#1: Maru - Greatest Players of All Time - Page 54

ejozl

Denmark3346 Posts

June 18 2024 18:08 GMT

#1061

On June 19 2024 02:37 Cactus66 wrote:
This has very limited use because even if the game was perfectly balanced at all points of time, the chances that the talent in all 3 races is evenly distributed throughout time is essentially 0.

Flipping a coin and rolling dice are examples of evenly balanced probabilities. If you had rolled a three sided die and used this as tournament results it would still appear uneven. If you then attempted to "balance" these tournament results the exercise makes no sense.

So this logic doesn't even work in a statistically proven experiment.

I can agree to that, but it is also some wishful thinking.

Here are according to prize earnings top 5 underpowered race periods:
2024: Protoss (Now, gj cabal.)
2015: Terran
2017: Protoss
2023: Protoss
2011: Protoss

and here are according to prize earnings top 5 overpowered race periods:
2019: Zerg
2018: Zerg
2011: Terran
2023: Terran
2017: Zerg

Just pooping out some of my stats here. But what are the odds really that this has nothing to do with balance, when in 2015 we go from Terran suffering from the 2nd most underpowered period for a race, they get dominated by Protoss mostly. And then LotV releases and Protoss becomes the 3rd most underpowered race of a period, losing to Zergs that dominate from 2017->2019.

Locutos

Brazil259 Posts

June 18 2024 18:14 GMT

#1062

On June 16 2024 09:40 radracer wrote:

Show nested quote +

That would only prove his dominance not the fact that he is dominating when no one cares about the game anymore.

Yes, but if Zest dominated at an X rate (lets say, winning 10% of premier tourneys in a given year) playing among an Y number of pro players.

You could compare that to the same statistics made for Serral (X'/Y').

Cactus66

23 Posts

June 18 2024 18:26 GMT

#1063

On June 19 2024 03:08 ejozl wrote:

Show nested quote +

What are the odds that this has nothing to do with balance? Zero. Definitely is impacted by balance. The game has certainly not been balanced equally throughout it's history. But talent has also not been equally distributed either and it's impossible to calculate to what degree of either. Prize money is top loaded so when a race has an outlier in the top spot these numbers shouldn't be equal even if the game is perfectly balanced.

MyLovelyLurker

France756 Posts

June 18 2024 21:48 GMT

#1064

Honesty, I play Protoss, but this feels like an affront to the law of large numbers and Kolmogorov lol.

If you really want to, you can justify Maru being the GOAT simply by invoking his total number of premier wins, which is still a few over Serral (might be dethroned in a year or so ceteris paribus IIRC) provided you don't count Serral's euro-only wins - a bit harsh but hey. This is more intellectually honest than just performing arbitrary importance sampling by invoking a distribution SHOULD be perfect and zero-variance because you just said it would be (spoiler alert, empirical variance equal to 0 has by definition vanishing probability).

Balnazza

Germany1125 Posts

June 18 2024 22:59 GMT

#1065

I mean, since fairness seems to be the utmost goal here...teamhouses naturally gave an unfair advantage, therefore they imbalanced the natural skill distribution. Which basically means we need to remove any player who ever trained in a teamhouse at any given time.

Therefore, by earnings, this is the true list of Top 10 SC2 players:

1. Serral
2. Reynor
3. Neeb
4. Scarlett
5. SpeCial
6. Oliveira
7. Nerchio
8. Snute (noice!)
9. ShoWTimE
10. Clem

(according to Esportsearnings...wtf, is Clem really that low on the list?)
Disclaimer: I'm not sure if Scarlett and SpeCial ever trained in a korean teamhouse, so maybe they need to be kicked out aswell.

There, fixed it. Data clearly supports it, therefore it most be true.

(just in case: No, I'm not serious, but c'mon, neither is that "balancing")

Perceivere

131 Posts

June 18 2024 23:40 GMT

#1066

On June 19 2024 06:48 MyLovelyLurker wrote:
Honesty, I play Protoss, but this feels like an affront to the law of large numbers and Kolmogorov lol.

If you really want to, you can justify Maru being the GOAT simply by invoking his total number of premier wins, which is still a few over Serral (might be dethroned in a year or so ceteris paribus IIRC) provided you don't count Serral's euro-only wins - a bit harsh but hey. This is more intellectually honest than just performing arbitrary importance sampling by invoking a distribution SHOULD be perfect and zero-variance because you just said it would be (spoiler alert, empirical variance equal to 0 has by definition vanishing probability).

Even if we completely discount Serral's regional wins (which is an amazingly dismissive and dishonest reach), he would still have 18 premieres, vs Maru's 17. I counted Nation Wars 2019 for Serral, because it was basically him vs the world (sorry, ZhuGe, you did contribute some, I know).

Serral

ESL SC2 Masters 2024 Spring
IEM Katowice 2024
Master's Coliseum 7
Master's Coliseum 6
ESL SC2 Masters 2023 Summer
TeamLiquid StarLeague 9
HomeStory Cup XXI
IEM Katowice 2022 IEM Katowice 2022
NeXT 2021 S2 – SC2 Masters
DH SC2 Masters 2021 Fall: Season Finals
DH SC2 Masters 2020 Winter: Season Finals
DH SC2 Masters 2020 Summer: Season Finals
NationWars 2019
HomeStory Cup XX
2019 GSL vs the World
HomeStory Cup XVIII
2018 WCS Global Finals
2018 GSL vs the World

and Maru.

StarsWar 11
2024 Global StarCraft II League Season 1: Code S
2023 Global StarCraft II League Season 2: Code S
2023 Global StarCraft II League Season 1: Code S
2022 Global StarCraft II League Season 3: Code S
DH SC2 Masters 2021: Last Chance 2022
King of Battles 2
DH SC2 Masters 2021 Winter: Season Finals
King of Battles: KB International Championship
2020 AfreecaTV GSL Super Tournament 1
2019 Global StarCraft II League Season 1: Code S
2018 Global StarCraft II League Season 3: Code S
2018 Global StarCraft II League Season 2: Code S
2018 Global StarCraft II League Season 1: Code S
World Electronic Sports Games 2017
2015 StarCraft II StarLeague Season 1: Main Event
2013 WCS Season 2 Korea OSL: Premier League

The fact that Serral accumulated everything in two-thirds the amount of time as Maru is also significant.

Husyelt

United States829 Posts

June 19 2024 05:42 GMT

#1067

oh folks wrap it up, serral massacres maru by every metric
its not even close
( i say this a someone who places Serral at 9.9, and Maru and Rogue at 9.7 now)

Charoisaur

Germany15914 Posts

June 19 2024 05:53 GMT

#1068

On June 19 2024 08:40 Perceivere wrote:

Show nested quote +

Then you should also count Maru's Proleague victory as he hard-carried with a 22-4 record

MJG

United Kingdom917 Posts

June 19 2024 06:18 GMT

#1069

On June 19 2024 08:40 Perceivere wrote:
The fact that Serral accumulated everything in two-thirds the amount of time as Maru is also significant.

The fact that Serral accumulated everything after Proleague collapsed and the Korean scene was gutted is also significant...

... or maybe not because this is all subjective.

Husyelt

United States829 Posts

June 19 2024 06:26 GMT

#1070

On June 19 2024 15:18 MJG wrote:

Show nested quote +

The fact that Serral accumulated everything after Proleague collapsed and the Korean scene was gutted is also significant...

... or maybe not because this is all subjective.

damn dog true
every stacraft 2 play literally collapsed on the floor, and their talent left the atmosphere when Proleage left. its incredible what happen. i was talking to Stats and he said he literally couldnt remember what hotel room he was in because SC2 Proleague fell apart. Serral dunking on the Korean pro scene post 2017 is totally a shame.

WombaT

Northern Ireland24931 Posts

June 19 2024 06:34 GMT

#1071

On June 19 2024 07:59 Balnazza wrote:
I mean, since fairness seems to be the utmost goal here...teamhouses naturally gave an unfair advantage, therefore they imbalanced the natural skill distribution. Which basically means we need to remove any player who ever trained in a teamhouse at any given time.

Therefore, by earnings, this is the true list of Top 10 SC2 players:

1. Serral
2. Reynor
3. Neeb
4. Scarlett
5. SpeCial
6. Oliveira
7. Nerchio
8. Snute (noice!)
9. ShoWTimE
10. Clem

(according to Esportsearnings...wtf, is Clem really that low on the list?)
Disclaimer: I'm not sure if Scarlett and SpeCial ever trained in a korean teamhouse, so maybe they need to be kicked out aswell.

There, fixed it. Data clearly supports it, therefore it most be true.

(just in case: No, I'm not serious, but c'mon, neither is that "balancing")

Got a chuckle, although semi-seriously I do think something like Proleague should only be invoked when comparing folks who competed in it. It’s almost as closed-off a tournament as there has been in the scene. It didn’t run all that long in the wider scheme of things, you had go be in Korea as well as being on a team participating.

Prize money is just a wonky metric all-round, given the exact same tournaments with the same prestige fluctuate in what they award amongst other things. Do these sites account for inflation I wonder, or currency fluctuation? :p

Interestingly (or not) Serral is the top eSports earner of all time if you exclude tournaments with million dollar+ prize pools from consideration. Maru’s pretty high up too along with a few SC2 boys.

Solar comes out top of the most online tournaments participated in in which money was awarded, at 629 entries for a cool $167,421.11 :O And that’s across all logged titles, Byun not far behind with 610

Despite being on record many a time as not liking using prize money as a comparative competitive metric, at least I’m finding interesting/completely useless stats out of my browsing

WombaT

Northern Ireland24931 Posts

June 19 2024 07:09 GMT

#1072

On June 19 2024 15:26 Husyelt wrote:

Show nested quote +

I feel it’s not brought up particularly often but, surely if the doomsayers are to be believed, players aren’t practicing, instead staring down their soju reminiscising about Proleague etc etc, why did players outside the usual suspects not make a bit more hay?

Prize money didn’t just disappear overnight, if one’s competition is your fellow Koreans who are now living like noir private eyes, and some bloke from Finland would it not make sense for someone to bust an absolute gut for a year or two and clean house?

I think that we didn’t really see that is testament to actually the level remaining pretty damn high, but tapering off a bit over time due to attrition in the playerbase.

Not that I don’t bemoan the decline of things over in Korea, and especially that we didn’t get to see that new generation. It really doesn’t help that SC2 really just isn’t that big over there for a start.

On the other hand, aside from sheer quality of play we can enjoy, I think eSports on the whole probably does somewhat benefit from not having a system like Kespa implemented. On an individual level I think the route a Serral/Reynor/Clem went on feels healthier to me on a life balance sense. On a wider scene competitiveness sense it’s rather difficult to compete with some of Korea’s advantages without at least somewhat aping that model. Which really throws more young kids (and it invariably is) into making that jump and commitment who are outside Korea. Plus all the expenses it adds to orgs if they’re gathering more disparately distributed talent together.

Perceivere

131 Posts

June 19 2024 09:05 GMT

#1073

On June 19 2024 15:18 MJG wrote:

Show nested quote +

The fact that Serral accumulated everything after Proleague collapsed and the Korean scene was gutted is also significant...

... or maybe not because this is all subjective.

I'm not sure what the point is. Proleague wouldn't have put even a remote damper on Serral's results, since his results stem largely from global tournaments, not Korean tournaments.

I''m not sure if you're rehashing the "more competitive era" argument, but in case you are, I'd already countered this argument at least twice before in this forum. The fact is, Proleague was replete with a bunch of Code A and Code B players. It's no difference if Maru, or even Serral beats up a bunch of them, or if they smashed through a bunch of upper-mid-tier Europeans, or even low-low-tier code S players today. Proleague wasn't all it's cracked up to be. It was just a very large pool of talents, ranging from low-tier Koreans that players like Heromarine/Showtime would easily crush to upper-tier Koreans, the vast majority of whom remained when Kespa pulled out support. It's the top talents that make the real difference in terms of level of competition.

To say it differently, the bell curve of the level of talent of current era Koreans is actually slightly further to the right than the curve of Proleaguers, and you may even throw in the Koreans who competed abroad into that mix. Only the size of the pool has changed, but when only a small subset of the pool actually matter in terms of difficulty of obtaining global tournament results, it doesn't really matter all that much. I would argue that the dip in funding after 2021 hurt the global scene more than the pull out of Kespa.

Perceivere

131 Posts

June 19 2024 09:20 GMT

#1074

On June 19 2024 14:53 Charoisaur wrote:

Show nested quote +

Then you should also count Maru's Proleague victory as he hard-carried with a 22-4 record

Which tournament was that? We were only counting non-EU-regional premieres that were won, and I added in a team tournament due to Serral's 92% winrate hard-carrying Finland. I'm not seeing any team premiere won by Maru's team where he had scored 22-4, although that score is still pretty impressive. Only premiere wins were being counted in our posts.

MJG

United Kingdom917 Posts

June 19 2024 09:48 GMT

#1075

On June 19 2024 18:05 Perceivere wrote:

Show nested quote +

I''m not sure if you're rehashing the "more competitive era" argument, but in case you are, I'd already countered this argument at least twice before in this forum. The fact is, Proleague was replete with a bunch of Code A and Code B players. It's no difference if Maru, or even Serral beats up a bunch of them, or if they smashed through a bunch of upper-mid-tier Europeans, or even low-low-tier code S players today. Proleague wasn't all it's cracked up to be. It was just a very large pool of talents, ranging from low-tier Koreans that players like Heromarine/Showtime would easily crush to upper-tier Koreans, the vast majority of whom remained when Kespa pulled out support. It's the top talents that make the real difference in terms of level of competition.

Many things in this debate are subjective, but this assertion is demonstrably false. "Low tier" Koreans utterly dominated the European and North American WCS circuits until they were region-locked out of them.

Perceivere

131 Posts

June 19 2024 09:50 GMT

#1076

On June 19 2024 18:05 Perceivere wrote:

Show nested quote +

I'm not sure what the point is. Proleague wouldn't have put even a remote damper on Serral's results, since his results stem largely from global tournaments, not Korean tournaments.

I'm not sure if you're rehashing the "more competitive era" argument, but in case you are, I'd already countered this argument at least twice before in this forum. The fact is, Proleague was replete with a bunch of Code A and Code B players. It's no difference if Maru, or even Serral beats up a bunch of them, or if they smashed through a bunch of upper-mid-tier Europeans, or even low-low-tier code S players today. Proleague wasn't all it's cracked up to be. It was just a very large pool of talents, ranging from low-tier Koreans that players like Heromarine/Showtime would easily crush to upper-tier Koreans, the vast majority of whom remained when Kespa pulled out support. It's the top talents that make the real difference in terms of level of competition.

To say it differently, the bell curve of the level of talent of current era Koreans is actually slightly further to the right than the curve of Proleaguers, and you may even throw in the Koreans who competed abroad into that mix. Only the size of the pool has changed, but when only a small subset of the pool actually matter in terms of difficulty of obtaining global tournament results, it doesn't really matter all that much. I would argue that the dip in funding after 2021 hurt the global scene more than the pull out of Kespa.

Addendum to this post:

I would like to add the caveat that while I think it's significant that Serral achieved more in a shorter span of time, that I don't think it really matters all too much that Maru didn't dominate in his younger years pre-LotV. There's a lot to be said for the level of competition in the early days of SC2 when so many competitors were so young and mentally undeveloped. Mental development occurs at different paces for everyone, and not everyone who show extremely promising results early in their teens is necessarily bound to be as competitive in their full adulthood. We've seen this in various chess super GMs who became GM at an extremely early age, but still barely cracked the top20 in their 20s. I don't think Life or MvP, for example, would've necessarily been as dominant as Rogue/Maru post-LotV for this very reason. There are late bloomers, just as there are early bloomers. There are also those who have a very high potential, but take their time to reach it.

For the results Maru achieved at the ages of 13-14, he was doing pretty damn well. Credit to that. Regardless, I feel it's really weird to heavily weigh results from such an underdeveloped era of an underdeveloped game with underdeveloped players into a GOAT conversation. It's like judging basketball players' greatness based on their high school varsity results (even if it is professional HS basketball). It's just...no. LotV is also much more complex and rapid-paced than WoL.

Perceivere

131 Posts

June 19 2024 09:56 GMT

#1077

On June 19 2024 18:48 MJG wrote:

Show nested quote +

"Low tier" Koreans utterly dominated the European and North American WCS circuits until they were region-locked out of them.

Not true. Low tier Koreans, for the most part, stayed in Korea, and played in Proleague. The Koreans who went abroad to compete against foreigners were largely mid-to-upper tier players. It makes sense. If you're not confident in your own ability, it's way too ambitious and risky to travel so far away to compete when you can already do so at home where it's comfortable. Bomber, Polt, MMA, Taeja, MC, etc. were far from low-tier. The non-Koreans of those days were also miles away from the Big Three of today's EU. Even the European players directly gatekeeping the Big Three were/are at least as strong as Neeb and Snute. Of course you would expect those Korean names listed to dominate those pre-LotV foreigners.

MJG

United Kingdom917 Posts

June 19 2024 10:01 GMT

#1078

On June 19 2024 18:50 Perceivere wrote:
LotV is also much more complex and rapid-paced than WoL.

It's also an expansion that places greater emphasis on a trait that Zerg is designed around, that being the requirement to take much faster expansions, whilst also eradicating a lot of strategic depth from the early game.

Both of these are a strike against players (especially Zerg) from the LotV era as far as I'm concerned. I care about strategy much more than I care about who can click fastest.

But like I said: Subjective.

Bennito_bh

15 Posts

June 19 2024 15:40 GMT

#1079

On June 19 2024 19:01 MJG wrote:

Show nested quote +

I like how you recategorized 'build order wins' as 'strategic depth'. Nice move.

BTW the article you quote is hyperbolic at best. "6-10 pools, the most extreme versions of proxy gateway(s), 11/11 rax and cannon rushes were unintentionally eliminated as a part of the LotV overhaul." - the first two were only true in the most technical sense, as one would not kill one's own workers to perform the new versions of those rushes. Yet proxy 3 rax has had a great and lasting representation in LOTV, cannon rushes continued until they were nerfed like 3(?) years ago with the shield battery changes, and 12 pools are the new 6-10 pool.

The author literally mourns the death of unscoutable builds. Taking rock-paper-scissors build orders out of the game doesn't kill the strategy, it saves it.

Expensive-Law-9830

129 Posts

June 19 2024 17:38 GMT

#1080

On June 19 2024 18:56 Perceivere wrote:

Show nested quote +

Pack it up boys, this forum has peaked at a new level of delusion.

It was in fact region locking that prevented foreigners from dominating Korea, not the other way around. How could past sc2 fans be all so wrong.

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