that cliff when there is a ramp next by?
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I like the part about the mirror matches.
Begone, Terran!
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On March 29 2012 18:15 zlosynus wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 12:18 1a2a3aPro wrote: Finally, how much skew is there, really? Winning 16 in a row is ridiculous, and is not a fair judge of a players ability. A player with 70% across all matchups would not only be S class, they would be as good as Flash. This means a player can do WWLWWLWWLW, repeat, for their entire career, and always win Bo3s and have a great win rate in proleague. Why is it necessary to have such ridiculous streaks? I feel that you have some selection bias here, you are selecting a statistic that will of course heavily favour Terran, due to the volatility of PvP and ZvZ maches.
Sorry, but from mathematical point of view, if you have winning chance 70%, it is extremely likely (if you play enough games) that you will have a long winning streak (and pretty short lose streak). I am too lazy to calculate it now . Even with 70% winning chance, longer streaks with no loss are not too likely. The probability to win two games in a row is just 50%, to win three games in a row is roughly 1/3. With 50% winning chance it's only 1/8, so 70% winning ratio gives you longer streaks but they are still probably not too long.
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On March 29 2012 13:56 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 13:49 Mortality wrote:So much of this was already talked about in the other thread and largely ignored it seems. 1) Individual league performance post-Savior does not support this. Even with Flash at the helm, Terran is behind Zerg. 2) As has been pointed out numerous times, winning a boX is not the same as bo1 records. If player A wins against player B 2/3 of the time, then the chance that player A wins a bo3 against player B is 74%. Much, much higher. 3) Historical X-factors cannot be ignored. Pre-Boxer, Terran sucked. Post Boxer, many players were converted to Terran including the random player NaDa and the Zerg player Oov. Maybe they wouldn't have been as dominant with other races, but there's no denying the impact these players had on Terran and on Starcraft and its development. A player doesn't just produce a win rate... he influences other players! 4) If you browse this forum, a long time ago someone made a thread explaining why Z > P being the least balanced match up indicates Terran dominance. See here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=61932 1. Not by much. Post-Savior could honestly be considered an arbitrary cutoff point to justify cherry-picking, because it's not like there weren't other significant innovations in terran's favor as well throughout BW history. 2. True, but why is this relevant? It just stacks terran's advantage even more. 3. Pre-Boxer was pretty much pre-1.08. Terran was aided quite a bit by 1.08. Over time, Boxer's influence becomes less relevant. 4. Implicitly, my post addressed this issue. It further aids bonjwa-creation.
1. Certainly Savior is far from the only innovator. Nevertheless, this change towards Zerg favor can't really be ignored. I'd be more interested in the stats of "who eliminates who" in post-Savior era Starcraft.
2. Because your methodology assumes that the chance player A beats player B is always the average and does not take into account the confidence of victory a higher tier player (say top 5) has against a lower tier player (say below top 30). Moreover, the number of games played will skew towards the higher tier players. So what really matters is which race has the most higher tier players which is not exactly the same issue as racial balance as it is a much smaller sample and is influenced by the X-factors in (3).
3. How can the fact that so many players who went on to do great things switching to Terran be irrelevant in this discussion? NaDa was already a top player on ladders as random. Just by taking NaDa out of the equation alone you don't just lose a player with 6 trophies for Terran -- you lose EVERY INNOVATION that he made!!!! Of course eventually someone would figure out those innovations, but it could have been years! Meanwhile, even if you assume he wouldn't be as good with either Zerg or Protoss, and even if you assume that the reason why he wouldn't be as good is due purely to racial balance, it's hard to imagine that he wouldn't earn some significant accomplishments and push the metagame no matter which race he played. And he who controls the metagame controls the tournaments.
4. Although it does aid in Bonjwa creation, the point is that it's not actually Terran imbalance that produces this result, but actually Zerg imbalance against Protoss! This would also lend itself to explaining why Zerg is now the dominant race in Starleague since ZvP results were much worse pre-Bisu than they are now.
Conclusion: You're inferring too much from too little. The Terran Empire was built on the backs of giants and I don't think that can be ignored.
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was reading this thread; then i ran into this quote and it made me laugh:
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." - Benjamin Disraeli
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I argue that the correct cut-off point for historical results has to be after muta stacking was introduced to the pro-scene. This is different than most innovations because most innovations introduce new strategies and tactics using existing micro techniques. Muta stacking, though, is like introducing a brand new unit into the game. Modern ZvT would be completely hopeless without it and it also tilts ZvP more towards Zerg.
Muta stacking is not particularly map-dependent, since it makes Zerg better on every map. It's also not strategy-dependent, as long as the strategy builds mutas at some point. It's not skill-dependent, since even D players can have better muta micro now than was possible for pro players before muta stacking.
It's reasonable to argue that the popularization of Forge FE is comparable, except that Nal_rA was doing Forge FE before revolution day. Forge FE needed the right combination of maps and follow-ups to become game-changing.
On the other hand, I've seen Yellow doing 2 hatch muta in an old VOD. The strategies where muta stacking is useful existed before muta stacking. It's not crazy to think that Yellow might have won a title if he just knew to group his mutalisks with an overlord. (As a random example I just pulled out of the VOD archive, check out this moment in a Boxer vs Yellow game. Imagine if those mutas were stacked.)
On March 29 2012 14:55 oldgregg wrote: Ok probably not relevant and maybe no one cares but I just did some averages and for the top 10 peak and current ELO of ZvZ and PvP, ZvZ got higher scores for both, so PvP is more of a coinflip matchup!
ZvZ peak average (for top 10): 2223.9 PvP peak avg: 2194.5 ZvZ current avg : 2125.3 PvP current avg: 2109.8
A progamer (Stork?) said in an interview that pro PvP is more of a coinflip than pro ZvZ.
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Lightwip made this thread just to cover his back every time he complains when Fla...I mean Terran wins an SL and every time Bis...I mean a Protoss doesn't. Your argument is that Terrans are statiscally favored towards the end of starleagues by nature of their imbalance, but look at recent results....its the ZERGS who are crowding the top finishes at starleagues, and almost all of them did it with victories in ZvZ's. Not to mention many many of them were flukes and not considered top tier players (Great vs Hydra anyone?). The ONLY terran players who've accomplished anything of note in (recent) individuals are Flash and Fantasy.
All this effort to prove that Terran *actually* has a 2-3% more chance of winning a particular game than some other race. I'd argue that in an important match, the many many other factors involved - skill level, practice, mindgames, map, mental condition, build order, etc. etc. more than muddle the stats to the point that racial imbalances don't matter when applied to an individual's league success. Flash wins because he can harness all factors to beat any player inferior to him no matter what and reach the finals consistently, and if he was Zerg or Protoss, he'd do the same thing. Bisu on the other hand, isn't dropping out of OSL's due to PvP's...
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The problem with using muta stacking as a cut-off is that it took a while before everybody started using the skill and even longer for everybody to master it. Muta stacking was invented in 2005 during the height of Terran supremacy.
Anyway, muta stacking had MUCH LESS OF AN IMMEDIATE IMPACT than netizens seem to think. It's a bad case of selective memory.
Here's the game of an unknown Zerg DEMOLISHING NaDa who was 70% wins in the past 12 months TvZ against THE HARDEST IMAGINABLE opponents at the time: (see record here: http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/details.php?section=korean&type=players&id=147&part=games&vs=Z&league=standard&map=any&from_year=2004&from_month=4&from_day=27&to_year=2005&to_month=4&to_day=27&action=Update)
That player's name was SAVIOR and he did it WITHOUT muta stacking. (see video here: http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/games/2081_NaDa_vs_sAviOr/vod)
Prior to Shark inventing the muta stacking trick, it was still possible to group your mutas, for example, by clicking them all over the same mineral patch. This form of "stacking" is what Savior uses to trap NaDa in his base and it's so effective he is able to expand twice AND tech hive before NaDa even moves out.
It was 3 hatch muta into fast 4 base hive (later changed to 3 base hive) that "fixed" ZvT. The importance of muta stacking was that it allowed this style to remain effective to this day.
Forge -> FE is actually VERY old. I first saw it done by {B_Blade]Annippy who was a progamer around 2001-2002. The build started entering the mainstream around 2004 or so and became the backbone of PvZ long before Bisu. In fact, Bisu did not even invent the "Bisu build." It was Daezang. Bisu perfected that style of play, but again, it wasn't really until about a year later that Protoss entered its height as this strategy was perfected.
OLD SCHOOL ZvZ was the TRUE coinflip. In old school ZvZ palyers would go 9 pool (before OL) + gas, 12 pool + gas or 12 hatch. This created a rock-paper-scissors dynamic. If two players were of equal skill, the player with the BO advantage had an almost guaranteed victory, period. In modern ZvZ, 9 pool before OL is no longer used instead replaced by overpool (popularized by Savior) and 12 pool gas was changed into 12 pool -> 12 hatch gas. With these new builds, although BO advantages and disadvantages still exist, at the highest level it is possible to work around them with careful play and a little luck. basically, a 90% advantage got turned into more like a 60 or 70% advantage assuming equal skill.
In PvP things have kind of gone the other way it seems. The issue is the reaver. As Starcraft history moves forward, build orders and midgame strategies always become more and more streamlined, so every scarab counts for more and every injury your reaver or your shuttle takes counts for more.
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On March 29 2012 15:48 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 15:44 Demonhunter04 wrote:On March 29 2012 13:49 Mortality wrote: 2) As has been pointed out numerous times, winning a boX is not the same as bo1 records. If player A wins against player B 2/3 of the time, then the chance that player A wins a bo3 against player B is 74%. Much, much higher.
How'd you calculate that? If A has 2/3 win ratio vs B, doesn't A have a 89% chance (8/9) to win a bo3? (This would be either 2-0 or 2-1, it doesn't change the odds) Chance of B to win is 1/3, and B has to win 2 games to win the bo3, so (1/3)^2 is 1/9. Mortality is right. It's a binomial distribution scenario. Given 2/3 winrate, you have a 74.1% chance of not getting less than 2 wins. Sorry to jump in with the statistics again...
Let's clear this all up:
Ways to win: WW, WLW, LWW
Calculating A: (2/3)*(2/3) + (2/3)*(1/3)*(2/3) + (1/3)*(2/3)*(2/3) = 4/9 + 4/27 + 4/27 = 20/27 = 74.1%
Calculating B: 1-A = 25.9%
As far as I know, Lightwip & Mortality are right.
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I was expecting a lot more. Kind of disappointed.
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On March 30 2012 03:49 Mortality wrote: OLD SCHOOL ZvZ was the TRUE coinflip. In old school ZvZ palyers would go 9 pool (before OL) + gas, 12 pool + gas or 12 hatch. This created a rock-paper-scissors dynamic. If two players were of equal skill, the player with the BO advantage had an almost guaranteed victory, period. In modern ZvZ, 9 pool before OL is no longer used instead replaced by overpool (popularized by Savior) and 12 pool gas was changed into 12 pool -> 12 hatch gas. With these new builds, although BO advantages and disadvantages still exist, at the highest level it is possible to work around them with careful play and a little luck. basically, a 90% advantage got turned into more like a 60 or 70% advantage assuming equal skill.
Thanks for your interesting post. This paragraph is mistaken about modern ZvZ builds though. 9 pool gas (with the pool before overlord, and the gas usually for speed), 12 pool gas expand, and 12 hatch remain the most common builds in modern ZvZ. There are some other builds (such as overpool gas, overgas) but they are much less common.
To ensure that I'm not crazy, I went through the 5 most recent ZvZs and checked builds:
The only unusual build in these 5 was Shine's overpool gas, and the game illustrates why overpool gas is rare, as his zerglings are too late to punish Hoejja's 12hatch.
Edit: Regarding Forge FE, I thought it was pretty well known that Bisu didn't invent the Bisu build (and of course the Bisu build is only one particular follow-up to Forge FE).
If you have a link to a VOD where the muta stacking trick was first used in a promatch, I'd be very interested. I thought the first time it was shown on TV was in Hwasin vs July, since Hwasin looks pretty surprised in that game. Given that July and Shark were both on MBC at the time, it seems plausible to me that Shark could've taught July the trick.
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On March 30 2012 03:49 Mortality wrote:The problem with using muta stacking as a cut-off is that it took a while before everybody started using the skill and even longer for everybody to master it. Muta stacking was invented in 2005 during the height of Terran supremacy. Anyway, muta stacking had MUCH LESS OF AN IMMEDIATE IMPACT than netizens seem to think. It's a bad case of selective memory. Here's the game of an unknown Zerg DEMOLISHING NaDa who was 70% wins in the past 12 months TvZ against THE HARDEST IMAGINABLE opponents at the time: (see record here: http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/details.php?section=korean&type=players&id=147&part=games&vs=Z&league=standard&map=any&from_year=2004&from_month=4&from_day=27&to_year=2005&to_month=4&to_day=27&action=Update)That player's name was SAVIOR and he did it WITHOUT muta stacking. (see video here: http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/games/2081_NaDa_vs_sAviOr/vod)Prior to Shark inventing the muta stacking trick, it was still possible to group your mutas, for example, by clicking them all over the same mineral patch. This form of "stacking" is what Savior uses to trap NaDa in his base and it's so effective he is able to expand twice AND tech hive before NaDa even moves out. It was 3 hatch muta into fast 4 base hive (later changed to 3 base hive) that "fixed" ZvT. The importance of muta stacking was that it allowed this style to remain effective to this day. Forge -> FE is actually VERY old. I first saw it done by {B_Blade]Annippy who was a progamer around 2001-2002. The build started entering the mainstream around 2004 or so and became the backbone of PvZ long before Bisu. In fact, Bisu did not even invent the "Bisu build." It was Daezang. Bisu perfected that style of play, but again, it wasn't really until about a year later that Protoss entered its height as this strategy was perfected. OLD SCHOOL ZvZ was the TRUE coinflip. In old school ZvZ palyers would go 9 pool (before OL) + gas, 12 pool + gas or 12 hatch. This created a rock-paper-scissors dynamic. If two players were of equal skill, the player with the BO advantage had an almost guaranteed victory, period. In modern ZvZ, 9 pool before OL is no longer used instead replaced by overpool (popularized by Savior) and 12 pool gas was changed into 12 pool -> 12 hatch gas. With these new builds, although BO advantages and disadvantages still exist, at the highest level it is possible to work around them with careful play and a little luck. basically, a 90% advantage got turned into more like a 60 or 70% advantage assuming equal skill. In PvP things have kind of gone the other way it seems. The issue is the reaver. As Starcraft history moves forward, build orders and midgame strategies always become more and more streamlined, so every scarab counts for more and every injury your reaver or your shuttle takes counts for more. Just as as a note: very few builds in BW are attributed to the right person, SK Terran is one of the only ones that come to mind. And even though SoulKey pioneered it, NaDa is the one who took it to the point where it became a core style in TvZ. Which brings up the huge point of attributing the person who did perfect it. A lot of the times, a player can win with a certain style for the wrong reasons, mainly the whatthefuckbuildisthisi'veneverseenthisbeforewhatthefuckdoidohowdoicounteritwowilostwhatthefuck?!?!?!? factor, more commonly known as the Surprise Factor. The player who can take a build like that and make it perfectly viable, even when everyone knows it's coming is just as much, if not more, important to the process of making a build.
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Overpool was really popular before 12pool expo became a prominent build. Like, around the time when Luxury and Jaedong were pumping out tons of creative ZvZ openings like 11gas 10pool and overgas. Before 12pool expo became solidified all these funky 1base builds had a place, but after 12pool expo became refined they pretty much all became obsolete. Overpool suffered because it couldn't punish 12pool expo, and 12pool expo itself didn't really lose out to 9pool much after people refined timings, so the role of overpool petered out. The coinflip of builds actually became worse since 12pool expo came out I think, because creativity in openings pretty much got shattered and it has pretty much been reduced to 9pool, 12pool, and 12hatch again, with the occasional overgas that has mostly been relegated to a map specific build now.
The main difference though, is that people have started to learn how to make the most out of build disadvantages a lot more now, mostly by studying how Jaedong used to pull out the most ridiculous wins during his long ZvZ supremacy.
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I feel this game actually supports the importance of muta stacking. If Savior had known the muta stacking trick, he would've had a decent chance of ending this game with mutalisks (since Nada built only a single turret), without any change to his strategy. That's why muta stacking is so important: it makes every mutalisk build better, on every map, in every situation. Strategic innovations only apply if you actually use the strategy.
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On March 30 2012 09:01 blueblimp wrote:If you have a link to a VOD where the muta stacking trick was first used in a promatch, I'd be very interested. I thought the first time it was shown on TV was in Hwasin vs July, since Hwasin looks pretty surprised in that game. Given that July and Shark were both on MBC at the time, it seems plausible to me that Shark could've taught July the trick.
No game showcases magic box stacked mutas better than that one, but it's not the first televised appearance of the trick. TL became aware of the trick a couple months earlier:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=40490
I have no idea when it was was first used in a televised game though.
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99% of you guys speaking vs the original post are really good at understading sc, but have apsolutly no idea of statistic
good job man
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On March 30 2012 09:30 blueblimp wrote:I feel this game actually supports the importance of muta stacking. If Savior had known the muta stacking trick, he would've had a decent chance of ending this game with mutalisks (since Nada built only a single turret), without any change to his strategy. That's why muta stacking is so important: it makes every mutalisk build better, on every map, in every situation. Strategic innovations only apply if you actually use the strategy.
It seems I am wrong about ZvZ, although I should add that when I said "12 pool gas" I don't mean "12 pool gas expo" but just "12 pool gas." That's how ZvZ used to be played. Lair would follow before a second hatch would be made.
Something else that I did not point out is the benefit of modern muta micro to ZvZ (not just stacking, but in particular the use of "patrol"). This is why if you did not have the economic advantage you had to at the very least severely damage your opponent with lings or else you had no chance of victory.
However, I disagree with your post above. Yes muta stacking would have made Savior even more imbalanced, but the point is that: 1) It is commonly thought among netizens that mutas were useless in ZvT prior to stacking, which is simply not true. In fact 3 hatch spire was a common build, although the particular variant I remember as being typically used was something like expo -> lair -> 3rd hatch -> spire, which was popularized for Lost Temple since mutas are crucial for defending your cliff from a drop. Savior's style revolutionized timings and gave Zerg a cohesive mid game plan that lead to a strong late game. Even without muta stacking.
2) Muta stacking was not the real turning point for ZvT. It was Savior's style. The real problem with ZvT was the timing issues. Trying to get such a fast hive would mean giving up the initiative, but persisting in lair tech would ultimately mean a weaker late game. Savior gained control of the timings, which when you get down to it, is the one common defining feature behind every revolutionary player since mid/late 2002 and onwards, certainly including TBLS.
3) Muta stacking was not perfected the moment it was introduced. It definitely created a skill gap between elite players and non-elite, as was made most painfully obvious by July's thorough dismantling of In_Dove in WCG Korea in 2006, but it took a full year before this skill gap started becoming obvious and it wasn't until much later (in particular Jaedong) that muta stacking showed its full advantage, which played a significant role in re-popularizing 2 hatch lair, which had been made completely obsolete by Savior.
4) In the long run it did indeed become necessary for Zerg's to continue with his style, but that turning point did not occur until sometime after Savior had already switched from 4 gas hive to 3 gas hive that it became a necessary component for success, because until then the main advance had been the streamlining of the timing inherent to the build.
Edit:
5) At the end of the day what's relevant when choosing a cut-off date is that changes that happen that day are instantaneous and universal, so the 1.08 patch really is the only logical cut-off date. Muta stacking was really a much more gradual change than people remember. We didn't go from "lololol mutas are irrelevant" to Jaedong over night. Mutas were always relevant and the true impact of muta stacking took at least a year, arguably 2 years before it was truly felt.
So no. I mean, I disagree with OP jumping to such conclusions based only on the rough numbers because it does not adequately describe the situation on the SC scene, and I do agree that muta stacking, Savior's style, and other innovations make the balance issues of Boxer era Starcraft completely irrelevant. But you can't just choose muta stacking as the cut-off point and say that's an accurate representation of balance either.
There's no reason why that date stands out as being more significant than, for example, 3/3/2007. Prior to Bisu Savior was winning 80% of his ZvP games in brutally one-sided fashion. But again, it took about a year before the full impact of the Bisu build was realized... and what followed from there? Protoss domination in 2008.
But then we could just as easily choose Jaedong's 4 hatch hydra/muta build as a turning point. Or July's 3 hatch spire -> 5 hatch hydra that followed about 6 months later. And again, it took about a full year for these advances to shift the balance. And then what occurred? SWARM SEASON!
So OP did choose the best cut-off date, but what I've been saying this entire time is that Starcraft balance is controlled (mainly) by the metagame. And yes, he's not without a point that Terran has historically had the overall metagame edge for the longest, but that edge came from innovation, not imbalance.
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United States47024 Posts
While selecting the discovery of the muta stacking trick is indeed an arbitrary cutoff, the discussion does indicate something:
Games that have been played more recently are more indicative of balance than games that have been played further in the past. There are a multitude of factors to this--player improvement, discovery of certain core mechanics, more balanced map design, etc.
The proper way to approximate this is not to toss out games at an arbitrary cutoff, but rather to re-calculate a time-weighted win percentage. Rather than using raw historical win % numbers, it would make more sense to determine a weighting scheme that gives higher value to recently played games.
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On March 30 2012 03:35 Savant wrote: Lightwip made this thread just to cover his back every time he complains when Fla...I mean Terran wins an SL and every time Bis...I mean a Protoss doesn't. Your argument is that Terrans are statiscally favored towards the end of starleagues by nature of their imbalance, but look at recent results....its the ZERGS who are crowding the top finishes at starleagues, and almost all of them did it with victories in ZvZ's. Not to mention many many of them were flukes and not considered top tier players (Great vs Hydra anyone?). The ONLY terran players who've accomplished anything of note in (recent) individuals are Flash and Fantasy.
All this effort to prove that Terran *actually* has a 2-3% more chance of winning a particular game than some other race. I'd argue that in an important match, the many many other factors involved - skill level, practice, mindgames, map, mental condition, build order, etc. etc. more than muddle the stats to the point that racial imbalances don't matter when applied to an individual's league success. Flash wins because he can harness all factors to beat any player inferior to him no matter what and reach the finals consistently, and if he was Zerg or Protoss, he'd do the same thing. Bisu on the other hand, isn't dropping out of OSL's due to PvP's...
This is so wrong on so many levels.... Yes, Z did win a lot of starleagues but there are many factors in a tournament(luck, opponent level, maps, etc) If Flash played Z or P, he would NOT have the amount of dominance he has today. Terran, at S class level, is the strongest race.
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Very nice post, thanks. I definitely underestimated how much Savior managed to overturn ZvT imbalance without the use of muta stacking, and I concede it's completely possible that Savior's strategic innovations made a bigger difference than the introduction of muta stacking, even in the long run.
That said, I still support muta stacking as an arbitrary cutoff. The reason is that there have been many times in Brood War's history when strategic innovations (and map pool for that matter) have changed match-up win rates. While Savior was one of the most significant, there have been many changes afterwards too. On the other hand, I can't think of any significant micro trick that was discovered after muta stacking. (Maybe Valkyrie micro? That's minor, anyway.)
Since all-time match-up imbalances are less than 5%, then even if muta stacking only makes a slight difference to win rates, the lack of that technique would still be a significant disadvantage to early Zergs.
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What is this season/past season's race winrates?
@Mortality: You do realize swarm season was 50/50 ZvT right? The fact that the period the Zergs did the best vs Terran was relatively even doesnt set off any alarms about match imbalance?
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On March 30 2012 10:12 ajmbek wrote: 99% of you guys speaking vs the original post are really good at understading sc, but have apsolutly no idea of statistic
good job man
lol
Why not divide the history of the scene into parts and not take the history of the game as a whole?
divide it into 4s.
2000-2003 2004-2006 2007-2010 2011-present?
or base the division on evolution/quality/balance-ish of maps? Started following back in 2007 but when I watched the older games, maps before were horrendous.
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I would heavily disagree with the use of pure statistics to view balance. To fully examine balance would require a few things. 1. Examine what makes a unit "cost-effective", based on range, DPS, health, harassment potential and cost. Then determine what the most cost-effective units are. 2. Examine compositions. Which race's units have the best synergy and what are the risks of each unit composition. 3. Build times for units and buildings, transitioning between tech tiers, and the ability to exploit certain timings. For example, whichever race has the earliest exploitable timing windows will clearly have an advantage. 4. Spellcasters and support units (assume jaedong/boxer level micro) 5. Special abilities (i.e. repair, lifting, building warp-in, regeneration) 6. Responsiveness. The combination of a race's ability to be versatile with the each unit (i.e. which has the fewest hard and soft counters) and the speed with which a race can adapt their army composition. 7. Ability to exploit maps 8. Best music
I'm sure there are many more features (SCV IMBA) to consider but I feel like it's impossible to address all of these coherently, and I think that if somebody could, they would find that different races win in each category. As a protoss though, vultures are the only thing i consider when i think of balance. If reavers were that fast I would drop the issue.
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On March 30 2012 11:09 GhostOwl wrote: What is this season/past season's race winrates?
@Mortality: You do realize swarm season was 50/50 ZvT right? The fact that the period the Zergs did the best vs Terran was relatively even doesnt set off any alarms about match imbalance?
The classical balance of T > Z > P > T has always existed. At its best ZvT has only been about 50-50. At its best PvZ has only been about 50-50. At its best TvP has only been about 50-50.
The issue is the balance of the second match-up. And if you are paying attention to OP, his point isn't that TvZ is better than ZvP, but that historically ZvP and TvZ are more imbalanced than PvT, which is why Terran is dominant.
MY point is that this is a gross over-simplification since balance is controlled by metagame and metagame is dictated by the innovators, ergo the race that has the most significant innovators will ultimately appear to be the strongest. Had Boxer never played this game, I honestly believe that to this day Terran would be considered the weak race. Not only because of what Boxer himself did, but because of the players who followed him. Similarly, say what you want about Savior as a person, but his impact is undeniable.
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There's a lot more than what meets the eye. The idea of Terran being ever-so-slightly more powerful than Zerg or Protoss is really insignificant in the long run. The magic of Broodwar is there are a hundred of other variables that we have to account for rather than 'Oh tanks should have 1 less range'.
For example in driving games, if we had 3 cars - 1 has the fastest top speed, 1 has fastest acceleration and other has best handling. If all 3 cars were considered 'balanced', then it boils down to the: Player, Map, Game Mechanics.
However, if all maps were Neo Outlier, we definitely would see a problem here.
Broodwar is balanced to an accepted balance level. Not ultimate balance because it is ultimately impossible to achieve. It's amazing how Broodwar is not about how this and that should be nerfed, but we talk about strategy, players, insane micro/macro and mechanics instead. If commentators were like 'Lol, tanks imba', Broodwar would lose alot of fans but instead they say 'Lol, Flash is god'.
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On the contrary, if we had a car driving at 61 km/h instead of 60, we would see the 61 car pull further and further ahead over time. This car is terran scum. However, there are other factors. But the thing is, the other factors stack with this slight imbalance, pushing terran far enough ahead to make bonjwas.
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On March 30 2012 14:52 Lightwip wrote: On the contrary, if we had a car driving at 61 km/h instead of 60, we would see the 61 car pull further and further ahead over time. This car is terran scum. However, there are other factors. But the thing is, the other factors stack with this slight imbalance, pushing terran far enough ahead to make bonjwas.
Not very logical. That assumes the road is straight. That assumes that speed is a good thing 100% of the time. It's not. When making tight curves, the faster you move, the larger the arc your car makes, ergo, the worse your turn becomes.
I don't know exactly what prompted this topic. The statistics are interesting, but very unconvincing.
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you forgot to mention the part where terran is an awful race below progamer level
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On March 30 2012 17:00 Caladbolg wrote:Show nested quote +On March 30 2012 14:52 Lightwip wrote: On the contrary, if we had a car driving at 61 km/h instead of 60, we would see the 61 car pull further and further ahead over time. This car is terran scum. However, there are other factors. But the thing is, the other factors stack with this slight imbalance, pushing terran far enough ahead to make bonjwas. Not very logical. That assumes the road is straight. That assumes that speed is a good thing 100% of the time. It's not. When making tight curves, the faster you move, the larger the arc your car makes, ergo, the worse your turn becomes. I don't know exactly what prompted this topic. The statistics are interesting, but very unconvincing. I like the car/road to race/map analogy. Initial D ftw!
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To be honest, post-savior TvZ has consistently had a Terran edge to it, looking at Proleague:
Swarm-Season is a myth. Looking at the aggregate numbers, Hell, look at all the proleague aggregate winrate numbers through the years. TvZ has ALWAYS been, every season, T favored, even if the numbers have varied: http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/leagues/123_SKY2005_Proleague_R1 http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/leagues/124_SKY2005_Proleague_R2 http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/leagues/5_SKY2006_Proleague_R1 http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/leagues/3_SKY2006_Proleague_R2 http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/leagues/118_Shinhan07_Proleague_R1 http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/leagues/133_Shinhan07_Proleague_R2 http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/leagues/157_Shinhan08-09_Proleague http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/leagues/274_Shinhan09-10_Proleague http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/leagues/710_Shinhan10-11_Proleague http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/leagues/2085_SKP11-12_Proleague_S1
(Im excluding individual and allstar/winner leagues because they have a somewhat biased sample so dont give as honest an overview of the scene as the classic team league setup)
On March 29 2012 12:18 1a2a3aPro wrote:There are several potential points to object your analysis on. I will name only a few of them. Firstly, you are taking historical data from the beginning of Brood War. This is simply not fair. Pre-savior ZvT is in no resemblance to post-savior ZvT. The same can be said for mutalisk micro and stacking. Or the popularization of forge fast expansion builds against Zerg. These changes revolutionized a matchup that before this, was heavily favoured towards one race. These older changes add skew to the %s and distribution. The second point I want to make, is that just because the best players have been Terran, does not mean that Terran is the best race. The players growing up idolize and want to be like BoxeR, like NaDa, like oov. This causes a heavier skew on the ladder towards these races. It also causes there to be very good coaching for those respected races, from some of these players (I'm looking at you, oov). Finally, how much skew is there, really? Winning 16 in a row is ridiculous, and is not a fair judge of a players ability. A player with 70% across all matchups would not only be S class, they would be as good as Flash. This means a player can do WWLWWLWWLW, repeat, for their entire career, and always win Bo3s and have a great win rate in proleague. Why is it necessary to have such ridiculous streaks? I feel that you have some selection bias here, you are selecting a statistic that will of course heavily favour Terran, due to the volatility of PvP and ZvZ maches. Overall, I think this is "see great Terran players, infer Terran bias, find a way to make statistics work to my conclusion." 1) Terran destroyed for a long time before players figured out different things, adds skew. 2) The %s we are talking about are very, very minute. Compare these to a game like WC3, and you will see what I mean (a couple of races come out clearly better). 3) Your criteria of large win streak is not the characteristic of a bonjwa. Someone with a consistent 70-75% winrate would simply completely dominate the game. I will re-evaluate my #1 if you can prove the validity of this statement: Show nested quote +
1. There can be no complaints of a lucky season or an outlier player. The Six Dragons era is statistically insignificant. Swarm Season is statistically insignificant. Flash, Boxer, Oov, and Nada are also all statistically insignificant.
Over ANY 3-4 year period, these numbers are about equal. Savior's innovations, Nal_rA's innovations, etc. are all insignificant over time because all the other races are, in the long term, able to compensate for these differences. These statistics are not a relic of a pre-Savior past.
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On March 30 2012 17:52 puppykiller wrote: you forgot to mention the part where terran is an awful race below progamer level Only because people aren't very good at playing it. Unless you missed the part where I noted that under pro level is irrelevant?
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I totally agree with Lightwip. But I still don’t comprehend how Jd has over 81% wins vs. ter in 2011. And Bisu with his >71% vs Z overall. Absolutely insane.
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As much as you may not want to admit it, because you seem to disslike Terran, maps play a huge role in how well a race does. That is why during the corse of proleague's, teams wont send certain races out on certain maps, skewing the %'s. I understand you probley feel frustration twords the Terran race, in which case i would urge you to do some research and find out which maps Terran, statistically, does bad on and only play those maps.
Also, Terran is not as forgiving as you say. In a TvP game, lets just say, if protoss holds off the 2/1 200/200 push, protoss has a better chance of winning that game, because at that point protoss has enough base's/gateways to just throw units at Terran untill he breaks.
I am a lifetime zerg player, but I dont really see the imbalance in the race(s), today, that you are speaking of. Mabey you are refering to the imbalance of the tank shooting half way across the map back in 2000, but if we look at each race, as it stands today, it is very balanced and has been this way for quite awhile, and the only imbalances you will find come from the maps.
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Take your balance discussions to Sc2 , this is broodwar where any amount of skill can make up for any disadvantage. i.e.: learning how to control the pace of zvt by incorporating a threat of backstabbing mentally breaking your opponent down
Take your bullshit balance whining back to Sc2 where it belongs
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On March 31 2012 02:05 decker247777 wrote: Take your balance discussions to Sc2 , this is broodwar where any amount of skill can make up for any disadvantage. i.e.: learning how to control the pace of zvt by incorporating a threat of backstabbing mentally breaking your opponent down
Take your bullshit balance whining back to Sc2 where it belongs Because using statistical analysis to try to prove imbalance is whining.
On March 31 2012 00:14 sGs.Stregon wrote: As much as you may not want to admit it, because you seem to disslike Terran, maps play a huge role in how well a race does. That is why during the corse of proleague's, teams wont send certain races out on certain maps, skewing the %'s. I understand you probley feel frustration twords the Terran race, in which case i would urge you to do some research and find out which maps Terran, statistically, does bad on and only play those maps.
Also, Terran is not as forgiving as you say. In a TvP game, lets just say, if protoss holds off the 2/1 200/200 push, protoss has a better chance of winning that game, because at that point protoss has enough base's/gateways to just throw units at Terran untill he breaks.
I am a lifetime zerg player, but I dont really see the imbalance in the race(s), today, that you are speaking of. Mabey you are refering to the imbalance of the tank shooting half way across the map back in 2000, but if we look at each race, as it stands today, it is very balanced and has been this way for quite awhile, and the only imbalances you will find come from the maps. Oh, maps matter all right. Yet as an aggregate performance, the effect of map balance is mitigated. Even after accounting for fluctuations, terran is still ever so slightly ahead, and that coupled with a few other factors makes the path to bonjwahood much, much easier.
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It is very thickly veiled and well intended whining. The best kind of whining.
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On March 29 2012 12:23 endy wrote: While I agree that on the ~32k games you aggregated "anomalies" like Flash do not impact on the race statistics figures, you cannot keep this assumption at your next step, it's like 1. Flash, Bisu, NaDa incredible win rates do not impact on 32k games. Ok. 2. Let's keep this assumption when we only have 36 players and 20 games for each player. You can't keep this assumption at all.
In order to use the same variability of your entire population when looking at your sample, you would have to argue that your selection of 36 players were chosen at random. As I understand it, your fictional Starleague selects the best of each race, in which case you would have to look at the variability across the sample (36) to determine if the results were significant enough. You speak of "qualifying" so I'm not sure how you're determining the players within the group. I'm not sure if I agree with your measure of 16/20 as being representative of a bonjwa.
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On March 31 2012 07:07 TwoToneTerran wrote: It is very thickly veiled and well intended whining. The best kind of whining. More like "your idol gets the easy path to greatness."
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On March 31 2012 08:24 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2012 07:07 TwoToneTerran wrote: It is very thickly veiled and well intended whining. The best kind of whining. More like "your idol gets the easy path to greatness."
Haha as if Flash is my idol. He's just the latest iteration of great KT players.
So, question, why isn't Fantasy bonjwa? I mean it's so easy, right, he's Terran!
It's whining, plain and simple, and shows a notable lack of knowledge of the game and scene itself for pretty much anytime before Flash was playing. Seriously, go try to play on Bifrost or Nostalgia and you'll figure out why Terrans won everything.
Statistics without context.
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Just throwing this one out there...maybe terran has better players?
Just an idea.
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On March 31 2012 08:27 TwoToneTerran wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2012 08:24 Lightwip wrote:On March 31 2012 07:07 TwoToneTerran wrote: It is very thickly veiled and well intended whining. The best kind of whining. More like "your idol gets the easy path to greatness." Haha as if Flash is my idol. He's just the latest iteration of great KT players. So, question, why isn't Fantasy bonjwa? I mean it's so easy, right, he's Terran! It's whining, plain and simple, and shows a notable lack of knowledge of the game and scene itself for pretty much anytime before Flash was playing. Seriously, go try to play on Bifrost or Nostalgia and you'll figure out why Terrans won everything. Statistics without context.
2 simple reasons why Fantasy isn't bonjwa
1) He's not S-class level player like Flash / Bisu / Jaedong. Fantasy has weak mentality and chokes easily.
2) Another Terran is already occupying the bonjwa throne
Yes, maps do make a difference, but it's the race that can get the most benefit from maps, like Tank range can abuse cliffs like no other units can because they have the longest range, that make a race more advantageous than others through maps.
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On March 31 2012 08:27 TwoToneTerran wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2012 08:24 Lightwip wrote:On March 31 2012 07:07 TwoToneTerran wrote: It is very thickly veiled and well intended whining. The best kind of whining. More like "your idol gets the easy path to greatness." Haha as if Flash is my idol. He's just the latest iteration of great KT players. So, question, why isn't Fantasy bonjwa? I mean it's so easy, right, he's Terran! It's whining, plain and simple, and shows a notable lack of knowledge of the game and scene itself for pretty much anytime before Flash was playing. Seriously, go try to play on Bifrost or Nostalgia and you'll figure out why Terrans won everything. Statistics without context. It's as if you recognize your own argument's faults and grow defensive in denial. Then you flame and flame, with no arguments but that I simply do not understand! How wonderful.
http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/maps/84_Bifrost http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/maps/42_Nostalgia I can't deny, both of these maps are very terran. But the stats still aren't that significant. One had nearly no games on it(and the future iterations of Bifrost are even worse for your case) and the others deviate only slightly from the aggregates. The fact is, Terran gets maps that are hard for them too. Dreamliner, Battle Royal, HBR. And yet after all that, they still have the largest win %. The fact is, terran has the best chance to win, and the best chance to make bonjwas because of an inherent imbalance in their favor, enhanced by multiple favorable conditions.
Let's not pretend a map or two in terran's favor made terran the race of bonjwas, because everyone has ups and downs in maps. But one factor that HAS always remained constant is that terrans have a favorable situation in matchups over long stretches of time.
Your argument is basically "I know it, I believe it, that settles it."
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On March 31 2012 08:24 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2012 07:07 TwoToneTerran wrote: It is very thickly veiled and well intended whining. The best kind of whining. More like "your idol gets the easy path to greatness." Okay I've had enough of this nonsense. I tried to fight fire with fire using an enormously long post on statistics, so let's just try straightforward and pure logic.
Let's say Terran is, as you say, ever-so-slightly imbalanced. It has virtually no effect on what RACE wins Starleagues. Do you known why?
Because the players who win Starleagues are not flukes. You said the exact same thing earlier in this thread. MSLs, maybe (no that was not a slight jab at Bisu, though it could be), but not Starleagues.
In fact, it is not WHAT RACE wins starleagues, it is about THE PLAYER. JD had, as someone said earlier, a ridiculous TvZ streak where he won 80%, and a ridiculous ZvZ streak when he was over 80%. Bisu has always been beast at PvZ (the "weak" MU), and Fantasy is ridiculously strong TvP but laughable TvZ.
Those "average stats" have absolutely nothing to do with who wins. Do you know why? The race itself is not competing. For someone like JD, do you think a slight TvZ imbalance stopped his 80% madness? NO. It has zero effect. Do you think Flash used to crush Protoss with bio because TvP is slightly in favor of Protoss. NO. No effect.
Your "statistics" assume that every player is "average". This is nonsense. Only ONE PLAYER will win the Starleague, and he is never "average" and is never affected by what is "probable". JD on a good day could have raped everyone to win the Starleague. 80% ZvZ? Flash 80% TvT? Bisu 70%+ PvZ career? The top level is not touched by stupid statistics and probability. At the end of the day, it is the better player who walks away with the trophy. The only exceptions I can think of are map balance, power outages, and KESPA. Which are completely different topics altogether.
In fact, it wasn't until recently when everyone started saying "Terran Imba". You know why? Everyone went through Swarm season and Six Dragon season, but one person broke everything. Flash. Flash is imba, not Terran. Do you see tons of amazing Terrans constantly competing in Starleague titles recently? Where is your slight "imba" for everyone else? Who other than Fantasy even reaches the finals? Is it just that "all the other terrans are just incompetent"?
Take a look at this.
2011 Jinair OSL Semis: 1 T, 2 Z, 1 P (Fanta, Hydra, Soo, Jangbi) 2010 KAL OSL 2 Semis: 1 T, 1 Z, 2 P (Flash, JD, Free, Stork) 2010 KAL OSL 1 Semis: 1 T, 1 Z, 2 P (Flash, Effort, Pure, Kal) 2009 EVER OSL Semis: 1 T, 2 Z, 1 P (Flash, JD, Calm, Movie) 2009 Bacchus OSL Semis: 1 T, 3 Z (Fanta, JD, Yellow[arnc], type-b) 2008 Batoo OSL Semis: 1 T, 2 Z, 1 P (Fanta, JD, by.hero, Bisu) 2008 Incruit OSL Semis: 1 T, 1 Z, 2 P (Fanta, GGPlay, Stork, Best) 2008 EVER OSL Semis: 2 Z, 2 P (Luxury, July, Best, Backho) 2008 Bacchus OSL Semis: 1 T, 1 Z, 2 P (Flash, Luxury, Bisu, Stork) 2007 EVER OSL Semis: 1 T, 1 Z, 2 P (Upmagic, JD, Bisu, Stork) 2007 Daum OSL Semis: 2 T, 1 Z, 1 P (Flash, Iris, GGPlay, Stork)
You have to go back 12 OSLs and 5 YEARS for the last time there was more than 1 Terran in the Semis of a Starleague.
Over the previous 11 seasons: Terran has had 10 semifinalists (for only 3 unique players) Zerg has had 16 semifinalists (for 10 unique players), Protoss has had 15 semifinalists (for 9 unique players).
The point is this. Your "statistics" would be great if they actually were shown to be true. But they're nonsense. They have absolutely no effect on who WINS starleagues. Sure they might have some effect at the average level. But I'm sick of hearing you whine about Terrans winning starleagues, because you have absolutely NOTHING to back it up, not your statistics (as I disproved earlier), or even results. If your "imba theory" was true, why hasn't it shown up in the past 5 YEARS? Most people see 5 years as a DAMN long time, and if you really believe in statistics as I do, then you'll know that 5 years is a long time for "imba" not to show up. You might raise the ridiculous rebuttal that including the reign of the 4 other bonjwas would change the statistics, but that is 5+ years ago. I'm not going to analyze tennis and say that the wooden racquet with whatever strings was "imba", because that was freaking back then, and this is now. No one plays with those strategies anymore.
I don't even know how you can really respond to this. I've had enough of this "Terran imba" nonsense. If you really want to, go complain in the SC2 thread as someone said earlier, where Terran is AFAIK actually broken. I hear their semifinals are constantly filled with random Terrans. That, is called "real evidence".
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On March 31 2012 09:41 Keone wrote: In fact, it wasn't until recently when everyone started saying "Terran Imba". You know why? Everyone went through Swarm season and Six Dragon season, but one person broke everything.
You must be new.
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On March 31 2012 09:28 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2012 08:27 TwoToneTerran wrote:On March 31 2012 08:24 Lightwip wrote:On March 31 2012 07:07 TwoToneTerran wrote: It is very thickly veiled and well intended whining. The best kind of whining. More like "your idol gets the easy path to greatness." Haha as if Flash is my idol. He's just the latest iteration of great KT players. So, question, why isn't Fantasy bonjwa? I mean it's so easy, right, he's Terran! It's whining, plain and simple, and shows a notable lack of knowledge of the game and scene itself for pretty much anytime before Flash was playing. Seriously, go try to play on Bifrost or Nostalgia and you'll figure out why Terrans won everything. Statistics without context. It's as if you recognize your own argument's faults and grow defensive in denial. Then you flame and flame, with no arguments but that I simply do not understand! How wonderful. http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/maps/84_Bifrosthttp://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/maps/42_NostalgiaI can't deny, both of these maps are very terran. But the stats still aren't that significant. One had nearly no games on it(and the future iterations of Bifrost are even worse for your case) and the others deviate only slightly from the aggregates. The fact is, Terran gets maps that are hard for them too. Dreamliner, Battle Royal, HBR. And yet after all that, they still have the largest win %. The fact is, terran has the best chance to win, and the best chance to make bonjwas because of an inherent imbalance in their favor, enhanced by multiple favorable conditions. Let's not pretend a map or two in terran's favor made terran the race of bonjwas, because everyone has ups and downs in maps. But one factor that HAS always remained constant is that terrans have a favorable situation in matchups over long stretches of time. Your argument is basically "I know it, I believe it, that settles it."
Your argument is that statistically there is a slight terran bias over the course of Broodwar's history, my argument is that yeah, that's true, and it's because the VAST majority of maps made before 2008 or so were atrociously imbalanced in favor of terran. I speak from experience of having to play on these terrible maps and having watched shit like 1 hatch lurker being standard.
You named maps made in the last 3 years. Do you have any experience with older maps, the maps that make up the vast majority of your sample size? Not everyone has ups and downs in maps. Zerg was complete fucking trash for years because of awful maps that completely ignored their strengths(It's why Zerg was the weakest race before Savior and has been by far the strongest since, people recognized Zerg strengths and maps became larger and easier to play with more than 2 bases).
Also Boxer made the terran bonjwas, as Mortality already plainly told you. Players who were not Terran started playing Terran at a higher frequency, and that happened to contain the smartest and best players up until Savior. The bonjwas are a minor percentage of the games played (Though by their relevance in leagues they played more than the average player) and should not be purely dictated by the overall large sample of statistics you brought forth. It's like saying the Moon's gravity causes us to sway violently like it does the Ocean. You needlessly attribute vast sample sizes to individuals which is a frequent and terrible statistically fallacy.
Addendum, your argument was ALSO an ad hominem, saying my points only existed because I root for a specific player.
I just think it's pathetic you attribute the great success of the best players in history to "lol terran imba." It's a fluffed up version of that exact same mentality. Confirmation bias at its best.
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A few fair observations, along with a few not-so-fair ones and a whole lot of rage. Dunno why you hate on MSLs. I see about as many flukes in the OSL as in the MSL. July and Effort are two rather recent examples. There's also a fairly recent example of a terran-dominated semi there as well. But Zergs do indeed often dominate semis. That's great, they make wonderful fodder for terrans! Sure, there are quite a few zerg-dominated semifinals. I'd argue that zergs are simply very good at being average. Strong ZvP and numbers go a long way to improving results to a marginally higher level, after all. Terrans tend to be either slightly weaker or quite a bit stronger than SL zergs. Good players can, of course, overcome average statistics and get insanely large win records. Yet they play the same race, and therefore have the same problems and advantages as their peers. This certainly influences their results, even if we'd like to think it doesn't. Yet .5-1.5% doesn't make a bonjwa. However, numbers aren't the only things I was talking about. The thing is, everything about terran lets its best players win much more, and that never hurts their chances. I talked about a few of these, including the mirror. Maybe a few percentage points alone don't make it easy for terran to walk away with the most titles and the most bonjwas. But it's part of it, and considering everything else, it's hard to deny that it's quite a bit easier for terran to rise to the top than Z or especially P.
On March 31 2012 10:09 TwoToneTerran wrote: You named maps made in the last 3 years. Do you have any experience with older maps, the maps that make up the vast majority of your sample size? Not everyone has ups and downs in maps. Zerg was complete fucking trash for years because of awful maps that completely ignored their strengths(It's why Zerg was the weakest race before Savior and has been by far the strongest since, people recognized Zerg strengths and maps became larger and easier to play with more than 2 bases). I'll address this one point, since everything else has not even an attempt at being civil. The last 4 or so years have about as many games played as everything before that. The volume of games have increased significantly since. This pattern of T>Z>P>T has been like this for years. If anything, it has become more T favored since TvZ used to be about equal in the very early years.
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On March 31 2012 07:04 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2012 02:05 decker247777 wrote: Take your balance discussions to Sc2 , this is broodwar where any amount of skill can make up for any disadvantage. i.e.: learning how to control the pace of zvt by incorporating a threat of backstabbing mentally breaking your opponent down
Take your bullshit balance whining back to Sc2 where it belongs Because using statistical analysis to try to prove imbalance is whining. Show nested quote +On March 31 2012 00:14 sGs.Stregon wrote: As much as you may not want to admit it, because you seem to disslike Terran, maps play a huge role in how well a race does. That is why during the corse of proleague's, teams wont send certain races out on certain maps, skewing the %'s. I understand you probley feel frustration twords the Terran race, in which case i would urge you to do some research and find out which maps Terran, statistically, does bad on and only play those maps.
Also, Terran is not as forgiving as you say. In a TvP game, lets just say, if protoss holds off the 2/1 200/200 push, protoss has a better chance of winning that game, because at that point protoss has enough base's/gateways to just throw units at Terran untill he breaks.
I am a lifetime zerg player, but I dont really see the imbalance in the race(s), today, that you are speaking of. Mabey you are refering to the imbalance of the tank shooting half way across the map back in 2000, but if we look at each race, as it stands today, it is very balanced and has been this way for quite awhile, and the only imbalances you will find come from the maps. Oh, maps matter all right. Yet as an aggregate performance, the effect of map balance is mitigated. Even after accounting for fluctuations, terran is still ever so slightly ahead, and that coupled with a few other factors makes the path to bonjwahood much, much easier.
You seem to have read the first part. But yes, maps play a HUGE part in balance in Sc:Bw. You cannot deny it, just because it doesnt work into your statistics, this game is what balance looks like, and the X factor to make one race stronger than another is the map pool.
Secondly, Terran may seem a little unbalanced, but like I stated, teams generaly only send Terrans out on maps that are Terran favoured or where they have a slight dissadvantage but have things built into the map they can use to create an advantage((i.e. strategic, hard to reach, cliffs, ledges)), which comes back the map pool..
Sc:Bw is balanced. You can look at any statistic you want and claim any race is inbalanced, but inbalances come from the maps. That is why, generally, on ICCup you see mainly Fighting Spirit only. Because that map is basically 33.3/33.3/33.3% balanced between the races, and player skill determines who wins((or protoss cheese)), as compaired to a map like Outlier, or Neo Medusa
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Fighting Spirit is a very balanced map, but it's completely standard and an inaccurate representation of the pro scene. Not all games are standard, and some races benefit more than others from certain trends in maps. Maps change things, but patterns still emerge.
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I'm getting confused, are you accusing me of raging and flaming you or what because the most insulting thing I've done is pointed out that you argue from a perspective that's mostly confined to the last few years with a cursory knowledge of who dominated the past. Is this untrue?
Anyhow, I'd like you to cite exactly how many games have been played since 2008(kind of arbitrary but it's where I'm working from) and how many games have been played before, if you wouldn't mind. I'd like to be sure of this. Also note that literally hundreds of games have not been recorded in TLPD from before 2005 because there were a lot more leagues and showmatchy type deals that didn't stick around, so you are missing some past games.
Moving on, T>Z>P>T hasn't been consistent for years. It was P>Z for about a year after Bisu beat Savior, althought it was something to the tune of 51% P winrate as opposed to the typical 53-55% we see in the standard race imbalance. There were also times when Terrans stomped Protoss for several months at a time (Back in Reach's hayday, before Nal_rA really came around, Reach was the only protoss with a modicum of ability to beat anyone). Or directly after Savior where, before Flash's domination, there was like 3 Terran league winners (Flash OSL Mind MSL ForGG MSL) compared to like 4 Protoss and a bazillion zergs.
The T>Z>P>T thing is true over a long, large sample size, but not in isolated time periods of relevance (Which is all it takes to win titles).
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On March 31 2012 10:24 Lightwip wrote: Fighting Spirit is a very balanced map, but it's completely standard and an inaccurate representation of the pro scene. Not all games are standard, and some races benefit more than others from certain trends in maps. Maps change things, but patterns still emerge.
AND there in lies my ENTIRE point.. Maps determin balance is Sc:Bw anymore.. Terrans dont play on maps that they are statistically weak on - hince Terran's SEEM a little over powered, when in reality, the coach's are just maximizing their line ups, by only playing Terrans on Terran favoured maps, for the most part..
This thread is thinly veiled QQ. So you lose to Terrans, it happens. Watch your replays, and find out where you made your mistakes, and try not making them the next time you play.
This is not Sc2, this doesnt need anymore balance((which would probley result in breaking one of the races, to appease those who cant play//insert Sc2 terran comment here\\))
And if you are not sold on maps playing a huge part in balance. There is this thing called a BO win.. If you can accuratly scout what build your opponent is going, you can switch into a build order that beats it, statistically, alot. If you are really going todo a statistics thing, you cant leave out BO wins((which doesnt determine which race is op, but instead which player was smart enough to be able to directly counter what his opponent was doing//insert Flash here\\))
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On March 31 2012 11:13 sGs.Stregon wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2012 10:24 Lightwip wrote: Fighting Spirit is a very balanced map, but it's completely standard and an inaccurate representation of the pro scene. Not all games are standard, and some races benefit more than others from certain trends in maps. Maps change things, but patterns still emerge. AND there in lies my ENTIRE point.. Maps determin balance is Sc:Bw anymore.. Terrans dont play on maps that they are statistically weak on - hince Terran's SEEM a little over powered, when in reality, the coach's are just maximizing their line ups, by only playing Terrans on Terran favoured maps, for the most part.. This thread is thinly veiled QQ. So you lose to Terrans, it happens. Watch your replays, and find out where you made your mistakes, and try not making them the next time you play. This is not Sc2, this doesnt need anymore balance((which would probley result in breaking one of the races, to appease those who cant play//insert Sc2 terran comment here\\)) You may notice that I specifically said that this analysis has no relevance whatsoever except in the pro scene. Read more carefully.
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I don't see why you think it's logical to look at these stats from a "Over all time, T wins slightly more, therefore they are going to have more bonjwas" perspective. Why can't you make the argument "T has had more bonjwas, therefore they are going to win slightly more over all time."? If T had 4 of the 5 best players ever and didn't win more than Z and P, it would actually mean the race is underpowered at the below bonjwa level. Artosis had a post about this a while back that was related: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=70545
Also, you claim "Flash, Boxer, Oov, and Nada are also all statistically insignificant" but I don't see why you claimed that. Did you run the numbers? It is certainly not obvious. In the aggregate, they clearly have a huge influence on the winrates -- they've played >800 TvZs between them and won over 66%.
I have lots of other problems with this post, but I'd like to start with these.
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this is a great article, thank-you.
and i am a little embarrassed that i did not think of it myself!!!
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On March 31 2012 11:18 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2012 11:13 sGs.Stregon wrote:On March 31 2012 10:24 Lightwip wrote: Fighting Spirit is a very balanced map, but it's completely standard and an inaccurate representation of the pro scene. Not all games are standard, and some races benefit more than others from certain trends in maps. Maps change things, but patterns still emerge. AND there in lies my ENTIRE point.. Maps determin balance is Sc:Bw anymore.. Terrans dont play on maps that they are statistically weak on - hince Terran's SEEM a little over powered, when in reality, the coach's are just maximizing their line ups, by only playing Terrans on Terran favoured maps, for the most part.. This thread is thinly veiled QQ. So you lose to Terrans, it happens. Watch your replays, and find out where you made your mistakes, and try not making them the next time you play. This is not Sc2, this doesnt need anymore balance((which would probley result in breaking one of the races, to appease those who cant play//insert Sc2 terran comment here\\)) You may notice that I specifically said that this analysis has no relevance whatsoever except in the pro scene. Read more carefully.
You seem willfully ignorant((dumb on purpose)).. You do realize that the Proleague is PRO right? You realize that the Proleague is what im talking about, with coach's maximizing line ups by playing Terrans on Terran favoured maps, right?
or are you not willfully ignorant, but mentally stunted =/ Look at all my posts together as a whole, and you would easily realize I am talking about PRO games myself, and simply used a map like Fighting Spirit for my argument of maps creating imbalances in one race or another.
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On March 31 2012 11:21 sGs.Stregon wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2012 11:18 Lightwip wrote:On March 31 2012 11:13 sGs.Stregon wrote:On March 31 2012 10:24 Lightwip wrote: Fighting Spirit is a very balanced map, but it's completely standard and an inaccurate representation of the pro scene. Not all games are standard, and some races benefit more than others from certain trends in maps. Maps change things, but patterns still emerge. AND there in lies my ENTIRE point.. Maps determin balance is Sc:Bw anymore.. Terrans dont play on maps that they are statistically weak on - hince Terran's SEEM a little over powered, when in reality, the coach's are just maximizing their line ups, by only playing Terrans on Terran favoured maps, for the most part.. This thread is thinly veiled QQ. So you lose to Terrans, it happens. Watch your replays, and find out where you made your mistakes, and try not making them the next time you play. This is not Sc2, this doesnt need anymore balance((which would probley result in breaking one of the races, to appease those who cant play//insert Sc2 terran comment here\\)) You may notice that I specifically said that this analysis has no relevance whatsoever except in the pro scene. Read more carefully. You seem willfully ignorant((dumb on purpose)).. You do realize that the Proleague is PRO right? You realize that the Proleague is what im talking about, with coach's maximizing line ups by playing Terrans on Terran favoured maps, right? or are you not willfully ignorant, but mentally stunted =/ I'll let you figure out exactly why your post is so ridiculous. Hint: it involves something you mentioned in your post.
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On March 31 2012 11:26 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2012 11:21 sGs.Stregon wrote:On March 31 2012 11:18 Lightwip wrote:On March 31 2012 11:13 sGs.Stregon wrote:On March 31 2012 10:24 Lightwip wrote: Fighting Spirit is a very balanced map, but it's completely standard and an inaccurate representation of the pro scene. Not all games are standard, and some races benefit more than others from certain trends in maps. Maps change things, but patterns still emerge. AND there in lies my ENTIRE point.. Maps determin balance is Sc:Bw anymore.. Terrans dont play on maps that they are statistically weak on - hince Terran's SEEM a little over powered, when in reality, the coach's are just maximizing their line ups, by only playing Terrans on Terran favoured maps, for the most part.. This thread is thinly veiled QQ. So you lose to Terrans, it happens. Watch your replays, and find out where you made your mistakes, and try not making them the next time you play. This is not Sc2, this doesnt need anymore balance((which would probley result in breaking one of the races, to appease those who cant play//insert Sc2 terran comment here\\)) You may notice that I specifically said that this analysis has no relevance whatsoever except in the pro scene. Read more carefully. You seem willfully ignorant((dumb on purpose)).. You do realize that the Proleague is PRO right? You realize that the Proleague is what im talking about, with coach's maximizing line ups by playing Terrans on Terran favoured maps, right? or are you not willfully ignorant, but mentally stunted =/ I'll let you figure out exactly why your post is so ridiculous. Hint: it involves something you mentioned in your post.
Mentally stunted it is..
Quit your Terran QQ. Sc/Bw is balanced, and your just bad
/thread
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But if pvp and zvz are coinflippy, while tvt is not, do you not need to practice way more for that matchup than zvz/pvp? (also tvt is damn hard!)
Which leaves less room to practice for the other matchups.
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tvt is many times more complex than either zvz or pvp, why else do you think that it is the only match up that there are 0 guides in english on how to play it?
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Quit bickering about maps. Maps do make a big difference, but as I've said before, if a race can make more advantage from certain map terrain (i.e. cliffs, small ramps), because they have the longest range ground unit / best defensive structures and abilities respectively, then it shows that the race is more of a problem than maps.
By removing these qualities, a map can work to take away these race advantages, but every map is going to be different, and truthfully, Terran race has units / abilities designed that benefits most from little map features. That itself shows how other races like Zerg / Protoss are weaker than Terran. The race that can abuse the map the greatest is the problem, not the maps itself. And we're not even talking about how flexible a race is (And guess which race has the most flexibility and innovating options? )
User was temp banned for this post.
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Nope, purely a matter of map making. Protoss does better in open spaces and with lots of expansions or on island maps. People just didn't like playing on island maps so no one made as many maps that would horrendously benefit protoss in that way(There used to be a lot more island maps, now there are none. Protoss used to be generally stronger, now they aren't. Correlation is not causation though, I know, just a relevant point). It's not a problem with terran (if there ever was one, I'm still skeptical). Terrans hate it when their enemies can expand and the true expansion timing macro game (not just oov's "make lots of units at heretofore unknown timings" macro)didn't really kick in until 2005-2006 (that savior guy with his silly expansion/tech timings doing those craaazy things)
People got into starcraft because Boxer did crazy 1 base micro strategies, so they made more maps with lots of 1-2 base viable shit which benefits Terrans the most, protoss a little, and zerg the least (Zerg was the worst for several years). Years where only every 1 in 5 maps were it was reasonable for a zerg to get their third gas before getting defilers to move out, or protoss had to one base no matter what.
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On March 29 2012 15:22 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 15:17 Keone wrote:On March 29 2012 14:56 Lightwip wrote:On March 29 2012 14:37 Keone wrote:I am a statistics major, and Lightwip, your statistics are suspect and flawed. Though I somewhat agree with your topic, I don't think your reasoning is very sound. Here's a long-winded explanation of why: --------------------------------------- 1. Specific Starleague SampleYour stats are heavily based on your (13/13/10) race distribution of Terran/Zerg/Protoss. How about a different example, say Incruit OSL 2008? Their race distribution (T/Z/P) was (13/10/17). Here are the new numbers: Terran: 54.40*(10/35) + 47.44*(17/35) + 50*(12/35) = 55.73% Zerg: 54.67*(17/35) + 45.6*(13/35) + 50*(9/35) = 56.35% Protoss: 52.56*(13/35) + 45.33*(10/35) + 50*(16/35) = 55.33% Also, I have a question here: how did you get your numbers? Because with a true binomial distribution P(X >= 16), you shouldn't get those values. Not necessary in my argument, but I don't understand your math, you should go and check, I've included what they should be in spoiler below. + Show Spoiler + Your values should be:
T: 0.007378994 (AKA .738%) Z: 0.005479762 (AKA .548%) P: 0.004825193 (AKA .483%)
Perhaps you forgot that you should not just do the binomial of P(X = 16), which I believe you did. For example, a StarLeague winner might have won all 20 of his matches. This doesn't have any effect on my argument, I'm just letting you know that you probably made a mistake here.
Anyway, the new probabilities for winning: T: 0.02202714 Z: 0.02505878 P: 0.02024176 Scaled & Sorted (Highest to Lowest): Zerg: 37.2%T: 32.7% P: 30.1% Well what do we have here. Zerg comes out on top by nearly 5%. Not as shocking as your 13% T>Z, but I just wanted to show you how the sample set you use affects your result. 2. Questionable Abuse of StatisticsA questionable part is your system of scaling your binomial distributed results. I believe is actually inappropriate given how .166%*13 + .118%*13 + .102%*13 = 5% of ANYONE winning an OSL lol. For your argument to be valid, this should equal 1. Scaling is dangerous: why? I understand your want of scaling, but it's like saying an ant has a 20% better chance of killing an elephant than a gnat, which is abusing statistics. For the statistical test to be sound, the total value must equal to 1; scaling to 1, especially from such a low percentage, is sketch and often leads to untrue answers. Of course, I don't know if that's the case here simply based off the stats, but one thing is for sure; it's not enough to base a conclusion on. To be honest, all this statistical stuff gives us is a completely different conclusion, and that conclusion would be: The winner of the starleague is likely the race that has a lot of its best matchup, and least of its worst matchup. ... No shit, right? Essentially I'm saying that your use of statistics here cannot be used to help your "Terran" argument. 3. Number in RacesAnother important point is the number of people playing a race. If we use your statistics (I don't know how to look up the real numbers): TvZ: 6549-5490 (54.40%) ZvP: 5162-4280 (54.67%) PvT: 4782-4317 (52.56%) Zerg has played the most matches (~12000 TvZs & ~9400 ZvPs = ~21400 games), with Terran in second, and Protoss in third (in non-mirror matches). This is obviously lacking due to the mirror matches... However, it is common knowledge in Korea that Zerg and Terran are the most popular races there. Do you see where I'm going? The conclusion we reached earlier was: The winner of the starleague is likely the race that has a lot of its best matchup, and least of its worst matchup. The point is that there are simply more Zerg and Terran players than there are Protoss players. This has a lot of ramifications. As before, your stats system shows that the winner of the SL is the race which has the most of its ideal matchup, and least of its worst matchup. Therefore, Terran starts out with an already obvious advantage: the lack of Protoss + the popularity of Zergs. This, I believe, is the real driving reason of why Terrans have been so dominant over SCBW's history. 4. Your Valid PointsHowever, this isn't a post just to trash your points. You made several good and valid points. Namely, TvT and mirror matchups. This is very true and a very good reason why elite Z & P players get knocked out so early due to a measure of luck. Jaedong was most definitely an exception in the most volatile of MUs; however, TvT seems to be a more stable mirror, perhaps simply due to the length of the games (thus allowing more skill to matter in the game). To this point, I don't have any real qualms, and I agree that it must play a big factor in the establishment of "Bonjwas". Coupled with the conclusion in Part 3, I can see how Terrans have become so dominant.----------------------------------------- I hope you'll view this post objectively and not subjectively. Thanks! I'll edit for mistakes later, but I think this pretty much shows why your statistics are misleading, yet it leads to reasoning that agrees with your general conclusion. If you could add this to your OP in spoiler tags, people can read both sides to the statistics part; but of course that's up to you =) Of course they aren't perfect. I made this in about 1-2 hours, so I could have made a mistake. 1. generally, P are not as highly represented throughout the SLs. Incruit is pretty much one of the few counter-examples. 2. A 1 - binomcdf(n,p,x). Actually I made a mistake here(16 instead of 15 for x), but that doesn't change the results much. T: 41.7% Z: 31.0% P: 27.3% That doesn't change my point, but thanks. I didn't put enough time into this to re-check my math. I understand I'm doing bad practice here, but it doesn't change the result. The alternative would be to run a few thousand samples, which would be hard given how much effort coding that would take. Also, while it is bad maths, it happens to be pretty consistent with actual titles. T>Z>>P. 3. All of these other factors are true in the pro-scene, and they are further meant to prove my point about bonjwas. Yet even before those, terran has a slight advantage.4. There's a pretty good spread of races played by pros. Z>T>P but they're all in the 300's, according to TLPD. 5. Your Incruit counterexample actually explains the random Z wins pretty well, actually. While a normal SL favors terran, a situation can heavily influence the statistics, suddenly favoring Z for that SL. However, that does not contradict the general trend. ^ That bolded part is what I'm saying isn't proven in your argument. But I could easily believe that. And I think you've missed the point of my post. I'm not picking on your mistakes. I'm saying your approach is impossible because the simple fact that there are more Zergs & Terrans with fewer Toss makes Terran's situation always more favorable, so if Terran is indeed imba, you can't use those numbers because they have a big advantage already, so your statistical approach doesn't show anything imba about Terran, and instead proves that your argument does not prove imba-ness. I think the parameters themselves are proof of it, really. ~1% isn't large, but I'd say it's pretty statistically significant. In a fairly weighted contest, the hypothetical terran is the best.
I'm no expert, but shouldn't a standard deviation be calculated? Is 1% actually statistically significant?
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There are quite a few problems I have with your statistics. Below are the three most important.
1) You claim that long term averaging negates the need to do a more thorough job on the time-dependence of matchups. Yes, the power of averaging is great but using a filter window size of "The history of Broodwar" doesn't give a whole lot of chance to see how things may have changed over the years. There really does need to be a much higher bandwidth (shorter time) filter applied to the statistics and have that scrolled over the history of broodwar. Part of what I do for a living is design control systems, I can do all of this except for the data mining portion. It's really something for you to attribute Flash's bonjwa status to the fact that he's terran when we don't even know what the time dependence of the matchups look like. The fact that Oov pwned zergs so bad back in the day has very little relevance to the TvZ statistics right now except for the contributions he made to the base understanding of the matchup. The players now are playing a different game than Oov played.
2) The proleague problem. I have a feeling proleague statistics will exacerbate the imbalance in XvX statistics due to the fact that Coach's will try to put good players out on maps that are good for them (presumably good for their race). The result is that you'll see a lot of Stork on P favored maps (insert any of TBLS, just picked one at random) rolling over whatever fodder the other team sends out. This will show up as racial imbalance when it's truly skill imbalance which is causing the divergence of matchup statistics. There probably should be a separate study carried out splitting out team league statistics from individual statistics. I believe individual statistics should be more accurate as players typically have to play on a more balanced mapset.
3) The effect absolute player skill has on imbalance. This one is unfortunately probably impossible to figure out. The argument goes like this, just because ZvP is favored at 54-46 for Z for the set of all pro gamers does not mean that this is true at all levels of player skill. If you go down to D level, what does the racial imbalance look like down there, I'm willing to bet it's different than for an average pro level. Who cares what the balance looks like at the D level, who cares what it looks like at the average pro level, what is most important is what does it look like at the very top. As you try to focus in on only the top players you run into a problem of not having enough data to make any certain predictions. Beyond that you face the task of quantifying a player's absolute skill.
In short the effort is somewhat futile, all we really care about is what does racial balance look like at the uppermost prolevel and how it changes over time. Throw in the fact that we don't know a player's absolute skill level and it really gets messy. Add for good measure the feedback loops that good players have on the pro-scene (I don't believe it's coincidence that we have things like swarm season after JD dominance, the era of the dragons, or that one MSL where terrans got 3/4 semi's slots after Flash's 2010). There's also the unknown feedback effect that Boxer had on the whole scene. The first Bonjwa terran emerges, many people look up to him and select T as their race and then go on to do good things themselves. Were most of the bonjwa terran due to an imbalance, or because the first bonjwa was terran and they all copied (this ignores the fact that Boxer actually counts as 2 bonjwas because of his protoge' Oov).
On March 31 2012 10:16 Lightwip wrote: A few fair observations, along with a few not-so-fair ones and a whole lot of rage. Dunno why you hate on MSLs. I see about as many flukes in the OSL as in the MSL. July and Effort are two rather recent examples. There's also a fairly recent example of a terran-dominated semi there as well. But Zergs do indeed often dominate semis. That's great, they make wonderful fodder for terrans!
For the hell of it I ran the MSL numbers for the last 11 seasons:
Show nested quote + ABC Mart 2011 - Flash, Zero, Jaedong, Leta (2 T, 2 Z) PDPop 2011 - Hydra, Great, Jaedong, Zero (4 Z) BigFile 2010 - Flash, Jaedong, Light, Fantasy (3 T, 1 Z) Hana Daetoo MSL 2010 - Flash, Jaedong, Calm, Free (1 T, 2 Z, 1 P) Nate 2009 - Jaedong, Flash, Kwanro, Kal (1 T, 2 Z, 1 P) Avalon 2009 - Calm, Kwanro, Iris, Jaedong (1 T, 3 Z) Lost Saga 2009 - Luxury, Jangbi, Stork, Zero (2 Z, 2 P) Club Day 2008 - Bisu, Jangbi, Free, Kal (4 P) Arena MSL 2008 - ForGG, Jaedong, Flash, Much (2 T, 1 Z, 1 P) Gom TV 4 2008 - Jaedong, Kal, Jangbi, Mind (1 T, 1 Z, 2 P) Gom TV 3 2007 - Mind, Bisu, Xellos, Savior (2 T, 1 Z, 1 P)
13 T, Flash, Leta, Light, Fantasy, Iris, ForGG, Mind, Xellos - 8 Unique 19 Z, Zero, Jaedong, Hydra, Great, Calm, Kwanro, Luxury, Savior - 8 Unique 12 P, Free, Kal, Jangbi, Stork, Bisu, Much - 6 Unique
OSL Stats
10 T, 3 Unique 16 Z, 10 Unique 15 P, 9 Unique
Total MSL + OSL
23 T - 9 Unique 35 Z - 14 Unique 27 P - 9 Unique
So yes, include the MSL and you don't have to go back as far to find more than 1 T in a semis. But that doesn't change the fact that there still have been more toss in semi-finals than terran in the past 11 seasons.
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I don't understand whats the big deal?? I played Brood war since 99... SC 2 since it came out... one thing that is always constant is that Terran is the race where u can be dominate in. The best players were always Terran. Boxer, Nada, iloveoov, xellos, and now some new guy name Flash.
Terran is the hardest race to play, and in life in general, high risk... high reward. That goes for everything in life.
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OSL prelim spoilers: + Show Spoiler + Terran went 3-6 vs protoss in matches, zerg went 9-1, clearly this shows that terran is OP!!!!!!! nerf plz blizzard!!!!!
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On April 01 2012 03:23 b0lt wrote:OSL prelim spoilers: + Show Spoiler + Terran went 3-6 vs protoss in matches, zerg went 9-1, clearly this shows that terran is OP!!!!!!! nerf plz blizzard!!!!!
So, did you even read the OP? T has a disadvantage vP while Z has an advantage vP that was amplified by the maps. But worry not, this is very much an easy terran title!
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On April 01 2012 03:23 b0lt wrote:OSL prelim spoilers: + Show Spoiler + Terran went 3-6 vs protoss in matches, zerg went 9-1, clearly this shows that terran is OP!!!!!!! nerf plz blizzard!!!!!
OP said terran has an advantage at individual league cuz their mirror, TvT, is less fraudulent than, say, a zerg mirror, ZvZ. So a better player terran player does not have to be leagues ahead of his peers in order to be a consistent winner, while players from races like zerg and protoss do.
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I updated the OP with a lot more analysis and reasoning in response to the criticisms in here. I hope my argument is a bit more convincing now to those who weren't really sure before.
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On March 29 2012 11:49 Lightwip wrote: Brood War is one of the most balanced games ever created. In fact, it may be the most balanced competitive game ever created, an amazing feat given the fact that the three races of Brood War are about as different from each other as they could possibly be. Indeed, the game is very well-balanced, and it's very hard to tell which race is superior when just starting to play. Yet, although it is hard to admit it for many fans of the game, there is one race which is clearly superior to them all. Meet Brood War's favorite child: Terran.
The introduction to your OP is so poorly thought out that I can't venture to read anything else.
Let me loosely interpret it here:
"Brood War is balanced. Brood War is balanced. Three different races but Brood War is balanced. Brood War is balanced. Races seem evely matched at first BUT... Brood War is clearly imbalanced. Meet Terran."
It's just Schizophrenic.
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On May 17 2012 11:05 Fyodor wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 11:49 Lightwip wrote: Brood War is one of the most balanced games ever created. In fact, it may be the most balanced competitive game ever created, an amazing feat given the fact that the three races of Brood War are about as different from each other as they could possibly be. Indeed, the game is very well-balanced, and it's very hard to tell which race is superior when just starting to play. Yet, although it is hard to admit it for many fans of the game, there is one race which is clearly superior to them all. Meet Brood War's favorite child: Terran.
The introduction to your OP is so poorly thought out that I can't venture to read anything else. Let me loosely interpret it here: "Brood War is balanced. Brood War is balanced. Three different races but Brood War is balanced. Brood War is balanced. Races seem evely matched at first BUT... Brood War is clearly imbalanced. Meet Terran." It's just Schizophrenic.
If we're nitpicking, I like whatever I wrote more than anything with a typo, that's for sure.
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First of all I have to say that I still cant believe they dont consider Jaedong a bonjwas I mean wtf does the man have to do? He has won 5 SL. Dominated and destroyed some of the best. Gotta admit the game is balance. The only imbalance thing about BW is TERRAN TURTLE. That is probably the most dreadful thing out there, we've seen Flash come back from the point of rape and win with terran turtle.
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On May 17 2012 11:20 BreakerD wrote: First of all I have to say that I still cant believe they dont consider Jaedong a bonjwas I mean wtf does the man have to do? He has won 5 SL. Dominated and destroyed some of the best. Gotta admit the game is balance. The only imbalance thing about BW is TERRAN TURTLE. That is probably the most dreadful thing out there, we've seen Flash come back from the point of rape and win with terran turtle. JD has to consistently beat Flash and Bisu for a period of time. He hasn't beat Bisu since 2009 IIRC. Even when him and flash were winning everything, Flash was handing his ass to on a platter so he could kiss it good-bye.
The main problem with the OP arguement is that there is Pre FFE PvZ and Post FFE PvZ. Since Pre FFE PvZ was so heavily zerg favored, i imagine the the Post FFE PvZ is much closer to 50% if not more than 50%. This leaves TvZ as the black sheep because since the dawn of time, TvZ has always been Terran favored. Yellow < Xellos, Oov, Boxer, ... Savior was really only successful because the older generation out of their prime, while Flash not god yet. Jaedong < Flash (mostly), Light (a little bit), Skyhigh (this was silly)
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On May 17 2012 11:42 Release wrote:Show nested quote +On May 17 2012 11:20 BreakerD wrote: First of all I have to say that I still cant believe they dont consider Jaedong a bonjwas I mean wtf does the man have to do? He has won 5 SL. Dominated and destroyed some of the best. Gotta admit the game is balance. The only imbalance thing about BW is TERRAN TURTLE. That is probably the most dreadful thing out there, we've seen Flash come back from the point of rape and win with terran turtle. JD has to consistently beat Flash and Bisu for a period of time. He hasn't beat Bisu since 2009 IIRC. Even when him and flash were winning everything, Flash was handing his ass to on a platter so he could kiss it good-bye. The main problem with the OP arguement is that there is Pre FFE PvZ and Post FFE PvZ. Since Pre FFE PvZ was so heavily zerg favored, i imagine the the Post FFE PvZ is much closer to 50% if not more than 50%. This leaves TvZ as the black sheep because since the dawn of time, TvZ has always been Terran favored. Yellow < Xellos, Oov, Boxer, ... Savior was really only successful because the older generation out of their prime, while Flash not god yet. Jaedong < Flash (mostly), Light (a little bit), Skyhigh (this was silly) I did warn about talking about a single era changing everything, didn't I? The simple fact is, each era is only part of a larger trend. Zergs have found ways to cope with FFE and ways to abuse it, and protoss to counter that. Zergs have found amazing builds like 3BS->5HH that net serious ZvP advantage. But it all balances out. The fact that our sample is as big as it is allows us to compensate for skew in the long term. Trends go every way, but over 32k games, I think it's fair to assume that if a trend exists, the sample size is certainly large enough to show it.
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On May 17 2012 11:10 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On May 17 2012 11:05 Fyodor wrote:On March 29 2012 11:49 Lightwip wrote: Brood War is one of the most balanced games ever created. In fact, it may be the most balanced competitive game ever created, an amazing feat given the fact that the three races of Brood War are about as different from each other as they could possibly be. Indeed, the game is very well-balanced, and it's very hard to tell which race is superior when just starting to play. Yet, although it is hard to admit it for many fans of the game, there is one race which is clearly superior to them all. Meet Brood War's favorite child: Terran.
The introduction to your OP is so poorly thought out that I can't venture to read anything else. Let me loosely interpret it here: "Brood War is balanced. Brood War is balanced. Three different races but Brood War is balanced. Brood War is balanced. Races seem evely matched at first BUT... Brood War is clearly imbalanced. Meet Terran." It's just Schizophrenic. If we're nitpicking, I like whatever I wrote more than anything with a typo, that's for sure. It's not nitpicking, if you can't present your post in a cohesive, intelligent way then you don't offer any incentive to read more. You clearly contradicted yourself in the first paragraph...
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Poor Bisu He's not getting enough credit for being the best player in the world. He's absolutely amazing, with plenty of his fans to bash on other "scrubs" whenever possible. I'm sure he is proud.
All players are on the same level in terms of skill....wait All players flipped coins to choose their race....wait Statistics explain everything....wait
Bisu should play better, or just quit because he is just not good enough to overcome the imbalance in starcraft. Or, everyone should have ~50% winrate! That's perfectly balanced! :D Never respect a player in broodwar, because it's all about luck and imbalance. What a terrible game. Why did I bother watching this stupid game for +4 years? Such a waste of time.
High risk, high reward? Wait, Bisu must be terrible at starcraft then! He picked the easy race! What a shame!
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On May 17 2012 11:50 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On May 17 2012 11:42 Release wrote:On May 17 2012 11:20 BreakerD wrote: First of all I have to say that I still cant believe they dont consider Jaedong a bonjwas I mean wtf does the man have to do? He has won 5 SL. Dominated and destroyed some of the best. Gotta admit the game is balance. The only imbalance thing about BW is TERRAN TURTLE. That is probably the most dreadful thing out there, we've seen Flash come back from the point of rape and win with terran turtle. JD has to consistently beat Flash and Bisu for a period of time. He hasn't beat Bisu since 2009 IIRC. Even when him and flash were winning everything, Flash was handing his ass to on a platter so he could kiss it good-bye. The main problem with the OP arguement is that there is Pre FFE PvZ and Post FFE PvZ. Since Pre FFE PvZ was so heavily zerg favored, i imagine the the Post FFE PvZ is much closer to 50% if not more than 50%. This leaves TvZ as the black sheep because since the dawn of time, TvZ has always been Terran favored. Yellow < Xellos, Oov, Boxer, ... Savior was really only successful because the older generation out of their prime, while Flash not god yet. Jaedong < Flash (mostly), Light (a little bit), Skyhigh (this was silly) I did warn about talking about a single era changing everything, didn't I? The simple fact is, each era is only part of a larger trend. Zergs have found ways to cope with FFE and ways to abuse it, and protoss to counter that. Zergs have found amazing builds like 3BS->5HH that net serious ZvP advantage. But it all balances out. The fact that our sample is as big as it is allows us to compensate for skew in the long term. Trends go every way, but over 32k games, I think it's fair to assume that if a trend exists, the sample size is certainly large enough to show it.
Honestly beside Flash and Bisu, I don't see any other player set up trends in the metagame in the past 3 years. And the last person to do so was JD with Crazy Zerg. Stork have sort of tried to shift the way of playing PvZ with off the wall 1 base play but no one else really followed suit. If Protoss players really tried to mix things up with occational old school pre FFE, Zergs would have to be extra cautious of Hydra busting.
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On May 17 2012 12:10 Eun_Star wrote:Poor Bisu He's not getting enough credit for being the best player in the world. He's absolutely amazing, with plenty of his fans to bash on other "scrubs" whenever possible. I'm sure he is proud. All players are on the same level in terms of skill....wait All players flipped coins to choose their race....wait Statistics explain everything....wait Bisu should play better, or just quit because he is just not good enough to overcome the imbalance in starcraft. Or, everyone should have ~50% winrate! That's perfectly balanced! :D Never respect a player in broodwar, because it's all about luck and imbalance. What a terrible game. Why did I bother watching this stupid game for +4 years? Such a waste of time. High risk, high reward? Wait, Bisu must be terrible at starcraft then! He picked the easy race! What a shame!
Sadly, when you reach Bisu's level of gaming, Protoss isn't a good race to work with. It's an uphill battle on both sides
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On May 17 2012 12:11 Xiphos wrote:Show nested quote +On May 17 2012 11:50 Lightwip wrote:On May 17 2012 11:42 Release wrote:On May 17 2012 11:20 BreakerD wrote: First of all I have to say that I still cant believe they dont consider Jaedong a bonjwas I mean wtf does the man have to do? He has won 5 SL. Dominated and destroyed some of the best. Gotta admit the game is balance. The only imbalance thing about BW is TERRAN TURTLE. That is probably the most dreadful thing out there, we've seen Flash come back from the point of rape and win with terran turtle. JD has to consistently beat Flash and Bisu for a period of time. He hasn't beat Bisu since 2009 IIRC. Even when him and flash were winning everything, Flash was handing his ass to on a platter so he could kiss it good-bye. The main problem with the OP arguement is that there is Pre FFE PvZ and Post FFE PvZ. Since Pre FFE PvZ was so heavily zerg favored, i imagine the the Post FFE PvZ is much closer to 50% if not more than 50%. This leaves TvZ as the black sheep because since the dawn of time, TvZ has always been Terran favored. Yellow < Xellos, Oov, Boxer, ... Savior was really only successful because the older generation out of their prime, while Flash not god yet. Jaedong < Flash (mostly), Light (a little bit), Skyhigh (this was silly) I did warn about talking about a single era changing everything, didn't I? The simple fact is, each era is only part of a larger trend. Zergs have found ways to cope with FFE and ways to abuse it, and protoss to counter that. Zergs have found amazing builds like 3BS->5HH that net serious ZvP advantage. But it all balances out. The fact that our sample is as big as it is allows us to compensate for skew in the long term. Trends go every way, but over 32k games, I think it's fair to assume that if a trend exists, the sample size is certainly large enough to show it. Honestly beside Flash and Bisu, I don't see any other player set up trends in the metagame in the past 3 years. And the last person to do so was JD with Crazy Zerg. Stork have sort of tried to shift the way of playing PvZ with off the wall 1 base play but no one else really followed suit. If Protoss players really tried to mix things up with occational old school pre FFE, Zergs would have to be extra cautious of Hydra busting. Setting trends is only part of it. Many innovations come and go in every matchup without ever really getting their time of day. They certainly do have a lasting effect, but they just get buried over time. It's just that because they're so quickly integrated into improving normal play, it's hard to see their effect so clearly, even if it's there. That helps balance things out over a long period of time to the point that you can start looking for long-term trends.
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On May 17 2012 12:15 Lightwip wrote:Show nested quote +On May 17 2012 12:11 Xiphos wrote:On May 17 2012 11:50 Lightwip wrote:On May 17 2012 11:42 Release wrote:On May 17 2012 11:20 BreakerD wrote: First of all I have to say that I still cant believe they dont consider Jaedong a bonjwas I mean wtf does the man have to do? He has won 5 SL. Dominated and destroyed some of the best. Gotta admit the game is balance. The only imbalance thing about BW is TERRAN TURTLE. That is probably the most dreadful thing out there, we've seen Flash come back from the point of rape and win with terran turtle. JD has to consistently beat Flash and Bisu for a period of time. He hasn't beat Bisu since 2009 IIRC. Even when him and flash were winning everything, Flash was handing his ass to on a platter so he could kiss it good-bye. The main problem with the OP arguement is that there is Pre FFE PvZ and Post FFE PvZ. Since Pre FFE PvZ was so heavily zerg favored, i imagine the the Post FFE PvZ is much closer to 50% if not more than 50%. This leaves TvZ as the black sheep because since the dawn of time, TvZ has always been Terran favored. Yellow < Xellos, Oov, Boxer, ... Savior was really only successful because the older generation out of their prime, while Flash not god yet. Jaedong < Flash (mostly), Light (a little bit), Skyhigh (this was silly) I did warn about talking about a single era changing everything, didn't I? The simple fact is, each era is only part of a larger trend. Zergs have found ways to cope with FFE and ways to abuse it, and protoss to counter that. Zergs have found amazing builds like 3BS->5HH that net serious ZvP advantage. But it all balances out. The fact that our sample is as big as it is allows us to compensate for skew in the long term. Trends go every way, but over 32k games, I think it's fair to assume that if a trend exists, the sample size is certainly large enough to show it. Honestly beside Flash and Bisu, I don't see any other player set up trends in the metagame in the past 3 years. And the last person to do so was JD with Crazy Zerg. Stork have sort of tried to shift the way of playing PvZ with off the wall 1 base play but no one else really followed suit. If Protoss players really tried to mix things up with occational old school pre FFE, Zergs would have to be extra cautious of Hydra busting. Setting trends is only part of it. Many innovations come and go in every matchup without ever really getting their time of day. They certainly do have a lasting effect, but they just get buried over time. It's just that because they're so quickly integrated into improving normal play, it's hard to see their effect so clearly, even if it's there. That helps balance things out over a long period of time to the point that you can start looking for long-term trends.
Honestly I thought the ZvZ hive shenanigans we saw over a year ago was there to stay with more and more Zerg players attempting to think outside of the box. But alas t'was not meant to be.
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On May 17 2012 12:11 Xiphos wrote:Show nested quote +On May 17 2012 11:50 Lightwip wrote:On May 17 2012 11:42 Release wrote:On May 17 2012 11:20 BreakerD wrote: First of all I have to say that I still cant believe they dont consider Jaedong a bonjwas I mean wtf does the man have to do? He has won 5 SL. Dominated and destroyed some of the best. Gotta admit the game is balance. The only imbalance thing about BW is TERRAN TURTLE. That is probably the most dreadful thing out there, we've seen Flash come back from the point of rape and win with terran turtle. JD has to consistently beat Flash and Bisu for a period of time. He hasn't beat Bisu since 2009 IIRC. Even when him and flash were winning everything, Flash was handing his ass to on a platter so he could kiss it good-bye. The main problem with the OP arguement is that there is Pre FFE PvZ and Post FFE PvZ. Since Pre FFE PvZ was so heavily zerg favored, i imagine the the Post FFE PvZ is much closer to 50% if not more than 50%. This leaves TvZ as the black sheep because since the dawn of time, TvZ has always been Terran favored. Yellow < Xellos, Oov, Boxer, ... Savior was really only successful because the older generation out of their prime, while Flash not god yet. Jaedong < Flash (mostly), Light (a little bit), Skyhigh (this was silly) I did warn about talking about a single era changing everything, didn't I? The simple fact is, each era is only part of a larger trend. Zergs have found ways to cope with FFE and ways to abuse it, and protoss to counter that. Zergs have found amazing builds like 3BS->5HH that net serious ZvP advantage. But it all balances out. The fact that our sample is as big as it is allows us to compensate for skew in the long term. Trends go every way, but over 32k games, I think it's fair to assume that if a trend exists, the sample size is certainly large enough to show it. Honestly beside Flash and Bisu, I don't see any other player set up trends in the metagame in the past 3 years. And the last person to do so was JD with Crazy Zerg. Stork have sort of tried to shift the way of playing PvZ with off the wall 1 base play but no one else really followed suit. If Protoss players really tried to mix things up with occational old school pre FFE, Zergs would have to be extra cautious of Hydra busting. Crazy Zerg was from the Zerg twins and Kwanro, not Jaedong.
and lol @ not giving respect to Jaedong's contribution to ZvZ (everything changed).
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On May 17 2012 11:20 BreakerD wrote: First of all I have to say that I still cant believe they dont consider Jaedong a bonjwas I mean wtf does the man have to do? He has won 5 SL. Dominated and destroyed some of the best. Gotta admit the game is balance. The only imbalance thing about BW is TERRAN TURTLE. That is probably the most dreadful thing out there, we've seen Flash come back from the point of rape and win with terran turtle.
The reason why not is that bonjwa means you are totally undisputed. If a logical argument can be made that someone is as good as you, then you aren't bonjwa. At the start of JD's career that somebody was Flash. Then when Flash started to slump Protoss had a great time with wins in, for example, Incruit OSL and ClubDay MSL (I think that's the one Bisu won around late 08/early 09 or so... this computer is lagging a bit so I'm not gonna double check on TLPD). So with Protoss winning the tournaments, JD couldn't be called the undisputed best. Then JD started winning the tournaments again, peaking at around August 09, but again he fell into rivalry, now with Fantasy who he beat in OSL 3-2 but lost twice to in the PL finals, and as soon as that got cleared up and JD looked to be crowned 5th bonjwa at Nate MSL, Flash was now dominating and JD's win over Flash suffered from the controversy of the blackout. Fans didn't really consider JD the better player, especially when Flash went on to dominate him later in convincing fashion.
Probably he should have been crowned anyway, controversy or no. July's run could also be compared. In fact, the term bonjwa was first used by July's fans, but most fans could not acknowledge July as bonjwa when he lost 3-0 to NaDa and 3-0 to Oov in 2 of his 4 consecutive (?) OSL finals apperances during 04-05.
Stork, Bisu, Fantasy, and Nal_Ra are all examples of players who were/are great but don't fit the bill at all since they could not/cannot be considered undisputed. That's a title earned over a long period of domination in which you are acknowledged as having no equal.
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Honestly why Lightwip hasn't been banned yet is a mystery to me, he has been trolling and starting flame wars ever since I came to TL. I don't seem to remember him bitching about Terran at the start, I think he was just another annoying Bisu fanboy. Someone should check to see if he's another alternate account of AzureEye.
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On May 17 2012 13:13 writer22816 wrote: Honestly why Lightwip hasn't been banned yet is a mystery to me, he has been trolling and starting flame wars ever since I came to TL. I don't seem to remember him bitching about Terran at the start, I think he was just another annoying Bisu fanboy. Someone should check to see if he's another alternate account of AzureEye.
You're advocating someone being banned because they saying facts about your race that you don't like. It wasn't a flame war until people like you came along; it's a legit discussion about bonjwas and their statistics. All the bonjwas have been Terrans except Savior, that's a fact, not an opinion. Thank you for trying to backseat moderate
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On May 17 2012 13:40 GhostOwl wrote:Show nested quote +On May 17 2012 13:13 writer22816 wrote: Honestly why Lightwip hasn't been banned yet is a mystery to me, he has been trolling and starting flame wars ever since I came to TL. I don't seem to remember him bitching about Terran at the start, I think he was just another annoying Bisu fanboy. Someone should check to see if he's another alternate account of AzureEye. You're advocating someone being banned because they saying facts about your race that you don't like. It wasn't a flame war until people like you came along; it's a legit discussion about bonjwas and their statistics. All the bonjwas have been Terrans except Savior, that's a fact, not an opinion. Thank you for trying to backseat moderate
Err...I get the feeling that this guy has known Lightwip for far longer and is not basing his complaints on this thread alone.
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On May 17 2012 13:40 GhostOwl wrote:Show nested quote +On May 17 2012 13:13 writer22816 wrote: Honestly why Lightwip hasn't been banned yet is a mystery to me, he has been trolling and starting flame wars ever since I came to TL. I don't seem to remember him bitching about Terran at the start, I think he was just another annoying Bisu fanboy. Someone should check to see if he's another alternate account of AzureEye. You're advocating someone being banned because they saying facts about your race that you don't like. It wasn't a flame war until people like you came along; it's a legit discussion about bonjwas and their statistics. All the bonjwas have been Terrans except Savior, that's a fact, not an opinion. Thank you for trying to backseat moderate
Check his post history. For someone with such high post count, he is definitely a bad example to newcomers + etc (not that the newbies are stupid enough to follow his example, but it's definitely irritating. Not to mention, the only reason I hate Bisu is because of Lightwip. Bisu's a great player, Lightwip is not doing a right job as a fan. I'm not going to argue against that. I can understand why he isn't being banned though, since he is active and his posts tend to stay near the borderline. By quantity of his trolling + flame baits, yes, it's a mystery. "facts about your race that you don't like." A fact? Look at the flaws of his so called "statistics." This is definitely an example of how NOT to use statistics. Don't become Lightwip #2. You're dangerously close to becoming one.
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While it's nice enough to hear others talk about me, I actually made this thread to discuss the issues that are addressed in the OP, not to have baseless flame wars, as a few of you are intent on having. I would appreciate if you did not derail a legitimate discussion with flame wars.
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On May 17 2012 13:13 writer22816 wrote: Honestly why Lightwip hasn't been banned yet is a mystery to me, he has been trolling and starting flame wars ever since I came to TL. I don't seem to remember him bitching about Terran at the start, I think he was just another annoying Bisu fanboy. Someone should check to see if he's another alternate account of AzureEye. Ironic that you post this when you come in here to try to trash my thread. I bumped this to supplement my analysis after concerns about its effectiveness were brought up by Keone, Mortality, and the like. In any case, it's a legitimate analysis with proof for my position. You, on the other hand, come in here with the sole purpose of derailing a legitimate discussion. Needless to say, I don't really appreciate that. If I made this in such a way that was an obvious flame bait, you might have had a point. But If you read my post, you'd see that I tried to make it as objective as possible.
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I don't buy it. Sure the statistics sort of make sense, but I don't see how that shows that terran is imbalanced, that just shows that terran players have historically had higher winrates. And I know you said that outliers such as Flash would be irrelevant in thousands of games, but really if there are a lot of terran players with high winrates that could actually be because of 2 reasons: 1) terran is a better race or 2) the higher-skilled players happen to have chosen terran. And I don't think through a method like this you could show which of these two it could be. You also mention that you don't think its because of one unit that terran wins more, but because of a greater number of options that terran has. But you have shown no math to prove any such claim. I don't think you could either, unless you were to come up with some way of testing it and then watching thousands of VODS for data. But I don't know statistics, so maybe I'm just completely wrong.
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Hmm... I wonder if adding Collosi and banelings would even out the winrates
Just kidding! Don't hang me! Or if you do hang me, don't do it for that comment! Twas just a joke
My main problem with the graph is metagame bias. For example, since flash is KT's ace player, he not only wins more games (as Terran) but he also gets sent out more often as the clutch play in Proleague. Whenever KT *needs* to send someone out there--they'll choose Flash if they can.
Also, there needs to be cut off points. Boxer, Nada, oov owning their metagames holds ZERO relevance to the current metagames. And vice versa. You kind of need to break up the stats into 4-5 different versions split by time periods, bonjwas, ace matches, etc....
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A lot of OSLs and MSLs were on crappy maps or Yellow and Reach would've had like 5 more titles between them. Terran imba only exists in maps, not inherently in the race.
I still cringe at the "broodwar's favored child" line. I know a lot of it is tongue in cheek but it's a thin veil for your true intention considering how much you hate terrans.
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You bit off more than you can chew.
Your STA100 prof should have taught you biases better.
On March 29 2012 11:49 Lightwip wrote: I won't deny that I'm pretty biased on this subject, but I will try to avoid bias and justify my position through facts and numbers, not bias.
Let's start with bias. Quite simply, there is none. We're not using any data that could be skewed by any form of human tendencies because all these numbers are a fact.
I'd like to hear your thoughts and criticisms. Perhaps my logic, analysis, or numbers are somehow wrong. Please, point this out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inherent_bias
The term "inherent bias" refers to the effect of underlying factors or assumptions that skew viewpoints a subject under discussion. There are multiple formal definitions of "inherent bias" which depend on the particular field of study.
In statistics, the term is used in relation to an inability to measure accurately and directly what one would wish to measure, meaning that indirect measurements are used which might be subject to unknown distortions.
By claiming there are no biases, your whole "analysis" is thrown out the window. It is quite frankly very lol-worthy. I was skimming until I saw that you claimed this "supreme objectivity" of yours. Anywhoo if I read any more I bet I could find more, it's pretty embarrassing at this point.
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On May 18 2012 12:46 ThePurist wrote:You bit off more than you can chew. Your STA100 prof should have taught you biases better. Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 11:49 Lightwip wrote: I won't deny that I'm pretty biased on this subject, but I will try to avoid bias and justify my position through facts and numbers, not bias.
Let's start with bias. Quite simply, there is none. We're not using any data that could be skewed by any form of human tendencies because all these numbers are a fact.
I'd like to hear your thoughts and criticisms. Perhaps my logic, analysis, or numbers are somehow wrong. Please, point this out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inherent_biasThe term "inherent bias" refers to the effect of underlying factors or assumptions that skew viewpoints a subject under discussion. There are multiple formal definitions of "inherent bias" which depend on the particular field of study.
In statistics, the term is used in relation to an inability to measure accurately and directly what one would wish to measure, meaning that indirect measurements are used which might be subject to unknown distortions.By claiming there are no biases, your whole "analysis" is thrown out the window. It is quite frankly very lol-worthy. I was skimming until I saw that you claimed this "supreme objectivity" of yours. Anywhoo if I read any more I bet I could find more, it's pretty embarrassing at this point. By "bias" I refer to bias in the data. The data itself is not skewed in any way by human tendencies, only potentially my interpretation of it. And I also noted every point at which I think Icould be wrong, but that isn't a statistical bias.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_(statistics) A statistic is biased if it is calculated in such a way that is systematically different from the population parameter of interest.
Since all my data was collected from records and not from a survey, that would not induce any statistical bias.
You can argue about the method I used for creating a new model. I agree, it's a controversial, potentially completely misleading measure of success. However, it's not a form of bias in the results gathered, only in the analysis. I think it's pretty clear that I myself am biased, but the data is not.
On May 18 2012 11:16 lorkac wrote: My main problem with the graph is metagame bias. For example, since flash is KT's ace player, he not only wins more games (as Terran) but he also gets sent out more often as the clutch play in Proleague. Whenever KT *needs* to send someone out there--they'll choose Flash if they can.
Also, there needs to be cut off points. Boxer, Nada, oov owning their metagames holds ZERO relevance to the current metagames. And vice versa. You kind of need to break up the stats into 4-5 different versions split by time periods, bonjwas, ace matches, etc.... Don't forget that being used more often if they're better happens to all players of all races. Each race has enough players for it to balance out.
The bonjwa eras are actually relevant in that they help to show whether or not there is inherent terran imbalance. There's time periods that have gone T's way and times that have not. But over a long term, we can look at whether or not tendencies and trends exist.
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On March 29 2012 12:18 1a2a3aPro wrote:There are several potential points to object your analysis on. I will name only a few of them. Firstly, you are taking historical data from the beginning of Brood War. This is simply not fair. Pre-savior ZvT is in no resemblance to post-savior ZvT. The same can be said for mutalisk micro and stacking. Or the popularization of forge fast expansion builds against Zerg. These changes revolutionized a matchup that before this, was heavily favoured towards one race. These older changes add skew to the %s and distribution. The second point I want to make, is that just because the best players have been Terran, does not mean that Terran is the best race. The players growing up idolize and want to be like BoxeR, like NaDa, like oov. This causes a heavier skew on the ladder towards these races. It also causes there to be very good coaching for those respected races, from some of these players (I'm looking at you, oov). Finally, how much skew is there, really? Winning 16 in a row is ridiculous, and is not a fair judge of a players ability. A player with 70% across all matchups would not only be S class, they would be as good as Flash. This means a player can do WWLWWLWWLW, repeat, for their entire career, and always win Bo3s and have a great win rate in proleague. Why is it necessary to have such ridiculous streaks? I feel that you have some selection bias here, you are selecting a statistic that will of course heavily favour Terran, due to the volatility of PvP and ZvZ maches. Overall, I think this is "see great Terran players, infer Terran bias, find a way to make statistics work to my conclusion." 1) Terran destroyed for a long time before players figured out different things, adds skew. 2) The %s we are talking about are very, very minute. Compare these to a game like WC3, and you will see what I mean (a couple of races come out clearly better). 3) Your criteria of large win streak is not the characteristic of a bonjwa. Someone with a consistent 70-75% winrate would simply completely dominate the game. I will re-evaluate my #1 if you can prove the validity of this statement: Show nested quote +
1. There can be no complaints of a lucky season or an outlier player. The Six Dragons era is statistically insignificant. Swarm Season is statistically insignificant. Flash, Boxer, Oov, and Nada are also all statistically insignificant.
Over ANY 3-4 year period, these numbers are about equal. Savior's innovations, Nal_rA's innovations, etc. are all insignificant over time because all the other races are, in the long term, able to compensate for these differences. These statistics are not a relic of a pre-Savior past.
This criticism is actually quite constructive, since you can then do binning of the results based on these "eras."
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I appreciate the effort but one should do proper statistical/econometrical analysis to conclude anything and even then I would only take it as suggestive evidence.
There are many variable missing that one would like to control for. I think the best way to tackle the question would be running a probit regression: probability of winning a game on race, year, ability, age, team, experience. You want to control for the unobserved variables. Now we don't observe ability but maybe we can proxy for that using result in the first year of progaming or sth like that.
You want to control for year effect or at least allow for structural breaks. This is because as discussed a lot in this thread the balance definitely shitfs over time. I would expect that there would be significant difference pre- and post-savior.
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On May 17 2012 10:46 Lightwip wrote: I updated the OP with a lot more analysis and reasoning in response to the criticisms in here. I hope my argument is a bit more convincing now to those who weren't really sure before.
A few problems I have with the new sections (at least what I think are the new sections, I don't rightly remember what is new and old).
1) You seed your hypothetical starleague with data obtained from Proleague + Individual leagues. I would like to be convinced of the equivalence of the data.
2) Use of binomial distribution in the hypothetical starleague. Binomial distribution relies on the independence of the tests (events). This simply isn't so, aside from the fact that there are multiple players playing there's also the fact that what one player does in one game impacts the strategies used in the next. I can't tell you what to use instead, but I can tell you that you shouldn't use the binomial distribution.
3) While no bias was exercised in the calculations performed the choice of start date is a bias. If you start picking your data at a different points I would be exceptionally surprised if it always came back the same. 1.08 seems no more logical choice of a start date than any other paradigm shift in gameplay.
As for some additional comments:
You did attempt to move away from proleague to an analysis centered on individual leagues but otherwise you largely ignored my previous post (page 6). Disregarding balance as a function of time and player skill makes everything largely irrelevant. As an anecdotal parallel I contest that the current superpower of the world is the UK because they were the world superpower from 1600-1850, that's more time than the US has been founded! The time dependence I understand and can work on, but the player skill is a giant question mark.
Edit: Or Lebesgue could totally beat me to the punch.
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Actually TvP is balanced. If competent TvP player is on the line, Protoss have a really hard time against Terran. I still argue that before inventing "modern style" late TvZ, play against a Zerg was quite balanced as well. Terran had advantage on mid game, but when late game started, the ultralisks and defilers came, and if terran was not carefull with his vessel cloud, he was easily raped by streams of cheap zerg units. Old time late TvZ was played with advantage of a zerg player. And we have many Zerg multi-champions like July, Savior, JD and some lesser champions like ggplay, Calm or Effort.
But than terrans started to "rebalance" the late game with much more mech-heavy style of late play, and additionally maps were not in Zergs favor as well. this put an end to quite balanced play and Zerg champions slauther has started. The culmination of this was Bigfile OSL, when all best Zergs of the Era- Effort, Calm and finally Jeadong were all brutally slauthered by terrans (3 terrans in semis with only 1 Zerg, and JD still had a really hard time with Light). Still, Zergs remain the most overrepresented race in semi-finals in whole history of Brood War.
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On May 18 2012 23:45 hitthat wrote: Actually TvP is balanced. If competent TvP player is on the line, Protoss have a really hard time against Terran. I still argue that before inventing "modern style" late TvZ, play against a Zerg was quite balanced as well. Terran had advantage on mid game, but when late game started, the ultralisks and defilers came, and if terran was not carefull with his vessel cloud, he was easily raped by streams of cheap zerg units. Old time late TvZ was played with advantage of a zerg player. And we have many Zerg multi-champions like July, Savior, JD and some lesser champions like ggplay, Calm or Effort.
But than terrans started to "rebalance" the late game with much more mech-heavy style of late play, and additionally maps were not in Zergs favor as well. this put an end to quite balanced play and Zerg champions slauther has started. The culmination of this was Bigfile OSL, when all best Zergs of the Era- Effort, Calm and finally Jeadong were all brutally slauthered by terrans (3 terrans in semis with only 1 Zerg, and JD still had a really hard time with Light). Still, Zergs remain the most overrepresented race in semi-finals in whole history of Brood War. EVERY proleague since 2005 has had T advantage in TVZ.hardly a new thing. and i dont count older ones because of small sample size making it dubious to judge by, but probably was true then too.
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On May 18 2012 23:50 storkfan wrote: EVERY proleague since 2005 has had T advantage in TVZ.hardly a new thing. and i dont count older ones because of small sample size making it dubious to judge by, but probably was true then too.
So many Zerg golds in 2007-2010 are hard to explain other way that this matchup was quite balanced OR the maps were horrible for terrans. In 2009 we had a freaking marathon of ZvZ semis.
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I'd be more interested in a statistical analysis of the first 1-2 rounds of each individual league.
Once you get past the first few rounds the winners of the early rounds start counting for double or triple the value of those who lost in the early round meaning a player like Flash would give +5-6 data points to terran but some guy who lost in the first round would only give one data point.
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On May 18 2012 23:58 lorkac wrote: I'd be more interested in a statistical analysis of the first 1-2 rounds of each individual league.
Once you get past the first few rounds the winners of the early rounds start counting for double or triple the value of those who lost in the early round meaning a player like Flash would give +5-6 data points to terran but some guy who lost in the first round would only give one data point. exactly. and this is why regular format proleague is the best metric of overall balance situation. And it tends to confirm - terran has had the upper hand over zerg consistently for the past 8+ years
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On May 19 2012 00:11 storkfan wrote:Show nested quote +On May 18 2012 23:58 lorkac wrote: I'd be more interested in a statistical analysis of the first 1-2 rounds of each individual league.
Once you get past the first few rounds the winners of the early rounds start counting for double or triple the value of those who lost in the early round meaning a player like Flash would give +5-6 data points to terran but some guy who lost in the first round would only give one data point. exactly. and this is why regular format proleague is the best metric of overall balance situation. And it tends to confirm - terran has had the upper hand over zerg consistently for the past 8+ years
But this also inclueds loses/wins in matches of horrible/mediocre players, what single handly crashes the statistics. And in my opinion it was 2010 that draw the line. 2009 was incredible for Zerg players.
And also Terran always had 1 major advantage over Zerg- he had much bigger variety of strats.
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performance is performance.
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A very interesting read. I think a lot of the feedback in this thread has also been on the nose. Of course, there's a bigger conceputal question beyond the statistics themselves - the final leap from "Terran players win more" to "Terran is imbalanced." I apologize of much of what follows seems self-evident, but I think it is important to explicate in terms of discussing the logic linking the statistical work to the ultimate conclusion.
A lot of this hinges on how one defines "imbalance," or, more properly, "balance." Imbalance is one of those wierd concepts (like darkness or evil) that is defined primarily in opposition to something that actually exists - i.e., balance. I think that, when most people talk about RTS game balance, they are talking about a game in which the player who exhibits the most skill in a particular match wins the match. RTS games are meant to be contests of skill, in which players pit their talent and training head-to-head, under the assumption that one player will play better than the other and thus win. Therefore, having a game that is balanced - that is, a game where when one plays with greater skill, one wins - is literally the entire point of having an RTS. Factors mitigating against such balance could be different sets of units (one race's units give the players of that race an unfair advantage, allowing those who play with less skill to overcome those with greater skill) or different maps (a certain map allows those who play with less skill to overcome those with greater skill). In any event, these elements of imbalance are ultimately bad for the game, since they mitigate against what ought to be the central issue - that is, the skill of the players involved.
This explication of what constitutes "balance" offers two challenges for the conclusion that Terran is imbalanced, aside from any questions of statistical validity. Assume for a moment that, laying aside all of the questions of history and trends and statistics, we accept the analysis that Terran players win more than non-Terran players. What remains, then, is to demonstrate that Terran players win more than non-Terran players because Terran units are more powerful than non-Terran units. In the end, it is this hypothesis that is the primary issue, and it is a hypothesis whose validity is nowhere addressed in the statistical analysis in question. Alternate hypotheses remain, with equal validity, to explain higher Terran winrates; to whit:
1) Terran players win more than non-Terran players because the map pool has consistently favored Terran players over non-Terran players
2) Terran players win more than non-Terran players because, on average, Terran players play with higher skill than non-Terran players.
Thus, even if Terran players win more than non-Terran players, it remains to be demonstrated that Terran players win more than non-Terran players because they play Terran. I look forward to seeing further analysis in the future to try to demonstrate this fact, if the OP decides it's worth pursuing.
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On May 19 2012 00:16 hitthat wrote:Show nested quote +On May 19 2012 00:11 storkfan wrote:On May 18 2012 23:58 lorkac wrote: I'd be more interested in a statistical analysis of the first 1-2 rounds of each individual league.
Once you get past the first few rounds the winners of the early rounds start counting for double or triple the value of those who lost in the early round meaning a player like Flash would give +5-6 data points to terran but some guy who lost in the first round would only give one data point. exactly. and this is why regular format proleague is the best metric of overall balance situation. And it tends to confirm - terran has had the upper hand over zerg consistently for the past 8+ years But this also inclueds loses/wins in matches of horrible/mediocre players, what single handly crashes the statistics. And in my opinion it was 2010 that draw the line. 2009 was incredible for Zerg players. And also Terran always had 1 major advantage over Zerg- he had much bigger variety of strats. why is it bad to have lower tier players in the statistics? In fact its good! You want the player frequency over skill, map etc range to be uniform in order to get an unbiased sample set. Proleague is pretty good at offering this. Starleagues are terrible.
2009 wasnt incredible for zerg, look at proleague stats for the year, TvZ was terran favoured like every year.
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On May 18 2012 23:56 hitthat wrote:Show nested quote +On May 18 2012 23:50 storkfan wrote: EVERY proleague since 2005 has had T advantage in TVZ.hardly a new thing. and i dont count older ones because of small sample size making it dubious to judge by, but probably was true then too. So many Zerg golds in 2007-2010 are hard to explain other way that this matchup was quite balanced OR the maps were horrible for terrans. In 2009 we had a freaking marathon of ZvZ semis. starleagues are a small and very biased sample set, it can have lots of different reasons why, and cannot be justified for overall balance arguments
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On May 19 2012 05:12 storkfan wrote:Show nested quote +On May 18 2012 23:56 hitthat wrote:On May 18 2012 23:50 storkfan wrote: EVERY proleague since 2005 has had T advantage in TVZ.hardly a new thing. and i dont count older ones because of small sample size making it dubious to judge by, but probably was true then too. So many Zerg golds in 2007-2010 are hard to explain other way that this matchup was quite balanced OR the maps were horrible for terrans. In 2009 we had a freaking marathon of ZvZ semis. starleagues are a small and very biased sample set, it can have lots of different reasons why, and cannot be justified for overall balance arguments
Why? It counts as well as loses of players poor in specific matchups. IMO true ballance is showed, when the very best players play, cuz they know how to use at last 90% of true potencial of their perspective race.
Off course you can argue that Fantasy, who have relatively weaker TvZ, have nice record also in this MU (even compared to some ZvT players considered good, like Zero). But also he started to win like crazy against Zerg in mid 2010, when I said was a "breaking" date. Before that, he was quite succesfull, but not consistent.
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On May 19 2012 05:11 storkfan wrote:Show nested quote +On May 19 2012 00:16 hitthat wrote:On May 19 2012 00:11 storkfan wrote:On May 18 2012 23:58 lorkac wrote: I'd be more interested in a statistical analysis of the first 1-2 rounds of each individual league.
Once you get past the first few rounds the winners of the early rounds start counting for double or triple the value of those who lost in the early round meaning a player like Flash would give +5-6 data points to terran but some guy who lost in the first round would only give one data point. exactly. and this is why regular format proleague is the best metric of overall balance situation. And it tends to confirm - terran has had the upper hand over zerg consistently for the past 8+ years But this also inclueds loses/wins in matches of horrible/mediocre players, what single handly crashes the statistics. And in my opinion it was 2010 that draw the line. 2009 was incredible for Zerg players. And also Terran always had 1 major advantage over Zerg- he had much bigger variety of strats. why is it bad to have lower tier players in the statistics? In fact its good! You want the player frequency over skill, map etc range to be uniform in order to get an unbiased sample set. Proleague is pretty good at offering this. Starleagues are terrible. 2009 wasnt incredible for zerg, look at proleague stats for the year, TvZ was terran favoured like every year.
Hey, why don't we include ICCUP C+ and up statistics to the pro data we have collected. That will be even more data and give us more statistical power!
Only in the individual leagues do good players have to play on maps that disfavor them as well as those that favor them.
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Honestly if you dont see that terran is too strong and protoss is too weak i really think you got a problem and this thing is not going to encourage more people to play and watch the game if only one race can be big champion.This game is asymetricly unblanced believe or not..
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Lol? This game was far from balanced.
how about emp that takes away all shields in a far radius.
how about siege tanks vs toss? Toss cant do much vs them.
plague? yeah ok.
Oh and SC2 continues the races being completely different from each other. Roach, Maurader, Stalker is just one great example. They are way different from each other.
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serenity in chaos, balance in imbalance. sweet sweet BW.
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Terrans just too good, end of story. Seige Tanks all the way
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On May 18 2012 23:56 hitthat wrote: So many Zerg golds in 2007-2010 are hard to explain other way that this matchup was quite balanced OR the maps were horrible for terrans. In 2009 we had a freaking marathon of ZvZ semis.
I think Zergs overall started to reach a level of mechanics that made them much more effective, players started to make far better use of defilers, faster multitasking that could deal with game-ending situations like drops better, strategies like 2hatch muta being perfected etc. While obviously Terran's improved too, i think Zergs gained a better advantage from the skill jump, in the short term at least. Then all the crazy amount of mech variations started once the maps were right (fuck polaris rhapsody) and the Terran's got accustomed to dealing with the muta's and developed ways to abuse the modern Zerg. It takes a while for Terran to have to work out things like 'at time A you can surivive with as little as B'. That's why when new maps come out that look good for mech they don't actually use it right away for example, like on Electric Circuit. So gradually they started taking back the initiative and taking back control of the game flow away from Zerg, which led to the current situation.
And while you'd hope it went back the other way Zerg really doesn't have the same extent of options available, so we only got gimmick strats like queen&broodlings as development, and not a noticeable big jump in ZvT skill, if anything it sort of dropped. I think YarnC and Kwanro not being involved anymore was quite a loss, 2 of the best aggressive ZvTers. If there's more management style Zergs at the very top tier i think things start to shift in that direction as people obviously try to use what the successful players are doing. But prehaps T defensively is capable of handling any of that kind of style at this point.
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On May 20 2012 01:20 PurePwnageofTerran wrote: Terrans just too good, end of story. Seige Tanks all the way
did you srsly make an account just to rage at terrans?
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