Let me quickly apologize for my poor english in advance. I do not live in an english talking country and never found the motivation to learn the language well.
Lately I've been wanting to get certain questions answered. I've tried to on my own but been unsuccesful at answering them with anything but "imbalance". I write here in hopes of expanding on my insight in the game by having people with superior knowledge englightening me. I want to point out that this is not a crytopic, but a topic in which I make a series of observations and ask myself a logical question.
Firstly, I want to point out that I'm taking a mathematical approach to my question. This is not based on personal experinces but on observations and statistics.
The only available source to do statistic on at this moment is www.sc2ranks.com. The site updates the ladder standings constantly.
I decided to base my statistics on the most skilled players as the gap between the level of play by these players and what can be described as optimal play is the smallest.
With the newly introduced Grand Master League, it seems logical to base my statistics solely on grandmaster players. This should ensure a reasonable high avarage skilllevel
Top 10; 7 terrans, 2 zergs, 1 protoss Top 20; 12 terrans, 4 zergs, 4 protoss Top 30; 18 terrans, 6 zergs, 5 protoss, 1 random
For the point rankings, terran is taking; 70% of top 10 60% of top 20 46.66% of top 30
For the win% rankings, terran is taking 70% of top 10 65% of top 20 56.66% of top 30
My first hypothesis was that more people were playing terran in GM league. That would be a logical explanation, as there will naturally be a clear correlation between the amount of players playing each individual race and the percentages of each individual race in the top rankings. However, is this not the case. Here is the race distribution by league graph taken from sc2ranks.com:
There currently is 1638 players listed in GM. The distribution is: 2.6% random 38% protoss 30.3% terran 29% zerg
For those 1638 players, the avarage win% are: Random: 52% Protoss: 56.6% Terran: 57.8% Zerg: 56.3%
For those 1638 players, the avarage amount of points is: Random: 249 Protoss: 325 Terran: 353 Zerg: 335
Looking at the same distributions of only top 100 players in GM we now have; 1 random 33 protoss 41 terrans 26 zergs (You might recognize these numbers from before)
For those 100 players, the avarage win% is: Random; 74.1% Protoss; 66.6% Terran; 68.8% Zerg; 66.5%
For those 100 players, the avarage amount of points is: Random: 657 Protoss: 661 Terran: 683 Zerg: 668
As you can see, terran is once again dominant in every area.
Based on the above statistics, I feel safe to make the conclusion that terran is dominating the top of GM League in every way I could think of (if you have alternative angles to observe from, let me know). I want to point out that this is not a topic about balance/imbalance. I am looking at the statistics with objective eyes in hopes of finding an ALTERNATIVE answer to that.
Why does terran crush the top ladder?
EDIT: Replaced what should have been images with links. If anyone can tell me how to post pictures it would be nice.
they are the most resilient race to random strategies / attack timings?
Does this apply specifically to ladder games? In that case, how does the ladder map differ from those being used in tournaments like TSL, GSL, Dreamhack, NASL etc?
On April 26 2011 02:02 Shaetan wrote: You can't claim to do statistical analysis then just throw out numbers and claim that X is true, you have to do the analysis.
Can you examplify? I thought I did a decent job at showig a trend based on every aspect of the top of the ladder I could think of. I even specifically pointed out that I'd gladly look into more if anyone got ideas.
Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
On April 26 2011 02:04 JJH777 wrote: Nestea said this: Terran you can be good after only playing a little, protoss you have to work hard but once you do you are unbeatable race, zerg sad.
I think that fits those statistics decently.
I believe you are referring to this interview by Artosis;
As much as I like the quote, it does not have much relevance as I'm specifically seaching for alternative aswers to "imbalance".
On April 26 2011 02:04 JJH777 wrote: Nestea said this: Terran you can be good after only playing a little, protoss you have to work hard but once you do you are unbeatable race, zerg sad.
I think that fits those statistics decently.
Prob true, you would think that for a race "so op" that there would be more pro players tearing it up, but no, the only people at the top right now are people who have been playing this race since the dawn of time. Too much stuff to learn to play it well.
On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote: Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
In other words you're stating that for any given TvX matchup, the terran player will be much more likely to win asuming slightly superior skilllevel than what would be the case for PvX and ZvX matchups? Can you elaborate on this?
On April 26 2011 02:08 lilky wrote: So basically... Races in order of most played to least played: Protoss, Terran, Zerg
Races in the Top (Insert any number here) in order of most to least: Terran, Zerg, Protoss
TLDR: Protoss is underpowered.. WHAT?!?!?!!?!?!?
Correct, that's my overall conclusion based on the observations I made and I'm open for expanding on those observations if anyone thinks I'm being biased.
they are the most resilient race to random strategies / attack timings?
Does this apply specifically to ladder games? In that case, how does the ladder map differ from those being used in tournaments like TSL, GSL, Dreamhack, NASL etc?
Well yea these would apply mostly to ladder games. MVP said that terran was the weakest race in GSL maps because of the large rush distances and lack of early game aggression which is where the terran race excels at.
On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote: Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
QFT. I think this explains a lot towards terran being ahead in terms of all races, since it has the most explored and least volatile mirror matchup. In TvT, moreso than any other mirror, the better player tends to win.
In tournaments you usually have a bo3 or bo5 format, whereas on the ladder almost all games are bo1 with minimal metagame or knowledge of your opponent. A terran may excel in a bo1 format (for whatever reason), whereas a protoss or zerg may be stronger in a bo1 < bo[x] format?
On April 26 2011 02:00 buldermar wrote: Firstly, I want to point out that I'm taking a mathematical approach to my question.
(...)
Based on the above statistics, I feel safe to make the conclusion that terran is dominating the top of GM League in every way I could think of.
If you really want to take a mathematical approach, you should work out some p-values before coming with a conclusion, or nobody will take you seriously.
On April 26 2011 02:02 Shaetan wrote: You can't claim to do statistical analysis then just throw out numbers and claim that X is true, you have to do the analysis.
Can you examplify? I thought I did a decent job at showig a trend based on every aspect of the top of the ladder I could think of. I even specifically pointed out that I'd gladly look into more if anyone got ideas.
You need to show that the difference you see is statistically significant and not just due to chance. You said yourself when looking at a sample size of ~1600 win rates were much more even so it's possible decreasing your sample size artificially created the disparity. Also not sure why you wouldn't look at the full 200 or at least all GM league top 100.
On April 26 2011 02:12 Cryllic wrote: Well yea these would apply mostly to ladder games. MVP said that terran was the weakest race in GSL maps because of the large rush distances and lack of early game aggression which is where the terran race excels at.
This is true. Especially if some people try to imitate builds that they are going to play on the bigger GSL maps on the smaller ladder maps, it can be very easy to randomly lose games against Terran.
On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote: Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
In other words you're stating that for any given TvX matchup, the terran player will be much more likely to win asuming slightly superior skilllevel than what would be the case for PvX and ZvX matchups? Can you elaborate on this?
He's saying TvT more dynamic than other mirror matchups. Although I'd say ZvZ is similar. PvP is pigeonholed into 4gate.
But I'd say mirrors moreso than other matchups let the best player win since "imbalance" is nonsensical.
On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote: Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
That's how MC has above 90% win rate in PvP, right?. For sure it isn't 50/50, the best player will have the upper hand. A good player must be good in all matchups, and you can't say that PvP win is based on luck. Even then it's only 1/3 of all the matchups, even if it puts the win ratio closer to 50% it shouldn't affect as much as we see. Protoss from being the most played race, yet having the least players in top.
First, the sample size of [top10] or [top30] is not big enough that you would expect it to be equal in the absence of imbalance. Over a thousand players, you can safely assume that the distributions of skill and race choice are independent. However, with ten players it's not unreasonable that there are just more Terran players of high skill.
Additionally, this assumes that winning enough on ladder to get into the top ten is dependent only on skill and game balance, whereas I think that luck is also involved; it's easy to imagine a player whose skill is #3 losing a lot of points in a BO loss to a player whose skill is #150.
Honestly OP, I just don't think you have enough data to say anything here.
On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote: Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
That's how MC has above 90% win rate in PvP, right?. For sure it isn't 50/50, the best player will have the upper hand. A good player must be good in all matchups, and you can't say that PvP win is based on luck. Even then it's only 1/3 of all the matchups, even if it puts the win ratio closer to 50% it shouldn't affect as much as we see. Protoss from being the most played race, yet having the least players in top.
MC is an extraordinarily good player, and outlier one may say :D. PvP is still very volatile in say low masters vs. high masters or even above that.
On April 26 2011 02:00 buldermar wrote: As you already might notice, top 6 spots is being occupied by terran players. However, a larger samplesize is required to show trends:
Top 10; 7 terrans, 2 zergs, 1 protoss Top 20; 12 terrans, 4 zergs, 3 protoss, 1 random Top 30; 14 terrans, 7 zergs, 8 protoss, 1 random Top 40; 16 terrans, 12 zergs, 11 protoss, 1 random Top 50; 23 terrans, 12 zergs, 14 protoss, 1 random Top 60; 27 terrans, 14 zergs, 18 protoss, 1 random Top 70; 31 terrans, 17 zergs, 21 protoss, 1 random Top 80; 34 terrans, 19 zergs, 26 protoss, 1 random Top 90; 37 terrans, 22 zergs, 30 protoss, 1 random Top 100; 41 terrans, 26 zergs, 33 protoss, 1 random
So based on this graph, over the course of the top 10 through top 100 players it actually seems fairly linear to me, the ratio of terran to protoss to zerg players at the top is consistent through these intervals which doesn't seem to suggest imbalance at all but would rather suggest that there are just more terran players.
I'm not sure why you're reading "more terran at every level" as "imbalanced" when its a linear progression at a relatively consistent ratio for all races through the top 100...
My first hypothesis was that more people were playing terran in GM league. That would be a logical explanation, as there will naturally be a clear correlation between the amount of players playing each individual race and the percentages of each individual race in the top rankings. However, is this not the case. Here is the race distribution by league graph taken from sc2ranks.com:
I don't like that you jump from "I'm going to only going to look at GM league because its the most accurate representation" to make your first point then switch straight to "looking at all the leagues to disprove a reasonable hypothesis".
There currently is 1638 players listed in GM. The distribution is: 2.6% random 38% protoss 30.3% terran 29% zerg
For those 1638 players, the avarage win% are: Random: 52% Protoss: 56.6% Terran: 57.8% Zerg: 56.3%
For those 1638 players, the avarage amount of points is: Random: 249 Protoss: 325 Terran: 353 Zerg: 335
Looking at the same distributions of only top 100 players in GM we now have; 1 random 33 protoss 41 terrans 26 zergs (You might recognize these numbers from before)
For those 100 players, the avarage win% is: Random; 74.1% Protoss; 66.6% Terran; 68.8% Zerg; 66.5%
For those 100 players, the avarage amount of points is: Random: 657 Protoss: 661 Terran: 683 Zerg: 668
As you can see, terran is once again dominant in every area.
All the win %'s are very close. The average number of points is very close, 15 points isn't a lot and as you've already stated, a large amount of top 10 is terrans which would easily skew this.
In short I'm not sure how these numbers give you the impression that terran is dominating in every area, a 2% higher win ratio isn't statistically significant even across 1638 players and all in all this last set of data actually looks pretty even across the board to me.
On April 26 2011 02:24 strongandbig wrote: First, the sample size of [top10] or [top30] is not big enough that you would expect it to be equal in the absence of imbalance. Over a thousand players, you can safely assume that the distributions of skill and race choice are independent. However, with ten players it's not unreasonable that there are just more Terran players of high skill.
Again, some genuine statistical analysis would quantify this for you. There's no need to go around guesstimating which sample sizes are big or small enough.
My opinion is that there are simply more pro terran players, nothing else and thus there are more of them in top 100. I mean just look at the EU ladder for GM league, there are like 15 terrans who are all top class players, and there is like only 4 top zerg players. Honestly i can name like 20 terrans and like 10-15 protosses who are considered top players but only like 5-6 zergs outside Korea.
I dont think the number of points is a good thing to analyze simply because the amount of points you get for a victory is somewhat undefined. Too much depends upon your opponents stats and the win-ratio is a much clearer stat which says more or less the same.
Generally I dont think any result of "more players of race X at the top" says anything about the state of the balance of the game. Even the top players chose their race a year ago and not many of them change race, so any of those who do change race will need some time to get to the top of the new race. Practice and experience keeps the same players at the top.
they are the most resilient race to random strategies / attack timings?
Does this apply specifically to ladder games? In that case, how does the ladder map differ from those being used in tournaments like TSL, GSL, Dreamhack, NASL etc?
On the ladder people tend to do random weird stuff that they come up with themselves alot more than what happens in tournaments. Sure there are some things in tournaments such as foxers mass marine, thorzains thorbuild, guineapigs void ray collosus etc, but in ladder there are a bunch more random attack timings, and if you're playing a resilient race that's easier to defend with, you're gonna come out on top alot more often. Also on the ladder you face new opponents every time, so a weird 15 minute proxy hatch (to make an example) can be very successful, whereas in a tournament bo5, you're simply not gonna win 3 games with the same cheesy (cheesy as in out right cheese, or just not solid) strategy.
TL;DR, Ladder = cheese, and terran's good at stopping cheese. The same cheddar doesn't work in a bo5.
On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote: Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
That's how MC has above 90% win rate in PvP, right?. For sure it isn't 50/50, the best player will have the upper hand. A good player must be good in all matchups, and you can't say that PvP win is based on luck. Even then it's only 1/3 of all the matchups, even if it puts the win ratio closer to 50% it shouldn't affect as much as we see. Protoss from being the most played race, yet having the least players in top.
MC is an extraordinarily good player, and outlier one may say :D. PvP is still very volatile in say low masters vs. high masters or even above that.
MC's micro is on an entirely different level than pretty much every other Protoss out there. As a Protoss player, I think Terran dominance has a lot to do with both the stability of Terran in regards to cheese and in regards to a mirror.
A Terran can wall in, repair the wall in, and defend the wall easiest of the three races. All their units are ranged, SCV repair is extremely powerful and efficient, and they can remove the wall with no cost.I think being the closest to cheese proof is a huge boost given the nature of ladder and those that play in it.
ZvZ and PvP are hugely oriented toward the Early to Mid (rarely) game. And even if they get past T1, the timings are thrown way off compared to standard play. TvT is helped by the weakness of the Marine against bunkers/an early Siege tank. All in all, I don't think Terrans are necessarily OP or any race UP, but as the metagame is figured out atm, they are definitely the most stable and able to play a diverse style.
There currently is 1638 players listed in GM. The distribution is: 2.6% random 38% protoss 30.3% terran 29% zerg
being a protoss player myself, it's a little hard to ignore how many protoss actually made it in to GM. considering this is the top 200 cumulative for each region it feels like your statistics are biased to make terran seem worse than they are. however, this may be due to the simple fact that more people play protoss? as far as terran dominating the ladder, i think it is due to the relative safety they have. zerg players must scout like hell, protoss players must adapt their composition, terran players can do the same build over and over again vs either race with relative safety. things like salvageable bunkers add to this, as many good players will opt for them when they are not sure.
On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote: Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
That's how MC has above 90% win rate in PvP, right?. For sure it isn't 50/50, the best player will have the upper hand. A good player must be good in all matchups, and you can't say that PvP win is based on luck. Even then it's only 1/3 of all the matchups, even if it puts the win ratio closer to 50% it shouldn't affect as much as we see. Protoss from being the most played race, yet having the least players in top.
Its not a coinflip par say unless youre of similar skill
MC is obviously leagues ahead in PvP similar to Jaedong vs Zerg or Flash vs Terran
On April 26 2011 02:04 JJH777 wrote: Nestea said this: Terran you can be good after only playing a little, protoss you have to work hard but once you do you are unbeatable race, zerg sad.
I think that fits those statistics decently.
I don't know about the terran part but the protoss part is true. When you have good enough forcefields you can make ZvP nightmare for Z
I think it has to do with : - the mappool is not as disfavored for terrans on ladder as the GSL/tournament's one is. - in BO1 that doesn't matter much, aka ladder, I'm sure a ton of ppl try some agressive / risky or even all-in strategies, and terrans are relatively safe in tvz, not so much in tvp (like the void ray pushes we have seen MC or Alicia do, and other stuff), and they can themselves do strats they can't do in bigger maps. - not sure about this one, but I heard pvp is volatile, and zvz a bit, whereas tvt is much much less volatile. - THIS IS LADDER (what I mean : MarineKing would be REALLY really happy if being 1st on ladder for the longest period a time gimmes you a title...)
Poopi has a lot of good reasons. Also, the best ladder players are not necessarily the best players in general. Winning a large number of Bo1s denotes skill, but not the most accurate measure of skill (which would probably be tournaments with bo3s and larger).
Terran is also probably the best race for Bo1s. They can easily adapt and can easily be aggressive. Someone said "most resilient to cheese," which is a good insight, too.
You can use this data to argue that Terran is the best race for the ladder, but the ladder is not the benchmark for ultimate skill, I think. Perhaps Protoss and Zerg are better for BoX matchups for some reason?
On April 26 2011 02:08 lilky wrote: So basically... Races in order of most played to least played: Protoss, Terran, Zerg
Races in the Top (Insert any number here) in order of most to least: Terran, Zerg, Protoss
TLDR: Protoss is underpowered.. WHAT?!?!?!!?!?!?
Correct, that's my overall conclusion based on the observations I made and I'm open for expanding on those observations if anyone thinks I'm being biased.
So what you're saying is this is a balance QQ with a clever 'statistical look' to it?
Someone lock this sham of a thread, you're not even using statistics correctly just listing out the fact there is more terran on top then toss or zerg. For any statistic to be truly significant the deviance needs to be high enough. Not to mention GM doesn't even represent loads of the actual top players, just the top players who ladder a lot. So there is plenty of margin for error in any statistical breakdown of the GM league.
On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote: Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
That's how MC has above 90% win rate in PvP, right?. For sure it isn't 50/50, the best player will have the upper hand. A good player must be good in all matchups, and you can't say that PvP win is based on luck. Even then it's only 1/3 of all the matchups, even if it puts the win ratio closer to 50% it shouldn't affect as much as we see. Protoss from being the most played race, yet having the least players in top.
Actually, that's exactly why he has such a high win rate. First, review any pro Protoss interview and see what they say about PvP. It is a rock/paper/scissors situation, but in MC's case, he knows how to do rock, paper, and scissors, and also knows often what his opponent is going to do. Someone who has such a high win % against people that are on par with him in a mirror can only suggest that there is more to the PvP mirror than just skill.
In TvT there are a few routes to take from the beginning of the game, making scouting information hints at what the opponent is doing. In ZvZ, there is still more than 1 option (from what I understand, you can bling or roach early game). In PvP, there is only 1 option: 4gate. Either you are 4gating, or you are defending it, and that makes it extremely easy to metagame against. So easy that it is possible, in a ladder where you play different players that you may or may not know, for a player to get a 90% or higher win rate because you know what the opponent is doing in every game. In every PvP I play mid-masters, I know what my opponent is doing. I can tell 2 minutes into the game if he is going to outright die to a 4gate or if I should continue on the next phase of the game because I know my timings. If you are late with an immortal, if you are late with your gates, if you lose a single stalker to an error in the beginning, you have a good chance of losing the game, and that's all it takes: 1 error. It doesn't mean that you are worse than your opponent, it is just the nature of the matchup. If you can play 100 games in which you don't make that 1 mistake (in MC's case) against people who make just 1, you will win those 100 games.
btw, if you're not at least in Masters, it still might not make sense to you so just take my word for it.
On April 26 2011 02:08 lilky wrote: So basically... Races in order of most played to least played: Protoss, Terran, Zerg
Races in the Top (Insert any number here) in order of most to least: Terran, Zerg, Protoss
TLDR: Protoss is underpowered.. WHAT?!?!?!!?!?!?
Correct, that's my overall conclusion based on the observations I made and I'm open for expanding on those observations if anyone thinks I'm being biased.
So what you're saying is this is a balance QQ with a clever 'statistical look' to it?
Someone lock this sham of a thread, you're not even using statistics correctly just listing out the fact there is more terran on top then toss or zerg. For any statistic to be truly significant the deviance needs to be high enough. Not to mention GM doesn't even represent loads of the actual top players, just the top players who ladder a lot. So there is plenty of margin for error in any statistical breakdown of the GM league.
You should take out the stuff about the players who go random. You can't get enough statistical data to make any opinion off of like 5 people rolling hard random. It's too small of data set.
On April 26 2011 02:08 lilky wrote: So basically... Races in order of most played to least played: Protoss, Terran, Zerg
Races in the Top (Insert any number here) in order of most to least: Terran, Zerg, Protoss
TLDR: Protoss is underpowered.. WHAT?!?!?!!?!?!?
Correct, that's my overall conclusion based on the observations I made and I'm open for expanding on those observations if anyone thinks I'm being biased.
So what you're saying is this is a balance QQ with a clever 'statistical look' to it?
Someone lock this sham of a thread, you're not even using statistics correctly just listing out the fact there is more terran on top then toss or zerg. For any statistic to be truly significant the deviance needs to be high enough. Not to mention GM doesn't even represent loads of the actual top players, just the top players who ladder a lot. So there is plenty of margin for error in any statistical breakdown of the GM league.
Can you show me a top player that isnt in GM? Everything I have seen indicates that GM is purely the actual top players.
On April 26 2011 02:24 strongandbig wrote: First, the sample size of [top10] or [top30] is not big enough that you would expect it to be equal in the absence of imbalance. Over a thousand players, you can safely assume that the distributions of skill and race choice are independent. However, with ten players it's not unreasonable that there are just more Terran players of high skill.
Additionally, this assumes that winning enough on ladder to get into the top ten is dependent only on skill and game balance, whereas I think that luck is also involved; it's easy to imagine a player whose skill is #3 losing a lot of points in a BO loss to a player whose skill is #150.
Honestly OP, I just don't think you have enough data to say anything here.
His sample size of 100 is more than enough, and the theory would be that outside factors such as luck will fade as more games are played. Unless you reasonably think somebody can be lucky for hundreds of games?
So based on this graph, over the course of the top 10 through top 100 players it actually seems fairly linear to me, the ratio of terran to protoss to zerg players at the top is consistent through these intervals which doesn't seem to suggest imbalance at all but would rather suggest that there are just more terran players.
I'm not sure why you're reading "more terran at every level" as "imbalanced" when its a linear progression at a relatively consistent ratio for all races through the top 100...
A linear progression is what should happen. However, it should theoretically be linear in terms of the number of players for each race. Assume there are 1000 players (300 P, 300 Z, 300 T, 100 R), if you have perfect balance and distribution of skill, you will have 3 P, 3 Z, 3 T, and 1 R in the top 10. Obviously there isnt a perfect distribution of skill, so that will change things. The question is, how much is balance effecting it? Why, even when there are more protoss in GM league, are there more terrans at the top at a significant margin? What is preventing the protoss from being at the top? Is it a difference in skill, or due to balance?
Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
On April 26 2011 02:25 dogmeatstew wrote: In short I'm not sure how these numbers give you the impression that terran is dominating in every area, a 2% higher win ratio isn't statistically significant even across 1638 players and all in all this last set of data actually looks pretty even across the board to me.
As far as I understand this research it has been made on a population basis. which means that every sign of deviation is "statistically significant". Now, you might be right if the OP was doing a sample size research which he intended to generalize over a larger population. Then you'd have to test the result for significance at an appropriate confidence level.
If tht OP was doing a such an generalization he'd most likely run into pretty severe problems with his sample data since it only represents the "top tier" of gamers and would therefore be scewed for its intents and purposes.
Now, all I'm saying is that a 2% differance IS statistically significance IF you have a population sized data. I'm NOT saying that the OP's interpetation of the results is correct or incorrect
On April 26 2011 02:24 strongandbig wrote: First, the sample size of [top10] or [top30] is not big enough that you would expect it to be equal in the absence of imbalance. Over a thousand players, you can safely assume that the distributions of skill and race choice are independent. However, with ten players it's not unreasonable that there are just more Terran players of high skill.
Again, some genuine statistical analysis would quantify this for you. There's no need to go around guesstimating which sample sizes are big or small enough.
Same goes here. The sample size the OP uses is the size of the population intended to be examined: the GM league. Thus we don't need to test wether his data is large enough, since by nature of the study, it's all the data that exists. T-, chi-, F-tests ect. are useful if we work with an incomplete set of data. But to my understanding, the data is not incomplete in this case.
On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote: Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote: Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
I think the closest we could get to that number is a full count of ladder accounts and the primary races played by each account.
The fact that a single player can have multiple accounts and that there is no way for us to link box serial numbers to accounts and then to races played makes it hard to be able to ever track this.
On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote: Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
I think this is a really good theory on why Protoss win rates and points on ladder are lower than expected (compared to opinions of pros and results of pro games).
I've noticed watching Grandmaster streams that the players often get pitted against high-masters players who they're super heavily favored against (even top players like Sheth). Dropping a game to someone so far below you will cause you to lose a whole lot of points. I imagine that top Protoss players would unfortunately lose to people that are worse than them more often in PvP due to the randomness of the matchup, hurting their scores in this way.
Terran would have this problem the least as I feel their matchups are somewhat best at enabling the better player to win. Zerg is somewhere in the middle IMO.
On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote: Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
I think the closest we could get to that number is a full count of ladder accounts and the primary races played by each account.
The fact that a single player can have multiple accounts and that there is no way for us to link box serial numbers to accounts and then to races played makes it hard to be able to ever track this.
The great thing about statistics is you dont need exact numbers to get a really good idea on percentages like that. What I posted should be extremely close to exact.
On April 26 2011 02:40 KillerPlague wrote: There currently is 1638 players listed in GM. The distribution is: 2.6% random 38% protoss 30.3% terran 29% zerg
being a protoss player myself, it's a little hard to ignore how many protoss actually made it in to GM. considering this is the top 200 cumulative for each region it feels like your statistics are biased to make terran seem worse than they are. however, this may be due to the simple fact that more people play protoss? as far as terran dominating the ladder, i think it is due to the relative safety they have. zerg players must scout like hell, protoss players must adapt their composition, terran players can do the same build over and over again vs either race with relative safety. things like salvageable bunkers add to this, as many good players will opt for them when they are not sure.
The point is under this 1638 players are players from all Servers and if you look at each server you will see Protoss is dominating the weaker Servers like China ( game was released only some weeks ago => obvious one of the weaker servers at the moment) or Latin America.. but in Europe and Korea terran takes the lead.
But this imbalance discussions are really funny. Like in the recent past everybody is saying toss is dominating the big tourneys and then I take a look on the CODE S and CODE A results or the GSL WC and it is not really looking good for toss. And then comes always the quoting of the progamers, but if you haven't mentioned it yet, they are always saying their race is up. Look at guys like Idra, he would even say Zerg is up if they would have 10 Zergplayers in the Top Ten. For some of these guys it might be only the fact, that they are searching for a easy excuse. But I think the main reason is, Blizzard said on the Blizzcon, the opinion of the progamers would be one part of balancing the game. So ask yourself would you really tell the public, if you are thinking your race is op?
Even if we would have a p-value under 5% for this stats. This wouldn't mean Toss is up or Terran op. This game is still very young and the patch still new... the only thing we could say that certain strats are at the moment strong or not strong. And with this stats it seems like terrans have at the moment maybe the best working strats for these ladder maps. But nobody knows if this will change in the next weeks even without a patch.
On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote: Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
71,624 Random 269,316 Protoss 250,438 Terran 186,267 Zerg
Overall with all leagues combined, only using data from the start of S2.
The problem with this is that it is not a real indicator of anything important... Isn't it feasible (and unverifiable), for instance, that the most time logged for a race in SC2 multiplayer is Zerg? What if Protoss and Terran players almost exclusively offrace as Zerg? That would make Zerg the least used main race but the most used race in terms of multiplayer hours, but no one would be able to verify that.
On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote: Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
71,624 Random 269,316 Protoss 250,438 Terran 186,267 Zerg
Overall with all leagues combined, only using data from the start of S2.
The problem with this is that it is not a real indicator of anything important... Isn't it feasible (and unverifiable), for instance, that the most time logged for a race in SC2 multiplayer is Zerg? This would mean that although Protoss and Terran play mostly Protoss and Terran, they almost exclusively offrace Zerg, making Zerg the least used main race but the most used race in terms of multiplayer hours?
The odds of even many of these players exclusively using zerg offrace, particularly on ladder, is likely very slim. Sure, it is possible and even likely that these players could do that... but the odds are not good for a majority of them. The main thing it indicates is (roughly) how things should be structured at any given level in terms of rankings. You do have to make the assumption that the skill distribution will be relatively even, but that doesnt seem overly outrageous to me when you consider the sample size is nearly 800k people.
On April 26 2011 02:40 KillerPlague wrote: There currently is 1638 players listed in GM. The distribution is: 2.6% random 38% protoss 30.3% terran 29% zerg
being a protoss player myself, it's a little hard to ignore how many protoss actually made it in to GM. considering this is the top 200 cumulative for each region it feels like your statistics are biased to make terran seem worse than they are. however, this may be due to the simple fact that more people play protoss? as far as terran dominating the ladder, i think it is due to the relative safety they have. zerg players must scout like hell, protoss players must adapt their composition, terran players can do the same build over and over again vs either race with relative safety. things like salvageable bunkers add to this, as many good players will opt for them when they are not sure.
The point is under this 1638 players are players from all Servers and if you look at each server you will see Protoss is dominating the weaker Servers like China ( game was released only some weeks ago => obvious one of the weaker servers at the moment) or Latin America.. but in Europe and Korea terran takes the lead.
But this imbalance discussions are really funny. Like in the recent past everybody is saying toss is dominating the big tourneys and then I take a look on the CODE S and CODE A results or the GSL WC and it is not really looking good for toss. And then comes always the quoting of the progamers, but if you haven't mentioned it yet, they are always saying their race is up. Look at guys like Idra, he would even say Zerg is up if they would have 10 Zergplayers in the Top Ten. For some of these guys it might be only the fact, that they are searching for a easy excuse. But I think the main reason is, Blizzard said on the Blizzcon, the opinion of the progamers would be one part of balancing the game. So ask yourself would you really tell the public, if you are thinking your race is op?
Even if we would have a p-value under 5% for this stats. This wouldn't mean Toss is up or Terran op. This game is still very young and the patch still new... the only thing we could say that certain strats are at the moment strong or not strong. And with this stats it seems like terrans have at the moment maybe the best working strats for these ladder maps. But nobody knows if this will change in the next weeks even without a patch.
Yes Idra would say that. When has Idra been wrong about balance?
On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote: Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
71,624 Random 269,316 Protoss 250,438 Terran 186,267 Zerg
Overall with all leagues combined, only using data from the start of S2.
The problem with this is that it is not a real indicator of anything important... Isn't it feasible (and unverifiable), for instance, that the most time logged for a race in SC2 multiplayer is Zerg? This would mean that although Protoss and Terran play mostly Protoss and Terran, they almost exclusively offrace Zerg, making Zerg the least used main race but the most used race in terms of multiplayer hours?
The odds of even many of these players exclusively using zerg offrace, particularly on ladder, is likely very slim. Sure, it is possible and even likely that these players could do that... but the odds are not good for a majority of them. The main thing it indicates is (roughly) how things should be structured at any given level in terms of rankings. You do have to make the assumption that the skill distribution will be relatively even, but that doesnt seem overly outrageous to me when you consider the sample size is nearly 800k people.
I was mainly commenting on Day's line of thought and the responses that were directed towards it. Since there is no clear way of knowing the actual facts, the presence of possibilities like the one I outlined above make it impossible to tell for sure what is really going on. Zerg could be the most played race, but no-one can say for sure.
On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote: Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
71,624 Random 269,316 Protoss 250,438 Terran 186,267 Zerg
Overall with all leagues combined, only using data from the start of S2.
The problem with this is that it is not a real indicator of anything important... Isn't it feasible (and unverifiable), for instance, that the most time logged for a race in SC2 multiplayer is Zerg? This would mean that although Protoss and Terran play mostly Protoss and Terran, they almost exclusively offrace Zerg, making Zerg the least used main race but the most used race in terms of multiplayer hours?
The odds of even many of these players exclusively using zerg offrace, particularly on ladder, is likely very slim. Sure, it is possible and even likely that these players could do that... but the odds are not good for a majority of them. The main thing it indicates is (roughly) how things should be structured at any given level in terms of rankings. You do have to make the assumption that the skill distribution will be relatively even, but that doesnt seem overly outrageous to me when you consider the sample size is nearly 800k people.
I was mainly commenting on Day's line of thought and the responses that were directed towards it. Since there is no clear way of knowing the actual facts, the presence of possibilities like the one I outlined above make it impossible to tell for sure what is really going on. Zerg could be the most played race, but no-one can say for sure.
I think we can definitively say that those percentages are close to accurate, certainly within like half a percent. It is also entirely possible that his line of thought is part of the situation, another factor could be that zerg has a higher learning curve to start with since other races can do the "probes and pylons" mentality while zerg has to choose. People decide they just want to take the easier route and thus fewer play zerg.
I am curious if the numbers will change much when HotS comes out though.
On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote: Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
That may be true for some very new players, but I'd wager competitive players in GM didn't pick their race based on the campaign. Also consider "zerg" has become a very popular term that people who haven't even played played starcraft will understand. There could even be people that pick zerg BECAUSE they didn't get a chance to play them in the campaign.
Why people play what race is baffling. Take World of Warcraft... when the game first launched almost every server HEAVILY alliance favored. And now? Most servers are horde favored. Why? There was minor racial balancing or whatever, but nothing that really explains the shift from a balance perspective. You could say that when people started out, they wanted to be more humanlike, but as the game evolved, the horde become the "cool" race. This is probably too much of a tangent, and mostly deals with the masses not the top gamers....
In my experience with games, the most top players play the (perceived) best race/character. There's always different reasons/justifications like "this race/character fits my playstyle" but what it really boils down to is that people play with the best chances of winning because that's what makes you feel good/justified in spending your time doing something.
For the masses, it's like picking a favorite color. There's no real "reason" to like orange or maroon. For top players, it's like picking a color to put on your product at the store. There's a very real, statistical impact this decision makes on your sales.
If we accept the premise that Terran dominates the ladder (which I'm not completely convinced of), I'd chalk it up to the scrappy nature of Terran. Terran have many tools that allow them to catch up and overcome from a very bad position. Situations where Zerg and Protoss would have to "GG", a Terran may be able to bounce back. This is a great quality to have on the ladder.
So the question is why do Protoss seem to dominate tournaments instead of Terran? And is there any significance to the fact that Zerg don't seem to dominate anything?
On April 26 2011 02:08 lilky wrote: So basically... Races in order of most played to least played: Protoss, Terran, Zerg
Races in the Top (Insert any number here) in order of most to least: Terran, Zerg, Protoss
TLDR: Protoss is underpowered.. WHAT?!?!?!!?!?!?
Correct, that's my overall conclusion based on the observations I made and I'm open for expanding on those observations if anyone thinks I'm being biased.
hey bulder, don't say that that is your overall conclusion, step one is to validate his claim.
his first premisse: "Races in order of most played to least played: Protoss, Terran, Zerg" correct, this is what his statistics show
his second premisse: "Races in the Top (Insert any number here) in order of most to least: Terran, Zerg, Protoss" correct only for top 10, 20, 40 and 50 in the case of top 30, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100 it is (from bulders statistics) Terran, Protoss, zerg.
his conclusion: "TLDR: Protoss is underpowered.. WHAT?!?!?!!?!?!?" since the second premisse is false, no correct conclusion can be made using this information, to lilky I say: L2statistics.
edit: I am not saying lilky is wrong, I am not saying lilky is right, I am just saying that the above described line of logic that lilky used is invalid.
On April 26 2011 03:29 4of8 wrote: And then comes always the quoting of the progamers, but if you haven't mentioned it yet, they are always saying their race is up. Look at guys like Idra, he would even say Zerg is up if they would have 10 Zergplayers in the Top Ten. For some of these guys it might be only the fact, that they are searching for a easy excuse. But I think the main reason is, Blizzard said on the Blizzcon, the opinion of the progamers would be one part of balancing the game. So ask yourself would you really tell the public, if you are thinking your race is op?
that's a gross generalization. If Zerg was "buffed" tomorrow and after the "buff" you saw 10 Z's in the top 16 of a tournament for a couple tournaments then ofc IdrA wouldn't say that Z is up. Yes, you should tell the public if you think your race is op, if it makes the game better than why wouldn't you? Beign so selfish as to underplay your race to get more easy wins is bs.
This discussion will lead nowhere untill the community can agree upon common definitions of an over-/under-powered race, the magnitude one race has to outperform other races to be considered overpowered, the persitance of overperformance of a race to be considered overpowered, the way in which a race outperform other races to be considered overpowered (winratio, grandmasterpresence to race distribution-quote ect.), where such outperformance should be measured and considered (LANS / tournaments / ladder ect.), which players constitutes a representative sample to measure imbalance (high level / top level / all levels?) ect.
Before you so this, the discussion will not amount to anything and nothing productive will ever come from it. "random" statistics will continue to be presented and people will talk over eachother for a few pages without coming to any conclusion.
A great deal of data is available from the top tiers of player so there's no excuse for anyone serious about trying to find imbalance to start on this project. The key point is to be honest about what you find and what you don't find and not pick sample data that happens to suit your point of view. That's as dishonest as it is common
I would argue it is a result of Terran being the most cheese proof of the three races, and having the largest variety of opening strategies, as well as being the hardest to scout and having the easiest scouting. It's not necessarily that they're stronger, but just have more viability in a system as volatile as ladder.
The ladder is volatile because every game is just that: one game. You might know your opponent in Grand Masters, but it doesn't matter, which means your foe could be doing anything from ridiculous builds for learning to really standard play etc.
With minimal statistics comprehension, you should realize that a because there is a majority of P players in GM, it means they play more against each other, therefore averaging their own race's win rate. You should have considered P's ratio against T and Z in your analysis.
What your research shows is that right now the best Terran's are able to reach and stay at the top of their ladder better then the top Protoss and Zerg. Essentially they are more Stable.
I think this is because the TvT match-up is the most stable and generally allows the better player to win, where as right now PvP is a guessing game, and ZvZ is always crazy.
If you look at BW players, the ones that stay at the top of the rankings always dominate their mirror match-up. The best BW ZvZ, TvT and PvP in the last few years have usually been Jaedong, Flash, and Bisu respectively. The correlation between staying at a high ranking and having a good mirror win rate is an often overlooked factor.
Right now it's hard for P and Z to have a high mirror win rate because the match-ups are not as stable as TvT.
My research indicates that the least popular race in the Bronze League is Zerg. Doesn't that mean that Zerg is terribly OP if it's less likely to be horrible?
On April 26 2011 05:01 ehalf wrote: 100 is obviously too small to draw any conclusion. from what i saw, top 1,000 players, protoss has the most number.
Except the skill divide between the top ~300 and the rest is bigger than the divide between Master's and Diamond
This is not a good statistical analysis I think your just trying to look for a pattern. All your are doing is taking numbers and showing correlations that prove absolutely nothing. Its like almost saying that more crimes occur in the summer and more ice cream sales also occur in the summer. So due to the statistics crime and ice cream sales have a direct correlation.
It seems like your just looking into trolling and causing a muck in the community for your own selfish personal reasons. Everyone knows statistics doesn't mean anything on ladder and the tournaments show that too. If statistics hold true to their meaning then the top players on ladder should have been winning tournaments left and right which is not the case.
The game is still being developed and statistics don't mean crap on something that is being developed. For all we know we could be playing the game completely wrong 1-2 years down the road from now.
Scientific evidence does not work on something as volatile as sc2 ladder nor tournaments so please people need to just can it with the statistics.
On April 26 2011 02:40 KillerPlague wrote: There currently is 1638 players listed in GM. The distribution is: 2.6% random 38% protoss 30.3% terran 29% zerg
being a protoss player myself, it's a little hard to ignore how many protoss actually made it in to GM. considering this is the top 200 cumulative for each region it feels like your statistics are biased to make terran seem worse than they are. however, this may be due to the simple fact that more people play protoss? as far as terran dominating the ladder, i think it is due to the relative safety they have. zerg players must scout like hell, protoss players must adapt their composition, terran players can do the same build over and over again vs either race with relative safety. things like salvageable bunkers add to this, as many good players will opt for them when they are not sure.
The point is under this 1638 players are players from all Servers and if you look at each server you will see Protoss is dominating the weaker Servers like China ( game was released only some weeks ago => obvious one of the weaker servers at the moment) or Latin America.. but in Europe and Korea terran takes the lead.
But this imbalance discussions are really funny. Like in the recent past everybody is saying toss is dominating the big tourneys and then I take a look on the CODE S and CODE A results or the GSL WC and it is not really looking good for toss. And then comes always the quoting of the progamers, but if you haven't mentioned it yet, they are always saying their race is up. Look at guys like Idra, he would even say Zerg is up if they would have 10 Zergplayers in the Top Ten. For some of these guys it might be only the fact, that they are searching for a easy excuse. But I think the main reason is, Blizzard said on the Blizzcon, the opinion of the progamers would be one part of balancing the game. So ask yourself would you really tell the public, if you are thinking your race is op?
Even if we would have a p-value under 5% for this stats. This wouldn't mean Toss is up or Terran op. This game is still very young and the patch still new... the only thing we could say that certain strats are at the moment strong or not strong. And with this stats it seems like terrans have at the moment maybe the best working strats for these ladder maps. But nobody knows if this will change in the next weeks even without a patch.
Yes Idra would say that. When has Idra been wrong about balance?
Pretty much every time he has spoken about it except when concerning pre-nerf Siege Tanks (which I dont think anyone would argue were balanced, except maybe Avilo) and early map balance (derp). But this goes for many many many other people. MVP thinks Terran is weak, and Nestea thinks Zerg is weak. What a twist! I think Im spotting a tendency here that indicates what a player playing a certain race will say about said race's balance.
Personally I stick to the Law of Artosis: When dealing with a percieved balance issue, refer to the three golden rules: Terran is OP Zerg is UP Protoss is gay
and your question will be answered... somewhat. This thread is therefore redundant. Mostly because all it really highlights is that the ladder is showing incredibly balanced statistics. Of course the ladder is not an indication of anything, unless it indicates a point you want to bring across.
Only looking at the top 100 is absolutely silly. The pros themselves say that the ladder rankings matter less and less the farther up you go. Many of the best players are not in the top 100: MC Nada San Anypro NesTea Select Mondragon Clearly many of these guys would be in the actual best 100 players in the world. Point is that the top 100 on ladder is not at all accurate of the actual best 100 players and is pretty much insignificant.
On April 26 2011 02:02 Shaetan wrote: You can't claim to do statistical analysis then just throw out numbers and claim that X is true, you have to do the analysis.
This...
On April 26 2011 02:25 dogmeatstew wrote: All the win %'s are very close. The average number of points is very close, 15 points isn't a lot and as you've already stated, a large amount of top 10 is terrans which would easily skew this.
In short I'm not sure how these numbers give you the impression that terran is dominating in every area, a 2% higher win ratio isn't statistically significant even across 1638 players and all in all this last set of data actually looks pretty even across the board to me.
...and this.
Let me start by saying that I don't think it's very useful to try and statistically analyze the current state of balance based off of the Blizzard ladder. I just want to make a point that if you're going to attempt using statistics, you should actually use statistical analysis and not just look at numbers and try and determine if patterns exist -- this doesn't work and this is why the field of statistics exists.
I'm not a statistician, just a lowly science grad student, but I did some really, really simple stat analysis on the North American Grandmaster league statistics (it would take a really long time to gather the data from every league into Excel). If you just look at the data (like the OP) did, it seems like there are some differences here:
But you can't really tell if there is or not without actually analyzing the data. So I ran a one-way ANOVA on the NA GM league, comparing win% between the races. All the data were pulled from SC2Ranks. The data weren't normal, so a square root transformation was applied [automatically, by the program] to meet the assumptions of normality for ANOVA. The assumption of homogeneity of variances was also met (p=0.430).
Here is the descriptive statistics table generated:
From just this table, you can see that the 95% CIs overlap between every race. Note that the mean values are the actual values, not the sqrt transformed values (not sure why the program does this).
The ANOVA table:
This shows that there is a statistically significant (p=0.043) difference overall between the group means, but it doesn't tell us where the differences are.
This is where post-hoc tests are important, as they lets us look at comparisons between multiple groups: Link for Big! Here, we have two post-hoc test results. In this table 1=P, 2=T, 3=Z, 4=R.
We can see that in the Tukey test, there is a marginally significant difference between T and P win%s, and the Least Significant Difference test shows that there is a significant difference between T and P. Essentially, what we glean from this entire test is that the only real differences in win% are between Terran and Protoss, and that difference is pretty small.
To visualize the actual comparisons, here is a bar graph with ERROR BARS!
TL;DR: Analysis of variance shows that the only difference between NA GM win%s is in T and P -- and it's not very big. Don't make threads about taking 'mathematical' approaches or statistical comparisons if you're not going to actually use statistics. Looking at numbers =/= statistics.
On April 26 2011 02:02 Shaetan wrote: You can't claim to do statistical analysis then just throw out numbers and claim that X is true, you have to do the analysis.
On April 26 2011 02:25 dogmeatstew wrote: All the win %'s are very close. The average number of points is very close, 15 points isn't a lot and as you've already stated, a large amount of top 10 is terrans which would easily skew this.
In short I'm not sure how these numbers give you the impression that terran is dominating in every area, a 2% higher win ratio isn't statistically significant even across 1638 players and all in all this last set of data actually looks pretty even across the board to me.
...and this.
Let me start by saying that I don't think it's very useful to try and statistically analyze the current state of balance based off of the Blizzard ladder. I just want to make a point that if you're going to attempt using statistics, you should actually use statistical analysis and not just look at numbers and try and determine if patterns exist -- this doesn't work and this is why the field of statistics exists.
I'm not a statistician, just a lowly science grad student, but I did some really, really simple stat analysis the North American Grandmaster league statistics (it would take a really long time to gather the data from every league into Excel). If you just look at the data (like the OP) did, it seems like there are some differences here:
But you can't really tell if there is or not without actually analyzing the data. So I ran a one-way ANOVA on the NA GM league, comparing win% between the races. All the data were pulled from SC2Ranks. The data weren't normal, so a square root transformation was applied [automatically, by the program] to meet the assumptions of normality for ANOVA. The assumption of homogeneity of variances was also met (p=0.430).
Here is the descriptive statistics table generated:
From just this table, you can see that the 95% CIs overlap between every race. Note that the mean values are the actual values, not the sqrt transformed values (not sure why the program does this).
The ANOVA table:
This shows that there is a statistically significant (p=0.043) difference overall between the group means, but it doesn't tell us where the differences are.
This is where post-hoc tests are important, as they lets us look at comparisons between multiple groups: Link for Big! Here, we have two post-hoc test results. In this table 1=T, 2=P, 3=Z, 4=R.
We can see that in the Tukey test, there is a marginally significant difference between T and P win%s, and the Least Significant Difference test shows that there is a significant difference between T and P. Essentially, what we glean from this entire test is that the only real differences in win% are between Terran and Protoss, and that difference is pretty small.
To visualize the actual comparisons, here is a bar graph with ERROR BARS!
[...]
TL;DR: Analysis of variance shows that the only difference between NA GM win%s is in T and P -- and it's not very big. Don't make threads about taking 'mathematical' approaches or statistical comparisons if you're not going to actually use statistics. Looking at numbers =/= statistics.
Thank god someone else shares my opinion. There has been a proliferation of pseudo-statistics threads recently by people who clearly have little statistical or mathematical background. All these threads do is troll people by generating meaningless debates. Statistics and applied math undergrad here.
On April 26 2011 05:46 SqueamishCow wrote: Only looking at the top 100 is absolutely silly. The pros themselves say that the ladder rankings matter less and less the farther up you go. Many of the best players are not in the top 100: MC Nada San Anypro NesTea Select Mondragon Clearly many of these guys would be in the actual best 100 players in the world. Point is that the top 100 on ladder is not at all accurate of the actual best 100 players and is pretty much insignificant.
This has been argued to death. I think the point is that people in Grandmasters can't really be considered bad players. One can argue circles and circles this way, and by doing that all they come up with is that all statistics aren't enough to be used as viable because one tournament someone played bad, because the top top players may not be #1 on ladder, etc etc. Then we really would never have any usable statistics. I think the ladder gives decently viable statistics because those players in the top 100/even in grandmasters know how to play the game well and can represent the top players of the world, even if they themselves aren't some of the top players in the world.
On another note, I don't really think you should put Mondragon on that list. He doesn't really have any results, besides beating ZeeRaX in the tsl, then losing to cruncher. There is no way he has proved himself as a top player.
Points only mean how often you've played, which means nothing. Nothing at all. Win ratio means nothing when you've played only 7 games. Terran win percentage is barely greater than the others, but that could just be because there are more terrans, resulting in tvt being the most common mirror matchup.
This post means nothing at all, it's just some statistics that are misleading.
On April 26 2011 02:14 the p00n wrote: In tournaments you usually have a bo3 or bo5 format, whereas on the ladder almost all games are bo1 with minimal metagame or knowledge of your opponent. A terran may excel in a bo1 format (for whatever reason), whereas a protoss or zerg may be stronger in a bo1 < bo[x] format?
Why would lack of metagame and lack of knowledge of your opponent favor terran players so drastically? Besides, The top players face each other more frequently than what is the case for lesser players due to them having fewer possible opponents for each mapseach.
Getting to the top of the ladder mostly means grinding points against many different oponents, maximizing wins and minimizing losses.
My explanation for this is that Terrans are the more stable race, less succeptible to cheese, more likely to make a comback after a blunder or failed cheese because of the mules, wall-ins and the sheer power of their units when doing counterattacks or harrasment(stim).
When facing completely different oponents every match, you cannot really prepare for your oponent or have a build order prepared for a particular style (like pros in tourneys do), so all you need is a stable play in order to statistically win more than you lose.
Therefore I believe that what we are seeing is the fact that Terran is usually safer than the other races.
I completely agree here with what Pelican has added to the discussion, and his given conclusion. I also want to note that what we don't see in the raw data is also some of the omitted variable bias that can play a role in the numbers, themselves. I'm not just speaking to values we cannot see, but also values that are rather hard to quantify. Such as that of differences in the goals of individual players on ladder. For instance, some will use ladder as a means of practice, while others will use it for experimentation. Unless you can justly quantify how this would affect percentages, or control for that in the data between the races, I don't see how you could logically come up with an argument.
The data also does not, to what I have seen, take into account what the players are matched up with. Such that there is a possibility that zerg mainly face protoss instead of mirror or zvt, and thus the data is biased in that the win percentage may be speaking about the zvp match-up instead of Zerg on the whole.
The data would also require trying to control for the differences in the ability of the individual. I would be so bold as to say that some players are simply better than others, in areas such as mechanics, game sense, and decision making. How can you control for the differences of the individual in trying to analyze the abilities of the races?
In summation, the data is too clouded, or rather, not collected enough in order to properly account the statistical relevance. If you would be able to embark upon the statistics with a team of people, and try to control for variable bias, then you may have an argument. As it currently stands, there is no such possibility. I like the idea, but the execution is a little poor.
On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote: Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
QFT. I think this explains a lot towards terran being ahead in terms of all races, since it has the most explored and least volatile mirror matchup. In TvT, moreso than any other mirror, the better player tends to win.
Bullshit. MC has the highest PvP winrate out there. He's the better player, like it or not.
I wouldn't say terran is dominating, they only have about 1% win rate higher than everyone else, and only about 20 points more than everyone else. Yes terrans at the top are doing better, but far from dominating.
On April 26 2011 04:48 Xirroh wrote: What your research shows is that right now the best Terran's are able to reach and stay at the top of their ladder better then the top Protoss and Zerg. Essentially they are more Stable.
I think this is because the TvT match-up is the most stable and generally allows the better player to win, where as right now PvP is a guessing game, and ZvZ is always crazy.
If you look at BW players, the ones that stay at the top of the rankings always dominate their mirror match-up. The best BW ZvZ, TvT and PvP in the last few years have usually been Jaedong, Flash, and Bisu respectively. The correlation between staying at a high ranking and having a good mirror win rate is an often overlooked factor.
Right now it's hard for P and Z to have a high mirror win rate because the match-ups are not as stable as TvT.
Bullshit again. P and Z mirrors require a different kind of skill is all. Just like BW ZvZ. Just because some people suck at it doesn't mean it's not a good matchup.
On April 26 2011 06:41 Etrnity wrote: the omitted variable bias
Given that the causal realtionships in social sciences are very specualative and that results are often contradictive even in fields with a great amount of prior reseach and established theoretical framework, we can't have too much hope of creating a model of imbalance for starcraft
How can we even begin to measure imbalance when there isn't even a agreed upon definition of what it is?
It's about the same. Nothing really crazy happening, I don't think you'll ever get 1/3 of all stats to each race, just because of different amounts of representation at different levels. It often times doesn't mean anything about balance or anything else, it usually just shows the amount of players at that level playing a certain race.
I know in the OP you only gave figures using grandmaster/top % of players, but I really feel like you cannot come to the kind of conclusion you have solely based on these statistics.
Would it not be fair to suggest that there are in fact more Terran players total than any other race currently competing in the ladder? I think it's also reasonable to say that the more players playing 1 specific race *could* lead inevitably to that race creating more top level players in the long term. I don't know whether this is actually true, but I think if it were plausible, you should find out approx the ratio of players playing with each race.
Just throwing it out there, there are so many variables that you need to think about if you want to be taken seriously on this matter.
I won't speak to balance or statistics because I don't have any qualification to do so. What I will say is that from personal experience, reading strategy forums and viewing tournaments and streams is that terran does have a larger amount of variety in every matchup from player to player and even sometimes a single player.
As it appears to me that many zergs and protoss play in a smaller range of variety in their builds and styles. The differences are much more subtle. In pvt I've seen some great mech play, bio play, sky terran play (banshees, raven into BC type play), along with scary all ins and greedy macro play. Even within these groupings of play styles their are many variations and possible opening and transitions. With mech for example there is ghost mech, tank heavy mech, thor heavy mech. With bio I typically see the variation as drops frequency, sometimes bio/early emp, bio with tanks or thors or PDD. In other words what the terran supports his bio with. These variations make can make all the difference in whether or not a particular response by the opponent will suffice.
Against zerg we see many of the same variations in play from terran, bio with tanks, drops, thors, some mech play. The variety of openings like banshee harass, hellion harass, 2 rax bunker rushes are very wide as well.
Almost pure marine has been shown to be viable at even the highest levels of play in every terran matchup. I've seen events where a single terran player has success with 3 totally different styles in 3 games of the same series.
I don't think anyone could argue that the flexibility and synergy between units that terran possesses is strong. It may really boil down to the fact that protoss and zerg players haven't yet mastered how to deal with every possibility terran can throw at them because the game is still young. (there are 2 expansions and many patches to come!) Perhaps these numbers will simply balance out with time, when top protoss and zerg players better understand the timings, weaknesses and responses to the wide variety of play terran offers and have the game down to a science. Maybe in the expansions there will be a single new upgrade or unit that unlocks worlds of possibilities to zerg and protoss. Imagine if hellions had spider mines, immortals had a range upgrade, or hydras could morph into lurkers. A single new upgrade to a unit in the expansion could start a revolution in matchups.
That's my guess anyway, it's just the variety of terran and the learning curve to dealing with it. With many changes coming to SC2 in the future it really doesn't matter if the game is balanced now. Does anyone really expect the game to be perfectly balanced at every stage of patching and through the release of expansions?
Also, I'd like to point out that I think ladder isn't necessarily worse to look at for statistics than tourneys(as some people in this thread have pointed out.) It is my guess that tournaments results are affected greatly by outside factors, for example can they hear the commentators or crowds? Are they jet lagged? Are they eating food they are not used to? Did they get a good nights sleep? Are they nervous? Did they play enough games today to warm up? Many of these things would not be a big factor to a player sitting in his room where he is comfortable, playing on ladder.
Also, OP, I would love to see the same statistics for the GM league as a whole (not just top 100 or 200) and divided by regions as well. If the same slight differences and averages hold true when divided by region and throughout GM league, I think it would be a stronger demonstration of any slight imbalances. Even though these kinds of variations are to be expected, we're in for a long haul of sc2 changes!
I hope I don't get flamed for this post, my intention is just to make some helpful observations. Overall the balance of the game is pretty damn good when considering how hard most player work to abuse anything they can in the game to win.
On April 26 2011 06:41 Etrnity wrote: I completely agree here with what Pelican has added to the discussion, and his given conclusion. I also want to note that what we don't see in the raw data is also some of the omitted variable bias that can play a role in the numbers, themselves. I'm not just speaking to values we cannot see, but also values that are rather hard to quantify. Such as that of differences in the goals of individual players on ladder. For instance, some will use ladder as a means of practice, while others will use it for experimentation. Unless you can justly quantify how this would affect percentages, or control for that in the data between the races, I don't see how you could logically come up with an argument.
The data also does not, to what I have seen, take into account what the players are matched up with. Such that there is a possibility that zerg mainly face protoss instead of mirror or zvt, and thus the data is biased in that the win percentage may be speaking about the zvp match-up instead of Zerg on the whole.
The data would also require trying to control for the differences in the ability of the individual. I would be so bold as to say that some players are simply better than others, in areas such as mechanics, game sense, and decision making. How can you control for the differences of the individual in trying to analyze the abilities of the races?
In summation, the data is too clouded, or rather, not collected enough in order to properly account the statistical relevance. If you would be able to embark upon the statistics with a team of people, and try to control for variable bias, then you may have an argument. As it currently stands, there is no such possibility. I like the idea, but the execution is a little poor.
I don't think that Pelican's analysis is relevant; the ladder tries to normalize win-loss ratios. Let's make some assumptions:
1. Z really is underpowered 2. The GM league requires players to have a certain amount of skill at the game to get in 3. Overall skill distribution across the races is roughly equal.
The result is that every player in GM is going to have a similar amount of skill; something above the threshold. Now, if Z is underpowered, their "skill" is reduced; that is, a Z has to be better than a P or T to beat them. So, what do you get from that? You'd expect two things:
1. Less Z and more P and T in GM league, because it's easier for them to get in; they need less "skill." 2. Roughly equal win rates across the races, because P and T skill equals Z skill, after accounting for the imbalance (Z are better overall, but the imbalance makes them play worse relative to others)
Hey, guess what you see if you look at the GM league statistics?
I think it's really naieve to say that it's just a coincidence that Terran has always held the highest position in the ladder since beta (look how many of these threads have come up over the months -_-), and that that has nothing to do with some combination of their mechanics+defensibility+having more units than any other race.
On April 26 2011 02:02 Shaetan wrote: You can't claim to do statistical analysis then just throw out numbers and claim that X is true, you have to do the analysis.
Can you examplify? I thought I did a decent job at showig a trend based on every aspect of the top of the ladder I could think of. I even specifically pointed out that I'd gladly look into more if anyone got ideas.
You need to show that the difference you see is statistically significant and not just due to chance. You said yourself when looking at a sample size of ~1600 win rates were much more even so it's possible decreasing your sample size artificially created the disparity. Also not sure why you wouldn't look at the full 200 or at least all GM league top 100.
Yea I'm gonna agree with this, as well as the poster above him.
Basically, your saying that race is not independent of [array of different sc2 statistics]. If race was independent there would be no relationship, and thus, a balanced game. The problem is that you cannot just claim this, you must prove it using a valid test. I'm not an expert, but i think a chi-squared test works here. So:
I divided the points by 10 so it would look better, but it doesn't change the result. Yes Terran seems to have a higher general ladder ranking, but is actually losing more than expected and all without any significance.
These are the actual numbers, and according to this test, the data is not statistically significant, doesn't not fit model and so we fail to reject the null hypothesis, which is that race is independent of win/loss, points ect. Note that while p ~= 0 the chi squared is way to high for the df.
Not very confident in my work here, feel free to point out what i got wrong.
On April 26 2011 06:41 Etrnity wrote: I completely agree here with what Pelican has added to the discussion, and his given conclusion. I also want to note that what we don't see in the raw data is also some of the omitted variable bias that can play a role in the numbers, themselves. I'm not just speaking to values we cannot see, but also values that are rather hard to quantify. Such as that of differences in the goals of individual players on ladder. For instance, some will use ladder as a means of practice, while others will use it for experimentation. Unless you can justly quantify how this would affect percentages, or control for that in the data between the races, I don't see how you could logically come up with an argument.
The data also does not, to what I have seen, take into account what the players are matched up with. Such that there is a possibility that zerg mainly face protoss instead of mirror or zvt, and thus the data is biased in that the win percentage may be speaking about the zvp match-up instead of Zerg on the whole.
The data would also require trying to control for the differences in the ability of the individual. I would be so bold as to say that some players are simply better than others, in areas such as mechanics, game sense, and decision making. How can you control for the differences of the individual in trying to analyze the abilities of the races?
In summation, the data is too clouded, or rather, not collected enough in order to properly account the statistical relevance. If you would be able to embark upon the statistics with a team of people, and try to control for variable bias, then you may have an argument. As it currently stands, there is no such possibility. I like the idea, but the execution is a little poor.
I don't think that Pelican's analysis is relevant; the ladder tries to normalize win-loss ratios. Let's make some assumptions:
1. Z really is underpowered 2. The GM league requires players to have a certain amount of skill at the game to get in 3. Overall skill distribution across the races is roughly equal.
The result is that every player in GM is going to have a similar amount of skill; something above the threshold. Now, if Z is underpowered, their "skill" is reduced; that is, a Z has to be better than a P or T to beat them. So, what do you get from that? You'd expect two things:
1. Less Z and more P and T in GM league, because it's easier for them to get in; they need less "skill." 2. Roughly equal win rates across the races, because P and T skill equals Z skill, after accounting for the imbalance (Z are better overall, but the imbalance makes them play worse relative to others)
Hey, guess what you see if you look at the GM league statistics?
It would be nice if you had the ability to read. His argument is to actually use statistical tests in order to determine if the numbers are significant. My argument is that we are assuming too much, even with using more advanced statistical tools. All you have done is provided assumptions as controls without justification (Broad based assumption that all GM players are of equal skill is horrific to begin with).
You're trying to counter my argument by saying that assuming = controlling, which is absolutely ludicrous.
the question here is not why there are so much terrans on GM... but who the hell is that mega baller top 20 random player because GOD random is so hard.
On April 26 2011 06:41 Etrnity wrote: I completely agree here with what Pelican has added to the discussion, and his given conclusion. I also want to note that what we don't see in the raw data is also some of the omitted variable bias that can play a role in the numbers, themselves. I'm not just speaking to values we cannot see, but also values that are rather hard to quantify. Such as that of differences in the goals of individual players on ladder. For instance, some will use ladder as a means of practice, while others will use it for experimentation. Unless you can justly quantify how this would affect percentages, or control for that in the data between the races, I don't see how you could logically come up with an argument.
The data also does not, to what I have seen, take into account what the players are matched up with. Such that there is a possibility that zerg mainly face protoss instead of mirror or zvt, and thus the data is biased in that the win percentage may be speaking about the zvp match-up instead of Zerg on the whole.
The data would also require trying to control for the differences in the ability of the individual. I would be so bold as to say that some players are simply better than others, in areas such as mechanics, game sense, and decision making. How can you control for the differences of the individual in trying to analyze the abilities of the races?
In summation, the data is too clouded, or rather, not collected enough in order to properly account the statistical relevance. If you would be able to embark upon the statistics with a team of people, and try to control for variable bias, then you may have an argument. As it currently stands, there is no such possibility. I like the idea, but the execution is a little poor.
I don't think that Pelican's analysis is relevant; the ladder tries to normalize win-loss ratios. Let's make some assumptions:
1. Z really is underpowered 2. The GM league requires players to have a certain amount of skill at the game to get in 3. Overall skill distribution across the races is roughly equal.
The result is that every player in GM is going to have a similar amount of skill; something above the threshold. Now, if Z is underpowered, their "skill" is reduced; that is, a Z has to be better than a P or T to beat them. So, what do you get from that? You'd expect two things:
1. Less Z and more P and T in GM league, because it's easier for them to get in; they need less "skill." 2. Roughly equal win rates across the races, because P and T skill equals Z skill, after accounting for the imbalance (Z are better overall, but the imbalance makes them play worse relative to others)
Hey, guess what you see if you look at the GM league statistics?
I wasn't trying to draw any conclusions from the stats that I ran, I was just trying to illustrate that drawing conclusions from numbers and statistical data isn't as simple as most of the posts I see on these forums would have one believe. Actual analysis has to be done to see if there are any real differences between sets of data. I'm not claiming that X or Y race is under/overpowered, I'm just saying that IF it's so important to look at these data in an attempt to answer that question, it should be done correctly. Edit: As correctly as possible, given the limited (quantitatively and qualitatively) data that we have, as Etrnity suggests.
On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote: Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
That may be true for some very new players, but I'd wager competitive players in GM didn't pick their race based on the campaign. Also consider "zerg" has become a very popular term that people who haven't even played played starcraft will understand. There could even be people that pick zerg BECAUSE they didn't get a chance to play them in the campaign.
Why people play what race is baffling. Take World of Warcraft... when the game first launched almost every server HEAVILY alliance favored. And now? Most servers are horde favored. Why? There was minor racial balancing or whatever, but nothing that really explains the shift from a balance perspective. You could say that when people started out, they wanted to be more humanlike, but as the game evolved, the horde become the "cool" race. This is probably too much of a tangent, and mostly deals with the masses not the top gamers....
In my experience with games, the most top players play the (perceived) best race/character. There's always different reasons/justifications like "this race/character fits my playstyle" but what it really boils down to is that people play with the best chances of winning because that's what makes you feel good/justified in spending your time doing something.
For the masses, it's like picking a favorite color. There's no real "reason" to like orange or maroon. For top players, it's like picking a color to put on your product at the store. There's a very real, statistical impact this decision makes on your sales.
This is only the case because: 1) Terrans are less susceptible to cheese/allins 2) Mirror is more figured out 3) Ladder maps are smaller than tournament maps. Terrans do a lot better on small distance maps.
Terran is the least likely to lose to build order poker and because of small mistakes. Therefor, in an enviorment where you are playing lots of games, Terran will do better, especially since you're playing lots of games in a row, and this makes you likely to lose to small mistakes. For a best of 3 or best of 5, Terran isn't better, but for 100 games, I think they are.
This doesn't mean they're imbalanced, I'm just saying. What do you think of this? Am I right or wrong? and if I'm wrong, please tell me why.
Alright, I have a few problems with this sort of analysis.
1) Skill level is not certain to be equal across ladders. A win on the Korean ladder could be more difficult than the NA ladder for instance. So mixing all of the GM leagues together is probably a mistake.
2) Your method of showing the race distribution of the Top XXX players doesn't produce very informative results. A better strategy would be to split the players into "bins" of 10. Or 50, as I had done some time ago. If I plug the new leaderboard into my old spreadsheet, I get something that looks like this:
No obvious winner there, is there?
3) There is no test for statistical significance. This has been brought up before, and people have provided their own significance tests, both ANOVA and chi-square, so I won't dwell on this. For what it is worth, my spreadsheet also showed no statistically significant anomalies in racial distribution.
I believe it is possible to put together a statistical analysis of balance using the ladder. I don't think this is it, though.
On April 26 2011 10:32 Scarmath wrote: Alright, I have a few problems with this sort of analysis.
1) Skill level is not certain to be equal across ladders. A win on the Korean ladder could be more difficult than the NA ladder for instance. So mixing all of the GM leagues together is probably a mistake.
2) Your method of showing the race distribution of the Top XXX players doesn't produce very informative results. A better strategy would be to split the players into "bins" of 10. Or 50, as I had done some time ago. If I plug the new leaderboard into my old spreadsheet, I get something that looks like this:
No obvious winner there, is there?
3) There is no test for statistical significance. This has been brought up before, and people have provided their own significance tests, both ANOVA and chi-square, so I won't dwell on this. For what it is worth, my spreadsheet also showed no statistically significant anomalies in racial distribution.
I believe it is possible to put together a statistical analysis of balance using the ladder. I don't think this is it, though.
Um, I'd have to disagree. On that chart protoss is clearly the winner. The blue line is at the top almost the whole way and only at the bottom in 1 spot....
Terrans have a 40% representation in the top 100 in both Korean and European ladders and have the most people with very high win rates...and not by a small margin.
NesTea had the right idea when he said it is much easier to do well with Terran, Protoss takes a long time to get good at because there are so many things you just lose to without being able to do much, a lot of timings to learn and a lot of games you must lose to figure it all out. Even a Protoss player as good as oGsMC still gets crushed by simple Terran build order pushes, like the Banshee,Tank,Raven,Marine done by MKP or the Banshee/Raven/Marine done by plot.
In the GSL, how many people are confident in a Toss player as they are confident in a player like MMA, SuperNova or MVP? MC, possibly Alicia, and the scary thing is there is a big difference between those two players still, maybe in a few years this might all even out, when everyone gets really good.
Um, I'd have to disagree. On that chart protoss is clearly the winner. The blue line is at the top almost the whole way and only at the bottom in 1 spot.....
You misunderstand. Racial distribution itself is not an indication of balance. The question is if the very top bins are disproportionate to the whole. Mathematically, they are not.
Um, I'd have to disagree. On that chart protoss is clearly the winner. The blue line is at the top almost the whole way and only at the bottom in 1 spot.....
You misunderstand. Racial distribution itself is not an indication of balance. The question is if the very top bins are disproportionate to the whole. Mathematically, they are not.
I didn't state anything about balance. All I was trying to say was I disagree with the statement at the bottom of the graph. My interpretation of that graph is that protoss is clearly the most preferred and zerg the least. In 13 of the 20 bins, protoss is the most, in 2 more it is tied for first and in 1 it is tied for second. There is only 1 bin on the chart that has protoss in last (not including ties)
Terran has a lot of sick players that's for sure. Just like BW, I think Terran rewards players with the highest skill set. I've thought Terran was the best race played perfect even in BW days. That's why I picked them, no race rewards skills more. Terran will always attract the best players because of this.
Um, I'd have to disagree. On that chart protoss is clearly the winner. The blue line is at the top almost the whole way and only at the bottom in 1 spot.....
You misunderstand. Racial distribution itself is not an indication of balance. The question is if the very top bins are disproportionate to the whole. Mathematically, they are not.
I didn't state anything about balance. All I was trying to say was I disagree with the statement at the bottom of the graph. My interpretation of that graph is that protoss is clearly the most preferred and zerg the least. In 13 of the 20 bins, protoss is the most, in 2 more it is tied for first and in 1 it is tied for second. There is only 1 bin on the chart that has protoss in last (not including ties)
My point is that which race has the most players is largely irrelevant, what matters is that it doesn't significantly change from bin to bin.
Nice statistics, always enjoyed looking at the race and win distributions for the respective races.
Of course, this is the ladder, which is not an exact representation of balance and many other factors affect the state of the ladder, which lest we forget is in constant flux.
Also, a lot of top pros don't feature prominently on the ladder, and there's differences in skill levels in general across the ladders, especially with the newly established Chinese ladder and the godlike Korean ladder...
Just a few caveats to keep in mind, I guess, when enjoying on this veritable statistical feast.
On April 26 2011 02:04 JJH777 wrote: Nestea said this: Terran you can be good after only playing a little, protoss you have to work hard but once you do you are unbeatable race, zerg sad.
I think that fits those statistics decently.
Is it necessary you post something almost identical in most of your posts?
Actually, a lot of people are making nearly the same exact post, and its getting old fast.
I could just as easily say "MVP recently said in an interview that terran is underpowered"
On April 26 2011 02:04 JJH777 wrote: Nestea said this: Terran you can be good after only playing a little, protoss you have to work hard but once you do you are unbeatable race, zerg sad.
I think that fits those statistics decently.
nestea said terran can be very good after practicing hard
then he said protoss will be unstoppable after practicing hard
Does it actually matter how many people are playing "race X" on the ladder?
It doesnt have any significance for balancing the game. It is only important for the "fun factor" when viewing tournaments and such, because tournaments with only 2 out of 3 races are less exciting. There isnt a significant skew in balance among the top tournament players however and thus the race distribution seems to be ok.
If players only have mirror matchups on the ladder it is their own fault, because they are playing the most powerful / easiest to play / prettiest race. Well its actually not entirely true, because Blizzard shares part of the blame due to the horrible tiny ladder maps and their close ground spawns, which disfavour Zerg and which make rushes against Zerg too easy for Terran and Protoss. Thus they are responsible for making these two races more more powerful on the ladder. Luckily most tournaments are using the sensible and much bigger GSL maps (and some iCCup ones as well).
On April 26 2011 02:00 buldermar wrote: Firstly, I want to point out that I'm taking a mathematical approach to my question.
(...)
Based on the above statistics, I feel safe to make the conclusion that terran is dominating the top of GM League in every way I could think of.
If you really want to take a mathematical approach, you should work out some p-values before coming with a conclusion, or nobody will take you seriously.
It is somewhat tricky to do statistical significance testing (at least with this method) due to my samples interrelation. For instance, while doing it on a samplesize of a dice, each throw does not influence the next throw, but when looked at the top rankings, two issues arise;
a) Each spot has a certain level of significance for the overall picture, the number one spot has the highest and the 100th spot the lowest (in the case of points top 100)
b) When dividing the spots into sections of 10, which is nesseccary unless I want to do a huge amount of work in excel OR give an overall picture of top100 instead, what shows in one section influence the likelyhood of each race being represented in the next.
There are ways to go around this, but it's time consuming. It would be a lot easier, but also a lot less interesting, to look at, for instance, Just "top 100" of GM ín relation to all of the players in GM.
Finally, who are you to decide the level of seriousness for the entire community?
On April 26 2011 02:02 Shaetan wrote: You can't claim to do statistical analysis then just throw out numbers and claim that X is true, you have to do the analysis.
Can you examplify? I thought I did a decent job at showig a trend based on every aspect of the top of the ladder I could think of. I even specifically pointed out that I'd gladly look into more if anyone got ideas.
You need to show that the difference you see is statistically significant and not just due to chance. You said yourself when looking at a sample size of ~1600 win rates were much more even so it's possible decreasing your sample size artificially created the disparity. Also not sure why you wouldn't look at the full 200 or at least all GM league top 100.
Top 200 includes too high an amount of players to represent the top of the ladder. When looking at only top10/top20 etc, the outcome can be explained solely with chance, but when looking at multiple areas you'll have to multiple the respective odds of it being due to variance for each area, which changes the picture dramatically. The issue is that many of the areas interrelate, making traditional statistical significance meassurements difficult.
My only excuse for not looking at entire top 100's the way I initially did is it being time consuming. I decided to just look at top 30 for each of the other groups as the top spots has the highest level of significance for what I'm looking into.
On April 26 2011 02:12 Cryllic wrote: Well yea these would apply mostly to ladder games. MVP said that terran was the weakest race in GSL maps because of the large rush distances and lack of early game aggression which is where the terran race excels at.
This is true. Especially if some people try to imitate builds that they are going to play on the bigger GSL maps on the smaller ladder maps, it can be very easy to randomly lose games against Terran.
But not for terran to randomly lose games when doing so, because their openings are less dependant on the size of the map, or?
On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote: Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
In other words you're stating that for any given TvX matchup, the terran player will be much more likely to win asuming slightly superior skilllevel than what would be the case for PvX and ZvX matchups? Can you elaborate on this?
He's saying TvT more dynamic than other mirror matchups. Although I'd say ZvZ is similar. PvP is pigeonholed into 4gate.
But I'd say mirrors moreso than other matchups let the best player win since "imbalance" is nonsensical.
Yes, but that's not because imbalance is nonsensical, that's because more boils down to micro and less is decisionmaking/openings (since openings are more commonly exactly the same OR equally good, i.e. 4gate vs 4gate). It is in other words very hard to lose a mirrormatchup of PvP if you simply 4gate and have 200 APM compared to your opponents 100, and the same applies to TvT in other ways. The most luckbased mirror matchup would be ZvZ since multiple common openings are more clear counters to other opponents (12p>9p, 9p>15h etc)
A simple way around this issue would be to always have BOX's and let the outcome of this best of decide who lost points and who won, but that means players will have to ahead of time estimate if they have the time to play X amount of matches, so it's not likely to be implemented despite clearly improving on the correlation between skilllevel and likelyhood of winning.
On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote: Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
That's how MC has above 90% win rate in PvP, right?. For sure it isn't 50/50, the best player will have the upper hand. A good player must be good in all matchups, and you can't say that PvP win is based on luck. Even then it's only 1/3 of all the matchups, even if it puts the win ratio closer to 50% it shouldn't affect as much as we see. Protoss from being the most played race, yet having the least players in top.
I agree that it should not affect itas much as we see, but I want to point out that the winrate you are referring to is from tournaments afaik, and they use a different map pool with the avarage map being significantly larger, making it much more skillbased since blind all-ins are less effective on avarage and games are longer --> more decisions to be made each game.
On April 26 2011 02:24 strongandbig wrote: First, the sample size of [top10] or [top30] is not big enough that you would expect it to be equal in the absence of imbalance. Over a thousand players, you can safely assume that the distributions of skill and race choice are independent. However, with ten players it's not unreasonable that there are just more Terran players of high skill.
Additionally, this assumes that winning enough on ladder to get into the top ten is dependent only on skill and game balance, whereas I think that luck is also involved; it's easy to imagine a player whose skill is #3 losing a lot of points in a BO loss to a player whose skill is #150.
Honestly OP, I just don't think you have enough data to say anything here.
The individual samples are not of large enough size, but put together it's different. I would happily look at thousands of players but the disparity in skilllevel would be too significant for the outcome, that's why I've had the neccessity of dividing players into groups of ten in my observations.
Keep in mind that despite only looking at smaller groups at once, they're all from the same source of candidates which would be the entire GM league. Therefore, it's certainly unreasonable to think that there's simply more terran players of high skilllevel - at least to this extent.
Of corse luck is involved for any individual player or any one throw of a dice but when looking at many areas in different ways and they all show the same overall tendency, luck becomes an inadequate explanation.
On April 26 2011 02:00 buldermar wrote: As you already might notice, top 6 spots is being occupied by terran players. However, a larger samplesize is required to show trends:
Top 10; 7 terrans, 2 zergs, 1 protoss Top 20; 12 terrans, 4 zergs, 3 protoss, 1 random Top 30; 14 terrans, 7 zergs, 8 protoss, 1 random Top 40; 16 terrans, 12 zergs, 11 protoss, 1 random Top 50; 23 terrans, 12 zergs, 14 protoss, 1 random Top 60; 27 terrans, 14 zergs, 18 protoss, 1 random Top 70; 31 terrans, 17 zergs, 21 protoss, 1 random Top 80; 34 terrans, 19 zergs, 26 protoss, 1 random Top 90; 37 terrans, 22 zergs, 30 protoss, 1 random Top 100; 41 terrans, 26 zergs, 33 protoss, 1 random
So based on this graph, over the course of the top 10 through top 100 players it actually seems fairly linear to me, the ratio of terran to protoss to zerg players at the top is consistent through these intervals which doesn't seem to suggest imbalance at all but would rather suggest that there are just more terran players.
I'm not sure why you're reading "more terran at every level" as "imbalanced" when its a linear progression at a relatively consistent ratio for all races through the top 100...
I'm not, and it's only a linear progression at a consistent ratio for all races through the top 100. When you look at the entire GM league the picture is different as terran only takes up about 30% of the spots.
My first hypothesis was that more people were playing terran in GM league. That would be a logical explanation, as there will naturally be a clear correlation between the amount of players playing each individual race and the percentages of each individual race in the top rankings. However, is this not the case. Here is the race distribution by league graph taken from sc2ranks.com:
I don't like that you jump from "I'm going to only going to look at GM league because its the most accurate representation" to make your first point then switch straight to "looking at all the leagues to disprove a reasonable hypothesis".
I don't "jump to looking at all the leagues", I'm still only looking at GM league.
There currently is 1638 players listed in GM. The distribution is: 2.6% random 38% protoss 30.3% terran 29% zerg
For those 1638 players, the avarage win% are: Random: 52% Protoss: 56.6% Terran: 57.8% Zerg: 56.3%
For those 1638 players, the avarage amount of points is: Random: 249 Protoss: 325 Terran: 353 Zerg: 335
Looking at the same distributions of only top 100 players in GM we now have; 1 random 33 protoss 41 terrans 26 zergs (You might recognize these numbers from before)
For those 100 players, the avarage win% is: Random; 74.1% Protoss; 66.6% Terran; 68.8% Zerg; 66.5%
For those 100 players, the avarage amount of points is: Random: 657 Protoss: 661 Terran: 683 Zerg: 668
As you can see, terran is once again dominant in every area.
All the win %'s are very close. The average number of points is very close, 15 points isn't a lot and as you've already stated, a large amount of top 10 is terrans which would easily skew this.
In short I'm not sure how these numbers give you the impression that terran is dominating in every area, a 2% higher win ratio isn't statistically significant even across 1638 players and all in all this last set of data actually looks pretty even across the board to me.
I agree that this part is less important due to it being influenced too much by the top rankings, which we already looked into. However, looking into this as a seperated sample, the gap is quite big. We are looking at 1638 players where terran is ahead of zerg with 1.5% winratio and protoss with 1.2%. In terms of avarage points, terran is ahead with 18 of zerg and 28 of protoss. I'm up for looking into this seperated from what else I've observed. I should have written down the exact amount of games this sample is based on yesterday, but I can tell that it is 294415 right now. With a number this high, the respective gaps cannot be explained solely with variance.
Anyway, what I'm mostly interested in is the top spots, not GM altogether, and why these topspots are being overrepresented by terran players.
On April 26 2011 02:29 Let it Raine wrote: as a zerg player who likes to say x is op
ladder doesn't mean much.
Ok? Did you read the post before replying? Are you aware that I'm not trying to estimate the correlaton between ladder and skilllevel but solely trying to answer why the top spots are being occupied by mostly terran players? I'm trying to figure out if this is due to map, certain matchups, the point system, lack of metagame etc etc.
On April 26 2011 02:34 Rabiator wrote: I dont think the number of points is a good thing to analyze simply because the amount of points you get for a victory is somewhat undefined. Too much depends upon your opponents stats and the win-ratio is a much clearer stat which says more or less the same.
Generally I dont think any result of "more players of race X at the top" says anything about the state of the balance of the game. Even the top players chose their race a year ago and not many of them change race, so any of those who do change race will need some time to get to the top of the new race. Practice and experience keeps the same players at the top.
Good thing I'm not looking into the state of the balance of the game then.
On April 26 2011 02:34 FabledIntegral wrote: Can someone explain to me why there are 1638 players in GM? I wasn't even aware there were 8 servers total.
I apologize if this has already been answered.
Every region has more than 200 GM players atm, Russia with the highest, being 211. (as of today with the total of GM players being 1644)
they are the most resilient race to random strategies / attack timings?
Does this apply specifically to ladder games? In that case, how does the ladder map differ from those being used in tournaments like TSL, GSL, Dreamhack, NASL etc?
On the ladder people tend to do random weird stuff that they come up with themselves alot more than what happens in tournaments. Sure there are some things in tournaments such as foxers mass marine, thorzains thorbuild, guineapigs void ray collosus etc, but in ladder there are a bunch more random attack timings, and if you're playing a resilient race that's easier to defend with, you're gonna come out on top alot more often. Also on the ladder you face new opponents every time, so a weird 15 minute proxy hatch (to make an example) can be very successful, whereas in a tournament bo5, you're simply not gonna win 3 games with the same cheesy (cheesy as in out right cheese, or just not solid) strategy.
TL;DR, Ladder = cheese, and terran's good at stopping cheese. The same cheddar doesn't work in a bo5.
You're contradicting yourself.
First you point out that cheese is more frequent on ladder and terran has an easier time defendin against it, improving on their avg winrate. Then you point out that cheese is less viable in a BO3+ when you have already pointed out that it isn't viable against terran in a BO1 on ladder?
On April 26 2011 02:06 tehemperorer wrote: Well, from a Protoss perspective, if you are in GM and you get a lot of PvP matches in one day, it seems you could really either skew your score or drop in points dramatically because the matchup is very volatile (coinflip BO loss people tend to say).
To be a top player you have to be dominant in every matchup, not just 2/3, and since PvP isn't figured out yet, top players might still go 50/50 in that matchup, whereas a Terran player can be really strong in their mirror and can win them most of the time? It seems that the Terran mirror is the best mirror because of the differing ways it can be played and still won.
That's how MC has above 90% win rate in PvP, right?. For sure it isn't 50/50, the best player will have the upper hand. A good player must be good in all matchups, and you can't say that PvP win is based on luck. Even then it's only 1/3 of all the matchups, even if it puts the win ratio closer to 50% it shouldn't affect as much as we see. Protoss from being the most played race, yet having the least players in top.
MC is an extraordinarily good player, and outlier one may say :D. PvP is still very volatile in say low masters vs. high masters or even above that.
MC's micro is on an entirely different level than pretty much every other Protoss out there. As a Protoss player, I think Terran dominance has a lot to do with both the stability of Terran in regards to cheese and in regards to a mirror.
A Terran can wall in, repair the wall in, and defend the wall easiest of the three races. All their units are ranged, SCV repair is extremely powerful and efficient, and they can remove the wall with no cost.I think being the closest to cheese proof is a huge boost given the nature of ladder and those that play in it.
ZvZ and PvP are hugely oriented toward the Early to Mid (rarely) game. And even if they get past T1, the timings are thrown way off compared to standard play. TvT is helped by the weakness of the Marine against bunkers/an early Siege tank. All in all, I don't think Terrans are necessarily OP or any race UP, but as the metagame is figured out atm, they are definitely the most stable and able to play a diverse style.
You're stating that terrans are not OP on the ladder AND are having an easier time winning games in which there is a skillgap than any other race. This is contradictory when looking solely at the ladder and how it works.
On April 26 2011 02:48 Poopi wrote: I think it has to do with : - the mappool is not as disfavored for terrans on ladder as the GSL/tournament's one is. - in BO1 that doesn't matter much, aka ladder, I'm sure a ton of ppl try some agressive / risky or even all-in strategies, and terrans are relatively safe in tvz, not so much in tvp (like the void ray pushes we have seen MC or Alicia do, and other stuff), and they can themselves do strats they can't do in bigger maps. - not sure about this one, but I heard pvp is volatile, and zvz a bit, whereas tvt is much much less volatile. - THIS IS LADDER (what I mean : MarineKing would be REALLY really happy if being 1st on ladder for the longest period a time gimmes you a title...)
As of now - with what I've taking into consideration - the current mappool seems to play the biggest role in terms of terran being the most dominant. I know little about TvT, but I know about the mapsituation from the perspective of both protoss and terran. In particular, from zergs perspective, at least one map seems always unfair in nonmirror matchups (delta quadrant due to vunerable expo), and some seems to be unair sometimes (slags pit close pos, metalopolis close pos, shattered close pos etc).
If we add to this hypothesis that TvT migt be less volatile than other matchups, and TvX might do better against frequent cheese overall, making the more skilled player in a game with a skillgap much more likely to win than what is the case for other matchups, we might have put together a possible explanation.
I wonder if there is a way to verify or falsify this.
On April 26 2011 02:57 zarepath wrote: Poopi has a lot of good reasons. Also, the best ladder players are not necessarily the best players in general. Winning a large number of Bo1s denotes skill, but not the most accurate measure of skill (which would probably be tournaments with bo3s and larger).
Terran is also probably the best race for Bo1s. They can easily adapt and can easily be aggressive. Someone said "most resilient to cheese," which is a good insight, too.
You can use this data to argue that Terran is the best race for the ladder, but the ladder is not the benchmark for ultimate skill, I think. Perhaps Protoss and Zerg are better for BoX matchups for some reason?
Yes, I'm inclined to think that both zerg and protoss would perform significantly better against terran on larger maps. I don't have much insight in the metagame perspective and I'm yet to find a reason to think that would in particular favor zerg/protoss over terran.
We can consider large maps compared to smaller maps for TvZ and TvP;
In TvZ, terran has the option of relying on harras. This can mean 2rax opening, 8rax 1base AI, early reactor hellions, blue flame hellions, banshees, blue flame hellion drop, stim marine drop, marine+scv AI etc. In common for all of these is the fact that they're less viable on larger maps due to the longer travel distance. This means that zerg can safer play a macrogame in which a) the more skilled player is more likely to come out ahead because more decisions are being made in a longer game and b) they can rely less on scouting information for the beginning of the game which makes getting that overlord into the base or seing that factory with poking zerglings at the ramp less important. It simply has less impact on the outcome of the game.
In TvP, protoss simply has the option of proxying a pylon when pushing, effectively negating any influence of the mapsize when they're being aggressive. On this same token, terran does not have this option and therefore their push will suffer from having to travel a longer distance, giving protoss more time to prepare. Similar, when harrasing with a warp prism, you're not inclined to have units in it. You can simply warp them in when you need them, where you need them, whereas a terran player will essentially have to remove the units from his army that he wishes to harras with. That means the units will not be a part of his army for a longer period of time on larger maps.
There is obviously much more to look into, but I can see why some people argue that larger maps favor Z and P more than T in TvX matchups, and maps being played in tournaments are larger on avarage than maps being played on ladder.
On April 26 2011 02:08 lilky wrote: So basically... Races in order of most played to least played: Protoss, Terran, Zerg
Races in the Top (Insert any number here) in order of most to least: Terran, Zerg, Protoss
TLDR: Protoss is underpowered.. WHAT?!?!?!!?!?!?
Correct, that's my overall conclusion based on the observations I made and I'm open for expanding on those observations if anyone thinks I'm being biased.
So what you're saying is this is a balance QQ with a clever 'statistical look' to it?
Someone lock this sham of a thread, you're not even using statistics correctly just listing out the fact there is more terran on top then toss or zerg. For any statistic to be truly significant the deviance needs to be high enough. Not to mention GM doesn't even represent loads of the actual top players, just the top players who ladder a lot. So there is plenty of margin for error in any statistical breakdown of the GM league.
No. As I believe I've mentioned, my intentions with the thread is to cast light on what could be the explanation to why terran players are currently being more dominant than other races on the top of the ladder. This is not a balance debate.
Nobody forces you to read the thread. It if doesn't fit your spectre of interest, simply open a new thread. I havn't violated any of the guidelines and was careful not to do so.
I don't believe any of the guidelines states that I have to use statistics in a certain way. I also believe that I am free to discuss something even if it leaves room for a margin for error in it's statistical breakdown.
On April 26 2011 03:21 Day[9] wrote: Does anyone have statistics on the overall race usage percentage?
Something like
"40% of people who own SC2 play Terran on ladder."
I certainly know that, for new players, there's a skew towards Terran / Protoss as the single player campaign introduces both of those races, but not zerg.
This shows race distribution in leagues. If you scroll down, it also shows win% distribution and avg points distribution for races specifically for GM's.
This shows the same, but solely for the top 100 players. This means that if you scroll down, you'll see the same distributions but solely based on the top 100 of GM.
You can see the same for each of the other leagues, but it has little to no relevance to what I'm looking at in this thread.
On April 26 2011 02:24 strongandbig wrote: First, the sample size of [top10] or [top30] is not big enough that you would expect it to be equal in the absence of imbalance. Over a thousand players, you can safely assume that the distributions of skill and race choice are independent. However, with ten players it's not unreasonable that there are just more Terran players of high skill.
Again, some genuine statistical analysis would quantify this for you. There's no need to go around guesstimating which sample sizes are big or small enough.
Same goes here. The sample size the OP uses is the size of the population intended to be examined: the GM league. Thus we don't need to test wether his data is large enough, since by nature of the study, it's all the data that exists. T-, chi-, F-tests ect. are useful if we work with an incomplete set of data. But to my understanding, the data is not incomplete in this case.[/QUOTE]
I took the freedom of highlighting this post as it is well worded and takes on something that many in this thread are skeptical about. Thank you for pointing this out.
On April 26 2011 02:40 KillerPlague wrote: There currently is 1638 players listed in GM. The distribution is: 2.6% random 38% protoss 30.3% terran 29% zerg
being a protoss player myself, it's a little hard to ignore how many protoss actually made it in to GM. considering this is the top 200 cumulative for each region it feels like your statistics are biased to make terran seem worse than they are. however, this may be due to the simple fact that more people play protoss? as far as terran dominating the ladder, i think it is due to the relative safety they have. zerg players must scout like hell, protoss players must adapt their composition, terran players can do the same build over and over again vs either race with relative safety. things like salvageable bunkers add to this, as many good players will opt for them when they are not sure.
The point is under this 1638 players are players from all Servers and if you look at each server you will see Protoss is dominating the weaker Servers like China ( game was released only some weeks ago => obvious one of the weaker servers at the moment) or Latin America.. but in Europe and Korea terran takes the lead.
But this imbalance discussions are really funny. Like in the recent past everybody is saying toss is dominating the big tourneys and then I take a look on the CODE S and CODE A results or the GSL WC and it is not really looking good for toss. And then comes always the quoting of the progamers, but if you haven't mentioned it yet, they are always saying their race is up. Look at guys like Idra, he would even say Zerg is up if they would have 10 Zergplayers in the Top Ten. For some of these guys it might be only the fact, that they are searching for a easy excuse. But I think the main reason is, Blizzard said on the Blizzcon, the opinion of the progamers would be one part of balancing the game. So ask yourself would you really tell the public, if you are thinking your race is op?
Even if we would have a p-value under 5% for this stats. This wouldn't mean Toss is up or Terran op. This game is still very young and the patch still new... the only thing we could say that certain strats are at the moment strong or not strong. And with this stats it seems like terrans have at the moment maybe the best working strats for these ladder maps. But nobody knows if this will change in the next weeks even without a patch.
Firstly, this is not a balance debate but a seach for alternative explanations to that 'perspective'. The fact that the game is young does not conflict with my desire of improving on my insight and undertanding of the current ongoing dynamics of the top of the ladder.
And to answer your moral-related question - Yes, personally I would, but I can also see why some would feel inclined to not tell the public.
Anyway, what I'm mostly interested in is the top spots, not GM altogether, and why these topspots are being overrepresented by terran players.
one thing you have to look at that i believe you have neglected (probably unintentionally) is the ratio of match-ups i.e. in what match-ups do these top terrans receive their highest win ratios and what the ratio of the match-ups is. if these particular Terran's best match-up is TvP and those are the most frequent match-ups that are played on the ladder (which would statistically make sense since most of the people at the top of the ladder are P), then their overall win percentage would most likely be higher than that of a P who's best match-up is PvZ (lulz) where he wins around 70& of games, *Numbers hereafter are made up solely for hypothetical situation* Imagine this there is a terran that rolls these percentages of each match-up: gets vP: 50% gets vT: 40% gets vZ: 10%
now his best match-up is vP so his win rate is ~70% vP he's okay vT so win rate is ~55% and he just cant figure out vZ consistently so win rate ~ 40%
his overall win rate for all combined would be roughly 165/300 or ~55 percent BUT that doesn't accurately show his win rate because vZ is only 10% of total games so adjusted for race encountered %, the win rate would be more like 63% [ 4/10 vZ 22/40 vT 35/50 vP 63/100 total ]
now lets look at his protoss buddy: his best matchup happens to be vZ (duuur): ~80% he knows vT but gets beaten because of Bo loss(reactor vikings when going colls etc: ~50% and his vP is the "coinflip" that everyone know and loves, he's just a little better at it: ~55%
his overall win rate is 185/300 or ~ 62 perent : more then terran buddy But lets account for race encountered again, it becomes ~ 56% [ 8/10 vZ 20/40 vT 28/50 vP 56/100 total ]
i believe, and i may be wrong, that it is this adjusted percentage that is calculated and shown for ladder rankings. thus putting more terrans who are good at vP ahead of most Ps and putting Z's who can hold there own to Ps around the same tier as the top Ps.
of course my match up encounter 5s are probably way of the mark( I don't think for a second its 33% each though), but these numbers arejust to show you what i mean.
On April 26 2011 03:45 TheRabidDeer wrote: I am curious if the numbers will change much when HotS comes out though.
What is HotS?
Heart of the swarm, the coming expansion pack for sc2.
Looking at these statistics all I can conclude is that they are inconclusive, not only that but I dont think ladder rankings are a very strong indication of balance.
No, you are wrong. Have you ever taken a statistics course? There is always variation in a sample due to pure stochastics. When you flip a coin 100 times, the odds of it landing heads exactly 50 times are actually quite small. Same logic applies here, you have to test what amount of deviation from the norm is actually due to randomness with 90/95/99 percent probability.
On April 26 2011 02:08 lilky wrote: So basically... Races in order of most played to least played: Protoss, Terran, Zerg
Races in the Top (Insert any number here) in order of most to least: Terran, Zerg, Protoss
TLDR: Protoss is underpowered.. WHAT?!?!?!!?!?!?
Correct, that's my overall conclusion based on the observations I made and I'm open for expanding on those observations if anyone thinks I'm being biased.
hey bulder, don't say that that is your overall conclusion, step one is to validate his claim.
his first premisse: "Races in order of most played to least played: Protoss, Terran, Zerg" correct, this is what his statistics show
his second premisse: "Races in the Top (Insert any number here) in order of most to least: Terran, Zerg, Protoss" correct only for top 10, 20, 40 and 50 in the case of top 30, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100 it is (from bulders statistics) Terran, Protoss, zerg.
his conclusion: "TLDR: Protoss is underpowered.. WHAT?!?!?!!?!?!?" since the second premisse is false, no correct conclusion can be made using this information, to lilky I say: L2statistics.
edit: I am not saying lilky is wrong, I am not saying lilky is right, I am just saying that the above described line of logic that lilky used is invalid.
Invalid when looking into each individual sample, valid when looking at is as a whole, which is why I put in the word "overall". I didn't intend to respond to the last part about Protoss being underpowered as this isn't a thread about balance/imbalance. I thought that was obvious.
Thank you for looking into it. In particular, I did not take the time to look into his 2nd premisse, which would have been preferred in terms of giving an accurate reply to his, and now that you point it out I probably should have.
I feel like these statistical analyses don't really help. A good new strategy/idea on a map for any race could skew the results to favor that race immensely. Then two weeks later the other races adapt and the statistics goes back to more normal figures.
On April 26 2011 02:08 lilky wrote: So basically... Races in order of most played to least played: Protoss, Terran, Zerg
Races in the Top (Insert any number here) in order of most to least: Terran, Zerg, Protoss
TLDR: Protoss is underpowered.. WHAT?!?!?!!?!?!?
Correct, that's my overall conclusion based on the observations I made and I'm open for expanding on those observations if anyone thinks I'm being biased.
So what you're saying is this is a balance QQ with a clever 'statistical look' to it?
Someone lock this sham of a thread, you're not even using statistics correctly just listing out the fact there is more terran on top then toss or zerg. For any statistic to be truly significant the deviance needs to be high enough. Not to mention GM doesn't even represent loads of the actual top players, just the top players who ladder a lot. So there is plenty of margin for error in any statistical breakdown of the GM league.
No. As I believe I've mentioned, my intentions with the thread is to cast light on what could be the explanation to why terran players are currently being more dominant than other races on the top of the ladder. This is not a balance debate.
Nobody forces you to read the thread. It if doesn't fit your spectre of interest, simply open a new thread. I havn't violated any of the guidelines and was careful not to do so.
I don't believe any of the guidelines states that I have to use statistics in a certain way. I also believe that I am free to discuss something even if it leaves room for a margin for error in it's statistical breakdown.
Statistics is a science, that means there's rigor in how statistical tools are used, and one can judge objectly when it is used incorrectly. Nearly every post in this thread (that's not yours) points to the fact that your usage of statistics are incorrect, misleading, or blatantly ignorant of basic principles (which in my eyes, are a sacrilege and affront to numerics). This is not your forum, you don't get to post bullshit just because you feel like it. Furthermore, it's unacceptable to bump your own thread fifteen times within a two hour period. I was also new to TL once, but back then I understand how to show restrain until I familiarize myself with the rules, something you obviously didn't do.
On April 26 2011 18:19 karpo wrote: I feel like these statistical analyses don't really help. A good new strategy/idea on a map for any race could skew the results to favor that race immensely. Then two weeks later the other races adapt and the statistics goes back to more normal figures.
Indeed, still though, I believe it's quite interesting that P seem to be doing really well in big tournaments while these stats do at least tell that T is doing really well on ladder. I believe several of the reasons for this have already been brought up. I personally think that salvageable bunkers, the ability to play very defensively and the amount of different cheeses play a big role. Also of course as some have brought up, the lesser games against a race you play, the less those % will be shown in the big picture. Would be really cool to have stats such as, XvP, XvT, XvZ and XvX. Would greatly increase the information able to be gathered from the numbers.
On April 26 2011 04:36 Silfurstar wrote: With minimal statistics comprehension, you should realize that a because there is a majority of P players in GM, it means they play more against each other, therefore averaging their own race's win rate. You should have considered P's ratio against T and Z in your analysis.
Although it is unlikely, it could be that the matchup system works so that you're facing an even amount of players from each respective race undependant on how many players that you can be matched up against are playing these respective races. Because I cannot rule this out due to lack of insight in how the matchup system works, I cannot justify accounting for it.
On April 26 2011 04:54 zarepath wrote: I've got some stats for you:
My research indicates that the least popular race in the Bronze League is Zerg. Doesn't that mean that Zerg is terribly OP if it's less likely to be horrible?
On April 26 2011 05:23 Raid wrote: This is not a good statistical analysis I think your just trying to look for a pattern. All your are doing is taking numbers and showing correlations that prove absolutely nothing. Its like almost saying that more crimes occur in the summer and more ice cream sales also occur in the summer. So due to the statistics crime and ice cream sales have a direct correlation.
It seems like your just looking into trolling and causing a muck in the community for your own selfish personal reasons. Everyone knows statistics doesn't mean anything on ladder and the tournaments show that too. If statistics hold true to their meaning then the top players on ladder should have been winning tournaments left and right which is not the case.
The game is still being developed and statistics don't mean crap on something that is being developed. For all we know we could be playing the game completely wrong 1-2 years down the road from now.
Scientific evidence does not work on something as volatile as sc2 ladder nor tournaments so please people need to just can it with the statistics.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I don't think what I'm doing is a fallacy, whereas your example clearly is.
What it seems to you is far from my intentions. Statistics are not dependant of what they are used on - only how they're interpreted is. My question is specifically related to the top of the ladder, I'm not interested in discussion the correlation between rank on ladder and likelyhood of winning a tournament.
The game is still being developed, but that does not keep me from wanting to improve on my understanding of its current dynamics. I don't know why this is so difficult to comprehend.
On April 26 2011 02:02 Shaetan wrote: You can't claim to do statistical analysis then just throw out numbers and claim that X is true, you have to do the analysis.
On April 26 2011 02:25 dogmeatstew wrote: All the win %'s are very close. The average number of points is very close, 15 points isn't a lot and as you've already stated, a large amount of top 10 is terrans which would easily skew this.
In short I'm not sure how these numbers give you the impression that terran is dominating in every area, a 2% higher win ratio isn't statistically significant even across 1638 players and all in all this last set of data actually looks pretty even across the board to me.
...and this.
Let me start by saying that I don't think it's very useful to try and statistically analyze the current state of balance based off of the Blizzard ladder. I just want to make a point that if you're going to attempt using statistics, you should actually use statistical analysis and not just look at numbers and try and determine if patterns exist -- this doesn't work and this is why the field of statistics exists.
I am not trying to analyze the current state of balance based off of the Blizzard ladder, merely trying to understand the top of GM is overpresenated by terrans. While what you're doing works for a single sample of data, it does not look into multiple areas and their interrelation.
On April 26 2011 05:49 Pelican wrote: I'm not a statistician, just a lowly science grad student, but I did some really, really simple stat analysis on the North American Grandmaster league statistics (it would take a really long time to gather the data from every league into Excel). If you just look at the data (like the OP) did, it seems like there are some differences here:
You should probably do it on top 100 or top 200 of GM rather than specifically on NA GM. SC2ranks.com allows for showing this data listed the same way that NA GM is listed.
On April 26 2011 05:49 Pelican wrote:
But you can't really tell if there is or not without actually analyzing the data. So I ran a one-way ANOVA on the NA GM league, comparing win% between the races. All the data were pulled from SC2Ranks. The data weren't normal, so a square root transformation was applied [automatically, by the program] to meet the assumptions of normality for ANOVA. The assumption of homogeneity of variances was also met (p=0.430).
This method does not account for the likelyhood of having multiple samples show the same trend. It solely looks at any one group of players, some variables related to them (i.e. win%, points, etc), and if the trend you're looking at is inside or out of the 95% confidence interval. (I do not know the english words, so I can only hope my point is still clear)
On April 26 2011 05:49 Pelican wrote:
Here is the descriptive statistics table generated:
From just this table, you can see that the 95% CIs overlap between every race. Note that the mean values are the actual values, not the sqrt transformed values (not sure why the program does this).
The ANOVA table:
This shows that there is a statistically significant (p=0.043) difference overall between the group means, but it doesn't tell us where the differences are.
This is where post-hoc tests are important, as they lets us look at comparisons between multiple groups: Link for Big! Here, we have two post-hoc test results. In this table 1=P, 2=T, 3=Z, 4=R.
We can see that in the Tukey test, there is a marginally significant difference between T and P win%s, and the Least Significant Difference test shows that there is a significant difference between T and P. Essentially, what we glean from this entire test is that the only real differences in win% are between Terran and Protoss, and that difference is pretty small.
To visualize the actual comparisons, here is a bar graph with ERROR BARS!
TL;DR: Analysis of variance shows that the only difference between NA GM win%s is in T and P -- and it's not very big. Don't make threads about taking 'mathematical' approaches or statistical comparisons if you're not going to actually use statistics. Looking at numbers =/= statistics.
The difference shows a less than 5% chance of it being due to variance/coincidence. Add to that the fact that you've only made this statistical analysis on one sample, and that this sample is NA rather than the actual top 200 of GM. I'd say that this supports what I reached with my approach more so than it conflicts it. You can't just do your 95% confidence interval analysis and then 'ignore' the fact that T-P is out of that interval.
If you have a link to a free version of the program you're using, I'll do it myself.
Also, what analysis method would you recommend for showing the confidence interval of the amount of terran players in the respective intervals of 10, accumulative (top10, top20, top30 etc) in relation to the total amount of terran players in GM? Is there a way around doing each group seperately?
On April 26 2011 06:13 azn_dude1 wrote: Points only mean how often you've played, which means nothing. Nothing at all. Win ratio means nothing when you've played only 7 games. Terran win percentage is barely greater than the others, but that could just be because there are more terrans, resulting in tvt being the most common mirror matchup.
This post means nothing at all, it's just some statistics that are misleading.
Except for the fact that there is only about 30% terrans in GM. If my post means nothing, where does it put yours?
On April 26 2011 06:41 Etrnity wrote: I completely agree here with what Pelican has added to the discussion, and his given conclusion. I also want to note that what we don't see in the raw data is also some of the omitted variable bias that can play a role in the numbers, themselves. I'm not just speaking to values we cannot see, but also values that are rather hard to quantify. Such as that of differences in the goals of individual players on ladder. For instance, some will use ladder as a means of practice, while others will use it for experimentation. Unless you can justly quantify how this would affect percentages, or control for that in the data between the races, I don't see how you could logically come up with an argument.
The data also does not, to what I have seen, take into account what the players are matched up with. Such that there is a possibility that zerg mainly face protoss instead of mirror or zvt, and thus the data is biased in that the win percentage may be speaking about the zvp match-up instead of Zerg on the whole.
The data would also require trying to control for the differences in the ability of the individual. I would be so bold as to say that some players are simply better than others, in areas such as mechanics, game sense, and decision making. How can you control for the differences of the individual in trying to analyze the abilities of the races?
In summation, the data is too clouded, or rather, not collected enough in order to properly account the statistical relevance. If you would be able to embark upon the statistics with a team of people, and try to control for variable bias, then you may have an argument. As it currently stands, there is no such possibility. I like the idea, but the execution is a little poor.
I agree with this, but I still do not see how this contradicts my desire of finding explanations. Obviously, more thorough datacollection, organization and interpretation would be preferred in terms of meassuring a confidencelevel, but this still does not contradict discussing what could possibly help terran to a dominant position in the top of GM in the current ladderform. There is a correlation between the benefits (in terms of improvement of accuracy on confidencelevel) in spending additional time on the reseach part, and how this influences the discussion part. I sincerely believe that what I've shown is sufficient to be basis for a discussion (not to be confused with balancing the game or anything like that). I'll respect if you believe otherwise, just as I expect of you to respect my standpoint.
On April 26 2011 04:36 Silfurstar wrote: With minimal statistics comprehension, you should realize that a because there is a majority of P players in GM, it means they play more against each other, therefore averaging their own race's win rate. You should have considered P's ratio against T and Z in your analysis.
Although it is unlikely, it could be that the matchup system works so that you're facing an even amount of players from each respective race undependant on how many players that you can be matched up against are playing these respective races. Because I cannot rule this out due to lack of insight in how the matchup system works, I cannot justify accounting for it.
Most of my protoss friends history point to a huge tendency to get PvP these last few weeks... so no, it doesn't balance the matchup distribution for you unfortunately.
I think many people's point in this thread is that you basically took numbers and made them say whatever you wanted. The only real conclusions you can make with the informations you have are just facts like : 38% of GM players are Protoss, and in the top 10, 7 out of 10 are Terrans.
Your question already implied an unproved hypothesis "terran crush the top ladder". Which isn't very objective. There's unfortunately not much to discuss, at least not seriously.
On April 26 2011 07:05 MasterKush wrote: I know in the OP you only gave figures using grandmaster/top % of players, but I really feel like you cannot come to the kind of conclusion you have solely based on these statistics.
Would it not be fair to suggest that there are in fact more Terran players total than any other race currently competing in the ladder? I think it's also reasonable to say that the more players playing 1 specific race *could* lead inevitably to that race creating more top level players in the long term. I don't know whether this is actually true, but I think if it were plausible, you should find out approx the ratio of players playing with each race.
Just throwing it out there, there are so many variables that you need to think about if you want to be taken seriously on this matter.
I've answered this multiple times now.
On April 26 2011 02:00 buldermar wrote: My first hypothesis was that more people were playing terran in GM league. That would be a logical explanation, as there will naturally be a clear correlation between the amount of players playing each individual race and the percentages of each individual race in the top rankings. However, is this not the case. Here is the race distribution by league graph taken from sc2ranks.com:
Just because certain races are more popular at a certain skill-range does not prove anything about balance at all. If the top 8 players in the world liked using Race X the most, Race X could dominate tournament and top ladder positions no matter if Race X was OP, balanced or maybe even slightly UP. It is unlikely that the skill distribution is equal between the races at every skill-range.
On April 26 2011 02:02 Shaetan wrote: You can't claim to do statistical analysis then just throw out numbers and claim that X is true, you have to do the analysis.
This...
On April 26 2011 02:25 dogmeatstew wrote: All the win %'s are very close. The average number of points is very close, 15 points isn't a lot and as you've already stated, a large amount of top 10 is terrans which would easily skew this.
In short I'm not sure how these numbers give you the impression that terran is dominating in every area, a 2% higher win ratio isn't statistically significant even across 1638 players and all in all this last set of data actually looks pretty even across the board to me.
...and this.
Let me start by saying that I don't think it's very useful to try and statistically analyze the current state of balance based off of the Blizzard ladder. I just want to make a point that if you're going to attempt using statistics, you should actually use statistical analysis and not just look at numbers and try and determine if patterns exist -- this doesn't work and this is why the field of statistics exists.
I am not trying to analyze the current state of balance based off of the Blizzard ladder, merely trying to understand the top of GM is overpresenated by terrans. While what you're doing works for a single sample of data, it does not look into multiple areas and their interrelation.
Yes, I performed a simple example of actual statistical analysis. The example I gave was looking at a single variable. There are literally dozens of tests that can be used to "look into multiple areas and their interrelation." You have to actually use these tests. You cannot make broad statements based on simply looking at numbers and calling it data analysis.
On April 26 2011 05:49 Pelican wrote: I'm not a statistician, just a lowly science grad student, but I did some really, really simple stat analysis on the North American Grandmaster league statistics (it would take a really long time to gather the data from every league into Excel). If you just look at the data (like the OP) did, it seems like there are some differences here:
You should probably do it on top 100 or top 200 of GM rather than specifically on NA GM. SC2ranks.com allows for showing this data listed the same way that NA GM is listed.
But you can't really tell if there is or not without actually analyzing the data. So I ran a one-way ANOVA on the NA GM league, comparing win% between the races. All the data were pulled from SC2Ranks. The data weren't normal, so a square root transformation was applied [automatically, by the program] to meet the assumptions of normality for ANOVA. The assumption of homogeneity of variances was also met (p=0.430).
This method does not account for the likelyhood of having multiple samples show the same trend. It solely looks at any one group of players, some variables related to them (i.e. win%, points, etc), and if the trend you're looking at is inside or out of the 95% confidence interval. (I do not know the english words, so I can only hope my point is still clear)
I only did it on the NA GM because it would take forever to import all of the GM data into excel. The statistical method is only limited by the data that is put into it -- if I ran data from every GM player through an Analysis of Variance, it would make the test more statistically robust, not less. It seems like you might be confused as to what and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) actually is, or maybe there is just a language barrier. See this: ANOVA explanation
Again, I performed a simple statistical analysis on a single variable. I wasn't necessarily trying to prove you wrong with one test, I was simply trying to illustrate that you can't draw conclusions from simply looking at numbers. That is not data analysis. There are ways to analyze the multivariate data that you want, and if you are so set on drawing conclusions from these data, then you should learn how to perform the proper analyses.
Here is the descriptive statistics table generated:
From just this table, you can see that the 95% CIs overlap between every race. Note that the mean values are the actual values, not the sqrt transformed values (not sure why the program does this).
The ANOVA table:
This shows that there is a statistically significant (p=0.043) difference overall between the group means, but it doesn't tell us where the differences are.
This is where post-hoc tests are important, as they lets us look at comparisons between multiple groups: Link for Big! Here, we have two post-hoc test results. In this table 1=P, 2=T, 3=Z, 4=R.
We can see that in the Tukey test, there is a marginally significant difference between T and P win%s, and the Least Significant Difference test shows that there is a significant difference between T and P. Essentially, what we glean from this entire test is that the only real differences in win% are between Terran and Protoss, and that difference is pretty small.
To visualize the actual comparisons, here is a bar graph with ERROR BARS!
TL;DR: Analysis of variance shows that the only difference between NA GM win%s is in T and P -- and it's not very big. Don't make threads about taking 'mathematical' approaches or statistical comparisons if you're not going to actually use statistics. Looking at numbers =/= statistics.
The difference shows a less than 5% chance of it being due to variance/coincidence. Add to that the fact that you've only made this statistical analysis on one sample, and that this sample is NA rather than the actual top 200 of GM. I'd say that this supports what I reached with my approach more so than it conflicts it. You can't just do your 95% confidence interval analysis and then 'ignore' the fact that T-P is out of that interval.
The difference is only significant in the Least Significant Differences (LSD) post-hoc test. The Tukey post-hoc test shows the difference as being not significant (or marginally significant, depending on what alpha-value thresholds you set for significance). LSD post-hoc tests are generally criticized for not controlling for Type I ('false positive') errors, while Tukey tests are quite robust, given that the sample distribution is normal. I only included the LSD test to emphasize the pattern in the data (e.g., differences between T-Z, P-Z, everything-R are extremely insignificant) -- it was probably a mistake to include it, but it's logical to me -- Tukey is an HSD test, and LSD offsets that, except that its inaccurate.
Strictly speaking, there is probably no significant difference between the win% of T and P in the NA GM -- LSD is an inaccurate post-hoc test, and Tukey showed the difference being marginal at best (p=0.081).
If you have a link to a free version of the program you're using, I'll do it myself.
Ooookay. Here is an Analysis of Variance on the top 100 GM. The numbers have actually changed since yesterday -- as of right now it is: T: 37 P: 34 Z: 29 R: 1 This adds up to 101 because there is a point-tie.
First, I had to exclude the 1 R because it had a group size of 1 -- this would make it impossible to do any post-hoc testing. I ran a quick chi-square test to see if there was any difference in race distribution: + Show Spoiler +
The difference in races being played here isn't significantly different from random (p=0.613).
Next, I actually run the ANOVA. Here is the output for the descriptive statistics. Remember that these are basically unanalyzed numbers and can't tell you much. The confidence intervals are interesting, but they haven't been analyzed/compared yet. + Show Spoiler +
Here, we can see that there is some sort of difference in mean win% between our groups, but we don't know where that is. This is why post-hoc tests are important.
Post-hoc test output: Link for Big! Note that 1=P, 2=T, 3=Z
This time, I used the Tukey HSD test and Scheffé's test, to eliminate confusion. Both of these tests are fairly robust, and are useful in different ways. Tukey's test is more valid if the interest is in pairwise comparisons, but Scheffé's is preferred when all contrasts may be of interest. Here, we see that there aren't any statistically significant differences between T-P win% (p=0.062, 0.056). The tests suggest that there may be a marginally significant difference, but that is really in the eye of the beholder -- this is why alpha values are set beforehand.
Also, what analysis method would you recommend for showing the confidence interval of the amount of terran players in the respective intervals of 10, accumulative (top10, top20, top30 etc) in relation to the total amount of terran players in GM? Is there a way around doing each group seperately?
The most straightforward method here is to do an Independent 2-sample t-Test or a Paired t-Test on each group and the whole. There are other ways, but they are more complicated than necessary.
Firstly, I want to point out that I'm taking a mathematical approach to my question. This is not based on personal experinces but on observations and statistics.
Pelican has pointed out that what you have done is not in-depth enough of statistics. I have pointed out that even using Pelican's methods are insufficient, considering variables unaccounted for.
The only available source to do statistic on at this moment is www.sc2ranks.com. The site updates the ladder standings constantly.
There are other websites that examine the base statistics between the races, individual match-ups, and player statistics. These are generally replay websites, and the data is unclear as to how accurate, or useful, they may be.
I decided to base my statistics on the most skilled players as the gap between the level of play by these players and what can be described as optimal play is the smallest.
You ignore the differences between regions, you are making an assumption that each player in each region is of equal skill, and you ignore the reasons for laddering at the highest level (not all of which is winning each game).
My first hypothesis was that more people were playing terran in GM league. That would be a logical explanation, as there will naturally be a clear correlation between the amount of players playing each individual race and the percentages of each individual race in the top rankings. However, is this not the case.
Here you correctly analyze the data. You don't necessarily need to run a regression to tell that there are more of one race than another, but if you wanted to, I supposed you could see if there was a significance.......
Based on the above statistics, I feel safe to make the conclusion that terran is dominating the top of GM League in every way I could think of (if you have alternative angles to observe from, let me know). I want to point out that this is not a topic about balance/imbalance. I am looking at the statistics with objective eyes in hopes of finding an ALTERNATIVE answer to that.
Why does terran crush the top ladder?
This is the real question here. Pelican has taken data just in the same way you have, and run p-tests in order to determine if there is any statistical significance. Having found a p-value greater than .05, we cannot reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference in the means of the data.
He has answered your question, given just as much data as you have used, so what more do you want? If you want more, then you need to provide significantly more data than what you have presented. If you cannot do this, then you must accept that what you have set out to find has been looked at, and has reached conclusion. I do not blame you for your confusion, as I assume you have not taken regression based statistics, but please end your silliness, it's annoying at this point.
Seriously. I will never understand people who don't know/understand statistics that try to make up their own statistics and refuse to listen to people who obviously DO know statistics. It's mind boggling. I've only taken an intro statistics course and I know that the OP is being ridiculous.
On April 26 2011 02:02 Shaetan wrote: You can't claim to do statistical analysis then just throw out numbers and claim that X is true, you have to do the analysis.
On April 26 2011 02:25 dogmeatstew wrote: All the win %'s are very close. The average number of points is very close, 15 points isn't a lot and as you've already stated, a large amount of top 10 is terrans which would easily skew this.
In short I'm not sure how these numbers give you the impression that terran is dominating in every area, a 2% higher win ratio isn't statistically significant even across 1638 players and all in all this last set of data actually looks pretty even across the board to me.
...and this.
Let me start by saying that I don't think it's very useful to try and statistically analyze the current state of balance based off of the Blizzard ladder. I just want to make a point that if you're going to attempt using statistics, you should actually use statistical analysis and not just look at numbers and try and determine if patterns exist -- this doesn't work and this is why the field of statistics exists.
I'm not a statistician, just a lowly science grad student, but I did some really, really simple stat analysis on the North American Grandmaster league statistics (it would take a really long time to gather the data from every league into Excel). If you just look at the data (like the OP) did, it seems like there are some differences here:
But you can't really tell if there is or not without actually analyzing the data. So I ran a one-way ANOVA on the NA GM league, comparing win% between the races. All the data were pulled from SC2Ranks. The data weren't normal, so a square root transformation was applied [automatically, by the program] to meet the assumptions of normality for ANOVA. The assumption of homogeneity of variances was also met (p=0.430).
Here is the descriptive statistics table generated:
From just this table, you can see that the 95% CIs overlap between every race. Note that the mean values are the actual values, not the sqrt transformed values (not sure why the program does this).
The ANOVA table:
This shows that there is a statistically significant (p=0.043) difference overall between the group means, but it doesn't tell us where the differences are.
This is where post-hoc tests are important, as they lets us look at comparisons between multiple groups: Link for Big! Here, we have two post-hoc test results. In this table 1=P, 2=T, 3=Z, 4=R.
We can see that in the Tukey test, there is a marginally significant difference between T and P win%s, and the Least Significant Difference test shows that there is a significant difference between T and P. Essentially, what we glean from this entire test is that the only real differences in win% are between Terran and Protoss, and that difference is pretty small.
To visualize the actual comparisons, here is a bar graph with ERROR BARS!
TL;DR: Analysis of variance shows that the only difference between NA GM win%s is in T and P -- and it's not very big. Don't make threads about taking 'mathematical' approaches or statistical comparisons if you're not going to actually use statistics. Looking at numbers =/= statistics.
Quoting Pelican's demolition of this thread for those too lazy to scroll back.
I like how he starts with 'Let me quickly apologize for my poor english in advance. I do not live in an english talking country and never found the motivation to learn the language well.' and then proceeds to write in English that's sadly better than the majority of highschoolers in the American midwest.
Tournament results and ladder results point to Terran getting a cushy gig. Historically, TvX has always allotted many mistakes for T. Terran comebacks are far more prevalent because their design is just stronger. Just watch any tournament game, even if the Terran is slightly behind, it's still 50/50. If they're even, you give a nod to Terran because they're Terran. And if the non-Terran is behind, they better have a miracle. Yes, my anecdotal evidence works because one time I used anecdotal evidence and it turned out I was right.