On January 14 2024 19:54 Telephone wrote: Someone said something about Dark and while I agree that he is in the top ten players (or better!l) of all time, there is unfortunately no argument for him to be made as the greatest of all time. It would be like naming Clem or Cure the GOAT. Some awesome recent results, but very few (comparatively) offline tournament wins and no sustained periods of complete dominance. I.e., Clem is obviously one of the best players to ever touch the game, but nobody would ever honestly put him in the running for greatest of all time.
Dark is in that bracket where he’s been one of the best players around for an absurd amount of time, which merits a high placing, but he’s never really had a period where he’s been the top dog at any particular time.
Whereas peak Innovation, even if he maybe didn’t win enough in his first incarnation I think most considered him the outright best player in that period, or Mvp, or a Maru or a Serral have.
Being a perennial top contender is obviously still admirable and for me Dark is up there, but if you haven’t ever been the absolute top dog in any particular era, and others have I’d weigh the latter more heavily
No one seems to really care about Serral's GSL vs. the world back to back wins, but to me they are pretty special also ....
2018: 3-0 Kelazhur 3-0 Innovation 3-1 Dark (who I think at the time hadn't ever lost to a foreigner before?) 4-3 Stats in the finals
2019: 3-1 TY 3-1 Trap 3-1 Classic 4-2 Elazer (who beat Dark, Time and Neeb to get to finals)
30M Won for both victories so I'm sure everyone was trying ($25K USD).
I know they definitely aren't exactly GSLs, but the fact that they were in Korea against mostly Koreans should count for something! I never see them mentioned when talking about Serral's achievements.
On January 14 2024 09:28 luxon wrote: Also once again, excusing Serral for being terrible at 15 while Life won GSLs at 14 (which at the time was world championship caliber or bigger) shows you how big the distinction is.
Another great argument from a korean elitist, truely remarkable. Same exact situation for both of them btw, clearly...
Typical Korean elitist. Funny they don’t mention Maru was terrible at the same age. Didn’t win GSL until his peers were in their late 20’s
Actually all the Koreans were pretty trash at that age except for Life and our boy Creator
On January 14 2024 09:28 luxon wrote: Also once again, excusing Serral for being terrible at 15 while Life won GSLs at 14 (which at the time was world championship caliber or bigger) shows you how big the distinction is.
Another great argument from a korean elitist, truely remarkable. Same exact situation for both of them btw, clearly...
Typical Korean elitist. Funny they don’t mention Maru was terrible at the same age. Didn’t win GSL until his peers were in their late 20’s
Actually all the Koreans were pretty trash at that age except for Life and our boy Creator
Maru won OSL at 15/16 during the kespa era. Even before his 2018 utter domination in Korea, he had a pedigree comparable to INnoVation
Given the criterion of this list Maru has the best case at being #1 so I am hopeful, Rogue will probably not be locked at #1
On January 14 2024 19:26 Telephone wrote: Serral is doubtless the best player right now, but he is not the GOAT and that is obvious to anyone who seriously considers the question. The only real answer is Rogue, and that is only the case because I believe the GOAT should have been world champion at least once. If you're looking purely at accomplishments and not mandating "world champion" as a requirement, then Maru is the clear favorite (it's not close, quit coping). Maru won 7 GSLs, a premiere offline tournament with the most difficult competition in the world (the most difficult SC2 competition in the world) and he achieved second place in two GSLs. Maru got 2nd place in a world championship, and made top 4 in 3 other world championships.
Maru having the clear most impressive tournament record against the highest difficulty opponents, plus the undisputed best team league record of all time, makes him the real GOAT.
Rogue is clearly in the top 2 based on strength of opponents, but it's difficult to determine who is the best between him and Maru. Serral is the obvious 3rd and Reynor seems like a pretty clear 4th.
Maru started to win his GSL’s when the Koreans were in the decline. At that time it was already Serral era, Maru GSL would actually meant something if he won it during 2013-2016. The truth is Mary’s GSL was won during the weak Korean period, but the elitist will keep telling you it’s the “hardest” tournament in the world still lol
On January 14 2024 19:26 Telephone wrote: Serral is doubtless the best player right now, but he is not the GOAT and that is obvious to anyone who seriously considers the question. The only real answer is Rogue, and that is only the case because I believe the GOAT should have been world champion at least once. If you're looking purely at accomplishments and not mandating "world champion" as a requirement, then Maru is the clear favorite (it's not close, quit coping). Maru won 7 GSLs, a premiere offline tournament with the most difficult competition in the world (the most difficult SC2 competition in the world) and he achieved second place in two GSLs. Maru got 2nd place in a world championship, and made top 4 in 3 other world championships.
Maru having the clear most impressive tournament record against the highest difficulty opponents, plus the undisputed best team league record of all time, makes him the real GOAT.
Rogue is clearly in the top 2 based on strength of opponents, but it's difficult to determine who is the best between him and Maru. Serral is the obvious 3rd and Reynor seems like a pretty clear 4th.
Maru started to win his GSL’s when the Koreans were in the decline. At that time it was already Serral era, Maru GSL would actually meant something if he won it during 2013-2016. The truth is Mary’s GSL was won during the weak Korean period, but the elitist will keep telling you it’s the “hardest” tournament in the world still lol
Serral won 2 GSL. He went, conquered, and left
Maru won OSL (practically same as GSL) in 2013. You're straight up wrong.
The gsl point system seems perfect to me. If you only got second you have symbolically beaten half of the player pool. If you won the finals you've beaten everyone. So it should count double, and you can argue that luck can be a factor for 2nd place, but not for the first place finisher. So I like the 0.99 for second, then you also don't end up with players tied for points.
Players have gotten better in terms of execution, this is undebatable, at least for the top players. But it is also a different game now. With the minimal changeups to the game and favouring macro play so heavily, then it is of course mechanical skill that players will excel at. But you can also see that with the less deep player base, with how the game is less about mind games, figuring out the new thing and creating your own luck that players have lost the ability to plan out series well. Maru, Clem, Cure, Stats and many more actually suck at this. They couldn't go back in time and win HotS, just like a Nestea would be hilariously bad nowadays.
Staying objective while making this is the hardest part and factoring in player pools, skill at the time will almost always just make it more messy. What's to say that the skill of a certain player should factor more than say the balance at the time. It can only get messy. I can argue that Zest is the goat because he got the most with the hardest race, but I don't think people would be very agreeable to that notion. Favouring certain periods will also get messy. I think a more fair way to look at periods, is, where is the majority of the player pool. Nowadays. Gsl is like half of what is was back in the day, because half of the strong players are non-koreans and won't attend. And in the earlier stages there were also so many tournament that the strong players were very spread out. This is a case for the Kespa period, because finally they were all together fighting for who is king. Not because the era was stronger than nowadays, or even the beginning, but because of how stacked the tournaments were.
If you win a tournament, you didn't beat everyone, you didn't even necessarily have the best win record in the tournament, SC2 tournaments are a shitshow of luck with single elimination rounds.
Also giving more points for players being on "their prime" is absurd.
Just choose whoever you want to be whatever rank lmao.
This video is still probably the most objective attempt at answering who is the goat:
On January 14 2024 19:26 Telephone wrote: Serral is doubtless the best player right now, but he is not the GOAT and that is obvious to anyone who seriously considers the question. The only real answer is Rogue, and that is only the case because I believe the GOAT should have been world champion at least once. If you're looking purely at accomplishments and not mandating "world champion" as a requirement, then Maru is the clear favorite (it's not close, quit coping). Maru won 7 GSLs, a premiere offline tournament with the most difficult competition in the world (the most difficult SC2 competition in the world) and he achieved second place in two GSLs. Maru got 2nd place in a world championship, and made top 4 in 3 other world championships.
Maru having the clear most impressive tournament record against the highest difficulty opponents, plus the undisputed best team league record of all time, makes him the real GOAT.
Rogue is clearly in the top 2 based on strength of opponents, but it's difficult to determine who is the best between him and Maru. Serral is the obvious 3rd and Reynor seems like a pretty clear 4th.
Maru started to win his GSL’s when the Koreans were in the decline. At that time it was already Serral era, Maru GSL would actually meant something if he won it during 2013-2016. The truth is Mary’s GSL was won during the weak Korean period, but the elitist will keep telling you it’s the “hardest” tournament in the world still lol
Serral won 2 GSL. He went, conquered, and left
Wait, Maru's GSLs don't mean anything but Serral's GSL vs the Worlds do?
On January 15 2024 00:39 LostUsername100 wrote: If you win a tournament, you didn't beat everyone, you didn't even necessarily have the best win record in the tournament, SC2 tournaments are a shitshow of luck with single elimination rounds.
Also giving more points for players being on "their prime" is absurd.
Just choose whoever you want to be whatever rank lmao.
This video is still probably the most objective attempt at answering who is the goat:
On January 15 2024 01:20 ejozl wrote: There is a shit ton of luck, it's true.
Luck usually evens itself out in the long run. Unless you're Solar and probably could get at least top-4 in many tournaments but you get Maru early every time. Then you're just cursed.
It would be interesting with a list that awards all 3 installments with the same amount of points. And all three races in those installments with the same amount of points. Then through percentage, see which player acrued the most points.
Or a list where each player from the 3 races that got the furthest in each tournament is awarded the win. Surely Maru would be super high on this one.
Extra thought. Prize money is generally too easily disregarded. The problem is with invite tourneys and the region locks.
On January 15 2024 01:20 ejozl wrote: There is a shit ton of luck, it's true.
Luck usually evens itself out in the long run. Unless you're Solar and probably could get at least top-4 in many tournaments but you get Maru early every time. Then you're just cursed.
Luck evens out in the end if you have enough tournaments you consider "valid", it's not the case when global offline tournaments are almost yearly, and people put an insane emphasis on whatever they want .
On January 15 2024 00:39 LostUsername100 wrote: If you win a tournament, you didn't beat everyone, you didn't even necessarily have the best win record in the tournament, SC2 tournaments are a shitshow of luck with single elimination rounds.
Also giving more points for players being on "their prime" is absurd.
Just choose whoever you want to be whatever rank lmao.
This video is still probably the most objective attempt at answering who is the goat:
I would like to see the raw data he used for that video. What is each players career timespan, what is he counting as premier? It doesn't simply seem to be what is listed on liquipedia because some things seem odd to me like Maru only having exactly 1 premier win per year of his career on average. Serral having 58 top 4s in premiers also seems questionable. Though that might be possible since he has so many in events that banned Koreans. And the way he calculated winrates will naturally favor players who started more recently which he does point out but I think he's underestimating the degree.
Any list that doesn't at least somewhat weight premiers even non world championships differently from each other is also flawed imo. An IEM Shanghai is harder than IEM pyeongchan, a Dreamhack with Koreans is a lot harder than a region locked dreamhack.
Even though Aligulac has serious flaws I think the best way to create a tournament ranking and then goat ranking would be to look at each tournament and check Aligulac ranking history on the closest possible date and if the tournament has 32 players ask out of the top 32 on aligulac how many are in this event? Do that for all events and the tournaments with the highest percentage get weighted the highest and then calculate goat by awarding points for tournament results based on that list. That is an objective way to determine tournament difficulty I only wish we had a better ELO system to use.
On January 14 2024 19:26 Telephone wrote: Serral is doubtless the best player right now, but he is not the GOAT and that is obvious to anyone who seriously considers the question. The only real answer is Rogue, and that is only the case because I believe the GOAT should have been world champion at least once. If you're looking purely at accomplishments and not mandating "world champion" as a requirement, then Maru is the clear favorite (it's not close, quit coping). Maru won 7 GSLs, a premiere offline tournament with the most difficult competition in the world (the most difficult SC2 competition in the world) and he achieved second place in two GSLs. Maru got 2nd place in a world championship, and made top 4 in 3 other world championships.
Maru having the clear most impressive tournament record against the highest difficulty opponents, plus the undisputed best team league record of all time, makes him the real GOAT.
Rogue is clearly in the top 2 based on strength of opponents, but it's difficult to determine who is the best between him and Maru. Serral is the obvious 3rd and Reynor seems like a pretty clear 4th.
Maru started to win his GSL’s when the Koreans were in the decline. At that time it was already Serral era, Maru GSL would actually meant something if he won it during 2013-2016. The truth is Mary’s GSL was won during the weak Korean period, but the elitist will keep telling you it’s the “hardest” tournament in the world still lol
Serral won 2 GSL. He went, conquered, and left
Wait, Maru's GSLs don't mean anything but Serral's GSL vs the Worlds do?
I think his general point is that people often claim that Serral "only dominates after the peak of SC2-skill" and then suddenly propose Maru as GOAT because "he won 7 GSL". You can't have it both ways. If Serrals world championships don't count for anything, then neither do any of Marus GSLs. And then both of them look pretty underwhelming compared to idk Mvp or something.
On January 14 2024 19:26 Telephone wrote: Serral is doubtless the best player right now, but he is not the GOAT and that is obvious to anyone who seriously considers the question. The only real answer is Rogue, and that is only the case because I believe the GOAT should have been world champion at least once. If you're looking purely at accomplishments and not mandating "world champion" as a requirement, then Maru is the clear favorite (it's not close, quit coping). Maru won 7 GSLs, a premiere offline tournament with the most difficult competition in the world (the most difficult SC2 competition in the world) and he achieved second place in two GSLs. Maru got 2nd place in a world championship, and made top 4 in 3 other world championships.
Maru having the clear most impressive tournament record against the highest difficulty opponents, plus the undisputed best team league record of all time, makes him the real GOAT.
Rogue is clearly in the top 2 based on strength of opponents, but it's difficult to determine who is the best between him and Maru. Serral is the obvious 3rd and Reynor seems like a pretty clear 4th.
Maru started to win his GSL’s when the Koreans were in the decline. At that time it was already Serral era, Maru GSL would actually meant something if he won it during 2013-2016. The truth is Mary’s GSL was won during the weak Korean period, but the elitist will keep telling you it’s the “hardest” tournament in the world still lol
Serral won 2 GSL. He went, conquered, and left
Wait, Maru's GSLs don't mean anything but Serral's GSL vs the Worlds do?
I think his general point is that people often claim that Serral "only dominates after the peak of SC2-skill" and then suddenly propose Maru as GOAT because "he won 7 GSL". You can't have it both ways. If Serrals world championships don't count for anything, then neither do any of Marus GSLs. And then both of them look pretty underwhelming compared to idk Mvp or something.
Not everyone deals in absolutes. A more reasonable view would be that Serrals World Championships as well as Marus GSLs count for quite a bit but not as much as the equivalent tournaments in 2013-2016 would count. And in the end Maru has success in both eras while Serral does not.
On January 14 2024 19:26 Telephone wrote: Serral is doubtless the best player right now, but he is not the GOAT and that is obvious to anyone who seriously considers the question. The only real answer is Rogue, and that is only the case because I believe the GOAT should have been world champion at least once. If you're looking purely at accomplishments and not mandating "world champion" as a requirement, then Maru is the clear favorite (it's not close, quit coping). Maru won 7 GSLs, a premiere offline tournament with the most difficult competition in the world (the most difficult SC2 competition in the world) and he achieved second place in two GSLs. Maru got 2nd place in a world championship, and made top 4 in 3 other world championships.
Maru having the clear most impressive tournament record against the highest difficulty opponents, plus the undisputed best team league record of all time, makes him the real GOAT.
Rogue is clearly in the top 2 based on strength of opponents, but it's difficult to determine who is the best between him and Maru. Serral is the obvious 3rd and Reynor seems like a pretty clear 4th.
Maru started to win his GSL’s when the Koreans were in the decline. At that time it was already Serral era, Maru GSL would actually meant something if he won it during 2013-2016. The truth is Mary’s GSL was won during the weak Korean period, but the elitist will keep telling you it’s the “hardest” tournament in the world still lol
Serral won 2 GSL. He went, conquered, and left
Wait, Maru's GSLs don't mean anything but Serral's GSL vs the Worlds do?
I think his general point is that people often claim that Serral "only dominates after the peak of SC2-skill" and then suddenly propose Maru as GOAT because "he won 7 GSL". You can't have it both ways. If Serrals world championships don't count for anything, then neither do any of Marus GSLs. And then both of them look pretty underwhelming compared to idk Mvp or something.
Not everyone deals in absolutes. A more reasonable view would be that Serrals World Championships as well as Marus GSLs count for quite a bit but not as much as the equivalent tournaments in 2013-2016 would count. And in the end Maru has success in both eras while Serral does not.
It's also reasonable to assert that the various world championships serral attended became inherently more difficult than (insert word) of those that preceded them simply because serral was one of the players in the event.
EPT
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