BW is a beloved game that has stood the test of time. With each year, the players improved their skills greatly, and strategies evolved owing to the sheer depth of the game. Notable players who made a mark on the scene such as Boxer, Nada and Reach were recognized for their talent and hard work. As the years rolled on, TBLS emerged, and the fans were treated to LeeSang battles thanks to Flash and Jaedong, with game quality reaching its foreseeable peak. It was the good times until the matchfixing scandal reared its ugly head, with the professional scene ending in 2012. While some players left for the military or transitioned to the sequel, others stuck around to help rebuild the BW scene. Slowly, but surely, the scene rose from the ashes, much like a phoenix. Reborn and re-energized, the meta evolved further as more players returned.
The environment may have changed with the revival, but there was one factor that remained mostly unchanged for the last 17 years. That was balance, and foremost, its perception. Throughout the history of BW, the topic of balance came up many times whenever a certain race was dominating. Seeing as BW's balance rests on a needle tip, this was quite understandable. Even more so, when most players are bias towards the race they play, and will join the chorus when their favourite player loses to a race that they deem imbalanced. As it stands, one topic that has always dominated balance talks and spawned many vocal critics over the years is that of Tesagi. The idea that Terran is imbalanced at the top levels. These discussions were always had whenever a Terran player had lots of success, be it during the early days during Boxer's time or later when Flash was dominating in both the KeSPA and post-KeSPA era.
Is there some truth to these claims? Does Tesagi really exist? If not, is it possible that these claims only surfaced due to the performance of Flash? This article, which is part editorial and part factual, aims to explore the topic of Tesagi and its prevalence in the post-KeSPA era while giving a nod to the racial differences that exist in BW.
Coming off the heels of Warcraft II which was lambasted by critics for its mostly symmetric design, Starcraft was designed to be a totally asymmetric RTS experience featuring three races that shared only key concepts in common. The expansion, Brood War, ended up adding several units for each race as well as making important modifications to the game. The development team ended up releasing patch 1.08, the last balance patch back in 2001, where each race had several important changes made to some of their core units.
Suffice to say, such a design by definition throws the topic of perfect balance out the window. How can perfect balance be achieved when all three races are that unique in structure? To illustrate this, let's take a look at the starting unit, the worker. A Terran SCV is bulkier than its counterparts, and is able to repair yet it's a melee unit and gets occupied building a structure. This means that a Terran player will temporary lose a mining worker when building a structure, and this worker is totally exposed to tickles from pesky probes or drones. Essentially, this almost guarantees that a Terran player will pull a second SCV to defend the building SCV.
However, their bulkiness adds another factor if a player was trying a cheesy strategy or just using them to block for their marines during defensive maneuvers. Likewise, probes and drones are unique in the fact that they can both regenerate a part or all of their hp in due time, have a short range and on top of that are either consumed in the process of making a building or can place one down and return to mining immediately. If you consider the above carefully, and keep in mind that these are the basic units that are vital to the game's flow, you'd realize that this simple look already reveals a huge difference in the way that each race functions. Did I mention that there are some minor mining differences between the workers as well? I'm sure some of our cool mapmakers can point those out.
SCVs are, but one of the many complaints that surface whenever Tesagi is brought up. But why not dig even deeper? How about the fact that aside from SCVs and firebats, all Terran units have range? What about tanks that have the highest range in the game, or vultures placing mini-nukes around the map? What about Science Vessels that are able to irradiate freely from the air? Even wraiths can seem overpowered in the hands of a skilled 2 port master such as Leta. How about Zerg and their lurkers where 2 of them can defend a ramp extremely well? What about stacked mutalisks that can decimate a turret line with several precise clicks or defilers which are the bane of many SK Terran players due to dark swarm and plague, two spells that are disastrous to bio players? Did I mention cracklings and their insane dps at taking down structures?
What about Protoss, and their reavers which when controlled well, have taken down even Flash? What about storm, which despite having the ability to damage friendly units, is extremely potent? Anyone forgot about dark templars, and how they've won games for pros over and over again? What about arbiters and the ability to recall into bases or on top of armies? Carriers in large numbers become almost an autowin if they are handled properly by the Protoss player, and even more so, depending on the map used. The point is pretty simple, and something that's been repeated before by some players. That each race is different, and each race has its own overpowered units. Units that only through human interaction, aka fantastic control, can excel beyond their intended design, helping to bring the game to another level.
One of my favourite BW quotes is that BW is a game where you throw a bunch of OP units at each other over and over. It's because in a nutshell, this is what the game is, and while it's true that it's difficult to determine just how well balanced the game is overall, the current group of competitive players that are playing the game day in and out have learned to rise above the challenge provided. Humans are not perfect, and we'll never see a perfect BW game, but that's also precisely why the game is considered to be as balanced as possible, and why the more skilled player will always come out as the winner in an encounter. In order to get a good sense of how balance is faring, we'll take a look at two different things: starleague standings, and winrates, in Korean tournaments. For starleague standings, we'll find out which race came out on top and grabbed first place in this era, looking individually at the Sonic and Afreeca era for starters. Inclusion criteria is offline tournaments with a minimum of 8 competitors and a prizepool of 7,000,000 won. For the winrates, we'll focus on offline and online tournaments from 2012 to 2018, starting with SSL7 and include all special events and showmatches.
For the purpose of this analysis, 50% is the ideal winrate. However, in this era, many factors such as a player's motivation, condition, lifestyle, and others can affect the winrate drastically considering the lack of team houses, necessities of streaming etc... Therefore, a balanced matchup will have a winrate of 50±5% in order to account for these factors. Let's dive in!
Starleague Standings
The scene was extremely blessed with a lot of tournaments in the post-KeSPA era which was composed of both the Sonic and Afreeca era. In the Sonic era, notable offline tournaments included the SonicTV BJ Starleague (SSL) Season 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11, GomTV Classic, Kongdoo Starleague, and VANT36.5 National Starleague. In the Afreeca era, we were treated to 6 iterations of ASL, SSL Classic, WEGL as well as Blizzard's KSL 1 and 2. That's a total of 18 different tournaments spread over ~6 years.
So, which race stood on top during each era and overall?
Sonic Era: Zerg was the most prosperous race during this era with 3 separate Zergs taking 4 first place finishes. This includes Killer's back to back SSL championships, hero's SSL11 3-0 win over Bisu, and EffOrt's VANT 3-1 win over Bisu. Terrans had most of their success during the end of 2014/beginning of 2015 when both SSL10 and the Kongdoo SL ran simultaneously. SSL10 had Terrans in the top 4 with sSak taking the win over Last while Mind surprised many as he won Kongdoo SL beating Kwanro 4-1. Let's not forget GOM Classic where Hiya took first place over Sea. Finally, Protoss only had a single champion with Bisu winning SSL9 over hero in a close 3-2 series, and securing 2 second place finishes in SSL11 and VANT to effectively carry the race.
Afreeca Era: The Zerg and Terran race were tied for first place with each race claiming 4 championships while the Protoss race trailed behind winning only 2 of them. However, there was a bit less diversity, and more repeat champions in comparison to the Sonic era. For Terran, Flash carried the banner in 2017 winning 3 back to back ASLs by beating Sea, Shine and hero, 3-1, 3-0, and 3-1 respectively. Last finally won his first championship in 2018 beating Jaedong 4-0 in KSL. For Zerg, EffOrt won SSL Classic over free, and recently beat Flash and his 1-1-1, 3-2 in ASL6 while Soulkey won WEGL crushing Last, Flash and Larva then recently claimed KSL2 over Sharp with a 4-1 score. For Protoss, Shuttle took their first ASL championship beating Sharp in the finals while Rain won ASL5 over Snow. Of interest is the lack of diversity in unique Terran players that ended up on the podium with Flash, Last, Sharp and Sea being the only ones.
Overall: If we consider both eras, the Zerg race is slightly ahead, however, one can call it close to a draw between the Terran and Zerg race while the Protoss race ended up dead last with a total of 3 championships compared to the 7 and 8 of Terran and Zerg respectively. A list of the champions from each race is shown below:
Zerg: EffOrt (x3) Killer (x2) Soulkey (x2) hero Terran: Flash (x3) Last Hiya sSak Mind Protoss: Bisu Rain Shuttle
Offline Winrates
Tournaments are extremely important for a healthy scene, especially offline ones where the players are able to meet their fans and see their support firsthand. This can be a strong motivator for some, allowing them to practice hard and in turn, they can showcase their true skills. A lot of smaller offline events and showmatches were included in this analysis to provide a more complete picture on how each race was performing. The graph below shows the winrates from 2012 to 2018:
Looking at the winrates overall, there were quite a bit of fluctuations over the years. The TvZ winrate reached its highest peak in 2014 while the highest peak for TvP occurred in 2017. Aside from 2015 and 2017 where the TvP winrate eclipsed the TvZ winrate by quite a bit, the TvZ winrate was almost always higher whether by several percentile or more. This may be due to the nature of the matchup, and the fact that more Terrans seem to enjoy some success there in comparison to TvP, where even players like Last have went on record saying that the matchup is quite difficult.
"Traditionally, Protoss is strong against Terran so even I have difficulty in the matchup."
For TvZ, the average winrate over the years came out to ~53%. The highest peak was ~63% in 2014 while the lowest trough was ~47% in 2015. The winrate was mostly below 55%, starting from 2012 and going all the way to 2018. The peak and trough were interesting to see, and even more so considering that it seemed to suggest that the Terran race had a nice high before hitting rock bottom the next year.
The peak in 2014 can be explained by Terrans performing outstandingly in special events such as the GomTV WeMakePrice Classic Season 4, and the HungryApp Esports League Special Matches. For instance, Sea and Hiya decimated the competition in GomTV Classic while Terrans took first place in 4 out of 5 matches in the HungryApp Esports League, besting a lot of Zergs on the way. I decided to investigate further, and took a more detailed look at the map pools used in both tournaments. The map pool was Terran-favoured overall with maps such as Fighting Spirit, Python, and Grand Line SE, making an appearance. Add on the fact that the Terran players who participated were performing at their peak at this time, and the increase doesn't seem all that unreasonable. If those two events are removed, the winrate drops by ~11.5% to ~51.5% which is a decent winrate.
The trough in 2015 was much more surprising to see considering that the Terran race had some of their best moments in 2015 when they won both SSL10 and the Kongdoo Starleague. SSL10 had Terrans take the top 4 spots with sSak emerging victorious, while Mind beat Kwanro in the Kongdoo SL finals. A close look at the winrate for the various events during that year reveals that while Terrans did well in SSL10, Kongdoo SL and the beginning of VANT, they performed terribly in SSL11 with a winrate of ~33% (7-14 record) which brought down their overall 2015 winrate.
For TvP, the average winrate over the years came out to ~51%. The highest peak was ~60% in 2017 while the lowest point was ~45% in 2012. The winrate was usually below 54% aside from the previously noted exception. It looked like the Terran race was doing better as the years went by, ending up with a yoyo effect whereby they'll do great one year then worst the next though the winrate would still be higher than the previous trough etc... This trend was broken with 2018 being worse than 2016. The peak at 2017 was a bit odd considering that it seemed that the Terran race was struggling against Protoss during this period of time. Of course, the decrease by ~10% in the following year was just as mystifying as well.
2012 was a bit rough to explain, since the map pools used were fairly well balanced or lacked a large enough sample size to indicate imbalance, however some Protoss players such as Sky and Perfectman stacked up a lot of wins vs Terran players during SSL7 which skewed results in the Protoss' favour. As for 2017, it was a combination of several things. Most notably Terran players performing well in ASL2 (anyone forgot Bisu's meltdown vs Sea?), and the fact that Terran players swept the majority of special events during this period going 11-2 with Flash's help. For 2018, despite doing really well in ASL6 and average in KSL2, Terran players went 14-25 in ASL5 and KSL1 which ended up lowering their winrate overall. It also didn't help that the map pool in ASL5 favoured Protoss as well as the fact that several Protoss players were hitting their stride during these tournaments.
Final Verdict: There was nothing spectacular about either the TvZ or TvP winrate in the post-KeSPA era when all offline tournaments and events were considered. Aside from the peaks that were explained earlier, the yearly and average winrates for both matchups were within several percentile of 50% for the majority of time. Going off the earlier definition, these results are a mark of truly good balance!
Online Winrates
While some players can perform better offline, some players are unable to show their true skills due to the intense pressure that they feel performing infront of an audience. This was routinely discussed during the KeSPA era when team houses existed, and other players spoke highly of a player on their team despite that player never making a mark in any tournaments offline. While playing online might not completely remove the pressure, you are at least in a familiar environment, thus logically, you should be able to play at your best.
The data used for this analysis was taken from TLPD, LP, and manually collected from many video channels and websites in order to provide the most complete set of data possible within current limitations. Almost 200 events were considered and 3700+ games were included. The graph below shows the winrates from 2012 to 2018:
A spider with a broken leg? That was my first impression despite the lack of more legs. A look at the graph shows an interesting trend in TvZ that will be expanded on shortly. As usual, the TvZ winrate was almost always higher than TvP, except for 2015. On the other hand, the TvP winrate was more stable, fluctuating ever so slightly early on with the Terran race surviving until 2017 where the winrate dropped off significantly.
For TvZ, the average winrate over the years came out to ~57%. The highest point was ~61% in 2012 while the lowest trough was ~51% in 2015. In the early years, the winrate was above 55%, but it started to fluctuate going above and below it once we hit 2015 till 2018. What's interesting here is the shape of the graph. If 2015 wasn't such a low point, the winrate would look like it's decreasing over the years till 2017, then there would be an increase till we hit ~60% in 2018.
There are some reasonable explanations for what we see here. During the early days of the post-KeSPA era, ex-pros started coming back with every SSL, and a lot of Zerg participants, whether they be amateurs or expros, had weak or just barely passable ZvT. In other words, when facing competent TvZers, they crumbled. This is reflected quite a bit in the winrate of 2012 for instance. A year where the Terran race absolutely clobbered the Zerg in SSL6/6.5, going 46-13 in the predecessors of SSL7. If we remove SSL6/6.5 from the pool, the winrate drops ~4% to ~57% which while is still high, is a bit more reasonable when other factors are considered.
What we end up seeing here is a result of the earlier days, where competition was still ruthless, but a lot of Zergs really needed to work on their skills to keep up. Not to mention that earlier on, a lot of tournaments were using more familiar maps that were being played on fish. Map pools that were more Terran-favoured containing maps such as Fighting Spirit were used, thus it became a double whammy from either perspective. There was one other factor that was just barely touched on that can explain the high winrate from 2013-2014. The idea that some of the players were hitting their peaks at that time. After all, for some of these players, they had to make a living streaming their games and competing in as many tournaments as possible.
Those who were not around or as cognizant of the scene at the time probably don't remember the days of players like Sea really dominating the scene. Yes, I'm talking about Yum Bo Sung. He may be an entertainer now, with BW being distant in his mind, but when Sea first came to the scene, and really got into the groove of things, he quickly became known as the king of online tournaments, placing on the podium for many tournaments in 2013 and 2014. Even in 2015, he placed well in 6 different online tournaments. How strong was Sea? A lot of older members might recall a period of time where he made 5 straight SRT finals, and he won all of them beating Killer who was considered the best Zerg at the time. Looking at his TvZ stats from 2013-2014, they sat at 68-33, or 67% which is ludicrous. Other players that had fearsome TvZs were sSak, Hiya, Mind, and PianO who was doing 12-13 hour practice sessions at the time. The point being that several notable players can make a large effect, especially when they had the skills to do so.
As the years went by, there were less online tournaments available for the pros as SSL took hold with its prestige and ability to play offline infront of the fans. Furthermore, some organizers left for the military or faced backlash such as LoveTV for their inability to deliver, which caused them to move away from the scene. Between this, and the arrival of stronger Zerg players who could play ZvT pretty well, the Zerg race fought back to even things out at ~50% in 2015. There was a bit of an increase in 2016 to ~58%, but that can be explained by Terrans performing really well in 41 Starleague Season 4 and KCM events. Things evened out in 2017 until we hit 2018, where the winrate once again rose to ~60% due to Terrans outperforming Zergs heavily in Moo Proleague 2 and KCM events.
For TvP, the average winrate over the years came out to ~50%. The highest peak was ~54% in 2015 while the lowest point was ~41% in 2018. In comparison to TvZ, the winrate was always lower than 55%. From 2012 to 2016, there were pretty small variations in the winrate where it hovered between 50% and ~54%, which is a good sign overall. However, the winrate took a nosedive once we hit 2017 and never recovered. This drop was unprecedented, and an investigation into the winrate drop was undertaken. It turns out that the drop was due to Terrans underperforming in two tournaments that were running at the time, Ajae League Season 2, and KCM events.
The Ajae League season 2 had strong PvT players such as Jangbi, Stork and free while some of the Terrans such as PianO struggle in TvP. In KCM events, Protoss players dominated more so than usual, and with the two factors combined, the scales tipped in favour of Protoss. Of course, the winrate was ~44% in 2017 which is still close to the boundaries that we set earlier. In 2018, the winrate dropped to its lowest record, ~41% which is definitely a concern. Once again, this was due to two tournaments. This time it was the DanJJING Star League Season 3, and KCM events where even though Flash helped rescue the race from an even worse record in the latter, it was not enough to counterbalance everything. This leads to the question, what will the new year bring for online TvP? Can the Terran race recover as more prominent Terrans quarrel with injuries or leave for the military?
Final Verdict: In TvZ, the winrate was above 55% in the first couple of years, however, those years aren't a good indicator of imbalance since many players were still coming back, and the skill level varied wildly. In the last couple of years, the winrate bounced greatly, going above and below 55%. If Tesagi does indeed exist, there should be some consistency where the winrate would always be above 55%. Alas, that is not what the data shows. As for TvP, the numbers were below the target, thus a sign that there is no Tesagi. The extremely low winrate in 2018 is of concern though, and depending on its movement in 2019, an argument could be made about whether Terran is actually UP in online TvP. When discussing the results earlier, I made several references to Flash. I'm going to coin the term, the Flash Effect here and the name gives you the gist of it. When Flash returned to the scene in 2016, his return was a huge boon for the Terran race. He helped move the meta along, refining builds such as the 5 rax +1 and the 1-1-1 while he showed fantastic gameplay and made decisions that were far beyond that of even the best Terrans at the time.
"All Terrans have become so much stronger since Flash started streaming. They just think differently when playing PvT now. Last/AlphaGo was strong before Flash came to Afreeca, but he's even stronger now." - Shuttle
His performance also helped increase the winrates substantially in some cases. This begs the question, what was his effect? While it's difficult to measure the effect of the meta changes, aside from the fact that more Terrans have started to use the refined 5 rax +1 and his 1-1-1, we are able to take a closer look at the winrates, and how they changed due to Flash. Keep in mind that Flash only started participating in ASL1 after around a month of practice.
The graph below shows the TvZ winrate with and without Flash in offline tournaments, including special events:
Flash played only several matches of TvZ in 2016, and won all 3 of them. Considering that only 35 TvZ games were played offline the whole year, this made a difference of ~4% bringing down the winrate from ~54% to ~50%. Still, 2016 was the year Flash was building himself up, seeing as he was eliminated by Last 3-0 in the quarterfinals of ASL1, and it wouldn't be until the start of ASL2, and 2017 when Flash really shows up what he's made of.
2017 was no doubt Flash's best year where he showed us a glimpse of his God form. He had quite the impact in the scene, reaching 3 straight back to back ASL finals, and winning them all to grab the 3-3-3. He went undefeated in series against Zerg players in tournaments that allowed preparation such as ASL, but for weekend-type tournaments, he lost to Soulkey in WEGL, and dropped the finals in Seoul Cup to EffOrt. For BO1 games, he dropped a single one to EffOrt in Seoul Cup, and to Soulkey in the final match in the Afreeca Team Battle. Otherwise, Flash has pretty much beaten all kinds of Zergs including, but not limited to Jaedong, Soulkey, Shine, hero, and EffOrt. He faced a lot of Zergs in 2017, playing a total of 31 games against the race, and ended up with a ~61% winrate. If his stats are considered, TvZ plummets ~8%, down to ~41% from ~49%.
Now, you're probably thinking: 8% is large, but I would've expected more from Flash. What if I told you that I found something else that's interesting. A deeper analysis was done that compared Flash's winrate in preparation tournaments such as ASL to weekend-type tournaments such as WEGL. In preparation tournaments, the Terran race had a 57% winrate with Flash having a 75% winrate against Zergs. Once his stats were removed, the winrate dipped to 45%, a ~12% drop. On the other hand, when only weekend-type tournaments were considered, the Terran race had a 36% winrate with Flash having a 36% winrate against Zergs (11 games). Though the sample size isn't as large as one would like, this does seem to partially confirm that Flash performs much better in tournaments where he could prepare, aka there was a week in between matches, rather than a day or two, if even.
2018 was less of a successful year for Flash as he was eliminated from ASL5 and ASL6 while he missed both KSL and KSL2, latter being for wrist injuries it seems. He beat Shine and Jaedong in ASL5 and ASL6 respectively, but he lost the ASL6 finals, 2-3 to an in-form EffOrt. The winrate didn't change at all when everything was considered. Taking everything into account, and looking at the winrate with and without Flash, the TvZ winrate was dangerously low in 2017 while it was within reasonable limits in 2016 and 2018. Having said that, this analysis seems to suggest that Flash played a large role in making the Terran race seem overpowered in 2017 if we go solely off winrates, and it was only through his domination of the competition that the winrate was elevated, no, boosted to a level where one believes that there may be a balance issue.
Now it's time to take a look at the offline TvP winrate with and without Flash's contribution:
Unlike TvZ where Flash played a large role in the meta game, Flash's TvP meta changes were less notable in comparison. He played a single game in 2016 against Movie in ASL2 which he won, but not much else which had a negligible effect overall.
In 2017, his effect was also felt in TvP, but to a lesser degree than in TvZ. He ended up winning 2 series against GuemChi, and Bisu while he dropped a single game to Tyson during the Afreeca Team Battle. He won several series against other Protoss in special events such as Seoul Cup and WEGL and ended his year with an offline winrate of ~81% (13-3). The winrate dropped ~6% from ~60% to ~54%. If we once again consider preparation tournaments, the Terran winrate is 56% with Flash having a winrate of ~75% (8 games). Once his stats are removed, the winrate drops to ~52%, nothing major. On the other hand, when only weekend-type tournaments were considered, the Terran race had a 68% winrate with Flash having ~88% winrate (8 games) which lowers the overall winrate to ~57%, an 11% drop. Even though we are dealing with a really small sample size, it's interesting to see that Flash's TvP wasn't as affected as his TvZ regardless of which type of tournament he played in.
2018 wasn't as impactful with Flash winning several series against players such as Mini and Shuttle to end with a respectable 10-3 record. Seeing as the winrate was sitting at ~50%, it would drop to ~45% once his stats are factored in. Once again, we see that Flash's winrate had a profound enough effect on the overall TvP winrate pushing it to levels where one would argue about imbalance, but without his stats, the winrates are around 50±5%.
Had Flash decided, and was able to participate in KSL1/2, we may have seen a greater impact in either TvZ or TvP considering the format of these tournaments. Alas, he didn't, and this limited his overall effect in both matchups in 2018. With Flash out of ASL7 due to wrist injuries, and his military service looming on the horizon, it remains to be seen how the winrates will change once he leaves the scene again, and if the other Terrans will work harder to make up for the loss of such a legendary Terran, and an icon.
Before we conclude, let's take some time to appreciate the beauty of BW TvZ and TvP. What follows is a very small collection of TvZ and TvP vods that were hand picked from the last 6+ years of the post-KeSPA era. They are presented in no particular order, and were chosen based on their merit. Enjoy!
The results have been presented and enough information has been provided to reach a conclusion on this Tesagi debate. When it came to starleague standings, Terran and Zerg were essentially neck in neck in terms of top finishes while Protoss trailed behind. When it came to winrates, some differences were observed between offline and online tournaments. However, offline results take precedence over online ones because in offline tournaments, the environment is more controlled, thus less confounding factors at play. After all, for all we know, maybe one player had their cat run by their feet which temporarily distracted them during a vital engagement, or they have a noisy neighbour which affected their gameplay while competing in an online tournament.
Regardless, all in all, the results showed an ideal winrate of 50±5% in both types of tournaments. Taking everything into consideration, I hereby declare that Tesagi does not exist in this era!
Writer: BigFan Graphics: v1 Photo Credits: Blizzard Sources: TLPD, Liquipedia Special Thanks: TheNewEra for helping with data gathering, EsportsJohn and 2Pacalypse- for feedback
when you see flash play: TESAGI! when you see a terran win in dominating fashion: TESAGI! when you're drinking soju with your fellow african BJs when most of your games are on fighting spirt: "테사기네..!! 씨발.."
Blimey. I'm gonna have to go through this when I get home, I only had time to skim through now, this looks thorough.
I have a sneaking suspicion that your average balance whiner lives in a magic foaming rage bubble not even reasoned facts can penetrate, but i applaud you for trying
Are we actually counting ASL5? With maps like Sparkle, 3rd world and Transistor..
You can argue against Tesagi but you can't argue against the fact that Protoss has always had god awful results. They basically need to have their titles spoon fed to them (via maps). And let's not act like Protoss players are "weaker" than the other races, Bisu wasn't able to do anything in the SOSPA era and he couldn't hold a candle to JD or FlaSh in the KeSPA era (despite his innovative/mechanical prowess).
On January 08 2019 14:07 TT1 wrote: Are we actually counting ASL5? With maps like Sparkle, 3rd world and Transistor..
You can argue against Tesagi but you can't argue against the fact that Protoss has always had god awful results. They basically need to have their titles spoon fed to them. And let's not act like Protoss players are "weaker" than the other races, Bisu wasn't able to do anything in the SOSPA era and he couldn't hold a candle to JD or FlaSh in the KeSPA era (despite his innovative/mechanical prowess).
If you can't conclude that someone is weaker than someone else based on results over many tournaments then there is no basis for comparison.
Protoss isn't underpowered - if they were, then they'd get completely dominated - not just struggle to win first place.
On January 08 2019 14:07 TT1 wrote: Are we actually counting ASL5? With maps like Sparkle, 3rd world and Transistor..
You can argue against Tesagi but you can't argue against the fact that Protoss has always had god awful results. They basically need to have their titles spoon fed to them. And let's not act like Protoss players are "weaker" than the other races, Bisu wasn't able to do anything in the SOSPA era and he couldn't hold a candle to JD or FlaSh in the KeSPA era (despite his innovative/mechanical prowess).
Bisu didn't have the best PvT though, yet Flash's TvP was his best. Remember how people would make fun of his carrier control in the same way with BeSt and his dohsairs?
Taesagi can neither be confirmed nor denied until people set up clear parameters and definitions that sensible people can all agree with. That's why people have been locked in a never ending debate for years on end, because those who feel terran is overpowered can always find the data backing them up, and those who feel there's a level playing field can find data backing their theory up also (to the reasonable degree).
Taesagi is a term that cannot be applied with a large brush stroke, but data supporting such claims can always be found depending on which sort of data you select (online sponsored matches excluding Flash's games are one of the favourite data brought up by Taesagi enthusiasts in recent times). In contrast, data supporting the claim that the protoss race sees the most success at the highest competitive level is infinitely harder to find unless you define highest competitive level to include the most mediocre amateur players. So as with all endless debates, there's an element of truth that breathes life into these discussions, and that's also why nobody takes people bitching about how protoss being too broken at the competitive level seriously, since that stops being true once you actually become competent at the game.
It is a matter of degree, and since Taesagi as a terminology isn't well defined, as well as the results not being optimally balanced enough to repel it on all fronts, Taesagi enthusiasts always have had, and always will find a voice within the community. All this racial balance talk is mostly hyperbole anyhow, most people would agree that the game is ridiculously well balanced for a game that has such distinct races that all have their own flavour. Every statistic from all eras lead to the same conclusion: your level of skill is the largest factor in deciding your competitive success, and if you're good enough, you can win regardless of your race.
With that being said. Fuck the terran race. There is no greater joy than seeing a so called solid, highly skilled terran player who thinks he's all that being dismantled at the hands of a non-terran user.
On January 08 2019 14:07 TT1 wrote: Are we actually counting ASL5? With maps like Sparkle, 3rd world and Transistor..
You can argue against Tesagi but you can't argue against the fact that Protoss has always had god awful results. They basically need to have their titles spoon fed to them. And let's not act like Protoss players are "weaker" than the other races, Bisu wasn't able to do anything in the SOSPA era and he couldn't hold a candle to JD or FlaSh in the KeSPA era (despite his innovative/mechanical prowess).
If you can't conclude that someone is weaker than someone else based on results over many tournaments then there is no basis for comparison.
Protoss isn't underpowered - if they were, then they'd get completely dominated - not just struggle to win first place.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to remove just Flash. At the very least, you should remove the top performing ZvT Zerg as well, to remove two of the outliers. Repeating this process for say the top 3 and bottom 3 TvZ/ZvT players would likely make the results balance out to a better estimate of the match-up at the pro level?
There is no greater joy than seeing a so called solid, highly skilled terran player who thinks he's all that being dismantled at the hands of a non-terran user.
Bwahaha. For me, there is no greater joy than seeing a so called amazing, fan-beloved, hugely hyped zerg or protoss player get knocked out by a well-timed hanbang or choked to death in a drawn out game filled with missile turrets.
On January 08 2019 16:01 Jealous wrote: I think it's a bit disingenuous to remove just Flash. At the very least, you should remove the top performing ZvT Zerg as well, to remove two of the outliers. Repeating this process for say the top 3 and bottom 3 TvZ/ZvT players would likely make the results balance out to a better estimate of the match-up at the pro level?
flash is the outlier because he actually won 3 asl in a row, no other player has done that thats why he is THE outlier.
very good read! the title was especially intriguing. i first thought it was gonna be an article about how bw and sc2 (or rather their communities) see balance differently since one has constant patches and one basically none. would love an article about that too!
I swear some of the people who get antsy over races in games need to see a doctor or something. They kinda come across as the type of loner white kid who would shoot up a school.
That's a lot of effort* to go into to be able to say:
"There's no tesagi, it's flashsagi. Read the article I wrote!"
True as it may be, I can't expect any less from a truly dedicated fan. Hahahahaha
On January 08 2019 16:40 NoS-Craig wrote:
swear people who get antsy over races in games need to see a doctor or something. They kinda come across as the type of loner white kid who would shoot up a school.
I don't like the balance whiners either but think you should fucking chill before comparing a balance whiner to a mass murderer.
Tesagi DOES NOT exist. The Terran race was propped up by Flash (and to a certain extent Last) in the post Kespa era. Watch Terran fall into mediocrity going into 2019 with these 2 players taking a break.
I agree with Letmelose that the game is incredibly, but not perfectly, balanced. For that reason, whether or not Tesagi is real or Protoss is weakest is unimportant. I will admit that most bonjwas are Terran and that Protoss has won the fewest Starleagues out of the three races. However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider. Also, the first three bonjwas were near the beginning of Starcraft competition so this argument is not as relevant to the discussion of racial balance in the modern meta. I would finally add that, even though Bisu does not have as many Starleagues as Flash and Jaedong, his winrate was pretty close to theirs and I think if he was more clutch of a tournament player, he probably would've had more starleague success. Basically, I think that he is closer to them in terms of skill than his Starleague career would suggest.
On January 08 2019 17:27 Anc13nt wrote: I agree with Letmelose that the game is incredibly, but not perfectly, balanced. For that reason, whether or not Tesagi is real or Protoss is weakest is unimportant. I will admit that most bonjwas are Terran and that Protoss has won the fewest Starleagues out of the three races. However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider. Also, the first three bonjwas were near the beginning of Starcraft competition so this argument is not as relevant to the discussion of racial balance in the modern meta. I would finally add that, even though Bisu does not have as many Starleagues as Flash and Jaedong, his winrate was pretty close to theirs and I think if he was more clutch of a tournament player, he probably would've had more starleague success. Basically, I think that he is closer to them in terms of skill than his Starleague career would suggest.
"However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider."
source?
Right now, there's 92 players listed in the sponbbang rankings, here's the race split:
33 T 31 P 28 Z
Despite the reasonably even split, there's only 4 protoss players among the top 20 atm.
On January 08 2019 16:01 Jealous wrote: I think it's a bit disingenuous to remove just Flash. At the very least, you should remove the top performing ZvT Zerg as well, to remove two of the outliers. Repeating this process for say the top 3 and bottom 3 TvZ/ZvT players would likely make the results balance out to a better estimate of the match-up at the pro level?
If there is a significant outlier and you remove said outlier and you find that your results are actually quite mellow, how is it disingenuous?
As an example, this didn't happen but if Bisu came in, smashed savior, and alone upped the PvZ % by like 4-5% points, and if you removed him Protoss was still like 50/50 in the matchup instead of 55/45, do you still think the matchup would be Protoss favored?
Is PvT favored to Terran if FlaSh is the only one who can confidently say he has a good matchup that is above 50/50, and if you remove him, PvT is toss favored?
As an addition, with FlaSh out of ASL7 and Last looking weak, while many thought Terrans are destroyed now, there are still more Terrans than any other race in the tournament. However, what quality of Terrans are we looking at? How many are we doing to keep moving to the Ro16? How many will we see in Ro8. My guess is, unless Last steps up again and returns to form, I'm really only seeing Sharp as the Terran who makes Ro8.
On January 08 2019 17:25 Dante08 wrote: Tesagi DOES NOT exist. The Terran race was propped up by Flash (and to a certain extent Last) in the post Kespa era. Watch Terran fall into mediocrity going into 2019 with these 2 players taking a break.
what about boxer's era? nada's era? iloveoov's era?
When a terran player dominates the scene they always talk about the fact that he is so amazing and shit and never take into consideration racial balance nor map pool. imo if bw was only one race and always mirror matchups i bet bisu wouldave never lost the best player in the world title. if bisu played terran he wouldave been greater than flash.
i know some ppl here hate LS cause he hacked and shit, but his points are quite good on this interview.
On January 08 2019 16:01 Jealous wrote: I think it's a bit disingenuous to remove just Flash. At the very least, you should remove the top performing ZvT Zerg as well, to remove two of the outliers. Repeating this process for say the top 3 and bottom 3 TvZ/ZvT players would likely make the results balance out to a better estimate of the match-up at the pro level?
If there is a significant outlier and you remove said outlier and you find that your results are actually quite mellow, how is it disingenuous?
As an example, this didn't happen but if Bisu came in, smashed savior, and alone upped the PvZ % by like 4-5% points, and if you removed him Protoss was still like 50/50 in the matchup instead of 55/45, do you still think the matchup would be Protoss favored?
Is PvT favored to Terran if FlaSh is the only one who can confidently say he has a good matchup that is above 50/50, and if you remove him, PvT is toss favored?
As an addition, with FlaSh out of ASL7 and Last looking weak, while many thought Terrans are destroyed now, there are still more Terrans than any other race in the tournament. However, what quality of Terrans are we looking at? How many are we doing to keep moving to the Ro16? How many will we see in Ro8. My guess is, unless Last steps up again and returns to form, I'm really only seeing Sharp as the Terran who makes Ro8.
Once we add enough caveats, nothing is off limits, which makes both sides sound pretty disingenuous at times. One of the main reasons viewers of AfreecaTV started to argue for terrans being too strong, was due to what they saw on a daily basis over thousands of online sponsored matches.
As of now, there are 47,925 recorded online sponsored matches on the above site dating back to May 2017. Excluding matches played by Flash and Last, we still have a data set of 42,196 online sponsored matches. Even if we ignore online sponsored matches that had Flash or Last in it, terrans still have the best overall record (by a slight margin) compared to the other two races.
If we exclude only Flash, terran players have a superior win rate against both the zerg and protoss race within the realm of online sponsored matches with a sample size of 44,734 matches.
This is the main thrust of the Taesagi argument presented by the some viewers of AfreecaTV, and while I agree that online sponsored matches have a different nature from tournament games played within a LAN setting, it is somewhat misleading to say Taesagi supporters are totally delusional because their main argument is based on their viewing experience from online sponsored matches, not tournament matches which are not daily occurences. The sheer overwhelming number of online sponsored matches changes perspective to a greater degree than one imagines, especially if you watch these streams on a daily basis.
I realize that the focus of this article is for racial balance in recent years within a tournament setting, but this hot issue was birthed mostly due to the online sponsored matches, the main streaming content that allowed the Brood War scene to thrive within a streaming platform. I wish this article addressed this issue in greater detail to give voice to both sides of the table rather than presenting only one side of the argument.
High quality post. I am always quite astonished by your careful data collection and analysis. I haven't even read all of the post tbh but it's very long. Liking what i'm reading so far.
Edit: Nice read. Loving the discussion in the comments too.
Total: the number Protoss players got in top 8 of the OSL + MSL + ASL: 62+51+17 = 130 the number Terran players got top 8 of the OSL + MSL + ASL: 97+92+18 = 207 the number Zerg players got top 8 of the OSL + MSL + ASL: 89+65+13 = 167
On January 08 2019 16:01 Jealous wrote: I think it's a bit disingenuous to remove just Flash. At the very least, you should remove the top performing ZvT Zerg as well, to remove two of the outliers. Repeating this process for say the top 3 and bottom 3 TvZ/ZvT players would likely make the results balance out to a better estimate of the match-up at the pro level?
If there is a significant outlier and you remove said outlier and you find that your results are actually quite mellow, how is it disingenuous?
As an example, this didn't happen but if Bisu came in, smashed savior, and alone upped the PvZ % by like 4-5% points, and if you removed him Protoss was still like 50/50 in the matchup instead of 55/45, do you still think the matchup would be Protoss favored?
Is PvT favored to Terran if FlaSh is the only one who can confidently say he has a good matchup that is above 50/50, and if you remove him, PvT is toss favored?
As an addition, with FlaSh out of ASL7 and Last looking weak, while many thought Terrans are destroyed now, there are still more Terrans than any other race in the tournament. However, what quality of Terrans are we looking at? How many are we doing to keep moving to the Ro16? How many will we see in Ro8. My guess is, unless Last steps up again and returns to form, I'm really only seeing Sharp as the Terran who makes Ro8.
Once we add enough caveats, nothing is off limits, which makes both sides sound pretty disingenuous times. One of the main reasons viewers of AfreecaTV started to argue for terrans being too strong, was due to what they saw on a daily basis over thousands of online sponsored matches.
As of now, there are 47,925 recorded online sponsored matches on the above site dating back to May 2017. Excluding matches played by Flash and Last, we still have a data set of 42,196 online sponsored matches. Even if we ignore online sponsored matches that had Flash or Last in it, terrans still have the best overall record (by a slight margin) compared to the other two races.
If we exclude only Flash, terran players have a superior win rate against both the zerg and protoss race within the realm of online sponsored matches with a sample size of 44,734 matches.
This is the main thrust of the Taesagi argument presented by the some viewers of AfreecaTV, and while I agree that online sponsored matches have a different nature from tournament games played within a LAN setting, it is somewhat misleading to say Taesagi supporters are totally delusional because their main argument is based on their viewing experience from online sponsored matches, not tournament matches which are not daily occurences. The sheer overwhelming number of online sponsored matches changes perspective to a greater degree than one imagines, especially if you watch these streams on a daily basis.
I realize that the focus of this article is for racial balance in recent years within a tournament setting, but this hot issue was birthed mostly due to the online sponsored matches, the main streaming content that allowed the Brood War scene to thrive within a streaming platform. I wish this article addressed this issue in greater detail to give voice to both sides of the table rather than presenting only one side of the argument.
Yes sounds very reasonable. I am itching to hurl stuff at BigFan but it's only fair to suppose BigFan might not have been aware of this :D
BigFan I suppose you could at least have a look and update your data with a more complete sample of games?
But I'm just using data from the Kespa days, although I'd argue it's the most accurate as we deal with progamers not BJs and we have access to tens of thousands of games to make up our data. But: when looking at Sponbbang matches over the entire time it was active, Terrans have the highest win rate. Some people tell me that Flash and Last are so good that they're not human, so I took their data out of the results. Yup, even with the top #1 and #2 not there Terrans still have the highest win rate. I'd have to ask if a race that requires multiple top players to be exempt from the data to have semblance of similar win rates is truly just as strong as the others.
From a purely statistical point of view, I think it's undeniable Terrans are at the very least advantaged though I'm not sure I'd use the term 'Tesagi'. No you don't need to choose Terran if you want to win (sorry Stork), but there's a clear correlation between good performance and playing Terran- whether you go by average win rates, number of championship victories, Bonjwa count, dominance over certain time period, etc.
Common objections (if Ygosu is an indication of anything):
- To call it tesagi or teyuri is to discount the Terran players' hard effort. Almost everyone who showed decent results worked hard in the Kespa days, though Stork, Grrr, and Sea are notable exceptions (oh and most of Estro and Sparkyz, but that's another story). Bisu, JD, Action, and Ggaemo were (in the case of the latter two: are) notorious practice machines. From a reversed perspective, would it not be discounting Protoss and Zerg players' hard effort to say they didn't try hard as the Terran counterparts? I also sense a tinge of irony that Flash gave the interview in SC2 where he thought Protosses were OP. Regardless of the veracity of the statement, did Flash discount other players' effort in a truly respectable example of hypocrisy?
If you truly believe that Terrans worked harder, the burden of proof is on you if null hypotheses are used at all in the scientific method.
- If Terrans are so overpowered, why doesn't the majority of the population play it? This assumes that the majority of the population plays exclusively to win. Protoss is indubitably easier at an amateur level, and some people play for fun even if that means losing more. For instance my Zerg is better than my Protoss but I just love using the high templar. And plus I'm a huge fan of Reach.
Not to mention that pre-S rank Protosses are dominant in every match-up. If there is a balance patch, I'm all for making Terrans play easier to help out the noobs.
- If progamers truly think tesagi is real, why don't they switch to Terran? By this logic, Terran players should perform identically if they switch to Zerg or Protoss. Both of these are unrealistic.
- Terran progamers who off-race as Protoss tend to beat Protosses who off-race as Terrans easily. Is this not an indication of their skill differences? No, because this assumes that the same skills are required to play all races. What equivalent would there be for years of reaver micro practice in Terran? Besides I think this reinforces the fact that on lower tiers Protoss is just easier to win with.
- [So and so] won recently and defeated [a strong Terran]. How overpowered is the race that beat the highest levels of tesagi? Ygosu actually said this about Soulkey and Effort. This is what we call cherrypicking, and I'd rather rely on the data formulated by tens of thousands of games that greatly reduce extraneous variables.
TL;DR: It's unclear whether good players choose Terrans or if Terrans are stronger than other races, but historically Terrans have performed very well by multiple metrics. In an optimal world I'd like for Terrans and Zergs to be easier to handle in lower tiers and Protoss to not suck in the higher ones.
I wasnt aware of this expression, but makes sense that Terran+imbalance is such a natural and often used combination of words it gave birth to a new expression.
Of course it's a complicated issue, and aside from the utterly stupid idea of "good players just picked terran more often in the course of 20+ years" interesting arguments can be made pro and con.
It's all about the maps. Replace CB and FS with Third World and Transistor in every tournament and see how the results change. Or always give Toss an easy 3rd gas PvZ, or Zerg an easy 3rd gas ZvT, argument can go on forever. Also, fyi Protoss is doing even worse at "top amateur" level, both in the foreigner and the Korean scene. I remember Scan mentioning that he lacked Protoss practice partners.
It's a fact that has been cited often that historically in starleagues (osl, msl... ask,ksl) overall terran has been the most and protoss the least represented race in first places and top 8's. I fail to believe that over such a long time this can merely be attributed to the outstanding skill of individual players. I don't know if Tesagi is real, but that Protoss is slightly underpowered at the highest level seems sensible to me.
On January 08 2019 21:01 bovienchien wrote: @Poegim: What would happen if Boxer, Nada, iloveoov and Flash don't play StarCraft?
I think that Terran is weakest race but Boxer, Nada, iloveoov and Flash are strongest players.
I think it's reaching to claim that Terrans are the weakest race but simultaneously claim that Terrans produced the best players. At the very least there is an incredibly strong correlation between bonjwa status and Terrans, which is unseen for Protosses and occurred just once for Zergs.
Also on the impact of maps: I'd argue their significance is not as high given the 12 years of data and hundreds of maps. I can't see why mapmakers would intentionally make Terran favoured maps and we saw circulation of maps that favour different races. So either map choices aren't as significant or there's something about Terrans that makes them dominant in most maps, even post Mercury days when mapmakers figured out what map features advantage which race. I think the former is agreeable for both sides.
On January 08 2019 20:20 Poegim wrote: Protoss is garbage race, eveyrone know it, and Tesagi exist, everyone know it.
Note how many different Terran winners there's been and note who they are.
Terran in general have had tournament winners, the 4 winners there Boxer, Oov, Nada, FlaSh have all understood the game far better than any of their peers in their respective eras. I'm also not entirely sure what that's supposed to be showing because it doesn't show Jangbi at all who won 2 starleagues near the end and does contain FanTaSy who unfortunately joined the kong line.
FlaSh could play any race and beat the vast majority of pros at his level. He is just vastly superior in overall knowledge of the game which is what led to his dominance. The same reason why Bisu dominated PvZ, he had oov teaching him and his own influence also. Outside of the top 4, there's very few terrans who I would even consider S tier. Of course FanTaSy was one of them given his proleague results and I'd say Sea was very close, but outside of them? There were very, very few S tier terrans.
You've also got to remember that game balance and the meta has changed considerably in the past 20 years. What was standard in 2001 would never fly today and if we were to go back to 2001 standards with todays meta the game would look entirely different.
FlaSh could play any race and beat the vast majority of pros at his level. He is just vastly superior in overall knowledge of the game which is what led to his dominance.
How do you back that up and what exactly are“ the vast majority of pros“. I could say Bisu plays bettet zerg than the vast majority of pros. I can't back that up either and it's too unspecific. Does flash play better Z than Where?
And how can you judge if his game knowledge is superior to other players?
FlaSh could play any race and beat the vast majority of pros at his level. He is just vastly superior in overall knowledge of the game which is what led to his dominance.
How do you back that up and what exactly are“ the vast majority of pros“. I could say Bisu plays bettet zerg than the vast majority of pros. I can't back that up either and it's too unspecific. Does flash play better Z than Where?
And how can you judge if his game knowledge is superior to other players?
It seems to me that Bigfan cherry picked some arguments to reach the conclusion that he wanted to reach:
That is, he dismisses some of the T dominance when Sea and other were crushing Zergs left and right, because there were wild fluctuations in level, and most pros returned to scene, but did include SSLs 7 and 8, in his analysis of titles won. There were not a single Starleague (OSL or MSL) champion in these SSls, so he should probably dismissed them as well, on the same grounds.
As for Flash effect, should also we have a Bisu effect, or Jaedong effect accounting for the slightly less abyssal Protoss number of Starleague wins (both KeSPA and post-KeSPA) or the fact that Z had just one bonjwa?
I dont know if I am also biased (liked LegalLord's "balance and bonjwas 1 and 2" very much when I read it in 2016) but to me a conclusion that yes, T is slightly imbalanced (and P bad, mainly because of bad PvZ) makes much more sense than to say that "there's no Tesagi".
Edit: But of course, ASL 5 proved that maps can fine tune the balance (of course, balancing 3 non-mirror match-ups perfectly should not be easy, to say the least).
The comments here are great, but the only thing that puzzles me about the article is the one-liner saying that Warcraft 2 was blasted by critics for being symmetrical. I was a kid at the time but I don't remember that at all and, while most of the reviews are probably in magazines in some archive somewhere, my google search for the time period turned up nothing that even mentioned that defect.
Ah yes, the good old argument that everything's balanced except that some terran players are just better. A real shame that those Protoss players wouldn't just try harder and become bonjwas themselves.
On January 08 2019 14:07 TT1 wrote: Are we actually counting ASL5? With maps like Sparkle, 3rd world and Transistor..
You can argue against Tesagi but you can't argue against the fact that Protoss has always had god awful results. They basically need to have their titles spoon fed to them. And let's not act like Protoss players are "weaker" than the other races, Bisu wasn't able to do anything in the SOSPA era and he couldn't hold a candle to JD or FlaSh in the KeSPA era (despite his innovative/mechanical prowess).
Bisu didn't have the best PvT though, yet Flash's TvP was his best. Remember how people would make fun of his carrier control in the same way with BeSt and his dohsairs?
I feel like Protoss fans have always and maybe are doomed to forever wait for a player that has the PvZ of Bisu combined with the PvT of Stork/Jangbi. If Bisu's PvT was as good as their's he'd probably have twice as many golds.
I actually really enjoyed this article, but it does nothing but prove an already known entity, that pure win stats are fairly well distributed at a pro level. Does this disprove tesagi?
Well, that all depends on how we define tesagi. Is it a general imbalance or is it an imbalance of achievable skill cap, in other words, outliers. If it's the latter, then excluding Flash from the conversation is the opposite of productive.
Let's exclude the possibility that Terran is imbalanced in general, because that's been beaten to death and I think this article does a good job at beating that horse.
As for the outliers, at a glance, it seems like tesagi is real, however, even if you statistically proved that over the 12 years of pro BW... Is there enough data to prove a point? When a player can be the most dominant for one race over 5 years, a decade seems insignificant as a sample size. (excluding post-KeSPA due to players coming and going for external reasons, lesser stability during the regrowth)
At most, I think you can conclude which has had the most and strongest outliers, but the sample is so small. Do we rank from most success to least or based on winrate? (Because success is also based on opportunity)
The most accurate representation would probably to take the best player from each race, each year and compare stats excluding head to head. Let's call the exclusion, the Jaedong effect because he may well be the second best player of all time, we want to compare him to Boxer, not Flash. (Conversely, you can repeat the same excersize exclusively head to head, which would provide relative success) From that, you'll probably reach the conclusion that T >= Z > P
My own hypothesis on the matter is not that Protoss is weaker, but it is how matchups shake out... Quick comparison:
Terran wants to have more stuff, in better position and never wants to trade Zerg wants to have more stuff, more speed with control all over and always wants to trade
That leaves Protoss in a tough spot with not only different units and flavour per matchup (which all races do), but also different mindset and approach to map control, game pace and willingness to trade units. It's not harder to play Protoss, but it is more difficult to master all 3 matchups and none of the Protoss greats really did, they always had one matchup that was an Achilles heel.
People get confused at looking at the pvt stats but the issue is that zvp is zergs "easy" match up and tvz is Terrans "easy" match up. Pvt is supposed to be protoss' easy match up but I'd say it's actually more or less balanced compared to zvp and and tvz. The moral of the story is toss don't get an easy match up.
oh the guy above me mentioned how protoss gets the short end of the stick a lot and i agree simply put, general features of a map being tight or open will suck for protoss in exactly 1 out of 2 matchups
On January 09 2019 00:42 ZigguratOfUr wrote: Ah yes, the good old argument that everything's balanced except that some terran players are just better. A real shame that those Protoss players wouldn't just try harder and become bonjwas themselves.
Yeah we're all special snowflakes. Each race deserves an equal number of bonjwas and first place finishes. It's inconceivable that there are any selection biases going on with regards to races, let alone any peer effects.
I'm glad people are finally recognizing that Bisu was the strongest player in starcraft history.
Guys I challenge all of you to look at both sides of the argument. Those who don’t believe in tesagi, what are the strongest arguments one could think of to argue it?
Observers now have 60shield/60hp Medics Heal ability now regenerates 5% slower Arbiters Recall ability now costs 200 mana and stasis costs 150
--
Developer Manifesto:
Observers having 120hp makes it so that scourge/lurkers are slightly less as good in zvp
We feel that tvz is a relatively fair matchup but to skew the % towards zerg the slightest bit we have lowered the regeneration rate of medics by 5%
Arbiters are the reason terran can't really ever get a 4th/5th base in tvp, carriers could be as well but you can design maps around carriers, you can't really design maps around arbiters.
We feel like these are polarized units towards specific matchups and are the easiest to tinker with without affecting the balance of their other matchups. IE Observers being stronger doesn't really change pvt, medics do not affect tvp and arbiters do not affect pvz.
make cc liftoff cost something after the 1st too many times i see terran press liftoff and the scvs auto-escape from the ling/ultra or zealots at a remote expansion
Terrans are just tryhards man. I mean just take a look at the Translated Pro Vids Coordination thread. Terran bros helping each other out producing and translating heaps of tutorials meanwhile Ps just got 2 vids lol. Even back in Kespa days T coaches were the most famous. The whole SKT1 Terran lineage is like some Kung Fu school shit with one Sifu passing the style on to the next one. Meanwhile Zergs are out there struggling and Ps are the token burly guy in the Kung Fu movie with OP genetics but shit technique.
On January 09 2019 03:33 REDBLUEGREEN wrote: Terrans are just tryhards man. I mean just take a look at the Translated Pro Vids Coordination thread. Terran bros helping each other out producing and translating heaps of tutorials meanwhile Ps just got 2 vids lol. Even back in Kespa days T coaches were the most famous. The whole SKT1 Terran lineage is like some Kung Fu school shit with one Sifu passing the style on to the next one. Meanwhile Zergs are out there struggling and Ps are the token burly guy in the Kung Fu movie with OP genetics but shit technique.
Sure man. Skill just comes natural to some and others have to train hard for it. The first group plays toss
On January 09 2019 03:33 REDBLUEGREEN wrote: Terrans are just tryhards man. I mean just take a look at the Translated Pro Vids Coordination thread. Terran bros helping each other out producing and translating heaps of tutorials meanwhile Ps just got 2 vids lol. Even back in Kespa days T coaches were the most famous. The whole SKT1 Terran lineage is like some Kung Fu school shit with one Sifu passing the style on to the next one. Meanwhile Zergs are out there struggling and Ps are the token burly guy in the Kung Fu movie with OP genetics but shit technique.
Mostly just flash having some amazing guides that is comprehensive and explains his thought process well
no other race really has guides close to his at all
"Terran isn't imbalanced" said the Terran player. "Tesagi doesn't exist!" yelled the Flash fan. "Dark Templars make up for the fact that Protoss has no core late game unit and needs to use several waves of a mid-game army with gimmicky auxiliary late-game units like a couple of templars, Archons and Arbiters to even hope to beat a late game terran army!" screeches the same guy who laughs at people who build Archons in Terran games because a single emp can take out like 6 Archons for free and science vessels cost less gas than a single Archon.
I'm not salty at all. This is fine. It's just raining single drops of saltwater in my room. On my cheeks.
On January 08 2019 16:01 Jealous wrote: I think it's a bit disingenuous to remove just Flash. At the very least, you should remove the top performing ZvT Zerg as well, to remove two of the outliers. Repeating this process for say the top 3 and bottom 3 TvZ/ZvT players would likely make the results balance out to a better estimate of the match-up at the pro level?
If there is a significant outlier and you remove said outlier and you find that your results are actually quite mellow, how is it disingenuous?
As an example, this didn't happen but if Bisu came in, smashed savior, and alone upped the PvZ % by like 4-5% points, and if you removed him Protoss was still like 50/50 in the matchup instead of 55/45, do you still think the matchup would be Protoss favored?
Is PvT favored to Terran if FlaSh is the only one who can confidently say he has a good matchup that is above 50/50, and if you remove him, PvT is toss favored?
As an addition, with FlaSh out of ASL7 and Last looking weak, while many thought Terrans are destroyed now, there are still more Terrans than any other race in the tournament. However, what quality of Terrans are we looking at? How many are we doing to keep moving to the Ro16? How many will we see in Ro8. My guess is, unless Last steps up again and returns to form, I'm really only seeing Sharp as the Terran who makes Ro8.
Once we add enough caveats, nothing is off limits, which makes both sides sound pretty disingenuous at times. One of the main reasons viewers of AfreecaTV started to argue for terrans being too strong, was due to what they saw on a daily basis over thousands of online sponsored matches.
As of now, there are 47,925 recorded online sponsored matches on the above site dating back to May 2017. Excluding matches played by Flash and Last, we still have a data set of 42,196 online sponsored matches. Even if we ignore online sponsored matches that had Flash or Last in it, terrans still have the best overall record (by a slight margin) compared to the other two races.
If we exclude only Flash, terran players have a superior win rate against both the zerg and protoss race within the realm of online sponsored matches with a sample size of 44,734 matches.
This is the main thrust of the Taesagi argument presented by the some viewers of AfreecaTV, and while I agree that online sponsored matches have a different nature from tournament games played within a LAN setting, it is somewhat misleading to say Taesagi supporters are totally delusional because their main argument is based on their viewing experience from online sponsored matches, not tournament matches which are not daily occurences. The sheer overwhelming number of online sponsored matches changes perspective to a greater degree than one imagines, especially if you watch these streams on a daily basis.
I realize that the focus of this article is for racial balance in recent years within a tournament setting, but this hot issue was birthed mostly due to the online sponsored matches, the main streaming content that allowed the Brood War scene to thrive within a streaming platform. I wish this article addressed this issue in greater detail to give voice to both sides of the table rather than presenting only one side of the argument.
That's actually interesting that this began from the sponsored matches. I had thought that Terran's great advantage in tournaments was TvT, because it is the one mirror matchup that always goes on a long time (more chances for a better player to comeback or cement a victory), and less volatile in build order advantages (also better chance for better player to show their skill). Zerg actually post surprisingly good results for having a mirror that is in my unbacked-by-data opinion a little more unforgiving than PvP (in that, although both matchups have build order disadvantages, PvP can sometimes go on for a long game, and if the builds are equal it seems a little less of a razor's edge). But then when comparing the Zergs to the Protoss, we have to sympathise for the early game problem of PvZ where a lesser overall player can knock out a good protoss player if they hit a hydra rush.
It is interesting that even if you take out the tournament issues of players getting knocked out by lesser players, there's still a Terran bias. Perhaps because the Terran matchups have more skill transfer between them, where ZvZ can be it's own game entirely, or perhaps just because when used to their highest potential, Terran units really do have more possibility and potential. It is a funny thing, because Terran has long been considered the hardest race to master, Protoss has long been considered a little weak at the highest level, and Zerg has long been considered volatile and prone to short hotstreaks.
Still, it's always been impressive that there have been dominant players from all races. The balance achieved in BW has also long been considered an incredible fluke. It does seem like Terran is the most stable and the most rewarding for a skilled player with good managements in mid and late game, with good opportunities for surprise in the early game. In certain matchups that just isn't true, but all Terran matchups seem to have gotten lucky, with TvP being hard but not unrewarding to the stronger player.
On January 08 2019 17:27 Anc13nt wrote: I agree with Letmelose that the game is incredibly, but not perfectly, balanced. For that reason, whether or not Tesagi is real or Protoss is weakest is unimportant. I will admit that most bonjwas are Terran and that Protoss has won the fewest Starleagues out of the three races. However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider. Also, the first three bonjwas were near the beginning of Starcraft competition so this argument is not as relevant to the discussion of racial balance in the modern meta. I would finally add that, even though Bisu does not have as many Starleagues as Flash and Jaedong, his winrate was pretty close to theirs and I think if he was more clutch of a tournament player, he probably would've had more starleague success. Basically, I think that he is closer to them in terms of skill than his Starleague career would suggest.
"However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider."
source?
Right now, there's 92 players listed in the sponbbang rankings, here's the race split:
33 T 31 P 28 Z
Despite the reasonably even split, there's only 4 protoss players among the top 20 atm.
Sorry, I meant in the context of Starleagues of the past. Also, I have no statistics on the racial distributions in the MSL either, so I'm aware that my statement can only be shown to be true for the OSLs. Nonetheless, if you look at the race distribution chart of OSL participants, Protoss definitely looks like the least commonly played race (looks like only 24-26% of OSL participants were Protoss and yet they won 29.4% of the OSLs (10 OSL wins, 9 silvers). I'm aware that the statistics are worse for MSL (they won only 4 OSLs and had 9 silvers). Assuming 25% of players were Protoss in all starleagues (which I'm aware is a big assumption and I hope someone will check MSL racial distribution to make sure if my guess is close to reality), Protoss won 14/60 (23.3%) starleagues and got 18/60 (30%) silvers, which does not indicate that protoss players performed disproportionately poorly compared to the other two races, imo. I think the main reason Protoss is seen as being kind of "bad" is because they never had a player like Flash or Jaedong. BIsu in an alternate universe probably should have won 4-5 Starleagues if he was a better tournament player.
Also, If someone could count the Starleague semifinals that would give better information.
Lastly, I would like to add that I think that LegalLord wrote some of the most insightful articles about racial balance. My own opinion is, yes, terran seems to be barely stronger and protoss barely weaker but the game is so well balanced that these differences in the strength of the races are very small and insignificant. I'm of the belief that, if necessary, the map pool is enough to balance the races and there is no need to change unit stats or anything like that.
On January 08 2019 17:27 Anc13nt wrote: I agree with Letmelose that the game is incredibly, but not perfectly, balanced. For that reason, whether or not Tesagi is real or Protoss is weakest is unimportant. I will admit that most bonjwas are Terran and that Protoss has won the fewest Starleagues out of the three races. However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider. Also, the first three bonjwas were near the beginning of Starcraft competition so this argument is not as relevant to the discussion of racial balance in the modern meta. I would finally add that, even though Bisu does not have as many Starleagues as Flash and Jaedong, his winrate was pretty close to theirs and I think if he was more clutch of a tournament player, he probably would've had more starleague success. Basically, I think that he is closer to them in terms of skill than his Starleague career would suggest.
"However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider."
source?
Right now, there's 92 players listed in the sponbbang rankings, here's the race split:
33 T 31 P 28 Z
Despite the reasonably even split, there's only 4 protoss players among the top 20 atm.
Sorry, I meant in the context of Starleagues of the past. Also, I have no statistics on the racial distributions in the MSL either, so I'm aware that my statement can only be shown to be true for the OSLs. Nonetheless, if you look at the race distribution chart of OSL participants, Protoss definitely looks like the least commonly played race (looks like only 24-26% of OSL participants were Protoss and yet they won 29.4% of the OSLs (10 OSL wins, 9 silvers). I'm aware that the statistics are worse for MSL (they won only 4 OSLs and had 9 silvers). Assuming 25% of players were Protoss in all starleagues (which I'm aware is a big assumption and I hope someone will check MSL racial distribution to make sure if my guess is close to reality), Protoss won 14/60 (23.3%) starleagues and got 18/60 (30%) silvers, which does not indicate that protoss players performed disproportionately poorly compared to the other two races, imo. I think the main reason Protoss is seen as being kind of "bad" is because they never had a player like Flash or Jaedong. BIsu in an alternate universe probably should have won 4-5 Starleagues if he was a better tournament player.
Also, If someone could count the Starleague semifinals that would give better information.
"I think the main reason Protoss is seen as being kind of "bad" is because they never had a player like Flash or Jaedong. BIsu in an alternate universe probably should have won 4-5 Starleagues if he was a better tournament player"
I have an issue with these type of arguments because they're baseless, there's nothing backing your statement. Throughout the entire history of the game there hasn't been a single bonjwa calibre P player whereas T and Z had multiple bonjwas. I could say Bisu never became a player like Flash or Jaedong because his race held him back. Hell he wasn't even able to dominate BW even when Flash and Jaedong were playing SC2.
On January 08 2019 17:27 Anc13nt wrote: I agree with Letmelose that the game is incredibly, but not perfectly, balanced. For that reason, whether or not Tesagi is real or Protoss is weakest is unimportant. I will admit that most bonjwas are Terran and that Protoss has won the fewest Starleagues out of the three races. However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider. Also, the first three bonjwas were near the beginning of Starcraft competition so this argument is not as relevant to the discussion of racial balance in the modern meta. I would finally add that, even though Bisu does not have as many Starleagues as Flash and Jaedong, his winrate was pretty close to theirs and I think if he was more clutch of a tournament player, he probably would've had more starleague success. Basically, I think that he is closer to them in terms of skill than his Starleague career would suggest.
"However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider."
source?
Right now, there's 92 players listed in the sponbbang rankings, here's the race split:
33 T 31 P 28 Z
Despite the reasonably even split, there's only 4 protoss players among the top 20 atm.
Sorry, I meant in the context of Starleagues of the past. Also, I have no statistics on the racial distributions in the MSL either, so I'm aware that my statement can only be shown to be true for the OSLs. Nonetheless, if you look at the race distribution chart of OSL participants, Protoss definitely looks like the least commonly played race (looks like only 24-26% of OSL participants were Protoss and yet they won 29.4% of the OSLs (10 OSL wins, 9 silvers). I'm aware that the statistics are worse for MSL (they won only 4 OSLs and had 9 silvers). Assuming 25% of players were Protoss in all starleagues (which I'm aware is a big assumption and I hope someone will check MSL racial distribution to make sure if my guess is close to reality), Protoss won 14/60 (23.3%) starleagues and got 18/60 (30%) silvers, which does not indicate that protoss players performed disproportionately poorly compared to the other two races, imo. I think the main reason Protoss is seen as being kind of "bad" is because they never had a player like Flash or Jaedong. BIsu in an alternate universe probably should have won 4-5 Starleagues if he was a better tournament player.
Also, If someone could count the Starleague semifinals that would give better information.
"I think the main reason Protoss is seen as being kind of "bad" is because they never had a player like Flash or Jaedong. BIsu in an alternate universe probably should have won 4-5 Starleagues if he was a better tournament player"
I have an issue with these type of arguments because they're baseless, there's nothing backing your statement. Throughout the entire history of the game there hasn't been a single bonjwa calibre P player whereas T and Z had multiple bonjwas. I could say Bisu never became a player like Flash or Jaedong because his race held him back. Hell he wasn't even able to dominate BW even when Flash and Jaedong were playing SC2.
There has been 5 Bonjwas, 4 terrans and a discredited Zerg whom most SC fans want to just forget.
On January 08 2019 17:27 Anc13nt wrote: I agree with Letmelose that the game is incredibly, but not perfectly, balanced. For that reason, whether or not Tesagi is real or Protoss is weakest is unimportant. I will admit that most bonjwas are Terran and that Protoss has won the fewest Starleagues out of the three races. However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider. Also, the first three bonjwas were near the beginning of Starcraft competition so this argument is not as relevant to the discussion of racial balance in the modern meta. I would finally add that, even though Bisu does not have as many Starleagues as Flash and Jaedong, his winrate was pretty close to theirs and I think if he was more clutch of a tournament player, he probably would've had more starleague success. Basically, I think that he is closer to them in terms of skill than his Starleague career would suggest.
"However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider."
source?
Right now, there's 92 players listed in the sponbbang rankings, here's the race split:
33 T 31 P 28 Z
Despite the reasonably even split, there's only 4 protoss players among the top 20 atm.
Sorry, I meant in the context of Starleagues of the past. Also, I have no statistics on the racial distributions in the MSL either, so I'm aware that my statement can only be shown to be true for the OSLs. Nonetheless, if you look at the race distribution chart of OSL participants, Protoss definitely looks like the least commonly played race (looks like only 24-26% of OSL participants were Protoss and yet they won 29.4% of the OSLs (10 OSL wins, 9 silvers). I'm aware that the statistics are worse for MSL (they won only 4 OSLs and had 9 silvers). Assuming 25% of players were Protoss in all starleagues (which I'm aware is a big assumption and I hope someone will check MSL racial distribution to make sure if my guess is close to reality), Protoss won 14/60 (23.3%) starleagues and got 18/60 (30%) silvers, which does not indicate that protoss players performed disproportionately poorly compared to the other two races, imo. I think the main reason Protoss is seen as being kind of "bad" is because they never had a player like Flash or Jaedong. BIsu in an alternate universe probably should have won 4-5 Starleagues if he was a better tournament player.
Also, If someone could count the Starleague semifinals that would give better information.
"I think the main reason Protoss is seen as being kind of "bad" is because they never had a player like Flash or Jaedong. BIsu in an alternate universe probably should have won 4-5 Starleagues if he was a better tournament player"
I have an issue with these type of arguments because they're baseless, there's nothing backing your statement. Throughout the entire history of the game there hasn't been a single bonjwa calibre P player whereas T and Z had multiple bonjwas. I could say Bisu never became a player like Flash or Jaedong because his race held him back. Hell he wasn't even able to dominate BW even when Flash and Jaedong were playing SC2.
There has been 5 Bonjwas, 4 terrans and a discredited Zerg whom most SC fans want to just forget.
jd, july and savior = 3 zergs flash, nada, iloveoov, boxer = 4 terrans
On January 08 2019 17:27 Anc13nt wrote: I agree with Letmelose that the game is incredibly, but not perfectly, balanced. For that reason, whether or not Tesagi is real or Protoss is weakest is unimportant. I will admit that most bonjwas are Terran and that Protoss has won the fewest Starleagues out of the three races. However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider. Also, the first three bonjwas were near the beginning of Starcraft competition so this argument is not as relevant to the discussion of racial balance in the modern meta. I would finally add that, even though Bisu does not have as many Starleagues as Flash and Jaedong, his winrate was pretty close to theirs and I think if he was more clutch of a tournament player, he probably would've had more starleague success. Basically, I think that he is closer to them in terms of skill than his Starleague career would suggest.
"However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider."
source?
Right now, there's 92 players listed in the sponbbang rankings, here's the race split:
33 T 31 P 28 Z
Despite the reasonably even split, there's only 4 protoss players among the top 20 atm.
Sorry, I meant in the context of Starleagues of the past. Also, I have no statistics on the racial distributions in the MSL either, so I'm aware that my statement can only be shown to be true for the OSLs. Nonetheless, if you look at the race distribution chart of OSL participants, Protoss definitely looks like the least commonly played race (looks like only 24-26% of OSL participants were Protoss and yet they won 29.4% of the OSLs (10 OSL wins, 9 silvers). I'm aware that the statistics are worse for MSL (they won only 4 OSLs and had 9 silvers). Assuming 25% of players were Protoss in all starleagues (which I'm aware is a big assumption and I hope someone will check MSL racial distribution to make sure if my guess is close to reality), Protoss won 14/60 (23.3%) starleagues and got 18/60 (30%) silvers, which does not indicate that protoss players performed disproportionately poorly compared to the other two races, imo. I think the main reason Protoss is seen as being kind of "bad" is because they never had a player like Flash or Jaedong. BIsu in an alternate universe probably should have won 4-5 Starleagues if he was a better tournament player.
Also, If someone could count the Starleague semifinals that would give better information.
"I think the main reason Protoss is seen as being kind of "bad" is because they never had a player like Flash or Jaedong. BIsu in an alternate universe probably should have won 4-5 Starleagues if he was a better tournament player"
I have an issue with these type of arguments because they're baseless, there's nothing backing your statement. Throughout the entire history of the game there hasn't been a single bonjwa calibre P player whereas T and Z had multiple bonjwas. I could say Bisu never became a player like Flash or Jaedong because his race held him back. Hell he wasn't even able to dominate BW even when Flash and Jaedong were playing SC2.
I'll admit it's pretty surprising the lack of greatest protoss players but there is always an element of randomness in competition. The fact that out of the 6 Bonjwas, 5 were terran and 1 was zerg (maybe even 2 zergs because even though Jaedong is not considered a bonjwa, he was pretty dominant and had more achievements than most of the Bonjwas besides Nada and Flash, so I think one could make a case for him), I think this fact gives a lot of credence to the idea Protoss is the worst when it comes to the greatest of players and I am not aware of many reasonable counterarguments besides bad luck.
My point that BIsu would have won 4-5 Starleagues I know is pure speculation but still seems reasonable to me. Bisu is skillwise almost as good as Flash and Jaedong even though his Starleague career is less successful. Bisu himself said, "Compared to Jae-dong or Young-ho, I guess I didn't have that much ambition," and "Maybe, back then, a part of me subconsciously thought that I didn't need to try as hard since in Proleague I had already done well enough." In terms of peak elo and winrates, which could be argued as better indicators of skill than Starleagues, BIsu is really close to Jaedong. So even though there is no Protoss bonjwa, I think many would argue that in terms of peak skill, the third greatest player of all time is a Protoss, which is important to consider when discussing whether Protoss is considerably weaker at the highest level of professional BW.
On January 08 2019 14:07 TT1 wrote: Are we actually counting ASL5? With maps like Sparkle, 3rd world and Transistor..
You can argue against Tesagi but you can't argue against the fact that Protoss has always had god awful results. They basically need to have their titles spoon fed to them. And let's not act like Protoss players are "weaker" than the other races, Bisu wasn't able to do anything in the SOSPA era and he couldn't hold a candle to JD or FlaSh in the KeSPA era (despite his innovative/mechanical prowess).
If you can't conclude that someone is weaker than someone else based on results over many tournaments then there is no basis for comparison.
Protoss isn't underpowered - if they were, then they'd get completely dominated - not just struggle to win first place.
On January 08 2019 16:01 Jealous wrote: I think it's a bit disingenuous to remove just Flash. At the very least, you should remove the top performing ZvT Zerg as well, to remove two of the outliers. Repeating this process for say the top 3 and bottom 3 TvZ/ZvT players would likely make the results balance out to a better estimate of the match-up at the pro level?
If there is a significant outlier and you remove said outlier and you find that your results are actually quite mellow, how is it disingenuous?
As an example, this didn't happen but if Bisu came in, smashed savior, and alone upped the PvZ % by like 4-5% points, and if you removed him Protoss was still like 50/50 in the matchup instead of 55/45, do you still think the matchup would be Protoss favored?
Is PvT favored to Terran if FlaSh is the only one who can confidently say he has a good matchup that is above 50/50, and if you remove him, PvT is toss favored?
As an addition, with FlaSh out of ASL7 and Last looking weak, while many thought Terrans are destroyed now, there are still more Terrans than any other race in the tournament. However, what quality of Terrans are we looking at? How many are we doing to keep moving to the Ro16? How many will we see in Ro8. My guess is, unless Last steps up again and returns to form, I'm really only seeing Sharp as the Terran who makes Ro8.
Once we add enough caveats, nothing is off limits, which makes both sides sound pretty disingenuous at times. One of the main reasons viewers of AfreecaTV started to argue for terrans being too strong, was due to what they saw on a daily basis over thousands of online sponsored matches.
As of now, there are 47,925 recorded online sponsored matches on the above site dating back to May 2017. Excluding matches played by Flash and Last, we still have a data set of 42,196 online sponsored matches. Even if we ignore online sponsored matches that had Flash or Last in it, terrans still have the best overall record (by a slight margin) compared to the other two races.
If we exclude only Flash, terran players have a superior win rate against both the zerg and protoss race within the realm of online sponsored matches with a sample size of 44,734 matches.
This is the main thrust of the Taesagi argument presented by the some viewers of AfreecaTV, and while I agree that online sponsored matches have a different nature from tournament games played within a LAN setting, it is somewhat misleading to say Taesagi supporters are totally delusional because their main argument is based on their viewing experience from online sponsored matches, not tournament matches which are not daily occurences. The sheer overwhelming number of online sponsored matches changes perspective to a greater degree than one imagines, especially if you watch these streams on a daily basis.
I realize that the focus of this article is for racial balance in recent years within a tournament setting, but this hot issue was birthed mostly due to the online sponsored matches, the main streaming content that allowed the Brood War scene to thrive within a streaming platform. I wish this article addressed this issue in greater detail to give voice to both sides of the table rather than presenting only one side of the argument.
That's actually interesting that this began from the sponsored matches. I had thought that Terran's great advantage in tournaments was TvT, because it is the one mirror matchup that always goes on a long time (more chances for a better player to comeback or cement a victory), and less volatile in build order advantages (also better chance for better player to show their skill). Zerg actually post surprisingly good results for having a mirror that is in my unbacked-by-data opinion a little more unforgiving than PvP (in that, although both matchups have build order disadvantages, PvP can sometimes go on for a long game, and if the builds are equal it seems a little less of a razor's edge). But then when comparing the Zergs to the Protoss, we have to sympathise for the early game problem of PvZ where a lesser overall player can knock out a good protoss player if they hit a hydra rush.
It is interesting that even if you take out the tournament issues of players getting knocked out by lesser players, there's still a Terran bias. Perhaps because the Terran matchups have more skill transfer between them, where ZvZ can be it's own game entirely, or perhaps just because when used to their highest potential, Terran units really do have more possibility and potential. It is a funny thing, because Terran has long been considered the hardest race to master, Protoss has long been considered a little weak at the highest level, and Zerg has long been considered volatile and prone to short hotstreaks.
Still, it's always been impressive that there have been dominant players from all races. The balance achieved in BW has also long been considered an incredible fluke. It does seem like Terran is the most stable and the most rewarding for a skilled player with good managements in mid and late game, with good opportunities for surprise in the early game. In certain matchups that just isn't true, but all Terran matchups seem to have gotten lucky, with TvP being hard but not unrewarding to the stronger player.
The distribution of match-ups for online sponsored matches is almost entirely dependent on the market demand. The mirror match-up factor you've mentioned may have played a role in overall terran success on other platforms (such as the ProLeague where a disproportionately high number of mirror match-ups took place), but online sponsored matches are obviously not one of those examples.
As of today, 48,000 online sponsored matches have been recorded since May 2017. If every player picked random, and the match-ups happened entirely by chance, the distribution should be roughly 22% for each of the non-mirror match-ups, and approximately 11% for the mirror match-ups. The actual distribution of the match-ups are as follows:
TvZ: 14,791 matches (30.81% of the entire sample available for analysis) ZvP: 13,475 matches (28.07% of the entire sample available for analysis) PvT: 13,610 matches (28.35% of the entire sample available for analysis) TvT: 1,813 matches (3.78% of the entire sample available for analysis) ZvZ: 2,106 matches (4.38% of the entire sample available for analysis) PvP: 2,205 matches (4.59% of the entire sample available for analysis)
As expected, terran-versus-zerg is the most in demand match-up, while terran-versus-terran match-up is the lowest in terms of viewer demand.
The landscape of AfreecaTV has warped the distribution of the match-ups, and I think the overwhelming number of matches where the zerg player gets stomped (with Flash being one of the main culprits for the phenomenon) has shaped the current perception of the terran race to an unhealthy degree. With Flash's games in the picture, zerg-versus-terran has the lowest win rate out of any match-ups within the realm of online sponsored matches, and due to popular market demand, zerg players have no choice but to partake in the one sided massacre over and over again.
So I personally would tackle the issue from the perspective that people enjoy the terran-versus-zerg match-up the most, which artificially raises the frequency of zergs being defeated on stream, which in turn shapes public perception of the terran race (especially since they don't suffer as much even without Flash against the protoss race in online sponsored matches thanks to Last), which makes people question Flash's overwhelming success within the ASL, which makes Flash supporters insecure and go too far in the other direction and state that every good terran result comes from Flash alone, which then makes people take away Flash's records in online sponsored matches to prove that terran players still enjoy the highest win rate even without Flash in the picture.
This entire argument would be less heated if both sides were ready to make concessions and make less outlandish hyperboles based on statistics that favour their viewpoint. The only thing that needed to happen was to state that the overall viewing experince of online sponsored matches portrays a somewhat warped view of Brood War due to the popularity of the terran-versus-zerg match-up, although truth be told, the fact that terran players enjoy an above 50% win rate versus the protoss race in online sponsored matches even after taking away all games where Flash participated is a little bothersome.
This topic has too much nuance to be confirmed or denied by a single article, and the debate could last a lifetime. There's always a way out even for the most retarded viewpoint, which makes the discussion extremely attractive to whoever wants to throw in their two cents. I've been guilty of it as well.
On January 08 2019 16:01 Jealous wrote: I think it's a bit disingenuous to remove just Flash. At the very least, you should remove the top performing ZvT Zerg as well, to remove two of the outliers. Repeating this process for say the top 3 and bottom 3 TvZ/ZvT players would likely make the results balance out to a better estimate of the match-up at the pro level?
If there is a significant outlier and you remove said outlier and you find that your results are actually quite mellow, how is it disingenuous?
As an example, this didn't happen but if Bisu came in, smashed savior, and alone upped the PvZ % by like 4-5% points, and if you removed him Protoss was still like 50/50 in the matchup instead of 55/45, do you still think the matchup would be Protoss favored?
Is PvT favored to Terran if FlaSh is the only one who can confidently say he has a good matchup that is above 50/50, and if you remove him, PvT is toss favored?
As an addition, with FlaSh out of ASL7 and Last looking weak, while many thought Terrans are destroyed now, there are still more Terrans than any other race in the tournament. However, what quality of Terrans are we looking at? How many are we doing to keep moving to the Ro16? How many will we see in Ro8. My guess is, unless Last steps up again and returns to form, I'm really only seeing Sharp as the Terran who makes Ro8.
Once we add enough caveats, nothing is off limits, which makes both sides sound pretty disingenuous at times. One of the main reasons viewers of AfreecaTV started to argue for terrans being too strong, was due to what they saw on a daily basis over thousands of online sponsored matches.
As of now, there are 47,925 recorded online sponsored matches on the above site dating back to May 2017. Excluding matches played by Flash and Last, we still have a data set of 42,196 online sponsored matches. Even if we ignore online sponsored matches that had Flash or Last in it, terrans still have the best overall record (by a slight margin) compared to the other two races.
If we exclude only Flash, terran players have a superior win rate against both the zerg and protoss race within the realm of online sponsored matches with a sample size of 44,734 matches.
This is the main thrust of the Taesagi argument presented by the some viewers of AfreecaTV, and while I agree that online sponsored matches have a different nature from tournament games played within a LAN setting, it is somewhat misleading to say Taesagi supporters are totally delusional because their main argument is based on their viewing experience from online sponsored matches, not tournament matches which are not daily occurences. The sheer overwhelming number of online sponsored matches changes perspective to a greater degree than one imagines, especially if you watch these streams on a daily basis.
I realize that the focus of this article is for racial balance in recent years within a tournament setting, but this hot issue was birthed mostly due to the online sponsored matches, the main streaming content that allowed the Brood War scene to thrive within a streaming platform. I wish this article addressed this issue in greater detail to give voice to both sides of the table rather than presenting only one side of the argument.
That's actually interesting that this began from the sponsored matches. I had thought that Terran's great advantage in tournaments was TvT, because it is the one mirror matchup that always goes on a long time (more chances for a better player to comeback or cement a victory), and less volatile in build order advantages (also better chance for better player to show their skill). Zerg actually post surprisingly good results for having a mirror that is in my unbacked-by-data opinion a little more unforgiving than PvP (in that, although both matchups have build order disadvantages, PvP can sometimes go on for a long game, and if the builds are equal it seems a little less of a razor's edge). But then when comparing the Zergs to the Protoss, we have to sympathise for the early game problem of PvZ where a lesser overall player can knock out a good protoss player if they hit a hydra rush.
It is interesting that even if you take out the tournament issues of players getting knocked out by lesser players, there's still a Terran bias. Perhaps because the Terran matchups have more skill transfer between them, where ZvZ can be it's own game entirely, or perhaps just because when used to their highest potential, Terran units really do have more possibility and potential. It is a funny thing, because Terran has long been considered the hardest race to master, Protoss has long been considered a little weak at the highest level, and Zerg has long been considered volatile and prone to short hotstreaks.
Still, it's always been impressive that there have been dominant players from all races. The balance achieved in BW has also long been considered an incredible fluke. It does seem like Terran is the most stable and the most rewarding for a skilled player with good managements in mid and late game, with good opportunities for surprise in the early game. In certain matchups that just isn't true, but all Terran matchups seem to have gotten lucky, with TvP being hard but not unrewarding to the stronger player.
The distribution of match-ups for online sponsored matches is almost entirely dependent on the market demand. The mirror match-up factor you've mentioned may have played a role in overall terran success on other platforms (such as the ProLeague where a disproportionately high number of mirror match-ups took place), but online sponsored matches are obviously not one of those examples.
As of today, 48,000 online sponsored matches have been recorded since May 2017. If every player picked random, and the match-ups happened entirely by chance, the distribution should be roughly 22% for each of the non-mirror match-ups, and approximately 11% for the mirror match-ups. The actual distribution of the match-ups are as follows:
TvZ: 14,791 matches (30.81% of the entire sample available for analysis) ZvP: 13,475 matches (28.07% of the entire sample available for analysis) PvT: 13,610 matches (28.35% of the entire sample available for analysis) TvT: 1,813 matches (3.78% of the entire sample available for analysis) ZvZ: 2,106 matches (4.38% of the entire sample available for analysis) PvP: 2,205 matches (4.59% of the entire sample available for analysis)
As expected, terran-versus-zerg is the most in demand match-up, while terran-versus-terran match-up is the lowest in terms of viewer demand.
The landscape of AfreecaTV has warped the distribution of the match-ups, and I think the overwhelming number of matches where the zerg player gets stomped (with Flash being one of the main culprits for the phenomenon) has shaped the current perception of the terran race to an unhealthy degree. With Flash's games in the picture, zerg-versus-terran has the lowest win rate out of any match-ups within the realm of online sponsored matches, and due to popular market demand, zerg players have no choice but to partake in the one sided massacre over and over again.
So I personally would tackle the issue from the perspective that people enjoy the terran-versus-zerg match-up the most, which artificially raises the frequency of zergs being defeated on stream, which in turn shapes public perception of the terran race (especially since they don't suffer as much even without Flash against the protoss race in online sponsored matches thanks to Last), which makes people question Flash's overwhelming success within the ASL, which makes Flash supporters insecure and go too far in the other direction and state that every good terran result comes from Flash alone, which then makes people take away Flash's records in online sponsored matches to prove that terran players still enjoy the highest win rate even without Flash in the picture.
This entire argument would be less heated if both sides were ready to make concessions and make less outlandish hyperboles based on statistics that favour their viewpoint. The only thing that needed to happen was to state that the overall viewing experince of online sponsored matches portrays a somewhat warped view of Brood War due to the popularity of the terran-versus-zerg match-up, although truth be told, the fact that terran players enjoy an above 50% win rate versus the protoss race in online sponsored matches even after taking away all games where Flash participated is a little bothersome.
This topic has too much nuance to be confirmed or denied by a single article, and the debate could last a lifetime. There's always a way out even for the most retarded viewpoint, which makes the discussion extremely attractive to whoever wants to throw in their two cents. I've been guilty of it as well.
Not sure how relevant this is or how well I understand it but I believe sample size shows diminishing returns after a certain point. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size_determination For example if flash's win rate is around 70% after a million games it's safe to say it's going to be around the same after 2 million games in spite of almost twice as many games played. Just some food for thought.
The analysis on whether Tesagi exists should also factor in the Protoss and Zerg game samples and perspectives (ZvP, ZvT, PvZ and PvT) and not just from the Terran perspective (TvZ and TvP).
So, from a larger sample, you can then define the winning percentage for each race and conclude which race is slightly favoured (though that may not define "Tesagi".)
Thus,
T win% = ((TvZ% + TvP%)/2) P win% = ((PvZ% + PvT%)/2) Z win% = ((ZvT% + ZvP%)/2)
I found the following analysis to be more accurate though it might be outdated :
Removing FlaSh, I think, removes the point of the idea of tesagi - the concept that the game at the very highest level in imbalanced in favor of Terran. If anything, I think the existence of FlaSh is because of the tesagi phenomenon.
All the idea of tesagi is, is saying that Terran has the higher skillcap - BoxeR, NaDa, iloveoov, and FlaSh (like three different times) have been the people in the game who push on that skillcap. Because Terran is the most mechanically difficult, its best players are mechanically the game’s best players, and StarCraft is a mechanical game.
i think the real issue here, as has been clearly highlighted once again by this article, is that toss is crap. TOSSREGI is real. lets be honest, if toss didnt have bisu to carry their asses we may have actually gotten an official balance patch
On January 08 2019 17:25 Dante08 wrote: Tesagi DOES NOT exist. The Terran race was propped up by Flash (and to a certain extent Last) in the post Kespa era. Watch Terran fall into mediocrity going into 2019 with these 2 players taking a break.
what about boxer's era? nada's era? iloveoov's era?
When a terran player dominates the scene they always talk about the fact that he is so amazing and shit and never take into consideration racial balance nor map pool. imo if bw was only one race and always mirror matchups i bet bisu wouldave never lost the best player in the world title. if bisu played terran he wouldave been greater than flash.
On January 08 2019 15:45 Ej_ wrote: And zerg sucked dick in proleague
TE SA GI
Unless playoff and KT (the best one) was playing
Indeed. HoeJJa is the holder of the all-time ProLeague post-season win streak record with eight consecutive play-off victories, beating Jaedong and FanTaSy's record of seven consecutive ProLeague post-season victories. His record is even more singular in nature because both Jaedong and FanTaSy had their ProLeague post-season win streaks created due to the Winner's League post-season (easier to have win streaks due to the king-of-the-hill format), while HoeJJa did it solely through regular ProLeague post-season games.
The unsung hero of KT Rolster's redemption arc against the SK Telecom T1 empire.
On January 08 2019 16:01 Jealous wrote: I think it's a bit disingenuous to remove just Flash. At the very least, you should remove the top performing ZvT Zerg as well, to remove two of the outliers. Repeating this process for say the top 3 and bottom 3 TvZ/ZvT players would likely make the results balance out to a better estimate of the match-up at the pro level?
If there is a significant outlier and you remove said outlier and you find that your results are actually quite mellow, how is it disingenuous?
As an example, this didn't happen but if Bisu came in, smashed savior, and alone upped the PvZ % by like 4-5% points, and if you removed him Protoss was still like 50/50 in the matchup instead of 55/45, do you still think the matchup would be Protoss favored?
Is PvT favored to Terran if FlaSh is the only one who can confidently say he has a good matchup that is above 50/50, and if you remove him, PvT is toss favored?
As an addition, with FlaSh out of ASL7 and Last looking weak, while many thought Terrans are destroyed now, there are still more Terrans than any other race in the tournament. However, what quality of Terrans are we looking at? How many are we doing to keep moving to the Ro16? How many will we see in Ro8. My guess is, unless Last steps up again and returns to form, I'm really only seeing Sharp as the Terran who makes Ro8.
Once we add enough caveats, nothing is off limits, which makes both sides sound pretty disingenuous at times. One of the main reasons viewers of AfreecaTV started to argue for terrans being too strong, was due to what they saw on a daily basis over thousands of online sponsored matches.
As of now, there are 47,925 recorded online sponsored matches on the above site dating back to May 2017. Excluding matches played by Flash and Last, we still have a data set of 42,196 online sponsored matches. Even if we ignore online sponsored matches that had Flash or Last in it, terrans still have the best overall record (by a slight margin) compared to the other two races.
If we exclude only Flash, terran players have a superior win rate against both the zerg and protoss race within the realm of online sponsored matches with a sample size of 44,734 matches.
This is the main thrust of the Taesagi argument presented by the some viewers of AfreecaTV, and while I agree that online sponsored matches have a different nature from tournament games played within a LAN setting, it is somewhat misleading to say Taesagi supporters are totally delusional because their main argument is based on their viewing experience from online sponsored matches, not tournament matches which are not daily occurences. The sheer overwhelming number of online sponsored matches changes perspective to a greater degree than one imagines, especially if you watch these streams on a daily basis.
I realize that the focus of this article is for racial balance in recent years within a tournament setting, but this hot issue was birthed mostly due to the online sponsored matches, the main streaming content that allowed the Brood War scene to thrive within a streaming platform. I wish this article addressed this issue in greater detail to give voice to both sides of the table rather than presenting only one side of the argument.
That's actually interesting that this began from the sponsored matches. I had thought that Terran's great advantage in tournaments was TvT, because it is the one mirror matchup that always goes on a long time (more chances for a better player to comeback or cement a victory), and less volatile in build order advantages (also better chance for better player to show their skill). Zerg actually post surprisingly good results for having a mirror that is in my unbacked-by-data opinion a little more unforgiving than PvP (in that, although both matchups have build order disadvantages, PvP can sometimes go on for a long game, and if the builds are equal it seems a little less of a razor's edge). But then when comparing the Zergs to the Protoss, we have to sympathise for the early game problem of PvZ where a lesser overall player can knock out a good protoss player if they hit a hydra rush.
It is interesting that even if you take out the tournament issues of players getting knocked out by lesser players, there's still a Terran bias. Perhaps because the Terran matchups have more skill transfer between them, where ZvZ can be it's own game entirely, or perhaps just because when used to their highest potential, Terran units really do have more possibility and potential. It is a funny thing, because Terran has long been considered the hardest race to master, Protoss has long been considered a little weak at the highest level, and Zerg has long been considered volatile and prone to short hotstreaks.
Still, it's always been impressive that there have been dominant players from all races. The balance achieved in BW has also long been considered an incredible fluke. It does seem like Terran is the most stable and the most rewarding for a skilled player with good managements in mid and late game, with good opportunities for surprise in the early game. In certain matchups that just isn't true, but all Terran matchups seem to have gotten lucky, with TvP being hard but not unrewarding to the stronger player.
The distribution of match-ups for online sponsored matches is almost entirely dependent on the market demand. The mirror match-up factor you've mentioned may have played a role in overall terran success on other platforms (such as the ProLeague where a disproportionately high number of mirror match-ups took place), but online sponsored matches are obviously not one of those examples.
As of today, 48,000 online sponsored matches have been recorded since May 2017. If every player picked random, and the match-ups happened entirely by chance, the distribution should be roughly 22% for each of the non-mirror match-ups, and approximately 11% for the mirror match-ups. The actual distribution of the match-ups are as follows:
TvZ: 14,791 matches (30.81% of the entire sample available for analysis) ZvP: 13,475 matches (28.07% of the entire sample available for analysis) PvT: 13,610 matches (28.35% of the entire sample available for analysis) TvT: 1,813 matches (3.78% of the entire sample available for analysis) ZvZ: 2,106 matches (4.38% of the entire sample available for analysis) PvP: 2,205 matches (4.59% of the entire sample available for analysis)
As expected, terran-versus-zerg is the most in demand match-up, while terran-versus-terran match-up is the lowest in terms of viewer demand.
The landscape of AfreecaTV has warped the distribution of the match-ups, and I think the overwhelming number of matches where the zerg player gets stomped (with Flash being one of the main culprits for the phenomenon) has shaped the current perception of the terran race to an unhealthy degree. With Flash's games in the picture, zerg-versus-terran has the lowest win rate out of any match-ups within the realm of online sponsored matches, and due to popular market demand, zerg players have no choice but to partake in the one sided massacre over and over again.
So I personally would tackle the issue from the perspective that people enjoy the terran-versus-zerg match-up the most, which artificially raises the frequency of zergs being defeated on stream, which in turn shapes public perception of the terran race (especially since they don't suffer as much even without Flash against the protoss race in online sponsored matches thanks to Last), which makes people question Flash's overwhelming success within the ASL, which makes Flash supporters insecure and go too far in the other direction and state that every good terran result comes from Flash alone, which then makes people take away Flash's records in online sponsored matches to prove that terran players still enjoy the highest win rate even without Flash in the picture.
This entire argument would be less heated if both sides were ready to make concessions and make less outlandish hyperboles based on statistics that favour their viewpoint. The only thing that needed to happen was to state that the overall viewing experince of online sponsored matches portrays a somewhat warped view of Brood War due to the popularity of the terran-versus-zerg match-up, although truth be told, the fact that terran players enjoy an above 50% win rate versus the protoss race in online sponsored matches even after taking away all games where Flash participated is a little bothersome.
This topic has too much nuance to be confirmed or denied by a single article, and the debate could last a lifetime. There's always a way out even for the most retarded viewpoint, which makes the discussion extremely attractive to whoever wants to throw in their two cents. I've been guilty of it as well.
Not sure how relevant this is or how well I understand it but I believe sample size shows diminishing returns after a certain point. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size_determination For example if flash's win rate is around 70% after a million games it's safe to say it's going to be around the same after 2 million games in spite of almost twice as many games played. Just some food for thought.
Kind of. Sample Size determines how good your estimate for any value (e.g Win-Ratio) is. Let's say you only have 10 games TvP. P wins 7 of them. That would give a Winrate of 70%. But, due to limited data you would get a uncertanty of 2.7. Meaning that you would need to add say the Winrate is 70% +/- 27%, which changes perception a lot.
By the way, i've not read the whole thread, but the opening thread did not do a simple p-value analysis. What's the p-Value for this being significant over an assumption of 50% ratio?
To be honest, based on the title in the forum sidebar alone, I thought this was going to be another Reddit-tier balance whining post but oh boy was I in for a treat.
Excellent write-up, this kind of insightful analysis of Brood War's balance sparks some really interesting conversations. I personally feel that some factors to consider as well are the outside viewers' schemas towards Terran being the hardest race (equaling to higher skillcap, therefore better results, maybe?). Then again, this post regarded pro-level play rather than the grassroots of picking a race etc.
On January 08 2019 17:25 Dante08 wrote: Tesagi DOES NOT exist. The Terran race was propped up by Flash (and to a certain extent Last) in the post Kespa era. Watch Terran fall into mediocrity going into 2019 with these 2 players taking a break.
what about boxer's era? nada's era? iloveoov's era?
When a terran player dominates the scene they always talk about the fact that he is so amazing and shit and never take into consideration racial balance nor map pool. imo if bw was only one race and always mirror matchups i bet bisu wouldave never lost the best player in the world title. if bisu played terran he wouldave been greater than flash.
i know some ppl here hate LS cause he hacked and shit, but his points are quite good on this interview.
This is a really good talk. If I remember correctly LS makes a rhetorical point in this presenting the hypothetical situation of Bisu picking Terran instead of Protoss. Wonder what that world would look like.
On January 08 2019 17:27 Anc13nt wrote: I agree with Letmelose that the game is incredibly, but not perfectly, balanced. For that reason, whether or not Tesagi is real or Protoss is weakest is unimportant. I will admit that most bonjwas are Terran and that Protoss has won the fewest Starleagues out of the three races. However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider. Also, the first three bonjwas were near the beginning of Starcraft competition so this argument is not as relevant to the discussion of racial balance in the modern meta. I would finally add that, even though Bisu does not have as many Starleagues as Flash and Jaedong, his winrate was pretty close to theirs and I think if he was more clutch of a tournament player, he probably would've had more starleague success. Basically, I think that he is closer to them in terms of skill than his Starleague career would suggest.
"However, Protoss is also the least-played race so that is important to consider."
source?
Right now, there's 92 players listed in the sponbbang rankings, here's the race split:
33 T 31 P 28 Z
Despite the reasonably even split, there's only 4 protoss players among the top 20 atm.
Sorry, I meant in the context of Starleagues of the past. Also, I have no statistics on the racial distributions in the MSL either, so I'm aware that my statement can only be shown to be true for the OSLs. Nonetheless, if you look at the race distribution chart of OSL participants, Protoss definitely looks like the least commonly played race (looks like only 24-26% of OSL participants were Protoss and yet they won 29.4% of the OSLs (10 OSL wins, 9 silvers). I'm aware that the statistics are worse for MSL (they won only 4 OSLs and had 9 silvers). Assuming 25% of players were Protoss in all starleagues (which I'm aware is a big assumption and I hope someone will check MSL racial distribution to make sure if my guess is close to reality), Protoss won 14/60 (23.3%) starleagues and got 18/60 (30%) silvers, which does not indicate that protoss players performed disproportionately poorly compared to the other two races, imo. I think the main reason Protoss is seen as being kind of "bad" is because they never had a player like Flash or Jaedong. BIsu in an alternate universe probably should have won 4-5 Starleagues if he was a better tournament player.
Also, If someone could count the Starleague semifinals that would give better information.
"I think the main reason Protoss is seen as being kind of "bad" is because they never had a player like Flash or Jaedong. BIsu in an alternate universe probably should have won 4-5 Starleagues if he was a better tournament player"
I have an issue with these type of arguments because they're baseless, there's nothing backing your statement. Throughout the entire history of the game there hasn't been a single bonjwa calibre P player whereas T and Z had multiple bonjwas. I could say Bisu never became a player like Flash or Jaedong because his race held him back. Hell he wasn't even able to dominate BW even when Flash and Jaedong were playing SC2.
There has been 5 Bonjwas, 4 terrans and a discredited Zerg whom most SC fans want to just forget.
jd, july and savior = 3 zergs flash, nada, iloveoov, boxer = 4 terrans
How did you come up with that list. If anyone can claim these things, than it s easy to counter your argument, saying there were 2 Protoss Bonjwas as well, Bisu and Stork, or whoever. As far as I know this thing is fairly un-controversial, there has been 5 Bonjwa
And you will be hard pressed to find a more biased JD fan on TL than I was (am), but still I dont claim he was a Bonjwa.
The problem protoss has is not terran, it's zerg. It's fitting to say that when you look at proleague and even now you say that X protoss is a PvT master/specialist. There's only one person you can say that about in PvZ and that's Bisu. Every other protoss' vs Z is pretty terrible especially these days. The one that came closest to having great PvZ was certainly shuttle and even then it didn't even hold a candle to Bisu.
Meanwhile, Bisu's PvT late game sucked majorly. In comparison to players like Stork, JangBi who had amazing PvT and terrible PvZ.
If stats-wise it holds that T>Z>P>T but for whatever reason Protoss lags behind (perhaps the kind of player who would pick up protoss correlates worse with championship - calliber player?) in success than terran is indeed in favorable position, right?
Like if stats wide the races are balanced via imbalance but one race is seen less frequently deep in tournaments etc.
On January 10 2019 00:43 Qikz wrote: The problem protoss has is not terran, it's zerg. It's fitting to say that when you look at proleague and even now you say that X protoss is a PvT master/specialist. There's only one person you can say that about in PvZ and that's Bisu. Every other protoss' vs Z is pretty terrible especially these days. The one that came closest to having great PvZ was certainly shuttle and even then it didn't even hold a candle to Bisu.
Meanwhile, Bisu's PvT late game sucked majorly. In comparison to players like Stork, JangBi who had amazing PvT and terrible PvZ.
Maybe you're exaggerating a little bit by saying that stork's/ jangbi's PvZ was terrible (both finished the kespa era with >50% winrate in the MU). But yeah if you look at the TLPD list of top PvZ ELO peaks, Bisu is so far ahead of everyone else. He's the only player with >60% in the MU, whereas all of the other top PvZers sit around 53-55% (plus movie at 58%).
It's probably not specific enough of a stat though since its only looking at career stats and not just stretches of peak performance (players like jangbi, kal, stork, and free all had stretches of pretty good PvZ but also had some pretty big slumps). T and Z only have 2-3 top players with >60% winrate in the unfavored MU, but almost all of them also did better in their favored MU, unlike Bisu.
On January 10 2019 00:43 Qikz wrote: The problem protoss has is not terran, it's zerg. It's fitting to say that when you look at proleague and even now you say that X protoss is a PvT master/specialist. There's only one person you can say that about in PvZ and that's Bisu. Every other protoss' vs Z is pretty terrible especially these days. The one that came closest to having great PvZ was certainly shuttle and even then it didn't even hold a candle to Bisu.
Meanwhile, Bisu's PvT late game sucked majorly. In comparison to players like Stork, JangBi who had amazing PvT and terrible PvZ.
All of Bisu, Stork, Reach and GARIMTO had 60+% PvZ during their prime (not over their careers), but none of these reached elite status even in their prime as they all either faltered in PvP or PvT. Other players faltered in PvZ. It's not clear statistically if PvZ is the core for Protoss failures.
Even if the argument of Z >>> P is true, wouldn't that mean a huge advantage for Terran? Your argument does more to validate tesagi than to discredit it. If your toughest opposition is made weaker, then you are made relatively stronger by default. If you consider rock paper scissors, if scissors became no longer viable, or less viable... Then Paper would be broken, even if paper had no effect on scissors being weak.
On January 10 2019 00:43 Qikz wrote: The problem protoss has is not terran, it's zerg. It's fitting to say that when you look at proleague and even now you say that X protoss is a PvT master/specialist. There's only one person you can say that about in PvZ and that's Bisu. Every other protoss' vs Z is pretty terrible especially these days. The one that came closest to having great PvZ was certainly shuttle and even then it didn't even hold a candle to Bisu.
Meanwhile, Bisu's PvT late game sucked majorly. In comparison to players like Stork, JangBi who had amazing PvT and terrible PvZ.
All of Bisu, Stork, Reach and GARIMTO had 60+% PvZ during their prime (not over their careers), but none of these reached elite status even in their prime as they all either faltered in PvP or PvT. Other players faltered in PvZ. It's not clear statistically if PvZ is the core for Protoss failures.
Even if the argument of Z >>> P is true, wouldn't that mean a huge advantage for Terran? Your argument does more to validate tesagi than to discredit it. If your toughest opposition is made weaker, then you are made relatively stronger by default. If you consider rock paper scissors, if scissors became no longer viable, or less viable... Then Paper would be broken, even if paper had no effect on scissors being weak.
I think the problem is that rock paper scissors doesn't work. PvZ is strongly zerg favored at the top level, but if you look at the data that the OP presented, we see that even excluding from the data (which is BS in the first place) TvP was slighty T favored or even (50-52%) winrate in online games. So it is T->Z->P=T. And by that metric it's obvious that T overperforms while P underperforms and Z is just fine.
The problem materializes also in the mappool. We all accept maps as the tool to ensure balance. Yet we see maps like CB as balanced, that rock TvZ 59% ZvP 60,2% PvT 45 % !! Winrate. In my mind thats the core of the problem. These big macro maps with little abusable features and simple layout emphasize terrans passive strength in the MU.
Flash fans and Terrans were majorly offended by the imbalanced and protoss favored map pool in ASL 5. But perhaps thats exactlx the right thing to ensure a balanced comoetition and restore rock-paper-scissors? Albeit ASL 5 maps were a bit extreme perhaps, thats part of the core problem. Bland macro maps level PvT winrates to close to 50% if we talk rock-paper-scissors.
On January 08 2019 21:01 bovienchien wrote: @Poegim: What would happen if Boxer, Nada, iloveoov and Flash don't play StarCraft?
I think that Terran is weakest race but Boxer, Nada, iloveoov and Flash are strongest players.
What would happen if they did, but Bisu, Nal-ra, Reach, Stork and JangBi didnt?
The better comparison would be what would happen if Flash, Boxer, iloveeoov and Nada didn't play Starcraft and neither did Stork, Bisu, Reach and Nal-ra.
On January 08 2019 16:01 Jealous wrote: I think it's a bit disingenuous to remove just Flash. At the very least, you should remove the top performing ZvT Zerg as well, to remove two of the outliers. Repeating this process for say the top 3 and bottom 3 TvZ/ZvT players would likely make the results balance out to a better estimate of the match-up at the pro level?
If there is a significant outlier and you remove said outlier and you find that your results are actually quite mellow, how is it disingenuous?
As an example, this didn't happen but if Bisu came in, smashed savior, and alone upped the PvZ % by like 4-5% points, and if you removed him Protoss was still like 50/50 in the matchup instead of 55/45, do you still think the matchup would be Protoss favored?
Is PvT favored to Terran if FlaSh is the only one who can confidently say he has a good matchup that is above 50/50, and if you remove him, PvT is toss favored?
As an addition, with FlaSh out of ASL7 and Last looking weak, while many thought Terrans are destroyed now, there are still more Terrans than any other race in the tournament. However, what quality of Terrans are we looking at? How many are we doing to keep moving to the Ro16? How many will we see in Ro8. My guess is, unless Last steps up again and returns to form, I'm really only seeing Sharp as the Terran who makes Ro8.
Once we add enough caveats, nothing is off limits, which makes both sides sound pretty disingenuous at times. One of the main reasons viewers of AfreecaTV started to argue for terrans being too strong, was due to what they saw on a daily basis over thousands of online sponsored matches.
As of now, there are 47,925 recorded online sponsored matches on the above site dating back to May 2017. Excluding matches played by Flash and Last, we still have a data set of 42,196 online sponsored matches. Even if we ignore online sponsored matches that had Flash or Last in it, terrans still have the best overall record (by a slight margin) compared to the other two races.
If we exclude only Flash, terran players have a superior win rate against both the zerg and protoss race within the realm of online sponsored matches with a sample size of 44,734 matches.
This is the main thrust of the Taesagi argument presented by the some viewers of AfreecaTV, and while I agree that online sponsored matches have a different nature from tournament games played within a LAN setting, it is somewhat misleading to say Taesagi supporters are totally delusional because their main argument is based on their viewing experience from online sponsored matches, not tournament matches which are not daily occurences. The sheer overwhelming number of online sponsored matches changes perspective to a greater degree than one imagines, especially if you watch these streams on a daily basis.
I realize that the focus of this article is for racial balance in recent years within a tournament setting, but this hot issue was birthed mostly due to the online sponsored matches, the main streaming content that allowed the Brood War scene to thrive within a streaming platform. I wish this article addressed this issue in greater detail to give voice to both sides of the table rather than presenting only one side of the argument.
That's actually interesting that this began from the sponsored matches. I had thought that Terran's great advantage in tournaments was TvT, because it is the one mirror matchup that always goes on a long time (more chances for a better player to comeback or cement a victory), and less volatile in build order advantages (also better chance for better player to show their skill). Zerg actually post surprisingly good results for having a mirror that is in my unbacked-by-data opinion a little more unforgiving than PvP (in that, although both matchups have build order disadvantages, PvP can sometimes go on for a long game, and if the builds are equal it seems a little less of a razor's edge). But then when comparing the Zergs to the Protoss, we have to sympathise for the early game problem of PvZ where a lesser overall player can knock out a good protoss player if they hit a hydra rush.
It is interesting that even if you take out the tournament issues of players getting knocked out by lesser players, there's still a Terran bias. Perhaps because the Terran matchups have more skill transfer between them, where ZvZ can be it's own game entirely, or perhaps just because when used to their highest potential, Terran units really do have more possibility and potential. It is a funny thing, because Terran has long been considered the hardest race to master, Protoss has long been considered a little weak at the highest level, and Zerg has long been considered volatile and prone to short hotstreaks.
Still, it's always been impressive that there have been dominant players from all races. The balance achieved in BW has also long been considered an incredible fluke. It does seem like Terran is the most stable and the most rewarding for a skilled player with good managements in mid and late game, with good opportunities for surprise in the early game. In certain matchups that just isn't true, but all Terran matchups seem to have gotten lucky, with TvP being hard but not unrewarding to the stronger player.
The distribution of match-ups for online sponsored matches is almost entirely dependent on the market demand. The mirror match-up factor you've mentioned may have played a role in overall terran success on other platforms (such as the ProLeague where a disproportionately high number of mirror match-ups took place), but online sponsored matches are obviously not one of those examples.
As of today, 48,000 online sponsored matches have been recorded since May 2017. If every player picked random, and the match-ups happened entirely by chance, the distribution should be roughly 22% for each of the non-mirror match-ups, and approximately 11% for the mirror match-ups. The actual distribution of the match-ups are as follows:
TvZ: 14,791 matches (30.81% of the entire sample available for analysis) ZvP: 13,475 matches (28.07% of the entire sample available for analysis) PvT: 13,610 matches (28.35% of the entire sample available for analysis) TvT: 1,813 matches (3.78% of the entire sample available for analysis) ZvZ: 2,106 matches (4.38% of the entire sample available for analysis) PvP: 2,205 matches (4.59% of the entire sample available for analysis)
As expected, terran-versus-zerg is the most in demand match-up, while terran-versus-terran match-up is the lowest in terms of viewer demand.
The landscape of AfreecaTV has warped the distribution of the match-ups, and I think the overwhelming number of matches where the zerg player gets stomped (with Flash being one of the main culprits for the phenomenon) has shaped the current perception of the terran race to an unhealthy degree. With Flash's games in the picture, zerg-versus-terran has the lowest win rate out of any match-ups within the realm of online sponsored matches, and due to popular market demand, zerg players have no choice but to partake in the one sided massacre over and over again.
So I personally would tackle the issue from the perspective that people enjoy the terran-versus-zerg match-up the most, which artificially raises the frequency of zergs being defeated on stream, which in turn shapes public perception of the terran race (especially since they don't suffer as much even without Flash against the protoss race in online sponsored matches thanks to Last), which makes people question Flash's overwhelming success within the ASL, which makes Flash supporters insecure and go too far in the other direction and state that every good terran result comes from Flash alone, which then makes people take away Flash's records in online sponsored matches to prove that terran players still enjoy the highest win rate even without Flash in the picture.
This entire argument would be less heated if both sides were ready to make concessions and make less outlandish hyperboles based on statistics that favour their viewpoint. The only thing that needed to happen was to state that the overall viewing experince of online sponsored matches portrays a somewhat warped view of Brood War due to the popularity of the terran-versus-zerg match-up, although truth be told, the fact that terran players enjoy an above 50% win rate versus the protoss race in online sponsored matches even after taking away all games where Flash participated is a little bothersome.
This topic has too much nuance to be confirmed or denied by a single article, and the debate could last a lifetime. There's always a way out even for the most retarded viewpoint, which makes the discussion extremely attractive to whoever wants to throw in their two cents. I've been guilty of it as well.
Since the Flash TvZ sponmatches are a plague on the Zerg, you would think they could put their heads together like the Terrans did once upon a time.
So much for the Hivemind T.T You would think a lot of people thinking about the same problem would eventually come up with something even Flash had trouble with.
On January 10 2019 00:43 Qikz wrote: The problem protoss has is not terran, it's zerg. It's fitting to say that when you look at proleague and even now you say that X protoss is a PvT master/specialist. There's only one person you can say that about in PvZ and that's Bisu. Every other protoss' vs Z is pretty terrible especially these days. The one that came closest to having great PvZ was certainly shuttle and even then it didn't even hold a candle to Bisu.
Meanwhile, Bisu's PvT late game sucked majorly. In comparison to players like Stork, JangBi who had amazing PvT and terrible PvZ.
Looking at this from a balance perspective, it would be hard to fix pvz without screwing with zvt. You'd end up fixing zvp and leave zerg with the only difficult match up (tvz) making zerg the weakest race. You'd be better off making tvp on par with pvz and zvt. Something that only effected tvp like mech upgrades taking 20% longer might be subtle enough.
I guess plenty of people have said this already, but looking at Terran's individual matchups is pointless. You have to look at the whole environment to get the real picture.
The real picture? Well, look at protoss winning almost nothing, even including when they are delivered a win on a platter.
On January 08 2019 21:01 bovienchien wrote: @Poegim: What would happen if Boxer, Nada, iloveoov and Flash don't play StarCraft?
I think that Terran is weakest race but Boxer, Nada, iloveoov and Flash are strongest players.
What would happen if they did, but Bisu, Nal-ra, Reach, Stork and JangBi didnt?
The better comparison would be what would happen if Flash, Boxer, iloveeoov and Nada didn't play Starcraft and neither did Stork, Bisu, Reach and Nal-ra.
I think you missed my point. I was arguing that excluding outliers from any single race will not produce good data, not what better way of excluding outliers to achieve such good data would be. (And you are of course right what the better comparison would be).
I like reading opinion different from my own, but the author of the OP seemed to already have his mind made up. How is it that he didn’t bring up the best arguments the other side uses?
I think TvP is balanced. It is TvZ tesagi which is the problem. And this will hopefully be fixed over time with better maps in the future. Remember Hero’s 2.5 hatch build in ZvT? Maybe they need to make a map where Zerg’s third is slightly closer than it is on Fighting Spirit.
PvZ is the only other matchup unfair. They call it Zesagi. There is no such thing as Pesagi because Protoss doesn’t have a strong matchup. Maybe to make PvZ fair they should have future maps where the natural and main are both on high ground? It would presumably help Protoss players survive Hydra breaks. It really is detrimintal to the game the amount of b.s. Hydra all-ins we see in ZvP.
I don’t agree with the author and others mentioning Flash as the exception. He is the represenative of Terrans as a whole. That is why 2/3 of the top 100 global players play Terran. The 100 best players globally pick T the most because they watch flash and think they can emulate his success. If anything it is like an old Slayers’Boxer effect.
Overall after reading the article I don’t believe as much in Tesagi. I think a balanced map pool with “good maps for ZvT” would make the matchup just fine.
It is probably never the matchup that is imbalanced but more likely to be blamed is the map that is imbalanced.
I never felt like there was any Inbalance in bw, but I always felt like protoss had the least potential. At the lower levels of the game protoss seems overpowered, but as skill levels go up it just seems like there isn't as much to do with protoss as there is with Terran and Zerg. As skill goes up a player gains access to certain parts of the game with Terran or Zerg that they couldn't access before. The same is true with protoss, but I just think there is less to access.
On January 10 2019 04:18 errol1001 wrote: I guess plenty of people have said this already, but looking at Terran's individual matchups is pointless. You have to look at the whole environment to get the real picture.
The real picture? Well, look at protoss winning almost nothing, even including when they are delivered a win on a platter.
Mapmakers need to do a better job.
Mapmakers have provided good protoss maps, and they were tossed away for being imbalanced. Meanwhile FS and CB are still the mostly used maps despite their lack of balance (especially CB if we are looking at the Protoss problem)
On January 10 2019 05:08 MuNi wrote: I never felt like there was any Inbalance in bw, but I always felt like protoss had the least potential. At the lower levels of the game protoss seems overpowered, but as skill levels go up it just seems like there isn't as much to do with protoss as there is with Terran and Zerg. As skill goes up a player gains access to certain parts of the game with Terran or Zerg that they couldn't access before. The same is true with protoss, but I just think there is less to access.
I've always felt protoss had the least potential too since they have fewer units compared to zerg and don't have as many ranged units compared to terran. That said, I think there are good counterarguments in favour of protoss. I've never played team melee but I heard it being said that Protoss is seen as the strongest in team melee and even though PvZ is really bad for Protoss, there is no zerg who I would favour against Bisu (I'm aware effort has positive record on him but I am talking about Bisu from 2007-2012).
On January 10 2019 00:43 Qikz wrote: The problem protoss has is not terran, it's zerg. It's fitting to say that when you look at proleague and even now you say that X protoss is a PvT master/specialist. There's only one person you can say that about in PvZ and that's Bisu. Every other protoss' vs Z is pretty terrible especially these days. The one that came closest to having great PvZ was certainly shuttle and even then it didn't even hold a candle to Bisu.
Meanwhile, Bisu's PvT late game sucked majorly. In comparison to players like Stork, JangBi who had amazing PvT and terrible PvZ.
Looking at this from a balance perspective, it would be hard to fix pvz without screwing with zvt. You'd end up fixing zvp and leave zerg with the only difficult match up (tvz) making zerg the weakest race. You'd be better off making tvp on par with pvz and zvt. Something that only effected tvp like mech upgrades taking 20% longer might be subtle enough.
Make cannons warp-in faster? It changes almost nothing for TvP but would make the Hydra "all-ins" less viable.
There's nothing wrong with bias as everyone is biased, but it does feel like he started the analysis knowing exactly where he wanted the conclusions to lie.
On January 10 2019 04:18 errol1001 wrote: I guess plenty of people have said this already, but looking at Terran's individual matchups is pointless. You have to look at the whole environment to get the real picture.
The real picture? Well, look at protoss winning almost nothing, even including when they are delivered a win on a platter.
Mapmakers need to do a better job.
Mapmakers have provided good protoss maps, and they were tossed away for being imbalanced. Meanwhile FS and CB are still the mostly used maps despite their lack of balance (especially CB if we are looking at the Protoss problem)
I guess you are right, there is really a community perception problem here too. CB being used for 6-7 years ...
In my opinion, the imbalances lie on the Zerg rather than Terran. Zerg has a low ZvT winrate and a high ZvP winrate, whereas TvP is balanced (around 50-51% average according to the analysis.)
So I suggest that map pools should be focused/centered around the Zerg where the list should include a zerg-favoured map (against Terran) such as Aztec (not Neo Aztec), and a Protoss favoured map (against Zerg) such as Sparkle to even out the odds.
On January 10 2019 12:27 William Blue wrote: In my opinion, the imbalances lie on the Zerg rather than Terran. Zerg has a low ZvT winrate and a high ZvP winrate, whereas TvP is balanced (around 50-51% average according to the analysis.)
So I suggest that map pools should be focused/centered around the Zerg where the list should include a zerg-favoured map (against Terran) such as Aztec (not Neo Aztec), and a Protoss favoured map (against Zerg) such as Sparkle to even out the odds.
Zerg basic combat unit is melee. Protoss basic combat unit is melee. Terran basic combat unit is ranged. A skilled player operating ranged units should beat a skilled player operating melee units in many situations.
Also a strong Terran army is far less resource intensive than a strong zerg/toss army. Terrans are able to take less bases and mineral only expos while Protoss/Zergs cannot and have to spread wider to have enough gas to compete. It is far easier to protect a small area than a large area (or several small areas).
You have to look at the maps, to do this kind of analysis. The maps are just as important as the players.
To pick an extreme example, on Fastest Protoss has a clear, obvious advantage. Obviously that's not a "pro" map, but it does at least show that the Protoss units aren't inherently crippled. But a typical pro macro-style map limits their ability to do shuttle raids on workers.
Looking at these stats (excluding flash and last): http://sponbbang.com/race/?month1=2017-05&month2=2019-01&bj=이영호, 김성현 You can see the map effect really clearly. Just TvZ win rates: All maps combined (42361 games): 53.5% Circuit Breaker (12837 games): 54.9% Fighting Spirit( 9476 games): 56.2% Gladiator (2981 games): 53.1% Transistor (1706 games): 46.1% Crossing Fields 1189 games): 44.5%
The rest that they list have under 1k games played, but show the same sort of variance between maps.
So the answer is pretty simple: if you want Terran to win more, sponsor games on Circuit Breaker and Fighting Spirit. If you want them to win less, sponsor games on Transistor and Crossing Fields. The overall imbalance is just there there have been a lot more games on Circuit Breaker and Fighting Spirit than any other map.
I don't think Terran is inherently better. But, as long as Circuit Breaker and Fighting Spirit are the "standard" maps (both to play on, and for map makers to copy their design) then Terran will have an advantage.
if maps are used to correct balance, reference to map stats isnt answering the question of balance but talking around it. I think its clear if we are to discuss the issue that terran has the most versatile set of options, the best player has traditionally been terran, that says something to me. Terran is a race with a wide variety of options which means they tend to take the initiatve in dominating the meta [i.e have the most bonjwas] but balance in broodwar is a feature of maps, so maps are often tilted against terran to make up for this inherent top heavy strength.
Look at all the map features we DONT use because of terran
-Cliffs -small maps [t>>>z, hell even big maps are used to help give p some strength in pvt] -lots of maps have unbuildable middles or other locations to limit turret crawling etc -one of those ASL maps recently even nerfed the gas at the natural third location in a tvp, which would really only impact terran, showing korean map makers are trying to weaken the terran turtle even further
On January 10 2019 14:42 Dazed. wrote: if maps are used to correct balance, reference to map stats isnt answering the question of balance but talking around it. I think its clear if we are to discuss the issue that terran has the most versatile set of options, the best player has traditionally been terran, that says something to me. Terran is a race with a wide variety of options which means they tend to take the initiatve in dominating the meta [i.e have the most bonjwas] but balance in broodwar is a feature of maps, so maps are often tilted against terran to make up for this inherent top heavy strength.
Look at all the map features we DONT use because of terran
-Cliffs -small maps [t>>>z, hell even big maps are used to help give p some strength in pvt] -lots of maps have unbuildable middles or other locations to limit turret crawling etc -one of those ASL maps recently even nerfed the gas at the natural third location in a tvp, which would really only impact terran, showing korean map makers are trying to weaken the terran turtle even further
Well, you can also come up with map features that would disadvantage terrans: -island maps -multiple gasses in the main -unbuildable/unlandable high ground behind minerals
I guess if they patched the race balance then we might see a lot of maps that look really crazy, but it's hard to speculate. I don't think it's talking around the balance issue to focus on the maps that we actually use and have data from, rather than hypothetical maps that don't exist or never get used.
On January 10 2019 14:21 Luddite wrote: You have to look at the maps, to do this kind of analysis. The maps are just as important as the players.
To pick an extreme example, on Fastest Protoss has a clear, obvious advantage. Obviously that's not a "pro" map, but it does at least show that the Protoss units aren't inherently crippled. But a typical pro macro-style map limits their ability to do shuttle raids on workers.
Looking at these stats (excluding flash and last): http://sponbbang.com/race/?month1=2017-05&month2=2019-01&bj=이영호, 김성현 You can see the map effect really clearly. Just TvZ win rates: All maps combined (42361 games): 53.5% Circuit Breaker (12837 games): 54.9% Fighting Spirit( 9476 games): 56.2% Gladiator (2981 games): 53.1% Transistor (1706 games): 46.1% Crossing Fields 1189 games): 44.5%
The rest that they list have under 1k games played, but show the same sort of variance between maps.
So the answer is pretty simple: if you want Terran to win more, sponsor games on Circuit Breaker and Fighting Spirit. If you want them to win less, sponsor games on Transistor and Crossing Fields. The overall imbalance is just there there have been a lot more games on Circuit Breaker and Fighting Spirit than any other map.
I don't think Terran is inherently better. But, as long as Circuit Breaker and Fighting Spirit are the "standard" maps (both to play on, and for map makers to copy their design) then Terran will have an advantage.
I think you're talking around the issue for a different reason. This may account for the success of Terrans in Sponbbangs (though I'd argue BJs have less incentive to win than progamers- just look at Calm), but what about the overall historical Terran dominance during Kespa days?
If you want the numbers I made a post on the second page, but to chalk up the relative success of Terrans to maps alone seems unlikely. Mapmakers have little reason to intentionally create Terran favoured maps, and in fact may shift map designs to help an underperforming race out; like in Savior's dominance the island map Desert Fox was thrown in to help Protosses (though Bisu won without it). Over the 12 years we had progamers, we saw the cycling of hundreds of maps and horrifically unbalanced maps were usually removed quickly. Taking all this into account and sticking to the "Terrans aren't OP the maps used favour Terran" explanation, it seems like the only way to account for Terran dominance is to say that Terrans are dominant on most maps- which is just tesagi with extra steps. Or maybe maps aren't the only reason (if one at all) that Terrans were so dominant.
For full disclosure, I'm a Pregi/Tossregi man myself.
I think to find a proper answer its far more complex than how we are looking at it. You cant just look at the overall winrates and discuss shifts in the 5% region and not take the players into account. Than the map plays also a part. And how do you wanna extract the skill of a player from the race he is playing.
This is very difficult and goes way deeper than looking at winrates. There are just to many factors that can influence the data in lead you to a wrong conclusion.
On January 10 2019 16:57 MarcoJ wrote: I think to find a proper answer its far more complex than how we are looking at it. You cant just look at the overall winrates and discuss shifts in the 5% region and not take the players into account.
[...]
This is very difficult and goes way deeper than looking at winrates. There are just to many factors that can influence the data in lead you to a wrong conclusion.
That's exactly the reason we take twelve years of data instead of a single year or tournament. The hundreds of maps, hundreds of players, and tens of thousands of games that comprise the sample size reduces the impact of extraneous variables because statistics is a still thing. I don't talk about post-Kespa data if I can help it because unlike progamers, BJs are incentivized to get star balloons and not necessarily win (if anything, people like Calm can actually earn more by losing and reacting), and the player pool is far smaller.
Dealing with unknown variables is par for the course if you're planning to do any analytical study. Would you say what you've said about any another study? "Well this heart medication reduced blood pressure by 20% in 47500 participants out of 50000 in comparison to the placebo, but there are too many variables so we can't make a conclusion." Yeah there are extraneous variables in any study. That's why you address it and discuss its significance, not discredit the conclusion outright.
Obviously it is impossible to quantify the exact skill of a player (I'd think that's exactly what winrates are but whatever) and compare it against the exact impact of maps. This is what's called the nirvana fallacy, and also why proving anything does not exist in science.
From this there are a few possible reasons for the Terran dominance: - We know TvZ favours Terran, ZvP favours Zerg, but PvT only slightly favours Protoss, which would obviously advantage Terrans. In other words, Protoss is crap. - Players with the best knowledge of the game just happened to pick Terran (ie: first assumption is wrong). Possible, but what does it say when players who understand the game best all chose the same race? Also if anything shouldn't Protoss see the most success as it's the most popular one and has the largest pool of players to draw from? - Terran is stronger than the other races.
The first explanation makes the most sense to me as following that logic Terrans would be the most successful, Zergs would be moderately successful, and Protosses would be the least successful- and that's exactly what we see. If you have any concrete data or argument to suggest why I'm wrong, I'm all ears.
At lower levels, Protoss is the strongest, but that doesn't matter; just git gud.
At very high levels, Protoss is slightly weaker than Zerg and Terran. We should solve this with maps. Blue Storm is an example of a Protoss favoured PvZ map, and La Mancha is an example of a Protoss favoured PvT map. I'm not saying that we should make it imbalanced in the other direction, but I am saying that we should adopt maps that are slightly more Protoss favoured than the norm is today (No more FS and CB).
What would a map that is good for Protoss in both PvZ and PvT look like? The third base for Terran would need to be difficult to take, or be a mineral only, or both. Taking a fourth base should also be made difficult for mech. For PvZ, we should avoid free main bases behind natural expos. Make expansions very open and hard to defend with sunken spore lurker. If Terran only gets a mineral only, but Protoss gets a full expansion, that's good for Protoss.
An additional possibility is to go with very open, hard to defend expansions, but to also give players an expansion with two geysers that is not viable for mech as a third base, but which is viable for P and Z. Giving this one base a choke point might be better for P in PvZ.
Edit: Statistics from various time periods, as well as strategic analysis, prove that my claims about La Mancha and Blue Storm are correct. Thus, it is possible to make maps that are better for Protoss. We should admit that Protoss is slightly weak on FS and CB, and move on to more Protoss favoured (thus more balanced) maps. I am not advocating for going so far that it actually becomes imbalanced. I only advocate moving slightly in the direction of what is Protoss favoured.
Other examples of Protoss favoured maps include Outlier and Central Plains. These maps, especially Central Plains, went too far and were actually significantly imbalanced in favour of Protoss in both match ups, but they prove that balance is all about maps. That Protoss is slightly underpowered in the normal ecosystem is a result of maps.
On January 10 2019 14:42 Dazed. wrote: if maps are used to correct balance, reference to map stats isnt answering the question of balance but talking around it. I think its clear if we are to discuss the issue that terran has the most versatile set of options, the best player has traditionally been terran, that says something to me. Terran is a race with a wide variety of options which means they tend to take the initiatve in dominating the meta [i.e have the most bonjwas] but balance in broodwar is a feature of maps, so maps are often tilted against terran to make up for this inherent top heavy strength.
Look at all the map features we DONT use because of terran
-Cliffs -small maps [t>>>z, hell even big maps are used to help give p some strength in pvt] -lots of maps have unbuildable middles or other locations to limit turret crawling etc -one of those ASL maps recently even nerfed the gas at the natural third location in a tvp, which would really only impact terran, showing korean map makers are trying to weaken the terran turtle even further
Well, you can also come up with map features that would disadvantage terrans: -island maps -multiple gasses in the main -unbuildable/unlandable high ground behind minerals
I guess if they patched the race balance then we might see a lot of maps that look really crazy, but it's hard to speculate. I don't think it's talking around the balance issue to focus on the maps that we actually use and have data from, rather than hypothetical maps that don't exist or never get used.
Island maps favour terran over zerg, and are fairly only slightly disadvantaged against p i think, whereas in a semi island map t is favoured in all matchups decisively. Anyway, sure, there are maps that are anti terran, but I think if you go through map history you will find a lot more terran imbalanced maps. Frankly, boxers entire era were just maps that were impossible to stop any decent terran on, especially before the muta glitch was found out. Maybe all these terran maps were a matter of contrivance- terran was popular, they rigged the leagues a little bit over the years. Or, terran is just strong on a lot of map concepts because its the swiss army knife of broodwar, which is why its imbalanced.
On January 10 2019 21:50 vOdToasT wrote: At lower levels, Protoss is the strongest, but that doesn't matter; just git gud.
At very high levels, Protoss is slightly weaker than Zerg and Terran. We should solve this with maps. Blue Storm is an example of a Protoss favoured PvZ map, and La Mancha is an example of a Protoss favoured PvT map. I'm not saying that we should make it imbalanced in the other direction, but I am saying that we should adopt maps that are slightly more Protoss favoured than the norm is today (No more FS and CB).
What would a map that is good for Protoss in both PvZ and PvT look like? The third base for Terran would need to be difficult to take, or be a mineral only, or both. Taking a fourth base should also be made difficult for mech. For PvZ, we should avoid free main bases behind natural expos. Make expansions very open and hard to defend with sunken spore lurker. If Terran only gets a mineral only, but Protoss gets a full expansion, that's good for Protoss.
An additional possibility is to go with very open, hard to defend expansions, but to also give players an expansion with two geysers that is not viable for mech as a third base, but which is viable for P and Z. Giving this one base a choke point might be better for P in PvZ.
Edit: Statistics from various time periods, as well as strategic analysis, prove that my claims about La Mancha and Blue Storm are correct. Thus, it is possible to make maps that are better for Protoss. We should admit that Protoss is slightly weak on FS and CB, and move on to more Protoss favoured (thus more balanced) maps. I am not advocating for going so far that it actually becomes imbalanced. I only advocate moving slightly in the direction of what is Protoss favoured.
Other examples of Protoss favoured maps include Outlier and Central Plains. These maps, especially Central Plains, went too far and were actually significantly imbalanced in favour of Protoss in both match ups, but they prove that balance is all about maps. That Protoss is slightly underpowered in the normal ecosystem is a result of maps.
Tau cross was always statistically a very balanced map as well. I'd like to see them run a tournament with La Mancha, Tau Cross and Blue Storm. I do think most balance problems can be ironed out with a decent map pool.
On January 10 2019 16:57 MarcoJ wrote: I think to find a proper answer its far more complex than how we are looking at it. You cant just look at the overall winrates and discuss shifts in the 5% region and not take the players into account.
[...]
This is very difficult and goes way deeper than looking at winrates. There are just to many factors that can influence the data in lead you to a wrong conclusion.
That's exactly the reason we take twelve years of data instead of a single year or tournament.
And you would be making a huge mistake right off the bat if you do so. Are 15 minute 1 hatch ZvP games from 1999 relevant at all to balance in 2019?
On January 10 2019 14:21 Luddite wrote: You have to look at the maps, to do this kind of analysis. The maps are just as important as the players.
To pick an extreme example, on Fastest Protoss has a clear, obvious advantage. Obviously that's not a "pro" map, but it does at least show that the Protoss units aren't inherently crippled. But a typical pro macro-style map limits their ability to do shuttle raids on workers.
Looking at these stats (excluding flash and last): http://sponbbang.com/race/?month1=2017-05&month2=2019-01&bj=이영호, 김성현 You can see the map effect really clearly. Just TvZ win rates: All maps combined (42361 games): 53.5% Circuit Breaker (12837 games): 54.9% Fighting Spirit( 9476 games): 56.2% Gladiator (2981 games): 53.1% Transistor (1706 games): 46.1% Crossing Fields 1189 games): 44.5%
The rest that they list have under 1k games played, but show the same sort of variance between maps.
So the answer is pretty simple: if you want Terran to win more, sponsor games on Circuit Breaker and Fighting Spirit. If you want them to win less, sponsor games on Transistor and Crossing Fields. The overall imbalance is just there there have been a lot more games on Circuit Breaker and Fighting Spirit than any other map.
I don't think Terran is inherently better. But, as long as Circuit Breaker and Fighting Spirit are the "standard" maps (both to play on, and for map makers to copy their design) then Terran will have an advantage.
I think you're talking around the issue for a different reason. This may account for the success of Terrans in Sponbbangs (though I'd argue BJs have less incentive to win than progamers- just look at Calm), but what about the overall historical Terran dominance during Kespa days?
If you want the numbers I made a post on the second page, but to chalk up the relative success of Terrans to maps alone seems unlikely. Mapmakers have little reason to intentionally create Terran favoured maps, and in fact may shift map designs to help an underperforming race out; like in Savior's dominance the island map Desert Fox was thrown in to help Protosses (though Bisu won without it). Over the 12 years we had progamers, we saw the cycling of hundreds of maps and horrifically unbalanced maps were usually removed quickly. Taking all this into account and sticking to the "Terrans aren't OP the maps used favour Terran" explanation, it seems like the only way to account for Terran dominance is to say that Terrans are dominant on most maps- which is just tesagi with extra steps. Or maybe maps aren't the only reason (if one at all) that Terrans were so dominant.
For full disclosure, I'm a Pregi/Tossregi man myself.
I read your post from page 2. It was interesting, but I'd like to see more detailed stats from the Kespa days. Do you have any stats that break it down by map? Also like Jealous said, you can kinda ignore the earliest years of Kespa when everything was so new. (although Boxer being such a fan favorite from that era might have caused some lingering bias in favor of Terran)
You said "Mapmakers have little reason to intentionally create Terran favoured maps, and in fact may shift map designs to help an underperforming race out". I agree they don't want to let any one race dominate, but I wonder if they do have an incentive to help Terran a little? Kespa wanted to make money, so they needed maps that would give entertaining games and pull in fans. That usually means either weird gimmick maps that only last one season, or macro maps where players can quickly build up to max supply and slug it out all over the map. So we get maps like Python/Andromeda/Fighting Spirit/Circuit Breaker, basically the same map being played forever. (edit- i guess Andromeda actually has a losing record for Terrans, but it was also played the least and is the most unusual of those maps)
The hardcore fans can geek out over how good Jaedong is at zergling rushes, but most casual fans aren't interested. So we get maps that it hard to do early zergling (or zealot) aggression, and it makes it too easy for Terran to get their perfect 3/3 200 supply steamroller. There might be some conflict here between what makes for good TV, and what makes for a well-balanced esport.
To test this, I wonder if we could group up the maps by type? I think Terran has an advantage on maps that are 4 players, symmetric, easy to take a third and no obvious gimmicks. It's not so much that they have an advantage over hundreds of different maps, it's this one particular map type. It started with Lost Temple and it never stopped. I'll bet if you divided the maps between "4 player macro maps" and everything else, you'd see a big difference in race balance.
Here is a thought. If we need to remove the data from the earliest years of professional starcraft because the level of play back then wasn't developed enough, how do we know that the current level of play is? As sports go, starcraft is still very young. Look at chess, that game has been played for much longer and the level of play is still rising. Who's to say that in starcraft the level of play can't reach much higher levels. At which of these levels are we determining whether or not the game is balanced?
I find it weird that people say Flash should be removed from the equation. If we remove the best player by far from every race Protoss would lose Bisu and I think one of the guys here who said that without Bisu we might have actually gotten a balance patch wasn't too far off the mark.
On January 11 2019 04:31 Sr18 wrote: Here is a thought. If we need to remove the data from the earliest years of professional starcraft because the level of play back then wasn't developed enough, how do we know that the current level of play is? As sports go, starcraft is still very young. Look at chess, that game has been played for much longer and the level of play is still rising. Who's to say that in starcraft the level of play can't reach much higher levels. At which of these levels are we determining whether or not the game is balanced?
Because it's been 20 years and Starcraft isn't chess, chess is perfectly balanced in nearly all aspects because the players have the same "units" and Broodwar might be great but it will not last centuries. To be honest the comparison is terrible and you should feel terrible for making it in the first place.
Honestly, apart from actual theoretical balance at the top level, i think the actual important question is between balance and design. tvz may or may not be imbalanced at flashes level, or mine, or whatever, but one thing I dont think can be denied is: that zerg has only one real option as a valid gameplan, muta into defilier, is bad game design. Balance or not, do we want to have to constrain ourselves to the maps and styles necessary for balance indefinitely? Theres many match ups that, regardless of balance, might need tending to.
Like @ the guy mentioning maps which would help protoss out, im totally in favour of that in terms of the pro circuit. But the type of maps he was describing are kind of....boring maps, and we are already playing on fairly bland maps, as well. Balance through maps might not be good enough anymore.
To test this, I wonder if we could group up the maps by type? I think Terran has an advantage on maps that are 4 players, symmetric, easy to take a third and no obvious gimmicks. It's not so much that they have an advantage over hundreds of different maps, it's this one particular map type. It started with Lost Temple and it never stopped. I'll bet if you divided the maps between "4 player macro maps" and everything else, you'd see a big difference in race balance.
If you constrained it one step further and kept the 4 player macro maps to be on the slightly smaller end of the scale [like fs compared to electric circuit] i think you would see the tilt favour terran all the more. Easily splittable macro maps with small to medium size are the best for terran imo.
On January 11 2019 04:31 Sr18 wrote: Here is a thought. If we need to remove the data from the earliest years of professional starcraft because the level of play back then wasn't developed enough, how do we know that the current level of play is? As sports go, starcraft is still very young. Look at chess, that game has been played for much longer and the level of play is still rising. Who's to say that in starcraft the level of play can't reach much higher levels. At which of these levels are we determining whether or not the game is balanced?
tbh with all the pros going to military soon and getting older, unfortunately I think the peak level of starcraft play may already be behind us. Perhaps one could look at data after 2007 ( which I guess some would consider this near the beginning of the "modern" era of broodwar), in which zerg won 11 out of 26 starleagues, terran won 9 out of 26 and protoss won 6 out of 26. I'm not talking about current broodwar since I don't have much info regarding it but I do think based on those stats alone, tesagi during the days of pro broodwar is a bit overhyped while tossregi seems pretty convincing, even if it's pretty minor imbalance in my opinion. Also, I wonder what the korean pros think about tesagi and protoss.
On January 11 2019 05:12 SilentchiLL wrote: I find it weird that people say Flash should be removed from the equation. If we remove the best player by far from every race Protoss would lose Bisu and I think one of the guys here who said that without Bisu we might have actually gotten a balance patch wasn't too far off the mark.
On January 11 2019 04:31 Sr18 wrote: Here is a thought. If we need to remove the data from the earliest years of professional starcraft because the level of play back then wasn't developed enough, how do we know that the current level of play is? As sports go, starcraft is still very young. Look at chess, that game has been played for much longer and the level of play is still rising. Who's to say that in starcraft the level of play can't reach much higher levels. At which of these levels are we determining whether or not the game is balanced?
Because it's been 20 years and Starcraft isn't chess, chess is perfectly balanced in nearly all aspects because the players have the same "units" and Broodwar might be great but it will not last centuries. To be honest the comparison is terrible and you should feel terrible for making it in the first place.
(I hope I have understood this argument well)
The fact that SC is not chess doens't mean that there are not relevant similarities. Both have imbalanced match-ups (white v black in chess), require lots of skill, are very mature strategy wise, but still we havent still se their skill cap in any human yet. So the comparison is perfectly valid.
And yes, chess is balanced in nearly all aspects, but on the one it isn't the unbalance makes a substantial difference. White has about 55% of points taken in competition, even higher in world championship matches (from wikipedia: Of 755 games played in 34 matches between 1886 and 1990, White won 234 (31.0%), drew 397 (52.6%), and lost 124 (16.4%), for a total white winning percentage of 57.3%). So its about the same difference as ZvP or TvZ. Still there's a raging debate about the extent of whie's advantage, even with some (Adorjan) saying that it doesnt exist at all.
Even with many centuries of practice there's nothing resembling a consensus on this matter. The fact is that any cutoff point for skill will be arbitrary, because it do not spike in one sudden leap, but evolves over time.
PS. I have been playing and following tournament chess for the past 20 years or so, and have a 2040 fide rating.
On January 11 2019 04:31 Sr18 wrote: Here is a thought. If we need to remove the data from the earliest years of professional starcraft because the level of play back then wasn't developed enough, how do we know that the current level of play is? As sports go, starcraft is still very young. Look at chess, that game has been played for much longer and the level of play is still rising. Who's to say that in starcraft the level of play can't reach much higher levels. At which of these levels are we determining whether or not the game is balanced?
Because it's been 20 years and Starcraft isn't chess, chess is perfectly balanced in nearly all aspects because the players have the same "units" and Broodwar might be great but it will not last centuries. To be honest the comparison is terrible and you should feel terrible for making it in the first place.
It's not about a direct comparison between starcraft and chess, but about comparing a young sport like starcraft with an older one. If you don't like the comparison with chess, pick any other old sport. Any other, it doesn't matter which one because it's not about the sport itself but about the influence it's age has had on it's level of mastery. It seems to me, that the longer we as people try to get good at a sport, the better we become at it. Think of it this way: if starcraft would have a continuous professional scene for a 100 years, do you think the level of play after that 100 years would be higher than it is now? I think it would. And that begs the question, at what level should the game be balanced? The current highest level, the highest level attainable by humans, something else?
On January 11 2019 04:31 Sr18 wrote: Here is a thought. If we need to remove the data from the earliest years of professional starcraft because the level of play back then wasn't developed enough, how do we know that the current level of play is? As sports go, starcraft is still very young. Look at chess, that game has been played for much longer and the level of play is still rising. Who's to say that in starcraft the level of play can't reach much higher levels. At which of these levels are we determining whether or not the game is balanced?
tbh with all the pros going to military soon and getting older, unfortunately I think the peak level of starcraft play may already be behind us.
On January 11 2019 04:31 Sr18 wrote: Here is a thought. If we need to remove the data from the earliest years of professional starcraft because the level of play back then wasn't developed enough, how do we know that the current level of play is? As sports go, starcraft is still very young. Look at chess, that game has been played for much longer and the level of play is still rising. Who's to say that in starcraft the level of play can't reach much higher levels. At which of these levels are we determining whether or not the game is balanced?
The game has to be balanced for the highest currently available human level. People in 2001 were right to discuss their current issues, and we are right to discuss our current issues. What would the game be like if played by super humans with 666+ apm and 200+ IQ? Irrelevant, really. What would it be like if we had more knowledge? Maybe in the future, a strategy will be invented that breaks the game. There's no way to know.
What ever level you're at, you have to try to make the game as good as possible for yourself. Right now, that means making the game balanced at the highest existing level.
On January 11 2019 04:31 Sr18 wrote: Here is a thought. If we need to remove the data from the earliest years of professional starcraft because the level of play back then wasn't developed enough, how do we know that the current level of play is? As sports go, starcraft is still very young. Look at chess, that game has been played for much longer and the level of play is still rising. Who's to say that in starcraft the level of play can't reach much higher levels. At which of these levels are we determining whether or not the game is balanced?
The game has to be balanced for the highest currently available human level. People in 2001 were right to discuss their current issues, and we are right to discuss our current issues. What would the game be like if played by super humans with 666+ apm and 200+ IQ? Irrelevant, really. What would it be like if we had more knowledge? Maybe in the future, a strategy will be invented that breaks the game. There's no way to know.
What ever level you're at, you have to try to make the game as good as possible for yourself. Right now, that means making the game balanced at the highest existing level.
Deep six exists. There just doesn't exist anyone man enough to use it at the pro level.
On January 11 2019 04:31 Sr18 wrote: Here is a thought. If we need to remove the data from the earliest years of professional starcraft because the level of play back then wasn't developed enough, how do we know that the current level of play is? As sports go, starcraft is still very young. Look at chess, that game has been played for much longer and the level of play is still rising. Who's to say that in starcraft the level of play can't reach much higher levels. At which of these levels are we determining whether or not the game is balanced?
The game has to be balanced for the highest currently available human level. People in 2001 were right to discuss their current issues, and we are right to discuss our current issues. What would the game be like if played by super humans with 666+ apm and 200+ IQ? Irrelevant, really. What would it be like if we had more knowledge? Maybe in the future, a strategy will be invented that breaks the game. There's no way to know.
What ever level you're at, you have to try to make the game as good as possible for yourself. Right now, that means making the game balanced at the highest existing level.
Deep six exists. There just doesn't exist anyone man enough to use it at the pro level.
On January 11 2019 05:12 SilentchiLL wrote: I find it weird that people say Flash should be removed from the equation. If we remove the best player by far from every race Protoss would lose Bisu and I think one of the guys here who said that without Bisu we might have actually gotten a balance patch wasn't too far off the mark.
On January 11 2019 04:31 Sr18 wrote: Here is a thought. If we need to remove the data from the earliest years of professional starcraft because the level of play back then wasn't developed enough, how do we know that the current level of play is? As sports go, starcraft is still very young. Look at chess, that game has been played for much longer and the level of play is still rising. Who's to say that in starcraft the level of play can't reach much higher levels. At which of these levels are we determining whether or not the game is balanced?
Because it's been 20 years and Starcraft isn't chess, chess is perfectly balanced in nearly all aspects because the players have the same "units" and Broodwar might be great but it will not last centuries. To be honest the comparison is terrible and you should feel terrible for making it in the first place.
(I hope I have understood this argument well)
The fact that SC is not chess doens't mean that there are not relevant similarities. Both have imbalanced match-ups (white v black in chess), require lots of skill, are very mature strategy wise, but still we havent still se their skill cap in any human yet. So the comparison is perfectly valid.
And yes, chess is balanced in nearly all aspects, but on the one it isn't the unbalance makes a substantial difference. White has about 55% of points taken in competition, even higher in world championship matches (from wikipedia: Of 755 games played in 34 matches between 1886 and 1990, White won 234 (31.0%), drew 397 (52.6%), and lost 124 (16.4%), for a total white winning percentage of 57.3%). So its about the same difference as ZvP or TvZ. Still there's a raging debate about the extent of whie's advantage, even with some (Adorjan) saying that it doesnt exist at all.
Even with many centuries of practice there's nothing resembling a consensus on this matter. The fact is that any cutoff point for skill will be arbitrary, because it do not spike in one sudden leap, but evolves over time.
PS. I have been playing and following tournament chess for the past 20 years or so, and have a 2040 fide rating.
I agree that there are relevant similarities, I don't think I ever denied that. His comparison was just terrible and makes little sense. Interesting albeit irrelevant chess trivia aside, it's just not the same and the white-black advantage is not comparable to the racial (im)balance of starcraft since it has completely different reasons/origins.
So I repeat, the comparison was bad and he should feel bad.
On January 11 2019 06:31 Sr18 wrote:
It's not about a direct comparison between starcraft and chess, but about comparing a young sport like starcraft with an older one. If you don't like the comparison with chess, pick any other old sport. Any other, it doesn't matter which one because it's not about the sport itself but about the influence it's age has had on it's level of mastery. It seems to me, that the longer we as people try to get good at a sport, the better we become at it. Think of it this way: if starcraft would have a continuous professional scene for a 100 years, do you think the level of play after that 100 years would be higher than it is now? I think it would. And that begs the question, at what level should the game be balanced? The current highest level, the highest level attainable by humans, something else?
The problem is that the entire premise is faulty, any balance act in a game or sport with equal sides will affect both "races." And while starting first in chess does make a difference as having the initiative tends to do, pretty much every other change would affect both sides (near) equally. That just isn't the case in Broodwar. You can lower the energy regeneration of medics by 25% and it will not affect the match ups without Terrans in any way at all, it also won't make Protoss or Zerg weaker but will strictly affect Terran. There's a reason why Chess rules have been relatively stable with just minor changes and additions over the centuries: Because at least at the first glance it seems perfectly fair. Broodwar doesn't, because Broodwar isn't. It's a game built around huge differences between the races, which is part of the reason why it's so incredibly popular, but that also means that it has the potential to become incredibly skewed towards one race. Honestly, the question we should ask ourselves isn't whether Terran or any other race is so strong, but why we are so lucky that it isn't worse, because several times in Broodwar's evolution there was a ton of potential for one race to be objectively way superior but the other races always caught up, making a balance patch not (blatantly) necessary. Broodwar was made by nerds in the 90s, it's not a work of God, so it's an incredible miracle that it stayed as balanced as it is now 20 years later despite active balancing having long ceased.
Edit for clarity: The game's inherently imbalanced, will never be balanced and seeing the pros try is fun, but it cannot be compared to chess since it can both be changed in a much easier fashion and you can actually directly weaken one side without directly affecting the other side in any way; Broodwar is also not equal in nearly any way, meaning that acts of balancing aren't just possible but also inherently necessary. Make no mistake, the game we have right now is not balanced, it's just close enough that people can agree to let it slide and certain things, like the extremely narrow techtree for zerg in the midgame or the lack of a real meaty lategame unit for Toss aside from the nowadays nearly never really seen and always situational carrier in comparison to the Zerg's Ultralisks/Guardians or the Siege Tank/Battlecruiser of the Terrans has always been a problem. Those things just don't seem like problems because we aren't used to thinking of them that way, we aren't used to questioning why protoss plays with zealots and dragoons for pretty much the entirety of the match even though neither (especially the dragoons) get incredibly strong due to upgrades like the zerglings later. We don't question these things because they've always been like that and they seem "balanced" despite being obvious weaknesses and Toss being the objectively weakest race judging from pro play alone, even if they are the easiest to play for a beginner. But we really should.
On January 11 2019 01:37 Alpha-NP- wrote: What’s a map that is good for Z in ZvT? Blue Storm?
I can't think of any imbalanced map in favour of Z in ZvT, but there are plenty of maps at 50% (Not CB or FS).
Here's some I can remember:
Ride of the Valkyries (48% TvZ)
Electric Circuit (not Neo) Dante's Peak Triathlon Battle Royale Flight Dreamliner Holy World Holy World SE
Although none of these had the biggest sample size.
Also see more recently Crossing Field Sparkle
I think one of the major components of making a map zerg favoured in ZvT is make it near impossible to leave your base. One thing Dante's Peak, Battle Royale, Flight Dreamliner, Holy World and Holy World SE feature is the aspect of having a huge amount of airspace around the mains where mutas can fly in at a lot of different angles while also having a relatively long rush distance by ground (especially on Flight Dreamliner).
Holy World and Holy World SE's main component alongside the above is the huge amount of open ground in the middle makes it very hard for Terran to go anywhere without either being countered or majorly surrounded.
On January 11 2019 20:51 SilentchiLL wrote: Honestly, the question we should ask ourselves isn't whether Terran or any other race is so strong, but why we are so lucky that it isn't worse, because several times in Broodwar's evolution there was a ton of potential for one race to be objectively way superior but the other races always caught up, making a balance patch not (blatantly) necessary. Broodwar was made by nerds in the 90s, it's not a work of God, so it's an incredible miracle that it stayed as balanced as it is now 20 years later despite active balancing having long ceased.
Maps have always been chosen in major tournaments to cater to the current metagame. A metagame where [s]Flash[s] Terran is strongest will have anti-Terran maps to create a tournament where all the races have a chance.
On January 11 2019 20:51 SilentchiLL wrote: Honestly, the question we should ask ourselves isn't whether Terran or any other race is so strong, but why we are so lucky that it isn't worse, because several times in Broodwar's evolution there was a ton of potential for one race to be objectively way superior but the other races always caught up, making a balance patch not (blatantly) necessary. Broodwar was made by nerds in the 90s, it's not a work of God, so it's an incredible miracle that it stayed as balanced as it is now 20 years later despite active balancing having long ceased.
Maps have always been chosen in major tournaments to cater to the current metagame. A metagame where [s]Flash[s] Terran is strongest will have anti-Terran maps to create a tournament where all the races have a chance.
Then all the terrans bar FlaSh struggle as we saw in ASL6. It really is FlaShsagi, it's not Tesagi.
On January 11 2019 20:51 SilentchiLL wrote: Honestly, the question we should ask ourselves isn't whether Terran or any other race is so strong, but why we are so lucky that it isn't worse, because several times in Broodwar's evolution there was a ton of potential for one race to be objectively way superior but the other races always caught up, making a balance patch not (blatantly) necessary. Broodwar was made by nerds in the 90s, it's not a work of God, so it's an incredible miracle that it stayed as balanced as it is now 20 years later despite active balancing having long ceased.
Maps have always been chosen in major tournaments to cater to the current metagame. A metagame where [s]Flash[s] Terran is strongest will have anti-Terran maps to create a tournament where all the races have a chance.
Then all the terrans bar FlaSh struggle as we saw in ASL6. It really is FlaShsagi, it's not Tesagi.
CB and FS are slightly Terran favoured in both match ups. I support getting rid of them.
On January 11 2019 05:12 SilentchiLL wrote: I find it weird that people say Flash should be removed from the equation. If we remove the best player by far from every race Protoss would lose Bisu and I think one of the guys here who said that without Bisu we might have actually gotten a balance patch wasn't too far off the mark.
On January 11 2019 04:31 Sr18 wrote: Here is a thought. If we need to remove the data from the earliest years of professional starcraft because the level of play back then wasn't developed enough, how do we know that the current level of play is? As sports go, starcraft is still very young. Look at chess, that game has been played for much longer and the level of play is still rising. Who's to say that in starcraft the level of play can't reach much higher levels. At which of these levels are we determining whether or not the game is balanced?
Because it's been 20 years and Starcraft isn't chess, chess is perfectly balanced in nearly all aspects because the players have the same "units" and Broodwar might be great but it will not last centuries. To be honest the comparison is terrible and you should feel terrible for making it in the first place.
(I hope I have understood this argument well)
The fact that SC is not chess doens't mean that there are not relevant similarities. Both have imbalanced match-ups (white v black in chess), require lots of skill, are very mature strategy wise, but still we havent still se their skill cap in any human yet. So the comparison is perfectly valid.
And yes, chess is balanced in nearly all aspects, but on the one it isn't the unbalance makes a substantial difference. White has about 55% of points taken in competition, even higher in world championship matches (from wikipedia: Of 755 games played in 34 matches between 1886 and 1990, White won 234 (31.0%), drew 397 (52.6%), and lost 124 (16.4%), for a total white winning percentage of 57.3%). So its about the same difference as ZvP or TvZ. Still there's a raging debate about the extent of whie's advantage, even with some (Adorjan) saying that it doesnt exist at all.
Even with many centuries of practice there's nothing resembling a consensus on this matter. The fact is that any cutoff point for skill will be arbitrary, because it do not spike in one sudden leap, but evolves over time.
PS. I have been playing and following tournament chess for the past 20 years or so, and have a 2040 fide rating.
I agree that there are relevant similarities, I don't think I ever denied that. His comparison was just terrible and makes little sense. Interesting albeit irrelevant chess trivia aside, it's just not the same and the white-black advantage is not comparable to the racial (im)balance of starcraft since it has completely different reasons/origins.
So I repeat, the comparison was bad and he should feel bad.
It's not about a direct comparison between starcraft and chess, but about comparing a young sport like starcraft with an older one. If you don't like the comparison with chess, pick any other old sport. Any other, it doesn't matter which one because it's not about the sport itself but about the influence it's age has had on it's level of mastery. It seems to me, that the longer we as people try to get good at a sport, the better we become at it. Think of it this way: if starcraft would have a continuous professional scene for a 100 years, do you think the level of play after that 100 years would be higher than it is now? I think it would. And that begs the question, at what level should the game be balanced? The current highest level, the highest level attainable by humans, something else?
The problem is that the entire premise is faulty, any balance act in a game or sport with equal sides will affect both "races." And while starting first in chess does make a difference as having the initiative tends to do, pretty much every other change would affect both sides (near) equally. That just isn't the case in Broodwar. You can lower the energy regeneration of medics by 25% and it will not affect the match ups without Terrans in any way at all, it also won't make Protoss or Zerg weaker but will strictly affect Terran. There's a reason why Chess rules have been relatively stable with just minor changes and additions over the centuries: Because at least at the first glance it seems perfectly fair. Broodwar doesn't, because Broodwar isn't. It's a game built around huge differences between the races, which is part of the reason why it's so incredibly popular, but that also means that it has the potential to become incredibly skewed towards one race. Honestly, the question we should ask ourselves isn't whether Terran or any other race is so strong, but why we are so lucky that it isn't worse, because several times in Broodwar's evolution there was a ton of potential for one race to be objectively way superior but the other races always caught up, making a balance patch not (blatantly) necessary. Broodwar was made by nerds in the 90s, it's not a work of God, so it's an incredible miracle that it stayed as balanced as it is now 20 years later despite active balancing having long ceased.
Edit for clarity: The game's inherently imbalanced, will never be balanced and seeing the pros try is fun, but it cannot be compared to chess since it can both be changed in a much easier fashion and you can actually directly weaken one side without directly affecting the other side in any way; Broodwar is also not equal in nearly any way, meaning that acts of balancing aren't just possible but also inherently necessary. Make no mistake, the game we have right now is not balanced, it's just close enough that people can agree to let it slide and certain things, like the extremely narrow techtree for zerg in the midgame or the lack of a real meaty lategame unit for Toss aside from the nowadays nearly never really seen and always situational carrier in comparison to the Zerg's Ultralisks/Guardians or the Siege Tank/Battlecruiser of the Terrans has always been a problem. Those things just don't seem like problems because we aren't used to thinking of them that way, we aren't used to questioning why protoss plays with zealots and dragoons for pretty much the entirety of the match even though neither (especially the dragoons) get incredibly strong due to upgrades like the zerglings later. We don't question these things because they've always been like that and they seem "balanced" despite being obvious weaknesses and Toss being the objectively weakest race judging from pro play alone, even if they are the easiest to play for a beginner. But we really should.
My posts were not about balance, but about levels of mastery. My hypothesis is that (i) the human race is better at chess than it is at starcraft and (ii) that if we ever get as good at starcraft as we are at chess now, things we percieve to be imbalanced now might be considered balanced then (and vice versa). Whether or not starcraft is inherently more imbalanced than chess, which your last post was about (that made total sense by the way), has no bearing on any of this.
On January 11 2019 01:37 Alpha-NP- wrote: What’s a map that is good for Z in ZvT? Blue Storm?
I can't think of any imbalanced map in favour of Z in ZvT, but there are plenty of maps at 50% (Not CB or FS).
Here's some I can remember:
Ride of the Valkyries (48% TvZ)
Electric Circuit (not Neo) Dante's Peak Triathlon Battle Royale Flight Dreamliner Holy World Holy World SE
Although none of these had the biggest sample size.
Also see more recently Crossing Field Sparkle
I think one of the major components of making a map zerg favoured in ZvT is make it near impossible to leave your base. One thing Dante's Peak, Battle Royale, Flight Dreamliner, Holy World and Holy World SE feature is the aspect of having a huge amount of airspace around the mains where mutas can fly in at a lot of different angles while also having a relatively long rush distance by ground (especially on Flight Dreamliner).
Holy World and Holy World SE's main component alongside the above is the huge amount of open ground in the middle makes it very hard for Terran to go anywhere without either being countered or majorly surrounded.
Off topic but you prompted me to go back and review some OSL seasons. Reading through "2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3" really solidifies why Savior is one of the most incredible Starcraft players. How did he even win this tournament with the map pool?!? 2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3
Longinus " The fact that it still has somewhat passable statistics in ZvT has largely been attributed to sAviOr; without him the map stands at a grim 11-27 ZvT (29%). "
Arkanoid "NaDa dominated Arkanoid during the 2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 2, 2006-2007 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3, and 2007 Shinhan Bank OnGameNet Masters, reflected by his 15-2 record on both map versions combined" *Note Nada lost to Savior in the finals with this map in the pool
Reverse Temple "Zerg had a hard time against Terran on this map; aside from sAviOr, who went 6-1 on it, the TvZ statistics for this map are 14-3 in favor of Terran. "
I agree that there are relevant similarities, I don't think I ever denied that. His comparison was just terrible and makes little sense. Interesting albeit irrelevant chess trivia aside, it's just not the same and the white-black advantage is not comparable to the racial (im)balance of starcraft since it has completely different reasons/origins.
So I repeat, the comparison was bad and he should feel bad.
On January 11 2019 06:31 Sr18 wrote:
Silent, I will disagree once again. At least I understood that the comparison was centered in between the rising skill level of players over time, which IS relevant in both BW and chess (and you responded about simmetry). And even though chess armies are symmetrical, there are changes that could reduce the imbalance while reducing white's power, and increasing black's one, namely "fair first move": "after player 1 makes the first move with the white pieces, player 2 has the option of either moving normally or choosing to switch colors (and then the game proceeds normally, with player 1 moving again and playing the black pieces for the rest of the game)".
Of course when both games are dissimilar certain comparisons should have little value, but it was not the case here, the comparison between skill level over time is similar, and relevant to the topic of arbitrary cutoffs from where to analyse the game balance by (also) using percentages of winning (for W/B or P/T/Z) in both games.
I also hope I will not offend you to say that you were responding to a strawman, and should feel bad.
Edit: And Armaggedon rules also tries to balance W/B while not affecting bot sides equally.
On January 11 2019 20:51 SilentchiLL wrote: Honestly, the question we should ask ourselves isn't whether Terran or any other race is so strong, but why we are so lucky that it isn't worse, because several times in Broodwar's evolution there was a ton of potential for one race to be objectively way superior but the other races always caught up, making a balance patch not (blatantly) necessary. Broodwar was made by nerds in the 90s, it's not a work of God, so it's an incredible miracle that it stayed as balanced as it is now 20 years later despite active balancing having long ceased.
Maps have always been chosen in major tournaments to cater to the current metagame. A metagame where [s]Flash[s] Terran is strongest will have anti-Terran maps to create a tournament where all the races have a chance.
Having a chance to win and playing a balanced game are different things though. Objectively worse strategies have won countless games in Starcraft after all.
On January 11 2019 05:12 SilentchiLL wrote: I find it weird that people say Flash should be removed from the equation. If we remove the best player by far from every race Protoss would lose Bisu and I think one of the guys here who said that without Bisu we might have actually gotten a balance patch wasn't too far off the mark.
On January 11 2019 04:31 Sr18 wrote: Here is a thought. If we need to remove the data from the earliest years of professional starcraft because the level of play back then wasn't developed enough, how do we know that the current level of play is? As sports go, starcraft is still very young. Look at chess, that game has been played for much longer and the level of play is still rising. Who's to say that in starcraft the level of play can't reach much higher levels. At which of these levels are we determining whether or not the game is balanced?
Because it's been 20 years and Starcraft isn't chess, chess is perfectly balanced in nearly all aspects because the players have the same "units" and Broodwar might be great but it will not last centuries. To be honest the comparison is terrible and you should feel terrible for making it in the first place.
(I hope I have understood this argument well)
The fact that SC is not chess doens't mean that there are not relevant similarities. Both have imbalanced match-ups (white v black in chess), require lots of skill, are very mature strategy wise, but still we havent still se their skill cap in any human yet. So the comparison is perfectly valid.
And yes, chess is balanced in nearly all aspects, but on the one it isn't the unbalance makes a substantial difference. White has about 55% of points taken in competition, even higher in world championship matches (from wikipedia: Of 755 games played in 34 matches between 1886 and 1990, White won 234 (31.0%), drew 397 (52.6%), and lost 124 (16.4%), for a total white winning percentage of 57.3%). So its about the same difference as ZvP or TvZ. Still there's a raging debate about the extent of whie's advantage, even with some (Adorjan) saying that it doesnt exist at all.
Even with many centuries of practice there's nothing resembling a consensus on this matter. The fact is that any cutoff point for skill will be arbitrary, because it do not spike in one sudden leap, but evolves over time.
PS. I have been playing and following tournament chess for the past 20 years or so, and have a 2040 fide rating.
I agree that there are relevant similarities, I don't think I ever denied that. His comparison was just terrible and makes little sense. Interesting albeit irrelevant chess trivia aside, it's just not the same and the white-black advantage is not comparable to the racial (im)balance of starcraft since it has completely different reasons/origins.
So I repeat, the comparison was bad and he should feel bad.
On January 11 2019 06:31 Sr18 wrote:
It's not about a direct comparison between starcraft and chess, but about comparing a young sport like starcraft with an older one. If you don't like the comparison with chess, pick any other old sport. Any other, it doesn't matter which one because it's not about the sport itself but about the influence it's age has had on it's level of mastery. It seems to me, that the longer we as people try to get good at a sport, the better we become at it. Think of it this way: if starcraft would have a continuous professional scene for a 100 years, do you think the level of play after that 100 years would be higher than it is now? I think it would. And that begs the question, at what level should the game be balanced? The current highest level, the highest level attainable by humans, something else?
The problem is that the entire premise is faulty, any balance act in a game or sport with equal sides will affect both "races." And while starting first in chess does make a difference as having the initiative tends to do, pretty much every other change would affect both sides (near) equally. That just isn't the case in Broodwar. You can lower the energy regeneration of medics by 25% and it will not affect the match ups without Terrans in any way at all, it also won't make Protoss or Zerg weaker but will strictly affect Terran. There's a reason why Chess rules have been relatively stable with just minor changes and additions over the centuries: Because at least at the first glance it seems perfectly fair. Broodwar doesn't, because Broodwar isn't. It's a game built around huge differences between the races, which is part of the reason why it's so incredibly popular, but that also means that it has the potential to become incredibly skewed towards one race. Honestly, the question we should ask ourselves isn't whether Terran or any other race is so strong, but why we are so lucky that it isn't worse, because several times in Broodwar's evolution there was a ton of potential for one race to be objectively way superior but the other races always caught up, making a balance patch not (blatantly) necessary. Broodwar was made by nerds in the 90s, it's not a work of God, so it's an incredible miracle that it stayed as balanced as it is now 20 years later despite active balancing having long ceased.
Edit for clarity: The game's inherently imbalanced, will never be balanced and seeing the pros try is fun, but it cannot be compared to chess since it can both be changed in a much easier fashion and you can actually directly weaken one side without directly affecting the other side in any way; Broodwar is also not equal in nearly any way, meaning that acts of balancing aren't just possible but also inherently necessary. Make no mistake, the game we have right now is not balanced, it's just close enough that people can agree to let it slide and certain things, like the extremely narrow techtree for zerg in the midgame or the lack of a real meaty lategame unit for Toss aside from the nowadays nearly never really seen and always situational carrier in comparison to the Zerg's Ultralisks/Guardians or the Siege Tank/Battlecruiser of the Terrans has always been a problem. Those things just don't seem like problems because we aren't used to thinking of them that way, we aren't used to questioning why protoss plays with zealots and dragoons for pretty much the entirety of the match even though neither (especially the dragoons) get incredibly strong due to upgrades like the zerglings later. We don't question these things because they've always been like that and they seem "balanced" despite being obvious weaknesses and Toss being the objectively weakest race judging from pro play alone, even if they are the easiest to play for a beginner. But we really should.
My posts were not about balance, but about levels of mastery. My hypothesis is that (i) the human race is better at chess than it is at starcraft and (ii) that if we ever get as good at starcraft as we are at chess now, things we percieve to be imbalanced now might be considered balanced then (and vice versa). Whether or not starcraft is inherently more imbalanced than chess, which your last post was about (that made total sense by the way), has no bearing on any of this.
The question of human mastery is only relevant in so far as how much we should ignore in regards to balancing because it will either work itself out or doesn't actually need balancing due to individual prowess. But neither is the case here, we've had 20 years of Starcraft with pretty obvious results and I suggest anybody who wants to ignore Flash should ignore Bisu and see what happens to the stats. Those are points I've mentioned before already, points which I feel make the comparison senseless. If you need a more practical one: We simply don't have the time to wait for centuries when it comes to Starcraft, I don't think we'll get to enjoy centuries of SC:BW, man.
Silent, I will disagree once again. At least I understood that the comparison was centered in between the rising skill level of players over time, which IS relevant in both BW and chess (and you responded about simmetry). And even though chess armies are symmetrical, there are changes that could reduce the imbalance while reducing white's power, and increasing black's one, namely "fair first move": "after player 1 makes the first move with the white pieces, player 2 has the option of either moving normally or choosing to switch colors (and then the game proceeds normally, with player 1 moving again and playing the black pieces for the rest of the game)".
Of course when both games are dissimilar certain comparisons should have little value, but it was not the case here, the comparison between skill level over time is similar, and relevant to the topic of arbitrary cutoffs from where to analyse the game balance by (also) using percentages of winning (for W/B or P/T/Z) in both games.
I also hope I will not offend you to say that you were responding to a strawman, and should feel bad.
Edit: And Armaggedon rules also tries to balance W/B while not affecting bot sides equally.
I responded about symmetry because there are clear disadvantages you simply cannot make up for in an asymmetrical game. The only unequal thing in Chess is the fact that white starts first, which has a pretty big impact on the game. Meanwhile Broodwar has a ton of unequal things about it, so of course it'll have a huge impact. I reponded about symmetry because it is directly related to the skill level as it can counterbalance that fact and CANNOT simply be discounted in a game which is not symmetrical.
And don't worry about the strawman, people build their argument while arguing it unless they're just repeating talking points from earlier conversations so responding to points both real and imagined can have value, though I think you just don't see the connection here that I do.
EDIT: Cut some unnecessarily quoted text.
PS: Armageddon rules don't change the internal rules of chess in any way, they generally give one player a bit more time and say that a draw is enough to win for one side, they have absolutely no effect on the actual mechanics and just change the environment of decision making for the players and the win-condition. It's like saying Protoss only needs to survive for 30 minutes to win and the Terran player gets a dead fish thrown at his face every 5 minutes. Sure it helps, but it doesn't change the actual balance inside of the game in any way, which makes it irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
EDIT2: I think the crux of my argument (rather philosophical side-discussions aside) is basically: No amount of waiting will change the inherent flaws and drawbacks of the Protoss race, waiting 100 years will not give Protoss a viable beefy ground unit to build a lategame army around, so you'll never not need several midgame armies in waves to beat Terran armies in the late game. It's a restriction set by the very game you cannot overcome with skill because the necessary tools don't exist in the game.
I know hitchhiker was considered t >> z at the time of saviors osl run. Might of ended up more balanced, or just happened to be statistically balanced despite an underlying imbalance, i dont know. I just remember at the time it was viewed as a slight t map.
The landscape of AfreecaTV has warped the distribution of the match-ups, and I think the overwhelming number of matches where the zerg player gets stomped (with Flash being one of the main culprits for the phenomenon) has shaped the current perception of the terran race to an unhealthy degree.
On January 11 2019 01:37 Alpha-NP- wrote: What’s a map that is good for Z in ZvT? Blue Storm?
I can't think of any imbalanced map in favour of Z in ZvT, but there are plenty of maps at 50% (Not CB or FS).
Here's some I can remember:
Ride of the Valkyries (48% TvZ)
Electric Circuit (not Neo) Dante's Peak Triathlon Battle Royale Flight Dreamliner Holy World Holy World SE
Although none of these had the biggest sample size.
Also see more recently Crossing Field Sparkle
I think one of the major components of making a map zerg favoured in ZvT is make it near impossible to leave your base. One thing Dante's Peak, Battle Royale, Flight Dreamliner, Holy World and Holy World SE feature is the aspect of having a huge amount of airspace around the mains where mutas can fly in at a lot of different angles while also having a relatively long rush distance by ground (especially on Flight Dreamliner).
Holy World and Holy World SE's main component alongside the above is the huge amount of open ground in the middle makes it very hard for Terran to go anywhere without either being countered or majorly surrounded.
Off topic but you prompted me to go back and review some OSL seasons. Reading through "2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3" really solidifies why Savior is one of the most incredible Starcraft players. How did he even win this tournament with the map pool?!? 2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3
Longinus " The fact that it still has somewhat passable statistics in ZvT has largely been attributed to sAviOr; without him the map stands at a grim 11-27 ZvT (29%). "
Arkanoid "NaDa dominated Arkanoid during the 2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 2, 2006-2007 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3, and 2007 Shinhan Bank OnGameNet Masters, reflected by his 15-2 record on both map versions combined" *Note Nada lost to Savior in the finals with this map in the pool
Reverse Temple "Zerg had a hard time against Terran on this map; aside from sAviOr, who went 6-1 on it, the TvZ statistics for this map are 14-3 in favor of Terran. "
That's interesting. Savior is such an outlier, the only non-T player to really dominate the scene (bonjwa) and apparently he even did it on maps that were rigged against Zerg.
The funny thing is, it doesn't seem like Savior had particularly great mechanics, at least not by pro standards. I know he was the first one to really perfect the 3-hatch macro Zerg style of play, but I'm surprised that it took so long for opponents to cope or for other zerg players to copy it. It almost seems like he rode to fame on the back of this one crazy build order and micro trick.
Also to go back to the idea that Tesagi is caused by the leaders... it really sucks for Zerg players that, after years of being beaten down by boxer-oov-nada, they finally get a real champion and it turns out he's a selfish piece of shit, lol. Somehow I doubt Savior was doing much mentoring or sharing his strategies.
Oh, and for toss players, they finally get a player who can win reliably at PvZ- Bisu- and... for some reason no one else can copy him. It's just weird. I've never understood why seemingly no one else can do what Bisu does. Not like he's a flash in the pan either, he's been winning at PvZ for a long time now. He might be the biggest outlier of them all.
On January 11 2019 01:37 Alpha-NP- wrote: What’s a map that is good for Z in ZvT? Blue Storm?
I can't think of any imbalanced map in favour of Z in ZvT, but there are plenty of maps at 50% (Not CB or FS).
Here's some I can remember:
Ride of the Valkyries (48% TvZ)
Electric Circuit (not Neo) Dante's Peak Triathlon Battle Royale Flight Dreamliner Holy World Holy World SE
Although none of these had the biggest sample size.
Also see more recently Crossing Field Sparkle
I think one of the major components of making a map zerg favoured in ZvT is make it near impossible to leave your base. One thing Dante's Peak, Battle Royale, Flight Dreamliner, Holy World and Holy World SE feature is the aspect of having a huge amount of airspace around the mains where mutas can fly in at a lot of different angles while also having a relatively long rush distance by ground (especially on Flight Dreamliner).
Holy World and Holy World SE's main component alongside the above is the huge amount of open ground in the middle makes it very hard for Terran to go anywhere without either being countered or majorly surrounded.
Off topic but you prompted me to go back and review some OSL seasons. Reading through "2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3" really solidifies why Savior is one of the most incredible Starcraft players. How did he even win this tournament with the map pool?!? 2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3
Longinus " The fact that it still has somewhat passable statistics in ZvT has largely been attributed to sAviOr; without him the map stands at a grim 11-27 ZvT (29%). "
Arkanoid "NaDa dominated Arkanoid during the 2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 2, 2006-2007 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3, and 2007 Shinhan Bank OnGameNet Masters, reflected by his 15-2 record on both map versions combined" *Note Nada lost to Savior in the finals with this map in the pool
Reverse Temple "Zerg had a hard time against Terran on this map; aside from sAviOr, who went 6-1 on it, the TvZ statistics for this map are 14-3 in favor of Terran. "
That's interesting. Savior is such an outlier, the only non-T player to really dominate the scene (bonjwa) and apparently he even did it on maps that were rigged against Zerg.
The funny thing is, it doesn't seem like Savior had particularly great mechanics, at least not by pro standards. I know he was the first one to really perfect the 3-hatch macro Zerg style of play, but I'm surprised that it took so long for opponents to cope or for other zerg players to copy it. It almost seems like he rode to fame on the back of this one crazy build order and micro trick.
Also to go back to the idea that Tesagi is caused by the leaders... it really sucks for Zerg players that, after years of being beaten down by boxer-oov-nada, they finally get a real champion and it turns out he's a selfish piece of shit, lol. Somehow I doubt Savior was doing much mentoring or sharing his strategies.
Oh, and for toss players, they finally get a player who can win reliably at PvZ- Bisu- and... for some reason no one else can copy him. It's just weird. I've never understood why seemingly no one else can do what Bisu does. Not like he's a flash in the pan either, he's been winning at PvZ for a long time now. He might be the biggest outlier of them all.
Yeah I am not sure what makes Bisu and Flash so different but it's interesting that, at least in my opinion, the greatest TvP is arguably stronger than the greatest PvT and the greatest PvZ is arguably stronger than the greatest ZvP. I think it's hard to say the same for ZvT but I guess one could argue that Jaedong was virtually neck and neck (in terms of head to head records) against Flash and Light.
I think Bisu's PvZ is so unique because his multitasking is so great, better than any other protoss. And PvZ allows for more harassment opportunities than PvT does. So Bisu is able to leverage his multitasking throughout an entire PvZ match to gain advantages: early zealot pressure, midgame sair/dt harassment, late-game storm drops, etc. But in PvT there's a lot less opportunity to do that (basically just early mid-game reaver drops and maybe late-game storm drops).
Maybe I'm way off though, but that's sorta always been my impression of his style. But he also just seems to know the MU so much better than anyone else, you never see him second-guess himself or be indecisive. Whereas his PvT has a lot more mistakes.
On January 11 2019 01:37 Alpha-NP- wrote: What’s a map that is good for Z in ZvT? Blue Storm?
I can't think of any imbalanced map in favour of Z in ZvT, but there are plenty of maps at 50% (Not CB or FS).
Here's some I can remember:
Ride of the Valkyries (48% TvZ)
Electric Circuit (not Neo) Dante's Peak Triathlon Battle Royale Flight Dreamliner Holy World Holy World SE
Although none of these had the biggest sample size.
Also see more recently Crossing Field Sparkle
I think one of the major components of making a map zerg favoured in ZvT is make it near impossible to leave your base. One thing Dante's Peak, Battle Royale, Flight Dreamliner, Holy World and Holy World SE feature is the aspect of having a huge amount of airspace around the mains where mutas can fly in at a lot of different angles while also having a relatively long rush distance by ground (especially on Flight Dreamliner).
Holy World and Holy World SE's main component alongside the above is the huge amount of open ground in the middle makes it very hard for Terran to go anywhere without either being countered or majorly surrounded.
Off topic but you prompted me to go back and review some OSL seasons. Reading through "2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3" really solidifies why Savior is one of the most incredible Starcraft players. How did he even win this tournament with the map pool?!? 2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3
Longinus " The fact that it still has somewhat passable statistics in ZvT has largely been attributed to sAviOr; without him the map stands at a grim 11-27 ZvT (29%). "
Arkanoid "NaDa dominated Arkanoid during the 2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 2, 2006-2007 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3, and 2007 Shinhan Bank OnGameNet Masters, reflected by his 15-2 record on both map versions combined" *Note Nada lost to Savior in the finals with this map in the pool
Reverse Temple "Zerg had a hard time against Terran on this map; aside from sAviOr, who went 6-1 on it, the TvZ statistics for this map are 14-3 in favor of Terran. "
Wow, I'm both in awe (of his skil)l and sadden( by his character) at the same time, while I was reading that.
That statistic along with his mechanics makes his dominance even more of an enigma compared to Flash. His mechanics was so different from the others that the first time I watched a Savior FPVOD, I thought I had clicked the wrong link and I was watching a normal video by an observer.
On January 11 2019 01:37 Alpha-NP- wrote: What’s a map that is good for Z in ZvT? Blue Storm?
I can't think of any imbalanced map in favour of Z in ZvT, but there are plenty of maps at 50% (Not CB or FS).
Here's some I can remember:
Ride of the Valkyries (48% TvZ)
Electric Circuit (not Neo) Dante's Peak Triathlon Battle Royale Flight Dreamliner Holy World Holy World SE
Although none of these had the biggest sample size.
Also see more recently Crossing Field Sparkle
I think one of the major components of making a map zerg favoured in ZvT is make it near impossible to leave your base. One thing Dante's Peak, Battle Royale, Flight Dreamliner, Holy World and Holy World SE feature is the aspect of having a huge amount of airspace around the mains where mutas can fly in at a lot of different angles while also having a relatively long rush distance by ground (especially on Flight Dreamliner).
Holy World and Holy World SE's main component alongside the above is the huge amount of open ground in the middle makes it very hard for Terran to go anywhere without either being countered or majorly surrounded.
Off topic but you prompted me to go back and review some OSL seasons. Reading through "2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3" really solidifies why Savior is one of the most incredible Starcraft players. How did he even win this tournament with the map pool?!? 2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3
Longinus " The fact that it still has somewhat passable statistics in ZvT has largely been attributed to sAviOr; without him the map stands at a grim 11-27 ZvT (29%). "
Arkanoid "NaDa dominated Arkanoid during the 2006 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 2, 2006-2007 Shinhan Bank OSL Season 3, and 2007 Shinhan Bank OnGameNet Masters, reflected by his 15-2 record on both map versions combined" *Note Nada lost to Savior in the finals with this map in the pool
Reverse Temple "Zerg had a hard time against Terran on this map; aside from sAviOr, who went 6-1 on it, the TvZ statistics for this map are 14-3 in favor of Terran. "
That's interesting. Savior is such an outlier, the only non-T player to really dominate the scene (bonjwa) and apparently he even did it on maps that were rigged against Zerg.
The funny thing is, it doesn't seem like Savior had particularly great mechanics, at least not by pro standards. I know he was the first one to really perfect the 3-hatch macro Zerg style of play, but I'm surprised that it took so long for opponents to cope or for other zerg players to copy it. It almost seems like he rode to fame on the back of this one crazy build order and micro trick.
Also to go back to the idea that Tesagi is caused by the leaders... it really sucks for Zerg players that, after years of being beaten down by boxer-oov-nada, they finally get a real champion and it turns out he's a selfish piece of shit, lol. Somehow I doubt Savior was doing much mentoring or sharing his strategies.
Oh, and for toss players, they finally get a player who can win reliably at PvZ- Bisu- and... for some reason no one else can copy him. It's just weird. I've never understood why seemingly no one else can do what Bisu does. Not like he's a flash in the pan either, he's been winning at PvZ for a long time now. He might be the biggest outlier of them all.
Yeah I am not sure what makes Bisu and Flash so different but it's interesting that, at least in my opinion, the greatest TvP is arguably stronger than the greatest PvT and the greatest PvZ is arguably stronger than the greatest ZvP. I think it's hard to say the same for ZvT but I guess one could argue that Jaedong was virtually neck and neck (in terms of head to head records) against Flash and Light.
What's funny is after watching Bisu for so long, I find PvZ my easiest matchup by far. The game just makes so much sense. I usually study and take his build orders for old maps that pop up in new friendly 1v1s. It's great. +1 speedlot bisu build changed the game for me too.
Changing topics slightly- what's the deal with Fake Yellow? Look at his stats: 1v1 Record: All: 154-144 (51.68%) vT: 66-43 (60.55%) vZ: 49-56 (46.67%) vP: 39-45 (46.43%)
As far as I know he's the only pro Zerg player ever who has a much better record against T than any other matchup. He's like the Zerg Bisu, except not as good. What did he do differently than everyone else? Was he just practicing ZvT nonstop and nothing else?
i can tell OP put a lot of effort into this, but his handling of statistics is a little bit questionable. multiple times he points out that the data don't agree with him but then handwaves it away with subjective explanations that are presented as obvious and unquestionable. adding more words and more graphs to an analysis doesn't make it more accurate
On January 13 2019 10:49 Luddite wrote: Changing topics slightly- what's the deal with Fake Yellow? Look at his stats: 1v1 Record: All: 154-144 (51.68%) vT: 66-43 (60.55%) vZ: 49-56 (46.67%) vP: 39-45 (46.43%)
As far as I know he's the only pro Zerg player ever who has a much better record against T than any other matchup. He's like the Zerg Bisu, except not as good. What did he do differently than everyone else? Was he just practicing ZvT nonstop and nothing else?
Interesting.. I am curious to find out more about why?
On January 13 2019 10:49 Luddite wrote: Changing topics slightly- what's the deal with Fake Yellow? Look at his stats: 1v1 Record: All: 154-144 (51.68%) vT: 66-43 (60.55%) vZ: 49-56 (46.67%) vP: 39-45 (46.43%)
As far as I know he's the only pro Zerg player ever who has a much better record against T than any other matchup. He's like the Zerg Bisu, except not as good. What did he do differently than everyone else? Was he just practicing ZvT nonstop and nothing else?
Interesting.. I am curious to find out more about why?
Yarnc had incredible muta micro. It was quite flawless at times vT. He and his brother looked to be dominant players before the scandal occured. Often while many drooled over savior or Jaedong, I was loving yarnc. I think his ban was the hardest for me personally.
On January 13 2019 10:49 Luddite wrote: Changing topics slightly- what's the deal with Fake Yellow? Look at his stats: 1v1 Record: All: 154-144 (51.68%) vT: 66-43 (60.55%) vZ: 49-56 (46.67%) vP: 39-45 (46.43%)
As far as I know he's the only pro Zerg player ever who has a much better record against T than any other matchup. He's like the Zerg Bisu, except not as good. What did he do differently than everyone else? Was he just practicing ZvT nonstop and nothing else?
He was, in my opinion, one of the main beneficiaries of the mutalisk micro-management revolution. Even when the three hatchery management versus terran was in vogue due to sAviOr, YellOw[ArnC] stuck to his own style and kept making two hatchery management work with his own unique approach.
He was the dude that held the torch for aggressive unit focused style of zergs, when July was no longer the best zerg player around, and when Jaedong had yet to rise to superstardom, YellOw[ArnC] was the one branching out to non-conventional builds to make most of his unit mastery. His sheer level of mutalisk micro-management may not have equaled Jaedong, but the way in which he understood how to use them, coupled with his high level of execution made him nearly unstoppable versus the terran race. He was simply born to use stacked mutalisks, and he was one of the earliest zerg players to send low health mutalisks away to replenish their health bars, instead of attacking with them non-stop until they died.
These sort of characteristics that made YellOw[ArnC] such a threat versus the terran race wasn't so helpful versus the protoss race, since the greatest advantage zerg has over the protoss race is the information superiority, not the ability to outplay their units with your own. The way in which you angle your attacks, or abuse the terrain isn't as important, and it is more about laying the foundations for the superior set-up when it comes to defeating the protoss race, in my opinon.
On January 13 2019 10:49 Luddite wrote: Changing topics slightly- what's the deal with Fake Yellow? Look at his stats: 1v1 Record: All: 154-144 (51.68%) vT: 66-43 (60.55%) vZ: 49-56 (46.67%) vP: 39-45 (46.43%)
As far as I know he's the only pro Zerg player ever who has a much better record against T than any other matchup. He's like the Zerg Bisu, except not as good. What did he do differently than everyone else? Was he just practicing ZvT nonstop and nothing else?
He was, in my opinion, one of the main beneficiaries of the mutalisk micro-management revolution. Even when the three hatchery management versus terran was in vogue due to sAviOr, YellOw[ArnC] stuck to his own style and kept making two hatchery management work with his own unique approach.
He was the dude that held the torch for aggressive unit focused style of zergs, when July was no longer the best zerg player around, and when Jaedong had yet to rise to superstardom, YellOw[ArnC] was the one branching out to non-conventional builds to make most of his unit mastery. His sheer level of mutalisk micro-management may not have equaled Jaedong, but the way in which he understood how to use them, coupled with his high level of execution made him nearly unstoppable versus the terran race. He was simply born to use stacked mutalisks, and he was one of the earliest zerg players to send low health mutalisks away to replenish their health bars, instead of attacking with them non-stop until they died.
These sort of characteristics that made YellOw[ArnC] such a threat versus the terran race wasn't so helpful versus the protoss race, since the greatest advantage zerg has over the protoss race is the information superiority, not the ability to outplay their units with your own. The way in which you angle your attacks, or abuse the terrain isn't as important, and it is more about laying the foundations for the superior set-up when it comes to defeating the protoss race, in my opinon.
His zvt stats are also less impressive when you consider that he only had about 110 ZvT matches before getting banned, (a lot for an average progamer, but jaedong had almost 3x as many). And he only qualified for a handful for individual leagues (and reached the BoX stage of even fewer), whereas jaedong has dozens of zvt matches vs the best tvzers ever in Bo5s. He had great muta micro no doubt, one of the best ever. But he had nowhere near the depth of jaedong.
Sorry not to say that you were implying he was better or as good as JD, just that you made me look at yarnc's TLPD again and it made me realize just how fucking impressive and good jaedong is haha.
Real Yellow also has a super impressive record considering he has dozens of ZvTs against the very best TvZers of his era in BoXs, AND a long slump and Airforce ACE games on his record and he still retired with a 54% ZvT record (and the second highest zvt ELO peak). Surprisingly Jaedong still has more recorded official ZvT matches than Yellow (274 to Yellow's 225).
Basically now that I think about it, the point of this post is that im a little drunk but FUCK jaedong is/was so damn good. I really hope he is able to participate in 1 more league before going to the army :\
I really like how balance was adjusted and maintained by map design only for 17 years (!) without a single "balance patch".
I wonder why this was never possible for sc2. I guess with one expansion too many and yearly game-breaking redesigns of the gameplay, it is just a different philosophy...
On January 14 2019 06:43 MrMischelito wrote: I really like how balance was adjusted and maintained by map design only for 17 years (!) without a single "balance patch".
I wonder why this was never possible for sc2. I guess with one expansion too many and yearly game-breaking redesigns of the gameplay, it is just a different philosophy...
I agree. I think the main difference between BW and SC2 is that SC2 is more volatile in that the games are much shorter, cheese is a lot more common and armies die a lot faster. All of these factors make it harder to come back from a disadvantage so the effect of imbalance is greater.
On January 13 2019 10:49 Luddite wrote: Changing topics slightly- what's the deal with Fake Yellow? Look at his stats: 1v1 Record: All: 154-144 (51.68%) vT: 66-43 (60.55%) vZ: 49-56 (46.67%) vP: 39-45 (46.43%)
As far as I know he's the only pro Zerg player ever who has a much better record against T than any other matchup. He's like the Zerg Bisu, except not as good. What did he do differently than everyone else? Was he just practicing ZvT nonstop and nothing else?
He was, in my opinion, one of the main beneficiaries of the mutalisk micro-management revolution. Even when the three hatchery management versus terran was in vogue due to sAviOr, YellOw[ArnC] stuck to his own style and kept making two hatchery management work with his own unique approach.
He was the dude that held the torch for aggressive unit focused style of zergs, when July was no longer the best zerg player around, and when Jaedong had yet to rise to superstardom, YellOw[ArnC] was the one branching out to non-conventional builds to make most of his unit mastery. His sheer level of mutalisk micro-management may not have equaled Jaedong, but the way in which he understood how to use them, coupled with his high level of execution made him nearly unstoppable versus the terran race. He was simply born to use stacked mutalisks, and he was one of the earliest zerg players to send low health mutalisks away to replenish their health bars, instead of attacking with them non-stop until they died.
These sort of characteristics that made YellOw[ArnC] such a threat versus the terran race wasn't so helpful versus the protoss race, since the greatest advantage zerg has over the protoss race is the information superiority, not the ability to outplay their units with your own. The way in which you angle your attacks, or abuse the terrain isn't as important, and it is more about laying the foundations for the superior set-up when it comes to defeating the protoss race, in my opinon.
His zvt stats are also less impressive when you consider that he only had about 110 ZvT matches before getting banned, (a lot for an average progamer, but jaedong had almost 3x as many). And he only qualified for a handful for individual leagues (and reached the BoX stage of even fewer), whereas jaedong has dozens of zvt matches vs the best tvzers ever in Bo5s. He had great muta micro no doubt, one of the best ever. But he had nowhere near the depth of jaedong.
Sorry not to say that you were implying he was better or as good as JD, just that you made me look at yarnc's TLPD again and it made me realize just how fucking impressive and good jaedong is haha.
Real Yellow also has a super impressive record considering he has dozens of ZvTs against the very best TvZers of his era in BoXs, AND a long slump and Airforce ACE games on his record and he still retired with a 54% ZvT record (and the second highest zvt ELO peak). Surprisingly Jaedong still has more recorded official ZvT matches than Yellow (274 to Yellow's 225).
Basically now that I think about it, the point of this post is that im a little drunk but FUCK jaedong is/was so damn good. I really hope he is able to participate in 1 more league before going to the army :\
Even if we limit the topic soley to mutalisk micro-management, I don't think YellOw[ArnC] wasn't even mechanically superior compared to Jaedong. However, I do believe that he had at times a slightly more nuanced understanding of mutalisk usage, especially within the context of his trademark two hatchery builds. Jaedong was fantastic at two hatchery builds as well, but once we account for their general level of play, YellOw[ArnC] gave me the impression he was born to play two hatchery mutalisks.
If we contrast zerg-versus-terran ability compared to their fellow contemporary peers in two year time-frame blocks, nobody can match YellOw.
Top three zergs in terms of number of victories versus the terran race from 2001/02/16 to 2003/02/16 (data taken from TLPD):
1. YellOw (2001/02/16 ~ 2003/02/16)
ZvT record: 97-53 (64.67%)
2. JinNam (2001/02/16 ~ 2003/02/16)
ZvT record: 53-68 (43.80%)
2. H.O.T-Forever (2001/02/16 ~ 2003/02/16)
ZvT record: 52-50 (50.98%)
These three zergs are the only zergs from this era to have gathered over 50 victories versus the terran race within a professional setting over the course of two years. YellOw not only has nearly double the number of victories, he does it so with a drastically higher win rate.
Top three zergs in terms of number of victories versus the terran race from 2007/07/02 to 2009/07/02 (data taken from TLPD):
1. Jaedong (2007/07/02 ~ 2009/07/02)
ZvT record: 95-45 (67.86%)
2. EffOrt (2007/07/02 ~ 2009/07/02)
ZvT record: 49-19 (72.06%)
3. YellOw[ArnC] (2007/07/02 ~ 2009/07/02)
ZvT record: 44-18 (70.97%)
While Jaedong is the only zerg from this period of time to gain over 50 victories versus the terran race within a professional setting, and has nearly double the number of victories compared to his contemporary peers, there are fellow zerg players who have comparable, or even higher win rates (yes, I understand it becomes harder to sustain win rates as you become more successful and play versus harder opponents, but YellOw managed to do it whereas Jaedong couldn't).
So yes (unless I am mistaken), Jaedong was the only zerg in history apart from YellOw to have roughly double the number of victories versus the terran race when contrasted to his contemporary zerg peers, within a prolonged time-frame of two years, but YellOw did it in a much more impressive manner, once you factor in the status of zerg-versus-terran match-up at the time.
However, this is selective bias that works against Jaedong (he is the litmus test for literally all great zerg feats afterall). Jaedong's true value shines once we remove caveats such as this to include all match-ups, with extended time-frames, whereas YellOw's field of excellence where his results can be interpreted as being more impressive is much more narrow in range.
I think if you simply just change the PvZ match up to be less dodgy it'll make protoss more tournament viable. where once protoss loses scouting probe to speedlings they have to have the instincts of flash to anticipate any all-in type of strategies like 3 hatch hydra,etc. I'd say cannons should warp in a little faster to account for the hydras coming in or a combination of that and having hydra upgrades like atk range and movement speed take a little longer or more gas to research. That won't change Zerg's other match ups and will allow protoss to stop losing to stupid shit that gives zerg all the decision power in the game. A good example of a Zerg taking advantage of 3 hatch hydra is JD vs Rain. Rain did make a mistake by leaving his wall in open which resulted in his cannons not warping in time for the hydras later but he defended well with probes to buy time but he took such an economic hit he was so behind, when he tried to scout with zealots since his probes couldn't get out to see anything, but other than that one mistake, I don't see why Rain should be punished so heavily for a low risk but high reward strategy done by any zerg much less JD.
Zergs used to get punished badly with failing to end the game with 3 hatch hydra but now they have calculated with precision how much damage they can inflict on protoss to equalize the game at the bare minimum or be ahead, but the risk was so low to begin with it's why zergs are rewarded to do a low risk but high payoff strategy like this. Normally it should be high risk high reward, but not so in ZvP. Protoss makes a critical mistake early game, they lose outright, if they don't, game continues.
I think everyone can agree the PvZ match up is fairly balanced once you enter mid-late game and it's up to the player's skill and not simply lucky or not mind reading what zerg is doing at all times. I know mind games are good but not when there's little chance for the other player to reasonably anticipate vs the risk and reward relative to the zerg player is taking. There needs to be an equilibrium of how much zerg is risking for a high payoff vs a protoss just losing outright because of one error. We understand this concept when someone does a cheesy strat, it may be harder to scout and anticipate when it's done sparingly but the risk is you lose the game if it doesn't work unless you somehow manage to do enough damage with it. Zerg all-in cheeses are easier to transition into mid to late game relative to other cheeses with other races and match ups with not as much repercussions while Protoss has to stay vigilant at all times.
Because protoss gets knocked out more easily in PvZ, that makes Terran's harder match up less prevalent giving them the best statistical odds of winning in any given tournament.
As for TvZ, I think zerg have finally been able to successfully defend their 3rd base without much problems in a standard game. It isn't on a knife edge as it has been in the past where if Zerg makes one critical mistake they can lose their 3rd and then lose the game as compared to the PvZ match up. I think players like soulkey and larva have mapped out the ZvT match up in their favor and only supreme Terrans like Flash and Last can contest them.
The key issue is mainly PvZ, protoss has no viable way of scouting zerg if they decide to get speedlings, zealots just get traded inefficiently until protoss gets +1 or splash dmg and until they get corsair for scouting which will be too late for the all-ins.
One solution without any balance patches would be for protoss to stop being greedy and just cannon up to 2-3 cannons if they see speedling tech, which will buy themselves more time if they sniff out a hydra bust coming. But would that equalize out if zerg decides to fake out the protoss and just go economy from there? This would delay protoss's 1st push and harassing speedlots.
And I dont know why protoss don't practice their corsair control more, if they keep corsairs alive like bisu does all game, muta switches and ht snipes would happen much less. Or getting DA tech.
Because of the match ups and how they play out, Terrans have tournament match up statistics on their side simply because of PvZ. I don't think Terrans are Tesagi vs Zerg. I've seen enough Zergs to dominate good Terrans to see how Zerg can punish sloppy Terran play and vice versa with an equilibrium of risk/pay off rewards. If a Terran makes a risky play but it pays off then great, but the Terran can get punished heavily for it, then I think that's fine balance wise.
On January 15 2019 08:48 Moopower wrote: I think if you simply just change the PvZ match up to be less dodgy it'll make protoss more tournament viable. where once protoss loses scouting probe to speedlings they have to have the instincts of flash to anticipate any all-in type of strategies like 3 hatch hydra,etc. I'd say cannons should warp in a little faster to account for the hydras coming in or a combination of that and having hydra upgrades like atk range and movement speed take a little longer or more gas to research. That won't change Zerg's other match ups and will allow protoss to stop losing to stupid shit that gives zerg all the decision power in the game. A good example of a Zerg taking advantage of 3 hatch hydra is JD vs Rain. Rain did make a mistake by leaving his wall in open which resulted in his cannons not warping in time for the hydras later but he defended well with probes to buy time but he took such an economic hit he was so behind, when he tried to scout with zealots since his probes couldn't get out to see anything, but other than that one mistake, I don't see why Rain should be punished so heavily for a low risk but high reward strategy done by any zerg much less JD.
Zergs used to get punished badly with failing to end the game with 3 hatch hydra but now they have calculated with precision how much damage they can inflict on protoss to equalize the game at the bare minimum or be ahead, but the risk was so low to begin with it's why zergs are rewarded to do a low risk but high payoff strategy like this. Normally it should be high risk high reward, but not so in ZvP. Protoss makes a critical mistake early game, they lose outright, if they don't, game continues.
I think everyone can agree the PvZ match up is fairly balanced once you enter mid-late game and it's up to the player's skill and not simply lucky or not mind reading what zerg is doing at all times. I know mind games are good but not when there's little chance for the other player to reasonably anticipate vs the risk and reward relative to the zerg player is taking. There needs to be an equilibrium of how much zerg is risking for a high payoff vs a protoss just losing outright because of one error. We understand this concept when someone does a cheesy strat, it may be harder to scout and anticipate when it's done sparingly but the risk is you lose the game if it doesn't work unless you somehow manage to do enough damage with it. Zerg all-in cheeses are easier to transition into mid to late game relative to other cheeses with other races and match ups with not as much repercussions while Protoss has to stay vigilant at all times.
Because protoss gets knocked out more easily in PvZ, that makes Terran's harder match up less prevalent giving them the best statistical odds of winning in any given tournament.
As for TvZ, I think zerg have finally been able to successfully defend their 3rd base without much problems in a standard game. It isn't on a knife edge as it has been in the past where if Zerg makes one critical mistake they can lose their 3rd and then lose the game as compared to the PvZ match up. I think players like soulkey and larva have mapped out the ZvT match up in their favor and only supreme Terrans like Flash and Last can contest them.
The key issue is mainly PvZ, protoss has no viable way of scouting zerg if they decide to get speedlings, zealots just get traded inefficiently until protoss gets +1 or splash dmg and until they get corsair for scouting which will be too late for the all-ins.
One solution without any balance patches would be for protoss to stop being greedy and just cannon up to 2-3 cannons if they see speedling tech, which will buy themselves more time if they sniff out a hydra bust coming. But would that equalize out if zerg decides to fake out the protoss and just go economy from there? This would delay protoss's 1st push and harassing speedlots.
And I dont know why protoss don't practice their corsair control more, if they keep corsairs alive like bisu does all game, muta switches and ht snipes would happen much less. Or getting DA tech.
Because of the match ups and how they play out, Terrans have tournament match up statistics on their side simply because of PvZ. I don't think Terrans are Tesagi vs Zerg. I've seen enough Zergs to dominate good Terrans to see how Zerg can punish sloppy Terran play and vice versa with an equilibrium of risk/pay off rewards. If a Terran makes a risky play but it pays off then great, but the Terran can get punished heavily for it, then I think that's fine balance wise.
On January 14 2019 06:43 MrMischelito wrote: I really like how balance was adjusted and maintained by map design only for 17 years (!) without a single "balance patch".
I wonder why this was never possible for sc2. I guess with one expansion too many and yearly game-breaking redesigns of the gameplay, it is just a different philosophy...
Broodwar was a game first and then became a real e-sport after people learned to play around its quirks. Sc2 tried to be an esport immediately without letting the community build strategies around its imbalances.
On January 14 2019 06:43 MrMischelito wrote: I really like how balance was adjusted and maintained by map design only for 17 years (!) without a single "balance patch".
I wonder why this was never possible for sc2. I guess with one expansion too many and yearly game-breaking redesigns of the gameplay, it is just a different philosophy...
Broodwar was a game first and then became a real e-sport after people learned to play around its quirks. Sc2 tried to be an esport immediately without letting the community build strategies around its imbalances.
No offense, Im very glad Blizzard didnt just leave SC2 as it was in WoL, like seriously, come on.
On January 19 2019 01:32 Psyonic_Reaver wrote: I feel Flash would have dominated no matter which race he played.
How about Savior who used to practice Terran in order to understand the matchup better? I think if Savior chose Terran he could have been up there with Flash and Nada.
On January 19 2019 01:32 Psyonic_Reaver wrote: I feel Flash would have dominated no matter which race he played.
How about Savior who used to practice Terran in order to understand the matchup better? I think if Savior chose Terran he could have been up there with Flash and Nada.
Disagree.
sAviOr still plays, and he's not even remotely close to the same level that a top zerg like EffOrt is. He's STILL doing the same shit he always used to do even after all these years. He's barely changed the way he plays at all.
Flash and NaDa are both incredibly creative and innovative. Hell, we've just seen NaDa come up with a crazy strategy in TvZ. Flash has so many variations in his TvZ builds that completely destroy zergs with unique timing attacks.
sAviOr was absolutely incredible in 2006 (especially near the end of 2006) no one is going to deny that. It takes immense talent to do what he did. But the reason why he couldn't survive the test of time has nothing to do with the race he played.
On January 10 2019 21:50 vOdToasT wrote: At lower levels, Protoss is the strongest, but that doesn't matter; just git gud.
At very high levels, Protoss is slightly weaker than Zerg and Terran. We should solve this with maps. Blue Storm is an example of a Protoss favoured PvZ map, and La Mancha is an example of a Protoss favoured PvT map. I'm not saying that we should make it imbalanced in the other direction, but I am saying that we should adopt maps that are slightly more Protoss favoured than the norm is today (No more FS and CB).
What would a map that is good for Protoss in both PvZ and PvT look like? The third base for Terran would need to be difficult to take, or be a mineral only, or both. Taking a fourth base should also be made difficult for mech. For PvZ, we should avoid free main bases behind natural expos. Make expansions very open and hard to defend with sunken spore lurker. If Terran only gets a mineral only, but Protoss gets a full expansion, that's good for Protoss.
An additional possibility is to go with very open, hard to defend expansions, but to also give players an expansion with two geysers that is not viable for mech as a third base, but which is viable for P and Z. Giving this one base a choke point might be better for P in PvZ.
Edit: Statistics from various time periods, as well as strategic analysis, prove that my claims about La Mancha and Blue Storm are correct. Thus, it is possible to make maps that are better for Protoss. We should admit that Protoss is slightly weak on FS and CB, and move on to more Protoss favoured (thus more balanced) maps. I am not advocating for going so far that it actually becomes imbalanced. I only advocate moving slightly in the direction of what is Protoss favoured.
Other examples of Protoss favoured maps include Outlier and Central Plains. These maps, especially Central Plains, went too far and were actually significantly imbalanced in favour of Protoss in both match ups, but they prove that balance is all about maps. That Protoss is slightly underpowered in the normal ecosystem is a result of maps.
I really thought this post was interesting Voddy. How would a map look like that is favorable to Zerg in ZvT? And why is Blue Storm P favored in PvZ?
On January 10 2019 21:50 vOdToasT wrote: At lower levels, Protoss is the strongest, but that doesn't matter; just git gud.
At very high levels, Protoss is slightly weaker than Zerg and Terran. We should solve this with maps. Blue Storm is an example of a Protoss favoured PvZ map, and La Mancha is an example of a Protoss favoured PvT map. I'm not saying that we should make it imbalanced in the other direction, but I am saying that we should adopt maps that are slightly more Protoss favoured than the norm is today (No more FS and CB).
What would a map that is good for Protoss in both PvZ and PvT look like? The third base for Terran would need to be difficult to take, or be a mineral only, or both. Taking a fourth base should also be made difficult for mech. For PvZ, we should avoid free main bases behind natural expos. Make expansions very open and hard to defend with sunken spore lurker. If Terran only gets a mineral only, but Protoss gets a full expansion, that's good for Protoss.
An additional possibility is to go with very open, hard to defend expansions, but to also give players an expansion with two geysers that is not viable for mech as a third base, but which is viable for P and Z. Giving this one base a choke point might be better for P in PvZ.
Edit: Statistics from various time periods, as well as strategic analysis, prove that my claims about La Mancha and Blue Storm are correct. Thus, it is possible to make maps that are better for Protoss. We should admit that Protoss is slightly weak on FS and CB, and move on to more Protoss favoured (thus more balanced) maps. I am not advocating for going so far that it actually becomes imbalanced. I only advocate moving slightly in the direction of what is Protoss favoured.
Other examples of Protoss favoured maps include Outlier and Central Plains. These maps, especially Central Plains, went too far and were actually significantly imbalanced in favour of Protoss in both match ups, but they prove that balance is all about maps. That Protoss is slightly underpowered in the normal ecosystem is a result of maps.
I really thought this post was interesting Voddy. How would a map look like that is favorable to Zerg in ZvT? And why is Blue Storm P favored in PvZ?
Zerg maps are ones that have close air range. For example:
When I think of Starcraft and unfairness I think about micro physics and mechanical error that is present in computers, machines which may do a lot but are also all different and unique and prone to failures and shortcomings equally unique and individual. I think of playing Starcraft like trying to jump start a car, takes one or two working engines and some cables. Is it unfair that some cars engines run faster better and cleaner than others? Yes
On January 30 2019 16:52 MightyBeast wrote: When I think of Starcraft and unfairness I think about micro physics and mechanical error that is present in computers, machines which may do a lot but are also all different and unique and prone to failures and shortcomings equally unique and individual. I think of playing Starcraft like trying to jump start a car, takes one or two working engines and some cables. Is it unfair that some cars engines run faster better and cleaner than others? Yes
This is how you make a decent conclusion with 1% of work: - how often was zesagi argued? - how often was prosagi argued? - how often was tesagi argued?
Conclusion, Tesagi exists. To which degree? Read the OP.
They were briefly mentioned before by others, so I wanted to plug a couple of old posts I made on my own analysis of Terran in the BW balance equation: Balance and Bonjwas Part 1 and Part 2. My larger thoughts on Terran in the balance game at the pro level (in essence exactly this topic) are contained there. Ultimately I came to the conclusion described in this blog post: definitions are key and we can’t really agree on those so all this stuff ultimately tends to go nowhere.
In addition, I do have to share a couple other problems I see with the data set that we’re looking at. First, I’d say we’re working with a very small sample size of what can be semi-formally considered “pro games” - the post Kespa era kind of blurs the line and makes it hard to analyze that in a meaningful way because balance is very skill-sensitive. But more worrisome than that, the BW scene right now isn’t exactly organically developed; balance depends often far more on which top tier players from a bygone era return or play at their peak than on who, over time, developed to be the best. Same thing was true at the tail end of the BW era when players were jumping ship to SC2, and it throws massive noise into the entire process. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to stick to only pro games myself.
Always one of those recurring topic that draws big crowds, and I’m a bit sorry I was late to the party since it seems like we already had it out for this round of Terran balance talk.
On January 30 2019 21:17 niteReloaded wrote: This is how you make a decent conclusion with 1% of work: - how often was zesagi argued? - how often was prosagi argued? - how often was tesagi argued?
Conclusion, Tesagi exists. To which degree? Read the OP.
I think a discussion about balance is more meaningful when we talk about intended game outcome vs what we have. Like, im not interested in whether pvt is 'balanced', since thats up in the air, ambiguous as to what level we should be aiming at, and contriveable with maps. What i want is a match up with strategical complexity, strategical growth on both sides of the matchup [reactively and proactively], multiple possible styles, etc.
Like, if were purely framing the discussion as a point of balance, we miss discussing the mirrors, which do need discussion. zvz unquestionably doesnt meet the standards of the other matchups.
You could make a case that zvt is balanced as is, at least in the sense of: we are basically all ok with it. But is the gameplay what we should really want? Terran has a huge array of strategical options [which is likely a large factor in their historic dominance in the matchup and generally] whereas zerg has very little. In the late game, terran has many options-- all of which are countered by dark swarm and camping, which also happens to be every non cheese zerg gameplan. Use defilers cost efficiently and camp until your economy is overwhelming. It may or may not be balanced; but is it the proper kind of design going forward? zvt as played is also hugely destructive physically, which should bear into the conversation as well.
edit: similar question about zvp, balanced or not, is the best design a matchup where protoss play a game of 'catch the all in' half the time [and almost all pvz cheeses are out of meta and hurt by current map design] ?
More important than ambiguous balance: well developed match ups. Thats the discussion we should be aiming at.
edit: remember, that behind every sentiment of decrying something as imbalanced is this: I am not enjoying x matchup, I find it frustrating to play. imbalance complaints are not merely whining, they are gameplay criticisms to be taken seriously.
I recently opened the tab in bw which displays the race win-percentages per map. Some of the numbers: HBR - toss have won 40% of their games. Aztec- toss have won 40% of their games. CB - toss have won 40% of their games. FS - toss have won 41% of their games.
How would those numbers match the - widely as gospel seen - assumption that P is not at a disadvantage up until the top-top level?
On January 31 2019 19:09 molotow[eef] wrote: I recently opened the tab in bw which displays the race win-percentages per map. Some of the numbers: HBR - toss have won 40% of their games. Aztec- toss have won 40% of their games. CB - toss have won 40% of their games. FS - toss have won 41% of their games.
How would those numbers match the - widely as gospel seen - assumption that P is not at a disadvantage up until the top-top level?
There is something else to take into consideration for statistics, it's the number of players. I believe there are more protoss than zerg and terran, therefore it's bound to lower their winrate. To have reliable stats we would need to know how many players there are in each race.
On January 31 2019 19:09 molotow[eef] wrote: I recently opened the tab in bw which displays the race win-percentages per map. Some of the numbers: HBR - toss have won 40% of their games. Aztec- toss have won 40% of their games. CB - toss have won 40% of their games. FS - toss have won 41% of their games.
How would those numbers match the - widely as gospel seen - assumption that P is not at a disadvantage up until the top-top level?
There is something else to take into consideration for statistics, it's the number of players. I believe there are more protoss than zerg and terran, therefore it's bound to lower their winrate. To have reliable stats we would need to know how many players there are in each race.
Really, it would? If you consider each player to be distributed on the ladder randomly then the more players would make your playerbase better conform to the curve, which would seem to result in being closer to a 50% win rate.
This assumes, of course, that the protoss players have an equal talent distribution as the terran and zerg players.
On January 31 2019 19:09 molotow[eef] wrote: I recently opened the tab in bw which displays the race win-percentages per map. Some of the numbers: HBR - toss have won 40% of their games. Aztec- toss have won 40% of their games. CB - toss have won 40% of their games. FS - toss have won 41% of their games.
How would those numbers match the - widely as gospel seen - assumption that P is not at a disadvantage up until the top-top level?
It says that toss have won '40% of games', not '40% of their games', big difference and given blizzards track record with recording stats in RM I doubt thats even accurate.
Oh yeah, that would make sense, whenalso in the German version it says "Haben 40% IHRER Spiele gewonnen", which translates to "have won 40% of THEIR games".
Except that terrans already have 4 players in the r016, which is 1 off their perfect divide; you wouldnt expect a race, even an imbalanced race, to dominate the r016 statistically, especially after one of their top players dropped out of the tournament entirely. If flash were here, terran would have their exact 'half' of the proportion of remaining players. Sharp and mind are favoured to get out of their groups, if lasts wrists hold up, he will get out as well. If flash were here, he would of gotten out, obviously. There could be 3 terrans in the r08, which is huge, if things were a bit different we could reasonably of expected four. A bunch of newbs, chokers, and retireers returning, failing in early stages, does not constitute evidence that terran isnt imbalanced.
On February 01 2019 01:20 Dazed. wrote: There could be 3 terrans in the r08, which is huge
Well, one more and they're half, so theres no way to construe it as anything other than quite significant.
Let me switch it around on you. "One less and they're less than a third, so under-represented. There absolutely is a way to construe it as anything other than significant." Have you taken stats courses?
Let's say we have a drawer with 8 red socks, 8 blue socks, and 8 green socks. We draw socks at random until we have eight socks. What are the possible configurations for how many socks we have?
R/B/G 8/0/0, 0/8/0, 0/0/8 7/1/0, 7/0/1, 170, 071, 107, 017 611, 161, 116 620, 602, 260, 062, 206, 026... so on and so forth. A lot of combinations, right?
However, it should be obvious that it is less likely to select 8 red socks than it is to select, say, 4 green, 2 blue, and 2 red socks. I'm assuming you know basic probability, so I won't go into the math here. Take my word for it that this fact wouldn't change even if we had 100 of each sock (which is far more than there are representatives of each race in the current Brood War scene that are viable Ro8 candidates).
Similarly, it is obvious that the most likely configuration of randomly chosen socks will be 332. This means that out of 8 players in the Ro8, a distribution of 3 Terran 3 Protoss and 2 Zerg is about as close to perfect balance as we could have represented. Or 2 Terran 3 Protoss 3 Zerg. Or 3 Terran 2 Protoss 3 Zerg. In fact, even 4/2/2 is not that unlikely of a random draw.
Point being, what you're trying to argue is "quite significant" is actually completely insignificant from a statistical and probability standpoint.
Yeah, Jealous is right. Most past ASLs had 4/2/2 or 3/3/2 distribution (I'd imagine this is same for MSL and OSL overall). Only the first one had 5/2/1 distribution so just looking at that, I would say you need one race to make up 5/8 or more of the ro8 to call it unlikely (and since improbable does not mean impossible, it still does not necessarily suggest imbalance).
I made a compilation of Ro8/Ro4 appearances for every race (too much free time hehe). This is for ASL1-6, KSL1-2 and also VNSL (as ASL0) Ro8: Terran: 27 Flash(6), Last(6), Sharp(5), Mind(4), Sea(2), Ssak(2), Mong(1), Leta(1)
On February 01 2019 07:50 ortseam wrote: I made a compilation of Ro8/Ro4 appearances for every race (too much free time hehe). This is for ASL1-6, KSL1-2 and also Ro4 includes that single SSL season
I just compiled the stats, they don't necessarily mean much in terms of balance. Also you have to think about player pool, things like military service, players not playing tournaments by decision (for example Bisu has only played 3 of all 9 tournaments), Not to mention SSL was 8 players who qualified with ... fanvoting, so maybe I should remove those from Ro4(becomes 12/10/10 with Effort/Free/Soulkey/Mind having one less appearance, at least I didn't count the Ro8)
Edit: I will actually remove SSL and add VNSL, since Koreans counted that as "ASL S0" when calculating the group tiers and top 4 was seeded into ASL1
Edit2: Effort and Shuttle failed to make it out of the groups they made for themselves, so it's not always guaranteed (yeah that was supposed to be an edit, not a quote)
edit: similar question about zvp, balanced or not, is the best design a matchup where protoss play a game of 'catch the all in' half the time [and almost all pvz cheeses are out of meta and hurt by current map design] ?
The big problem is that zerg cheeses are not really all-ins, they can try to hydra-bust, succeed in a great percentage of tries, and when they don't, they can still transition to middle-late games easily. Of course your question was rethorical, certainly the MU could be better designed, so to speak.
My theory is things may be the way they are because they are the way the tournament runners want.
In other words, So long as the racial distribution in Ro16, Ro8, Ro4 are good, they are overall happy.
They are more concerned with the racial distribution of each tournament than who wins. It's less of a problem if Flash wins every tournament than if there are tons of mirror matches, cause overall, mirror matches are what people like watching the least.
So, if the current balance leads to good distributions during most of the tournament (which it does), life is good. The fact that Terran wins something like triple the tournaments Protoss wins is less important.
Also want to note that different stages of tournaments are very different in how they play out. I.e. Balance is different in a prepared Bo5 than in pools full of first-to-one cheeses.
Tesagi does exist! It's because we, terran master race, are the apex organisms in the Galaxy, while Zergs are the rags we wipe the floors, and Protoss are a funny space humpty dumpties that even have no mouth.
On February 01 2019 17:42 hitthat wrote: Tesagi does exist! It's because we, terran master race, are the apex organisms in the Galaxy, while Zergs are the rags we wipe the floors, and Protoss are a funny space humpty dumpties that even have no mouth.
Lore-wise, Terrans should be the least dominating of the three races. Protoss are clearly the more technical advanced humanoid race and the Zerg Swarm has nearly unlimited amounts of troops, the ability to evolve and adapt into any environmental and strategical nessecity, plus ultimate control by the overmind/kerrigan.
So, in short i think lore-wise zerg and protoss are at pari, both also representing two different aspects of the master race, xel naga, while terran is perhaps most agressive in space colonisation but technological the least developed.
(In my consideration im leaving the sc2 plotline out intentionally, because i consider it not canonic due to various reasons)
On February 01 2019 17:42 hitthat wrote: Tesagi does exist! It's because we, terran master race, are the apex organisms in the Galaxy, while Zergs are the rags we wipe the floors, and Protoss are a funny space humpty dumpties that even have no mouth.
Lore-wise, Terrans should be the least dominating of the three races. Protoss are clearly the more technical advanced humanoid race and the Zerg Swarm has nearly unlimited amounts of troops, the ability to evolve and adapt into any environmental and strategical nessecity, plus ultimate control by the overmind/kerrigan.
So, in short i think lore-wise zerg and protoss are at pari, both also representing two different aspects of the master race, xel naga, while terran is perhaps most agressive in space colonisation but technological the least developed.
(In my consideration im leaving the sc2 plotline out intentionally, because i consider it not canonic due to various reasons)
Considering the UED's expedition force caused such a headache for everyone, fairly sure in-game Terrans are the strongest.
One of the comments here suggested that maybe the perceived T dominance in tournaments is due the relative volatilities of the mirror matchups. I like this hypothesis because its so mathematical.
In TvT, there is little volatility; the better player usually wins. ZvZ is known for its high volatility, people call it a rock-paper-scissor matchup, highly depended on chance. Also PvP sees many wins when the players open 2gate-obs, 3gate or DTs (2gate-obs > DTs > 3gate > 2gate-obs).
The idea is that the mirror matchups shake out the bad Ts, but not the bad Zs or Ps. So it's not the T>Z>P>T that drives the unequal distribution, but the fact that mediocre Zs and Ps can advance on their mirror matchups.
I made a little monte-carlo-esque simulation of it. And if you accept that the volatility of is highest in PvP and lowest in TvT, you will see that Ts win most tourneys, and Ps the least.
On February 01 2019 17:42 hitthat wrote: Tesagi does exist! It's because we, terran master race, are the apex organisms in the Galaxy, while Zergs are the rags we wipe the floors, and Protoss are a funny space humpty dumpties that even have no mouth.
Lore-wise, Terrans should be the least dominating of the three races. Protoss are clearly the more technical advanced humanoid race and the Zerg Swarm has nearly unlimited amounts of troops, the ability to evolve and adapt into any environmental and strategical nessecity, plus ultimate control by the overmind/kerrigan.
So, in short i think lore-wise zerg and protoss are at pari, both also representing two different aspects of the master race, xel naga, while terran is perhaps most agressive in space colonisation but technological the least developed.
(In my consideration im leaving the sc2 plotline out intentionally, because i consider it not canonic due to various reasons)
There's no way that Terrans expand more aggressively than the Zerg
On February 03 2019 22:28 Navane wrote: One of the comments here suggested that maybe the perceived T dominance in tournaments is due the relative volatilities of the mirror matchups. I like this hypothesis because its so mathematical.
In TvT, there is little volatility; the better player usually wins. ZvZ is known for its high volatility, people call it a rock-paper-scissor matchup, highly depended on chance. Also PvP sees many wins when the players open 2gate-obs, 3gate or DTs (2gate-obs > DTs > 3gate > 2gate-obs).
The idea is that the mirror matchups shake out the bad Ts, but not the bad Zs or Ps. So it's not the T>Z>P>T that drives the unequal distribution, but the fact that mediocre Zs and Ps can advance on their mirror matchups.
I made a little monte-carlo-esque simulation of it. And if you accept that the volatility of is highest in PvP and lowest in TvT, you will see that Ts win most tourneys, and Ps the least.
Thing is, zvz and pvp volatility has been overstated. Top level zvz players players pull out as consistent results as terrans in mirrors, pvp too. Remember bisus like, 80% pvp record over the course of a year? 2009~ i think
edit: 36 wins - 7 losses (83.72%) from 2008-12-03 to 2009-10-28
obviously bisus superlative and so was jaedong but its not as if the players below them had results indicative of randomness or high volatility, you have players with years of consistent and explicable results.
Lore-wise, Terrans should be the least dominating of the three races. Protoss are clearly the more technical advanced humanoid race and the Zerg Swarm has nearly unlimited amounts of troops, the ability to evolve and adapt into any environmental and strategical nessecity, plus ultimate control by the overmind/kerrigan.
(This is not a thread about lore but as you brought it up): What does "more technologically advanced" mean? At least one has to consider that there are different fields where a race can be more or less advanced on.
I always find it funny when in films/games it's the blaster-weapon/psy-magic-users who're labeled "more advanced" when none of them came up with anything as destructive as firearms, meaning gunpowder and bullets, rockets (not to mention nukes). The latter are probably more wasteful in terms of resources but what effs if you can colonize and mine on infinite planets?
As for Zergs, they're obviously on "kill it with fire"-level.
Lore-wise, Terrans should be the least dominating of the three races. Protoss are clearly the more technical advanced humanoid race and the Zerg Swarm has nearly unlimited amounts of troops, the ability to evolve and adapt into any environmental and strategical nessecity, plus ultimate control by the overmind/kerrigan.
(This is not a thread about lore but as you brought it up): What does "more technologically advanced" mean? At least one has to consider that there are different fields where a race can be more or less advanced on.
I always find it funny when in films/games it's the blaster-weapon/psy-magic-users who're labeled "more advanced" when none of them came up with anything as destructive as firearms, meaning gunpowder and bullets, rockets (not to mention nukes). The latter are probably more wasteful in terms of resources but what effs if you can colonize and mine on infinite planets?
As for Zergs, they're obviously on "kill it with fire"-level.
yeah i agree, it's a common cliche in sci-fi films/games that the alien race with the psy/laser tech is more advanced. But Broodwar is just serving it, don't you think?
@Voddy: fair point. Zerg is clearly depicted as the most expansive race in the universe.
Lore-wise, Terrans should be the least dominating of the three races. Protoss are clearly the more technical advanced humanoid race and the Zerg Swarm has nearly unlimited amounts of troops, the ability to evolve and adapt into any environmental and strategical nessecity, plus ultimate control by the overmind/kerrigan.
(This is not a thread about lore but as you brought it up): What does "more technologically advanced" mean? At least one has to consider that there are different fields where a race can be more or less advanced on.
I always find it funny when in films/games it's the blaster-weapon/psy-magic-users who're labeled "more advanced" when none of them came up with anything as destructive as firearms, meaning gunpowder and bullets, rockets (not to mention nukes). The latter are probably more wasteful in terms of resources but what effs if you can colonize and mine on infinite planets?
As for Zergs, they're obviously on "kill it with fire"-level.
yeah i agree, it's a common cliche in sci-fi films/games that the alien race with the psy/laser tech is more advanced. But Broodwar is just serving it, don't you think?
Yeah, I admit the warping stuff in and recall-teleporting shit is kind of imbala advanced.
This is off-topic but related, apologies if this is not the correct place to ask this:
Tinyland had translated a video in the past about Iris (a.k.a. Berserker) talking to his stream about Tesagi, listing all of the things that Terran has that is Tesagi. He starts with one or two and slowly adds more as his chat brings more things up. Does anyone know if I can find that somewhere? I remember it was hilarious to watch.
I'm going to coin the term, the Flash Effect here and the name gives you the gist of it. When Flash returned to the scene in 2016, his return was a huge boon for the Terran race. He helped move the meta along, refining builds such as the 5 rax +1 and the 1-1-1 while he showed fantastic gameplay and made decisions that were far beyond that of even the best Terrans at the time.