[crAzerk]

Originally Posted by Meatex

What crAzerk says is wrong though as the game is horridly imbalanced at lower levels and blizzard isn't intending to do anything about it

Care to elaborate?
No wait, don't bother. A lower level player complaining about game balance is like a newbie basketball player who can't throw the ball into the hoop going 'This game is unfair! Make the hoop bigger!' There has already been much said about this elsewhere so I won't say more.


Ok @ Tom,

As you rightly point out, the data is also consistent with poor adaptation to the current metagame, and this could be the possible explanation

Hmm, I wouldn't quite say that the data is consistent with either of those. Making such a statement is a logical fallacy of begging the question, where you assume what you're setting out to prove.
(E.g. You're trying to show that Protoss is underpowered because Protoss are losing. And then you say Protoss are losing and this seems consistent with them being underpowered)

What is more accurate which you also did mention, is that 'Protoss being underpowered' is a plausible explanation for "Protoss losing', just as 'Protoss having a poorer Current Race Metagame' is a plausible explanation for 'Protoss losing'.


Regarding your second portion, I had an interesting thought -
Would it still be possible for a race to be performing well even though there is something wrong with the race?

If you think about it, it IS possible, if the other races haven't found a way to exploit it.
E.g. When Spanishiwa first brought his build out, he was dominating everyone with it, along with everyone else who hopped on to use his build. But there was a clear inherent flaw in it that it lacked map control and had 0 means of pressure in the early game, allowing others to double expand, etc. Did other races figure it out immediately ? No. Thus the Spanishiwa-bandwagon 'performed well' for a period of time, abusing the solid Zerg mechanic of Queen/Spine defence which seemed OP at that moment.

Which led me to think - if a race can perform well both when there is something wrong with it and when there's nothing wrong with it - is it then relevant to look at its current performance to use as an indicator of its balance?
Or should we be focusing on the reasons for its current performance (poor Current Race Metagame) instead?