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Hi folks, JaKaTaK and I have been studying the importance of nailing your larva injects. We expected to find that injects are super important and that high-level players do it better than low-level players.
We were in for a surprise. Here's the article.
Have a look and let us know what you think!
Thanks to Lings_of_Wiberty, Beta2K, Petered, Shaldengeki and Tenklavir who reviewed earlier versions. Any mistakes still in there are my fault.
EDIT: excerpt, as suggested by CrazyF1r3f0x:
Many in the community think that consistently keeping your Hatches injected with Larva is an important skill for any Zerg player to have. For example, here are some recent discussion threads on allthingszerg. In TheStaircase training methodology, we set benchmarks for several aspects of performance, including spending, supply blocks, and larva injects. In order to set the appropriate benchmarks for TheStaircase, we studied 44,903 1v1 HotS Ladder games from the GGTracker system, across every league and region. If the conventional wisdom is right, and consistent injects are an important skill, then we would expect to find that lower-league players would have trouble keeping their hatcheries consistently injected, and that higher-league Zergs would keep their hatcheries injected a notably higher percent of the time. We were in for a surprise. And as a result, we ultimately decided not to use inject consistency as part of TheStaircase.
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I love counter-intuitive findings like this where empirical data overturns gut-level conventional wisdom. Who would have argued before this that injects weren't the most important thing for zergs? It is THE thing to tell lower league players. "Just hit your injects, every inject, and then a-move your opponent with better macro"
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Might want to include an excerpt or something to beef up the OP
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Finally solid confirmation that Zergs macro is the easiest - we already knew they had it easy with only one production building and easiest tech switches in the game, now we know that they macro mechanic is also forgiving - and note that supposed unforgiveness of zerg mechanics was main argument for zerg's macro difficulty.
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I always thought it was intuitive to think that you needed more larva for the cheaper units and therefore injects were important but as the game progressed, the retention of higher tech expensive units changed the focus of mechanics, Its nice to see a formal experiment though.
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On May 22 2013 03:54 Embir wrote: Finally solid confirmation that Zergs macro is the easiest - we already knew they had it easy with only one production building and easiest tech switches in the game, now we know that they macro mechanic is also forgiving - and note that supposed unforgiveness of zerg mechanics was main argument for zerg's macro difficulty.
Sigh, did you had to turn this into a balance whine?
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Nice! What would be also interesting is, which pro hits the most Inject per game (85-90% most of the time)
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United Kingdom20158 Posts
You're missing something important in that higher level players will more often use energy for creep tumors etc on purpose with early queens while lower ones are much much more prone to just floating energy, and also one of the biggest things:
Idle larvae, not just inject uptime, but larvae sat next to hatch unused, sometimes preventing more larvae from spawning, it's night and day difference if you cut down on idle larvae time a lot, and there's a massive trend there for higher vs lower levels of play
Higher level players also take bases MUCH earlier (4'th base at 9 min if toss takes third with a stargate is not really uncommon) while lower ones are very prone to sitting on 2-3 hatches and just not injecting
I would never have guessed any kind of results like this, because from watching high master zergs, in the first 10-15 mins of the game they don't really float queen energy - but watching silver-plat league zerg friends, it's common to see them hit with immortal all in or something and have 120 energy on their main queen, and you can just say, wtf are you doing, if you hit all of your injects you even have the money (without factoring in drones that would have started mining earlier etc) to make enough units to amove and win a suprising amount of the time, i feel
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What about the harass factor? Queens are often subjected to harass (in fact, they are pretty much the n°1 priority for any player dropping/harassing), and one may expect that the better the opponent, the harder it is to consistently inject without having your queens killed or fighting with your army.
What do you think?
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This mostly just shows that higher level players expand more aswell as adding macro hatches. Resulting in more bases than queens -> lower numbers. Injects are still INCREDIBLY important in the first couple of minutes.
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Totally makes sense based off of how we've seen pro Zergs perform since release, and its good to see some analysis bring it to light.
I do wonder what a Zerg would look like if they committed to a true "swarm style" where they hit their injects consistently into the late game and sat on lair tech units rather than ultralisks and broods.
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On May 22 2013 03:56 Assirra wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 03:54 Embir wrote: Finally solid confirmation that Zergs macro is the easiest - we already knew they had it easy with only one production building and easiest tech switches in the game, now we know that they macro mechanic is also forgiving - and note that supposed unforgiveness of zerg mechanics was main argument for zerg's macro difficulty.
Sigh, did you had to turn this into a balance whine?
Some reading comprehension issues dude. Difficulty of playing given race has nothing to do with balance, as long as it is humanly possible to play other races to win. Terran is the most difficult race mechanically, but in right hands it can be powerful tool. Zerg might even not the most powerful race at the moment, it is just the easiest to master, it is the most noobie friendly race by far, as soon as you getting used to its specific mechanics.
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inject is just an example of behaviorism.
I have never like it, but I'm glad it has less importance if the match goes longer.
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EDIT: delete, double post
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On May 22 2013 03:56 Assirra wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 03:54 Embir wrote: Finally solid confirmation that Zergs macro is the easiest - we already knew they had it easy with only one production building and easiest tech switches in the game, now we know that they macro mechanic is also forgiving - and note that supposed unforgiveness of zerg mechanics was main argument for zerg's macro difficulty.
Sigh, did you had to turn this into a balance whine?
He's not whining.
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im really happy to see that silver players have better injects than master players in 30+mins games. i see kinda often that low lvl players still focus on injecting even when they have enough larva and dont fully focus on positioning their army etc.
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Im calling bullshit on this. I dont think what you showed there means anything. The inject percentage is correlated to the numbers of hatcheries. And in higher level play you have more hatcheries way faster. so after 10 minutes when the master zerg is on 4 base he does way more absolute injects than the silver level player thats still on one base. So thats not an useful comparison.
"Wow, the silver level player hits injects on one base almost as good as master level players on 4 base. I guess injects dont really matter that much." Kappa
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On May 22 2013 04:06 SpikeStarcraft wrote: Im calling bullshit on this. I dont think what you showed there means anything. The inject percentage is correlated to the numbers of hatcheries. And in higher level play you have more hatcheries way faster. so after 10 minutes when the master zerg is on 4 base he does way more absolute injects than the silver level player thats still on one base. So thats not an useful comparison.
"Wow, the silver level player hit injects on one base almost as good as master level players on 4 base. I guess injects dont really matter that much." Kappa
they also build macro hatcheries :D
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That's actually really interesting.
I still want to improve my injects though, but it makes me feel better about missing them haha.
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On May 22 2013 04:07 75 wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:06 SpikeStarcraft wrote: Im calling bullshit on this. I dont think what you showed there means anything. The inject percentage is correlated to the numbers of hatcheries. And in higher level play you have more hatcheries way faster. so after 10 minutes when the master zerg is on 4 base he does way more absolute injects than the silver level player thats still on one base. So thats not an useful comparison.
"Wow, the silver level player hit injects on one base almost as good as master level players on 4 base. I guess injects dont really matter that much." Kappa they also build macro hatcheries :D
oh im sure of that. But way less and later in the game.
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I dont understand it. What does this mean "Inject Timing = 62%". Did only 62 from 100 injects (if you do perfect) at this timeframe?
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Am I missing something, or did you not factor in the additional difficulty of injecting more bases? It's not hard to nail your injects consistently when you're on 2 bases for 30 minutes. As well, it's not hard to hit your injects when there's literally nothing else going on, which is a hallmark of silver league games - either you kill each other in 10 minutes, or you sit around til 200 food and one of you dies shortly after.
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does it count queenless hatcheries?
because in lategame there will be a lot of these, while having more than 4 queens for injecting is bad (arguably it might be best to have literally no queens injecting endgame, because queens take up supply and you don't need as much larvae as ressources dry up and you only want high tech units anyway)
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On May 22 2013 04:02 Embir wrote: Terran is the most difficult race mechanically
Zerg ..., it is just the easiest to master, it is the most noobie friendly race by far
this mentality is disgusting and a cancer on the entire starcraft 2 scene.
Guess which race has the highest APM on average? No, it's not terran..
we can cherrypick stats all day long.
User was warned for this post
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On May 22 2013 04:06 SpikeStarcraft wrote: Im calling bullshit on this. I dont think what you showed there means anything. The inject percentage is correlated to the numbers of hatcheries. And in higher level play you have more hatcheries way faster. so after 10 minutes when the master zerg is on 4 base he does way more absolute injects than the silver level player thats still on one base. So thats not an useful comparison.
"Wow, the silver level player hits injects on one base almost as good as master level players on 4 base. I guess injects dont really matter that much." Kappa
this is definitely true, just use common sense and you'll understand how important injects are, when they stop being important and how a high level macro-zerg player in mid/lategame will always have more hatcheries than queens.
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Yeah, this seems complete rubbish. Injects are important, no matter what what your poor interpretation and technique of your data says.
Case in point, Masters will always have low energy queens, Silver will not. 30% Masters will have worse injects than the average Silvers? Don't kid yourself. Not even 1% of masters will have worse injects than the average silver, who would be still be Bronze league level under WoL. It just shows your methodolgy is flawed.
All in all, this is just a poorly disguised advert for your sc2 training method.
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"A hatch is considered active from the first time a Queen injects it" So what happens if a hatch is never active because it never gets an inject? Or it only gets one after being idle for 10 minutes and then you win at minute 11?
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On May 22 2013 04:12 willstertben wrote: does it count queenless hatcheries?
because in lategame there will be a lot of these, while having more than 4 queens for injecting is bad (arguably it might be best to have literally no queens injecting endgame, because queens take up supply and you don't need as much larvae as ressources dry up and you only want high tech units anyway) The inject rate is computed using hatchery data, not queen.
Could you run the same analysis using the number of hatcheries as a covariate at the different steps of the game?
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On May 22 2013 04:11 Dingodile wrote: I dont understand it. What does this mean "Inject Timing = 62%". Did only 62 from 100 injects (if you do perfect) at this timeframe? It is explained in the article.
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On May 22 2013 04:13 darkscream wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:02 Embir wrote: Terran is the most difficult race mechanically
Zerg ..., it is just the easiest to master, it is the most noobie friendly race by far this mentality is disgusting and a cancer on the entire starcraft 2 scene. Guess which race has the highest APM on average? No, it's not terran.. we can cherrypick stats all day long.
That's because of "S+ZZZZZZ". There's nothing disgusting about it. Terran was also the hardest to play in BW.
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On May 22 2013 04:14 Dangermousecatdog wrote: Yeah, this seems complete rubbish. Injects are important, no matter what what your poor interpretation and technique of your data says.
Case in point, Masters will always have low energy queens, Silver will not. 30% Masters will have worse injects than the average Silvers? Don't kid yourself. Not even 1% of masters will have worse injects than the average silver, who would be still be Bronze league level under WoL. It just shows your methodolgy is flawed.
All in all, this is just a poorly disguised advert for your sc2 training method.
I would not be that aggressive but clearly it's not only counter intuitive it also goes against any kind of observations. Reaching a point where some can say a Silver hits his injects more often or as often as a master does not make sense, unless all the silvers game you analysed were played by smurfing masters.
I am very skeptic about these results
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On May 22 2013 03:54 Embir wrote: Finally solid confirmation that Zergs macro is the easiest - we already knew they had it easy with only one production building and easiest tech switches in the game, now we know that they macro mechanic is also forgiving - and note that supposed unforgiveness of zerg mechanics was main argument for zerg's macro difficulty.
How does this article confirms that Zergs macro is the easiest? If anything the fact that the best players in the world only manage to maintain a 60+ inject score kinda shows that it's pretty fucking hard to do perfectly.
It would make sense that Lower leagues have pretty similar scores since it's the thing you should focus on the most. They don't spread creep, they don't deal with heavy harass, they don't expand as often and as fast.
If you made an experiment about how different leagues manage the timing of their mule drops you would probably get the same results.
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On May 22 2013 04:06 SpikeStarcraft wrote: I dont think what you showed there means anything.
And then:
The inject percentage is correlated to the numbers of hatcheries. And in higher level play you have more hatcheries way faster. so after 10 minutes when the master zerg is on 4 base he does way more absolute injects than the silver level player thats still on one base.
Now people know that the higher-level players are not hitting perfect injects on their 4 bases. Maybe you already knew that, I didn't.
The original goal of this work was to set a benchmark for inject %. Ideally, we could tell a player, "Good job, your injects were Master-level in that game" as we currently do with Spending.
However, based on the data, we cannot do that. That was the main conclusion of the article.
"Wow, the silver level player hits injects on one base almost as good as master level players on 4 base. I guess injects dont really matter that much."
You are suggesting the the # of bases and the absolute # of larva are very important, more important than the inject %. Good idea, I should study those at some point.
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On May 22 2013 04:21 Diavlo wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 03:54 Embir wrote: Finally solid confirmation that Zergs macro is the easiest - we already knew they had it easy with only one production building and easiest tech switches in the game, now we know that they macro mechanic is also forgiving - and note that supposed unforgiveness of zerg mechanics was main argument for zerg's macro difficulty.
How does this article confirms that Zergs macro is the easiest? If anything the fact that the best players in the world only manage to maintain a 60+ inject score kinda shows that it's pretty fucking hard to do perfectly.
He's suggesting that it doesn't need to be done perfectly to cross the threshold of being able to remax multiple times — hence the lack of difference between plat and masters.
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On May 22 2013 04:02 Embir wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 03:56 Assirra wrote:On May 22 2013 03:54 Embir wrote: Finally solid confirmation that Zergs macro is the easiest - we already knew they had it easy with only one production building and easiest tech switches in the game, now we know that they macro mechanic is also forgiving - and note that supposed unforgiveness of zerg mechanics was main argument for zerg's macro difficulty.
Sigh, did you had to turn this into a balance whine? Some reading comprehension issues dude. Difficulty of playing given race has nothing to do with balance, as long as it is humanly possible to play other races to win. Terran is the most difficult race mechanically, but in right hands it can be powerful tool. Zerg might even not the most powerful race at the moment, it is just the easiest to master, it is the most noobie friendly race by far, as soon as you getting used to its specific mechanics. You're the one to talk about comprehension issues. Nothing in here points to Zerg being easier in any way than the other races.
I must say I also find the conclusions made in the article somewhat weird. Mainly because there is a clear difference in injection consistency between the various leagues, but it also seems a lot of factors aren't taken into account (e.g. better players might have similar inject % but twice the number of hatcheries, also relates to the absolute inject question in your FAQ -> injects/minute?).
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Wouldn't it still be important to tell these lower level players to focus on injects? That way they get it into muscle memory that they have to perform this task, and are able to do the other tasks that players in the higher leagues are doing at the same time.
Maybe that's not important though
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The reason highlevel players dont inject all the time is because they know when larva is needed and when creep is better. Sure maybe you could get more drones or army if you injected more, but the game is much more complex than that. Queens fight harass, spread creep and sometimes a queen per hatch instantly isnt the best. As for example any 3 base zerg build gets injects on 3rd hatch kind of late because otherwise you are at a surplus of larva but the 3rd base is still highly relevant for other reasons (Drone saturation and creep spread).
It's a good point that later game units require less larva and it can become less important. Also high level players can relatively easy achieved max (19) larva per hatch just from injecting lategame. This makes the queen float a lot of energy or makes injecting redundant.
Larva inject is by no means something that should be "kept up" but what would be a more interesting statistic, is how low the energy on the queens are. Thats something I'd love to see. If a queen stays low on energy then i'd be amazed! Not on the inject uptime.
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Interesting, apparently I am a boss at injects. My lowest inject% is 61% in a 35 minute ZvZ and it looks like I average around 75% injects until 20 minutes in. Not bad considering I play only like 10 games/month right now.
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On May 22 2013 04:31 TheRabidDeer wrote: Interesting, apparently I am a boss at injects. My lowest inject% is 61% in a 35 minute ZvZ and it looks like I average around 75% injects until 20 minutes in. Not bad considering I play only like 10 games/month right now. Take a look at your Unit tab counts toward the end of the game in a replay. How many larvae do you have? Do you need to keep injections that high to still be competitive at that point in the game or can you focus your APM elsewhere?
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one way to waste your time i guess
User was temp banned for this post.
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Queen energy or total larva spawned seem like a significantly better way of going about this.
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On May 22 2013 04:22 dsjoerg wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:06 SpikeStarcraft wrote: I dont think what you showed there means anything.
And then: Show nested quote + The inject percentage is correlated to the numbers of hatcheries. And in higher level play you have more hatcheries way faster. so after 10 minutes when the master zerg is on 4 base he does way more absolute injects than the silver level player thats still on one base.
Now people know that the higher-level players are not hitting perfect injects on their 4 bases. Maybe you already knew that, I didn't. The original goal of this work was to set a benchmark for inject %. Ideally, we could tell a player, "Good job, your injects were Master-level in that game" as we currently do with Spending. However, based on the data, we cannot do that. That was the main conclusion of the article. Show nested quote + "Wow, the silver level player hits injects on one base almost as good as master level players on 4 base. I guess injects dont really matter that much."
You are suggesting the the # of bases and the absolute # of larva are very important, more important than the inject %. Good idea, I should study those at some point. It should be useful to introduce the number of hatcheries as a covariate for the inject %, what do you think?
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On May 22 2013 04:14 Dangermousecatdog wrote: Injects are important, no matter what what your poor interpretation and technique of your data says.
I shared the data in the article so that experts like you can get in there and show me how it's done.
Case in point, Masters will always have low energy queens, Silver will not.
Yes, I expect that high-level players are spending their Queen energy on creep tumors in favor of injecting in the later game, to some extent. That reinforces my point, which is that inject is (surprisingly) not the priority for high-level players.
30% Masters will have worse injects than the average Silvers? Don't kid yourself. Not even 1% of masters will have worse injects than the average silver, who would be still be Bronze league level under WoL. It just shows your methodolgy is flawed.
Please substantiate with an argument, or data, or something. Surely we can have a better discussion than a meaningless repeat of "Yes!" "No!" "Yes!" "No!". Have you looked at Masters-level and Silver-level matches? I have, and you won't have to look at very many to be struck by how the Silver-level players are doing fine in terms on Inject %. It is truly surprising.
All in all, this is just a poorly disguised advert for your sc2 training method.
I would love to advertise GGTracker and TheStaircase, but why don't we talk about injects instead.
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On May 22 2013 04:34 tenklavir wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:31 TheRabidDeer wrote: Interesting, apparently I am a boss at injects. My lowest inject% is 61% in a 35 minute ZvZ and it looks like I average around 75% injects until 20 minutes in. Not bad considering I play only like 10 games/month right now. Take a look at your Unit tab counts toward the end of the game in a replay. How many larvae do you have? Do you need to keep injections that high to still be competitive at that point in the game or can you focus your APM elsewhere? Where is the unit tab? I see army composition but nothing that has larvae. Also, 5 actions (or 10 per minute) really isnt that much to keep larvae injecting.
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On May 22 2013 04:35 Vanngar wrote: Queen energy or total larva spawned seem like a significantly better way of going about this.
I agree, but then again it depends on your goal. People go on about how critical injects are, they are right here in this thread.
Rather than total larva spawned, how about larvablock? To my way of thinking that cuts to the point, which is that you should always have enough larva so that you don't get larvablocked.
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So this article essentially takes Idra and a bunch of random masters players as the high benchmark of skill, and claims based on raw mathematical analysis of their inject rates across random games played out in very different scenarios, that injecting is not very important.
Why I see absolutely no flaw in that aproach at all.
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Maybe I missed something, and I suspect what I'm about to ask is difficult to get out of a replay file, but how does these numbers (~60% of the time are they producing extra larvae) correlate to energy expenditure on the queens?
A few seconds here and there will result in alot of unused energy, can't this be used in order to figure a way to measure the efficiency of ones macro?
I'm kinda tired so I might be way off! Cool data nonetheless
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The similarity between inject % with silver and masters players makes me feel there is something wrong with the analysis... having watched silver league games. There is no way the data stays that consistent across all leagues. Simply no way.
When there is an odd occurrence in the data collected it is usually either a significant finding or a flaw in the analysis/data collection. Considering the possible problems outlined in the posts before mine I think it is still a stretch to draw any conclusions from the analysis. More study necessary!
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On May 22 2013 04:41 sitromit wrote: So this article essentially takes Idra and a bunch of random masters players as the high benchmark of skill, and claims based on raw mathematical analysis of their inject rates across random games played out in very different scenarios, that injecting is not very important.
Why I see absolutely no flaw in that aproach at all. Is 44,000+ games across from the largest leagues by population % not randomly sampled enough for you? Is there some game scenario not being captured?
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On May 22 2013 04:41 sitromit wrote: So this article essentially takes Idra and a bunch of random masters players as the high benchmark of skill, and claims based on raw mathematical analysis of their inject rates across random games played out in very different scenarios, that injecting is not very important.
Why I see absolutely no flaw in that aproach at all.
It's 44,000 games. Don't be dismissive because you don't emotionally agree with the results.
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On May 22 2013 04:13 darkscream wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:02 Embir wrote: Terran is the most difficult race mechanically
Zerg ..., it is just the easiest to master, it is the most noobie friendly race by far this mentality is disgusting and a cancer on the entire starcraft 2 scene. Guess which race has the highest APM on average? No, it's not terran.. we can cherrypick stats all day long.
APM has nothing to do with difficulty of playing with given race. In SC2 Zerg gets spikes of APM because of production with larva, when you push S and then constantly hold R or Z you got massive APM spikes, thus Zerg players often got the highest APM.
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I think what some people are saying is really what it is.
I don't think higher level players are just as bad at injecting as lower level players. It is just that there are a lot more factors that make constant injects impossible at higher levels (harrass, difference in base taking, emphasis on creep, idle larva).
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On May 22 2013 04:45 DemigodcelpH wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:41 sitromit wrote: So this article essentially takes Idra and a bunch of random masters players as the high benchmark of skill, and claims based on raw mathematical analysis of their inject rates across random games played out in very different scenarios, that injecting is not very important.
Why I see absolutely no flaw in that aproach at all. It's 44,000 games. Don't be dismissive because you don't personally agree with the results.
44K random games. One may be 5 minutes. The other may be a 40 minute game where the player pulled all his Queens off the hatcheries in the last 15 minutes to transfuse his Ultras. And these are random ladder players, not exactly the high benchmark of skill, and frankly, neither is Idra.
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On May 22 2013 04:50 sitromit wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:45 DemigodcelpH wrote:On May 22 2013 04:41 sitromit wrote: So this article essentially takes Idra and a bunch of random masters players as the high benchmark of skill, and claims based on raw mathematical analysis of their inject rates across random games played out in very different scenarios, that injecting is not very important.
Why I see absolutely no flaw in that aproach at all. It's 44,000 games. Don't be dismissive because you don't personally agree with the results. 44K random games. One may be 5 minutes. The other may be a 40 minute game where the player pulled all his Queens off the hatcheries in the last 15 minutes to transfuse his Ultras. And these are random ladder players, not exactly the high benchmark of skill, and frankly, neither is Idra. You realize random sampling is precisely what you want, right?
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United Kingdom20158 Posts
Guess which race has the highest APM on average? No, it's not terran..
My APM gets a 30-50% inflation when i offrace as zerg man
People seem to think APM correlates to player, when infact it's extremely variable based on race
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I think if one analyzed "larva produced", you would see a great difference between the leagues. This would account for spending of larva, thus enabling automatic larva production, and also having more bases.
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On May 22 2013 04:41 dsjoerg wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:35 Vanngar wrote: Queen energy or total larva spawned seem like a significantly better way of going about this. I agree, but then again it depends on your goal. People go on about how critical injects are, they are right here in this thread. Rather than total larva spawned, how about larvablock? To my way of thinking that cuts to the point, which is that you should always have enough larva so that you don't get larvablocked. That seems like it could provide something interesting too, but then again, due to the nature of teching for zerg, they stockpile larva (i.e. saving larva so they can mutate 10 mutas at once or just waiting for a roach warren)
and it would become potentially meaningless after 200/200 though it may be best to only keep this data relegated to the first x amount of minutes for that and other reasons?
the nature of zerg seems to make it hard to get anything concrete here
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Maybe a better measurement might be how often they are under 3 larva, since most of the time over 3 larva it means the hatchery wont' be producing natural larva, as well as the fact it probably means the zerg built too many hatcheries/injecting-queens.
If a zerg is spending most of their time over 3 larva it means that their hatchery isn't producing any, which is nearly just as bad as a queen not doing anything.
On May 22 2013 04:55 Kaitlin wrote: I think if one analyzed "larva produced", you would see a great difference between the leagues. This would account for spending of larva, thus enabling automatic larva production, and also having more bases. Or this. Similar things since optimal larva production would require hatcheries to always have less than 3 larva. Sometimes larva doesn't get used though despite good production amounts, so it might be good to say "larva expended", but at that point it's hardly any different from just saying "units produced" :\
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On May 22 2013 04:49 Teoman wrote: I think what some people are saying is really what it is.
I don't think higher level players are just as bad at injecting as lower level players. It is just that there are a lot more factors that make constant injects impossible at higher levels (harrass, difference in base taking, emphasis on creep, idle larva).
Maybe part is the fact that higher level players are active on the map, while lower levels are looking at their bases lol.
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Wow, people sure are defensive of their elite larva inject skills. It doesn't matter what the scenario is that leads to the inject% being where they are as a function of league. You can argue all you want about how master players have to do this while silver players only have to do that, but that's all irrelevant. What is relevant is that the data shows that this idea of inject% is not correlated in any way to skill. It means that if you want to improve as Zerg then you should focus on some other things, while maintaining some minimum inject% that doesn't have to be anywhere close to 100%. According to the data this seems to be about 65% or so.
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On May 22 2013 04:34 tenklavir wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:31 TheRabidDeer wrote: Interesting, apparently I am a boss at injects. My lowest inject% is 61% in a 35 minute ZvZ and it looks like I average around 75% injects until 20 minutes in. Not bad considering I play only like 10 games/month right now. Take a look at your Unit tab counts toward the end of the game in a replay. How many larvae do you have? Do you need to keep injections that high to still be competitive at that point in the game or can you focus your APM elsewhere? 17 minute game 0 larvae 70% injects 10 minute game 2 larvae 76% injects 23 minute game 14 larvae 62% injects (maxed with bank, just remaxing with any lost units) 23 minute game 0 larvae 65% injects (first game in a month and a half) 16 minute game 16 larvae 77% injects (maxed with bank, remaxing with lost units)
These are my most recent games outside of the 35 minute zvz
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On May 22 2013 04:57 Kaitlin wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:49 Teoman wrote: I think what some people are saying is really what it is.
I don't think higher level players are just as bad at injecting as lower level players. It is just that there are a lot more factors that make constant injects impossible at higher levels (harrass, difference in base taking, emphasis on creep, idle larva). Maybe part is the fact that higher level players are active on the map, while lower levels are looking at their bases lol.
Only looking outside of your base is equally bad. High level players do both.
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On May 22 2013 04:53 tenklavir wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:50 sitromit wrote:On May 22 2013 04:45 DemigodcelpH wrote:On May 22 2013 04:41 sitromit wrote: So this article essentially takes Idra and a bunch of random masters players as the high benchmark of skill, and claims based on raw mathematical analysis of their inject rates across random games played out in very different scenarios, that injecting is not very important.
Why I see absolutely no flaw in that aproach at all. It's 44,000 games. Don't be dismissive because you don't personally agree with the results. 44K random games. One may be 5 minutes. The other may be a 40 minute game where the player pulled all his Queens off the hatcheries in the last 15 minutes to transfuse his Ultras. And these are random ladder players, not exactly the high benchmark of skill, and frankly, neither is Idra. You realize random sampling is precisely what you want, right?
No, with the number of things that can happen in a game that can affect why a player may or may not be injecting, random is exactly what you DON'T want. Say a player is under attack and transfuses a spine crawler instead of injecting. If you just analyze that mathematically, you come up with the conclusion that that player has less than perfect injects, when in fact he made a calculated sacrifice. It doesn't mean inject is not important, or that it's enough to inject with 60% efficiency and any better makes no difference.
The number one rule in doing research that is meaningful in any way, is to control and reduce the number of variables.
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On May 22 2013 04:55 Kaitlin wrote: I think if one analyzed "larva produced", you would see a great difference between the leagues. This would account for spending of larva, thus enabling automatic larva production, and also having more bases. Agreed, though this is a fundamentally different question.
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You dont account for number of injects in your graphs. Masters players will have more hatcheries than silver players- I'd bet if you accounted for that your numbers would be much more in line with expectation.
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On May 22 2013 05:00 sitromit wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:53 tenklavir wrote:On May 22 2013 04:50 sitromit wrote:On May 22 2013 04:45 DemigodcelpH wrote:On May 22 2013 04:41 sitromit wrote: So this article essentially takes Idra and a bunch of random masters players as the high benchmark of skill, and claims based on raw mathematical analysis of their inject rates across random games played out in very different scenarios, that injecting is not very important.
Why I see absolutely no flaw in that aproach at all. It's 44,000 games. Don't be dismissive because you don't personally agree with the results. 44K random games. One may be 5 minutes. The other may be a 40 minute game where the player pulled all his Queens off the hatcheries in the last 15 minutes to transfuse his Ultras. And these are random ladder players, not exactly the high benchmark of skill, and frankly, neither is Idra. You realize random sampling is precisely what you want, right? No, with the number of things that can happen in a game that can affect why a player may or may not be injecting, random is exactly what you DON'T want. Say a player is under attack and transfuses a spine crawler instead of injecting. If you just analyze that mathematically, you come up with the conclusion that that player has less than perfect injects, when in fact he made a calculated sacrifice. It doesn't mean inject is not important, or that it's enough to inject with 60% efficiency and any better makes no difference. The number one rule in doing research that is meaningful in any way, is to control and reduce the number of variables.
That's not how statistics work, nor what the data is measuring. The analysis says nothing about only applying to unrealistic scenarios where you don't have to do anything else on the map like you keep making up.
44,000 games is a comprehensive sample size for what it's actually measuring which is inject up-time across skill level.
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On May 22 2013 05:00 sitromit wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:53 tenklavir wrote:On May 22 2013 04:50 sitromit wrote:On May 22 2013 04:45 DemigodcelpH wrote:On May 22 2013 04:41 sitromit wrote: So this article essentially takes Idra and a bunch of random masters players as the high benchmark of skill, and claims based on raw mathematical analysis of their inject rates across random games played out in very different scenarios, that injecting is not very important.
Why I see absolutely no flaw in that aproach at all. It's 44,000 games. Don't be dismissive because you don't personally agree with the results. 44K random games. One may be 5 minutes. The other may be a 40 minute game where the player pulled all his Queens off the hatcheries in the last 15 minutes to transfuse his Ultras. And these are random ladder players, not exactly the high benchmark of skill, and frankly, neither is Idra. You realize random sampling is precisely what you want, right? No, with the number of things that can happen in a game that can affect why a player may or may not be injecting, random is exactly what you DON'T want. Say a player is under attack and transfuses a spine crawler instead of injecting. If you just analyze that mathematically, you come up with the conclusion that that player has less than perfect injects, when in fact he made a calculated sacrifice. It doesn't mean inject is not important, or that it's enough to inject with 60% efficiency and any better makes no difference. The number one rule in doing research that is meaningful in any way, is to control and reduce the number of variables.
So how many of the 44k games do you think that might be the case and in what way do you think controlling for that will change the results? Do you think that across all leagues examined, only certain players decided whether to transfuse or inject at a given timing? Is this captured in their league placement, if we say Silver league injected while Gold and above transfused and therefore won the game?
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Umm...the lower the league the more likely they are to just sit on slow 2-3 hatcheries and just macro up for a big attack...I sure hope they have at least 60% inject...
I have no proof and this is just my assumption...but I assume the higher the league the more harass/multitasking/bases is happening. Making it more difficult to keep up perfect injects, so 60% for a masters may be much harder to maintain than 60% for a silver player. Though I'm sure some masters players just sit back and macro up too, so it's in no way universally harder/expected.
Though I'd guess a 60-70% is what blizzard would go for in terms of forgiveness on timings, if zerg required more it may be too unforgiving.
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On May 22 2013 03:54 Embir wrote: Finally solid confirmation that Zergs macro is the easiest - we already knew they had it easy with only one production building and easiest tech switches in the game, now we know that they macro mechanic is also forgiving - and note that supposed unforgiveness of zerg mechanics was main argument for zerg's macro difficulty.
This is an interesting take on the data, lel
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This article is interesting, but as others have pointed out, I think it's a small part of a bigger problem. Even if a silver player hits his injects as well as a master's player, there's still no denying which of the two can actually macro better.
Injects and macro aren't the same thing. Good injects are an important part of Zerg macro, regardless of what stats may say. These stats are mostly just an indicator that good injects aren't as hard to hit as they appear to be. But other aspects of Zerg macro also matter a lot. Creep spread, not floating larvae, etc.
Come to think of it, Silver level play doesn't require as much multi tasking as master level play. I'm guessing that silver players can hit injects more easily because there isn't a lot going on. Once the game pace starts picking up, it's not as evident to hit every larvae inject.
Recently I picked up the game again after a really long break, I started in gold and I'm in diamond now. I can assure you that I hit my injects quite, quite, quite better at the moment (when I'm in diamond) then back when I started in gold.
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On May 22 2013 05:00 sitromit wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:53 tenklavir wrote:On May 22 2013 04:50 sitromit wrote:On May 22 2013 04:45 DemigodcelpH wrote:On May 22 2013 04:41 sitromit wrote: So this article essentially takes Idra and a bunch of random masters players as the high benchmark of skill, and claims based on raw mathematical analysis of their inject rates across random games played out in very different scenarios, that injecting is not very important.
Why I see absolutely no flaw in that aproach at all. It's 44,000 games. Don't be dismissive because you don't personally agree with the results. 44K random games. One may be 5 minutes. The other may be a 40 minute game where the player pulled all his Queens off the hatcheries in the last 15 minutes to transfuse his Ultras. And these are random ladder players, not exactly the high benchmark of skill, and frankly, neither is Idra. You realize random sampling is precisely what you want, right? No, with the number of things that can happen in a game that can affect why a player may or may not be injecting, random is exactly what you DON'T want. Say a player is under attack and transfuses a spine crawler instead of injecting. If you just analyze that mathematically, you come up with the conclusion that that player has less than perfect injects, when in fact he made a calculated sacrifice. It doesn't mean inject is not important, or that it's enough to inject with 60% efficiency and any better makes no difference. The number one rule in doing research that is meaningful in any way, is to control and reduce the number of variables.
You have a very skewed perception of Master's league games. I don't want to say 'Never', because it's possible it may have happened at least once, but it's extremely unlikely a Masters Zerg player would consciously decide to skip 2 rounds of injects in order to have a transfuse ready to hold off a certain timing. If they have energy for a transfuse, it's because they had extra queen for creep spread or missed injects.
I'm extremely surprised by the findings here. Anyone who's claiming higher level players have more bases = harder to inject I'm tempted to call bullshit on, because as a former Zerg player injects took literally 1/2 a second to do no matter how many bases I had, just press 6 (select all queens) F1 V F2 V F3 V F4 V ect, or V V if I had a macro hatch at one of the bases. All I needed to do was get the timing down and the number of bases didn't make a huge difference.
Macro hatch / expansion timings may be a better indicator, for example even if a Masters Z and a Silver Z are hitting injects the same amount of the time, if a Masters Z has 3 hatches while a Silver Z has 2 then the Masters Z is much less likely to get larva blocked.
Also maybe the amount of time spent doing injects, once I got my inject cycle down to costing 1/2 second every 40 seconds or so Z macro seemed really easy, but I imagine if I was spending 3-4 seconds every 40 seconds on injects it would be much harder.
Definitely more research is necessary before any solid conclusions can be made, but I'm still very surprised.
Edit: This also might explain why injects always seemed so easy to me, and I was always wondering why people complained about them. Maybe they actually are just easier than we think, and there's something else in Zerg production (i.e. autopilot making drones when you needed to be making units) that makes injects seem hard / unforgiving.
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Those differences in percentage of injects in early-mid game between silver to master players is all that matters just because of the timings, how tight they are, and how your resources are utilized to full extent and not idle.
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one thing to bear in mind that might skew your data is that higher level players have more hatcheries and thus even with lower %age of injects they hit more injects overall
but nice findings!
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On May 22 2013 04:13 darkscream wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:02 Embir wrote: Terran is the most difficult race mechanically
Zerg ..., it is just the easiest to master, it is the most noobie friendly race by far this mentality is disgusting and a cancer on the entire starcraft 2 scene. Guess which race has the highest APM on average? No, it's not terran.. we can cherrypick stats all day long. well, just to inform you. Zergs apm is always artificially inflated, since holding down Z to make lings is counted as pushing the key down for each ling. If you make 25-36 lings at once, the game counts this as 25-36 actions a second, roughly. This will inflate the zergs current apm to 500 or higher for that one production cycle. This on its own is no big deal. But this effects your average apm based on the number of times you mass produce anything from larvae from the beginning of a game to the end of a game.
Often times, a zergs average apm is 30-50apm off. After your game ends, if your average apm was 230, and the terrans is 200-190apm, you have exactly the same apm. The zergs apm is artificially inflated per production cycle that you make while holding down a key. Combine all mass production cycles in a game; drone, ling, roach, muta, overlords, ultralisk, banelings, broodlords, and this greatly effects average apm.
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On May 22 2013 05:27 Armada Vega wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:13 darkscream wrote:On May 22 2013 04:02 Embir wrote: Terran is the most difficult race mechanically
Zerg ..., it is just the easiest to master, it is the most noobie friendly race by far this mentality is disgusting and a cancer on the entire starcraft 2 scene. Guess which race has the highest APM on average? No, it's not terran.. we can cherrypick stats all day long. well, just to inform you. Zergs apm is always artificially inflated, since holding down Z to make lings is counted as pushing the key down for each ling. If you make 25-36 lings at once, the game counts this as 25-36 actions a second, roughly. This will inflate the zergs current apm to 500 or higher for that one production cycle. This on its own is no big deal. But this effects your average apm based on the number of times you mass produce anything from larvae from the beginning of a game to the end of a game. Often times, a zergs average apm is 30-50apm off. After your game ends, if your average apm was 230, and the terrans is 200-190apm, you have exactly the same apm. The zergs apm is artificially inflated per production cycle that you make while holding down a key. Combine all mass production cycles in a game; drone, ling, roach, muta, overlords, ultralisk, banelings, broodlords, and this greatly effects average apm.
I feel like a Korean when I morph banelings. Dat APM.
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i dont understand....
isnt this like arguing Terrans who use their mules are better than terrans who never use mules?
or
"We conducted an experiment and collected data to test whether or not using Chrono boost from your nexus, will increase your chances of success as protoss"
??
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when did the %inject tracking begin? The strategies that the regular silver-league player uses, and the timing of actually producing queens contribute also.
On the other hand, i have never believed that today's zergs have been on top of this mechanic as much as they can be. there are special exceptions say, DRG, Life in certain matchups who actually need the larvae on-demand.
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Very nice finding! This overturns years of flawed conventional wisdom :p
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Very nice piece of work! :D
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On May 22 2013 05:29 MaestroSC wrote: i dont understand....
isnt this like arguing Terrans who use their mules are better than terrans who never use mules?
or
"We conducted an experiment and collected data to test whether or not using Chrono boost from your nexus, will increase your chances of success as protoss"
?? If u read the conclusion it presents some interesting ideas and concepts to further understand the depths of the hive mind & zerg strats.
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Awesome results. Does confirm my gut feelings that I'm focusing too much on hitting my injects, and not enough on the other things I'm missing on.
It's funny to see so many people interpret this study completely wrongly. The study isn't intended to say that silvers are as good as Masters. Obviously, the people on Masters are much much better, and they can macro much better as well. The entire point of the analysis, is that hitting your injects is not a major differentiating factor. All the other things people mentioned, like taking more bases, building macro-hatches, spreading creep, not being supply blocked, keeping your resources low ... these are equally/more differentiating factors, and these are the things people may want to focus equally/more on.
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On May 22 2013 05:40 whacks wrote: Awesome results. Does confirm my gut feelings that I'm focusing too much on hitting my injects, and not enough on the other things I'm missing on.
It's funny to see so many people interpret this study completely wrongly. The study isn't intended to say that silvers are as good as Masters. Obviously, the people on Masters are much much better, and they can macro much better as well. The entire point of the analysis, is that hitting your injects is not a major differentiating factor. All the other things people mentioned, like taking more bases, building macro-hatches, spreading creep, not being supply blocked, keeping your resources low ... these are equally/more differentiating factors, and these are the things people may want to focus equally/more on. The type of games in master vs silver is so different that comparing inject rates is meaningless, so you can't tell whether injecting is or isn't important.
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I firmly believe that this study has data wrong. There is no way I hit injects THIS MUCH better than other players. 71.48% injects over 48 games 19.96 minutes average game time
The average masters player (the league I am in) is BELOW 60%.
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So is it just one 44k sample, and assumed to be normally distributed? Or multiple samples out of a 44k population and running the tests for each random sample you take? The raw data is rather confusingly labeled/unlabeled.
Also, while inject % is an important skill, whether or not it affects the game is highly dependent on other factors. Sure early game there may be an issue of being larva blocked, but in the mid and late game the far more important factor is whether or not those larva are actually contributing something. Injecting larva doesn't contribute to winning the game if those larva end up doing nothing for whatever reason (supply blocked/no resources/etc). The only time unspent larva contributes is if you are building up a larva bank in the late game for a quick remax. Even if you are saving the larva for a muta swell timing, those larva don't do anything in that time, you are trading their inefficiency for the possibilty that the mutas will do more damage later to make up for it.
Perfect inject efficency probably isn't something that will happen even at the pro level. It may look like there is some inefficiency going on, but there's a chance that there were more important things to do than having a few extra larva; for example, if one had to use a transfuse to not lose the game right then, the inject efficiency would be moot as injecting at that time would not contribute to winning the game, or even be the cause of a loss. There may be times when one decides to drop a creep tumour instead of injecting, waits for a time to sync up all his injects to the same timing, or uses queens for transfuse in a defense or pull with the army.
Also, where exactly are the technical notes mentioned that explain how you calculated race macro score? I can't seem to find where that is mentioned again. Was that just supposed to be the inject % calculation?
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On May 22 2013 05:46 Grumbels wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 05:40 whacks wrote: Awesome results. Does confirm my gut feelings that I'm focusing too much on hitting my injects, and not enough on the other things I'm missing on.
It's funny to see so many people interpret this study completely wrongly. The study isn't intended to say that silvers are as good as Masters. Obviously, the people on Masters are much much better, and they can macro much better as well. The entire point of the analysis, is that hitting your injects is not a major differentiating factor. All the other things people mentioned, like taking more bases, building macro-hatches, spreading creep, not being supply blocked, keeping your resources low ... these are equally/more differentiating factors, and these are the things people may want to focus equally/more on. The type of games in master vs silver is so different that comparing inject rates is meaningless, so you can't tell whether injecting is or isn't important.
oh thank you for putting it that simple. This thread gave me headaches because people produce flaws faster than its possible to set them straight..
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Interesting. I wonder, can you do the same graph for Mule calldowns and protoss injects to see if it also follows the same trend? I suspect it does.
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On May 22 2013 03:57 Ahelvin wrote: What about the harass factor? Queens are often subjected to harass (in fact, they are pretty much the n°1 priority for any player dropping/harassing), and one may expect that the better the opponent, the harder it is to consistently inject without having your queens killed or fighting with your army.
What do you think?
I think correlation is not causation
As you are arguing indirectly good sir
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On May 22 2013 05:47 TheRabidDeer wrote: I firmly believe that this study has data wrong. There is no way I hit injects THIS MUCH better than other players. 71.48% injects over 48 games 19.96 minutes average game time
The average masters player (the league I am in) is BELOW 60%. I would consider that their conclusion would indicate you could spend less time focusing on your injects and get better results focusing on other aspects of the game.
I do think their conclusion is accurate-- not only are later tier units more larvae-efficient, but better players are more efficient with their units, and the fewer units you lose the fewer larva you need to replace them.
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On May 22 2013 04:19 anatase wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:14 Dangermousecatdog wrote: Yeah, this seems complete rubbish. Injects are important, no matter what what your poor interpretation and technique of your data says.
Case in point, Masters will always have low energy queens, Silver will not. 30% Masters will have worse injects than the average Silvers? Don't kid yourself. Not even 1% of masters will have worse injects than the average silver, who would be still be Bronze league level under WoL. It just shows your methodolgy is flawed.
All in all, this is just a poorly disguised advert for your sc2 training method. I would not be that aggressive but clearly it's not only counter intuitive it also goes against any kind of observations. Reaching a point where some can say a Silver hits his injects more often or as often as a master does not make sense, unless all the silvers game you analysed were played by smurfing masters. I am very skeptic about these results
Im not that in silver yuo get a lot less harass.
ITs do your build ... deal with some half assed spazzy harass (which in silver involves units instead of using queens to save shit)
In higher leagues harass timing and scale requires more finesse = queens not actually in play to inject.
Also i am only talking about early game (ie 10 mins or less)
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On May 22 2013 05:56 jpditri wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 05:47 TheRabidDeer wrote: I firmly believe that this study has data wrong. There is no way I hit injects THIS MUCH better than other players. 71.48% injects over 48 games 19.96 minutes average game time
The average masters player (the league I am in) is BELOW 60%. I would consider that their conclusion would indicate you could spend less time focusing on your injects and get better results focusing on other aspects of the game. I do think their conclusion is accurate-- not only are later tier units more larvae-efficient, but better players are more efficient with their units, and the fewer units you lose the fewer larva you need to replace them. My micro does suck, but I have a hard time with micro because my handspeed is low because of wrist issues. However, the less than 1 second required to inject does not impact my micro. I also refuse to believe that pro's would have such a low inject rate when they have such high APM.
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On May 22 2013 05:47 TheRabidDeer wrote: I firmly believe that this study has data wrong. There is no way I hit injects THIS MUCH better than other players. 71.48% injects over 48 games 19.96 minutes average game time
The average masters player (the league I am in) is BELOW 60%.
SC2 is that awesome. There will be players who excel through a focus on macro, like you, who injects more. Then there will be those who excel with a focus on tech-timings, or unit-control, or multi-tasking.
Someone who excels in all of the above, i imagine would be in grandmaster league or pro level.
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Very interesting, great read too. Thanks!
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I applaud this article and its creators for sticking to their method, and trusting their numbers in finding their results. Thank you for not letting, "common sense" get in the way of your scientific method. Not believing something just because it doesn't seem right even though your data supports it is an easy trap to fall into, and is one that many in this thread have. If your disagree with their data find a problem with their methodology. Don't just say its bad because you can't accept that masters players can suck at something.
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Cool study, but shouldn't be interpreted wrongly. Injects are STILL important, but so is unit control. Surprise, surprise.
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On May 22 2013 05:59 TheRabidDeer wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 05:56 jpditri wrote:On May 22 2013 05:47 TheRabidDeer wrote: I firmly believe that this study has data wrong. There is no way I hit injects THIS MUCH better than other players. 71.48% injects over 48 games 19.96 minutes average game time
The average masters player (the league I am in) is BELOW 60%. I would consider that their conclusion would indicate you could spend less time focusing on your injects and get better results focusing on other aspects of the game. I do think their conclusion is accurate-- not only are later tier units more larvae-efficient, but better players are more efficient with their units, and the fewer units you lose the fewer larva you need to replace them. My micro does suck, but I have a hard time with micro because my handspeed is low because of wrist issues. However, the less than 1 second required to inject does not impact my micro. I also refuse to believe that pro's would have such a low inject rate when they have such high APM.
This stat does not have GM league due to sample size. It is more representative of the overall ladder however. I don't think pros have such low inject rate. BUT, I recall watching plenty of Stephano games where he wasn't keeping near-perfect injects - and he still won (against a foreign protoss pro, but still pro level). He won through fantastic engagements and map control.
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I would love to see a comparison between the data in this research compared to idle time from terran production
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Really surprising! I would have never expected this. Never missing an inject is certainly better than constantly missing them, but it appears that hitting them throughout the lategame is less important than hitting them throughout the early game.
Thanks for all your work!
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On May 22 2013 05:47 TheRabidDeer wrote: I firmly believe that this study has data wrong. There is no way I hit injects THIS MUCH better than other players. 71.48% injects over 48 games 19.96 minutes average game time
The average masters player (the league I am in) is BELOW 60%.
If you read in the article the standard deviation for injects is quite large, you are about 11% over the average, or 1 standard deviation from the mean... not that ridiculous
Besides, i'm sure your % drops just as much as the other players as game length increases...
You can't just discredit a study because it doesn't feel right, lol. If you find some actual flaw in the data, then that would be something.
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Yeah, as a lower league player, I don't think these numbers are too surprising, because they don't take into account the context of the situations. You can see it on the graph... that time period where the masters league players have higher inject percentage is the 7-12 minute mark where most of the rushes come in and keeping our injects up is waaay harder and way more important than other times.
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On May 22 2013 05:46 Grumbels wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 05:40 whacks wrote: Awesome results. Does confirm my gut feelings that I'm focusing too much on hitting my injects, and not enough on the other things I'm missing on.
It's funny to see so many people interpret this study completely wrongly. The study isn't intended to say that silvers are as good as Masters. Obviously, the people on Masters are much much better, and they can macro much better as well. The entire point of the analysis, is that hitting your injects is not a major differentiating factor. All the other things people mentioned, like taking more bases, building macro-hatches, spreading creep, not being supply blocked, keeping your resources low ... these are equally/more differentiating factors, and these are the things people may want to focus equally/more on. The type of games in master vs silver is so different that comparing inject rates is meaningless, so you can't tell whether injecting is or isn't important.
Did you read their full results? They have data broken down by division, all the way from Silver to Masters. If you want to compare Diamond to Masters, or Platinum to Diamond, that's all there in their results as well.
A while back, someone collected similar data for workers-produced, time-supply-blocked, and surplus-resources-banked. Their results showed vast differences between the different divisions, implying that the above metrics are a major differentiating factor between the different divisions & skill levels. The empirical approach does work.
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On May 22 2013 06:03 plogamer wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 05:47 TheRabidDeer wrote: I firmly believe that this study has data wrong. There is no way I hit injects THIS MUCH better than other players. 71.48% injects over 48 games 19.96 minutes average game time
The average masters player (the league I am in) is BELOW 60%. SC2 is that awesome. There will be players who excel through a focus on macro, like you, who injects more. Then there will be those who excel with a focus on tech-timings, or unit-control, or multi-tasking. Someone who excels in all of the above, i imagine would be in grandmaster league or pro level. I have always known I had great mechanics (it is the only reason I did well in BW, I knew shit in that game and scouted horrifically) but I just cant believe that my mechanics are on par or better than a pro. I mean, that would mean I would have a chance at being GM if I were to allow time for my wrists to heal and then work on unit control.
Regardless... what it means (for me) is that I should probably try to exploit ~15 minute timings since I will have (on average) at least 12 more usable larvae than most people.
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The point about number of injecting queens not being controlled for is a good point. Wonder if that would make a big difference especially early to mid game?
Also zerg's APM spikes are completely overblown in the difference that they make. Look at those spikes as a % of actions in a whole game, its a small effect at best. Zerg is an APM intensive race. Terran might be more APM intensive but this is reflected in that the top terrans tend to have higher APM than the top zergs. For example Yoda has a higher APM than any player I have ever seen.
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I swear, every time someone provides some data point, instead of sparking interesting debate, half the responses are like your data is wrong, my intuition is perfect and therefore i reject your findings.
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On May 22 2013 06:06 plogamer wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 05:59 TheRabidDeer wrote:On May 22 2013 05:56 jpditri wrote:On May 22 2013 05:47 TheRabidDeer wrote: I firmly believe that this study has data wrong. There is no way I hit injects THIS MUCH better than other players. 71.48% injects over 48 games 19.96 minutes average game time
The average masters player (the league I am in) is BELOW 60%. I would consider that their conclusion would indicate you could spend less time focusing on your injects and get better results focusing on other aspects of the game. I do think their conclusion is accurate-- not only are later tier units more larvae-efficient, but better players are more efficient with their units, and the fewer units you lose the fewer larva you need to replace them. My micro does suck, but I have a hard time with micro because my handspeed is low because of wrist issues. However, the less than 1 second required to inject does not impact my micro. I also refuse to believe that pro's would have such a low inject rate when they have such high APM. This stat does not have GM league due to sample size. It is more representative of the overall ladder however. I don't think pros have such low inject rate. BUT, I recall watching plenty of Stephano games where he wasn't keeping near-perfect injects - and he still won (against a foreign protoss pro, but still pro level). He won through fantastic engagements and map control.
Injects are basically most important until you reach your desired drone saturation. After this point engagement control and map control, like you say, take precedence.
The room for further macroing will hit a ceiling very fast in SC2 so I don't find the results very surprising. There's not much you can do past the 12-ish minute mark aside from controlling what is now your presumably maxed army while looking for a good engagement.
Had larva inject supplied only 2 larva, had SC2 been a slower paced game, or had SC2 had a higher max cap than 200 I am fairly certain there would be a greater discrepancy between skill levels in the late game. The way it is now: there's no potential for taking further bases, there's no potential for building more units (you max out). So what is left to do? You control your army. Naturally the rate of injects will drop off towards the late game.
Although I would think progamer matches where there are frequent trades and constant action will tend to show different results. It's very easy to get into a lull in the late game. And I'd imagine lower skill levels get in this lull more frequently.
Although I'm really just guessing. If you watch Stephano's recent WCS ZvTs on for example Star Station, I very much doubt his inject rates late game are higher than a silver leaguer's. He basically spent minute 15-30 in the game maxed out on 3 bases while desperately trying to secure a fourth and while at all costs avoiding an unfavorable engagement.
This is what you get when you design a game with a capped ceiling. The relevance of certain mechanics fade with game length.
Thank you dsjoerg!
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I think one reason is that at higher level player you are keep under constant pression with drops and harras, so it's harder to hit perfect injects.
For experiment may be interesting to see the inject % in a match between a master and a silver..i think in this case it will be very close to 90%
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On May 22 2013 06:14 BreakfastBurrito wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 05:47 TheRabidDeer wrote: I firmly believe that this study has data wrong. There is no way I hit injects THIS MUCH better than other players. 71.48% injects over 48 games 19.96 minutes average game time
The average masters player (the league I am in) is BELOW 60%. If you read in the article the standard deviation for injects is quite large, you are about 11% over the average, or 1 standard deviation from the mean... not that ridiculous Besides, i'm sure your % drops just as much as the other players as game length increases... You can't just discredit a study because it doesn't feel right, lol. If you find some actual flaw in the data, then that would be something. I am not discrediting the study, but the data that the study used. Either via the tracking or other methods. One thing that I found when looking through my games was the issue of a queen dying. If a queen injects a hatch, then dies, it is considered to be not injecting. I had one game that I threw out because my queen injected, then died due to an early pool zerg and I was unable to afford a queen until 10 minutes which meant 5 minutes of "no injects".
Also, the SD seems to be quite high.... 11% SD means there exist people (even in masters) that have 11-17% inject rates at 30 minutes or 100% perfect injects at 20 minutes.
EDIT: If the data is right, it puts me in the top 200 zergs in the world (of masters zergs) when it comes to injecting.
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On May 22 2013 04:13 darkscream wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:02 Embir wrote: Terran is the most difficult race mechanically
Zerg ..., it is just the easiest to master, it is the most noobie friendly race by far this mentality is disgusting and a cancer on the entire starcraft 2 scene. Guess which race has the highest APM on average? No, it's not terran.. we can cherrypick stats all day long.
you do know that zerg apm spikes whenever you press S+ ZZZZZZZ or DDDDDDD etc right? There's a reason why only koreans can play terran successfully and white people play zerg l0l. Clearly it's because zerg has a higher mechanical skill cap...oh wait.
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These data are indeed remarkable, who would have thought the percentages would be so close? There is one important thing missing in these data though,(not sure if mentioned before, didnt read the whole thread only read the article) something wich could explain why the percentages are so close. I would asume that master players on average have a higher number of bases/hatcheries then silver players, wich could effect the conclusion and the data. It is much easier for a silver player to keep injecting his one base timely, then it is for a master player who has 5 bases to keep up with, It is possible to take this into account in the study, for example compare the data where master and silver players both have the same amount of bases/hatcheries, i think you will then find a bigger difference in the percentage of inject active times and injecting properly might be more important then this study shows ,it would be realy interesting to see the results of such a study though it probably would not be that easy to do such a study. Still i think it could be an important aspect wich might explain the small differences shown in this study.
There is one more thing wich might skew the data a bit,if i remember correctly from watching streams and tournaments manny master players use the first inject of the 2nd queen to make a creep tumor instead of injecting their expansion(because they then dont have the monney to make annything from the larva or something) this happens early ingame and sets back their inject active time by a lot, a silver player in this situation might simply inject (or not have an expension at all..) and not make the tumour (and then also not be able to make annything from the larva because he has no monney) This could also explain partially why the figures are so close.
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You can actually play pretty decently with no injects
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Very interesting! Thanks for sharing this research.
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On May 22 2013 06:41 rysecake wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:13 darkscream wrote:On May 22 2013 04:02 Embir wrote: Terran is the most difficult race mechanically
Zerg ..., it is just the easiest to master, it is the most noobie friendly race by far this mentality is disgusting and a cancer on the entire starcraft 2 scene. Guess which race has the highest APM on average? No, it's not terran.. we can cherrypick stats all day long. you do know that zerg apm spikes whenever you press S+ ZZZZZZZ or DDDDDDD etc right? There's a reason why only koreans can play terran successfully and white people play zerg l0l. Clearly it's because zerg has a higher mechanical skill cap...oh wait.
As I said already this is a very small % of total APM and the difference this makes is very small. I dunno why this ALWAYS come up when discussing APM.Zerg unit spam makes a tiny difference only, its an APM intensive race.
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This is some pretty interesting data but I think there are several other conclusion which can also be drawn from this. As been mentioned before, in higher level games its a lot more common that drops and other harass interfere with your macro and queens are often used for defence. Sniping queens to prevent injects is on top of that fairly standard.
A fully-saturated base gathers 861 minerals/minute and 242 gas/minute = 1103 resources/minute. A queen can generate enough energy to inject larva once every 44.44 seconds, which creates 4 larva. So that's 11.11 seconds for a larva, or 5.4 larva per minute. Together with the 4 larva per minute from the hatch itself, that’s 9.4 larva per minute, which is not quite the 11 larva per minute we'd need.
But if we have any macro hatches, or any hatches that are mined out, or any bases less than fully saturated, or we're making units more expensive than 100 resources per larva, then we don't need perfect injects.
While commenting on this I would first like to say that I can understand the need when it comes to simplifying gas and mineral cost and bundle it up by calling it resources. However, the assumption regarding larva generation is a bit flawed. The 4 larvae generated per minute you get from the hatchery itself only occurs when you're actually spending those 4 larvae. If you dont inject your hatchery and dont spend your larvae making units it will never have more than 3 larvae sitting there waiting for you. The higher level of play the more likely it is that a larva is used as soon as it spawns. In lower levels its not uncommon to forget building units which will then limit your larva production. Because of this you will actually need to inject more to make up for the loss in larvae production at lower levels.
Master players still display a higher percentage of inject uptime for most games with a fairly standard duration. Including earlier hatcheries the total larva production gained is probably quite big. All this despite the fact that they're most likely losing more queens and inject timings from harass. Blocking your ramp with a queen against hellions simply appear to be worth the missed inject(s). Then again, I dont find that very surprising.
As was noted under "Directions for Future Exploration", queen energy would also be very interesting, knowing when to skip injecting and spreading creep, or simply when to move out with queen support to transfuse is most likely quite important.
Last but not least I feel that the rather large value of standard deviation within the leagues deserve extra mentioning. The fact that roughly 30% of the master zerg games show a lower inject percentage than the average number in the silver league does fist of all not mean that 30% of the master zerg players have worse injects than than average silver player, something which can be wrongfully interpreted when reading the following:
That means[1] that about 30% of Masters Zerg games have an inject % that’s worse than the average Silver inject %. They did worse than the average Silver game, yet somehow they are in Masters with sub-Silver injects.
Instead this most likely indicates that the games themselves and the tactics used by both the zerg player and the opponent plays a huge role when it comes to both the importance of injects and the ability to inject properly.
Edit: Great work though, I realised I sounded a bit negative and I'm sorry about that, it certainly wasnt my intention.
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I would say this is to be expected. In lower league games there isn't much going on so hitting all your injects is fairly easy (plus it's not like the only thing most people tell a low league zerg is to just hit his injects), while in higher leagues it's a lot harder to hit every inject given that there is so much more multitasking involved. Also I find using a site that doesn't even track all games in conjuction with implying that diamond/masters players are actually high level is kind of a weak source. On top of that your inject numbers is based on hatches, and I may have been watching and playing the wrong rts here, but afaik you don't get a queen for every single hatch you ever build during a game, now do you? So since lower league players build less hatches it's obvious that they'll do fine in terms of injects.
Well as always you can't trust a study you didn't fake yourself, but this one pretty much says nothing. If you have a spell that gives you more production it will always be very very important to use that spell perfectly, and nothing said in this thread has any influence on that fact.
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Dsjoerg, Blizzard said they'd add more data to replay files. Do you know what exactly they're gonna add (or have added, I'm not in the loop. Have they already implemented this patch?)?
If replays contained supply data it would be interesting to plot inject rate against the average supply during a game (assuming this is possible to calculate; draw/collect supply every x time interval and average it).
I would bet that that out of two 25 minute games, the one with the lower average game supply would generally have the higher inject rates.
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When people talk about the importance of larvae injects, 99% of the time they are speaking about it in the context of macro. So when you isolate the stats that ONLY speak about the frequency of injects (nothing to do with actual production of units), it really doesn`t tell me anything in terms of macro or importance of injects. So I really can`t say these stats tell me anything of value when it comes to the importance of injects.
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I am in no way condoning the research and work that you put in this article, the data alone is pretty interesting, but the analysis and 'conclusions' are just way off and can be very misleading. As others have mentioned, inject percentage comparison is meaningless as master players need to put up with far more things throughout the game, you need to give numbers a lot more perspective, cross-relating harrass, multitasking and actions with injects will give you a far better scope of what to look for in these statistics.
If we looked at professional car racing and had a percentage of accidents per competitor and then compare it to the percentage of accidents from an amateur or casual driver we could see that they'll maybe have a similar percentage, but this in no way means that the amateur is near the level of a pro driver, it may be because a pro will have tougher competition, trickier tracks, and many more things to factor in. This is why a correct approach to the numbers is far more important than just having a bunch of data and immediately assume that your comparison is correct.
Because Starcraft is a game that has an enormous amount of variables to account for, you'll have a ton of variation in replays and scenarios when the winning factor is more than just a 'key mechanic', how much of this silver level percentage would drop if he was facing a masters opponent? Probably a lot. Therefore, even if we're talking about the same 'metric' (inject percentage) it's just bad practice to even suggest that those percentages can be compared and have a valid conclusion.
The problem with these articles is that many people don't even stop to analyse and just take it for granted because there's a lot of data and a nice spreadsheet and then try to account the data as 'proof' that a race is easier or harder than the others, which just invites more ignorant discussion.
TLDR nice idea, great effort, cool statistics, pretty blind analysis and conclusions.
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Its because once you get into late game, zerg switches from being cost ineffective to incredibly cost effective. It only takes about 8 larva to roll over someone with a wave of ultras.
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I think this is good research but the results of the data are analyzed in very narrow focused way.
Its not a helpful find to know that as the game goes on i have to worry less about injects, but what is really interesting is the implications of the graph they supplied.
with Starcraft being a game of gaining advantages we're all always looking for ways to get ahead during all stages of the game. This graph shows us that macro mechanics find their best advantages where the difference between leagues is the greatest, so about the 7-20 min range.
A good way to think of it in my mind is that advantages are earned the following ways
early game: crisp openings and proper development of economy(for mid game)n mid game: Smooth and efficient macro. Powering up an army while developing upgrades for late game (~8-20mins roughly) late game: Proper army composition, control and upgrades
With timings and cheese working to exploit holes in development in army or tech before late game
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On May 22 2013 07:40 Shousan wrote: I am in no way condoning the research and work that you put in this article, the data alone is pretty interesting, but the analysis and 'conclusions' are just way off and can be very misleading. As others have mentioned, inject percentage comparison is meaningless as master players need to put up with far more things throughout the game, you need to give numbers a lot more perspective, cross-relating harrass, multitasking and actions with injects will give you a far better scope of what to look for in these statistics.
If we looked at professional car racing and had a percentage of accidents per competitor and then compare it to the percentage of accidents from an amateur or casual driver we could see that they'll maybe have a similar percentage, but this in no way means that the amateur is near the level of a pro driver, it may be because a pro will have tougher competition, trickier tracks, and many more things to factor in. This is why a correct approach to the numbers is far more important than just having a bunch of data and immediately assume that your comparison is correct.
Because Starcraft is a game that has an enormous amount of variables to account for, you'll have a ton of variation in replays and scenarios when the winning factor is more than just a 'key mechanic', how much of this silver level percentage would drop if he was facing a masters opponent? Probably a lot. Therefore, even if we're talking about the same 'metric' (inject percentage) it's just bad practice to even suggest that those percentages can be compared and have a valid conclusion.
The problem with these articles is that many people don't even stop to analyse and just take it for granted because there's a lot of data and a nice spreadsheet and then try to account the data as 'proof' that a race is easier or harder than the others, which just invites more ignorant discussion.
TLDR nice idea, great effort, cool statistics, pretty blind analysis and conclusions.
Their theory and analysis is solid. Rather it's posts like yours, filled to the brim with pseudo-statements, that provide the blind analysis.
Let's see what their analysis is:
1. larva to resource ratio decreases as the game progresses and you tend towards using higher tech units (ultras, broodlords etc cost both more resources and supply).
2. Mined out locations keep supplying larva. Less risk of "larva blockage" late game.
I think they are solid explanations. Only thing I'd like to see added is that you spend a considerable time maxed out during the late game (partly covered by larva to resource ratio and larva blockage explanation). As they state in their analysis: When you resupply and/or remax lategame you tend to resupply on high tech, high resource, high supply demanding units and less so on cheep larva demanding ones.
I can't spot what's so blind about their analysis? Apart from the fact that you and most others similar posters in the thread probably didn't even bother reading it. The truly blind ones are those who don't bother addressing specific points but rather use vague language to cover up their contribution to an "ignorant discussion".
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I'd be more interested to see # of total injects, rather than a percentage of injection over time.
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On May 22 2013 07:05 _SpiRaL_ wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 06:41 rysecake wrote:On May 22 2013 04:13 darkscream wrote:On May 22 2013 04:02 Embir wrote: Terran is the most difficult race mechanically
Zerg ..., it is just the easiest to master, it is the most noobie friendly race by far this mentality is disgusting and a cancer on the entire starcraft 2 scene. Guess which race has the highest APM on average? No, it's not terran.. we can cherrypick stats all day long. you do know that zerg apm spikes whenever you press S+ ZZZZZZZ or DDDDDDD etc right? There's a reason why only koreans can play terran successfully and white people play zerg l0l. Clearly it's because zerg has a higher mechanical skill cap...oh wait. As I said already this is a very small % of total APM and the difference this makes is very small. I dunno why this ALWAYS come up when discussing APM.Zerg unit spam makes a tiny difference only, its an APM intensive race.
It actually makes a huge difference, I dont know what you are going on about.
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On May 22 2013 05:27 Armada Vega wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:13 darkscream wrote:On May 22 2013 04:02 Embir wrote: Terran is the most difficult race mechanically
Zerg ..., it is just the easiest to master, it is the most noobie friendly race by far this mentality is disgusting and a cancer on the entire starcraft 2 scene. Guess which race has the highest APM on average? No, it's not terran.. we can cherrypick stats all day long. well, just to inform you. Zergs apm is always artificially inflated, since holding down Z to make lings is counted as pushing the key down for each ling. If you make 25-36 lings at once, the game counts this as 25-36 actions a second, roughly. This will inflate the zergs current apm to 500 or higher for that one production cycle. This on its own is no big deal. But this effects your average apm based on the number of times you mass produce anything from larvae from the beginning of a game to the end of a game. Often times, a zergs average apm is 30-50apm off. After your game ends, if your average apm was 230, and the terrans is 200-190apm, you have exactly the same apm. The zergs apm is artificially inflated per production cycle that you make while holding down a key. Combine all mass production cycles in a game; drone, ling, roach, muta, overlords, ultralisk, banelings, broodlords, and this greatly effects average apm.
Disagree. Making 1 pair of zerglings counts as 1 action and costs 1 supply. Making 1 marine counts as 1 action and costs 1 supply. For the purposes of average APM, it doesn't matter that zerg was able to hold down Z and briefly reach 500+apm, as opposed to rapidly queuing up marines - given that supplies for Zerg and the other races grow relatively similarly (watch Polt's games, where he often maintains higher supply than Zerg) and 1 action counts for 1 supply, there is no inflation.
You could argue that the supply inefficiency of zerg units actually limits their APM - eg making roaches, where 1 action expends 2 supply.
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I quite liked some of other works from the OP but this was one was shitty.
Comparing the largest difference to the standard deviation at a point is lousy way to say the difference is small, because you don't account for the fact that the positive difference is pretty much across the entire range. Test for example equality of intercepts of both regression lines as it seems very reasonable to assume from this data the slope is fairly constant but the intercepts differ. Basically a difference should be compared with some measure for the standard deviation of the difference while here it compares a difference with just a standard deviation of one group which is usually much larger, it's somewhat like applying a independant two sample t-test when you should be doing a paired t-test.
Besides that the article kind of implies that inject efficiency being a thing should show up as while this is not really true at all. It's easy for a real effect to be hidden by confouding in an observational study, there are tons of examples where this is thought to be true. For example there is no shown correlation between wearing a seatbelt and lower risk of dying in an accident while it's pretty much an accepted fact seatbelts are very beneficial. Something akin to that is very well possible here and seems far more likely than the theory suggested in the article which sounds rubbish. Higher skilled players make hatches faster which are harder to inject all and meet more aggressive opponents who make it harder to keep injecting.
The end result is pretty sound though, it's a shitty statistic as indicator for skill.
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On May 22 2013 07:32 LaLuSh wrote: Dsjoerg, Blizzard said they'd add more data to replay files. You know what exactly they're gonna add (or have added, I'm not in the loop. Have they already implemented this patch?).
If replays contained supply data it would be interesting to plot inject rate against the average supply during a game (assuming this is possible to calculate).
I would bet that that out of two 25 minute games, the one with the lower average game supply would generally have the higher inject rates.
I believe that you are correct, but that differentiates the necessity of injects rather than the standard of injects for various leagues, which was the intent (at least part of it).
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On May 22 2013 07:32 LaLuSh wrote: Dsjoerg, Blizzard said they'd add more data to replay files. You know what exactly they're gonna add (or have added, I'm not in the loop. Have they already implemented this patch?).
If replays contained supply data it would be interesting to plot inject rate against the average supply during a game (assuming this is possible to calculate).
I would bet that that out of two 25 minute games, the one with the lower average game supply would generally have the higher inject rates.
The patch was implemented, it came out 2 weeks ago. Supply data is in there! Thanks for the suggestion <3 makes sense
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When doing SkillCraft 1, we looked at various measures of inject timing and never found anything interesting.
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This is really interesting.
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It's really not a surprise for me. Injecting is very hard mechanically and it's clear that Zerg is not balanced with the assumption of perfect injects from the get-go. I've known for a long time that even high level players are somewhat bad at injecting (just look at replays of people you consider mechanical gods, they always have way too much energy on their queens past 12 minutes, because they have a lot of other shit to do ^^)
What is interesting however is that there isn't much difference between high and low level players. That I didn't expect :D
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On May 22 2013 08:14 contv wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 05:27 Armada Vega wrote:On May 22 2013 04:13 darkscream wrote:On May 22 2013 04:02 Embir wrote: Terran is the most difficult race mechanically
Zerg ..., it is just the easiest to master, it is the most noobie friendly race by far this mentality is disgusting and a cancer on the entire starcraft 2 scene. Guess which race has the highest APM on average? No, it's not terran.. we can cherrypick stats all day long. well, just to inform you. Zergs apm is always artificially inflated, since holding down Z to make lings is counted as pushing the key down for each ling. If you make 25-36 lings at once, the game counts this as 25-36 actions a second, roughly. This will inflate the zergs current apm to 500 or higher for that one production cycle. This on its own is no big deal. But this effects your average apm based on the number of times you mass produce anything from larvae from the beginning of a game to the end of a game. Often times, a zergs average apm is 30-50apm off. After your game ends, if your average apm was 230, and the terrans is 200-190apm, you have exactly the same apm. The zergs apm is artificially inflated per production cycle that you make while holding down a key. Combine all mass production cycles in a game; drone, ling, roach, muta, overlords, ultralisk, banelings, broodlords, and this greatly effects average apm. Disagree. Making 1 pair of zerglings counts as 1 action and costs 1 supply. Making 1 marine counts as 1 action and costs 1 supply. For the purposes of average APM, it doesn't matter that zerg was able to hold down Z and briefly reach 500+apm, as opposed to rapidly queuing up marines - given that supplies for Zerg and the other races grow relatively similarly (watch Polt's games, where he often maintains higher supply than Zerg) and 1 action counts for 1 supply, there is no inflation. You could argue that the supply inefficiency of zerg units actually limits their APM - eg making roaches, where 1 action expends 2 supply.
It's not about how many action, it's about the amount of time required to do it. Terran's have 100 other things they'd rather be doing, but they need to only make as many marines as they have barracks (i.e. hit a button 10 times to make 10 marines because you have 5 reactored rax) whereas zerg can just hold the button down to make as many zerglings as possible, meaning an easy 500+ apm spike before returning to standard apm doing other things immediately. If actions themselves were the limiting factor, what you said makes sense, but actions aren't, time is.
I get about 50% apm inflation playing as Z as opposed to T (avg terran apm is ~140, zerg is ~220) and when I play spammy I get upwards of 100% apm inflation as Z. Might differ for others, but I genuinely think just play playing Z you get a pretty significant APM boost.
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You don't need to hit all your injects when you're zerg. It's like making 10 marines out of 3 barracks; zerg can do it anyway.
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On May 22 2013 08:27 ZenithM wrote: It's really not a surprise for me. Injecting is very hard mechanically and it's clear that Zerg is not balanced with the assumption of perfect injects from the get-go. I've known for a long time that even high level players are somewhat bad at injecting (just look at replays of people you consider mechanical gods, they always have way too much energy on their queens past 12 minutes, because they have a lot of other shit to do ^^)
What is interesting however is that there isn't much difference between high and low level players. That I didn't expect :D It also doesn't matter as much after that point in the game. By then you have 4-5 hatches and much more cost effective units. Early game when droning and making shitty units like roaches and lings off of 2-3 hatches its a huge deal that you get every last one that you can. But once you are up to units like infestors, swarm hosts, mutas, ultras, vipers, brood lords, etcetera, you can do way more with less larva. Plus spores and spines don't really cost larva late in the game since you were going to make the initial drone no matter what. And if you are Fitzy then half of your army doesn't cost larva to begin with.
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The master plateau you see at around 15m for master corresponds to hive tech. This also corresponds with the appropriate loss of the plateau region for all of the other leagues - their transitions are more bumpy. It also is why they all end up at the same point as the restricting fact is not larva, it's resources.
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On May 22 2013 08:40 sambo400 wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 08:27 ZenithM wrote: It's really not a surprise for me. Injecting is very hard mechanically and it's clear that Zerg is not balanced with the assumption of perfect injects from the get-go. I've known for a long time that even high level players are somewhat bad at injecting (just look at replays of people you consider mechanical gods, they always have way too much energy on their queens past 12 minutes, because they have a lot of other shit to do ^^)
What is interesting however is that there isn't much difference between high and low level players. That I didn't expect :D It also doesn't matter as much after that point in the game. By then you have 4-5 hatches and much more cost effective units. Early game when droning and making shitty units like roaches and lings off of 2-3 hatches its a huge deal that you get every last one that you can. But once you are up to units like infestors, swarm hosts, mutas, ultras, vipers, brood lords, etcetera, you can do way more with less larva. Plus spores and spines don't really cost larva late in the game since you were going to make the initial drone no matter what. And if you are Fitzy then half of your army doesn't cost larva to begin with.
Swarm hosts, indeed. I've opened swarm host before taking a third in just about every zvp I've played since hots came out and ggtracker thinks my macro in zvp is just plain shitty compared to my zvz and zvt.
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On May 22 2013 05:52 Ender985 wrote: Interesting. I wonder, can you do the same graph for Mule calldowns and protoss injects to see if it also follows the same trend? I suspect it does.
It won't. With protoss it will, with huge spikes in energy usage for each major engagement. With terrans, lower leaguers will call down mules in huge spurts. Grandmasters and higher will eventually make the 19 orbital transition and their mule usage will spike.
What would be a more interesting thing is to see how the number of constructed production buildings varies per league.
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These numbers don't make sense. Whenever I observe a lower league person they totally miss injects more or less all the time.
But Queens are also used to transfuse and spread creep, is that considered when making these studies?
Overall though I have to say cheers for an intresting topic.
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Really interesting. It's true that as time progresses inject becomes less and less important, but a lot was overlooked in this research as was mentioned by various users. In the current metagame, queens are essential in the late game. When I'm on ultralisk or broodlord tech, I'm not building a ton of lings, just a small number of beefy units, so I want to use that energy in transfuse...especially since at that point I have 5+ hatches. I also often spend my first 25 energy on tumors. There's a bunch of other less typical examples mentionned in this thread that make this data questionable, A lot of strategies to require impeccable injects, and proper macro wins/loses a lot of games, especially in the early game. If your macro isn't perfect on 3 bases, you can forget about stopping wide array of 2 base protoss all ins in the current meta game as having an overwhelming amount of units is the only way to stop them
This is still very interesting and shows how few have mastered sc2 mechanically. This is still only data from the ladder which is pretty low level.
To address claims that Zerg is the easiest macro, hold your tongue. I watch replays a lot and it's baffling at midmasters how many struggle with things like supply very early on in the game. I hate to target people in particular but I'm thinking about protoss specifically who make several macro mistakes. Zerg macro early on is extremely tight, as you have to prepare for every scenario. A classic example is the forge expand into 4 gate pressure, really popular in WoL and doing a resurgence nowadays with the mothership core. With standard timings, you scout it as the gates finish. The build works so that your inject at your third pops at the same time as your roach warren finishes, as the first wave of zealot are warped in. Get supply blocked once, or get behind in your inject, and you're looking at game ending damage. A lot of 2 base timings pretty much require you to max out. Sure there is some finesse in collosi all in but I think the macro required to defend it is much harder. It's tough to complain about tech switches being easy too, when you have idle max energy sentries sitting at your natural that you could use to make the fastest unit in the game to scout. Or have invisible detectors. Or have instant detection from your 3CCs. I really don't think T and P are in a position to complain about scouting.
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On May 22 2013 03:57 Cyro wrote: You're missing something important in that higher level players will more often use energy for creep tumors etc on purpose with early queens while lower ones are much much more prone to just floating energy, and also one of the biggest things:
This is definitely true; I remember when Idra was teaching JP the 14 hatch build; he flat out said the first queen doesn't inject because you don't have the minerals to morph the larvae (or maybe it was the second queen, point was it was an FE buld where only one hatch was injected due to econ constraints, not skill).
On May 22 2013 06:17 Eventine wrote: I swear, every time someone provides some data point, instead of sparking interesting debate, half the responses are like your data is wrong, my intuition is perfect and therefore i reject your findings.
Agreed, the point of the article however shows that larvae management / macro is much more than just how often you inject with your queens.
Half the anecdotal 'apologists' for why better players have worse inject uptimes even follow this conclusion; it's about planning out when you actually need the larvae, rather than just spamming them all out. So yes, controlling your injects is important, blindly spamming them is less so (but can't hurt right?!).
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Why don't you put some time into practice instead of misleading research so maybe you could get out of platinum as well as learn something relevant to actually improving at the game?
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On May 22 2013 04:06 SpikeStarcraft wrote: Im calling bullshit on this. I dont think what you showed there means anything. The inject percentage is correlated to the numbers of hatcheries. And in higher level play you have more hatcheries way faster. so after 10 minutes when the master zerg is on 4 base he does way more absolute injects than the silver level player thats still on one base. So thats not an useful comparison.
"Wow, the silver level player hits injects on one base almost as good as master level players on 4 base. I guess injects dont really matter that much." Kappa
Calling bullshit? And where's you're subsequent data to disprove them?
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I can't really go through seven pages right now cause the posts are all so lengthy (and I think that speaks to the high level of discussion) but here are some points:
Data is skewed towards equality because lower league players don't think about trade offs in terms of queen usage. Higher level players might inject or get a creep tumor, depending on whether they can use the larvae in time (if they stay idle the gain is near zero as the base-larvae don't regenerate). They might also get earlier expansions before pools which explains the lower inject percentage before 5min. Higher level players are also under a lot more aggressive pressure and use queens in their defense, often times missing injects because they block chokes and fight units. Lower level players will at the same time just go by conventional wisdom and "inject, inject, inject". We can also assume that it's easy to inject when people constantly look at their base which happens more in lower leagues as higher level players are more active around the map, scouting and fighting early skirmishes. It's an attention and APM trade off that could just as well show that higher level players are so good at injecting that they keep their hatcheries injected even under the greater requirements of higher level games. Queens might also be pulled off hatcheries in late game for offensive transfusing. Finally it could be the case that because every Zerg is always taught that injecting is key that all Zerg tend to learn this skill first, putting the learning curve about injects at a very different point than the learning curve about the game in general. It makes sense as it is a very binary thing with only one positive outcome. To get better results we would need to take equal players with random inject rates which is obviously impossible.
Overall I think it's WAY too early to draw conclusions from data like this. It should still be important for things like the Staircase although adjusted for game time. It is however very cool to see it and I thank you for your work. Maybe after a peer review it will get published for a broader audience
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You guys need to calm down, the article can be explained a better way:
Good macro leads to better injects, Better injects don't lead to good macro.
(also, you'll notice that master's DO outperform silver, but its not by much).
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On May 22 2013 08:06 LaLuSh wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 07:40 Shousan wrote: I am in no way condoning the research and work that you put in this article, the data alone is pretty interesting, but the analysis and 'conclusions' are just way off and can be very misleading. As others have mentioned, inject percentage comparison is meaningless as master players need to put up with far more things throughout the game, you need to give numbers a lot more perspective, cross-relating harrass, multitasking and actions with injects will give you a far better scope of what to look for in these statistics.
If we looked at professional car racing and had a percentage of accidents per competitor and then compare it to the percentage of accidents from an amateur or casual driver we could see that they'll maybe have a similar percentage, but this in no way means that the amateur is near the level of a pro driver, it may be because a pro will have tougher competition, trickier tracks, and many more things to factor in. This is why a correct approach to the numbers is far more important than just having a bunch of data and immediately assume that your comparison is correct.
Because Starcraft is a game that has an enormous amount of variables to account for, you'll have a ton of variation in replays and scenarios when the winning factor is more than just a 'key mechanic', how much of this silver level percentage would drop if he was facing a masters opponent? Probably a lot. Therefore, even if we're talking about the same 'metric' (inject percentage) it's just bad practice to even suggest that those percentages can be compared and have a valid conclusion.
The problem with these articles is that many people don't even stop to analyse and just take it for granted because there's a lot of data and a nice spreadsheet and then try to account the data as 'proof' that a race is easier or harder than the others, which just invites more ignorant discussion.
TLDR nice idea, great effort, cool statistics, pretty blind analysis and conclusions. Their theory and analysis is solid. Rather it's posts like yours, filled to the brim with pseudo-statements, that provide the blind analysis. Let's see what their analysis is: 1. larva to resource ratio decreases as the game progresses and you tend towards using higher tech units (ultras, broodlords etc cost both more resources and supply). 2. Mined out locations keep supplying larva. Less risk of "larva blockage" late game. I think they are solid explanations. Only thing I'd like to see added is that you spend a considerable time maxed out during the late game (partly covered by larva to resource ratio and larva blockage explanation). As they state in their analysis: When you resupply and/or remax lategame you tend to resupply on high tech, high resource, high supply demanding units and less so on cheep larva demanding ones. I can't spot what's so blind about their analysis? Apart from the fact that you and most others similar posters in the thread probably didn't even bother reading it. The truly blind ones are those who don't bother addressing specific points but rather use vague language to cover up their contribution to an "ignorant discussion".
"That means (assuming normally distributed scores) that about 30% of masters zerg games have an inject % that's worse than the average silver inject %. They did worse than the average silver game, yet somehow they are in masters with sub-silver injects."
That's a blind statement, saying that "somehow they are in masters with sub-silver injects" is just wrong, as a silver player in the same situation (vs a master player) would have a considerably lower percentage, add the fact that silver players won't choose correctly whether to use a tumor or inject and just plainly inject every time.
If I can manage to make 60 drones in 8 minutes in bronze league it doesn't mean that I have the same macro as a GM (at least for those 8 min), no matter how much the numbers look alike, since a GM will probably have more things happening in those 8 minutes and still manage to get those numbers.
There's a lot to factor in to make this proof that inject efficiency IS an important skill, their conclusions said it was NOT, since they decided to not incorporate inject consistency as a part of their training program. The points you mentioned are theories behind their reasoning while the conclusion is that inject efficiency is not an important skill (not important enough to teach thoroughly, anyway), they back this up with a standard deviation which in this case doesn't really prove a lot and is still consistent with other races and their respective macro mechanic. This is a poor analysis, because they're rushing to a conclusion without hard evidence behind it and just a couple of statements that are pretty clear without looking at the data even.
You can get far more interesting conclusions from the information gathered than a plain "Since higher tier units consume less larvae, then perfect injects are less important the longer the game goes, also, you have more bases etc..." well, no kidding, but that's not the sole reason for it, the longer the game goes, you need to focus on a lot more things, hence the mechanic being more forgiving, and that's true not just for zerg, but for the other races as well, the difference between leagues in MULE percentage or Chrono-Boost percentage with the given standard deviations are still not far from one another, and both follow the same tendency to drop the longer the game goes, is it because dropping MULES is less important in the late game? Don't think so, it's probably because there's simply more going on and the mechanic is built around that fact, so it'll be more forgiving if you are not as precise with it given that you have a stable economy and good numbers of infrastructure to produce.
The fact that there are people thinking that this is not a good analysis doesn't mean that we didn't bother reading it, more like some might recognize that in a study it's pretty difficult to do a great analysis even with good information if you don't approach what you want to prove correctly and just decide something with poor basis. It's not about making pseudo statements or using vague language, is about looking objectively at something that has the potential to be relevant and it's not because of how the information is treated.
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Super important early game and gets less important as the game progresses.
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Countless times zergs at the pro level have lost in the late game, because of not enough larva to defend quickly enough.
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The primary conclusion of this article is that there is no useful benchmark for inject %.
Those who disagree, please propose a benchmark for inject %. I would love to have one!
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Obviously injects become less important in a lategame scenario. You're spending more money on fewer units--larva becomes an abundant resource. However in the early-midgame injects are VITAL. Say you get hit by a timing from a terran or protoss. If you haven't been keeping up with your injects (or don't during the fight) you won't have enough units to keep up. It's the same as late game you will have many more hatches to make larva on their on.
And to people saying this is obvious proof that zerg macro is easy, that's bullshit and you know it. Macro for all 3 races is DIFFERENT. It's like comparing Starcraft and Chess. You just can't because they're just so different. Starcraft is a game of incomplete knowledge, whereas chess is a game of complete knowledge. That's just ONE difference out of a vast array. Calm the fuck down people, this isn't a warrant to whine.
This isn't as gamechanging as people think.
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I think a more correct approach would be to base it on queen energy effiency, rather than just injecting, since creep tumors also play a huge role in the outcome of the game and cost of opportunity forces you to choose when is better to use one or the other at least in the early stages of the game, this is just basing on the fact that the goal of that study was to determine whether inject efficiency is relevant enough to incorporate to your methodology, and it sure has more variables to it (queens just to spread creep, to attack, etc.) but it'd be more indicative of skill throughout leagues
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I'd love to see where Life is on this chart, or other Code S level Zergs.
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Injecting is hard bc you can't spam them all at once like MULES and to a lesser extent, Chronos (on multiple upgrades/production facilities, etc)
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On May 22 2013 08:06 LaLuSh wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 07:40 Shousan wrote: I am in no way condoning the research and work that you put in this article, the data alone is pretty interesting, but the analysis and 'conclusions' are just way off and can be very misleading. As others have mentioned, inject percentage comparison is meaningless as master players need to put up with far more things throughout the game, you need to give numbers a lot more perspective, cross-relating harrass, multitasking and actions with injects will give you a far better scope of what to look for in these statistics.
If we looked at professional car racing and had a percentage of accidents per competitor and then compare it to the percentage of accidents from an amateur or casual driver we could see that they'll maybe have a similar percentage, but this in no way means that the amateur is near the level of a pro driver, it may be because a pro will have tougher competition, trickier tracks, and many more things to factor in. This is why a correct approach to the numbers is far more important than just having a bunch of data and immediately assume that your comparison is correct.
Because Starcraft is a game that has an enormous amount of variables to account for, you'll have a ton of variation in replays and scenarios when the winning factor is more than just a 'key mechanic', how much of this silver level percentage would drop if he was facing a masters opponent? Probably a lot. Therefore, even if we're talking about the same 'metric' (inject percentage) it's just bad practice to even suggest that those percentages can be compared and have a valid conclusion.
The problem with these articles is that many people don't even stop to analyse and just take it for granted because there's a lot of data and a nice spreadsheet and then try to account the data as 'proof' that a race is easier or harder than the others, which just invites more ignorant discussion.
TLDR nice idea, great effort, cool statistics, pretty blind analysis and conclusions. Their theory and analysis is solid. Rather it's posts like yours, filled to the brim with pseudo-statements, that provide the blind analysis. Let's see what their analysis is: 1. larva to resource ratio decreases as the game progresses and you tend towards using higher tech units (ultras, broodlords etc cost both more resources and supply). 2. Mined out locations keep supplying larva. Less risk of "larva blockage" late game. I think they are solid explanations. Only thing I'd like to see added is that you spend a considerable time maxed out during the late game (partly covered by larva to resource ratio and larva blockage explanation). As they state in their analysis: When you resupply and/or remax lategame you tend to resupply on high tech, high resource, high supply demanding units and less so on cheep larva demanding ones. I can't spot what's so blind about their analysis? Apart from the fact that you and most others similar posters in the thread probably didn't even bother reading it. The truly blind ones are those who don't bother addressing specific points but rather use vague language to cover up their contribution to an "ignorant discussion".
He actually did have some solid points about the easiest to mess up aspects of statistics, it's not technically pseudo-statements. His example made the point of interpolation vs extrapolation (statistics doesn't allow for extrapolation), and about hidden variables possibly skewing the data (correlation does not equal causation). Not that he's necessarily right in this case (I don't see any extrapolation in the article, though possible hidden variables that could arise from the inject % calculation method weren't really discussed much), but he's not wrong for being skeptical of the analysis with his more major point of hidden variables at least, what with statistics being inherently fuzzy math (though the justification of the analysis in the study adequate enough for this to be a good jumping off point for more study and has good "Directions for Future Exploration") and starcraft being incredibly complex with the interactions of its many macro variables.
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I remember I has such good injects in gold, but then got worse at them when I started focusing on other aspects of the game. In diamond I actually don't think my injects were as good as they were in gold when that was all I cared about. Now that im highish masters I think im finally back to gold level injects xD
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On May 22 2013 09:47 dsjoerg wrote: The primary conclusion of this article is that there is no useful benchmark for inject %.
Those who disagree, please propose a benchmark for inject %. I would love to have one! . Could you calculate an opportunity value of missed injects? it could be a simple formula of %missed * # of hatcheries * time and then regress that against win rate.
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I hate to be that guy, but apart from theoretizations on these very unexpected results, there also seems to be something odd about the data you're using.
This image suggests that IdrA injects his third hatchery only haphazardly:
It does not seem to account for the fourth (macro) hatch right next to it that gets injected by the same queen:
However, to add insult to injury, if you account for the fourth hatchery (never mind the fifth, it doesn't get any injects), IdrA's inject efficiency goes down to 55% (according to SC2gears, which computes Main building control (Zerg) for four hatcheries). In other words, because he injects faster than one hatch can produce larvae, his injects are to be considered less efficient. That can't be right?
Honestly, I don't see "Inject % = (total # of minutes all hatches spent with injected larva) / (total # of minutes all hatches were active)" actually measuring what you're aiming for... like, at all.
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On May 22 2013 06:17 Eventine wrote: I swear, every time someone provides some data point, instead of sparking interesting debate, half the responses are like your data is wrong, my intuition is perfect and therefore i reject your findings.
This. I find it amusing how every Zerg (well Zerg mains because I do play Zerg) player suddenly attempted to become a statistics major. Quite convenient, eh? To quote someone else:
A while back, someone collected similar data for workers-produced, time-supply-blocked, and surplus-resources-banked. Their results showed vast differences between the different divisions, implying that the above metrics are a major differentiating factor between the different divisions & skill levels. The empirical approach does work.
The above metrics are also subjected to the same "real active game world" scrutiny in the same exact way, and yet they scale non-marginally with skill level.
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On May 22 2013 10:54 Poffel wrote: I hate to be that guy, but apart from theoretizations on these very unexpected results, there also seems to be something odd about the data you're using.
Thank you for checking the data! I love "that guy" usually he's me.
I ran my code in "debug mode": + Show Spoiler + Active:09.40 Injects:06.40 Last:14.24 Hatchery [3B80001] Injects: 04.44 05.27 06.15 07.01 07.44 08.25 09.12 10.00 11.13 13.02 Active:06.27 Injects:02.40 Last:14.24 Hatchery [4680001] Injects: 07.57 08.42 10.37 11.45 Hatchery [5D80001] Injects: 09.49 Active:09.39 Injects:06.40 Last:14.24 Lair [32C0001] Injects: 04.45 05.30 06.12 07.00 07.45 08.32 09.26 10.35 11.47 13.01
The Hatchery [5D80001] you're writing about gets only one inject, at 09.49. I dug into my code and there's an extra rule that I didn't describe in the article: a base must receive more than one inject to be considered at all for the inject % measurement.
So, no bug here.
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On May 22 2013 03:54 Embir wrote: Finally solid confirmation that Zergs macro is the easiest - we already knew they had it easy with only one production building and easiest tech switches in the game, now we know that they macro mechanic is also forgiving - and note that supposed unforgiveness of zerg mechanics was main argument for zerg's macro difficulty.
Ye cause Terran/Toss is not unforgiving at all. If you don't hit those crucial mule's before capped 200/200 you're gonne be in trouble! Same with Chronoboost, imagine waiting 50 seconds longer than u could've, instant GG. Terran/Toss has easier macro mechanics as it doesn't penalize you by waiting with chrono/mule (more than delaying timings).
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Yeah you really can't get much information from data like this. So many other things to take into consideration such as the number of bases, macro hatches, queens being used for other purposes. A masters player is far more likely to use a transfuse during a rush or a creep tumor early on, etc. But of course people are just going to read the summary and instantly cry about how Zerg takes no skill or something.
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On May 22 2013 03:54 Embir wrote: Finally solid confirmation that Zergs macro is the easiest - we already knew they had it easy with only one production building and easiest tech switches in the game, now we know that they macro mechanic is also forgiving - and note that supposed unforgiveness of zerg mechanics was main argument for zerg's macro difficulty.
What the... how did you manage to get the idea Z has easiest macro from data that says inject might not be the most deciding macro? If anything, Z is the only race that cant constantly build troops without going back to their base screen.
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On May 22 2013 11:09 dsjoerg wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 10:54 Poffel wrote: I hate to be that guy, but apart from theoretizations on these very unexpected results, there also seems to be something odd about the data you're using.
Thank you for checking the data! I love "that guy" usually he's me. I ran my code in "debug mode": + Show Spoiler + Active:09.40 Injects:06.40 Last:14.24 Hatchery [3B80001] Injects: 04.44 05.27 06.15 07.01 07.44 08.25 09.12 10.00 11.13 13.02 Active:06.27 Injects:02.40 Last:14.24 Hatchery [4680001] Injects: 07.57 08.42 10.37 11.45 Hatchery [5D80001] Injects: 09.49 Active:09.39 Injects:06.40 Last:14.24 Lair [32C0001] Injects: 04.45 05.30 06.12 07.00 07.45 08.32 09.26 10.35 11.47 13.01
The Hatchery [5D80001] you're writing about gets only one inject, at 09.49. I dug into my code and there's an extra rule that I didn't describe in the article: a base must receive more than one inject to be considered at all for the inject % measurement. So, no bug here. Ok, there's no bug but a conscious exclusion... still, that's one inject lost in the void, and IdrA receives a lower efficiancy rating than if he had applied that inject to the other hatchery, whereas it stands to reason that it does not matter in the slightest which hatchery he injects. Don't get me wrong, your results are indeed quite surprising, and I - like many others - would have expected a huge difference between the leagues even under your conditions of observation. Still, a macro hatch is far from an obscure incident. In your model, if a player distributes a queen's injects between several hatcheries, his efficiency drops by a large margin. Frankly, I'm unsure whether that's the kind of noise we have to tacitly accept for useful modelization or if it has to be considered a severe flaw of the model you're using.
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On May 22 2013 05:00 sitromit wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:53 tenklavir wrote:On May 22 2013 04:50 sitromit wrote:On May 22 2013 04:45 DemigodcelpH wrote:On May 22 2013 04:41 sitromit wrote: So this article essentially takes Idra and a bunch of random masters players as the high benchmark of skill, and claims based on raw mathematical analysis of their inject rates across random games played out in very different scenarios, that injecting is not very important.
Why I see absolutely no flaw in that aproach at all. It's 44,000 games. Don't be dismissive because you don't personally agree with the results. 44K random games. One may be 5 minutes. The other may be a 40 minute game where the player pulled all his Queens off the hatcheries in the last 15 minutes to transfuse his Ultras. And these are random ladder players, not exactly the high benchmark of skill, and frankly, neither is Idra. You realize random sampling is precisely what you want, right? No, with the number of things that can happen in a game that can affect why a player may or may not be injecting, random is exactly what you DON'T want. Say a player is under attack and transfuses a spine crawler instead of injecting. If you just analyze that mathematically, you come up with the conclusion that that player has less than perfect injects, when in fact he made a calculated sacrifice. It doesn't mean inject is not important, or that it's enough to inject with 60% efficiency and any better makes no difference. The number one rule in doing research that is meaningful in any way, is to control and reduce the number of variables. So what you're saying is that there are a whole bunch of reasons that you wouldn't want to inject? Or in other words, that inject isn't as high of a priority for high level play as people make it out to be? You do realize that's exactly what the OP is saying right?
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In a long macro game, inject just becomes much less important. Gas is the number one issue for Zerg to macro and the rest of the larva unused can go into cheap unit lime lings. That's why we have the fast ultra queen build in zvp. The injects aren't so important and energy for creep and transfused becomes far more important. Not to mention late game is much less about max but it's about maxing with the right army composition. More larva can't help you get more hive tech units out. Thus larva less important, inject less important etc
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A lot of people in here who pretend to understand stats but don't, and drawing nonsense (and common sense) conclusions from the data.
Bottom line, this stuff is interesting because it shows a common community perception, that injects separate the men from the boys, is largely imagined.
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On May 22 2013 03:45 dsjoerg wrote:Many in the community think that consistently keeping your Hatches injected with Larva is an important skill for any Zerg player to have. For example, here are some recent discussion threads on allthingszerg. . . . If the conventional wisdom is right, and consistent injects are an important skill, then we would expect to find that lower-league players would have trouble keeping their hatcheries consistently injected, and that higher-league Zergs would keep their hatcheries injected a notably higher percent of the time.
On May 22 2013 12:20 aksfjh wrote: A lot of people in here who pretend to understand stats but don't, and drawing nonsense (and common sense) conclusions from the data.
Bottom line, this stuff is interesting because it shows a common community perception, that injects separate the men from the boys, is largely imagined.
The OP analysis is flawed because of the "silver, master? doesn't matter" angle. In a silver vs silver game, a silver player will be able to hit their early/mid game injects. I guarantee that if you put a silver vs a master, that silver is not going to be hitting their injects in the early/mid game. Thus, the perception of "injects separate the men from the boys" IS correct, because the better players will continue to inject even while being harassed and/or when their attention is being taxed in combat/elsewhere. A lesser player will fall apart and forget to inject, which is 100% crucial in the early/mid game.
Injects DO matter. The better players continue to inject vs equally skilled opponents. This data may show something, but it does not show that injects don't matter.
(EDIT: Also, of course, masters+ will be having more hatcheries to inject sooner than a silver player, and the data doesn't seem to take that into account.)
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idk, Nestea says that if your queens get over 25 energy you lose game. i believe Nestea.
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The analysis is good, it's always cool to takes huge datas and compute stuff. But the problem is to know if it's really meaningfull
That means[1] that about 30% of Masters Zerg games have an inject % that’s worse than the average Silver inject %. They did worse than the average Silver game, yet somehow they are in Masters with sub-Silver injects. For exemple this quote is quite missleading, because no a silver game don't look at all like a master game. If you put the "sub-injects" master player in the "godly-inject" silver player game, you will probably see that he magically hit better injects. And as zerg is mainly a defensive race, you don't really choice when "action occurs", and don't always have the time to hit your injects. That's why the "parade push" is really annying for a zerg, because it requires constant attention, and makes it harder to hit good injects.
But I think what is to remember from the study is that as you play better, you don't "hit more injects", but more "hit as many injects while doing a lot of other stuff".
I think an interesting study to do now would be "what does the player does while he doesn't inject ?", to see if it's pretty much the same things across all league.
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I'm better at hitting injects than I am at spending larva. Though 4 larva pop off per inject, I doubt I'm actually -gaining- 4 larva per inject, because I'll leave them idle long enough (especially on 3-4 bases) for the natural spawn of larva to have been delayed enough for the injects to have hardly mattered.
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On May 22 2013 12:20 aksfjh wrote: A lot of people in here who pretend to understand stats but don't, and drawing nonsense (and common sense) conclusions from the data.
Bottom line, this stuff is interesting because it shows a common community perception, that injects separate the men from the boys, is largely imagined.
It's mostly just Zerg mains being illegitimately dismissive out of emotional response. We're all open to good arguments, but generally the most people are doing here is throwing out random anecdotes and other irrelevant things.
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One thing to consider, if someone were near perfect, would it benefit them. It'd be interesting to see someone like a DRG, Life or w/e inject %
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On May 22 2013 11:21 IcedBacon wrote: Yeah you really can't get much information from data like this. So many other things to take into consideration such as the number of bases, macro hatches, queens being used for other purposes. A masters player is far more likely to use a transfuse during a rush or a creep tumor early on, etc. But of course people are just going to read the summary and instantly cry about how Zerg takes no skill or something. this would be a valid point if I could make 6 colossus at a time
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You're missing a key reason for why Master players have less injects at the beginning of the game: They're using their queens to fend off harassment.
Especially in ZvT, Queens are crucial for spreading creep and defending hellions, but also in ZvP and ZvZ many early games are focused on Queen defence.
If you REALLY want to see the difference in macro mechanics at various levels look at average Queen energy. Right now you're treating laying creep tumours like a macro mistake.
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On May 22 2013 13:34 _Search_ wrote: You're missing a key reason for why Master players have less injects at the beginning of the game: They're using their queens to fend off harassment.
Especially in ZvT, Queens are crucial for spreading creep and defending hellions, but also in ZvP and ZvZ many early games are focused on Queen defence.
If you REALLY want to see the difference in macro mechanics at various levels look at average Queen energy. Right now you're treating laying creep tumours like a macro mistake. Generally speaking, you use extra queens on creep spread, not queens that usually inject. The only exclusion might be ZvP where you spare 1 inject to get a creep tumor down for your fast third.
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On May 22 2013 13:34 _Search_ wrote: You're missing a key reason for why Master players have less injects at the beginning of the game: They're using their queens to fend off harassment.
Especially in ZvT, Queens are crucial for spreading creep and defending hellions, but also in ZvP and ZvZ many early games are focused on Queen defence.
If you REALLY want to see the difference in macro mechanics at various levels look at average Queen energy. Right now you're treating laying creep tumours like a macro mistake.
Low level players have to defend hellions too; if anything low level players are even more vulnerable to harassment and will spend more time defending it. Futhermore, the article isn't measuring any kind of mistake or treating exceptions as mistakes as these exceptions occur at every level while being normalized by a sample-size of data that is by all means statistically representative of the entire population.
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On May 22 2013 13:41 DemigodcelpH wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 13:34 _Search_ wrote: You're missing a key reason for why Master players have less injects at the beginning of the game: They're using their queens to fend off harassment.
Especially in ZvT, Queens are crucial for spreading creep and defending hellions, but also in ZvP and ZvZ many early games are focused on Queen defence.
If you REALLY want to see the difference in macro mechanics at various levels look at average Queen energy. Right now you're treating laying creep tumours like a macro mistake. Low level players have to defend hellions too; if anything low level players are even more vulnerable to harassment and will spend more time defending it. Futhermore, the article isn't measuring any kind of mistake or treating exceptions as mistakes as these exceptions occur at every level while being normalized by a sample-size of data that is by all means statistically representative of the entire population.
p-p-p-p-p-pow! Holy Moley Batman! That was so bad, your momma made a mom joke about your momma.
User was warned for this post
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On May 22 2013 11:04 DemigodcelpH wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 06:17 Eventine wrote: I swear, every time someone provides some data point, instead of sparking interesting debate, half the responses are like your data is wrong, my intuition is perfect and therefore i reject your findings. This. I find it amusing how every Zerg (well Zerg mains because I do play Zerg) player suddenly attempted to become a statistics major. Quite convenient, eh? To quote someone else: Show nested quote +A while back, someone collected similar data for workers-produced, time-supply-blocked, and surplus-resources-banked. Their results showed vast differences between the different divisions, implying that the above metrics are a major differentiating factor between the different divisions & skill levels. The empirical approach does work. The above metrics are also subjected to the same "real active game world" scrutiny in the same exact way, and yet they scale non-marginally with skill level.
I find it amusing that you assume that people not well trained in statistics. Statistics are not perfect predictors, but they are good tools to understand what is happening. As my prof says, all models are wrong, some are useful.
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On May 22 2013 14:00 Eventine wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 11:04 DemigodcelpH wrote:On May 22 2013 06:17 Eventine wrote: I swear,every time someonew ides some data point, instead of sparking interesting debate, half the responses are like your data is wrong, my intuition is perfect and therefore i reject your findings. This. I find it amusing how every Zerg (well Zerg mains because I do play Zerg) player suddenly attempted to become a statistics major. Quite convenient, eh? To quote someone else: A while back, someone collected similar data for workers-produced, time-supply-blocked, and surplus-resources-banked. Their results showed vast differences between the different divisions, implying that the above metrics are a major differentiating factor between the different divisions & skill levels. The empirical approach does work. The above metrics are also subjected to the same "real active game world" scrutiny in the same exact way, and yet they scale non-marginally with skill level. I find it amusing that you assume that people not well trained in statistics. Statistics are not perfect predictors, but they are good tools to understand what is happening. As my prof says, all models are wrong, some are useful. Its much safer to assume people don't understand stats, I have a major in econometric and stats is extremely complicated. A wrong test can lead to a very wrong conclusion and mislead the readers. For example in this report they mentioned they might do a test on win ratio and inject ratio. This is already gonna be one huge mistake because they will be omitting so many important variables that the importance of inject will be significantly enlarged.
There is a reason why there are so many specialised statistic units out for different majors like econometric and psychometric. If basic level static is enough to cover complicated matters like a starcraft 2 game or real world business simulation, then we won't need advanced stats course for these majors.
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The conclusion set by this statistical analysis is singular: larva injections become less paramount as the game progresses due to unit-larva costs. The statistics is somewhat sound, although the Silver-Master statement is very misleading and discrediting; I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's some statistic that I think is omitted that is crucial (though I am typing this at an inopportune time, so I could just be loopy). There is nothing in this analysis that speaks to the skill difficulty of managing the zerg macromechanics, or indeed zerg mechanics as a whole, compared to other races. All this analysis does is do away with a myth, a preconceived notion that seems intuitive, but in reality is not; why that is, be it harassment, creep spread or another queen distraction or utility, is a different argument for a different time.
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On May 22 2013 12:27 Jinky wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 03:45 dsjoerg wrote:Many in the community think that consistently keeping your Hatches injected with Larva is an important skill for any Zerg player to have. For example, here are some recent discussion threads on allthingszerg. . . . If the conventional wisdom is right, and consistent injects are an important skill, then we would expect to find that lower-league players would have trouble keeping their hatcheries consistently injected, and that higher-league Zergs would keep their hatcheries injected a notably higher percent of the time. Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 12:20 aksfjh wrote: A lot of people in here who pretend to understand stats but don't, and drawing nonsense (and common sense) conclusions from the data.
Bottom line, this stuff is interesting because it shows a common community perception, that injects separate the men from the boys, is largely imagined. The OP analysis is flawed because of the "silver, master? doesn't matter" angle. In a silver vs silver game, a silver player will be able to hit their early/mid game injects. I guarantee that if you put a silver vs a master, that silver is not going to be hitting their injects in the early/mid game. Thus, the perception of "injects separate the men from the boys" IS correct, because the better players will continue to inject even while being harassed and/or when their attention is being taxed in combat/elsewhere. A lesser player will fall apart and forget to inject, which is 100% crucial in the early/mid game. Injects DO matter. The better players continue to inject vs equally skilled opponents. This data may show something, but it does not show that injects don't matter. (EDIT: Also, of course, masters+ will be having more hatcheries to inject sooner than a silver player, and the data doesn't seem to take that into account.) You can't guarantee that through the data, just your own hunches. For the data we have, we only know that lower level players hit their injects with roughly the same consistency as higher levels. I'm also not saying that injects don't matter, but that there isn't a clear distinction between them and levels of play.
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In the later stages of the game, good players will generally be on many bases with macro hatches, but won't have queens at them all because of the supply sink of the queens. This is probably the biggest reason why inject percentage is the way it is for higher level players. It has nothing to do with zerg macro being easy, as stated more than once in this thread. So please, before you try to bash zerg players just because you're angry, think of a better response than "SEE, zerg macro EZ durrrr".
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On May 22 2013 14:27 knOxStarcraft wrote: In the later stages of the game, good players will generally be on many bases with macro hatches, but won't have queens at them all because of the supply sink of the queens. This is probably the biggest reason why inject percentage is the way it is for higher level players. It has nothing to do with zerg macro being easy, as stated more than once in this thread. So please, before you try to bash zerg players just because you're angry, think of a better response than "SEE, zerg macro EZ durrrr".
Especially when terran macro is the same lategame.
While it asks a lot early game to have constant scv production and good build orders without supply block, once on 3 bases, a terran can just watch his army and control it while producing 17 marines per 17 marines when he loses parts of his army.
Would love to see barracks usage (if they are doing nothing at certain stage of the game) statistics.
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On May 22 2013 12:20 aksfjh wrote: A lot of people in here who pretend to understand stats but don't, and drawing nonsense (and common sense) conclusions from the data.
Bottom line, this stuff is interesting because it shows a common community perception, that injects separate the men from the boys, is largely imagined. It's not imagined, the stat is just too hard to calculate accurately. If a masters player and a silver player were both on 3 bases with one queen per base devoted only to injects, the energy on the masters player's queens would be far lower at the 10 - 15 min mark than the energy on the silver player's queens.
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Yeah...Creep tumors and macro hatcheries in higher level play makes this study flawed.
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On May 22 2013 14:33 knOxStarcraft wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 12:20 aksfjh wrote: A lot of people in here who pretend to understand stats but don't, and drawing nonsense (and common sense) conclusions from the data.
Bottom line, this stuff is interesting because it shows a common community perception, that injects separate the men from the boys, is largely imagined. It's not imagined, the stat is just too hard to calculate accurately. If a masters player and a silver player were both on 3 bases with one queen per base devoted only to injects, the energy on the masters player's queens would be far lower at the 10 - 15 min mark than the energy on the silver player's queens.
I recently helped a masters Zerg in the Zerg Help Me thread (or it might've been an independent thread actually, but I digress) who consistently had all queens 75%-full energy from about the 12 minute mark onward (to the end of the game at approximately 28 minutes) in an overall relatively passive macro game, so no that's not always true. If you're going to make blatant statements then you'll need some data to back that up.
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On May 22 2013 14:42 DemigodcelpH wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 14:33 knOxStarcraft wrote:On May 22 2013 12:20 aksfjh wrote: A lot of people in here who pretend to understand stats but don't, and drawing nonsense (and common sense) conclusions from the data.
Bottom line, this stuff is interesting because it shows a common community perception, that injects separate the men from the boys, is largely imagined. It's not imagined, the stat is just too hard to calculate accurately. If a masters player and a silver player were both on 3 bases with one queen per base devoted only to injects, the energy on the masters player's queens would be far lower at the 10 - 15 min mark than the energy on the silver player's queens. I recently helped a masters Zerg in the Zerg Help Me thread (or it might've been an independent thread actually, but I digress) who consistently had all queens 75%-full energy from about the 12 minute mark onward (to the end of the game at approximately 28 minutes) in an overall relatively passive macro game, so no that's not always true. If you're going to make blatant statements then you'll need some data to back that up. On the other side, I'm around platinum when I off-race as Zerg to fool around, but for some reason I'm totally obsessed with injects and actually have pretty low energy over long games. I'm just awful at everything else.
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On May 22 2013 14:42 DemigodcelpH wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 14:33 knOxStarcraft wrote:On May 22 2013 12:20 aksfjh wrote: A lot of people in here who pretend to understand stats but don't, and drawing nonsense (and common sense) conclusions from the data.
Bottom line, this stuff is interesting because it shows a common community perception, that injects separate the men from the boys, is largely imagined. It's not imagined, the stat is just too hard to calculate accurately. If a masters player and a silver player were both on 3 bases with one queen per base devoted only to injects, the energy on the masters player's queens would be far lower at the 10 - 15 min mark than the energy on the silver player's queens. I recently helped a masters Zerg in the Zerg Help Me thread (or it might've been an independent thread actually, but I digress) who consistently had all queens 75%-full energy from about the 12 minute mark onward (to the end of the game at approximately 28 minutes) in an overall relatively passive macro game, so no that's not always true. If you're going to make blatant statements then you'll need some data to back that up. "It's not true for this one guy so this is not a good rule of thumb!"
You are not even proving the previous poster wrong, you are just saying that this guy's queen energy was high, not that it was higher than the queen energy from a silver player. Are you disagreeing that the average master player's queens would have lower energy than the silver player's queens?
Of course it will not be true all the time, but that was not previous guy's point.
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I personally would like to see separate stats for both high masters and gm. It's hard to take the masters stat seriously when it's lumped up with the low ones.
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On May 22 2013 14:42 DemigodcelpH wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 14:33 knOxStarcraft wrote:On May 22 2013 12:20 aksfjh wrote: A lot of people in here who pretend to understand stats but don't, and drawing nonsense (and common sense) conclusions from the data.
Bottom line, this stuff is interesting because it shows a common community perception, that injects separate the men from the boys, is largely imagined. It's not imagined, the stat is just too hard to calculate accurately. If a masters player and a silver player were both on 3 bases with one queen per base devoted only to injects, the energy on the masters player's queens would be far lower at the 10 - 15 min mark than the energy on the silver player's queens. I recently helped a masters Zerg in the Zerg Help Me thread (or it might've been an independent thread actually, but I digress) who consistently had all queens 75%-full energy from about the 12 minute mark onward (to the end of the game at approximately 28 minutes) in an overall relatively passive macro game, so no that's not always true. If you're going to make blatant statements then you'll need some data to back that up. Yes you're right, I shouldn't have made the statement the way I did. I should have said, in general the energy on the masters player's queens would be far lower at the 10 - 15 min mark than the energy on the silver player's queens given the same types of situations. Additionally, masters is a very diverse league, so I should have said high masters to GM. I post without thinking some times ><
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On May 22 2013 14:52 Thrax wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 14:42 DemigodcelpH wrote:On May 22 2013 14:33 knOxStarcraft wrote:On May 22 2013 12:20 aksfjh wrote: A lot of people in here who pretend to understand stats but don't, and drawing nonsense (and common sense) conclusions from the data.
Bottom line, this stuff is interesting because it shows a common community perception, that injects separate the men from the boys, is largely imagined. It's not imagined, the stat is just too hard to calculate accurately. If a masters player and a silver player were both on 3 bases with one queen per base devoted only to injects, the energy on the masters player's queens would be far lower at the 10 - 15 min mark than the energy on the silver player's queens. I recently helped a masters Zerg in the Zerg Help Me thread (or it might've been an independent thread actually, but I digress) who consistently had all queens 75%-full energy from about the 12 minute mark onward (to the end of the game at approximately 28 minutes) in an overall relatively passive macro game, so no that's not always true. If you're going to make blatant statements then you'll need some data to back that up. "It's not true for this one guy so this is not a good rule of thumb!"
The previous guy was stating, simply put, that "X is always true", so in order to show him that his blanket statement was incorrect I simply pointed out a real-world situation where X wasn't true. Burden of proof is on him.
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On May 22 2013 03:54 Embir wrote: Finally solid confirmation that Zergs macro is the easiest - we already knew they had it easy with only one production building and easiest tech switches in the game, now we know that they macro mechanic is also forgiving - and note that supposed unforgiveness of zerg mechanics was main argument for zerg's macro difficulty.
Really? You have managed to make this a balance whine? *sigh*... Personally play random, and think zerg has the most unforgiving macro mechanics.
On topic, great read OP. Thanks for looking into this, was a surprising read initially but when I thought about it it kind of made sense. Since you're attacking, harassing, scouting etc more often in higher leagues you will be less focused on your inject APM. Also, macro hatches for 350 mins are thoroughly worth the reduced necessity to have perfect injects and thus freeing up APM for more important tasks. Still, enjoyed the post, thanks!
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On May 22 2013 14:27 knOxStarcraft wrote: In the later stages of the game, good players will generally be on many bases with macro hatches, but won't have queens at them all because of the supply sink of the queens. This is probably the biggest reason why inject percentage is the way it is for higher level players. It has nothing to do with zerg macro being easy, as stated more than once in this thread. So please, before you try to bash zerg players just because you're angry, think of a better response than "SEE, zerg macro EZ durrrr". I dunno if you know this, but this is particularly relevant with the hatcheries without queens thing. If a hatch isnt injected more than once, it is excluded from the inject rate.
I seriously wish we could see an analysis of a high end player, rather than one replay from a single player (idra). I imagine that Life would have insanely high inject rates for example.
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In order to draw any real conclusions about anything else than the fact that inject uptime decrease in longer games regardless of league, I think there are a number of extra variables to look closer at.
For example: In a 20 minute game, master players are sitting just below 60% uptime on injects. Here it would be interesting to know how the inject uptime looked in the first 10 and 15 minutes of those games to shed some light on if there are any specific timings in the game where people "stop" injecting. Queen energy has also been mentioned before but it would still be pretty hard to draw any significant conclusions from that alone. You would probably have to include some way of telling if there is a queen present on the map able to inject as well to account for the "actual" possible uptime.
I also think its wrong to not compare inject rates to games lost and won.
Since the ladder system is in effect, players would gradually migrate to the spot on the ladder corresponding to the rank of their skills, with the noise causing random fluctuations in ladder/MMR rank.
When two people play against each other on the ladder, they have approximately equal MMR. Since they are meeting on ladder and have approximately equal MMR, the expected win% is 50% for each. If one of them has better inject skill (or in general, better race macro), then, since they have approximately equal MMR, the other player must have superiority in other skills to compensate. Therefore we would not see any correlation between win% and inject%, even though in this model inject% is important.
While there shouldnt be any correlation between win% and inject uptime (as more or less everyone should be at 50%), there could still be a difference between games won and games lost when it comes to injects. You might for example find that when winning matches, you have a higher percentage of inject uptime compared to when you lose. One could then speculate that when facing easier opponents you are generally more comfortable with your play as a whole, and injects are easier to hit, resulting in a better game. Likewise, if the games lost show a lower percentage of inject uptime, one could further speculate that denying people the chance to inject is a good way of winning a game.
If games lost and games won display a fairly similar inject uptime it would be easier to claim that, while of course still important, injecting is perhaps not more important than any other skill.
Edit: I was also unable to determine if you rebalance the graphs to account for the fact that 90% is max. As an example, 66% out of 100 is still 66 but if you account for the fact that 90 is max, you actually end up at roughly 73.3%. 60% out 90 is on the other hand roughly 66.7. So instead of having a difference of 6 percentage units we're now sitting at a difference of 6.6 percentage units. An increase of the 10% we left out of the equation when using 100% as max instead of 90%.
Ofc when using more than one queen per hatchery it would then be possible to reach over 100% but I dont really think anyone is doing that. If you rescale the numbers putting 90% as the maximum uptime instead of 100%, the difference between the leagues increases.
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On May 22 2013 03:54 Embir wrote: Finally solid confirmation that Zergs macro is the easiest - we already knew they had it easy with only one production building and easiest tech switches in the game, now we know that they macro mechanic is also forgiving - and note that supposed unforgiveness of zerg mechanics was main argument for zerg's macro difficulty.
Your a bitch ?
Larva injects , spread creep , drones , units , upgrades , scouting , composition (massive for Zerg more than other races I think).
Getting it all right aint simple ....every race has different aspects , take your crying elsewhere ....
User was temp banned for this post.
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On May 22 2013 03:59 FawxzTV wrote: This mostly just shows that higher level players expand more aswell as adding macro hatches. Resulting in more bases than queens -> lower numbers. Injects are still INCREDIBLY important in the first couple of minutes.
Pretty much this, if a silver league player only has 2 queens and 2 hatches it's no wonder that his hatches are equally as often injected as a master league player's. Also high level players choose when to inject or when not to and instead make a creep tumor etc. That injects become less important in the late game is no secret, that's why high level players more and more often use most of their queens to transfuse in the late game.
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On May 22 2013 12:20 aksfjh wrote: A lot of people in here who pretend to understand stats but don't, and drawing nonsense (and common sense) conclusions from the data.
Bottom line, this stuff is interesting because it shows a common community perception, that injects separate the men from the boys, is largely imagined.
No on the contrary It does not show that at all though i agree it is interesting none the less. It would be alot more interesting though if the study was done more carefully and if it took into account logical explanations wich skew the stats from the start (like pros using 2nd queen to make tumor first, and having more hatcheries and queens in general)
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To be honest the more hatches you have the less injects are important; In low masters some zerg players are terrible at injects, but it's okay as long as they injected well enough during the drone phase, and then made macro hatches or higher tech units. You only need really good injects when playing mass ling/banes and trading a lot. Otherwise you'll stockpile larvae anyway, and you'll be able to remax regardless of your injects.
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I think there are far too many differences between the two leagues to really state without a doubt that inject skill doesn't make the difference between silver and masters players. One cannot say simply that inject skill doesnt make the difference between a good and bad zerg because your data correlates. Correlation does not equal causation.
Like most people have said, the difference in expansion behavior of masters players versus silver players is huge in this study. If a silver zerg has two bases and injects always on both bases he will have a 100% inject rate. If a masters zerg has 4 bases and injects on 3 he will have a 75% inject rate. Which one in this case is better? Obviously, the masters zerg has a higher inject skill even though his percentage is lower. If you also realize that the majority of silver games are played on two bases this data becomes exceedingly irrelevant.
I like your data but I'm afraid the premise of counting inject percentage is fundamentally flawed if you analyze nothing more. If you had perhaps a more similar data set in which the silver is on 4 bases and the masters is as well then the results would be far more conclusive. If the percentages in this scenario were similar then your conclusion would be a valid one. As is, I'm afraid that the data is inconclusive. A more thorough analysis is required.
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On May 22 2013 19:15 Huckle wrote: Like most people have said, the difference in expansion behavior of masters players versus silver players is huge in this study. If a silver zerg has two bases and injects always on both bases he will have a 100% inject rate. If a masters zerg has 4 bases and injects on 3 he will have a 75% inject rate. Which one in this case is better? Obviously, the masters zerg has a higher inject skill even though his percentage is lower. If you also realize that the majority of silver games are played on two bases this data becomes exceedingly irrelevant.
Hatcheries that are not getting injected or only receive one inject are not taken into account, so its actually not that simple.
Still there are a few things which would require some clarification and/or further investigation before one can draw any real conclusions.
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On May 22 2013 19:19 Stol wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 19:15 Huckle wrote: Like most people have said, the difference in expansion behavior of masters players versus silver players is huge in this study. If a silver zerg has two bases and injects always on both bases he will have a 100% inject rate. If a masters zerg has 4 bases and injects on 3 he will have a 75% inject rate. Which one in this case is better? Obviously, the masters zerg has a higher inject skill even though his percentage is lower. If you also realize that the majority of silver games are played on two bases this data becomes exceedingly irrelevant. Hatcheries that are not getting injected or only receive one inject are not taken into account, so its actually not that simple. Still there are a few things which would require some clarification. it is that simple. More hatcheries, less accuracy and yet more larva.
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Amount of queen energy used would be a much better indicator.
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On May 22 2013 19:23 1Dhalism wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 19:19 Stol wrote:On May 22 2013 19:15 Huckle wrote: Like most people have said, the difference in expansion behavior of masters players versus silver players is huge in this study. If a silver zerg has two bases and injects always on both bases he will have a 100% inject rate. If a masters zerg has 4 bases and injects on 3 he will have a 75% inject rate. Which one in this case is better? Obviously, the masters zerg has a higher inject skill even though his percentage is lower. If you also realize that the majority of silver games are played on two bases this data becomes exceedingly irrelevant. Hatcheries that are not getting injected or only receive one inject are not taken into account, so its actually not that simple. Still there are a few things which would require some clarification. it is that simple. More hatcheries, less accuracy and yet more larva.
Yes, that can still be debated, but the comment on having 4 hatcheries and injecting 3 resulting in 75% inject rate is incorrect. That is not how the data presented works. I've made several comments myself pointing out weaknesses and/or flaws in the analysis, but there's a difference between coming to another conclusion and simply reading the data wrong.
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On May 22 2013 19:19 Stol wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 19:15 Huckle wrote: Like most people have said, the difference in expansion behavior of masters players versus silver players is huge in this study. If a silver zerg has two bases and injects always on both bases he will have a 100% inject rate. If a masters zerg has 4 bases and injects on 3 he will have a 75% inject rate. Which one in this case is better? Obviously, the masters zerg has a higher inject skill even though his percentage is lower. If you also realize that the majority of silver games are played on two bases this data becomes exceedingly irrelevant. Hatcheries that are not getting injected or only receive one inject are not taken into account, so its actually not that simple. Still there are a few things which would require some clarification and/or further investigation before one can draw any real conclusions.
I'm not so sure about that. Granted my idea of inject percentage is far simpler than the OP's. He uses time based percentages. For instance in his article he states, Inject % = (total # of minutes all hatches spent with injected larva) / (total # of minutes all hatches were active. So it is sort of that simple though. Uninjected hatches still contribute to the divisor in this case.
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Hmm also not realy since some people use queens to transfer (though mostly in lategame) and if you laying creep tumors it isnt that bad to safe up energy since you can then lay multiple tumors at once (like with orbitals safing up mules for a new expansion and to scan if needed) (this for the idea of looking at queen energy) Maybe can look at the unspend resources per hatchery in the first say 15 minutes of the game,since larva in the end does effect the amount of resources you can spend,it does have some relation with your injections. though this also has its flaws for example when people safe up to pop 7 mutas at once.
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On May 22 2013 19:30 Huckle wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 19:19 Stol wrote:On May 22 2013 19:15 Huckle wrote: Like most people have said, the difference in expansion behavior of masters players versus silver players is huge in this study. If a silver zerg has two bases and injects always on both bases he will have a 100% inject rate. If a masters zerg has 4 bases and injects on 3 he will have a 75% inject rate. Which one in this case is better? Obviously, the masters zerg has a higher inject skill even though his percentage is lower. If you also realize that the majority of silver games are played on two bases this data becomes exceedingly irrelevant. Hatcheries that are not getting injected or only receive one inject are not taken into account, so its actually not that simple. Still there are a few things which would require some clarification and/or further investigation before one can draw any real conclusions. I'm not so sure about that. Granted my idea of inject percentage is far simpler than the OP's. He uses time based percentages. For instance in his article he states, Inject % = (total # of minutes all hatches spent with injected larva) / (total # of minutes all hatches were active. So it is sort of that simple though. Uninjected hatches still contribute to the divisor in this case.
No, a hatchery is only considered active after it has received its first inject, furthermore there was an exclusion rule saying that if the hatchery only received one inject throughout the game, it was not taken into consideration.
Edit:
On May 22 2013 11:09 dsjoerg wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 10:54 Poffel wrote: I hate to be that guy, but apart from theoretizations on these very unexpected results, there also seems to be something odd about the data you're using.
Thank you for checking the data! I love "that guy" usually he's me. I ran my code in "debug mode": + Show Spoiler + Active:09.40 Injects:06.40 Last:14.24 Hatchery [3B80001] Injects: 04.44 05.27 06.15 07.01 07.44 08.25 09.12 10.00 11.13 13.02 Active:06.27 Injects:02.40 Last:14.24 Hatchery [4680001] Injects: 07.57 08.42 10.37 11.45 Hatchery [5D80001] Injects: 09.49 Active:09.39 Injects:06.40 Last:14.24 Lair [32C0001] Injects: 04.45 05.30 06.12 07.00 07.45 08.32 09.26 10.35 11.47 13.01
The Hatchery [5D80001] you're writing about gets only one inject, at 09.49. I dug into my code and there's an extra rule that I didn't describe in the article: a base must receive more than one inject to be considered at all for the inject % measurement.So, no bug here.
Exactly how is Inject % Computed?
Inject % = (total # of minutes all hatches spent with injected larva) / (total # of minutes all hatches were active)
A hatch is considered active from the first time a Queen injects it until the last time the hatch is selected by anyone for any reason, or the game ends. If we can someday get the actual hatch death time, we will use that instead.
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On May 22 2013 19:35 Stol wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 19:30 Huckle wrote:On May 22 2013 19:19 Stol wrote:On May 22 2013 19:15 Huckle wrote: Like most people have said, the difference in expansion behavior of masters players versus silver players is huge in this study. If a silver zerg has two bases and injects always on both bases he will have a 100% inject rate. If a masters zerg has 4 bases and injects on 3 he will have a 75% inject rate. Which one in this case is better? Obviously, the masters zerg has a higher inject skill even though his percentage is lower. If you also realize that the majority of silver games are played on two bases this data becomes exceedingly irrelevant. Hatcheries that are not getting injected or only receive one inject are not taken into account, so its actually not that simple. Still there are a few things which would require some clarification and/or further investigation before one can draw any real conclusions. I'm not so sure about that. Granted my idea of inject percentage is far simpler than the OP's. He uses time based percentages. For instance in his article he states, Inject % = (total # of minutes all hatches spent with injected larva) / (total # of minutes all hatches were active. So it is sort of that simple though. Uninjected hatches still contribute to the divisor in this case. No, a hatchery is only considered active after it has received its first inject, furthermore there was an exclusion rule saying that if the hatchery only received one inject throughout the game, it was not taken into consideration. Edit: Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 11:09 dsjoerg wrote:On May 22 2013 10:54 Poffel wrote: I hate to be that guy, but apart from theoretizations on these very unexpected results, there also seems to be something odd about the data you're using.
Thank you for checking the data! I love "that guy" usually he's me. I ran my code in "debug mode": + Show Spoiler + Active:09.40 Injects:06.40 Last:14.24 Hatchery [3B80001] Injects: 04.44 05.27 06.15 07.01 07.44 08.25 09.12 10.00 11.13 13.02 Active:06.27 Injects:02.40 Last:14.24 Hatchery [4680001] Injects: 07.57 08.42 10.37 11.45 Hatchery [5D80001] Injects: 09.49 Active:09.39 Injects:06.40 Last:14.24 Lair [32C0001] Injects: 04.45 05.30 06.12 07.00 07.45 08.32 09.26 10.35 11.47 13.01
The Hatchery [5D80001] you're writing about gets only one inject, at 09.49. I dug into my code and there's an extra rule that I didn't describe in the article: a base must receive more than one inject to be considered at all for the inject % measurement. So, no bug here. Show nested quote + Exactly how is Inject % Computed?
Inject % = (total # of minutes all hatches spent with injected larva) / (total # of minutes all hatches were active)
A hatch is considered active from the first time a Queen injects it until the last time the hatch is selected by anyone for any reason, or the game ends. If we can someday get the actual hatch death time, we will use that instead.
Well then this is an argument about degree. In this case yes, if one doesn't inject at least once then it would not be included in the divisor. However, If we make the assumption that a pro player will inject on his other bases at least twice (have you ever seen a pro or masters not inject on one of their bases that they can actually keep at least twice - I don't think I ever have.) Then that hatch will be considered active yet will contribute negatively to the inject percentage. This seems far more likely than a player injecting only once or not at all on a defensible expansion. My point remains, just not as expansively as I initially said.
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On May 22 2013 11:04 DemigodcelpH wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 06:17 Eventine wrote: I swear, every time someone provides some data point, instead of sparking interesting debate, half the responses are like your data is wrong, my intuition is perfect and therefore i reject your findings. This. I find it amusing how every Zerg (well Zerg mains because I do play Zerg) player suddenly attempted to become a statistics major. Quite convenient, eh? To quote someone else: Show nested quote +A while back, someone collected similar data for workers-produced, time-supply-blocked, and surplus-resources-banked. Their results showed vast differences between the different divisions, implying that the above metrics are a major differentiating factor between the different divisions & skill levels. The empirical approach does work. The above metrics are also subjected to the same "real active game world" scrutiny in the same exact way, and yet they scale non-marginally with skill level. You are saying that master level players are better at spending their resources than silver level players, which depends on good larva injects, but that master level players aren't really better at injecting? There are some other explanations, but I think it's more likely to be the case that the data is more difficult to interpret than you think.
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On May 22 2013 19:45 Grumbels wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 11:04 DemigodcelpH wrote:On May 22 2013 06:17 Eventine wrote: I swear, every time someone provides some data point, instead of sparking interesting debate, half the responses are like your data is wrong, my intuition is perfect and therefore i reject your findings. This. I find it amusing how every Zerg (well Zerg mains because I do play Zerg) player suddenly attempted to become a statistics major. Quite convenient, eh? To quote someone else: A while back, someone collected similar data for workers-produced, time-supply-blocked, and surplus-resources-banked. Their results showed vast differences between the different divisions, implying that the above metrics are a major differentiating factor between the different divisions & skill levels. The empirical approach does work. The above metrics are also subjected to the same "real active game world" scrutiny in the same exact way, and yet they scale non-marginally with skill level. You are saying that master level players are better at spending their resources than silver level players, which depend on good larva injects, but that master level players aren't really better at injecting? There are some other explanations, but I think it's more likely to be the case that the data is more difficult to interpret than you think.
To be fair, silver zergs are also worse at getting up a good and stable economy. Hence they will not have as many minerals and will therefore require less injects to spend all of their minerals while still retaining similar inject percentages under the op's criteria.
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On May 22 2013 19:44 Huckle wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 19:35 Stol wrote:On May 22 2013 19:30 Huckle wrote:On May 22 2013 19:19 Stol wrote:On May 22 2013 19:15 Huckle wrote: Like most people have said, the difference in expansion behavior of masters players versus silver players is huge in this study. If a silver zerg has two bases and injects always on both bases he will have a 100% inject rate. If a masters zerg has 4 bases and injects on 3 he will have a 75% inject rate. Which one in this case is better? Obviously, the masters zerg has a higher inject skill even though his percentage is lower. If you also realize that the majority of silver games are played on two bases this data becomes exceedingly irrelevant. Hatcheries that are not getting injected or only receive one inject are not taken into account, so its actually not that simple. Still there are a few things which would require some clarification and/or further investigation before one can draw any real conclusions. I'm not so sure about that. Granted my idea of inject percentage is far simpler than the OP's. He uses time based percentages. For instance in his article he states, Inject % = (total # of minutes all hatches spent with injected larva) / (total # of minutes all hatches were active. So it is sort of that simple though. Uninjected hatches still contribute to the divisor in this case. No, a hatchery is only considered active after it has received its first inject, furthermore there was an exclusion rule saying that if the hatchery only received one inject throughout the game, it was not taken into consideration. Edit: On May 22 2013 11:09 dsjoerg wrote:On May 22 2013 10:54 Poffel wrote: I hate to be that guy, but apart from theoretizations on these very unexpected results, there also seems to be something odd about the data you're using.
Thank you for checking the data! I love "that guy" usually he's me. I ran my code in "debug mode": + Show Spoiler + Active:09.40 Injects:06.40 Last:14.24 Hatchery [3B80001] Injects: 04.44 05.27 06.15 07.01 07.44 08.25 09.12 10.00 11.13 13.02 Active:06.27 Injects:02.40 Last:14.24 Hatchery [4680001] Injects: 07.57 08.42 10.37 11.45 Hatchery [5D80001] Injects: 09.49 Active:09.39 Injects:06.40 Last:14.24 Lair [32C0001] Injects: 04.45 05.30 06.12 07.00 07.45 08.32 09.26 10.35 11.47 13.01
The Hatchery [5D80001] you're writing about gets only one inject, at 09.49. I dug into my code and there's an extra rule that I didn't describe in the article: a base must receive more than one inject to be considered at all for the inject % measurement. So, no bug here. Exactly how is Inject % Computed?
Inject % = (total # of minutes all hatches spent with injected larva) / (total # of minutes all hatches were active)
A hatch is considered active from the first time a Queen injects it until the last time the hatch is selected by anyone for any reason, or the game ends. If we can someday get the actual hatch death time, we will use that instead.
Well then this is an argument about degree. In this case yes, if one doesn't inject at least once then it would not be included in the divisor. However, If we make the assumption that a pro player will inject on his other bases at least twice (have you ever seen a pro or masters not inject on one of their bases that they can actually keep at least twice - I don't think I ever have.) Then that hatch will be considered active yet will contribute negatively to the inject percentage. This seems far more likely than a player injecting only once or not at all on a defensible expansion. My point remains, just not as expansively as I initially said.
Yes, I never said there arent factors playing in which can be hard to measure. I've even made similar comments regarding actual larvae generation myself. Its certainly a viable conclusion but its not the definite truth and thats a pretty big difference.
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On May 22 2013 19:52 Stol wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 19:44 Huckle wrote:On May 22 2013 19:35 Stol wrote:On May 22 2013 19:30 Huckle wrote:On May 22 2013 19:19 Stol wrote:On May 22 2013 19:15 Huckle wrote: Like most people have said, the difference in expansion behavior of masters players versus silver players is huge in this study. If a silver zerg has two bases and injects always on both bases he will have a 100% inject rate. If a masters zerg has 4 bases and injects on 3 he will have a 75% inject rate. Which one in this case is better? Obviously, the masters zerg has a higher inject skill even though his percentage is lower. If you also realize that the majority of silver games are played on two bases this data becomes exceedingly irrelevant. Hatcheries that are not getting injected or only receive one inject are not taken into account, so its actually not that simple. Still there are a few things which would require some clarification and/or further investigation before one can draw any real conclusions. I'm not so sure about that. Granted my idea of inject percentage is far simpler than the OP's. He uses time based percentages. For instance in his article he states, Inject % = (total # of minutes all hatches spent with injected larva) / (total # of minutes all hatches were active. So it is sort of that simple though. Uninjected hatches still contribute to the divisor in this case. No, a hatchery is only considered active after it has received its first inject, furthermore there was an exclusion rule saying that if the hatchery only received one inject throughout the game, it was not taken into consideration. Edit: On May 22 2013 11:09 dsjoerg wrote:On May 22 2013 10:54 Poffel wrote: I hate to be that guy, but apart from theoretizations on these very unexpected results, there also seems to be something odd about the data you're using.
Thank you for checking the data! I love "that guy" usually he's me. I ran my code in "debug mode": + Show Spoiler + Active:09.40 Injects:06.40 Last:14.24 Hatchery [3B80001] Injects: 04.44 05.27 06.15 07.01 07.44 08.25 09.12 10.00 11.13 13.02 Active:06.27 Injects:02.40 Last:14.24 Hatchery [4680001] Injects: 07.57 08.42 10.37 11.45 Hatchery [5D80001] Injects: 09.49 Active:09.39 Injects:06.40 Last:14.24 Lair [32C0001] Injects: 04.45 05.30 06.12 07.00 07.45 08.32 09.26 10.35 11.47 13.01
The Hatchery [5D80001] you're writing about gets only one inject, at 09.49. I dug into my code and there's an extra rule that I didn't describe in the article: a base must receive more than one inject to be considered at all for the inject % measurement. So, no bug here. Exactly how is Inject % Computed?
Inject % = (total # of minutes all hatches spent with injected larva) / (total # of minutes all hatches were active)
A hatch is considered active from the first time a Queen injects it until the last time the hatch is selected by anyone for any reason, or the game ends. If we can someday get the actual hatch death time, we will use that instead.
Well then this is an argument about degree. In this case yes, if one doesn't inject at least once then it would not be included in the divisor. However, If we make the assumption that a pro player will inject on his other bases at least twice (have you ever seen a pro or masters not inject on one of their bases that they can actually keep at least twice - I don't think I ever have.) Then that hatch will be considered active yet will contribute negatively to the inject percentage. This seems far more likely than a player injecting only once or not at all on a defensible expansion. My point remains, just not as expansively as I initially said. Yes, I never said there arent factors playing in which can be hard to measure. I've even made similar comments regarding actual larvae generation myself. Its certainly a viable conclusion but its not the definite truth and thats a pretty big difference.
Indeed. I find the conclusion interesting but I still find a lot of difficulties in interpreting the data as "player skill does not make a substantial difference in injecting accuracy and skill. However a better conclusion would be "player skill does not make a substantial difference in injection percentage as calculated by the OP."
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Well I'm still waiting for just about anyone to actually reply to either of my two comments .
Especially this segment in my second post:
On May 22 2013 18:08 Stol wrote: I was also unable to determine if you rebalance the graphs to account for the fact that 90% is max. As an example, 66% out of 100 is still 66 but if you account for the fact that 90 is max, you actually end up at roughly 73.3%. 60% out 90 is on the other hand roughly 66.7. So instead of having a difference of 6 percentage units we're now sitting at a difference of 6.6 percentage units. An increase of the 10% we left out of the equation when using 100% as max instead of 90%.
Ofc when using more than one queen per hatchery it would then be possible to reach over 100% but I dont really think anyone is doing that. If you rescale the numbers putting 90% as the maximum uptime instead of 100%, the difference between the leagues increases.
Edit: I'd prefer a reply to the other stuff as well though .
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first thing that also came to my mind was lower league players having probably 2 base at a 12 min game while a masters for sure is on at least 3 bases i'd even say lowleague players go for almost 20 min with 2 to 3 base while master is 4+ with macrohatches
I agree with people saying this data is heavily falsified by not taking into consideration how many hatches there are and how much easier it is to inject 2 hatches than 6
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On May 22 2013 20:02 robih wrote: first thing that also came to my mind was lower league players having probably 2 base at a 12 min game while a masters for sure is on at least 3 bases i'd even say lowleague players go for almost 20 min with 2 to 3 base while master is 4+ with macrohatches
I agree with people saying this data is heavily falsified by not taking into consideration how many hatches there are and how much easier it is to inject 2 hatches than 6
I think its wrong to say the data is heavily falsified, it does however not paint the full picture and people are drawing conclusions from it which it doesnt support.
Edit: And that goes for people on either side of the discussion.
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-_-.... Larvae inject's importance is related to your chioce of strategy. In some strats, you will be using your queen aggresively, where injects will have no importance. In other strats, you will be agressive with larvae expensive units(i.e. lings). Just setting a benchmark across several games, will yield nothing of value.
I don't really follow thestaircase, so i don't know what your exact goals are, but if it includes finding ways to get better as zerg. i would reccomend simply practising the basic mechanics and understanding of zerg.
i.e. Creepspread, Overlord placement, injection, droning benchmarks, how to be efficient with all the different units in different combinations against different units and scouting. <---- This much is Basic, and should be what all zerg above noob/entry/beginner level should be able to do without thinking about it.
THEN you can move up to "Advanced" stuff, like scouting and preparing for timings, timing for overlord placements, advanced creepspread(overlord puke walking with queens/queen drop to corners of the map/hatchery cancellations), micro, baneling mines, nydusworm play, drop play, baneling carpet bombing, slow pushes with swarmhosts..
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On May 22 2013 19:57 Stol wrote:Well I'm still waiting for just about anyone to actually reply to either of my two comments . Especially this segment in my second post: Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 18:08 Stol wrote: I was also unable to determine if you rebalance the graphs to account for the fact that 90% is max. As an example, 66% out of 100 is still 66 but if you account for the fact that 90 is max, you actually end up at roughly 73.3%. 60% out 90 is on the other hand roughly 66.7. So instead of having a difference of 6 percentage units we're now sitting at a difference of 6.6 percentage units. An increase of the 10% we left out of the equation when using 100% as max instead of 90%.
Ofc when using more than one queen per hatchery it would then be possible to reach over 100% but I dont really think anyone is doing that. If you rescale the numbers putting 90% as the maximum uptime instead of 100%, the difference between the leagues increases. Edit: I'd prefer a reply to the other stuff as well though .
For comparison sake it doesn't matter about that 10% because proportionally it will yield the same result.
The graph would basically look the same, and the percent difference although as a raw number is higher it is out of 90 and not 100 so the difference is really the same. You would simply be manipulating numbers. Hopefully that makes sense and you see what you are suggesting would not make a real difference in data analysis.
And for what it is worth I'd love if this type of analysis could be done on the percent of the map covered by creep. I think that is the data that would really show the difference in leagues. Or simply number of active tumors.
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On May 22 2013 19:57 Stol wrote:Well I'm still waiting for just about anyone to actually reply to either of my two comments . Especially this segment in my second post: Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 18:08 Stol wrote: I was also unable to determine if you rebalance the graphs to account for the fact that 90% is max. As an example, 66% out of 100 is still 66 but if you account for the fact that 90 is max, you actually end up at roughly 73.3%. 60% out 90 is on the other hand roughly 66.7. So instead of having a difference of 6 percentage units we're now sitting at a difference of 6.6 percentage units. An increase of the 10% we left out of the equation when using 100% as max instead of 90%.
Ofc when using more than one queen per hatchery it would then be possible to reach over 100% but I dont really think anyone is doing that. If you rescale the numbers putting 90% as the maximum uptime instead of 100%, the difference between the leagues increases. Edit: I'd prefer a reply to the other stuff as well though .
This is actually quite smart. The difference increases when you realize that one can only realistically attain 90% inject rate. Hence the masters players are actually slightly farther away from their silver league counterparts. In my mind it's sort of negligible but still there simply because we are just taking the difference between both inject percentages divided by 90. Of course a difference multiplied by 1/x is always going to be greater than the difference itself if x is less than 1 and greater than 0 and the difference is nonnegative.
The fact that there is a difference itself between any of the inject percentages is interesting regardless of what we set the theoretical limit at. What this methodology does do however is make the masters leaguers seem slightly better than their lower league counterparts and in that way I'm more inclined to trust it. But really, all we are doing is messing with numbers. What matters most is the calculated inject percentage and as such I'm not really inclined to desire a change in the graph or a scaling of the inject percentage by 1/.9. To me the 100% limit is fine since it is theoretically possible to attain. And, in the end all we are doing is scaling both things by the same number. As such this will not fundamentally alter the data set.
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On May 22 2013 20:39 FLuE wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 19:57 Stol wrote:Well I'm still waiting for just about anyone to actually reply to either of my two comments . Especially this segment in my second post: On May 22 2013 18:08 Stol wrote: I was also unable to determine if you rebalance the graphs to account for the fact that 90% is max. As an example, 66% out of 100 is still 66 but if you account for the fact that 90 is max, you actually end up at roughly 73.3%. 60% out 90 is on the other hand roughly 66.7. So instead of having a difference of 6 percentage units we're now sitting at a difference of 6.6 percentage units. An increase of the 10% we left out of the equation when using 100% as max instead of 90%.
Ofc when using more than one queen per hatchery it would then be possible to reach over 100% but I dont really think anyone is doing that. If you rescale the numbers putting 90% as the maximum uptime instead of 100%, the difference between the leagues increases. Edit: I'd prefer a reply to the other stuff as well though . For comparison sake it doesn't matter about that 10% because proportionally it will yield the same result. The graph would basically look the same, and the percent difference although as a raw number is higher it is out of 90 and not 100 so the difference is really the same. You would simply be manipulating numbers. Hopefully that makes sense and you see what you are suggesting would not make a real difference in data analysis. And for what it is worth I'd love if this type of analysis could be done on the percent of the map covered by creep. I think that is the data that would really show the difference in leagues. Or simply number of active tumors.
There is a difference in the sense that what you would be measuring is the uptime of the actual injects available instead of the injects present on the hatchery. The fact that it would also affect every other aspect of the study along with standard deviation and so forth is irrelevant. The difference is in fact not the same as people are making their assumptions based on the difference in percentage points which in this case is smaller than the difference present when balancing the values.
A point you could be making is people waiting with their first inject gaining extra energy before the injects occur which does have an impact on the possible larvae generated, but that is an entirely different matter and until the data also take into consideration when the queens themselves were spawned, one can only speculate on how much it would interfere with the end result.
Edit: To make my point more clear lets visit a somewhat extreme value. Say that instead of 90%, only a 10% uptime was possible due to queen energy generation.
A master player sitting at 8% would not look that much more impressive than a silver player sitting at 7% when we're disregarding the fact that 10% is the possible maximum and instead use 100%. It would only be a difference of 1 percentage point.
However, seeing as 10% is the actual maximum we instead get the following result: 8/10 = 80% and 7/10 = 70%. He is in fact hitting his injects at a much more consistent rate. So while the amount of larvae generated isnt substantially higher, the better player is still a lot better at hitting his injects properly.
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On May 22 2013 11:34 Poffel wrote: In your model, if a player distributes a queen's injects between several hatcheries, his efficiency drops by a large margin.
The article states that a queen only regenerates enough energy for an inject every ~44 seconds and it takes 40 seconds for larvae to pop out after injecting. Therefore a single queen can only keep one hatchery injected 90% of the time. Therefore ~45% maximum on two hatcheries.
Consequently distributing a queen's injects between multiple hatcheries is massively inefficient by default. I fail to see how thats a failure of the system. They're still inefficient with their injects...the fact that their inefficiency is down to not having enough Queens is wholly irrelevant to whether or not inject efficiency is a useful measurement of ability.
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Very interesting finds.
You do need to argue for why you think the differences found are not important. Because there are differences, master players are better. One could make a case for that your finds are proof that injecting is an important skill to have. You're assuming the differences are small, but they could really be big. To the Statisticsmobile, I say!
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o.O interesting numbers, just checked my last 6 ladder games, half of which went to at least 3-4 bases, had a minimum uptime of 85% and a max of 90%... is 90% really the max uptime? Granted I kinda don't spread creep at all and prioritize injects for ling heavy style lol.
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I don't think there's anything surprising in the fact that perfect injection timing is not relevant in the later stages of the game, especially at master level. Most good master zerg players will only have about 4 queens injecting while using macro hatches for everything else (because queens take up supply, hatches do not) and most good zerg players will not rely on injects to rebuild their army.
What is important is to perfect injection timing in the first minutes of the game, because it makes a massive difference in how fast you can go 3base etc.
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On May 22 2013 21:26 EtherealDeath wrote: o.O interesting numbers, just checked my last 6 ladder games, half of which went to at least 3-4 bases, had a minimum uptime of 85% and a max of 90%... is 90% really the max uptime? Granted I kinda don't spread creep at all and prioritize injects for ling heavy style lol.
Because of how they measure, it would depend on how much energy your queens have before you start injecting. In theory, if you build several queens per hatchery and/or let them generate energy before the first inject on their "assigned" hatchery, you can reach 100% when it comes to inject uptime.
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On May 22 2013 20:47 Stol wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 20:39 FLuE wrote:On May 22 2013 19:57 Stol wrote:Well I'm still waiting for just about anyone to actually reply to either of my two comments . Especially this segment in my second post: On May 22 2013 18:08 Stol wrote: I was also unable to determine if you rebalance the graphs to account for the fact that 90% is max. As an example, 66% out of 100 is still 66 but if you account for the fact that 90 is max, you actually end up at roughly 73.3%. 60% out 90 is on the other hand roughly 66.7. So instead of having a difference of 6 percentage units we're now sitting at a difference of 6.6 percentage units. An increase of the 10% we left out of the equation when using 100% as max instead of 90%.
Ofc when using more than one queen per hatchery it would then be possible to reach over 100% but I dont really think anyone is doing that. If you rescale the numbers putting 90% as the maximum uptime instead of 100%, the difference between the leagues increases. Edit: I'd prefer a reply to the other stuff as well though . For comparison sake it doesn't matter about that 10% because proportionally it will yield the same result. The graph would basically look the same, and the percent difference although as a raw number is higher it is out of 90 and not 100 so the difference is really the same. You would simply be manipulating numbers. Hopefully that makes sense and you see what you are suggesting would not make a real difference in data analysis. And for what it is worth I'd love if this type of analysis could be done on the percent of the map covered by creep. I think that is the data that would really show the difference in leagues. Or simply number of active tumors. There is a difference in the sense that what you would be measuring is the uptime of the actual injects available instead of the injects present on the hatchery. The fact that it would also affect every other aspect of the study along with standard deviation and so forth is irrelevant. The difference is in fact not the same as people are making their assumptions based on the difference in percentage points which in this case is smaller than the difference present when balancing the values. A point you could be making is people waiting with their first inject gaining extra energy before the injects occur which does have an impact on the possible larvae generated, but that is an entirely different matter and until the data also take into consideration when the queens themselves were spawned, one can only speculate on how much it would interfere with the end result. Edit: To make my point more clear lets visit a somewhat extreme value. Say that instead of 90%, only a 10% uptime was possible due to queen energy generation. A master player sitting at 8% would not look that much more impressive than a silver player sitting at 7% when we're disregarding the fact that 10% is the possible maximum and instead use 100%. It would only be a difference of 1 percentage point. However, seeing as 10% is the actual maximum we instead get the following result: 8/10 = 80% and 7/10 = 70%. He is in fact hitting his injects at a much more consistent rate. So while the amount of larvae generated isnt substantially higher, the better player is still a lot better at hitting his injects properly.
That's why it would be nice to have a proper test statistical test for the difference as well as I think it would indeed be quite significant. Instead the author screwed that up and compared the difference to the wrong standard deviation and made a weird statement implying the differences are pretty small.
This thread is pointless though for solid criticism, any good comments get buried beneath the sea of crappy statements.
Besides there are already far more extensive works out there for modeling player skill not even mentioning this method of relying on statistics to improve is very questionable. I'm a fan of using statistics for classifying players in sports especially those where a solid individual ranking doesn't exist like baseball but using using it to improve players themselves is a lot more dodgy.
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Very interesting findings, however I think that the ratio between the inject% and number of hatches across leagues would be more valuable, though I am interested to hear your thoughts otherwise.
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On May 22 2013 19:57 Stol wrote:Well I'm still waiting for just about anyone to actually reply to either of my two comments . Especially this segment in my second post: Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 18:08 Stol wrote: I was also unable to determine if you rebalance the graphs to account for the fact that 90% is max. As an example, 66% out of 100 is still 66 but if you account for the fact that 90 is max, you actually end up at roughly 73.3%. 60% out 90 is on the other hand roughly 66.7. So instead of having a difference of 6 percentage units we're now sitting at a difference of 6.6 percentage units. An increase of the 10% we left out of the equation when using 100% as max instead of 90%.
Ofc when using more than one queen per hatchery it would then be possible to reach over 100% but I dont really think anyone is doing that. If you rescale the numbers putting 90% as the maximum uptime instead of 100%, the difference between the leagues increases. Edit: I'd prefer a reply to the other stuff as well though . That's also an interesting way to look at it. However, wouldn't it be even more important to account for the theoretical minimum values? Since only hatcheries with at least two injects are included in the dataset, 0% is effectively impossible no matter what game we're looking at... and the actual minimum depends, first and foremost, on game length:
The graph starts at a game length of 5 game minutes. I dare say that if I have done two injects before the five minute mark, my injects are at least decent. (From the top of my head, if I open Hatch first, I'm not even sure if I could have my queens out early enough for two injects by the 5 minute mark in a best-case scenario.) On the other hand, if I messed up my injects, it wouldn't count because I had no hatcheries with at least two injects. In other words, it's hardly surprising to see silver players with >70% inject efficiency in short games when ~70% may be the effective minimum to reach the prerequisite of a twice-injected hatchery in time.
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On May 22 2013 03:59 FawxzTV wrote: This mostly just shows that higher level players expand more aswell as adding macro hatches. Resulting in more bases than queens -> lower numbers. Injects are still INCREDIBLY important in the first couple of minutes. That's true. On top of that on a higher level your opponent will harrass more etc. Which will make you miss more injects.
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On May 22 2013 04:27 mnck wrote: The reason highlevel players dont inject all the time is because they know when larva is needed and when creep is better. Sure maybe you could get more drones or army if you injected more, but the game is much more complex than that. Queens fight harass, spread creep and sometimes a queen per hatch instantly isnt the best. As for example any 3 base zerg build gets injects on 3rd hatch kind of late because otherwise you are at a surplus of larva but the 3rd base is still highly relevant for other reasons (Drone saturation and creep spread).
It's a good point that later game units require less larva and it can become less important. Also high level players can relatively easy achieved max (19) larva per hatch just from injecting lategame. This makes the queen float a lot of energy or makes injecting redundant.
Larva inject is by no means something that should be "kept up" but what would be a more interesting statistic, is how low the energy on the queens are. Thats something I'd love to see. If a queen stays low on energy then i'd be amazed! Not on the inject uptime.
This. This is the answer. I've seen players like Scarlett purposely miss injects because they feel they need better creep spread against what their opponent is going for. Also having insane numbers of larvae is pretty useless unless you are going for the fast remax.
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On May 22 2013 22:16 Poffel wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 19:57 Stol wrote:Well I'm still waiting for just about anyone to actually reply to either of my two comments . Especially this segment in my second post: On May 22 2013 18:08 Stol wrote: I was also unable to determine if you rebalance the graphs to account for the fact that 90% is max. As an example, 66% out of 100 is still 66 but if you account for the fact that 90 is max, you actually end up at roughly 73.3%. 60% out 90 is on the other hand roughly 66.7. So instead of having a difference of 6 percentage units we're now sitting at a difference of 6.6 percentage units. An increase of the 10% we left out of the equation when using 100% as max instead of 90%.
Ofc when using more than one queen per hatchery it would then be possible to reach over 100% but I dont really think anyone is doing that. If you rescale the numbers putting 90% as the maximum uptime instead of 100%, the difference between the leagues increases. Edit: I'd prefer a reply to the other stuff as well though . That's also an interesting way to look at it. However, wouldn't it be even more important to account for the theoretical minimum values? Since only hatcheries with at least two injects are included in the dataset, 0% is effectively impossible no matter what game we're looking at... and the actual minimum depends, first and foremost, on game length: The graph starts at a game length of 5 game minutes. I dare say that if I have done two injects before the five minute mark, my injects are at least decent. (From the top of my head, if I open Hatch first, I'm not even sure if I could have my queens out early enough for two injects by the 5 minute mark in a best-case scenario.) On the other hand, if I messed up my injects, it wouldn't count because I had no hatcheries with at least two injects. In other words, it's hardly surprising to see silver players with >70% inject efficiency in short games when ~70% may be the effective minimum to reach the prerequisite of a twice-injected hatchery in time.
Yes, thats true, I should have thought of it myself. Depending on when the injects start compared to when the game ends, the gained uptime of injects on the overall population could be heavily overestimated as the games in which the players fail to produce the minimum amount of injects required are not included.
Edit: Even moving on into longer matches with more expansions this could be a problem, and possibly a part of the answer as to why the deviation within the leagues is so large. I would like to use the same example as was mentioned in the report, but with a slight twist.
For example, let’s say you had two hatches in a game that you won. The first one got its first inject at 4:45, and the second one at 7:45. You won the game at 10:45. So your first hatch was active for six minutes, and the second one for three minutes. So that’s nine total minutes that hatches were alive.
And let’s say you did six injects on the first hatch and three on the second. That’s nine injects total, and each inject lasts for 40 seconds. That’s six total minutes of injects being active. So your inject % for that game is 6/9 = 66.6%.
Lets use the same numbers but instead of winning at 10:45, you win at 11:45. Same amount of injects at first, you will ofc have a lower uptime but nothing fishy is going on.
Your first hatchery was active for 7 minutes and your second was active for 4. A total of 11 minutes of active hatcheries. With 6 injects on the first and 3 on the second you get the standard 9 injects in total. 6 total minutes of injects being active which means that 6/11 equals to roughly 0.545 so lets say 54.5%. Lets now say someone worse is playing in a similar scenario. 11 minutes of active hatcheries but they only manage 5 injects on the first and 2 on the second. 7 injects in total meaning 280 seconds of inject uptime. Over 11 minutes thats about 42.4% inject uptime.
Here it gets interesting. Say that instead of doing 5 + 2 you only do 5 + 1. The last hatchery is then not taken into consideration as it was only injected once. Your first hatchery was still active for 7 mintues and you managed 5 injects, 200 second uptime on injects over 7 minutes results in an uptime of about 47.6%. So someone injecting less than you can end up with a higher inject uptime. Now you can ofc play around with the actual duration of the games and the amounts of injects you manage to hit but the fact remains. Depending on when you expand and how fast you hit the injects on expansions, you can gain a lower score than someone far worse then you. In effect, the time the game ends compared to when you expand plays a larger role on the result than your ability to inject properly.
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Inject % = (total # of minutes all hatches spent with injected larva) / (total # of minutes all hatches were active)
So where do the number of hatches factor in here? Masters usually can manage more bases as the game progresses. I hate pretentious number crunching. >
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Not a big fan of your statistical analysis - PLEASE differentiate between percent and percentage points! What is your standard deviation in for example?
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On May 22 2013 22:42 TheFish7 wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:27 mnck wrote: The reason highlevel players dont inject all the time is because they know when larva is needed and when creep is better. Sure maybe you could get more drones or army if you injected more, but the game is much more complex than that. Queens fight harass, spread creep and sometimes a queen per hatch instantly isnt the best. As for example any 3 base zerg build gets injects on 3rd hatch kind of late because otherwise you are at a surplus of larva but the 3rd base is still highly relevant for other reasons (Drone saturation and creep spread).
It's a good point that later game units require less larva and it can become less important. Also high level players can relatively easy achieved max (19) larva per hatch just from injecting lategame. This makes the queen float a lot of energy or makes injecting redundant.
Larva inject is by no means something that should be "kept up" but what would be a more interesting statistic, is how low the energy on the queens are. Thats something I'd love to see. If a queen stays low on energy then i'd be amazed! Not on the inject uptime.
This. This is the answer. I've seen players like Scarlett purposely miss injects because they feel they need better creep spread against what their opponent is going for. Also having insane numbers of larvae is pretty useless unless you are going for the fast remax.
Ya, people are clinging too hard on their 'injects measure how good you are' rule of thumb and confusing the study as saying something it's not.
All it's saying is that there's no strong correlation between inject uptime (even when taking out things like Macro hatches) and player-performance. It even says there's a strong correlation between APM and Spending Quotient so starts to speculate for why the disconnect. I don't think they hit all the right reasons, but they hit a few good ones.
A lot of people are right when they say Queen Energy is what's actually important (since queens can do other things than inject) and there are builds where you just don't inject non-stop *even* at the beginning of the game. IE - 3 hatch before pool, you do not have the minerals for all that larva and unless you game the metric by only injecting on the same hatch (possible) you will end up with a poor inject uptime on active hatches (that's a mouthful).
My take-away is that injects should be viewed instead of an essential benchmark, like hitting your overlords, and more of a powering mechanic, like adding extra rax or gateways.
Of course it's free for Zerg to do this, so in an ideal world they would keep up injects late game just in case (how many times has a ling / roach remax failed because the player didn't have the larva for it?). On the other hand, adding Macro hatchings and using more Larva efficient units (never seen an Ultra remax fail for larva...) *do* make injects less important late game, so it's still not the end-all-be-all of Zerg mechanics.
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On May 22 2013 04:57 Kaitlin wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 04:49 Teoman wrote: I think what some people are saying is really what it is.
I don't think higher level players are just as bad at injecting as lower level players. It is just that there are a lot more factors that make constant injects impossible at higher levels (harrass, difference in base taking, emphasis on creep, idle larva). Maybe part is the fact that higher level players are active on the map, while lower levels are looking at their bases lol.
I think the difference then would be: Lower level players look at their base or at the field. high level players do both.
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Based on the article linked, we can see that progamer zergs consistently hit their inject % at 10-15% higher than masters level zergs for the same game-lengths.
Hence, injects are meaningfully correlated with skill- just not as much as things like apm...
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You made it into This Week in Starcraft 2! :D
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This study confuses me. I hate to go against so much data that seems well analyzed. All the stats i've studied tell me to trust the data, but this is as counter intuitive as it gets. All of my anecdotal evidence points to the norm statement that injects are absolutely crucial.
With that being said, my current opinion of this data is that your percentage, no matter how small, must make a monstrous difference. 5.1% improvement between masters and silver, must be one of the pillars that allow players to advance leagues. I think i agree with a large number of people's opinions in here. I believe the most useful statistic would be the total number of larva per unit time of the players of each league. 5% more larva must be enough that zerg is able to maximize drone production, and put out just enough units to hold some of the timings that come, that would kill less injectfully skilled players. Is there anyway we could find out something along the lines of how much more injected larva are produced by master players than silver players per minute or time. I am then curious to see if its like 10 more larva at ~9 minutes or something. Because then I can see master players surviving timings that would kill lesser players. I just repeated myself. Whatever.
Anyway, neat study, as with all suprising findings I would analyze more data a different way, and see if you come up with the same result.
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On May 22 2013 21:29 Stol wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 21:26 EtherealDeath wrote: o.O interesting numbers, just checked my last 6 ladder games, half of which went to at least 3-4 bases, had a minimum uptime of 85% and a max of 90%... is 90% really the max uptime? Granted I kinda don't spread creep at all and prioritize injects for ling heavy style lol. Because of how they measure, it would depend on how much energy your queens have before you start injecting. In theory, if you build several queens per hatchery and/or let them generate energy before the first inject on their "assigned" hatchery, you can reach 100% when it comes to inject uptime.
you can never get 100% perfect inject uptime because your first hatch always takes 50sec of not being injected while your queen is on the way + 60sec for the pool, at least.
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On May 22 2013 22:22 Vandrad wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 03:59 FawxzTV wrote: This mostly just shows that higher level players expand more aswell as adding macro hatches. Resulting in more bases than queens -> lower numbers. Injects are still INCREDIBLY important in the first couple of minutes. That's true. On top of that on a higher level your opponent will harrass more etc. Which will make you miss more injects. These two things seem like obvious flaws in the testing method.
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On May 22 2013 03:54 Embir wrote: Finally solid confirmation that Zergs macro is the easiest - we already knew they had it easy with only one production building and easiest tech switches in the game, now we know that they macro mechanic is also forgiving - and note that supposed unforgiveness of zerg mechanics was main argument for zerg's macro difficulty.
Haha, thanks for being "that guy", saying what everyone was thinking.
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This study is useless as you guys didn't control for the number of hatcheries the players have. A masters player is far more likely to end the game with more hatches than a gold player. A better study would have been to examine pro level games and check how inject percentages affect win rates, preferably by taking a look at many multi-game series between two opponents.
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On May 26 2013 10:46 kckkryptonite wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 03:54 Embir wrote: Finally solid confirmation that Zergs macro is the easiest - we already knew they had it easy with only one production building and easiest tech switches in the game, now we know that they macro mechanic is also forgiving - and note that supposed unforgiveness of zerg mechanics was main argument for zerg's macro difficulty.
Haha, thanks for being "that guy", saying what everyone was thinking. Just wait until they do a study that says you can not drop a mule till full energy and still be fine. :/ Actually nevermind don't really need a study for that. Zerg macro is more than injecting, not to mention it takes more to inject 4+hatcheries than 1-2 of lower leagues. This study has nothing to do with the difficulty of it either, just saying you don't have to have every hatch constantly injected to win. If you understood Zerg macro more you would probably already know that, it is about balancing larvae, supply and income.
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very simple find but i love it.
resources like this give us the information we need to focus on what is really happening and what is really needed in play.
cheers.
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I find it funny that people are talking about GM vs Silver as if that's the main point of the article. It's not. It's simply an example to prove a finer point, that being that the common notion that you always must hit your inject timings is flawed. All they're doing is displaying stats to show injects become less important as the game wears on. They're not something you need to constantly keep on top of like supply caps. Reading any more into it is rather silly.
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Got any numbers on Leenocks injectratio ?
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On May 26 2013 10:29 iKill wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 21:29 Stol wrote:On May 22 2013 21:26 EtherealDeath wrote: o.O interesting numbers, just checked my last 6 ladder games, half of which went to at least 3-4 bases, had a minimum uptime of 85% and a max of 90%... is 90% really the max uptime? Granted I kinda don't spread creep at all and prioritize injects for ling heavy style lol. Because of how they measure, it would depend on how much energy your queens have before you start injecting. In theory, if you build several queens per hatchery and/or let them generate energy before the first inject on their "assigned" hatchery, you can reach 100% when it comes to inject uptime. you can never get 100% perfect inject uptime because your first hatch always takes 50sec of not being injected while your queen is on the way + 60sec for the pool, at least.
There should be a multiple-choice test before you are allowed to comment, in order to verify that you actually read the article.
This is my friendly way of telling you that the issue you raised is not an issue, because of how Inject % is measured.
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Luckily my macro is bad, so when I get to the lategame it's good to have 20 free larva to max out on Ultras
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On May 26 2013 14:34 vesicular wrote: I find it funny that people are talking about GM vs Silver as if that's the main point of the article. It's not. It's simply an example to prove a finer point, that being that the common notion that you always must hit your inject timings is flawed. All they're doing is displaying stats to show injects become less important as the game wears on. They're not something you need to constantly keep on top of like supply caps. Reading any more into it is rather silly. The stats don't say anything about injects becoming less important, it simply shows that people don´t hit as many injects later in the game.
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On May 22 2013 08:09 Hypemeup wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 07:05 _SpiRaL_ wrote:On May 22 2013 06:41 rysecake wrote:On May 22 2013 04:13 darkscream wrote:On May 22 2013 04:02 Embir wrote: Terran is the most difficult race mechanically
Zerg ..., it is just the easiest to master, it is the most noobie friendly race by far this mentality is disgusting and a cancer on the entire starcraft 2 scene. Guess which race has the highest APM on average? No, it's not terran.. we can cherrypick stats all day long. you do know that zerg apm spikes whenever you press S+ ZZZZZZZ or DDDDDDD etc right? There's a reason why only koreans can play terran successfully and white people play zerg l0l. Clearly it's because zerg has a higher mechanical skill cap...oh wait. As I said already this is a very small % of total APM and the difference this makes is very small. I dunno why this ALWAYS come up when discussing APM.Zerg unit spam makes a tiny difference only, its an APM intensive race. It actually makes a huge difference, I dont know what you are going on about.
Open up a pro zerg replay in SC2 gears. You will find yourself surprised at what a small difference it makes.
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The difference is that a masters player keeps up injects when he intends to keep up injects, and does not keep up injects when he doesn't need to.
How many Zerg build orders do you see where a Hatchery is intentionally left queenless for some time, or when a Queens first 25 energy goes to a Creep tumor?
Larva are super important only when you are playing a strat that requires a lot of larva. Lingbanemuta and roach hydra midgames are very different from swarmhost midgames in larva usage, and also in the relative value of.creep vs larva.
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On May 26 2013 22:55 _SpiRaL_ wrote:Show nested quote +On May 22 2013 08:09 Hypemeup wrote:On May 22 2013 07:05 _SpiRaL_ wrote:On May 22 2013 06:41 rysecake wrote:On May 22 2013 04:13 darkscream wrote:On May 22 2013 04:02 Embir wrote: Terran is the most difficult race mechanically
Zerg ..., it is just the easiest to master, it is the most noobie friendly race by far this mentality is disgusting and a cancer on the entire starcraft 2 scene. Guess which race has the highest APM on average? No, it's not terran.. we can cherrypick stats all day long. you do know that zerg apm spikes whenever you press S+ ZZZZZZZ or DDDDDDD etc right? There's a reason why only koreans can play terran successfully and white people play zerg l0l. Clearly it's because zerg has a higher mechanical skill cap...oh wait. As I said already this is a very small % of total APM and the difference this makes is very small. I dunno why this ALWAYS come up when discussing APM.Zerg unit spam makes a tiny difference only, its an APM intensive race. It actually makes a huge difference, I dont know what you are going on about. Open up a pro zerg replay in SC2 gears. You will find yourself surprised at what a small difference it makes. Also people should keep in mind that every race has this :/ When you queue up marines on 10 reactor'd barracks late game that is 6aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa or w/e your hotkey setup is. Also when protoss warp in it is wzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzztttttttt +clicks. I don't know if you know this but in an RTS game you need units and every race spends apm making units.
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On May 22 2013 04:06 SpikeStarcraft wrote: Im calling bullshit on this. I dont think what you showed there means anything. The inject percentage is correlated to the numbers of hatcheries. And in higher level play you have more hatcheries way faster. so after 10 minutes when the master zerg is on 4 base he does way more absolute injects than the silver level player thats still on one base. So thats not an useful comparison.
"Wow, the silver level player hits injects on one base almost as good as master level players on 4 base. I guess injects dont really matter that much." Kappa
Gotta love it when people dont read the whole paper. They actually state that it turns out that injecting becomes less important as the game goes on and that by having macro hatches and more bases you no longer NEED perfect injects to spend all your minerals/gas.
The comparison is useful anyway, a silver player can probably only handle injecting a max 3 bases while a pro can do 6-7 but if larva inject was such a huge factor then even at 6-7 bases pros would NEED to have 80-90% perfect injects to win games. The whole conclusion is that as the game gets longer and thus higher base count and macro hatches and less larva hungry units are produced, then injecting perfectly doesn't matter anymore, obviously it would give you a greater advantage but it isn't essential, as we have been previously told.
So really what we can take away from this paper is that there is still a long way to go before Zerg reaches its full potential. If in the lategame Zergs are only hitting 30% of their injects, imagine what one could do if they could keep it above 60%!!!!! Though there would be little need for that, as pointed out in the paper, because once u have enough bases and macro hatches, they produce enough larva all by them selves to use all your income on high expense units like Ultras etc without having to inject very often.
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This is a very controversial find! I even think it's to such a high degree that we need more studying into this before we can conclude things definitely.
I have trying practicing with and improving my injects using this method myself and what I found was that the number of bases mattered ridiculously much. If I stay on two bases reaching 80% was not impossible but as soon as I hit three bases it fell drastically. So I tried really hard to improve this but it's still way below my two base. The thing is, it becomes much less necessary to inject once you have 3-4 hatcheries. It's still important, but if you miss injects with only two hatcheries, some timings will just outright kill you if you try to play your normal game. Also coupled with the fact that if you have more bases you are more vulnerable to harass and it becomes harder to hold which increases the difficulty of hitting all your injects by a ridiculous amount. As your level increases their harass just gets controlled better so even if you are faster than the lower league, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have more free actions to inject.
The point of all this is indeed, that if higher level players take more bases faster, then that is definitely going to affect the result of this. And it would seem like they do according to the guys who did the SQ study where higher level players had higher income faster.
But this still proves that you can't just use this method straight up to measure your injects. You will have to look at your number in relation to game time and number of bases. This is still just a theory to explain this, but logically, when watching low level games vs high level games, there seems to be a massive difference. So my point is that I think this rather proves that the method for measuring ability to inject is not good enough.
Another factor could be choice of strategy. Though I have no base to suggest how they would differ across leagues, I know from my personal play that if I go for swarm host queen or broodlord queen attacks vs Protoss and Terran respectively, I am barely going to inject at all once the game reaches a certain point. If these strats has higher prevalence in some leagues, that could affect it as well.
It's a shame that some people seem to be jumping on very firm conclusion very quickly. I'm not saying I have the answers, just that we need to know more about other factors / confounders to be certain of things.
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This reminds me of when Blizz first added Larva to the unit tab. People like Artosis were saying that it'd be a really important thing for casters to check and talk about, but since then I don't think I've heard it mentioned once by any caster in any game. And I watch a lot of games.
Seems like this would support the idea that injects just aren't something that separates top players from lower players.
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This study is a terrific example of a fantastic research idea drawing very wrong conclusions because the wrong things are being measured.
Injects directly relate to larva production, which is a common limiting resource for zergs to spend their resources. And I think it's not unfair to say that spending skill IS something that differentiates grandmasters from golds.
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Except they point out that there are spending metrics that clearly show a difference between leagues.
How often you inject your hatcheries is not one of them is all that should be taken from the study. The study is to blame fro trying to answer "why it's not important" of course. We all know there are times when it's important and there are times when it's not. But it's not nearly the constant importance that mineral collection or apm or even supply caps (until maxed) are, which is what the study set out to dis/prove.
So the study is very sound in answering their main thesis: "Why we don't teach constant injects as part of training new zerg players."
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Can you make something like a #Creep-tumors / Game-length chart for every league?
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My roommate didn't believe that injects are not as useful later game at first. It took some explaining in the way of supply, minerals/gas, and larvae against the units you are creating. At first I didn't believe it either. It would make more sense intuitively to have more larvae available, however, if you can't use them- they are just sitting there, and injects are almost wasting energy at that point. This was a superb thread, and very interesting read.
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