The GOAT ranking of GOAT rankings - Page 2

On August 10 2024 11:24 Waxangel wrote:
I was debating making a joke GOAT ranking of actual goat species, but it would have required too much research to make it worth the effort

On August 10 2024 17:31 PremoBeats wrote:


At this point rwala must be trolling. I was able to take him seriously until a certain point, but it is clear, that he isn't interested in discussing this issue further on a good faith level. To even suggest that this attempt is more credible or my list wasn't serious is utterly absurd.
Although I have to say that (iirc it was him) he at least was open about his subjective feelings trumping objectivity in another thread (Miz' or mine... can't remember).

This is similar to what you are suggesting here. But as I said in another thread, there are metrics for people that are present in GOAT discussions in other sports that can be measured. And these metrics include achievements, win rates, tournaments win rates, occupation of high ranks if the sport has a ranking system, trophies, awards and all kinds of more subjective qualities. But the hard metrics definitely include the ones that I looked at and there is a correlation with good results in these metrics and being in a GOAT discussion. I am further happy to add other metrics if people feel that I have been looking unfairly at this whole topic.

I am far from done with my re-work, as I definitely don't want to repeat the mistakes I made last time and be as objective as possible (small spoiler: so far, Serral has been - closely - kicked out of #1 in at least 1 metric by including team results in the tournament score - which was kind of expected as he isn't Korean and wasn't participating in that many team events).
The hardest thing at the moment is the era analysis... how to factor in retired/banned players, overall competitiveness and tournament structure is hard to wrap my head around. But the start looks promising... the data gathered so far indicates that I wasn't too far off with the era- plus tournamnet-multiplier combination from leveling the playing field between different eras.

On August 10 2024 08:00 WombaT wrote:

Most of those criteria actively nerfed Serral though

Nonetheless to me and many others greatness is a feeling, what people value will differ too, so trying to make some kind of objective set of metrics is almost doomed to failure from the outset.

Still, always makes for some fun discussion!

On August 10 2024 17:31 PremoBeats wrote:


At this point rwala must be trolling. I was able to take him seriously until a certain point, but it is clear, that he isn't interested in discussing this issue further on a good faith level. To even suggest that this attempt is more credible or my list wasn't serious is utterly absurd.
Although I have to say that (iirc it was him) he at least was open about his subjective feelings trumping objectivity in another thread (Miz' or mine... can't remember).

This is similar to what you are suggesting here. But as I said in another thread, there are metrics for people that are present in GOAT discussions in other sports that can be measured. And these metrics include achievements, win rates, tournaments win rates, occupation of high ranks if the sport has a ranking system, trophies, awards and all kinds of more subjective qualities. But the hard metrics definitely include the ones that I looked at and there is a correlation with good results in these metrics and being in a GOAT discussion. I am further happy to add other metrics if people feel that I have been looking unfairly at this whole topic.

I am far from done with my re-work, as I definitely don't want to repeat the mistakes I made last time and be as objective as possible (small spoiler: so far, Serral has been - closely - kicked out of #1 in at least 1 metric by including team results in the tournament score - which was kind of expected as he isn't Korean and wasn't participating in that many team events).
The hardest thing at the moment is the era analysis... how to factor in retired/banned players, overall competitiveness and tournament structure is hard to wrap my head around. But the start looks promising... the data gathered so far indicates that I wasn't too far off with the era- plus tournamnet-multiplier combination from leveling the playing field between different eras.

On August 11 2024 22:08 rwala wrote:



I’m glad you realize now that revealing your subjectivity and bias was a mistake though I have to say that’s a hard one to correct once the cat is out of the bag.

On August 11 2024 22:08 rwala wrote:
It’s hard to take seriously someone who struggles to understand why Life’s crimes should be factored into a GOAT convo

On August 11 2024 01:55 Balnazza wrote:



I feel compelled to note that Teemu Pukki played for "my" Schalke 04! Though he sadly never played as good as in the two matches in the EL quali that he almost ruined for us singlehandedly...

On August 09 2024 22:06 Balnazza wrote:
Fun ranking. Should the EWC Finals be a PvP, none of the players would get any points for it because Protoss would probably end up being the "favored race" of the year. So essentially, for "GOAT purposes", players punish themselves if they do great.

The weighting feels extremly off. So a guy winning a 100 bucks Online Cup in Dezember 2015 gets basically 400 points for it (compared to today), but the same player winning the same cup two weeks later in January 2016 only gets 200 points?
Or even worse: Serral winning the recent ESL Masters Spring event, y'know, where the best of the best came together, gives him half the points compared to MMA winning Homestory Cup XII at the end of 2015, right at the start of LotV, that had a whooping four koreans present (MMA, MC, TOP, HyuN).

Though right, you mentioned you subtracted points for "welfare tournaments"...so basically the entire ranking is "GSL + BlizzCon/Katowice", since the WCS Points are subtracted for the top players, blocking the chance for the weaker players to even get any.

If "Prizemoney" is your deciding factor, then all money should be equal. You can make adjustments, but awarding four times the points for a certain era is way over the top. That balancing happens by itself, considering for example the heavy prizepool discrepancies between todays GSL and the good ol' times. For example: GSL usually awarded around ~38K for the winner, the last one awarded 3.5K, so lets say today it is only worth 10%. You then apply your system and kill it even more, making a GSL win today effectively worth a 1/40 (2,5%) compared to back then. I'm not saying there isn't a difference between GSL then and now, but 2,5% of the worth? It is already balanced out by the prizepool, no need to beat it with a stick even further. Which btw ironically won't affect the "World Championship" at all, because even with your system winning EWC is still worth the same as winning BlizzCon 2015...

If you truely want to take Prizemoney as "face value" for GOATness, I feel like the only appliable subtraction should be to divide by years active or any kind of "diminishing returns" for long-lasting careers. It doesn't have to be a super-harsh punishment, but if you have three amazing years and then just cruise by for seven more, people shouldn't say "wow, that guy had a ten-year long career, so impressive!"

On August 16 2024 23:08 ejozl wrote:

If somehow ewc ended up with pvp finals, it would indicate that for the entire year, protoss had been strong, I find this scenario extremely unlikely though.

I gave 2016 0.7 value, where 2014 is 1.
It's true that the same tournament week later being 70% is extremely silly, but such is the nature of using years as arbitrary points of indication. This ranking is very low resolution, but it does give you a good overall picture of how things line up, imo.

The MMA hsc was ridiculous, it's basically an invitational, since the korean qualifier was removed all-together, due to unfortunate circumstances. And as we know, invitationals and regionals should be the main arguments against using prize money as the main metric.
Invitationals, imo shouldn't count for anything, there is a great difference between Serral winning 4x HSC invitationals in a row, I think 3 of them were invitationals, and Taeja winning 3 HSCs with full qualifier. This is why Taeja should still hold the record for longest Hsc streak.

I don't agree on putting a limit on the reign, since I just want to value the medals, that's why I think win rate is meaningless in this. But I did divide it into the most impressive reigns, if that's your interest. Ex: 3 most impressive years, award.

On August 10 2024 02:41 WombaT wrote:

Not if you arbitrarily just decide to give a 4 times multiplier on a particular timeframe over another. And a 2x elsewhere

I think there are some differences between eras, but this is a very crude way to try to account for them indeed.

Region lock kind of fucks this admittedly, but for example you could break down a year by how much prize money is in the total pot, and how much of that pot an individual obtained. It’s not perfect, and complicated by things like region lock, but it does somewhat account for prize pools fluctuating and is still ‘objective’.

Also, Proleague fucks it too. Those players weren’t always available to participate in tournaments, so how does one factor that in? Proleague IMO fucks every attempt to rank GOATs because it was never a neat fit in how SC2 players were perceived and judges both before and after. As I always stress, I loved Proleague but it’s a huge outlier in format and prioritisation.

Byun places ahead of Serral purely on these multipliers, despite only ever winning a premier tournament(s) in one year, on one patch.

Byun himself would have a hearty laugh that any attempt at a GOAT rank had a methodology that somehow placed him above Serral.

On August 10 2024 02:56 yubo56 wrote:
If you're dividing a players earnings by their race's total winnings in a year, does that downweigh years where one player is so dominant they single handedly skew the race's earnings? Like, if XXXX wins 4 / 7 titles in a year, and the other three are split between P/T, I feel like your methodology marks that as a "Z-favored year", whereas that may not be entirely fair to XXXX. The race weighting surely should at least be "compared to the other tournaments of the year", not "among all tournaments that year" right?

Otherwise poor Serral winning 80% of tournaments in a year gets called winning a Zerg-favored era when Maru's winning all the GSLs haha

But it's an interesting idea, and between Gamers 8 and EWC, it's pretty clear that the pros see prize money very heavily (naturally)