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On June 21 2024 03:44 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On June 21 2024 03:06 rwala wrote:On June 20 2024 07:51 Balnazza wrote:On June 19 2024 14:53 Charoisaur wrote:On June 19 2024 08:40 Perceivere wrote: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. Then you should also count Maru's Proleague victory as he hard-carried with a 22-4 record While I wouldn't count teamleagues at all...c'mon, this is silly. Maru didn't "hard-carry" Jin Air. They literally had three players in the Top 10. It's not like they would have been deadlast without Maru. But that is exactly the case with Finlands NationWar-win. Without Serral, they don't make it out the Group Stage. Serral went 24-2 that season, the next best Finnish player is ZhuGeLiang with I believe 3 wins to however many losses. Serral literally invited some dudes to a side-seeing tour to Paris. I highly doubt anyone would say "yes, the rest of Jin Air was just there to watch Maru play, they were basically useless". What’s silly is to compare NationWars on any level to Proleague, though I suppose this is actually a great example of what kind of perspective emerges from outcome-oriented thinking. I think a lot of people don’t realize that Proleague was arguably the most prestigious and important competition to ever exist in SCII (or at least on par with GSL, SSL, etc.). These were the matches that everyone watched. And players often devoted most of their practice time and saved their best builds for their Proleague matches with the hopes of impressing the managers and corporate sponsors and trading up to a new, better contract. NationWars was like a cute, fun thing featuring a handful of top pros, but mostly a bunch of mid- and lower-level pros. Very cool, but honestly nothing that should be seriously considered in any GOAT convo. There are lots of things in here on which reasonable people can disagree. This is not one of them. Except they really didn’t. There’s a reason big chunks of the community don’t put a huge amount of weight on it. I don’t think they’re right necessarily, but equally I think one can overstress its importance too. It was a vestigial competition ported from a Brood War with a very different scene and audience, and it didn’t even run that long in SC2 either. Where BW was closed and domestic, and Proleague was massive within that game and individual and team competition were equivalently prestigious, SC2 was more open, international and individual tournaments were the main focus from day 1. This isnt to diminish it either, but it really doesn’t neatly fit into the wider scene structure and GOAT chat outside of players who played in it and can directly be compared either. You had to be in Korea, on an eligible team and active for a relatively short period of SC2’s existence to even play in it at all. If memory serves Mvp didn’t in SC2, and Serral certainly never did. Said as someone who did actively follow and enjoy Proleague, but I don’t think it enjoys nearly the cachet within the wider SC2 context as it did within Brood War.
The main focus of who? I'm less interested in what Western audiences were focused on and cared about and more interested in the legacy of these competitions and Proleague 100% has a place within a SCII GOAT convo. It doesn't matter if Serral didn't play in Proleague, and it doesn't matter if it had more cache within the BW scene. I think it's important to educate people that Proleague wasn't some fun NationWars-esque showmatch kinda deal.
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On June 21 2024 05:03 Balnazza wrote:Show nested quote +On June 21 2024 03:06 rwala wrote:On June 20 2024 07:51 Balnazza wrote:On June 19 2024 14:53 Charoisaur wrote:On June 19 2024 08:40 Perceivere wrote: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. Then you should also count Maru's Proleague victory as he hard-carried with a 22-4 record While I wouldn't count teamleagues at all...c'mon, this is silly. Maru didn't "hard-carry" Jin Air. They literally had three players in the Top 10. It's not like they would have been deadlast without Maru. But that is exactly the case with Finlands NationWar-win. Without Serral, they don't make it out the Group Stage. Serral went 24-2 that season, the next best Finnish player is ZhuGeLiang with I believe 3 wins to however many losses. Serral literally invited some dudes to a side-seeing tour to Paris. I highly doubt anyone would say "yes, the rest of Jin Air was just there to watch Maru play, they were basically useless". What’s silly is to compare NationWars on any level to Proleague, though I suppose this is actually a great example of what kind of perspective emerges from outcome-oriented thinking. I think a lot of people don’t realize that Proleague was arguably the most prestigious and important competition to ever exist in SCII (or at least on par with GSL, SSL, etc.). These were the matches that everyone watched. And players often devoted most of their practice time and saved their best builds for their Proleague matches with the hopes of impressing the managers and corporate sponsors and trading up to a new, better contract. NationWars was like a cute, fun thing featuring a handful of top pros, but mostly a bunch of mid- and lower-level pros. Very cool, but honestly nothing that should be seriously considered in any GOAT convo. There are lots of things in here on which reasonable people can disagree. This is not one of them. Yes, I'm sure every European watched Proleague at 10:00 on a Monday/Tuesday, it's crazy how empty the streets here became on these times because everyone was watching Proleague...
They would have been, but it was tough competing against NationWars given that we got to finally see the real SC2 talent showcased via Team India, etc.
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Northern Ireland24921 Posts
On June 21 2024 08:03 rwala wrote:Show nested quote +On June 21 2024 03:44 WombaT wrote:On June 21 2024 03:06 rwala wrote:On June 20 2024 07:51 Balnazza wrote:On June 19 2024 14:53 Charoisaur wrote:On June 19 2024 08:40 Perceivere wrote: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. Then you should also count Maru's Proleague victory as he hard-carried with a 22-4 record While I wouldn't count teamleagues at all...c'mon, this is silly. Maru didn't "hard-carry" Jin Air. They literally had three players in the Top 10. It's not like they would have been deadlast without Maru. But that is exactly the case with Finlands NationWar-win. Without Serral, they don't make it out the Group Stage. Serral went 24-2 that season, the next best Finnish player is ZhuGeLiang with I believe 3 wins to however many losses. Serral literally invited some dudes to a side-seeing tour to Paris. I highly doubt anyone would say "yes, the rest of Jin Air was just there to watch Maru play, they were basically useless". What’s silly is to compare NationWars on any level to Proleague, though I suppose this is actually a great example of what kind of perspective emerges from outcome-oriented thinking. I think a lot of people don’t realize that Proleague was arguably the most prestigious and important competition to ever exist in SCII (or at least on par with GSL, SSL, etc.). These were the matches that everyone watched. And players often devoted most of their practice time and saved their best builds for their Proleague matches with the hopes of impressing the managers and corporate sponsors and trading up to a new, better contract. NationWars was like a cute, fun thing featuring a handful of top pros, but mostly a bunch of mid- and lower-level pros. Very cool, but honestly nothing that should be seriously considered in any GOAT convo. There are lots of things in here on which reasonable people can disagree. This is not one of them. Except they really didn’t. There’s a reason big chunks of the community don’t put a huge amount of weight on it. I don’t think they’re right necessarily, but equally I think one can overstress its importance too. It was a vestigial competition ported from a Brood War with a very different scene and audience, and it didn’t even run that long in SC2 either. Where BW was closed and domestic, and Proleague was massive within that game and individual and team competition were equivalently prestigious, SC2 was more open, international and individual tournaments were the main focus from day 1. This isnt to diminish it either, but it really doesn’t neatly fit into the wider scene structure and GOAT chat outside of players who played in it and can directly be compared either. You had to be in Korea, on an eligible team and active for a relatively short period of SC2’s existence to even play in it at all. If memory serves Mvp didn’t in SC2, and Serral certainly never did. Said as someone who did actively follow and enjoy Proleague, but I don’t think it enjoys nearly the cachet within the wider SC2 context as it did within Brood War. The main focus of who? I'm less interested in what Western audiences were focused on and cared about and more interested in the legacy of these competitions and Proleague 100% has a place within a SCII GOAT convo. It doesn't matter if Serral didn't play in Proleague, and it doesn't matter if it had more cache within the BW scene. I think it's important to educate people that Proleague wasn't some fun NationWars-esque showmatch kinda deal.
SC2’s audience? For basically the entirety of the game’s history team league efforts have been an afterthought
A separate tournament where it’s Bo1, to even compete in it one has to be in an eligible team and basically live in Korea, in a game where individual competition has always drawn in more viewers
Why even factor it in at all? It’s daft, it only lasted a few years.
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On June 21 2024 04:23 PremoBeats wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2024 03:06 MyLovelyLurker wrote:
(...) Maru's sheer longevity/track record length argument are evidently numbered. (...)
Adding to this: not one Maru-is-GOAT-guy so far has answered my question how long Maru in their eyes would keep the GOAT throne if things went on like they are now. Serral having win rates that are utterly surreal and showing a level of dominance no one ever could hope to attain. Accumulating more and more victories in the world's best events while beating everyone - including top Koreans - to the ground and standing at individual win records that are best to be described as absurd. Having more wins in PT with top Korean participation than anyone before him, while Maru still tries time and again to win Worlds and falling short, when the best of the world step in. This is going on in the seventh year now. Maru was never able to surpass his peers in the way Serral did or be considered the undenied best in any given year. But somehow, these 2 premier tournament wins and a remarkable career at never being truly #1 seem to surpass Serral. But then the question is: How long is Maru's duration of playing at the top level sufficient to counter balance the inhuman dominance of Serral, who is destroying everyone for over half the game's life span? Does Serral need another 7 years to prove the point? When is enough enough? Or are these people seriously trying to argue that playing in the Kespa era and winning 2 PT in that time frame, while never being #1 back then, is enough to lift Maru above Serral in a GOAT debate? No one so far, who claims Maru=GOAT has answered the question how long Serral's dominance needs to tower over everyone else, before Maru's duration handicap has reached its limit.
A problem is that many people only count wins. They're not judging the quality of the wins/dominance, and the difficulty justly.
I've tried to be as fair as possible. We can acknowledge that zerg was indeed imbalanced in 2018. I'm not sure why the Maru camp won't acknowledge that Maru has also enjoyed some advantages while Serral had some hurdles. Maru's best MU by far is TvT. Well, Korea is over-represented by terran. Terran also has no volatile MU, whereas zerg has to deal with the guesswork and difficult-to-scout/read gimmicks of fellow zergs. Somehow, someway, Serral recently had managed to somewhat close that gap between his ZvZ and other MUs, while other zergs remained in the 50%-ish winrate whirlpool of top-tier ZvZ. Serral has the entire world gunning/preparing builds for him, whereas Maru pretty much only has Korea focusing on him. Maru benefits from the fact that he plays in a region that Korea-biased writers/fans/casters overweigh. These individuals also happen to completely discount EU-regional premieres....as in ten wins count for exactly zero. This a slight-of-hand mental magic that they've still yet failed to rationalize...
probably because they can't rationalize it. Saying "it's easier," or "there just aren't enough good players" doesn't justify discounting all of the wins. An EU zerg beating Clem/Reynor is/was harder than a Korean terran beating anybody-not-Maru in Korea. Doing it 10 times over somehow means nothing in the judgments (or lack thereof) of some individuals.
Finally, you can't just count wins without counting the poor performances. Maru has bombed out of premier tournaments more often Serral. I can't remember which one it was, but he didn't even manage to break out of a large-size round robin groupstage at one time, and round robin is supposed to be among the most consistent formats for reducing randomness factor. When you count the fails, or relatively weak performance, as well as the achievements, and level of dominance of those achievements, you get a much more completely/unbiased view of these players.
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Miz finally found a way to keep this community busy until next big tournament lmao
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On June 21 2024 09:00 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On June 21 2024 08:03 rwala wrote:On June 21 2024 03:44 WombaT wrote:On June 21 2024 03:06 rwala wrote:On June 20 2024 07:51 Balnazza wrote:On June 19 2024 14:53 Charoisaur wrote:On June 19 2024 08:40 Perceivere wrote: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. Then you should also count Maru's Proleague victory as he hard-carried with a 22-4 record While I wouldn't count teamleagues at all...c'mon, this is silly. Maru didn't "hard-carry" Jin Air. They literally had three players in the Top 10. It's not like they would have been deadlast without Maru. But that is exactly the case with Finlands NationWar-win. Without Serral, they don't make it out the Group Stage. Serral went 24-2 that season, the next best Finnish player is ZhuGeLiang with I believe 3 wins to however many losses. Serral literally invited some dudes to a side-seeing tour to Paris. I highly doubt anyone would say "yes, the rest of Jin Air was just there to watch Maru play, they were basically useless". What’s silly is to compare NationWars on any level to Proleague, though I suppose this is actually a great example of what kind of perspective emerges from outcome-oriented thinking. I think a lot of people don’t realize that Proleague was arguably the most prestigious and important competition to ever exist in SCII (or at least on par with GSL, SSL, etc.). These were the matches that everyone watched. And players often devoted most of their practice time and saved their best builds for their Proleague matches with the hopes of impressing the managers and corporate sponsors and trading up to a new, better contract. NationWars was like a cute, fun thing featuring a handful of top pros, but mostly a bunch of mid- and lower-level pros. Very cool, but honestly nothing that should be seriously considered in any GOAT convo. There are lots of things in here on which reasonable people can disagree. This is not one of them. Except they really didn’t. There’s a reason big chunks of the community don’t put a huge amount of weight on it. I don’t think they’re right necessarily, but equally I think one can overstress its importance too. It was a vestigial competition ported from a Brood War with a very different scene and audience, and it didn’t even run that long in SC2 either. Where BW was closed and domestic, and Proleague was massive within that game and individual and team competition were equivalently prestigious, SC2 was more open, international and individual tournaments were the main focus from day 1. This isnt to diminish it either, but it really doesn’t neatly fit into the wider scene structure and GOAT chat outside of players who played in it and can directly be compared either. You had to be in Korea, on an eligible team and active for a relatively short period of SC2’s existence to even play in it at all. If memory serves Mvp didn’t in SC2, and Serral certainly never did. Said as someone who did actively follow and enjoy Proleague, but I don’t think it enjoys nearly the cachet within the wider SC2 context as it did within Brood War. The main focus of who? I'm less interested in what Western audiences were focused on and cared about and more interested in the legacy of these competitions and Proleague 100% has a place within a SCII GOAT convo. It doesn't matter if Serral didn't play in Proleague, and it doesn't matter if it had more cache within the BW scene. I think it's important to educate people that Proleague wasn't some fun NationWars-esque showmatch kinda deal. SC2’s audience? For basically the entirety of the game’s history team league efforts have been an afterthought A separate tournament where it’s Bo1, to even compete in it one has to be in an eligible team and basically live in Korea, in a game where individual competition has always drawn in more viewers Why even factor it in at all? It’s daft, it only lasted a few years.
This is a pretty shocking take from someone who claims to have followed and enjoyed Proleague. It was not an "afterthought" at all, and it's also not a coincidence that the game's decline coincided with the end of Proleague (I'm not making a cause-effect statement, but one could). Peak SCII competition was synonymous with Proleague. Far from lasting only a few years, I believe it was and still remains the longest-running esports show (I believe GSL will overtake it soon).
I guess from a Western audience perspective maybe it was all about those early MLG tourneys or whatever, but in terms of legacy on the game and level of competition, Proleague will always be legendary. Again, I'm less interested in what a predominantly white, Western audience feels like watching and more interested in the quality of the competition itself.
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On June 21 2024 09:15 Perceivere wrote:Show nested quote +On June 21 2024 04:23 PremoBeats wrote:On June 20 2024 03:06 MyLovelyLurker wrote:
(...) Maru's sheer longevity/track record length argument are evidently numbered. (...)
Adding to this: not one Maru-is-GOAT-guy so far has answered my question how long Maru in their eyes would keep the GOAT throne if things went on like they are now. Serral having win rates that are utterly surreal and showing a level of dominance no one ever could hope to attain. Accumulating more and more victories in the world's best events while beating everyone - including top Koreans - to the ground and standing at individual win records that are best to be described as absurd. Having more wins in PT with top Korean participation than anyone before him, while Maru still tries time and again to win Worlds and falling short, when the best of the world step in. This is going on in the seventh year now. Maru was never able to surpass his peers in the way Serral did or be considered the undenied best in any given year. But somehow, these 2 premier tournament wins and a remarkable career at never being truly #1 seem to surpass Serral. But then the question is: How long is Maru's duration of playing at the top level sufficient to counter balance the inhuman dominance of Serral, who is destroying everyone for over half the game's life span? Does Serral need another 7 years to prove the point? When is enough enough? Or are these people seriously trying to argue that playing in the Kespa era and winning 2 PT in that time frame, while never being #1 back then, is enough to lift Maru above Serral in a GOAT debate? No one so far, who claims Maru=GOAT has answered the question how long Serral's dominance needs to tower over everyone else, before Maru's duration handicap has reached its limit. A problem is that many people only count wins. They're not judging the quality of the wins/dominance, and the difficulty justly. I've tried to be as fair as possible. We can acknowledge that zerg was indeed imbalanced in 2018. I'm not sure why the Maru camp won't acknowledge that Maru has also enjoyed some advantages while Serral had some hurdles. Maru's best MU by far is TvT. Well, Korea is over-represented by terran. Terran also has no volatile MU, whereas zerg has to deal with the guesswork and difficult-to-scout/read gimmicks of fellow zergs. Somehow, someway, Serral recently had managed to somewhat close that gap between his ZvZ and other MUs, while other zergs remained in the 50%-ish winrate whirlpool of top-tier ZvZ. Serral has the entire world gunning/preparing builds for him, whereas Maru pretty much only has Korea focusing on him. Maru benefits from the fact that he plays in a region that Korea-biased writers/fans/casters overweigh. These individuals also happen to completely discount EU-regional premieres....as in ten wins count for exactly zero. This a slight-of-hand mental magic that they've still yet failed to rationalize... probably because they can't rationalize it. Saying "it's easier," or "there just aren't enough good players" doesn't justify discounting all of the wins. An EU zerg beating Clem/Reynor is/was harder than a Korean terran beating anybody-not-Maru in Korea. Doing it 10 times over somehow means nothing in the judgments (or lack thereof) of some individuals. Finally, you can't just count wins without counting the poor performances. Maru has bombed out of premier tournaments more often Serral. I can't remember which one it was, but he didn't even manage to break out of a large-size round robin groupstage at one time, and round robin is supposed to be among the most consistent formats for reducing randomness factor. When you count the fails, or relatively weak performance, as well as the achievements, and level of dominance of those achievements, you get a much more completely/unbiased view of these players.
Why might TvT be Maru's best matchup... It's almost as if one race is easier to beat than the others... But that's impossible, because we know that all three races are equal in strength and difficulty despite being different in every other way. I suppose we'll never know!
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On June 21 2024 10:36 tskarzyn wrote:Show nested quote +On June 21 2024 09:15 Perceivere wrote:On June 21 2024 04:23 PremoBeats wrote:On June 20 2024 03:06 MyLovelyLurker wrote:
(...) Maru's sheer longevity/track record length argument are evidently numbered. (...)
Adding to this: not one Maru-is-GOAT-guy so far has answered my question how long Maru in their eyes would keep the GOAT throne if things went on like they are now. Serral having win rates that are utterly surreal and showing a level of dominance no one ever could hope to attain. Accumulating more and more victories in the world's best events while beating everyone - including top Koreans - to the ground and standing at individual win records that are best to be described as absurd. Having more wins in PT with top Korean participation than anyone before him, while Maru still tries time and again to win Worlds and falling short, when the best of the world step in. This is going on in the seventh year now. Maru was never able to surpass his peers in the way Serral did or be considered the undenied best in any given year. But somehow, these 2 premier tournament wins and a remarkable career at never being truly #1 seem to surpass Serral. But then the question is: How long is Maru's duration of playing at the top level sufficient to counter balance the inhuman dominance of Serral, who is destroying everyone for over half the game's life span? Does Serral need another 7 years to prove the point? When is enough enough? Or are these people seriously trying to argue that playing in the Kespa era and winning 2 PT in that time frame, while never being #1 back then, is enough to lift Maru above Serral in a GOAT debate? No one so far, who claims Maru=GOAT has answered the question how long Serral's dominance needs to tower over everyone else, before Maru's duration handicap has reached its limit. A problem is that many people only count wins. They're not judging the quality of the wins/dominance, and the difficulty justly. I've tried to be as fair as possible. We can acknowledge that zerg was indeed imbalanced in 2018. I'm not sure why the Maru camp won't acknowledge that Maru has also enjoyed some advantages while Serral had some hurdles. Maru's best MU by far is TvT. Well, Korea is over-represented by terran. Terran also has no volatile MU, whereas zerg has to deal with the guesswork and difficult-to-scout/read gimmicks of fellow zergs. Somehow, someway, Serral recently had managed to somewhat close that gap between his ZvZ and other MUs, while other zergs remained in the 50%-ish winrate whirlpool of top-tier ZvZ. Serral has the entire world gunning/preparing builds for him, whereas Maru pretty much only has Korea focusing on him. Maru benefits from the fact that he plays in a region that Korea-biased writers/fans/casters overweigh. These individuals also happen to completely discount EU-regional premieres....as in ten wins count for exactly zero. This a slight-of-hand mental magic that they've still yet failed to rationalize... probably because they can't rationalize it. Saying "it's easier," or "there just aren't enough good players" doesn't justify discounting all of the wins. An EU zerg beating Clem/Reynor is/was harder than a Korean terran beating anybody-not-Maru in Korea. Doing it 10 times over somehow means nothing in the judgments (or lack thereof) of some individuals. Finally, you can't just count wins without counting the poor performances. Maru has bombed out of premier tournaments more often Serral. I can't remember which one it was, but he didn't even manage to break out of a large-size round robin groupstage at one time, and round robin is supposed to be among the most consistent formats for reducing randomness factor. When you count the fails, or relatively weak performance, as well as the achievements, and level of dominance of those achievements, you get a much more completely/unbiased view of these players. Why might TvT be Maru's best matchup... It's almost as if one race is easier to beat than the others... But that's impossible, because we know that all three races are equal in strength and difficulty despite being different in every other way. I suppose we'll never know!
Are you suggesting that terran is weaker than protoss?? Especially given the vastly larger number of top terrans in Korea than top protoss? I would love to see the olympic-level gymnastic arguments for that. I would also like to see the arguments explaining away his TvZ winrates improving as zerg keeps getting nerfed. TvT has been his best MU, despite there being way more top terrans than top protoss in Korea.
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United States1840 Posts
On June 21 2024 10:16 rwala wrote:Show nested quote +On June 21 2024 09:00 WombaT wrote:On June 21 2024 08:03 rwala wrote:On June 21 2024 03:44 WombaT wrote:On June 21 2024 03:06 rwala wrote:On June 20 2024 07:51 Balnazza wrote:On June 19 2024 14:53 Charoisaur wrote:On June 19 2024 08:40 Perceivere wrote: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. Then you should also count Maru's Proleague victory as he hard-carried with a 22-4 record While I wouldn't count teamleagues at all...c'mon, this is silly. Maru didn't "hard-carry" Jin Air. They literally had three players in the Top 10. It's not like they would have been deadlast without Maru. But that is exactly the case with Finlands NationWar-win. Without Serral, they don't make it out the Group Stage. Serral went 24-2 that season, the next best Finnish player is ZhuGeLiang with I believe 3 wins to however many losses. Serral literally invited some dudes to a side-seeing tour to Paris. I highly doubt anyone would say "yes, the rest of Jin Air was just there to watch Maru play, they were basically useless". What’s silly is to compare NationWars on any level to Proleague, though I suppose this is actually a great example of what kind of perspective emerges from outcome-oriented thinking. I think a lot of people don’t realize that Proleague was arguably the most prestigious and important competition to ever exist in SCII (or at least on par with GSL, SSL, etc.). These were the matches that everyone watched. And players often devoted most of their practice time and saved their best builds for their Proleague matches with the hopes of impressing the managers and corporate sponsors and trading up to a new, better contract. NationWars was like a cute, fun thing featuring a handful of top pros, but mostly a bunch of mid- and lower-level pros. Very cool, but honestly nothing that should be seriously considered in any GOAT convo. There are lots of things in here on which reasonable people can disagree. This is not one of them. Except they really didn’t. There’s a reason big chunks of the community don’t put a huge amount of weight on it. I don’t think they’re right necessarily, but equally I think one can overstress its importance too. It was a vestigial competition ported from a Brood War with a very different scene and audience, and it didn’t even run that long in SC2 either. Where BW was closed and domestic, and Proleague was massive within that game and individual and team competition were equivalently prestigious, SC2 was more open, international and individual tournaments were the main focus from day 1. This isnt to diminish it either, but it really doesn’t neatly fit into the wider scene structure and GOAT chat outside of players who played in it and can directly be compared either. You had to be in Korea, on an eligible team and active for a relatively short period of SC2’s existence to even play in it at all. If memory serves Mvp didn’t in SC2, and Serral certainly never did. Said as someone who did actively follow and enjoy Proleague, but I don’t think it enjoys nearly the cachet within the wider SC2 context as it did within Brood War. The main focus of who? I'm less interested in what Western audiences were focused on and cared about and more interested in the legacy of these competitions and Proleague 100% has a place within a SCII GOAT convo. It doesn't matter if Serral didn't play in Proleague, and it doesn't matter if it had more cache within the BW scene. I think it's important to educate people that Proleague wasn't some fun NationWars-esque showmatch kinda deal. SC2’s audience? For basically the entirety of the game’s history team league efforts have been an afterthought A separate tournament where it’s Bo1, to even compete in it one has to be in an eligible team and basically live in Korea, in a game where individual competition has always drawn in more viewers Why even factor it in at all? It’s daft, it only lasted a few years. This is a pretty shocking take from someone who claims to have followed and enjoyed Proleague. It was not an "afterthought" at all, and it's also not a coincidence that the game's decline coincided with the end of Proleague (I'm not making a cause-effect statement, but one could). Peak SCII competition was synonymous with Proleague. Far from lasting only a few years, I believe it was and still remains the longest-running esports show (I believe GSL will overtake it soon). I guess from a Western audience perspective maybe it was all about those early MLG tourneys or whatever, but in terms of legacy on the game and level of competition, Proleague will always be legendary. Again, I'm less interested in what a predominantly white, Western audience feels like watching and more interested in the quality of the competition itself.
Although you muddied some of the already muddy stuff, you are largely correct. Teams paid players to represent them in Proleague. If they won Individual Leagues it was great as far as bringing attention to your team. But, in the end, if you had a Code S final coming up in a few days and your coaches wanted you to play in Proleague, you were preparing for Proleague.
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Proleague is the most gated and locked competition there ever was.
Not even the best Korean SC2 player at the time was able to participate in it...
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I do think it is fair to say that western audiences may not have cared about pro league to the same extent. Bad time zone etc.
However I do think it's kinda dumb to look back and discount the results. That's where most of the kr scenes money came from so it was the priority. I also feel like it's slightly dishonest to look at the level of play in the competition and act like if inno won an extra mlg or two instead of playing pro league, that it would enhance his legacy.
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Northern Ireland24921 Posts
On June 21 2024 10:16 rwala wrote:Show nested quote +On June 21 2024 09:00 WombaT wrote:On June 21 2024 08:03 rwala wrote:On June 21 2024 03:44 WombaT wrote:On June 21 2024 03:06 rwala wrote:On June 20 2024 07:51 Balnazza wrote:On June 19 2024 14:53 Charoisaur wrote:On June 19 2024 08:40 Perceivere wrote: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. Then you should also count Maru's Proleague victory as he hard-carried with a 22-4 record While I wouldn't count teamleagues at all...c'mon, this is silly. Maru didn't "hard-carry" Jin Air. They literally had three players in the Top 10. It's not like they would have been deadlast without Maru. But that is exactly the case with Finlands NationWar-win. Without Serral, they don't make it out the Group Stage. Serral went 24-2 that season, the next best Finnish player is ZhuGeLiang with I believe 3 wins to however many losses. Serral literally invited some dudes to a side-seeing tour to Paris. I highly doubt anyone would say "yes, the rest of Jin Air was just there to watch Maru play, they were basically useless". What’s silly is to compare NationWars on any level to Proleague, though I suppose this is actually a great example of what kind of perspective emerges from outcome-oriented thinking. I think a lot of people don’t realize that Proleague was arguably the most prestigious and important competition to ever exist in SCII (or at least on par with GSL, SSL, etc.). These were the matches that everyone watched. And players often devoted most of their practice time and saved their best builds for their Proleague matches with the hopes of impressing the managers and corporate sponsors and trading up to a new, better contract. NationWars was like a cute, fun thing featuring a handful of top pros, but mostly a bunch of mid- and lower-level pros. Very cool, but honestly nothing that should be seriously considered in any GOAT convo. There are lots of things in here on which reasonable people can disagree. This is not one of them. Except they really didn’t. There’s a reason big chunks of the community don’t put a huge amount of weight on it. I don’t think they’re right necessarily, but equally I think one can overstress its importance too. It was a vestigial competition ported from a Brood War with a very different scene and audience, and it didn’t even run that long in SC2 either. Where BW was closed and domestic, and Proleague was massive within that game and individual and team competition were equivalently prestigious, SC2 was more open, international and individual tournaments were the main focus from day 1. This isnt to diminish it either, but it really doesn’t neatly fit into the wider scene structure and GOAT chat outside of players who played in it and can directly be compared either. You had to be in Korea, on an eligible team and active for a relatively short period of SC2’s existence to even play in it at all. If memory serves Mvp didn’t in SC2, and Serral certainly never did. Said as someone who did actively follow and enjoy Proleague, but I don’t think it enjoys nearly the cachet within the wider SC2 context as it did within Brood War. The main focus of who? I'm less interested in what Western audiences were focused on and cared about and more interested in the legacy of these competitions and Proleague 100% has a place within a SCII GOAT convo. It doesn't matter if Serral didn't play in Proleague, and it doesn't matter if it had more cache within the BW scene. I think it's important to educate people that Proleague wasn't some fun NationWars-esque showmatch kinda deal. SC2’s audience? For basically the entirety of the game’s history team league efforts have been an afterthought A separate tournament where it’s Bo1, to even compete in it one has to be in an eligible team and basically live in Korea, in a game where individual competition has always drawn in more viewers Why even factor it in at all? It’s daft, it only lasted a few years. This is a pretty shocking take from someone who claims to have followed and enjoyed Proleague. It was not an "afterthought" at all, and it's also not a coincidence that the game's decline coincided with the end of Proleague (I'm not making a cause-effect statement, but one could). Peak SCII competition was synonymous with Proleague. Far from lasting only a few years, I believe it was and still remains the longest-running esports show (I believe GSL will overtake it soon). I guess from a Western audience perspective maybe it was all about those early MLG tourneys or whatever, but in terms of legacy on the game and level of competition, Proleague will always be legendary. Again, I'm less interested in what a predominantly white, Western audience feels like watching and more interested in the quality of the competition itself.
We have a few years before it started in SC2, and we’re way past many more after, longer it actually ran
It’s got nothing to do with the whiteness of the audience it’s transplanting a system into a new environment that’s actually quite different from BW, and its prestige came from its status in that game.
I think of it as difficult to place for the mentioned reasons.
In something like Golf, winning the World Matchplay (different format) or being clutch in the Ryder Cup (team rather than individual) are huge deals. But if you want into the GOAT conversation it’s hugely about how they performed in the 4 majors, that’s just how that audience views it, even if (and they have) other tournaments spring up with even more money.
It’s not just Proleague, SC2’s fan base has generally preferred and weighted individual competition higher. MMA and Inno in GSTL, Serral in Nation’s League, Taeja’s miracle run in IPLTAC were all monster performances that are mentioned quite a way down their roll of honours.
I think it’s a pity it didn’t catch the imagination as much as it could have, as I said I like Proleague and wouldn’t diminish it, it just fits awkwardly for all sorts of reasons:
Kespa pulling out was a disaster for the scene much more than Proleague in and of itself, although they are pretty damn linked. As was Blizz/ESL not really stepping up.
That said I don’t think Kespa didn’t make errors in this time either, and making little tweaks and adjustments to properly port Proleague into SC2’s ecosystem was one of them IMO.
As Miz says, and it’s come up before, if it came to a Proleague game or a GSL/SSL playoff match, players would prioritise the former. Which speaks to how seriously the competition was taken, but also those minor tweaks I mention.
If those are the tournaments your audience is primarily watching, that’s not exactly ideal.
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Northern Ireland24921 Posts
On June 21 2024 22:38 Moonerz wrote:
I do think it is fair to say that western audiences may not have cared about pro league to the same extent. Bad time zone etc.
However I do think it's kinda dumb to look back and discount the results. That's where most of the kr scenes money came from so it was the priority. I also feel like it's slightly dishonest to look at the level of play in the competition and act like if inno won an extra mlg or two instead of playing pro league, that it would enhance his legacy.
Time zone was always a thing with GSL, and I think definitely impacted numbers there versus tournies in other regions, but I think generally it outdid Proleague pretty significantly.
I think another part was simply that it was new to many folks.
BW vets got it obviously, and a second category I myself was in where upon discovering the SC2 pro scene I went backwards into BW’s would know the history and prestige.
Outside of things at the very beginning of scenes, or if something with a gigantic prize pool like the EWC appears, it’s quite difficult to pop in and go ‘ok this is the big thing now’
But that aside yeah discounting it is a bit daft, so long as it’s comparing players who played in it rather than ‘well x didn’t play in Proleague’ manner which is also daft
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The difference between EU regionals and other tournaments is that players outside of EU literally aren't allowed to compete in it.
It's like the money argument - you can't compare prize money if players have unequal opportunities to earn it.
WESG and StarsWar were open to all players and including qualifiers many more players attempted to compete in it.
And there are also tournaments like ASUS Rog Maru won that aren't on the list
This is the hill you wanna die on? Out of 32 players there were 3 Koreans in WESG that year, and Maru never played Classic. These weren't the uberchad 2022 foreigners, these were early 2017 foreigners.
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United States33326 Posts
The one discounting Proleague are crazy; it's probably actually being underrated in the miz GOAT series.
During 2014-2016, the majority of top players were in KeSPA teams (the most notable exceptions being Life, Maru, and INnoVation for single years), and Proleague was clearly their primary focus. KeSPA players were only able to participate in international tournaments on a limited basis, and they generally won and/or took the top podium spots when they did (Life was the biggest outlier until he joined KT Rolster in 2015).
I've avoided the GOAT debate threads in general but that take is so bad it might be bannable for just being so wrong and ignorant.
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Northern Ireland24921 Posts
On June 22 2024 04:18 Waxangel wrote:
The one discounting Proleague are crazy; it's probably actually being underrated in the miz GOAT series.
During 2014-2016, the majority of top players were in KeSPA teams (the most notable exceptions being Life, Maru, and INnoVation for single years), and Proleague was clearly their primary focus. KeSPA players were only able to participate in international tournaments on a limited basis, and they generally won and/or took the top podium spots when they did (Life was the biggest outlier until he joined KT Rolster in 2015).
I've avoided the GOAT debate threads in general but that take is so bad it might be bannable for just being so wrong and ignorant.
You basically outlined why people find it difficult in how to weight Proleague in terms of GOAT chat.
Most of the top players were there, except those who weren’t. It ran for a couple of years in a game that we’re in the 14th year of. Kespa players were somewhat restricted in being able to attend tournaments that generally
Difficult to weigh doesn’t mean it’s worthless or anything like that. But in a scene where rep is largely defined by turning up and delivering in an individual tournament, trying to factor in a relatively short lived team league is tricky
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United States33326 Posts
On June 22 2024 05:46 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2024 04:18 Waxangel wrote:
The one discounting Proleague are crazy; it's probably actually being underrated in the miz GOAT series.
During 2014-2016, the majority of top players were in KeSPA teams (the most notable exceptions being Life, Maru, and INnoVation for single years), and Proleague was clearly their primary focus. KeSPA players were only able to participate in international tournaments on a limited basis, and they generally won and/or took the top podium spots when they did (Life was the biggest outlier until he joined KT Rolster in 2015).
I've avoided the GOAT debate threads in general but that take is so bad it might be bannable for just being so wrong and ignorant. But in a scene where rep is largely defined by turning up and delivering in an individual tournament
Yah, the entire point is you don't get to throw that out there as if it's a truism.
(unless you are specifically referring to recency-biased fans who haven't taken the time to thoroughly consider the history of SC2 with appropriate context  )
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On June 22 2024 04:18 Waxangel wrote:
The one discounting Proleague are crazy; it's probably actually being underrated in the miz GOAT series.
During 2014-2016, the majority of top players were in KeSPA teams (the most notable exceptions being Life, Maru, and INnoVation for single years), and Proleague was clearly their primary focus. KeSPA players were only able to participate in international tournaments on a limited basis, and they generally won and/or took the top podium spots when they did (Life was the biggest outlier until he joined KT Rolster in 2015).
I've avoided the GOAT debate threads in general but that take is so bad it might be bannable for just being so wrong and ignorant.
"During 2014-2016, the majority of top players were in KeSPA teams"
I'm looking back at the Aligulac lists between 2014-2016, and the vast, vast majority of the top players on those lists were the same top players after Kespa pulled out. The only Kespa players that touched the top10 were Hydra and Rain, and even then only for short periods. Between 2014-2015, San was there for a little while. Phantasy, Soulkey, and Flash were in the top20-30. Flash, Violet, Leenock, and Soulkey were in the top10 for a few months, but not after 2014. I see no evidence indicating that the "majority of top players were" from Kespa between 2014-2016. Quite the contrary—only a tiny sprinkle, and only for short periods. 1v1 tournament placements-wise, the top rankers were also mostly non-Kespa, with the top3 almost always non-Kespa, post-2014.
The results are pretty fascinating. They show that Kespa players had a very strong showing, until around late-2013, and then the Kespa players really began to fall behind quickly, actually. From that point on, it was very, very clear that the top SC2 players were non-Kespa. Both Aligulac and tournament results reflect this. I'm not sure what made you see it otherwise.
Actually, looking back at these lists somewhat confirms my ideas regarding mental development. The Kespa players ranked really high pre-2013, and then not so high afterward. The Kespa players were also on average a few years older. The Kespa players had an age and mental developmental advantage for a couple years, until the non-Kespa youngins got into their mid-teens, and quickly caught up, and outpaced the older players. These younger, non-Kespa players didn't have one foot in SC2, and one in BW; they were more focused on SC2. They also had SC2's mechanics/muscle memory more deeply ingrained in their adolescent minds. So, it makes perfect sense that they would be disadvantaged early on, but would eventually outperform the much older Kespa players. Note too that many of the tournament winners pre-2014 were players who were also relatively old. Fruitdealer and MvP, for example. Life may have been the biggest exception to the rule, but Life also didn't really begin to show results until around age 15. Maru was 14 at the time. Maru did extremely well for being at such early age. One year makes a big difference around this developmental period. Those were close series he had with Life. If he were a year or two older, perhaps he would've won.
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United States33326 Posts
On June 22 2024 09:13 Perceivere wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2024 04:18 Waxangel wrote:
The one discounting Proleague are crazy; it's probably actually being underrated in the miz GOAT series.
During 2014-2016, the majority of top players were in KeSPA teams (the most notable exceptions being Life, Maru, and INnoVation for single years), and Proleague was clearly their primary focus. KeSPA players were only able to participate in international tournaments on a limited basis, and they generally won and/or took the top podium spots when they did (Life was the biggest outlier until he joined KT Rolster in 2015).
I've avoided the GOAT debate threads in general but that take is so bad it might be bannable for just being so wrong and ignorant. "During 2014-2016, the majority of top players were in KeSPA teams" I'm looking back at the Aligulac lists between 2014-2016, and the vast, vast majority of the top players on those lists were the same top players after Kespa pulled out. The only Kespa players that touched the top10 were Hydra and Rain, and even then only for short periods. Between 2014-2015, San was there for a little while. Phantasy, Soulkey, and Flash were in the top20-30. Flash, Violet, Leenock, and Soulkey were in the top10 for a few months, but not after 2014. I see no evidence indicating that the "majority of top players were" from Kespa between 2014-2016. Quite the contrary—only a tiny sprinkle, and only for short periods. 1v1 tournament placements-wise, the top rankers were also mostly non-Kespa, with the top3 almost always non-Kespa, post-2014.
Can I assume you're someone who's more of a recent fan than someone who wasn't following at the time? Because you're making such an obviously nonsensical argument for anyone who was watching at the time, but I'll humor you briefly.
Aligulac is not a particularly good metric during that period because of how extremely silo'd each regional scene was, and also because of the low volume of games played. Post-2020 is much better because all the players generally play in the same competitions, and many of the top players play a LOT of online cup games.
It's funny that you bring up San, because he WASN'T a KeSPA player, and him poking into the top ten of Aligulac is a perfect example of how a tier-2, non-KeSPA player who farmed weaker international tournaments could inflate his Aligulac.com rating (albeit maybe he was a borderline top ten player at his best, but that's a tangent).
It's more instructive to look at the results in tournaments and see the general trend of what happens when KeSPA players play against the rest of the field. I'm not sure how you're saying non-KeSPA was took over after 2014, unless you're just doing a very cursory glance over Liquipedia. KeSPA players generally performed very well in the limited Tier-2/3 competitions they competed in, and DOMINATED the Tier-1 competitions where they showed up en masse (BlizzCon 2014 being notable as a last stand for the rest of the scene).
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United States1840 Posts
On June 22 2024 09:13 Perceivere wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2024 04:18 Waxangel wrote:
The one discounting Proleague are crazy; it's probably actually being underrated in the miz GOAT series.
During 2014-2016, the majority of top players were in KeSPA teams (the most notable exceptions being Life, Maru, and INnoVation for single years), and Proleague was clearly their primary focus. KeSPA players were only able to participate in international tournaments on a limited basis, and they generally won and/or took the top podium spots when they did (Life was the biggest outlier until he joined KT Rolster in 2015).
I've avoided the GOAT debate threads in general but that take is so bad it might be bannable for just being so wrong and ignorant. "During 2014-2016, the majority of top players were in KeSPA teams" I'm looking back at the Aligulac lists between 2014-2016, and the vast, vast majority of the top players on those lists were the same top players after Kespa pulled out. The only Kespa players that touched the top10 were Hydra and Rain, and even then only for short periods. Between 2014-2015, San was there for a little while. Phantasy, Soulkey, and Flash were in the top20-30. Flash, Violet, Leenock, and Soulkey were in the top10 for a few months, but not after 2014. I see no evidence indicating that the "majority of top players were" from Kespa between 2014-2016. Quite the contrary—only a tiny sprinkle, and only for short periods. 1v1 tournament placements-wise, the top rankers were also mostly non-Kespa, with the top3 almost always non-Kespa, post-2014. The results are pretty fascinating. They show that Kespa players had a very strong showing, until around late-2013, and then the Kespa players really began to fall behind quickly, actually. From that point on, it was very, very clear that the top SC2 players were non-Kespa. Both Aligulac and tournament results reflect this. I'm not sure what made you see it otherwise. Actually, looking back at these lists somewhat confirms my ideas regarding mental development. The Kespa players ranked really high pre-2013, and then not so high afterward. The Kespa players were also on average a few years older. The Kespa players had an age and mental developmental advantage for a couple years, until the non-Kespa youngins got into their mid-teens, and quickly caught up, and outpaced the older players. These younger, non-Kespa players didn't have one foot in SC2, and one in BW; they were more focused on SC2. They also had SC2's mechanics/muscle memory more deeply ingrained in their adolescent minds. So, it makes perfect sense that they would be disadvantaged early on, but would eventually outperform the much older Kespa players. Note too that many of the tournament winners pre-2014 were players who were also relatively old. Fruitdealer and MvP, for example. Life may have been the biggest exception to the rule, but Life also didn't really begin to show results until around age 15. Maru was 14 at the time. Maru did extremely well for being at such early age. One year makes a big difference around this developmental period. Those were close series he had with Life. If he were a year or two older, perhaps he would've won.
KeSPA players who won Code S/SSL/WCS WC/IEM WC from 2014-2016
Zest 3x, Classic 2x, INnoVation x2, Maru, herO, Life (he won WCS 2014 on StarTale which became a KeSPA team in 2015 and won S1 of Code S 2015 on KT), Dark, Solar, sOs 2x
Former KeSPA players who won Code S/SSL/WCS WC/IEM WC from 2014-2016
Rain (Rain was banned from joining another KeSPA team after leaving SKT)
Players who were never affiliated with KeSPA teams who won Code S/SSL/WCS WC/IEM WC from 2014-2016
ByuN 2x (both of which he won in the last four odd months of 2016)
Yep, looks like the whole KeSPA team thing was overrated...
AKA, you're a 
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EPT
