The GOAT ranking of GOAT rankings - Page 5

On July 15 2025 19:31 PremoBeats wrote:


rwala's reply consists mostly of straw men, false comparisons and already addressed arguments... what exactly do you think is well said about it?




It is not rhetorical to say that I penalized Serral, because I did:
1a. Do you deny that the Koreans played more lower tier players in comparison to Serral? Or do you deny that I wrote that I did not include this correction, which is detrimental to Serral?
1b. Do you deny that including non-prime years, which I did, penalizes/hurts Serral the most according to the data?

2. In the article - as well as multiple times in the other thread (and even in the very post you commented on and directly to you in the other thread!!) I explained that this weighting was proposed by ChatGTP.
I still don't understand why you keep pounding on that, tbh. As WombaT wrote out in the other thread, the weighting is entirely superfluous. The most important revelation was that most players have mixed results, while Serral is dominating them all.
You make it seem like the weighting was there to push Serral, which is not the case. You have no proof for this accusation. On the contrary, I posted the exact text that I used to let ChatGTP decide on the weighting, to let you guys double check. I only did so because I knew based on the results, that the weighting does not change in the first place and I couldn’t decide on a specific weighting, which I explained ad nauseam in the article as well as in the comments. First place would only change with an insane weighting-setup for efficiency… then Life (who most people disregard anyway) would be on top, with Serral being 2nd.
Arguing with the weighting result is utterly pointless… As this is your (and other critics) biggest point which you all come back to every time, I doubt that is much more substance to gain from you guys.

3a. In the tournament win %, similar to most metrics, I discounted all region-locked tournaments. This is a penalty to Serral, although a needed one to deny his easier tournament wins. But still it is a penalty; especially to deny them entirely, as Korean pros had rather easy tournament wins as well.
3b. You might disagree that the bonus is not enough according to your subjective feeling.
My reasoning for using 20%: I explained in detail why a larger player pool, especially in mostly tier 2, 3 and 4 players, would not decrease a tournament win percentage that much.
- doubling the player pool would most likely mean just one extra round. If that round was a group stage, it would naturally mean that you’d have to play more lower tier player statistically, boosting your match win rate
- I reasoned that this fact means that average place would need a higher era-multiplier than tournament win percentage
- Now looking at Serral’s average win rate of around 82% in his years from 2018-2024 subtracted with 2% (some lower match win for era but also considering that his win rates are deflated versus the Koreans because of 1a, also taking into account that earlier group stages are easier to win than knockout brackets), these more rounds would mean a win probability of roughly 80%. As an example: going from 4 rounds to 5 rounds would statistically mean a win probability dropping from 40% to 33%, meaning a loss of 17,5% or a boost of 21,2%.
- Now, comparing DH 2020 to a GSL or SSL 2013: Not all tournaments that other players have won were a GSL though. What about the 2013 Hot6ix Cup or ASUS ROG NorthCon? And didn’t Serral win uberly stacked tournaments as well?
You are committing a false equivalence/improper comparison fallacy here. In essence, you are right that one can’t compare a GSL to a DH. But that is also not what I did. There were not only GSLs in 2013 (as a matter of fact, there was only one) and Serral won more stacked tournaments as well. It also borders on a strawman, as my approach was not designed to precisely reflect the odds between only one of the hardest 2013 tournaments vs a specific 2020 event, but rather roughly corrects across periods.
- Do you further realize that arguing like this from an era/period-perspective also argues against Rogue’s and Maru’s case?
- What adjustment would you find appropriate?

Overall it is rather the modern Koreans that benefitted in this metric, as Serral, Clem and mostly Reynor were missing in the GSLs that they won.
Of course Serral wouldn’t have the same tournament win percentage had he been a full-time pro at his peak playing in the prime era. But the win percentages of INno, Rain, etc. would drop as well, had Mvp, Serral and Clem played there. I explained this already in the article.

“Again you call your 20% (or whatever it was) modifier a "penalty" to Serral”
Can you give the exact quote?

This would be much more fruitful if you didn’t try to rely on notions like my method was not statistical, keep using arguments that have been addressed or straight out deny that Serral was penalized on several occasions, which he clearly was.

Talk about the points ratio in the tournaments or the era-multiplier or your preferred weighting. Or - as you by your own account don’t care for statistical GOAT debates anyway - simply stay out of them. But making unsubstantiated accusations like me making a Serral GOAT-calculator or repeating the same already addressed notions is absolutely ridiculous.

On July 16 2025 02:14 PremoBeats wrote:


I was using strong language because I was hyped by the results... I even acknowledged that the hype-language was over the top. Perhaps I became a slight fanboy then, who knows. But if it happened, it was because of the results, that still are pretty robust. To quote WombaT from another thread: "I try to be as unbiased as I can, I think I don’t appear so merely because others are so biased that an attempt at neutrality appears biased to them."

I ask you again: Do you have any criticism about methodology except the ones we already discussed? Did I understand your metric proposal correctly that it is basically pretty much the same as my tournament score looked at through a yearly lense? A method which I didn't apply for any other metric that went into the final result?

On July 16 2025 23:19 rwala wrote:


I could point out dozens of issues with your methodology like the ones I and others have already pointed out, but candidly I have a day job so don't have time. It's also not super fruitful when you fail to admit your obvious bias, and how much it's skewing your methodology and results. Do you really think Serral is 5X the GOAT of Rogue? Do you think hiding behind your methodology that crumbles every time someone looks into it will shield you from criticism when you are displaying results like this?

On July 16 2025 23:04 rwala wrote:


Again, your criteria modifiers are either neutral, bonuses, or penalties to Serral depending on whether they serve as an appropriate baseline compared to expectations. I thought you understood this and were purposefully obscuring the point, but maybe you just don't understand?

You gave a 20% bonus for every year pre-2018 in your tournament win %. What this resulted in was at most a 5% increase for players like Life, but for others it was negligible. The question then becomes, for the Korean pros, who mostly participated in GSL and other KILs that were extremely hard to win, does this account for the expected differential in tournament win %? I don't think it does, and I don't think most people who have followed professional SCII think it does. I just want to be clear about your model, because it's important to admit the pro-Serral bias. You literally are saying that the odds of any pro winning the GSL in 2018 are the same as the odds of winning a Dreamhack masters event.

Like I said, your model is full of these (deliberate?) confusions in which you claim you are penalizing Serral but you are actually giving him huge bonuses. It's common sense, because the only way you get to Serral = 5X the GOAT of Rogue is by giving him bonuses. Again, it's time to stop pretending you are objective about this. It's really super obvious to everyone you are not.

On July 16 2025 23:19 rwala wrote:


I could point out dozens of issues with your methodology like the ones I and others have already pointed out, but candidly I have a day job so don't have time. It's also not super fruitful when you fail to admit your obvious bias, and how much it's skewing your methodology and results. Do you really think Serral is 5X the GOAT of Rogue? Do you think hiding behind your methodology that crumbles every time someone looks into it will shield you from criticism when you are displaying results like this?

On July 17 2025 00:16 WombaT wrote:

But the idea that these are Serral biased is beyond absurd. Tournaments won, tournaments won versus entries, average placement, overall win percentage and time spent as #1 in a ranking system are literally how GOATs are determined in every individual sport I follow, alongside intangibles of course.

On July 17 2025 02:12 PremoBeats wrote:


Yes, I understand that. That is why I gave explanations in the article and multiple threads how I arrived at the different era-multipliers for different metrics. But one can have a pretty solid approximation based on statistical regression or calculating how your tournament win chances go down at certain match win rates when you add a round or two. So while the multipliers carry some sort of arbitrariness, it can be approximated to a sufficient level (at least in my opinion).

You are committing a fallacy once again if you look only at hard tournaments. Which Korean Pro participated in mostly these tournaments? Can you give an example?
And wouldn't your logic be true in the modern era as well, if certain players only participated in tougher tournament formats? Or when the best player of the world was missing? Or the top three?
But I still don't see that as a Serral-bias. Because it is not Serral's fault that other contenders from his era were not able to win these potentially "easier" tournaments over him. One could actually reason from this observation, that the Korean Pros win rates are inflated in the tournaments where Serral did not participate.
But to address your core critique here: I can incorporate a tournament-multiplier similar to the one in the tournament score here... that's a valid idea.
Ooooor: I could incorporate the amount of GSLs since Serral turned full time pro and count them as straight out losses for Serral.. would that make you happy, even though he would still be ahead of Maru and Rogue (That's actually quite an amusing fun fact, don't you think, WombaT )?

And as you seem to dodge certain questions/follow ups, I will post them again to highlight that you are simply not discussing in good faith here:
- Do you deny that the Koreans played more lower tier players in comparison to Serral? Or do you deny that I wrote how I did not include this correction, which is detrimental to Serral?
- Do you deny that including non-prime years, which I did, penalizes/hurts Serral the most according to the data?
- “Again you call your 20% (or whatever it was) modifier a "penalty" to Serral”
Can you give the exact quote?

And yes, Life - like all other tournament results from pre-2018 got a 20% positive adjustment, which pushed his tournament win percentage by 5%. What exactly is your point here?



Don't do all of them. Do one more at a time... no worries.

You are either intellectually unable or unwilling to understand that the proposed weighting that put Serral at 5 times the points of Rogue was established by ChatGTP. I let the AI do it because the final result would not have changed and I wanted to save my time, unnecessarily defending the weighting (oh boy, that didn't quite work out, huh?). I further already proposed a different weighting and at least half a dozen times told you about this. So every time you go on about this already addressed issue I simply post this paragraph, similar to the questions above.

I also don't hide behind criticism... I incorporated the critique from the last article and I will do so in the new version as well. It is not my fault that you are unable to make proper points (except the thing you mentioned about the 20% era modifier, where you didn't reply to my question what kind of multiplier you would deem acceptable... so tell me your number and how you actually arrived at it, similar to my reasoning).

On July 17 2025 02:20 Antithesis wrote:

Good post, especially this part.

While many weightings and parameters used by PremoBeats are open to debate (as is unavoidable), most of the essential criteria applied by him are perfectly reasonable if not necessities in that winning games and tournaments is the supreme aim of any competitor in a sport. Rwala makes it sound as if these criteria were outlandish metrics, but ironically by asserting that statistics about wins favor Serral yet another argument is made for him being the GoaT.

On July 17 2025 01:28 Mizenhauer wrote:


All era multipliers are arbitrary.

On July 17 2025 04:17 rwala wrote:


You're not demonstrating that you actually understand the point. Do you understand that, quite literally, what you are describing as a "penalty" to Serral could be a "bonus"? How would you know if it were one or the other? You don't actually articulate this in any of your methodology. If you want to be transparent, you need to stop saying that you are giving Serral "penalties" and say that you feel this is an appropriate modifier but that if you are wrong, it could be a "bonus" to Serral. Whether you are giving Serral penalties versus bonuses is a debatable proposition (I and many others think you're giving him bonuses for all the reasons we've explained). But the fact that it could be either a penalty or a bonus (or neither) is not debatable. And the fact that you wrote thousands of words about your methodology without even addressing this basic methodological point nullifies the validity of your entire model. It's an issue across each of your criteria.

Let me explain it in a way that can be super duper easy to understand. GOAT #1 plays exclusively in tournaments with Bronze league players. GOAT #2 plays exclusively in tournaments with 80-90% of the world's best players. GOAT #1 has a tournament win % of 90%. GOAT #2 has a tournament win % of 30%. Although you don't feel it's necessary, you add 20% to GOAT #2, bumping his tournament win rate up to 36%.

In this example, has GOAT #1 been "penalized" or given a "bonus"?

Also, LOL that you only became a Serral fanboy after seeing your results. Even if that were true, it's honestly kind of sad. Are you just a fan of whoever your model tells you to be a fan of??? Do you realize when you say stuff like this that it has the opposite effect of what you're going for?

Are you familiar with the famous Shakespeare quote "the lady doth protest too much"?

On July 17 2025 00:16 WombaT wrote:

Why are you assuming that the ranking score = Serral being 5x better than Rogue?

Sabalenka in women’s tennis is close to double the points of Swiatek in the current WTA rankings. But nobody takes that to mean that she’s twice as good at tennis right now.

Serral having 5x more points on weighting doesn’t equal a claim that he’s 5x the GOAT.

Premo showed their numbers, if you disagree with the weighting then the option is there to do your own.

If we’re going off numbers and stats, I don’t see any way to crown Rogue the GOAT that isn’t specifically designed to do that. He wasn’t a competitive tournament contender in the Kespa era, and he wasn’t as consistent, nor won as much as Serral or Maru in the post-Kespa era.

If you took someone who understood how competitive games function, who knew nothing of StarCraft and got them to model it, they’ll pick similar metrics to Premo. Because outside of vibes that is literally how you figure out who the most consistently dominant player is.

They won’t be able to account for the eras and whatnot specific to SC2’s history, which does complicate things.

But the idea that these are Serral biased is beyond absurd. Tournaments won, tournaments won versus entries, average placement, overall win percentage and time spent as #1 in a ranking system are literally how GOATs are determined in every individual sport I follow, alongside intangibles of course.

Stats aren’t biased towards Serral, he’s overwhelmingly the best in so many metrics that, if you want to determine a GOAT based on stats without adjustment he just wins, easily. If you want to make reasonable adjustments to factor in a shifting scene, it’s still very hard to lock him out, but a case can be made.

Another option is to go on vibes and intangibles, alongside or instead of stats. Which I’ve said many times I’m absolutely fine with, greatness isn’t necessarily ‘the best’, it’s coming in clutch, it’s breaking new ground etc.

I’m ok with both approaches, on record as such many times. But if one is going to criticise Premo’s methodology then suggest an actual alternative. He’s showed his working on plenty of metrics, so one doesn’t even have to do the busy work.

It’s also a bit laughable to me that we’re even going back to criticise Premo’s effort in a thread where an alternate attempt was assigning arbitrary multipliers as high as 4x and had the (statistically) greatest SC2 player at 11th

On July 17 2025 04:36 PremoBeats wrote:

Give the quote where I said that Serral is receiving a penalty, where he actually has not been given one and I simply made a contextual adjustment like in your example.
Arbitrary and biased are two different things... they can overlap, but are not synonymous. Perhaps all this trouble stems from this misunderstanding.

And as you still refuse to engage properly:
- Do you deny that including non-prime years, which I did, penalizes/hurts Serral the most according to the data?
- “Again you call your 20% (or whatever it was) modifier a "penalty" to Serral”
Can you give the exact quote?

You are either intellectually unable or unwilling to understand that the proposed weighting that put Serral at 5 times the points of Rogue was established by ChatGTP. I let the AI do it because the final result would not have changed and I wanted to save myself time, unnecessarily defending the weighting (oh boy, that didn't quite work out, huh?). I further already proposed a different weighting and at least half a dozen times told you about this. So every time you go on about this already addressed issue I simply post this paragraph, similar to the questions above.

On July 17 2025 05:29 rwala wrote:


This is your quote:

"Maru benefits from this correction in two years, Rogue in one, Serral in no year."

You are claiming that Serral got no benefit from your modifier, but that's entirely dependent on the validity of your modifier (whether it's too high, too low, or just right). If your modifier is too low, then the opposite of what you are claiming would be true: Serral would "benefit" in every year. But even assuming you feel you got your modifier just right, then your statement is still not accurate because the modifier would provide no "benefit" to anyone...it would simply make a necessary adjustment to turn applies into oranges for purposes of the comparison. Do you understand now?

I don't understand your question about non-prime years, but basically I think compared to all your GOAT contenders Serral both played in easier-to-win tournaments and also had a much easier path to qualify for premier tournaments, therefore significantly increasing the number of premier tournaments he has won. Most Korean GOAT contenders regularly failed to qualify for one or more premier tournaments each year, sometimes they didn't even qualify for the world championships. FWIW, based on the subjective way I think about GOATs, I would NOT penalize Serral for this, but if I were trying to genuinely and objectively find a mathematical way to calculate GOATs, you would need to (and you do not).

Basically I think you significantly underestimate how hard it is to win a KIL and qualify for premier tournaments as a Korean pro during the region lock-eras. It was dramatically worse when there were hundreds of active Korean pros, but it remained a factor until very recently. Many would disagree, but I would argue that until maybe 2022 (whenever they got rid of the double group stages and standalone finals), winning a GSL was as hard as if not harder than winning a world championship or certainly a season global finals. But you certainly do not need to fully or even partially agree to understand the methodological issues I'm raising.

On July 17 2025 05:05 rwala wrote:


To understand why these metrics could be biased in Serral's direction, read my analysis of the tournament win % criteria and you can apply this to almost all the criteria. You may not agree with me that a KIL in 2013 is 5X harder to win than a 2020 Dreamhack Masters, but if you believe it is 1.21X or more harder to win, then mathematically Premo's model is Serral-biased for you as well whether you want to believe that or not. That's just how predictive modeling works. It's the same logic for why a company can post record profits and still have their stock price decrease when those profits are announced (because they nonetheless underperformed expectations).

An approach that places numerical measures of success in their appropriate context is not just "vibes" my friend. As I've said many times, you cannot justify the literal Greatest, Muhammed Ali, based exclusively on "statistics". His 5 losses are too many and his win % is too low compared to many boxers that retire undefeated. His stats are impressive enough, but certainly not what makes him the GOAT. And as I've also said, when you get so deep into the numbers and stats, you can forget what greatness really means and end up with weird results like crowing Shane Battier the basketball GOAT.

And as I've also said, my issue is not with Serral being the GOAT, I think he's a great GOAT pick for almost the same logic that Babe Ruth is a great baseball GOAT pick.

Re: Rogue as the GOAT, just watch the Artosis video. He does not need thousands of confusing words and a calculator to tally up Rogue's incredible accomplishments. He's absolutely a valid GOAT pick. As is, imho, Mvp.

If I were making a list, I'd do it like Miz did it, more or less, which is to place statistics and numbers into their appropriate context of what made each GOAT contender truly a GOAT. This is what every GOAT list does, and why every GOAT calculator is doomed to fail. There is no objective way to calculate a GOAT, period. Admitting that doesn't require you to just go off vibes, but it does require you to have a nuanced and historically grounded understanding of greatness.

To me this is very simple. Serral has zero results in this game's most competitive era and tournaments. His results are nonetheless so impressive that you could definitely say he's the GOAT but it's also totally fine if you pick a GOAT who played and showed results when there were hundreds of pros competing in the most prestigious e-sport leagues and tournaments on the planet.

On July 05 2025 00:38 [PkF] Wire wrote:

haha same !

On July 05 2025 02:12 Niklas009 wrote:
This is a fascinating approach—really appreciate the depth and logic behind your weighting system. Makes for a compelling GOAT discussion!

User was banned for this post.

On July 05 2025 14:56 PremoBeats wrote:

Are you really taking this list seriously? There is a 4 times multiplier on era, which no sound mathemetical approach would suggest. Players get penalized for solo carrying their race. The obvious language used... like what :D

And I can't decide... are these last two posts written by a person trying to troll hype or ridicule this thread, or are they actually bot accounts programmed to do that? The first text is definitely written by AI.

On July 12 2025 06:50 Balnazza wrote:


This is literally what you did though? Just to take the WCS eu/am again, it completly fulfills your criteria and yet you disregard it. Yes, the qualifier was open to ALL koreans, they just had to move to Europe or America. That is essentially the same requirement GSL had, you had to live in Korea for a while. The biggest reason not more koreans did it was most likely Proleague, because you couldn't really play Proleague when you played WCS. But that isn't an excluding factor.
This was pre-regionlock, when koreans were actually forced to be residents of Europe or America. But the whole criticism before that was how lackluster some koreans were in "their" new region, how little they contributed to the regional scenes.

If you want to take prizemoney, just take prizemoney. And yes, then you will have to live with the fact that Clem (by winning EWC), Reynor (by winning Gamers8) and even Maru to a degree (by winning WESG) have a bit of inflated stats, but that is the hand you have been dealt with if you pick prizemoney as the defining statistic. But the second you introduced your "fine-tuning", you made yourself vulnerable...and as you notice, a lot of people (if not all of them) don't agree with your fine-tuning, not even the ones that agree with the outcome. Because it is such a biased and random bunch of multipliers.
Just as an example I will point out again the HSC I mentioned earlier, that had barely anyone of notice in attendance but gave out more points than Katowice the next year, just because both tournaments were in different "eras"...divided by two months. damn did the scene drop in two months! And don't get me started on the highly subjective "imbalance"-multiplier...

No GOAT list will ever be perfect, that's impossible. If we had like 40 years of SC2 that would have been somewhat the same we would have a good metric to decide by, but considering how much shift and change there has been in the ~15 years lifespan of this game, it will always come down to what statistic you highlight and what metric you choose.
But sadly, your way just wasn't solid at all. It was highly biased and too radical to correctly adjust for change (not that you particularly need to).
But the funniest part is honestly that you think your approach is completly unbiased...

On July 17 2025 05:50 PremoBeats wrote:




So your whole issue is with this wording? So if I wrote "Adjustments can never be perfectly correct. In relation to that "perfect true adjustment" we cannot definitely know which player subsequently benefited or got penalized. But the adjustment had a positive effect on Maru's base result in 2 years... etc." you'd be ok with it?




Objective, yes.
Perfectly in line with "the truth", no. But again, that does not mean we cannot get pretty close.
Everyone would agree that 2018-2020 should not receive a positive adjustment for comparisons against 2013-2015. No sane person would argue that 2013-2015 should receive a 10x positive adjustment against 2018-2020, as it would be way too much. Thus we approximate era-multipliers. And yes, you are correct, that these adjustments won't be perfect, but they will get us close enough if we take into consideration all the thoughts I posted in the article and the subsequent threads (inflations, tournament structure, who played in which tournament and who didn't).

I will end this with a take on clearing things up once and for all:
1. You and Charoisaur are correct in saying that adjustments are either a buff, penalty or perfectly correct (which is with near certainty not possible). An undervalued buff can be seen as a penalty and vice-versa.
2. Because of the - in your opinion - insufficient 20% multiplier, you are saying that Serral received a buff because the adjustment was not penalizing him enough (could be the case and that is where we can find closer proximity discussing era-multipliers). But this is also targeting all post-2018 results... not only Serral's. If Serral received a buff from this kind of reasoning, so did Maru, Rogue and INno's post-2018 results.
3. My point is that Serral did - on multiple occasions - not receive the SAME TREATMENT as the others.
For example: The adjustment of inflated match win rates: You are correct in saying that Serral probably had an easier way into some tournaments, although I doubt that he wouldn't have gotten in via Global Qualifiers in the end.. but that means at the same time, that the Koreans played qualifiers where they could boost their match win rates versus weaker Koreans, whereas Serral statistically more often faced the top of the tops. I would have needed to upwardly adjust his numbers, which I did not do, thus it qualifies as a clear penalty. It was a deliberate decision to not include this match win rate boost that Serral would need to rightfully receive.
One could further argue that if you didn't make it through harder qualifiers into a tournament you wouldn't have won anyways, you were saved from a worse tournament win percentage result

I hope that clears it up.
If you want to discuss the era-multiplier or how I arrived at it in detail, we can do that.
Otherwise, I already suggested to qualify the played tournaments in the tournament win percentage similar to the tournament score, so we get a higher resolution for this metric.

Cheers.

On July 17 2025 08:41 WombaT wrote:
@Premo 4x is utterly bonkers. 16 makes much more sense.

One thing that I think goes under the radar in the current epoch, but I suppose I have to mention.

Most international weekenders are absolutely stacked. And have been for a while. The top 4 in the world are basically always there, and you’ve usually got all, or a considerable chunk of the top 10-15

This wasn’t always the case, going back to WoL initially you had a few of Korea’s best, and a bunch of foreigners who weren’t at that level. The Korean numbers did bump up over time. Then at peak Kespa you had teams prioritising Proleague and sometimes the fields weren’t nearly as strong as they could have been.

One can look at tournament wins in various eras and the quality of field can vary hugely.

Of course, KILs in the first 5 years of the game, insanely hard to win one of those.

But I think it goes a bit undermentioned that many of Serral’s, Maru’s (or whoever else) post 2017 wins in international weekenders are basically all against stacked fields.

On July 17 2025 10:30 rwala wrote:


LOL, don't tell that to Rogue. The guy barely qualified for his first world championship. SOS also barely qualified for his 2015 and 2013 world championships. And Life barely qualified in 2014. Every year, multiple Korean championship contenders have missed out on the global finals. Just in 2017 alone, Classic, Maru, SOS, Solar, Byun, Ryung, Trap, and Dear failed to qualify while Neeb, Serral, Snute, Elazer, Nerchio, TRUE, Kelazhur, and Special got the region-lock handicap spots. You don't even need to speculate since a lot of these players played consistently in GSL, but wouldn't have gotten enough points to qualify via GSL...they coasted in via the global circuit slots. In the case of TRUE, the guy literally was a GSL player and moved to the United States and then qualified. Quite literally the 2017 world championship was half-filled with players that demonstrably can't hang in GSL.

I'm genuinely curious: when you do the "one could argue" thing like you're doing here, is it that you actually believe this? Or you think maybe if you make some random counterargument it'll make your model look stronger?

Regarding your methodology, my issue isn't just wording, though it is true your wording is hiding what your model is actually doing. If you agree that KILs are 3,4,5X harder to win than modern era region-locked "premiere" tourneys, then your modifiers are way out of whack, substantively and numerically. In which case--as I think you now concede--Serral is getting huge bonuses in your model. Of course we do not agree on the substance of the modifiers, but that's the important debate/discussion. You can't say your modifiers are objectively more correct than mine.

I also don't agree that breaking things down by eras/timeframes is sufficient to account for the differences in tournament competitiveness and quality. In fact, GSL (and SSL) has been the strongest, most competitive tournament until very recently. Even as recently as 2022, former world and GSL champions had to win a mini-tournament filled with other championship-tier players to even qualify, at which point you're still fighting through two group stages to make it to the playoff bracket. All these GSL rounds are filled with former champions and champion-snipers. By contrast, the Dreamhacks in 2022 were filled with players like Has, Cham, MeomaikA, Botvinnik, DnS, NIce, Krystianer, Kelazhur, Probe, Mana, ShadoWn, Vindicta, Trigger, Uthermal, Lambo, and Elazer. Even the B-tier, non-championship contenders in GSL like Bunny can be hella scary snipers on any given day.

One of the areas where I think you miss the mark is assuming that because GSL, SSL, etc. never had Serral, it's basically a wash. I don't think that's right. Tournaments--especially in the formats that SCII has often run them--are basically gauntlets that you need to run. The presence or absence of any one player--even the GOAT--is not as relevant as the overall quality of the pool of players.

Anyways, all these things have been discussed before...

On July 17 2025 10:44 rwala wrote:


This is just not true. See the very back-of-napkin comparison of GSL in 2022 to Dreamhack Masters in 2022. They are all like that with nearly half the players being outside of the top 30, many not even in the top 50.

I think literally in 2025 it's becoming more true with Serral, Clem, and Reynor being legit championship contenders, but winning tournaments is still much more about running a gauntlet than facing any one player. The hardest tournaments to win are ones where nearly every player is a sniper that has a decent chance of taking out a championship contender and where most of the players are current or former champions. I don't think it's particularly shocking that a guy like Bunny has been trying to make a GSL finals for over a decade and instead made his first "premiere" finals at one of the handful of international events he participated in (Dreamhack Masters).