On January 19 2024 02:23 Fango wrote: If you take Starcraft as a game of who can make the fewest mistake, Serral is number 1. He dominates by scouting and reacting to everything perfectly and rarely ever makes bad decisions.
It's true that you can't play like that as zerg or terran, but that doesn't really matter, he figured out the best way to play his race. The only reason his play doesn't "inspire goosebumps" is because he plays reactively where Maru or Dark mostly win by aggression and play off-meta.
What is this cooked Take? While Maru won alot of Aggression at Times where He didnt See a good way to win the lategames, He shines in ultra Long macro Games Just as Well when He is playing for it. Dark is the Same as in He Has shown that He can do both very Well.
It seems fair to me. For a while only Maru pulled off that defensive rock style at the elite level, and subsequently I’ve seen players sorta emulate it without quite his mastery, but it was a very off-meta TvZ style he perfected for a while.
Dark is probably alone with Gumiho as the most idiosyncratic player within their race’s standards who’s won big titles. Especially for the last few years where basically every Zerg plays the same way and Dark has got even more Dark. Nobody else plays roach/ravager/infestor for like 20 minutes straight, never mind actually pulling it off like Dark, who I feel is a (tad) underrated
Those players can do both aggressive games, cheese and top tier macro games, absolutely.
But Serral has (largely) played the same style for his entire span as a pro player with little deviation.
I understand today is "peak skill" in terms of raw gameplay as it should be. Players get better over time and the meta gets more and more figured out. But I don't think that makes accomplishments more valuable now.
What gets lost is that players who have played for a long time get discredited for getting ro8s/ro4s or even ro16s, because there actually were a ton of top level players. These days there are barely 32 world class players across all the regions.
Being the best player in the world when there are team houses filled with players aspiring to be the best is a bigger accomplishment and tougher feat.
On January 19 2024 02:23 Fango wrote: If you take Starcraft as a game of who can make the fewest mistake, Serral is number 1. He dominates by scouting and reacting to everything perfectly and rarely ever makes bad decisions.
It's true that you can't play like that as zerg or terran, but that doesn't really matter, he figured out the best way to play his race. The only reason his play doesn't "inspire goosebumps" is because he plays reactively where Maru or Dark mostly win by aggression and play off-meta.
What is this cooked Take? While Maru won alot of Aggression at Times where He didnt See a good way to win the lategames, He shines in ultra Long macro Games Just as Well when He is playing for it. Dark is the Same as in He Has shown that He can do both very Well.
It seems fair to me. For a while only Maru pulled off that defensive rock style at the elite level, and subsequently I’ve seen players sorta emulate it without quite his mastery, but it was a very off-meta TvZ style he perfected for a while.
Dark is probably alone with Gumiho as the most idiosyncratic player within their race’s standards who’s won big titles. Especially for the last few years where basically every Zerg plays the same way and Dark has got even more Dark. Nobody else plays roach/ravager/infestor for like 20 minutes straight, never mind actually pulling it off like Dark, who I feel is a (tad) underrated
Those players can do both aggressive games, cheese and top tier macro games, absolutely.
But Serral has (largely) played the same style for his entire span as a pro player with little deviation.
I interviewed a bunch of EU pros back in 2019 for a now defunct website. Each and every one of them said a similar thing about Serral. The common thread was they all thought Serral was faster than anyone in EU (this might have changed since then, but remember at the time Serral was coming off winning Blizzcon and was dominating WCS events) and it wouldn't matter what strategies he used or what race he played. As long as he didn't somehow lose all his talent, he'd be able to leverage his scouting, micro and multitasking against anyone regardless of race.
On January 18 2024 03:40 ScrappyRabbit wrote: Serral is infuriating. He's never entered the signature SC2 tournament and his play doesn't inspire the goosebumps of someone like Maru or Inno, but he just...doesn't...lose. We've been waiting for him to get "exposed" for a half-decade but he just...keeps...beating...everybody.
Guess we're watching different games. You can take just about any one of serral's games that aren't of him just curbstomping some poor soul, and just see every moment that another player would have failed in his place over and over again.
Reynor's interview awhile back summed it up pretty nicely. When you play against him you feel just feel it. I've played against a lot of people and nothing rivals that feeling of hopelessness except for maybe matching Happy in wc3.
Also when you watch him he makes it seem effortless, and errors are very infrequent and harder to spot. On the other hand someone like Maru makes many obvious errors along with some bad/questionable decisions but he's able to overcome that with raw ability.
Yeah that's true, but I also think the race he plays has a big part in that. I think Zerg is the only race which can get away with just playing defensive macro every game and winning by reading the opponent correctly and shutting it down. Terran and Protoss need to mix it up and surprise the opponent, go for timings they don't expect etc. (Exception when Maru had that turtle style but that got figured out). So Serral is amazing but I don't think his playstyle which enables his incredible consistency would be possible with another race which has to be factored in.
No, it does not need to be "factored in", because every great player in Starcraft (and Warcraft for that matter) do the great thing they do with their race. Feels like a cheap-shot to point it out for one singular player.
It has to be factored in when one says "Serral is the Goat because his play feels more dominant than Marus". It doesn't devalue his achievements though ofc
It feels more dominant because he doesn’t make all too many big mistakes like, ever. It’s just relentless.
Even Dark and Rogue, Reynor have quite a lot of losses on their resumé from bad reads, bad build choices or atrocious engagements while also playing Zerg.
Serral obviously also does do such things, but they’re pretty rare, comparatively speaking.
It’s like playing a tennis player who just gets the ball back every time, or a golfer who always hits the fairways and green. Others may hit the odd more flashy shot, and they can win but beating the dude who just hits every regulation shot is pretty daunting.
I don’t know if greatest but I’d have Serral as a lock at #1 in any ‘most consistent player of all time’ list. Well, consistently good anyway!
I understand why people feel this way, and I kind of do too based on the feeling I get watching Serral play. But isn't Serral maybe the only GOAT contender to get 4-0'ed in grand finals multiple times? (That's a genuine question because there probably are others, I just can't think of them off the top.) There's other weird patches of streaky play too like losing to bottom seed Ragnarok in IEM Katowice and dropping out of double-elimination bracket in Euro finals that should otherwise be a lock for him. His struggle with ZvZ in my view are almost exclusively due to an over-reliance on scouting rather than "game sense", and therefore an inability to consistently read the game state properly if he isn't able to scout. That's more of a ZvZ thing than a Serral thing in my opinion, but then again he always has the option of playing PvZ instead like Reynor does sometimes I don't think any of these things take away from Serral's incredible accomplishments, nor do they mean that he's not the GOAT. And obviously all the other SC2 GOAT contenders have these kinds of weird off days and stretches of streaky play too (remember when Maru fell out of the IEM Katowice group stages??). But at least in terms of results, it's not nearly the level of consistency we saw out of, let's say, Flash, during his decade of dominance in BW. That's probably a very unfair standard to hold any SC2 player to, but at the same time, it's a standard that we know is achievable. It's possible that Serral is the most consistent player to ever play the game...like I said it kind of feels like it to me. I'd just be interested in actually seeing some data or evidence to support the claim.
On January 19 2024 02:23 Fango wrote: If you take Starcraft as a game of who can make the fewest mistake, Serral is number 1. He dominates by scouting and reacting to everything perfectly and rarely ever makes bad decisions.
It's true that you can't play like that as zerg or terran, but that doesn't really matter, he figured out the best way to play his race. The only reason his play doesn't "inspire goosebumps" is because he plays reactively where Maru or Dark mostly win by aggression and play off-meta.
What is this cooked Take? While Maru won alot of Aggression at Times where He didnt See a good way to win the lategames, He shines in ultra Long macro Games Just as Well when He is playing for it. Dark is the Same as in He Has shown that He can do both very Well.
It seems fair to me. For a while only Maru pulled off that defensive rock style at the elite level, and subsequently I’ve seen players sorta emulate it without quite his mastery, but it was a very off-meta TvZ style he perfected for a while.
Dark is probably alone with Gumiho as the most idiosyncratic player within their race’s standards who’s won big titles. Especially for the last few years where basically every Zerg plays the same way and Dark has got even more Dark. Nobody else plays roach/ravager/infestor for like 20 minutes straight, never mind actually pulling it off like Dark, who I feel is a (tad) underrated
Those players can do both aggressive games, cheese and top tier macro games, absolutely.
But Serral has (largely) played the same style for his entire span as a pro player with little deviation.
I interviewed a bunch of EU pros back in 2019 for a now defunct website. Each and every one of them said a similar thing about Serral. The common thread was they all thought Serral was faster than anyone in EU (this might have changed since then, but remember at the time Serral was coming off winning Blizzcon and was dominating WCS events) and it wouldn't matter what strategies he used or what race he played. As long as he didn't somehow lose all his talent, he'd be able to leverage his scouting, micro and multitasking against anyone regardless of race.
Funnily in 2019 the meta was super zerg favored, but the finalists at BlizzCon ended up being Dark and Reynor
On January 19 2024 02:23 Fango wrote: If you take Starcraft as a game of who can make the fewest mistake, Serral is number 1. He dominates by scouting and reacting to everything perfectly and rarely ever makes bad decisions.
It's true that you can't play like that as zerg or terran, but that doesn't really matter, he figured out the best way to play his race. The only reason his play doesn't "inspire goosebumps" is because he plays reactively where Maru or Dark mostly win by aggression and play off-meta.
If I want a general to be a safe pair of hands in a theatre of war I’m going for Serral above everyone.
If I want someone to lead a borderline suicide mission with some crazy plan I’m going Maru every time.
There’s a reason you’ll read about the former only in history books and Hollywood makes films about the latter.
In the parallel universe where Serral played T he just wouldn’t do things like somehow beating big, technical Toss armies with pure MMM because doing so puts you on an absolute knife edge of execution and I mean isn’t the optimal percentage play.
And he’d be right too, but as a fan of the game it’s absolutely glorious. Like watching Byun in those games where he just pushes and drops MMM for 20 minutes and pulls it off. Is it strategically sensible to play a style where a few, sometimes only one botched engagement destroys the enter tempo-based style? I mean it really isn’t, unless you’re really deficient in other areas of the game and are a robot with insane mechanics
Why I’m a big fan of clown fiestas, I find it interesting to see a game that isn’t mapped out and optimal, and how players navigate weird atypical scenarios.
Yeah I remember those old days when Maru refused to build vikings and would just stim into colossus and was beating guys like rain and zest when they were the best Ps in the world. I don't even remember when that was, like 2014? It was kind of incredible to see at the time.
On January 19 2024 02:23 Fango wrote: If you take Starcraft as a game of who can make the fewest mistake, Serral is number 1. He dominates by scouting and reacting to everything perfectly and rarely ever makes bad decisions.
It's true that you can't play like that as zerg or terran, but that doesn't really matter, he figured out the best way to play his race. The only reason his play doesn't "inspire goosebumps" is because he plays reactively where Maru or Dark mostly win by aggression and play off-meta.
What is this cooked Take? While Maru won alot of Aggression at Times where He didnt See a good way to win the lategames, He shines in ultra Long macro Games Just as Well when He is playing for it. Dark is the Same as in He Has shown that He can do both very Well.
It seems fair to me. For a while only Maru pulled off that defensive rock style at the elite level, and subsequently I’ve seen players sorta emulate it without quite his mastery, but it was a very off-meta TvZ style he perfected for a while.
Dark is probably alone with Gumiho as the most idiosyncratic player within their race’s standards who’s won big titles. Especially for the last few years where basically every Zerg plays the same way and Dark has got even more Dark. Nobody else plays roach/ravager/infestor for like 20 minutes straight, never mind actually pulling it off like Dark, who I feel is a (tad) underrated
Those players can do both aggressive games, cheese and top tier macro games, absolutely.
But Serral has (largely) played the same style for his entire span as a pro player with little deviation.
I interviewed a bunch of EU pros back in 2019 for a now defunct website. Each and every one of them said a similar thing about Serral. The common thread was they all thought Serral was faster than anyone in EU (this might have changed since then, but remember at the time Serral was coming off winning Blizzcon and was dominating WCS events) and it wouldn't matter what strategies he used or what race he played. As long as he didn't somehow lose all his talent, he'd be able to leverage his scouting, micro and multitasking against anyone regardless of race.
I could see him doing it with Terran, Protoss a bit less so. He’d still be bloody good but I just don’t think the race aligns with his skill set that well. Zest is probably the best example but they benefit from premeditation and less so from reactive play. The latter which I think is probably Serral’s best ability, and that he’s better at than anyone
But yeah, various Korean luminaries have also waxed lyrical about his abilities as well, and I imagine they have some insight.
On January 19 2024 02:23 Fango wrote: If you take Starcraft as a game of who can make the fewest mistake, Serral is number 1. He dominates by scouting and reacting to everything perfectly and rarely ever makes bad decisions.
It's true that you can't play like that as zerg or terran, but that doesn't really matter, he figured out the best way to play his race. The only reason his play doesn't "inspire goosebumps" is because he plays reactively where Maru or Dark mostly win by aggression and play off-meta.
What is this cooked Take? While Maru won alot of Aggression at Times where He didnt See a good way to win the lategames, He shines in ultra Long macro Games Just as Well when He is playing for it. Dark is the Same as in He Has shown that He can do both very Well.
It seems fair to me. For a while only Maru pulled off that defensive rock style at the elite level, and subsequently I’ve seen players sorta emulate it without quite his mastery, but it was a very off-meta TvZ style he perfected for a while.
Dark is probably alone with Gumiho as the most idiosyncratic player within their race’s standards who’s won big titles. Especially for the last few years where basically every Zerg plays the same way and Dark has got even more Dark. Nobody else plays roach/ravager/infestor for like 20 minutes straight, never mind actually pulling it off like Dark, who I feel is a (tad) underrated
Those players can do both aggressive games, cheese and top tier macro games, absolutely.
But Serral has (largely) played the same style for his entire span as a pro player with little deviation.
I interviewed a bunch of EU pros back in 2019 for a now defunct website. Each and every one of them said a similar thing about Serral. The common thread was they all thought Serral was faster than anyone in EU (this might have changed since then, but remember at the time Serral was coming off winning Blizzcon and was dominating WCS events) and it wouldn't matter what strategies he used or what race he played. As long as he didn't somehow lose all his talent, he'd be able to leverage his scouting, micro and multitasking against anyone regardless of race.
Well it's probably expected to to talk highly about someone who beats all of you every tournament
In terms of having the best mechanics, he could easily dominate with P or T. But not to the extent he has with zerg.
The only way to win seemingly every game you play is to scout everything and play reactively. If your race is built around timings and catching people off-guard, you might win a lot of games, but you can't win them all. Artosis would say that's why protoss is great on ladder and bad at winning tournaments.
Serral figured out the perfect way to play, maybe he could do the same for P/T. But he'd end up more like INnoVation, who wins constantly if his race is even slightly favoured.
On January 19 2024 02:23 Fango wrote: If you take Starcraft as a game of who can make the fewest mistake, Serral is number 1. He dominates by scouting and reacting to everything perfectly and rarely ever makes bad decisions.
It's true that you can't play like that as zerg or terran, but that doesn't really matter, he figured out the best way to play his race. The only reason his play doesn't "inspire goosebumps" is because he plays reactively where Maru or Dark mostly win by aggression and play off-meta.
What is this cooked Take? While Maru won alot of Aggression at Times where He didnt See a good way to win the lategames, He shines in ultra Long macro Games Just as Well when He is playing for it. Dark is the Same as in He Has shown that He can do both very Well.
It seems fair to me. For a while only Maru pulled off that defensive rock style at the elite level, and subsequently I’ve seen players sorta emulate it without quite his mastery, but it was a very off-meta TvZ style he perfected for a while.
Dark is probably alone with Gumiho as the most idiosyncratic player within their race’s standards who’s won big titles. Especially for the last few years where basically every Zerg plays the same way and Dark has got even more Dark. Nobody else plays roach/ravager/infestor for like 20 minutes straight, never mind actually pulling it off like Dark, who I feel is a (tad) underrated
Those players can do both aggressive games, cheese and top tier macro games, absolutely.
But Serral has (largely) played the same style for his entire span as a pro player with little deviation.
I interviewed a bunch of EU pros back in 2019 for a now defunct website. Each and every one of them said a similar thing about Serral. The common thread was they all thought Serral was faster than anyone in EU (this might have changed since then, but remember at the time Serral was coming off winning Blizzcon and was dominating WCS events) and it wouldn't matter what strategies he used or what race he played. As long as he didn't somehow lose all his talent, he'd be able to leverage his scouting, micro and multitasking against anyone regardless of race.
Well it's probably expected to to talk highly about someone who beats all of you every tournament
In terms of having the best mechanics, he could easily dominate with P or T. But not to the extent he has with zerg.
The only way to win seemingly every game you play is to scout everything and play reactively. If your race is built around timings and catching people off-guard, you might win a lot of games, but you can't win them all. Artosis would say that's why protoss is great on ladder and bad at winning tournaments.
Serral figured out the perfect way to play, maybe he could do the same for P/T. But he'd end up more like INnoVation, who wins constantly if his race is even slightly favoured.
My fiance and I met up with soO for lunch when I was in Korea and we talked about this project. I'll reveal his thoughts on the greatest players at the end.
I'm actually really interested to see if SoO makes this list--kind of crazy to think that a handful of games flipped the other way could have elevated him to the top.
As Char mentioned, I don't think SC2 truly has a clear-cut GOAT so it often distills down to preference. I do think it's pretty clear that Maru, Serral and Rogue are a level above the rest, and they all had chances to clinch a stronger hold on the claim. Serral losing to SoO at Katowice or Inno at WESG, Maru to Oliveria, etc. Rogue is easily the best tournament player/strategist and might have the grandest accomplishments of anyone, but his play never inspired me the way that Serral's or Dark's does. So like I said, preference.
On January 19 2024 06:53 Glorfindelio wrote: I'm actually really interested to see if SoO makes this list--kind of crazy to think that a handful of games flipped the other way could have elevated him to the top.
As Char mentioned, I don't think SC2 truly has a clear-cut GOAT so it often distills down to preference. I do think it's pretty clear that Maru, Serral and Rogue are a level above the rest, and they all had chances to clinch a stronger hold on the claim. Serral losing to SoO at Katowice or Inno at WESG, Maru to Oliveria, etc. Rogue is easily the best tournament player/strategist and might have the grandest accomplishments of anyone, but his play never inspired me the way that Serral's or Dark's does. So like I said, preference.
Given the criteria, I am pretty sure he makes the list
On January 19 2024 06:53 Glorfindelio wrote: I'm actually really interested to see if SoO makes this list--kind of crazy to think that a handful of games flipped the other way could have elevated him to the top.
As Char mentioned, I don't think SC2 truly has a clear-cut GOAT so it often distills down to preference. I do think it's pretty clear that Maru, Serral and Rogue are a level above the rest, and they all had chances to clinch a stronger hold on the claim. Serral losing to SoO at Katowice or Inno at WESG, Maru to Oliveria, etc. Rogue is easily the best tournament player/strategist and might have the grandest accomplishments of anyone, but his play never inspired me the way that Serral's or Dark's does. So like I said, preference.
Given the criteria, I am pretty sure he makes the list
One interesting thing about the criteria is that Rain ended up in the same slot on stuchiu's 2015 list as Miz's 2024 list (#10). On the one hand, that's not all that surprising because their criteria don't seem dramatically different. On the other hand, given that a few additional GOATs have emerged since the original list was constructed, I'm curious which of the other 2015 list top 10 GOATs will make it on here since there's not room for all of them. For those who don't make it, it would be interesting to hear why, and more generally an explanation of what it is that is different in the criteria if that's a factor in excluding some of the 2015 GOATs. FWIW, I believe the 2015 list was constructed before Rain's best 2015 results came in, which begs the question of where stichiu would have put him if those results had been factored in (and also demonstrates the limits of doing these lists when players are still crushing).
On January 19 2024 06:53 Glorfindelio wrote: I'm actually really interested to see if SoO makes this list--kind of crazy to think that a handful of games flipped the other way could have elevated him to the top.
As Char mentioned, I don't think SC2 truly has a clear-cut GOAT so it often distills down to preference. I do think it's pretty clear that Maru, Serral and Rogue are a level above the rest, and they all had chances to clinch a stronger hold on the claim. Serral losing to SoO at Katowice or Inno at WESG, Maru to Oliveria, etc. Rogue is easily the best tournament player/strategist and might have the grandest accomplishments of anyone, but his play never inspired me the way that Serral's or Dark's does. So like I said, preference.
Given the criteria, I am pretty sure he makes the list
One interesting thing about the criteria is that Rain ended up in the same slot on stuchiu's 2015 list as Miz's 2024 list (#10). On the one hand, that's not all that surprising because their criteria don't seem dramatically different. On the other hand, given that a few additional GOATs have emerged since the original list was constructed, I'm curious which of the other 2015 list top 10 GOATs will make it on here since there's not room for all of them. For those who don't make it, it would be interesting to hear why, and more generally an explanation of what it is that is different in the criteria if that's a factor in excluding some of the 2015 GOATs. FWIW, I believe the 2015 list was constructed before Rain's best 2015 results came in, which begs the question of where stichiu would have put him if those results had been factored in (and also demonstrates the limits of doing these lists when players are still crushing).
My reasons for having Rain at 10 are very different than Stuchiu's. He focused more on Rain's influence on PvP and his tournament runs (which are strong points!), but I wanted to avoid grading tournaments like he did and opted to use other statistics. I have Rain 10 because his numbers hold against anyone who was active in hots both in tournament finishes and overall win rate (Stuchiu did not prioritize win rate like I did).
It is, however, very amusing that Rain somehow ended up 10 both times as I completely had forgotten Stuchui ranked him there.
Btw saying the general public overvalues first place finishes, because it's all they remember doesn't make much sense, if you at the same time try to put value by the prestige of a tournament. It should either be cold facts: how open was the tournament for every pro to try and qualify, how high is the prize pool, how expansive was the tournament and maybe other factors. And then you value the statistics of the players and so fourth. But if you go by, this tournament is well remembered, it has a long history, it was called a world championship, then you should also go by that the finals is what counts, it's the culmination and the winning player should reap most of the tournaments worth.
Shouldn't WCS Korean Nationals from 2012 be part of StarLeague category? It was not weekly tournament - less then a month though and arguably not on par with contemporary GSL in terms of prize pool but it was still significant and top players took it seriously (because it gave a ticket to trash foreigners at WCS World Championship) so in my mind it should count.
EPT
I don't think any of these things take away from Serral's incredible accomplishments, nor do they mean that he's not the GOAT. And obviously all the other SC2 GOAT contenders have these kinds of weird off days and stretches of streaky play too (remember when Maru fell out of the IEM Katowice group stages??). But at least in terms of results, it's not nearly the level of consistency we saw out of, let's say, Flash, during his decade of dominance in BW. That's probably a very unfair standard to hold any SC2 player to, but at the same time, it's a standard that we know is achievable. It's possible that Serral is the most consistent player to ever play the game...like I said it kind of feels like it to me. I'd just be interested in actually seeing some data or evidence to support the claim. 
