Ladder stats, map pool and balance notes

Patch Clash is a balance mod, and the people tuning it (and anyone who likes arguing about balance) deserve real numbers. The ranked screen's toolbar has three doors for that: Ladder stats, Map pool and Balance changes. All three work signed out.

The Ladder stats door#

The Ladder stats door opens the ladder's balance report. It has six tabs that share two filters at the top.

Filters#

• Window: All time, 90 days, 30 days or 7 days.
• League: pick one or more leagues. A match only counts when both players were in the same selected league at the time, so filtering to Diamond shows how Diamond players play, not how a Diamond fares against a Bronze. "All leagues" clears the filter. With a filter on, a line tells you how many of the total matches are shown.

League bands are the same crests the leaderboard uses. A past match is placed by each player's rating going into it.

Tabs#

• Overview: the sample, a race win rate over time chart (bigger dots for bigger samples, hollow dots for thin ones), a win rate table by race, and the most and least vetoed maps.
• Matchups: win rate for each matchup (TvZ, PvT and so on) with games and a 95% range, a line of mirror volumes, and a per-league breakdown.
• Maps: each map with its games and ladder-wide veto rate, and a per-matchup breakdown per map.
• Vetoes: how often each map is banned, overall and per matchup (see below).
• Game length: matchup win rates bucketed by length (under 5 minutes, 5 to 10, 10 to 15, 15 to 20, 20 to 30, over 30).
• Openings: each opening's games and win rate with its 95% range, split by matchup.

Why the numbers can be trusted#

A balance report that quietly misleads is worse than none, because someone re-prices a unit on it. So:

• Every win rate carries its sample. Games, the decisive games it is computed over, and a 95% confidence range (a Wilson interval, which stays sensible near 0% and 100%). A figure from fewer than 30 decisive games is flagged as thin. Nothing is hidden; small samples are labelled.
• Mirrors are left out of race win rates. A PvP game always hands Protoss exactly one win and one loss, whatever the balance. Mirror volumes are published separately.
• Forfeits are left out entirely. A concession is a real result for the rating, but it is not balance evidence: players concede the matchups and maps they dislike, which would skew exactly the cells the report measures.
• Exclusions are counted by reason (forfeits, undecided games, unknown races, games with no map for the map cut), so a shrinking sample reads as a smaller sample rather than a moving win rate.
• A league cut only uses same-league games. A 2400 player beating an 1100 player measures the skill gap, not the balance.

Openings, named honestly#

Openings are read from the first six buildings each player starts, and named from that structure order: names like "Nexus First", "Two Gate", "Rax Expand", "Hatch Opening" or "Pool Opening", with a tech suffix when there is one. They are never borrowed from retail SC2 build names, because "1 Gate Expand" means something different once the mod re-prices things. A name never claims something is absent that the six-building window cannot see. Hover an opening for an example line and how much of the group it represents.

Openings are split by matchup and oriented by the player's own race: the TvZ row is Terran's opening against Zerg. Each matchup is recounted with its own sample and range, so a healthy pooled number cannot hide a 70% matchup and a 42% one.

Veto figures and your opponent's bans#

Map bans are blind, but after a match both players see every banned map in the lobby. If a ladder-wide ban count could move by exactly one match, someone could compare before and after and work out an opponent's picks. So veto figures are deliberately coarse:

• They count finished matches on closed days only.
• They publish in batches: the overall row only after another 100 player seats, each matchup cell after 40 of its own.
• Each rate is rounded to a bucket wide enough to hold at least 30 bans (20 points when a map has been on 150 boards, 10 at 300, 5 at 600, whole points from 3,000), and a map needs 150 boards before it shows a rate at all.
• No raw ban counts are published anywhere.

In simulated attacks with every lobby and exact board counts, this left nothing about an individual draft determinable. The Vetoes tab and the Maps tab veto rates ignore the window and league filters.

The per-card ban rate on the draft board itself uses a similar rule: finished matches only, refreshed every few minutes, rounded to 5%, and a dash until a map has 400 seats of history. See Match found and the map draft.

Export and API#

The footer shows the URL of the report you are looking at, with Copy URL, and a CSV menu with eleven cuts: matchups, races, maps, openings, openings by matchup, tiers, durations, timeline, mirrors, vetoes and vetoes by matchup. The files open cleanly in Excel and Google Sheets. The same data is available from a public API: see Ladder data for organizers and analysts.

The Map pool door#

The Map pool door opens a guide to every map in the pool, in pool order:

• A rail of map tiles with thumbnail, position, author and games played, plus How the veto works. A map with no games yet still gets a tile.
• The map page: full art (click for full size), the author, quick facts (spawns, rush distance, size, source, and the base map for PCE editions), a short summary and its features.
• The stats page: median and average game length, win rate by matchup and by race with 95% ranges, and the top three openings per race. These are the same numbers the Ladder stats door computes.

Use the left and right arrow keys to switch pages; Escape closes one layer at a time.

The map authors, from the pool's bios:

Map	Author
At Eternity's Edge	depressed1
Blackrock	AVEX
Rainfall	CharactR
Rorschach	Patches
Sanctuary III	AVEX
Washout	Patches
Anomaly Found PCE	OmniSkeptic
Moonwater PCE	monitor
Verdant Temple PCE	Patches
Heat Sink PCE	monitor
Lumen PCE	Patches
Sandwyrm PCE	CharactR

The How the veto works page inside the Map pool door explains the blind draft in brief; the full detail is in Match found and the map draft.

The Balance changes door#

Balance changes opens What's different in this mod: the mod team's patch notes, organized by race, with an Economy section for changes that affect everyone, such as starting workers and gas. Each entry names the unit or structure with its icon, lists the changes, and often includes the mod team's reasoning. The sheet opens on the race you have picked and shows when the notes were last updated.

Read it before your first games: Patch Clash re-prices units, changes timings and adds units and upgrades that do not exist in retail StarCraft II.