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On February 22 2013 16:32 Popkiller wrote: I'm sure people can give examples of Artosis being right... I just can't think of any off the top of my head...
I recall him really hyping up seed when he was still pretty unknown.
It seems like people are always bringing up unfair comparisons between BW and SC2. BW has had its metagame under development for a lot longer. Meanwhile SC2 is constantly being patched for various balance complaints, all of which would probably iron themselves out if left alone. This adds a ton of variance.
Always makes me laugh when someone actually believes there's a "skill ceiling" that has been reached in SC2.
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Anyone betting on Curious losing ZvP hasn't studied Curious ZvP enough. He messed with Partings timings nice and early every game with nuanced and beautiful adjustments to his play and followed that through with well executed mid-lategame where Parting made more mistakes.
The issue with starcraft II is there is no physical factor which severely hampers a pro player from being the best. It's all about understanding, reactions, mindgames and builds. So if all you need to do is change your mindset of course you can suddenly play a much better game and beat someone whom historically has been smarter at the game than you.
Part of what makes Starcraft so awesome is it isn't like other sport where physicality tends to take precedence, the mental side of things is super dominant.
Also yes there are elements of Poker (limited and false information) in Starcraft so it will rely more on chance than a sport where its about putting a ball in a net.
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Artosis has been consistently wrong since brood war, he was hyping up really as being the #2 best terran when he had like a 40% win rate, and there were at least 5 players that were obviously better.
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This is a real problem and here is my take on it. I really think that the skill level ceiling is actually quite high in SC2. The problem however is what kind of skill that used and utilized and is most important is SC2? It turns out the most important of these skills are mostly achieved by simply "more practice".
There is very little room for ingenuity. Most of the game is figured out. You beat X by Y (X and Y can be strategies or timings not just units). If you don't do Y you loose. There is no magic skill that will not compensate for using the wrong set of units or for scouting late or for using a different strategy. Moreover there are strategies that are very easy to execute and very hard to counter. Then there is the game balance problems which for some wierd reason some people think that balance is just about winrates which is not the case. If a certain strategy is too powerful to force a certain race into a very limited set of game style; it is actually imbalanced. The winrates will not show that because simply players will limit themselves to the only viable strategies and this is again whey we have the game figured out and having very limited answers to each of the opponents move. Then we have death ball play which is caused by factors like economy, map design and unit aoe design.
We can go on for days however we know that in 1v1 games non luck based games "grandmasters" would rarely loose to lower tier player. This is true for both chess and martial arts.
This is also damaging for fans which is a great need for the game to develop. Fans need to pick a new "star" every few months that it's not really fan-friendly thing.
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On February 22 2013 15:54 inSeason wrote:Show nested quote +On February 22 2013 15:49 Kennigit wrote: Is there something inherently wrong with a game where the supposed best players so often lose to players who are widely considered weaker than them? Like, is the skill ceiling not high enough? Is it too luck based? Why don't the best players beat the slightly less good players more often?
This has been suggested by pros, writers, community figures since 2008 when we started playing alpha builds. It has been consistently complained about (especially by idra) for years now. Why doesn't this change? Why aren't we seeing steps taken for this to improve? Show nested quote +On February 22 2013 15:53 MCXD wrote: But if the same player won every single competition and had a 90% winrate, wouldn't everyone complain about the fact the outcome of every tournament is boring and obvious? I'm pretty sure they would. Completely disagree. I want players to quiver in fear when they play against Flash. When a lesser player beats a better player, it would actually feel significant. Even Flash over his career only had a 70% win ratio in brood war, but no one is complaining about brood war's skill differentiation. True, he had periods where he absolutely dominated, like his 15 win streak in SPL, but even that has parallels in starcraft 2 (think the second open season of GOM where nestea went undefeated until the finals). The truth is starcraft is such an intricate and involved game that demands excellence in so many areas that it is very very hard to become as absolutely dominant as some people would like the best players to be. Given how much damage can be done in response to even the littlest of mistakes in the highest level of play it is no wonder that we don't see astronomical win ratios by certain players. That said, we still do have some select, consistent winners whose win ratios exceed 65%.
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The premise of the OP is completely wrong imo. Consider the statements comparing SC to pro sports:
If the measure of greatness of a team / player is utter domination to the point of predictability - where you could consistantly bet and win over (say) 70% of the time - bookies would be out of business. Sports gambling would be dead.
But it goes on day after day, month after month, year after year. Why?
Because the measure of an interesting / entertaining pro sport is NOT predictability by one team / player over a long period of time. The measure of an interesting / entertaining pro sport is having a roster of teams / players that are SO high level and closely matched when playing?
That predicting who will win is difficult. . Not easy.
Imo the reason why some people bring this up from time to time about this game is the fact that the game rules and factors vary over time with new patches. Football, baseball, hockey, tennis: The rules and factors stay basically the same and are even over long periods of time.
They don't have patches and expansions, and thousands of people bitching about "balance"
The players at the highest levels of Starcraft are extremely hardworking and talented and are essentially very closely matched. The smallest mistakes can lose a game in an eyeblink.
This is what makes it exciting (for most people). Not some expectation of predictability. Trust me, I'm 'just' a spectator. I don't even play the damn game.
But I am fascinated by this sport, spend money on merchandise, attend live tourneys when I can and probably blow at least an hour every day watching VODs and reading all sorts of essentially useless crap (lol) about what ya'll are doing and details about balance and units. I'm a diehard fan. Why?
Not because the game is predictable man.
Because it's *not*
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On February 22 2013 16:49 PiGStarcraft wrote: Anyone betting on Curious losing ZvP hasn't studied Curious ZvP enough. He messed with Partings timings nice and early every game with nuanced and beautiful adjustments to his play and followed that through with well executed mid-lategame where Parting made more mistakes.
The issue with starcraft II is there is no physical factor which severely hampers a pro player from being the best. It's all about understanding, reactions, mindgames and builds. So if all you need to do is change your mindset of course you can suddenly play a much better game and beat someone whom historically has been smarter at the game than you.
Part of what makes Starcraft so awesome is it isn't like other sport where physicality tends to take precedence, the mental side of things is super dominant.
Also yes there are elements of Poker (limited and false information) in Starcraft so it will rely more on chance than a sport where its about putting a ball in a net.
Interesting points. I would just like to add though that the problem (for me at least) isn't really that Curious defeated Parting but that I wouldn't really be surprised if Curious fell of a little bit now. To me, as a sports spectator, that just gives his win so much less meaning. For instance; I can't really hype myself up that much for watching Sniper even though he won the last GSL (haha I really hope I'm wrong about that...) since that apparently didn't mean that he would make it that far in this one.
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On February 22 2013 15:38 Gatesleeper wrote: I'm just gonna throw out an unpopular idea here that's been sitting at the back of my mind for a long time while watching Starcraft.
Is there something inherently wrong with a game where the supposed best players so often lose to players who are widely considered weaker than them? Like, is the skill ceiling not high enough? Is it too luck based? Why don't the best players beat the slightly less good players more often?
I know variance is a thing, and on paper the better player/team can and does lose to the weaker player/team, but this seems to happen a lot more in Starcraft than it does in other sports I watch. Federer can be injured or have a bad day, but 95% of the time he beats the lower ranked player that he faces.
Consider this: Artosis, perhaps the most knowledgable guy in all of Starcraft II, is constantly predicting certain players to do well and constantly getting it wrong. Hence, the "curse".
But what if this game is just inherently too luck based, too RNG, too coin flip-y, that to predict winners is very much like predicting winners in a tournament of people playing Rock, Paper, Scissors. Yeah, you can analyze and make up a bunch of depth and nuance that you think is there, but what if it's an illusion? You can say that PartinG is a much stronger player than Curious, he should win 3-1, maybe 3-2. But for then for him to get trounced 0-3, what does that say about this game we watch?
Here's something else. I am an avid liquibet voter. I've voted on every vote this season. I try to vote for the people I think will win, not hope will win. My correct liquibets is 125 of 236, or 53%. 53%! Only 3% higher than what a person would get if they closed their eyes and picked every answer at random (since all liquibets are 50/50).
And you know what? Even having a mere 53% correct voting rate puts me in the top 20% of people who vote every time. (There are 12310 people who have voted on liquibet this season, through the mystic arts of math and estimation, I've concluded that ~3100 people like me vote on every bet.) Isn't that weird?
The maximum number of liquibet points you can have this season right now is 242, if you got every vote correct. Obviously, this is essentially impossible, but how high do you think the #1 ranked person is?
The number 1 ranked person on liquibet, a fellow by the name of SpiZe, has 157 points. He has predicted the correct winner 64.9% of the time. There are 3 people tied for second (aznball123, Arla, and quannump) at 152 points, or 62.8%.
Don't those numbers seem low to you? Out of ~3100 people who vote every time (and these people who vote every time are probably gonna be pretty avid fans of Starcraft, not just casual viewers), the very best predictors, the Artosis of liquibet predictions, is only sitting at 64.9%, he's correct less than 2 out of 3 times. And he's an outlier, there are only 17, SEVENTEEN, people on liquibet who are right more than 60% of the time.
Consider if I were to look at any sport I don't watch at all, football or basketball, and predicted the winners of each game. Just by looking on wikipedia at the teams stats this season and last, I feel like I could probably be right around 65% of the time. Yet the absolute sickest nerd ballers of starcraft who know the game and players inside and out, have trouble being right 60% of the time.
Is there something wrong with the game? If so, is there anything that can be done to fix it?
edit: I originally submitted this as a thread on reddit, but long text posts by someone not famous have a habit of dying quick on that site. I wanted to hear some more opinions on the matter.
One point a couple of people made in that thread was that even back in Brood War, the best of the best maintained only a ~70% winrate. I would say that that's not good enough either. Additionally, there is no one in SC2 that can even reach that low watermark. Mvp, the King of Wings, has a lifetime TLPD winrate of 61%. Life, the most dominant player we've seen in a long time, has over the last 6 months a winrate of 68% (he also failed to reach the round of 8 the last two seasons). After Life, the very top pros are between ~54 and ~62% winrate over the last 6 months. This is for an expansion that's been played for nearly three years now and that's coming to an end soon, shouldn't the game be stable enough for it not to be so volatile?
Great point. The problem is game design. I think sc2 makes it too easy to cheese. If they made the game so you couldn't cheese and had to play standard every game, the best player would win more often. But this is less entertaining...
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On February 22 2013 16:54 b0lt wrote: Artosis has been consistently wrong since brood war, he was hyping up really as being the #2 best terran when he had like a 40% win rate, and there were at least 5 players that were obviously better.
Yeah *cough cough* ... "OMG! Clyde!!" .. *cough*
I love Artosis but ...
lol
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It blows my mind how people can feel like comparisons to sports and things of that nature to starcraft are valid or even relevant. People keep trying to theorize ways a game/scene could be better and do so with ridiculous methods. Enjoy the game, the scene, and help it grow. These ridiculous comparisons contribute nothing and have no basis whatsoever.
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On February 22 2013 17:07 Mohdoo wrote: It blows my mind how people can feel like comparisons to sports and things of that nature to starcraft are valid or even relevant. People keep trying to theorize ways a game/scene could be better and do so with ridiculous methods. Enjoy the game, the scene, and help it grow. These ridiculous comparisons contribute nothing and have no basis whatsoever.
Oh such negativity! So sad to see.
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The design of the game, like tennis is asking for repeated set.
but the random scoring is more like Football than Tennis or Chess.
(NB : the fun randomness of Football is ok for the fans, few people are asking to change the size of the field/ball or the numbers of players...).
So Bliz didn't manage to make a game where the 20th zerg has few chance to beat the number 1 terran.
Therefor the community had to organize these bo X format.
(Even if a bo5 is often not enough to save the "arguably" best player...)
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On February 22 2013 17:07 Mohdoo wrote: It blows my mind how people can feel like comparisons to sports and things of that nature to starcraft are valid or even relevant. People keep trying to theorize ways a game/scene could be better and do so with ridiculous methods. Enjoy the game, the scene, and help it grow. These ridiculous comparisons contribute nothing and have no basis whatsoever. It blows MY mind when I read such pompous and close minded reactions like this one.
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Agreed. The problem is that SC2 is too volatile. Units die so quickly, move so fast compared to the little fog of war, that a little wrong move/ attention going elsewhere can cost you the game. In addition, there's the luck of build order wins
Compared to WC3, where the top players like Moon, Fly, Lyn, Th000, Remind, during their top form, would barely ever lose to inferior opponents. In any tournament, you can almost always predict the ~5 players that would come out on top.
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On February 22 2013 17:14 christophequirion wrote: The design of the game, like tennis is asking for repeated set.
but the random scoring is more like Football than Tennis or Chess.
(NB : the fun randomness of Football is ok for the fans, few people are asking to change the size of the field/ball or the numbers of players...).
So Bliz didn't manage to make a game where the 20th zerg has few chance to beat the number 1 terran.
Therefor the community had to organize these bo X format.
(Even if a bo5 is often not enough to save the "arguably" best player...) Now to think of it. How many games/sets are repeated in tennis? I mean, it's almost as if it's a BO20+ or something.
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Sc2 is just way to hard, so even the best of the best don't know what they are doing and just rarely hit a spark of inspiration and win a few games in a row ... Just kidding. But I would actually think something is wrong with the game if some players had a win rate around 80%+ atleast in an rts. It would probably mean there is a wall in the game, an region where people wouldn't be able to win against those who crossed this wall and are only slightly better then the ones who didn't but basically win 95% of the time against them. Would be pretty uncompetitive in my eyes. So I think a winrate of ~70% for the best of the best is perfect as it shows that the better player will most likely win in a bo3 with there still being a chance for opponents to win.
Also RTS games have really high standards towards skill. They are fast and complex it is practically impossible to ever do everything that could be done. If Sc2 would be roundbased with no fog of war, there would most likely be players that would have a 90%ish win rate. But unknowns like Fog of War were added because you could add tools to reduce the effect of those unknowns. It made games more complex and harder to master.
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Liquibets aren't all 50:50. Take GSL groups for example: 2 out of 4 players advance, that's 6 possible combinations. If you pick "blind" you have a 16.6% chance to pick the right one.
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Asking for 90% winrate is ridiculous, most of the time the tournament format itself prevent that. Take GSL code S for example. - Best case scenario: in 2 group stage, you win every single game 2-0, and ro8, ro4 3-0, and lose the final 3-4. You win against 6 players and lose against 1 (85% winrate), but you actually only win 17/21 games, which makes it the 81% winrate.
- Worst case scenario: in 2 group stage, you win every single one 2-0, and ro8, ro4 3-2, and lose the final 0-4. Sure, you win against 6 and lose only to the champion (85% winrate), but actually you only win 14/24 games, which makes it only 58% winrate.
Using winrate based on the number of games will distort (in some way) the point we are trying to make. If you win two bo3 2-0 and lose 2-3 in a bo5, your winrate suddenly doesn't look as nice as it actually is anymore.
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United States23455 Posts
I feel bad for Artosis. Must suck always making public predictions, being wrong and having people say you curse their favorite players.
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I do think, that the game is very volitile - some matchups more than others - but Artosis is way too certain of himself, before thinking too far. I myself am sitting at a 62% rate on liquibet, and I rarely watch GSL anymore. I tune in sometimes if it's live and then except for matches with my absolute favorites I just run it in the background and tab in sometimes... As it has been pointed out earlier, there are a lot mindgames going on in GSL and people prepare very long for a single boX.
I really like Artosis, but I have to point out, that he often unjustly discredits players, that haven't made it really far in GSL. Like Gumiho, Polt, and many many others in the past. He was laughing at Polt and how badly he was gonna lose, when he had been sitting on top of the korean ladder for weeks. Same can be said about many others.
At the very top, we are talking top 32 in the world, the tides are constantly changing. There are a lot of factors other than GSL results you have to take into account. Like how much time have they had to practice. How is their confidence. How are they able to handle being on camera and things like that.
And while I'm on the subject this has annoyed me for ages. When the stats show up for fanpredictions and mvp gets 95% of the votes and Tastosis go "jees, I'm really surprised by that, I would have given maybe 60%, UNDERSTAND that people choose who they think is more likely to win. They DON'T individually assign how big a chance they think the player has of winning... So if it's obvious that a player has a bigger chance to win, even if it's only 2%, if everyone voted correctly that player would have 100% in the fanprediction :-)
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