The GOAT ranking of GOAT rankings

On August 10 2024 00:04 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


I'm sure someone will be upset that Serral didn't even make it into the top ten.

On August 09 2024 21:12 Charoisaur wrote:
Not sure if this is a shitpost but I actually agree with a lot of the measurements and while prize money imo isn't the end-all-be-all at least it makes the ranking 100% objective by focusing only on this metric.
Serral at #11 feels very low though

On August 10 2024 07:50 rwala wrote:
This is hilarious but in all seriousness it is more credible than the other actually serious (I think?) attempt that invented 7 criteria designed to crown Serral and had Mvp potentially as low as 16th.

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 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)

On August 10 2024 07:50 rwala wrote:
This is hilarious but in all seriousness it is more credible than the other actually serious (I think?) attempt that invented 7 criteria designed to crown Serral and had Mvp potentially as low as 16th.

On August 24 2024 03:22 ejozl wrote:

Well MVP isn't on this one. If I would nerf MMA from the 2016 invitational and made other similar adjustments to other players, MVP would probably be #18. On the unnerfed list MVP, I believe is #18 and Serral is #6.

On August 11 2024 23:27 PremoBeats wrote:


There is an "and" between not repeating mistakes and being as objective as possible.
And something you probably don't want to hear is, that Serral still was disfavored the most in my article. Thus going full objective probably doesn't help with your subjective wishes (Mostly I will correct my hype-speech as well as implement a more factual based approach when talking about who was favored by certain decisions and what the impact was in the areas that might be in alignmemt with your POV).



The greatness of Life's results and achievements and his claim to in overall GOAT discussion is something I am able to differentiate indeed. It is fine if you are not able to do it.

On August 24 2024 11:28 rwala wrote:


I mean I could allow math to dictate that a criminal cheater who arguably did more than any other person to bring about the game's premature decline is one of the game's GOATs. But I wouldn't. As you know--consistent with GOAT debates in every other game and sport--I don't believe "greatness" is a mere algorithmic output divorced from common sense notions of greatness...which happens to include not destroying the game (in my opinion).

On July 04 2025 14:54 ShowTheLights wrote:
MMA under SOLAR and PARTING LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

On July 04 2025 10:41 Balnazza wrote:
How are you basing your entire list on prizemoney and then keep finding ways to not actually use the prizemoney but instead add more and more random multipliers?
If you really think a GSL win in the "golden era" is, if I recall, worth 40x the points of todays GSL (10% of the prizepool and only 1/4 of era points), than EWC is easily worth 40x 10K tournaments. Or what, did the wrong people win EWC so far?

On August 09 2024 19:45 GoloSC2 wrote:
i was expecting a ranking of rankings, am slightly disappointed that we haven't gone meta yet

On July 05 2025 00:00 Balnazza wrote:


Which gives you two options: Either prizemoney is a bad option to calculate the GOAT or you specifically start manipulating the statistic until it gives you the "correct" answer...but then why have a statistic in the first place? The entire era- and balance-weighting is a flawed concept to begin with considering how subjective it is, it really does not get improved by also "punishing" big prizepools, which usually correspond with important titles.

Also...why did you disqualify WCS Europe/America? WCS Europe 2014 Season 1, in which MMA placed 2nd, fulfills all your criteria:
Offline (mostly), not an invitational (same format as GSL), Korean players (you said korean players OR korean qualifier, not both) and the prizepool is higher than 2K.

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 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 08 2025 16:40 Harris1st wrote:


In which esport is the best player right now 21 and under?
It's not SC2, not BW, not CS2 (though you could at least make a case for it). Don't know about the other esports.

On July 08 2025 11:36 rwala wrote:


It’s honestly no different than yours at a conceptual level

On July 08 2025 16:03 MJG wrote:

I take it just as seriously as any other list that thinks WoL, HotS and LotV are comparable games that can have a unified GOAT, or that Protoss, Terran and Zerg are comparable races that can have a unified GOAT, so I guess I take it just as seriously as your list.



At least Miz went to the effort of writing some genuinely entertaining articles to go alongside their rating!

And yes, those posts are clearly by bots and should be reported. Have you not noticed that bots are becoming a big problem around here? Damn varmints.

On July 05 2025 00:00 Balnazza wrote:


Which gives you two options: Either prizemoney is a bad option to calculate the GOAT or you specifically start manipulating the statistic until it gives you the "correct" answer...but then why have a statistic in the first place? The entire era- and balance-weighting is a flawed concept to begin with considering how subjective it is, it really does not get improved by also "punishing" big prizepools, which usually correspond with important titles.

Also...why did you disqualify WCS Europe/America? WCS Europe 2014 Season 1, in which MMA placed 2nd, fulfills all your criteria:
Offline (mostly), not an invitational (same format as GSL), Korean players (you said korean players OR korean qualifier, not both) and the prizepool is higher than 2K.

On July 13 2025 05:44 Charoisaur wrote:

Yeah, this measurement is quite faulty I think, but it brings a great point across which ironically is the one OP quoted in his post

"If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything"

At the end of the day you can use all the fancy stats and data you want, but it doesn't make your ranking any less subjective than someone's guts feeling, whether it's premobeats way overvaluing things like winrates or aligulac rating to prob Serral or the thing ejozl did here.

And we all know the one true Goat ranking is this one:

1. Serral
2. Maru (extremely close to Serral)
3. Inno
4. Rogue
5. Life
6. Zest
7. sOs
8. herO
9. Dark
10. Stats

On July 13 2025 21:29 PremoBeats wrote:

I think that quote was put there unironically to highlight the sarcastic over-the-top nature of the article.

But why do you mischaracterize what was happening? I wrote in the article that I did not come up with this weighting. I even posted the exact quote that I inserted into ChatGTP so that everyone can check it. Since then, I admitted several times that the weighting is off and even proposed a different one, where Aligulac and match win rates only make up 5% each. Also I never propped Serral lol. He gets penalized the most by subjective decisions I had to make (including non-prime years in tournament win percentage and leave out the inflation-bonus in the match win rate).
I remember being asked in the comments of my first article, if I would post the results, if changing the methodology of the original article would mean that Serral would not come out on top in any of the metrics. Well, as it is obvious now, I have no issue accepting that Serral is not the best in tournament win percentage. But it seems like people are trying to critique my result without actually addressing any core methodological feature (except for weighting, which was explained weeks ago).
What I would find more troubling than obvious weighting issues is a GOAT ranking that presents itself as statistical but in the end is a post-hoc feeling based scripture.

And of course you can make a ranking that is a lot more objective than someone's gut feeling. Not being in alignment with every subjective feeling for era-difference or tournament distinctions does not mean that going as close as possible in a statistical evaluation is the same as a random StarCraft II player that thinks this or that player is the GOAT.
We can very clearly see from the statistical evaluation that Serral is way ahead of Maru and Rogue in the time-frame that they played together. We can see that Life was ahead of Rain. We can also see what everyone subjectively thought for a long time: That Rogue has pretty mixed results.

Plus, subjectivity can be put into a bare minimum.
1. We need a point/ranking system for the tournaments (similar to what Miz and I did)
2. We need some kind of era-multiplier for different time brackets in terms of how hard it was to win (This can also be calculated more or less ok-ish as well) OR come to the conclusion that all time periods were the same, which I doubt is realistic or correct
3. Decide which metrics are the most important and then add a weighting (the community here and on reddit already agree that tournament score and tournament win participation are the most important

These are all the subjective things one needs and the community will probably come to a close proximity. But, even in the case that we have heavy disagreements here: When I revise my method one more time, I will try to make it in a way that people can tell me their desired ratios and I can post the result based on these suggestions. When all my excels are interlinked, I can easily take community suggestions for these three and we can look at how hard we would need to torture the data to make this or that player come out on top.

On July 15 2025 17:32 Charoisaur wrote:

Well said

On July 15 2025 03:59 rwala wrote:


You do not penalize Serral, though I think we all understand rhetorically why you say you do. You give him bonuses. A lot of them. And you only admit it when people call out the more obvious and ridiculous ways in which you do it like your 20% Aligulac weighting. The basic logical error you make is that you are calling all your criteria modifiers "penalties" to Serral but whether they are penalties or bonuses entirely depends on baselines versus expectations in your modifiers.

Take your tournament win % criteria. Again you call your 20% (or whatever it was) modifier a "penalty" to Serral. But the question is whether that is too high or too low or just right given that Serral competed exclusively in tournaments that are significantly easier to win than KILs, which have dozens and sometimes hundreds of additional competitors, harder groups stages, more group stages, etc. If it's just right, there's no penalty or bonus to Serral, if it's too high, it's a penalty to Serral, and if it's too low, it's a bonus to Serral. I simply do not agree that the 20% discount reflects the comparative odds of winning a 2020 Dreamhack Masters versus a 2013 GSL or SSL. It's probably 5X easier to win the former than the latter imho.

In this specific example, though, it doesn't even matter because it's actually a bonus to Serral irrespective of whether the 20% modifier is right or wrong as he is the only player on your GOAT list that does not have his tournament win % diluted by participation in the signiifcantly-harder-to-win KILs.

This is only one example of how you claim to be penalizing Serral when you're actually giving him bonuses in your model. This kind of logical error permeates your model.

At first I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that you did not understand some of these concepts in predictive modeling, but it's pretty clear that you do and are just hoping that others do not understand so you can get away with saying over and over again that you are penalizing Serral. Your entire goal is to say that no matter how much you penalize Serral, he is the GOAT, and because you're so focused on this, it's producing many errors and requiring you to go to great lengths to obscure what it is you are doing.

The simple fact is that your model giving Serral 2X the GOAT points of the next highest GOAT and 5X the GOAT points of Rogue is on its face not credible. You try to get around this by hiding behind your methodology, but in just a very cursory review of your methodology like I've done here reveals huge errors, almost all of which are designed to give Serral bonus GOAT points.

Wouldn't it be better at this point just to admin you've created a Serral = GOAT calculator? It's totally legitimate to call Serral the GOAT--he's probably most people's GOAT, even most players probably think he's the GOAT. You created a highly subjective model to crown Serral the GOAT. It's no different than this GOAT list, just different subjective criteria.

On August 10 2024 00:10 PremoBeats wrote:
Seriously.. if there is someone out there taking this obvious bait then it is on them...

On July 15 2025 20:14 MJG wrote:
Premo should take their own advice:

On July 15 2025 19:57 Charoisaur wrote:

You "penalize" Serral within metrics that heavily favor him.
For comparison, it's like if I would incorporate a metric for number of seperate years with a playoffs finish (a metric obviously favoring Maru since he had the longest career), giving it 25% of the overall score, and then acting like I penalized Maru because I considered korean tournaments the same as foreigner-only tournaments, despite being obviously harder.

On July 15 2025 20:54 Charoisaur wrote:

Aligulac rating, match winrate, tournament winrate, average placing are all metrics that favor Serral. Yes, because he's good at it, but you attributed all those metrics an unreasonably high influence on the final score, especially because some of them measure very similar things and thus have massive collinearity e.g. aligulac rating and average placement.
Metrics in which Serral wouldn't perform as well however are excluded, like longevity focused metrics, e.g. the aforementioned number of seperate years with a top x finish.

On July 15 2025 21:03 Charoisaur wrote:

If it's entirely reasonable to modify the data to enable comparability, I wouldn't call it a "penalty".
If we're talking about tournament wins for example, the raw data set should include online cups, however as we both agree it makes no sense to include them in a GOAT analysis and exclude them.
Despite that I wouldn't call it a Clem "penalty", it just removes data which is not relevant for the topic. That's how I feel about your so called Serral "penalty".

On July 15 2025 22:06 Harris1st wrote:
I mean you are both arguing that Serral is the GOAT with the only difference by how large a margin.

On July 16 2025 01:59 Charoisaur wrote:

Well, you certainly are lol, we can all see your post history.

That doesn't mean that every ranking you ever come up with should be instantly disregarded but in your first iteration the Serral bias was definitely far too strong and obvious.

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.