#6: Zest - Greatest Players of All Time - Page 7

On January 29 2024 09:21 Blargh wrote:

I really don't think this is true. Reynor's win is impressive, but the current era of SC2 is laughable in terms of competitiveness. I'd say anything past 2018 is vastly inferior to pre-2018. Post-pandemic? Even worse. Now there are literally only 16 Koreans who can even be considered "professional" SC2 players. I would say that any achievements in the last 3 years should be valued at close to 1/3 as much as before. You can just look at the effort players put in and it's laughable in comparison to how it was in 2011-2016. Players would be practicing all day, have teams and coaches all working their asses off, with a field of players roughly 3x larger. I'd even say that Top 4 of GSL 2012 was more impressive than winning the global finals in 2018-2023.

Sure, Reynor plays better than any player from 2016 did, but the strength and accomplishment of a player is always relative to the state of the competition at the time. In 10 years, there's probably going to be some player who has stuck with SC2 for all 10 years winning everything despite the scene being dead, and you'll be calling them the GOAT for winning the most tournaments out of any player ever.

I don't even feel like Maru or Dark try any more. You can see it in their play. No one is invested in the game the same way people were before. Basically no one has that burning fire in their heart to win it all. Sure, people want to win because money is good to have. But it's not what it was. Players were so invested back in the early days of GSL. Players literally gave up all of their home life, gave up good jobs, lived in grody team houses, just so they could be the best. No one does that now.

On January 31 2024 06:57 Pandain wrote:


Here is an extremely fun question: Who is the greater foreigner - Clem or Oliveira?

On January 31 2024 08:07 WombaT wrote:

Clam, and it’s not even that close.

Oliveira is like that relative frequent occurrence of some 100-150 ranked player winning a golf major when they catch fire for a few rounds.

Still very damn impressive but it doesn’t immediately elevate them into the elite, they’re still just an average pro (still incredible by regular standards) who had a great tournament.

I’m actually surprised that really, aside from Oliveira we’ve rarely had many rank outsiders have a great weekend and take the WC, it’s almost always somebody who’d be considered among the contenders going in. $o$ first time maybe, but then he subsequently established elite credentials.

On February 01 2024 06:33 Balnazza wrote:
It is really interesting to look at those wide-spread accomplishments. When I did my "Top 2 Finishes in Premier events"-list, I learned so much unexpected stuff. ByuN for example never lost a Premier finals. MaNa reached the finals of atleast one Premier event in each addon, being one of only four players who did so - and the only foreigner. Also...Heromarine, before Clem often mentioned in the same breath as Serral and Reynor when you talked about top-dog foreigners never actually managed to reach a Premier event final.

Ofc "reached a final in a Premier event" isn't a particularly strong metric, but interesting nevertheless

(also, funfact: With MC7 done, South Korea actually has a negative score in Finals - 218 won vs. 219 loss. Of course most of these are Korean vs. Korean, but still funny that Koreans lost more finals than they won...technically)