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I was browsing around and saw at the top of battle.net a thread complaining about the design issues of Protoss in LotV (here).
At first I just brushed it off but after letting it sink in I realized how much difficulty I had this week finding Protoss practice partners. I did a casual check of my own local experience and it doesn't look so good
Looking at the professional level there's a diverse mix with all races winning premier and major tournaments. But I get this feeling it's not indicative of the entire playerbase and there's a lot of dissatisfied Protoss players out there. Even here on TL, the Protoss strategy discussion is much more subdued than Zerg or Terran threads.
Is this the case? Or have Protoss players just embraced adept into dark shrine openers so fully that I can't see them even on the ladder?
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It shifts are pretty constantly. It used to be that no one played terran, for example.
Just how she goes.
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You can check here if it's underplayed:
http://www.rankedftw.com/stats/races/1v1/#v=2&r=-2&l=-2
Right now it's around 33% T, 30% Z and 27% P. Not a huge difference, but in some leagues like Diamond, Protoss is indeed underrepresented, while in Bronze and Silver there will be tons of Protoss.
The reason? No idea, but personally I do think it's the worst designed race with the most "bandaids" like photon overcharge to make the race work.
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If you look at the stats you'll note that the average zerg if mid-plat, while the average protoss is low-gold. This is due to Zerg rewarding macro more strongly than the other races (i.e when both players have awful micro and harassment, and both players a-move their armies together, zerg usually wins). And since the Protoss population is overall slightly lower, it creates a strong race differential in the platinum-masters range.
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Protoss2ez.
User was warned for this post
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Bisutopia19033 Posts
It's just a trend and not a problem. The same applies to BW at different levels.
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during wol and hots protoss was a noskill race where you could easily just roll a dice every game and win or lose based on luck pretty much. in LotV protoss requires a TON of skill. its only normal for the protoss playerbase to fall off a bit.
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i dont think the question is whether or not there's a reason, but
+ Show Spoiler +WHEN AND WHERE ARE WE CELEBRATING??
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I'm switching to Protoss to bring life back to this glorious divine race.
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I'm sure you'll find good reasons to whine and call protoss OP even starting from this information
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On October 18 2016 04:10 NEEDZMOAR wrote: during wol and hots protoss was a noskill race where you could easily just roll a dice every game and win or lose based on luck pretty much. in LotV protoss requires a TON of skill. its only normal for the protoss playerbase to fall off a bit.
What the hell. Especially in WoL when there was neither a good gateway unit nor mothership core for defense, so protoss wins often relied mostly on some gimmick.
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On October 18 2016 04:00 BisuDagger wrote: It's just a trend and not a problem. The same applies to BW at different levels. No. In BW protoss is underplayed because all protoss players become casters instead.
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Bisutopia19033 Posts
On October 18 2016 04:30 RoomOfMush wrote:Show nested quote +On October 18 2016 04:00 BisuDagger wrote: It's just a trend and not a problem. The same applies to BW at different levels. No. In BW protoss is underplayed because all protoss players become casters instead. This is to true
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On October 18 2016 04:30 RoomOfMush wrote:Show nested quote +On October 18 2016 04:00 BisuDagger wrote: It's just a trend and not a problem. The same applies to BW at different levels. No. In BW protoss is underplayed because all protoss players become casters instead.
That and their god, Slayers Boxer, switched to T.
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Franckly, I would ask you the opposite question : why would the 3 races be equally played?
There are a lot of external factors coming into play, such as culture and local esport heroes for instance, just look at the terran distribution in EU/AM vs KR.
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On October 18 2016 05:30 Gwavajuice wrote: Franckly, I would ask you the opposite question : why would the 3 races be equally played?
by the unfathomable power of statistics
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On EU protoss has been the race i've played the least in every single Lotv seasons, and its kinda annoying to be honest. I play random and i often don't see a single protoss in 10-15 games streaks and get no practice, this made improving XvP pretty tedious. It's also the race i end up playing the least out of the 3 for some odd reason.
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Yes, Protoss is massively underplayed on ladder. It's the lowest represented race from Gold to Grandmaster, and every league in between. In GM it's only 27% compared to the other races 34%, but the discrepancy between the races in Masters, Diamond, and Platinum is even more enormous.
Masters: 35% Zerg, 24% Protoss, 36% Terran Diamond: 37% Zerg, 21% Protoss, 34% Terran Platinum: 35% Zerg, 23% Protoss, 32% Terran
There are less Protoss on ladder than ever in LOTV, although the race was the least represented in mid to late HOTS as well, just not to this degree.
The race just became a lot more difficult to play in LOTV. Almost every Protoss unit has abilities, and one needs to properly use these abilities to get the most out of the race.
The core units of the race are also not as strong as the core t1 / t1.5 units of Terran or Zerg in a straight up fight in the mid -> late game, so Protoss players need to be able to tech to the T3 units they require and conserve them. Unlike HOTS, Protoss can't go Colossus in every match-up, so getting the right T3 units and keeping them alive is more difficult.
The changes to photon overcharge, pylon warpin, and chronoboost made the race trickier than before. Protoss players now have to consider the position of each pylon for photon overcharge purposes, as well as warp-in purposes. This is extremely important to counteract things like widow-mine drops, liberators, ling/bling runbys/drops, bio drops, and frontal assaults. Because of pylon warp-ins requiring a nexus or gateway nearby to be quick, reinforcing attacks is harder. (Need pylon + gateway, or warp prism).
For chronoboost, the skill just became a lot clunkier to use, and I'd argue that it's more difficult to get the most out of it now compared to before. You weren't punished by a slight delay in chrono before, due to that energy not being lost if it was below 100. Now, not switching chrono immediately after something is completed is a loss of effectiveness. Also, chronoing multiple buildings at once can be very annoying when trying to switch from one building to another. It is often the case that you have to rechronoboost everything you want after a single switch due to that single chrono being taken off the wrong building.
With that being said, I think it's obvious that Protoss is the most finicky gimmicky race, and below the Pro / Semi-pro level, players simply don't have the skill / patience to get the most out of all the abilities and little things the race offers. That's why a lot of players obviously switched to Terran / Zerg or outright quit the game. People like to joke about Protoss being a-move, but I'd say it is the least so. If you could just a-move low-mid tier units and win, it would have higher representation.
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On October 18 2016 02:54 Musicus wrote:You can check here if it's underplayed: http://www.rankedftw.com/stats/races/1v1/#v=2&r=-2&l=-2Right now it's around 33% T, 30% Z and 27% P. Not a huge difference, but in some leagues like Diamond, Protoss is indeed underrepresented, while in Bronze and Silver there will be tons of Protoss. The reason? No idea, but personally I do think it's the worst designed race with the most "bandaids" like photon overcharge to make the race work.
Personally, this is very indicative of a problem to me.
(1) Fewer people enjoy playing the race.
LotV starts out with the races fairly even (P / T / Z off by not much more than 3% at the end of January. Then Protoss leave the game much more rapidly than T / Z (visible at each ladder reset). Over time, the separation between the least-played and the most-played race increased from 3 / 92 -> 6 / 91 (roughly doubling the difference between the most-played and least-played races). Terran was ~7,000 players behind Zerg in the beginning, but Protoss is now ~15,000 players behind Terran (and that's with the overall population decreasing by ~3,500 players).
(2) Fewer people have success playing the race
Protoss' distribution across ladder has always been skewed in LotV (going from occasionally having "too many players" in GM / Masters (relative to their representation on the ladder) to the having "just enough", the entire race has still been consistently lacking players in Diamond, and Platinum. Protoss is simply harder to play on ladder (according to the stats we have). For a simple comparison: the top percentiles of players arranged by race:
Zerg (70,404 at time of writing) 10% - All of GM, Masters, and the top 18.2% of Diamond Zergs are the top 10% of the Zerg population 20% - Through the top 56.6% of Diamond Zerg 30% - Through the top 95.0% of Diamond Zerg 40% - Through the top 36.8% of Platinum Zerg
Terran (77,836 at time of writing) 10% - All of GM, Masters, and the top 23.8% of Diamond Terrans are the top 10% of the Terran population 20% - Through the top 70.2% of Diamond Terran 30% - Through the top 18.6% of Platinum Terran 40% - Through the top 70.7% of Platinum Terran
Protoss (62,679 at time of writing) 10% - All of GM, Masters, and the top 34.5% of Diamond Toss are the top 10% of the Toss population 20% - Through the top 93.5% of Diamond Toss 30% - Through the top 50.9% of Platinum Toss 40% - Through the top 6.4% of Gold Toss
(3) Many people don't like the additions to the race
Severe complaints about Protoss have seemingly led to only more disappointment (very subjective, this one). There were multiple very, very highly up-voted threads about Protoss design issues during LotV beta and continuing on to today (some of the very few threads with 150+ upvotes on SC2's official forums). No such consensus has seemed to be reached on any other issue (including even Mech) since the days of swarm-hosts vs mech in late HotS. Yet we have the most token changes on the design map (none of which seem to address anyone's concerns).
Most threads discussing the problems get highly upvoted ... most threads which then include possible solutions tend to get heavily downvoted. People seem intimately concerned, but it appears that nearly no one agrees on solutions.
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Honestly, can anyone claim that they're as excited for the Protoss changes (and think they're going to change the way the game is played as much) as the Terran / Zerg changes?
It's not a case of haves vs have-nots. I quite simply believe that Protoss has places where they can be improved. The test map seems to ignore these possibilities for Toss in favor of gimmicks, quality of life changes, or changes for other races (Blizzard isn't changing the Tempest for Toss players).
The future of Protoss seems to be much the same as the past: changes very few people desire (besides the occasional change for other races), dropping player-base, and decreasing representation at the highest levels of ladder.
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thx for the breakdown dawg.
i thought the Protoss campaign was the worst of the 3. that might be a factor in a new players' race decision.
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