David Kim talks Balance

Today David Kim weighed in on balance complaints which have achieved a crescendo.  Here's the meat of what he said:

Protoss does have an edge in PvT that slightly surpasses the minor advantages existing in other matchups. Nonetheless, the popular belief that Terran almost never wins vs. Protoss can be put to rest. The data does suggest that yes, we probably want to make some minor balance tweaks if this trend continues, but we don’t have a clear indication that major changes are called for.

Speaking of the pro level, we’ve been getting a lot of feedback from pro players that is contrary to what we were hearing from them last season. This seems to be mostly because of the results for Protoss pros this week in Proleague play. It’s the only major tournament going on right now, and it represents a sample size that is too small to draw any broad conclusions from, but Protoss players have lost at a noticeable clip in that tournament. As of this writing, they’ve recorded only 11 wins in 35 non-mirror matchups. As always, we’re closely following everything, and fortunately we have the WCS qualifiers getting underway to look at.

We’ve seen plenty of times in the past where meta games change at the pro level, and that translates to changes in balance at other skill levels on the ladder.

I agree with Kim--I don't think Protoss is overpowered.  To my mind Zerg has the best options of any race (with the two best mid-tier units in the game, the mutalisk and swarm host), but that's not to say it's imbalanced.  Terran mech could use some tweaking, but otherwise there aren't any major issues to deal with.  Looking at the overall picture from various WCS qualifiers thus far we see a 24/23/15 (p/z/t) split, which looks bad for Terran, but it's worth remembering that there are fewer Terran players to begin with.  I prefer the conservatism in making changes, albeit there have been cases (like the Wings of Liberty infestor) where Blizzard waited too long to fix the problem.

 

This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)