|
On January 23 2025 16:16 PremoBeats wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2025 08:31 Charoisaur wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
If Serral was even good enough to play maru in 2010 - 2017 Maru would beat him every single time; Meanwhile if maru was bad enough to not be able to play in finals in 2024 he won't have losing records to serral. Being a consistently top-tier player hurts Maru's resume? If we talk about greatest of ALL TIME it's Maru. Let alone how Maru saved terran race multiple times as the last terran and the 4th race. This guy's logic: "Oh Maru kept getting crushed by Serral since 2018? I'd just imagine Maru beat him every time in 2010-2017. oh I feel so much better as a Maru fan now. " It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I can do that too: "if Serral was born earlier and got out of school sooner to play Maru in 2010-2017 he would beat Maru every single time and ended up having a longer and more successful career than Maru, because Serral doesn't shrink in international offline tournaments." I can do it too - Serral has a negative record against Jaedong? Yeah but if Jaedong sticked with sc2 Serral surely would've beaten him over and over. It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I don't think the "what if Maru and Serral frequently played each other before 2018" hypothetical is stupid at all, it shows the problem with using all time H2H records as a metric. H2H between players who peaked at different times just doesn't mean anything, and then it just comes down to luck who happened to be closer to their peak when they played But are there truly serious users who have a somewhat deep understanding of SC2 and argue around a H2H in the GOAT debate when it comes to Maru versus Serral? Not die hard fanboys, but people who try to look at this discussion as unbiased as possible (which still leaves a lot of bias)? I don't think so to be honest... In H2H the only thing I think is worthy of being mentioned is the fact that Serral doesn't have a negative win rate against anyone he played regularly as that is a testament to his dominance. Everyone else has 1 or 2 players that got the better of them at one period or another, mostly due to what you mentioned: Different peak timings. But I think the only one who seems to be able to par his record with Serral seems to be Clem, as they stand at 31:20 at the moment with hopefully more games to come. Show nested quote +On January 23 2025 08:45 rwala wrote:On January 23 2025 06:37 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
If Serral was even good enough to play maru in 2010 - 2017 Maru would beat him every single time; Meanwhile if maru was bad enough to not be able to play in finals in 2024 he won't have losing records to serral. Being a consistently top-tier player hurts Maru's resume? If we talk about greatest of ALL TIME it's Maru. Let alone how Maru saved terran race multiple times as the last terran and the 4th race. This guy's logic: "Oh Maru kept getting crushed by Serral since 2018? I'd just imagine Maru beat him every time in 2010-2017. oh I feel so much better as a Maru fan now. " It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I can do that too: "if Serral was born earlier and got out of school sooner to play Maru in 2010-2017 he would beat Maru every single time and ended up having a longer and more successful career than Maru, because Serral doesn't shrink in international offline tournaments." +1 These hypotheticals are so tiring. We simply know Maru wasn't the GOAT pre-2018. And in 2018 came the emergence of the most dominant player StarCraft 2 has ever seen. Don't get me wrong: Seeing the little kid who at the time was the youngest player to ever win a Premier Tournament in 2013 grow into the monster he became in 2018 and stay at the top so long is incredible... but Serral simply came, saw and conquered after finishing school in an unprecedented manner no one ever thought possible. I didn't think doing what Mvp did was possible but Serral's record in tournaments that were probably 10X easier to win in a scene about 1/10th the size is also incredibly impressive. I know it sounds like I'm trolling, but the early days of this e-sport were just so insanely competitive that I genuinely mean it when I say Serral is balling real hard even in a scene that's a shadow of what it was. Sometimes I think people don't realize that you had to qualify for a tournament that you had to win to then get into a tournament that you had to win to then qualify for a tournament that featured two or three group stages and a bracket composed of the 64 best players in the world out of a pool of 1,000+ gamers that were playing this game pretty much 24/7. It's true that it relatively quickly winnowed down to the few hundred that were serious and good enough to compete professionally but being at the top of a game with 500+ active pros is a different thing than being at the top of a game with 50+ active pros. Anyways, we've had these convos before. I know some people in this forum think Proleague didn't matter and that Blizzcon was the most competitive tournament. Just gonna have to agree to disagree! True about Mvp. I agree that the prime era of 2013-2015 was much, much harder, but having compiled and looked at various data sets, I still think that the metric I used in my article (double the amount in points) was slightly too big of a multiplier for this era. With pretty high probability, the better player won. Yes, there were upsets, but they were upsets, because they made for a surprise. Data showed that there were 1 or 2 players you didn't think could do it, would end up having a deep run, or 1 occasional favorite would drop to Code A, but overall it actually was pretty reasonable in terms of predictability and average ranks in the Ro16 and Ro8. Plus, you had much more tournaments. Some of them colliding with dates or packed so closely that people couldn't attend both because of time zones or qualifiers. This means that your chances compared to now were worse because of more players, but better because of more tournaments that spread this bigger player base (yes, I know not in a 1:1 ratio, but remember that usually the best players advanced). I took your critique about Proleague to heart and included it in my update. I also never thought it didn't matter, I simply found it hard to factor it in because of the points I mentioned. But I figured out a way to circumvent the influence of other players, players being carried by their team or not participating much in the season to account for that. Show nested quote +On January 23 2025 10:41 Salazarz wrote:On January 23 2025 10:03 Blitzball04 wrote:On January 22 2025 10:14 WombaT wrote:On January 22 2025 09:02 Charoisaur wrote:On January 22 2025 08:23 WombaT wrote:On January 22 2025 05:40 Charoisaur wrote:On January 22 2025 04:25 Balnazza wrote:On January 22 2025 04:18 Telephone wrote:
But how can he be the GOAT if he gets stomped in the finals of the biggest tournament of the season by someone not even on the GOAT list? How can Maru be the GOAT if he constantly gets stomped by someone who got stomped in one tournament by someone who is not even on the GOAT list? I mean... that's the point of his comment as I understood it. The argument that Maru can't be the Goat because he loses vs Serral is as reasonable as the argument Serral can't be the Goat because he lost 5-0 to Clem. I’m not a big fan of head-to-heads, generally it’s how you do versus the overall field that’s more important by far. But I think it can become meaningful, even if it’s a tie-breaker. Player A with very similar achievements to B otherwise wins off H2H as a tiebreaker. I don’t think Serral’s winning H2H necessarily is that tiebreaker, but I do think it’s indicative of why he’s the greater player, for me. If you can’t be the all-conquering, dominant player, well another path to greatness is peaking when it counts, it’s those underdog wins, it’s you set planning to conquer the superior foe on paper. Maru’s overall performance I think is better than some give him credit for, for me he’s comfortably been the second best player in the world overall for the past half-decadish. But it’s been a long time since he pulled out the latter from his locker. It would be one thing if the match H2H was as it is now, but it’s full of all-time great series that could have gone either way. Mostly he’s just been battered over a long period of time, playing much the same way. Hey old man Mvp ultimately lost to Life, but his greatness rep was still enhanced for even getting there, testing Life to his limits despite injury really hampering his game. Lower stakes tournament sure, but Serral in recent times lost his first ZvP in forever in a patch Zergs aren’t enjoying the matchup on to out it mildly. Then another one immediately. Then come Masters Colosseum a few days later he loses to MaxPax. A day to sleep on it and make a few tweaks and he comes back and batters both him and herO to win the thing. I think it’s quite illustrative of their relative strengths and weaknesses I will add the caveat that I’m judging Maru incredibly harshly only because it’s the top end of the GOAT ranking, he’s an incredibly talented player and a pleasure to watch. But is he clutch? Can he grind it out to get over the line on the rare occasions he isn’t more skilled than an opponent? Sure, sometimes. But I’ve long thought JAGW papered over the very few cracks in his game and in this era you’re seeing them. Cracks Serral just doesn’t have. It is also worth noting that Serral still has a winning record against Clem overall, from quite a few encounters. It’s a shame the scene is as it is now because for me the two most intriguing storylines are, ‘can Clem maintain that level?’ and ‘can Serral figure out a way to live with that Clem?’ and we may never get an answer to that which is a crying shame. I see where you're coming from but Maru is now already in his 16th year as a fulltime pro and I don't think it's fair to judge his career by his losses to Serral at this stage of his career, he may just lack the drive now to overcome the problem after such a long time in the business. The much better argument against him imo is the lack of a world championship, which he could win at no stage in his career. Had Maru won at least one I'd still back him as the Goat, but with Serrals continous success I agree that he finally has surpassed Maru due to the latters failure to succeed in this particular domain. Maru’s claim is also hugely predicated on his longevity and what he’s accumulated from it. Which yeah 100% you have to give credit for. But what if Inno didn’t lose motivation, or what if other of Maru’s peers didn’t have to go to military? I’m not judging him on the head to head itself as I think I said, but if not I’ll make it more clear. It’s that it exposes the weaknesses he has that have seen him unable to take a WC. Oliveira was a crazy run, and an underdog and Maru was nigh-on impregnable in TvT at the time. He’s had Reynor on the ropes and thrown it away. In GSL we’ve seen Rogue a fair while ago, or Dark more recently come up with game plans to snipe a Maru who’s been consistently better than them at those times. Players have upset the odds, came up with gameplans to counter Maru in the last few years. But Maru has singularly failed to do so on the rare case where he’s the underdog versus Serral. It’s not about that head to head really to me, it’s that it showcases his inability to replicate the kind of snipes he sometimes suffers from, against someone else. Hey he’s still a lock for the upper GOAT echelons, but I think most of his honours come from his sheer talent and skill and being better than opponents at that time. When he doesn’t have that buffer I think you see some of the results come from there. Maru longevity is overrated. Prior to his success in 2018 his accomplishment was nothing worthy. I know his fans like to claim he won SSL and that the field was super competitive. But if we take a closer look his run. His opponents were not impressive You can even make a strong claim that the only reason Maru had success after 2018 was because the Korean pros were getting old / out of their prime or going to military. It's the Schrödinger's GOAT -- results achieved after 2018 don't matter because the scene became weaker, yet simultaneously are sufficient to make one the GOAT. To me, the argument always went like this: A player who was not considered the best pre-2018 could not become the GOAT when he wasn't considered the best in the period post-2018 either. Being the 2nd or 3rd or whatever best in two time spans to me would not suffice to lift you up to the Greatest of All Time overall. There was a time, when Serral's dominance was not clear yet and Maru had a good take. But that was also when people still thought that he would push through internationally to claim Worlds, which eventually never happened. Serral achieved an equal amount of Premier Tournament wins with Top Korean participation in much less time when their occurrence was less frequent (hence his insane tournament participation win ratios). Plus Maru could "farm" Premier Tournaments in the form of GSL, often without the top of the world interfering as Serral, Max, Reynor and Clem were simply not there. No questions asked, most people would see Maru as the GOAT had Serral never existed, even though most of his achievements were in the same period that Serral made his, namely non-prime-SC2. Thus, the question who else would be your GOAT seems legit. Either you pick someone from 2013-2015 (most likely INnoVation) or it is Serral, in my opinion, as the same arguments that discredit Serral's take, also for the most part discredit Maru's.
Personally, I think the whole goat debate around SC2 is rather pointless in general. To me, there's no real goat because nobody was dominant enough to really rise head and shoulders above the rest for a larger period of time than all of their peers when the game was actually thriving; and whomever is dominating the scene now is largely irrelevant because of how much the scene has shrunk. I'm not going to say that MVP or Innovation or Nestea or whatever would have ruled today's scene had they been around, and it's entirely possible that Serral could have been better than all of them had he been around back then -- but he wasn't, and declaring someone who has never faced the greats of the game in their prime as the bestest ever just seems, idk, almost offensive in a way. It's like if some dude started dominating the BW scene today and half a decade later folks go on to crown them as one true bonjwa and the greatest BW player to have ever lived, that'd be straight up silly no matter what sort of stats and tournament wins they rack up.
As far as Maru vs Serral goes, Maru at least has the proven ability to go toe to toe with the absolute best, in the most competitive period of SC2, and even if he wasn't actually the bestest at any given period of time, he has the unmatched longevity at or near the top going for him. Serral is basically the best of the rest. Not to throw shade on him or his accomplishments, it's just a matter of timing. I mean, is it really just a coincidence that non-Korean players only became competitive after all the Korean SC2 teams disbanded?
|
On January 23 2025 21:12 Salazarz wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2025 16:16 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 08:31 Charoisaur wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
If Serral was even good enough to play maru in 2010 - 2017 Maru would beat him every single time; Meanwhile if maru was bad enough to not be able to play in finals in 2024 he won't have losing records to serral. Being a consistently top-tier player hurts Maru's resume? If we talk about greatest of ALL TIME it's Maru. Let alone how Maru saved terran race multiple times as the last terran and the 4th race. This guy's logic: "Oh Maru kept getting crushed by Serral since 2018? I'd just imagine Maru beat him every time in 2010-2017. oh I feel so much better as a Maru fan now. " It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I can do that too: "if Serral was born earlier and got out of school sooner to play Maru in 2010-2017 he would beat Maru every single time and ended up having a longer and more successful career than Maru, because Serral doesn't shrink in international offline tournaments." I can do it too - Serral has a negative record against Jaedong? Yeah but if Jaedong sticked with sc2 Serral surely would've beaten him over and over. It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I don't think the "what if Maru and Serral frequently played each other before 2018" hypothetical is stupid at all, it shows the problem with using all time H2H records as a metric. H2H between players who peaked at different times just doesn't mean anything, and then it just comes down to luck who happened to be closer to their peak when they played But are there truly serious users who have a somewhat deep understanding of SC2 and argue around a H2H in the GOAT debate when it comes to Maru versus Serral? Not die hard fanboys, but people who try to look at this discussion as unbiased as possible (which still leaves a lot of bias)? I don't think so to be honest... In H2H the only thing I think is worthy of being mentioned is the fact that Serral doesn't have a negative win rate against anyone he played regularly as that is a testament to his dominance. Everyone else has 1 or 2 players that got the better of them at one period or another, mostly due to what you mentioned: Different peak timings. But I think the only one who seems to be able to par his record with Serral seems to be Clem, as they stand at 31:20 at the moment with hopefully more games to come. On January 23 2025 08:45 rwala wrote:On January 23 2025 06:37 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
If Serral was even good enough to play maru in 2010 - 2017 Maru would beat him every single time; Meanwhile if maru was bad enough to not be able to play in finals in 2024 he won't have losing records to serral. Being a consistently top-tier player hurts Maru's resume? If we talk about greatest of ALL TIME it's Maru. Let alone how Maru saved terran race multiple times as the last terran and the 4th race. This guy's logic: "Oh Maru kept getting crushed by Serral since 2018? I'd just imagine Maru beat him every time in 2010-2017. oh I feel so much better as a Maru fan now. " It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I can do that too: "if Serral was born earlier and got out of school sooner to play Maru in 2010-2017 he would beat Maru every single time and ended up having a longer and more successful career than Maru, because Serral doesn't shrink in international offline tournaments." +1 These hypotheticals are so tiring. We simply know Maru wasn't the GOAT pre-2018. And in 2018 came the emergence of the most dominant player StarCraft 2 has ever seen. Don't get me wrong: Seeing the little kid who at the time was the youngest player to ever win a Premier Tournament in 2013 grow into the monster he became in 2018 and stay at the top so long is incredible... but Serral simply came, saw and conquered after finishing school in an unprecedented manner no one ever thought possible. I didn't think doing what Mvp did was possible but Serral's record in tournaments that were probably 10X easier to win in a scene about 1/10th the size is also incredibly impressive. I know it sounds like I'm trolling, but the early days of this e-sport were just so insanely competitive that I genuinely mean it when I say Serral is balling real hard even in a scene that's a shadow of what it was. Sometimes I think people don't realize that you had to qualify for a tournament that you had to win to then get into a tournament that you had to win to then qualify for a tournament that featured two or three group stages and a bracket composed of the 64 best players in the world out of a pool of 1,000+ gamers that were playing this game pretty much 24/7. It's true that it relatively quickly winnowed down to the few hundred that were serious and good enough to compete professionally but being at the top of a game with 500+ active pros is a different thing than being at the top of a game with 50+ active pros. Anyways, we've had these convos before. I know some people in this forum think Proleague didn't matter and that Blizzcon was the most competitive tournament. Just gonna have to agree to disagree! True about Mvp. I agree that the prime era of 2013-2015 was much, much harder, but having compiled and looked at various data sets, I still think that the metric I used in my article (double the amount in points) was slightly too big of a multiplier for this era. With pretty high probability, the better player won. Yes, there were upsets, but they were upsets, because they made for a surprise. Data showed that there were 1 or 2 players you didn't think could do it, would end up having a deep run, or 1 occasional favorite would drop to Code A, but overall it actually was pretty reasonable in terms of predictability and average ranks in the Ro16 and Ro8. Plus, you had much more tournaments. Some of them colliding with dates or packed so closely that people couldn't attend both because of time zones or qualifiers. This means that your chances compared to now were worse because of more players, but better because of more tournaments that spread this bigger player base (yes, I know not in a 1:1 ratio, but remember that usually the best players advanced). I took your critique about Proleague to heart and included it in my update. I also never thought it didn't matter, I simply found it hard to factor it in because of the points I mentioned. But I figured out a way to circumvent the influence of other players, players being carried by their team or not participating much in the season to account for that. On January 23 2025 10:41 Salazarz wrote:On January 23 2025 10:03 Blitzball04 wrote:On January 22 2025 10:14 WombaT wrote:On January 22 2025 09:02 Charoisaur wrote:On January 22 2025 08:23 WombaT wrote:On January 22 2025 05:40 Charoisaur wrote:On January 22 2025 04:25 Balnazza wrote:On January 22 2025 04:18 Telephone wrote:
But how can he be the GOAT if he gets stomped in the finals of the biggest tournament of the season by someone not even on the GOAT list? How can Maru be the GOAT if he constantly gets stomped by someone who got stomped in one tournament by someone who is not even on the GOAT list? I mean... that's the point of his comment as I understood it. The argument that Maru can't be the Goat because he loses vs Serral is as reasonable as the argument Serral can't be the Goat because he lost 5-0 to Clem. I’m not a big fan of head-to-heads, generally it’s how you do versus the overall field that’s more important by far. But I think it can become meaningful, even if it’s a tie-breaker. Player A with very similar achievements to B otherwise wins off H2H as a tiebreaker. I don’t think Serral’s winning H2H necessarily is that tiebreaker, but I do think it’s indicative of why he’s the greater player, for me. If you can’t be the all-conquering, dominant player, well another path to greatness is peaking when it counts, it’s those underdog wins, it’s you set planning to conquer the superior foe on paper. Maru’s overall performance I think is better than some give him credit for, for me he’s comfortably been the second best player in the world overall for the past half-decadish. But it’s been a long time since he pulled out the latter from his locker. It would be one thing if the match H2H was as it is now, but it’s full of all-time great series that could have gone either way. Mostly he’s just been battered over a long period of time, playing much the same way. Hey old man Mvp ultimately lost to Life, but his greatness rep was still enhanced for even getting there, testing Life to his limits despite injury really hampering his game. Lower stakes tournament sure, but Serral in recent times lost his first ZvP in forever in a patch Zergs aren’t enjoying the matchup on to out it mildly. Then another one immediately. Then come Masters Colosseum a few days later he loses to MaxPax. A day to sleep on it and make a few tweaks and he comes back and batters both him and herO to win the thing. I think it’s quite illustrative of their relative strengths and weaknesses I will add the caveat that I’m judging Maru incredibly harshly only because it’s the top end of the GOAT ranking, he’s an incredibly talented player and a pleasure to watch. But is he clutch? Can he grind it out to get over the line on the rare occasions he isn’t more skilled than an opponent? Sure, sometimes. But I’ve long thought JAGW papered over the very few cracks in his game and in this era you’re seeing them. Cracks Serral just doesn’t have. It is also worth noting that Serral still has a winning record against Clem overall, from quite a few encounters. It’s a shame the scene is as it is now because for me the two most intriguing storylines are, ‘can Clem maintain that level?’ and ‘can Serral figure out a way to live with that Clem?’ and we may never get an answer to that which is a crying shame. I see where you're coming from but Maru is now already in his 16th year as a fulltime pro and I don't think it's fair to judge his career by his losses to Serral at this stage of his career, he may just lack the drive now to overcome the problem after such a long time in the business. The much better argument against him imo is the lack of a world championship, which he could win at no stage in his career. Had Maru won at least one I'd still back him as the Goat, but with Serrals continous success I agree that he finally has surpassed Maru due to the latters failure to succeed in this particular domain. Maru’s claim is also hugely predicated on his longevity and what he’s accumulated from it. Which yeah 100% you have to give credit for. But what if Inno didn’t lose motivation, or what if other of Maru’s peers didn’t have to go to military? I’m not judging him on the head to head itself as I think I said, but if not I’ll make it more clear. It’s that it exposes the weaknesses he has that have seen him unable to take a WC. Oliveira was a crazy run, and an underdog and Maru was nigh-on impregnable in TvT at the time. He’s had Reynor on the ropes and thrown it away. In GSL we’ve seen Rogue a fair while ago, or Dark more recently come up with game plans to snipe a Maru who’s been consistently better than them at those times. Players have upset the odds, came up with gameplans to counter Maru in the last few years. But Maru has singularly failed to do so on the rare case where he’s the underdog versus Serral. It’s not about that head to head really to me, it’s that it showcases his inability to replicate the kind of snipes he sometimes suffers from, against someone else. Hey he’s still a lock for the upper GOAT echelons, but I think most of his honours come from his sheer talent and skill and being better than opponents at that time. When he doesn’t have that buffer I think you see some of the results come from there. Maru longevity is overrated. Prior to his success in 2018 his accomplishment was nothing worthy. I know his fans like to claim he won SSL and that the field was super competitive. But if we take a closer look his run. His opponents were not impressive You can even make a strong claim that the only reason Maru had success after 2018 was because the Korean pros were getting old / out of their prime or going to military. It's the Schrödinger's GOAT -- results achieved after 2018 don't matter because the scene became weaker, yet simultaneously are sufficient to make one the GOAT. To me, the argument always went like this: A player who was not considered the best pre-2018 could not become the GOAT when he wasn't considered the best in the period post-2018 either. Being the 2nd or 3rd or whatever best in two time spans to me would not suffice to lift you up to the Greatest of All Time overall. There was a time, when Serral's dominance was not clear yet and Maru had a good take. But that was also when people still thought that he would push through internationally to claim Worlds, which eventually never happened. Serral achieved an equal amount of Premier Tournament wins with Top Korean participation in much less time when their occurrence was less frequent (hence his insane tournament participation win ratios). Plus Maru could "farm" Premier Tournaments in the form of GSL, often without the top of the world interfering as Serral, Max, Reynor and Clem were simply not there. No questions asked, most people would see Maru as the GOAT had Serral never existed, even though most of his achievements were in the same period that Serral made his, namely non-prime-SC2. Thus, the question who else would be your GOAT seems legit. Either you pick someone from 2013-2015 (most likely INnoVation) or it is Serral, in my opinion, as the same arguments that discredit Serral's take, also for the most part discredit Maru's. Personally, I think the whole goat debate around SC2 is rather pointless in general. To me, there's no real goat because nobody was dominant enough to really rise head and shoulders above the rest for a larger period of time than all of their peers when the game was actually thriving; and whomever is dominating the scene now is largely irrelevant because of how much the scene has shrunk. I'm not going to say that MVP or Innovation or Nestea or whatever would have ruled today's scene had they been around, and it's entirely possible that Serral could have been better than all of them had he been around back then -- but he wasn't, and declaring someone who has never faced the greats of the game in their prime as the bestest ever just seems, idk, almost offensive in a way. It's like if some dude started dominating the BW scene today and half a decade later folks go on to crown them as one true bonjwa and the greatest BW player to have ever lived, that'd be straight up silly no matter what sort of stats and tournament wins they rack up. As far as Maru vs Serral goes, Maru at least has the proven ability to go toe to toe with the absolute best, in the most competitive period of SC2, and even if he wasn't actually the bestest at any given period of time, he has the unmatched longevity at or near the top going for him. Serral is basically the best of the rest. Not to throw shade on him or his accomplishments, it's just a matter of timing. I mean, is it really just a coincidence that non-Korean players only became competitive after all the Korean SC2 teams disbanded?
Very reasonable take.
|
United States1809 Posts
On January 23 2025 22:05 rwala wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2025 21:12 Salazarz wrote:On January 23 2025 16:16 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 08:31 Charoisaur wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
If Serral was even good enough to play maru in 2010 - 2017 Maru would beat him every single time; Meanwhile if maru was bad enough to not be able to play in finals in 2024 he won't have losing records to serral. Being a consistently top-tier player hurts Maru's resume? If we talk about greatest of ALL TIME it's Maru. Let alone how Maru saved terran race multiple times as the last terran and the 4th race. This guy's logic: "Oh Maru kept getting crushed by Serral since 2018? I'd just imagine Maru beat him every time in 2010-2017. oh I feel so much better as a Maru fan now. " It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I can do that too: "if Serral was born earlier and got out of school sooner to play Maru in 2010-2017 he would beat Maru every single time and ended up having a longer and more successful career than Maru, because Serral doesn't shrink in international offline tournaments." I can do it too - Serral has a negative record against Jaedong? Yeah but if Jaedong sticked with sc2 Serral surely would've beaten him over and over. It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I don't think the "what if Maru and Serral frequently played each other before 2018" hypothetical is stupid at all, it shows the problem with using all time H2H records as a metric. H2H between players who peaked at different times just doesn't mean anything, and then it just comes down to luck who happened to be closer to their peak when they played But are there truly serious users who have a somewhat deep understanding of SC2 and argue around a H2H in the GOAT debate when it comes to Maru versus Serral? Not die hard fanboys, but people who try to look at this discussion as unbiased as possible (which still leaves a lot of bias)? I don't think so to be honest... In H2H the only thing I think is worthy of being mentioned is the fact that Serral doesn't have a negative win rate against anyone he played regularly as that is a testament to his dominance. Everyone else has 1 or 2 players that got the better of them at one period or another, mostly due to what you mentioned: Different peak timings. But I think the only one who seems to be able to par his record with Serral seems to be Clem, as they stand at 31:20 at the moment with hopefully more games to come. On January 23 2025 08:45 rwala wrote:On January 23 2025 06:37 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
If Serral was even good enough to play maru in 2010 - 2017 Maru would beat him every single time; Meanwhile if maru was bad enough to not be able to play in finals in 2024 he won't have losing records to serral. Being a consistently top-tier player hurts Maru's resume? If we talk about greatest of ALL TIME it's Maru. Let alone how Maru saved terran race multiple times as the last terran and the 4th race. This guy's logic: "Oh Maru kept getting crushed by Serral since 2018? I'd just imagine Maru beat him every time in 2010-2017. oh I feel so much better as a Maru fan now. " It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I can do that too: "if Serral was born earlier and got out of school sooner to play Maru in 2010-2017 he would beat Maru every single time and ended up having a longer and more successful career than Maru, because Serral doesn't shrink in international offline tournaments." +1 These hypotheticals are so tiring. We simply know Maru wasn't the GOAT pre-2018. And in 2018 came the emergence of the most dominant player StarCraft 2 has ever seen. Don't get me wrong: Seeing the little kid who at the time was the youngest player to ever win a Premier Tournament in 2013 grow into the monster he became in 2018 and stay at the top so long is incredible... but Serral simply came, saw and conquered after finishing school in an unprecedented manner no one ever thought possible. I didn't think doing what Mvp did was possible but Serral's record in tournaments that were probably 10X easier to win in a scene about 1/10th the size is also incredibly impressive. I know it sounds like I'm trolling, but the early days of this e-sport were just so insanely competitive that I genuinely mean it when I say Serral is balling real hard even in a scene that's a shadow of what it was. Sometimes I think people don't realize that you had to qualify for a tournament that you had to win to then get into a tournament that you had to win to then qualify for a tournament that featured two or three group stages and a bracket composed of the 64 best players in the world out of a pool of 1,000+ gamers that were playing this game pretty much 24/7. It's true that it relatively quickly winnowed down to the few hundred that were serious and good enough to compete professionally but being at the top of a game with 500+ active pros is a different thing than being at the top of a game with 50+ active pros. Anyways, we've had these convos before. I know some people in this forum think Proleague didn't matter and that Blizzcon was the most competitive tournament. Just gonna have to agree to disagree! True about Mvp. I agree that the prime era of 2013-2015 was much, much harder, but having compiled and looked at various data sets, I still think that the metric I used in my article (double the amount in points) was slightly too big of a multiplier for this era. With pretty high probability, the better player won. Yes, there were upsets, but they were upsets, because they made for a surprise. Data showed that there were 1 or 2 players you didn't think could do it, would end up having a deep run, or 1 occasional favorite would drop to Code A, but overall it actually was pretty reasonable in terms of predictability and average ranks in the Ro16 and Ro8. Plus, you had much more tournaments. Some of them colliding with dates or packed so closely that people couldn't attend both because of time zones or qualifiers. This means that your chances compared to now were worse because of more players, but better because of more tournaments that spread this bigger player base (yes, I know not in a 1:1 ratio, but remember that usually the best players advanced). I took your critique about Proleague to heart and included it in my update. I also never thought it didn't matter, I simply found it hard to factor it in because of the points I mentioned. But I figured out a way to circumvent the influence of other players, players being carried by their team or not participating much in the season to account for that. On January 23 2025 10:41 Salazarz wrote:On January 23 2025 10:03 Blitzball04 wrote:On January 22 2025 10:14 WombaT wrote:On January 22 2025 09:02 Charoisaur wrote:On January 22 2025 08:23 WombaT wrote:On January 22 2025 05:40 Charoisaur wrote:On January 22 2025 04:25 Balnazza wrote:
[quote]
How can Maru be the GOAT if he constantly gets stomped by someone who got stomped in one tournament by someone who is not even on the GOAT list? I mean... that's the point of his comment as I understood it. The argument that Maru can't be the Goat because he loses vs Serral is as reasonable as the argument Serral can't be the Goat because he lost 5-0 to Clem. I’m not a big fan of head-to-heads, generally it’s how you do versus the overall field that’s more important by far. But I think it can become meaningful, even if it’s a tie-breaker. Player A with very similar achievements to B otherwise wins off H2H as a tiebreaker. I don’t think Serral’s winning H2H necessarily is that tiebreaker, but I do think it’s indicative of why he’s the greater player, for me. If you can’t be the all-conquering, dominant player, well another path to greatness is peaking when it counts, it’s those underdog wins, it’s you set planning to conquer the superior foe on paper. Maru’s overall performance I think is better than some give him credit for, for me he’s comfortably been the second best player in the world overall for the past half-decadish. But it’s been a long time since he pulled out the latter from his locker. It would be one thing if the match H2H was as it is now, but it’s full of all-time great series that could have gone either way. Mostly he’s just been battered over a long period of time, playing much the same way. Hey old man Mvp ultimately lost to Life, but his greatness rep was still enhanced for even getting there, testing Life to his limits despite injury really hampering his game. Lower stakes tournament sure, but Serral in recent times lost his first ZvP in forever in a patch Zergs aren’t enjoying the matchup on to out it mildly. Then another one immediately. Then come Masters Colosseum a few days later he loses to MaxPax. A day to sleep on it and make a few tweaks and he comes back and batters both him and herO to win the thing. I think it’s quite illustrative of their relative strengths and weaknesses I will add the caveat that I’m judging Maru incredibly harshly only because it’s the top end of the GOAT ranking, he’s an incredibly talented player and a pleasure to watch. But is he clutch? Can he grind it out to get over the line on the rare occasions he isn’t more skilled than an opponent? Sure, sometimes. But I’ve long thought JAGW papered over the very few cracks in his game and in this era you’re seeing them. Cracks Serral just doesn’t have. It is also worth noting that Serral still has a winning record against Clem overall, from quite a few encounters. It’s a shame the scene is as it is now because for me the two most intriguing storylines are, ‘can Clem maintain that level?’ and ‘can Serral figure out a way to live with that Clem?’ and we may never get an answer to that which is a crying shame. I see where you're coming from but Maru is now already in his 16th year as a fulltime pro and I don't think it's fair to judge his career by his losses to Serral at this stage of his career, he may just lack the drive now to overcome the problem after such a long time in the business. The much better argument against him imo is the lack of a world championship, which he could win at no stage in his career. Had Maru won at least one I'd still back him as the Goat, but with Serrals continous success I agree that he finally has surpassed Maru due to the latters failure to succeed in this particular domain. Maru’s claim is also hugely predicated on his longevity and what he’s accumulated from it. Which yeah 100% you have to give credit for. But what if Inno didn’t lose motivation, or what if other of Maru’s peers didn’t have to go to military? I’m not judging him on the head to head itself as I think I said, but if not I’ll make it more clear. It’s that it exposes the weaknesses he has that have seen him unable to take a WC. Oliveira was a crazy run, and an underdog and Maru was nigh-on impregnable in TvT at the time. He’s had Reynor on the ropes and thrown it away. In GSL we’ve seen Rogue a fair while ago, or Dark more recently come up with game plans to snipe a Maru who’s been consistently better than them at those times. Players have upset the odds, came up with gameplans to counter Maru in the last few years. But Maru has singularly failed to do so on the rare case where he’s the underdog versus Serral. It’s not about that head to head really to me, it’s that it showcases his inability to replicate the kind of snipes he sometimes suffers from, against someone else. Hey he’s still a lock for the upper GOAT echelons, but I think most of his honours come from his sheer talent and skill and being better than opponents at that time. When he doesn’t have that buffer I think you see some of the results come from there. Maru longevity is overrated. Prior to his success in 2018 his accomplishment was nothing worthy. I know his fans like to claim he won SSL and that the field was super competitive. But if we take a closer look his run. His opponents were not impressive You can even make a strong claim that the only reason Maru had success after 2018 was because the Korean pros were getting old / out of their prime or going to military. It's the Schrödinger's GOAT -- results achieved after 2018 don't matter because the scene became weaker, yet simultaneously are sufficient to make one the GOAT. To me, the argument always went like this: A player who was not considered the best pre-2018 could not become the GOAT when he wasn't considered the best in the period post-2018 either. Being the 2nd or 3rd or whatever best in two time spans to me would not suffice to lift you up to the Greatest of All Time overall. There was a time, when Serral's dominance was not clear yet and Maru had a good take. But that was also when people still thought that he would push through internationally to claim Worlds, which eventually never happened. Serral achieved an equal amount of Premier Tournament wins with Top Korean participation in much less time when their occurrence was less frequent (hence his insane tournament participation win ratios). Plus Maru could "farm" Premier Tournaments in the form of GSL, often without the top of the world interfering as Serral, Max, Reynor and Clem were simply not there. No questions asked, most people would see Maru as the GOAT had Serral never existed, even though most of his achievements were in the same period that Serral made his, namely non-prime-SC2. Thus, the question who else would be your GOAT seems legit. Either you pick someone from 2013-2015 (most likely INnoVation) or it is Serral, in my opinion, as the same arguments that discredit Serral's take, also for the most part discredit Maru's. Personally, I think the whole goat debate around SC2 is rather pointless in general. To me, there's no real goat because nobody was dominant enough to really rise head and shoulders above the rest for a larger period of time than all of their peers when the game was actually thriving; and whomever is dominating the scene now is largely irrelevant because of how much the scene has shrunk. I'm not going to say that MVP or Innovation or Nestea or whatever would have ruled today's scene had they been around, and it's entirely possible that Serral could have been better than all of them had he been around back then -- but he wasn't, and declaring someone who has never faced the greats of the game in their prime as the bestest ever just seems, idk, almost offensive in a way. It's like if some dude started dominating the BW scene today and half a decade later folks go on to crown them as one true bonjwa and the greatest BW player to have ever lived, that'd be straight up silly no matter what sort of stats and tournament wins they rack up. As far as Maru vs Serral goes, Maru at least has the proven ability to go toe to toe with the absolute best, in the most competitive period of SC2, and even if he wasn't actually the bestest at any given period of time, he has the unmatched longevity at or near the top going for him. Serral is basically the best of the rest. Not to throw shade on him or his accomplishments, it's just a matter of timing. I mean, is it really just a coincidence that non-Korean players only became competitive after all the Korean SC2 teams disbanded? Very reasonable take.
Very unfun take.
|
Finally! Gratz and cheers for the GOAT  
|
Northern Ireland24682 Posts
On January 23 2025 21:12 Salazarz wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2025 16:16 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 08:31 Charoisaur wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
If Serral was even good enough to play maru in 2010 - 2017 Maru would beat him every single time; Meanwhile if maru was bad enough to not be able to play in finals in 2024 he won't have losing records to serral. Being a consistently top-tier player hurts Maru's resume? If we talk about greatest of ALL TIME it's Maru. Let alone how Maru saved terran race multiple times as the last terran and the 4th race. This guy's logic: "Oh Maru kept getting crushed by Serral since 2018? I'd just imagine Maru beat him every time in 2010-2017. oh I feel so much better as a Maru fan now. " It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I can do that too: "if Serral was born earlier and got out of school sooner to play Maru in 2010-2017 he would beat Maru every single time and ended up having a longer and more successful career than Maru, because Serral doesn't shrink in international offline tournaments." I can do it too - Serral has a negative record against Jaedong? Yeah but if Jaedong sticked with sc2 Serral surely would've beaten him over and over. It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I don't think the "what if Maru and Serral frequently played each other before 2018" hypothetical is stupid at all, it shows the problem with using all time H2H records as a metric. H2H between players who peaked at different times just doesn't mean anything, and then it just comes down to luck who happened to be closer to their peak when they played But are there truly serious users who have a somewhat deep understanding of SC2 and argue around a H2H in the GOAT debate when it comes to Maru versus Serral? Not die hard fanboys, but people who try to look at this discussion as unbiased as possible (which still leaves a lot of bias)? I don't think so to be honest... In H2H the only thing I think is worthy of being mentioned is the fact that Serral doesn't have a negative win rate against anyone he played regularly as that is a testament to his dominance. Everyone else has 1 or 2 players that got the better of them at one period or another, mostly due to what you mentioned: Different peak timings. But I think the only one who seems to be able to par his record with Serral seems to be Clem, as they stand at 31:20 at the moment with hopefully more games to come. On January 23 2025 08:45 rwala wrote:On January 23 2025 06:37 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
If Serral was even good enough to play maru in 2010 - 2017 Maru would beat him every single time; Meanwhile if maru was bad enough to not be able to play in finals in 2024 he won't have losing records to serral. Being a consistently top-tier player hurts Maru's resume? If we talk about greatest of ALL TIME it's Maru. Let alone how Maru saved terran race multiple times as the last terran and the 4th race. This guy's logic: "Oh Maru kept getting crushed by Serral since 2018? I'd just imagine Maru beat him every time in 2010-2017. oh I feel so much better as a Maru fan now. " It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I can do that too: "if Serral was born earlier and got out of school sooner to play Maru in 2010-2017 he would beat Maru every single time and ended up having a longer and more successful career than Maru, because Serral doesn't shrink in international offline tournaments." +1 These hypotheticals are so tiring. We simply know Maru wasn't the GOAT pre-2018. And in 2018 came the emergence of the most dominant player StarCraft 2 has ever seen. Don't get me wrong: Seeing the little kid who at the time was the youngest player to ever win a Premier Tournament in 2013 grow into the monster he became in 2018 and stay at the top so long is incredible... but Serral simply came, saw and conquered after finishing school in an unprecedented manner no one ever thought possible. I didn't think doing what Mvp did was possible but Serral's record in tournaments that were probably 10X easier to win in a scene about 1/10th the size is also incredibly impressive. I know it sounds like I'm trolling, but the early days of this e-sport were just so insanely competitive that I genuinely mean it when I say Serral is balling real hard even in a scene that's a shadow of what it was. Sometimes I think people don't realize that you had to qualify for a tournament that you had to win to then get into a tournament that you had to win to then qualify for a tournament that featured two or three group stages and a bracket composed of the 64 best players in the world out of a pool of 1,000+ gamers that were playing this game pretty much 24/7. It's true that it relatively quickly winnowed down to the few hundred that were serious and good enough to compete professionally but being at the top of a game with 500+ active pros is a different thing than being at the top of a game with 50+ active pros. Anyways, we've had these convos before. I know some people in this forum think Proleague didn't matter and that Blizzcon was the most competitive tournament. Just gonna have to agree to disagree! True about Mvp. I agree that the prime era of 2013-2015 was much, much harder, but having compiled and looked at various data sets, I still think that the metric I used in my article (double the amount in points) was slightly too big of a multiplier for this era. With pretty high probability, the better player won. Yes, there were upsets, but they were upsets, because they made for a surprise. Data showed that there were 1 or 2 players you didn't think could do it, would end up having a deep run, or 1 occasional favorite would drop to Code A, but overall it actually was pretty reasonable in terms of predictability and average ranks in the Ro16 and Ro8. Plus, you had much more tournaments. Some of them colliding with dates or packed so closely that people couldn't attend both because of time zones or qualifiers. This means that your chances compared to now were worse because of more players, but better because of more tournaments that spread this bigger player base (yes, I know not in a 1:1 ratio, but remember that usually the best players advanced). I took your critique about Proleague to heart and included it in my update. I also never thought it didn't matter, I simply found it hard to factor it in because of the points I mentioned. But I figured out a way to circumvent the influence of other players, players being carried by their team or not participating much in the season to account for that. On January 23 2025 10:41 Salazarz wrote:On January 23 2025 10:03 Blitzball04 wrote:On January 22 2025 10:14 WombaT wrote:On January 22 2025 09:02 Charoisaur wrote:On January 22 2025 08:23 WombaT wrote:On January 22 2025 05:40 Charoisaur wrote:On January 22 2025 04:25 Balnazza wrote:On January 22 2025 04:18 Telephone wrote:
But how can he be the GOAT if he gets stomped in the finals of the biggest tournament of the season by someone not even on the GOAT list? How can Maru be the GOAT if he constantly gets stomped by someone who got stomped in one tournament by someone who is not even on the GOAT list? I mean... that's the point of his comment as I understood it. The argument that Maru can't be the Goat because he loses vs Serral is as reasonable as the argument Serral can't be the Goat because he lost 5-0 to Clem. I’m not a big fan of head-to-heads, generally it’s how you do versus the overall field that’s more important by far. But I think it can become meaningful, even if it’s a tie-breaker. Player A with very similar achievements to B otherwise wins off H2H as a tiebreaker. I don’t think Serral’s winning H2H necessarily is that tiebreaker, but I do think it’s indicative of why he’s the greater player, for me. If you can’t be the all-conquering, dominant player, well another path to greatness is peaking when it counts, it’s those underdog wins, it’s you set planning to conquer the superior foe on paper. Maru’s overall performance I think is better than some give him credit for, for me he’s comfortably been the second best player in the world overall for the past half-decadish. But it’s been a long time since he pulled out the latter from his locker. It would be one thing if the match H2H was as it is now, but it’s full of all-time great series that could have gone either way. Mostly he’s just been battered over a long period of time, playing much the same way. Hey old man Mvp ultimately lost to Life, but his greatness rep was still enhanced for even getting there, testing Life to his limits despite injury really hampering his game. Lower stakes tournament sure, but Serral in recent times lost his first ZvP in forever in a patch Zergs aren’t enjoying the matchup on to out it mildly. Then another one immediately. Then come Masters Colosseum a few days later he loses to MaxPax. A day to sleep on it and make a few tweaks and he comes back and batters both him and herO to win the thing. I think it’s quite illustrative of their relative strengths and weaknesses I will add the caveat that I’m judging Maru incredibly harshly only because it’s the top end of the GOAT ranking, he’s an incredibly talented player and a pleasure to watch. But is he clutch? Can he grind it out to get over the line on the rare occasions he isn’t more skilled than an opponent? Sure, sometimes. But I’ve long thought JAGW papered over the very few cracks in his game and in this era you’re seeing them. Cracks Serral just doesn’t have. It is also worth noting that Serral still has a winning record against Clem overall, from quite a few encounters. It’s a shame the scene is as it is now because for me the two most intriguing storylines are, ‘can Clem maintain that level?’ and ‘can Serral figure out a way to live with that Clem?’ and we may never get an answer to that which is a crying shame. I see where you're coming from but Maru is now already in his 16th year as a fulltime pro and I don't think it's fair to judge his career by his losses to Serral at this stage of his career, he may just lack the drive now to overcome the problem after such a long time in the business. The much better argument against him imo is the lack of a world championship, which he could win at no stage in his career. Had Maru won at least one I'd still back him as the Goat, but with Serrals continous success I agree that he finally has surpassed Maru due to the latters failure to succeed in this particular domain. Maru’s claim is also hugely predicated on his longevity and what he’s accumulated from it. Which yeah 100% you have to give credit for. But what if Inno didn’t lose motivation, or what if other of Maru’s peers didn’t have to go to military? I’m not judging him on the head to head itself as I think I said, but if not I’ll make it more clear. It’s that it exposes the weaknesses he has that have seen him unable to take a WC. Oliveira was a crazy run, and an underdog and Maru was nigh-on impregnable in TvT at the time. He’s had Reynor on the ropes and thrown it away. In GSL we’ve seen Rogue a fair while ago, or Dark more recently come up with game plans to snipe a Maru who’s been consistently better than them at those times. Players have upset the odds, came up with gameplans to counter Maru in the last few years. But Maru has singularly failed to do so on the rare case where he’s the underdog versus Serral. It’s not about that head to head really to me, it’s that it showcases his inability to replicate the kind of snipes he sometimes suffers from, against someone else. Hey he’s still a lock for the upper GOAT echelons, but I think most of his honours come from his sheer talent and skill and being better than opponents at that time. When he doesn’t have that buffer I think you see some of the results come from there. Maru longevity is overrated. Prior to his success in 2018 his accomplishment was nothing worthy. I know his fans like to claim he won SSL and that the field was super competitive. But if we take a closer look his run. His opponents were not impressive You can even make a strong claim that the only reason Maru had success after 2018 was because the Korean pros were getting old / out of their prime or going to military. It's the Schrödinger's GOAT -- results achieved after 2018 don't matter because the scene became weaker, yet simultaneously are sufficient to make one the GOAT. To me, the argument always went like this: A player who was not considered the best pre-2018 could not become the GOAT when he wasn't considered the best in the period post-2018 either. Being the 2nd or 3rd or whatever best in two time spans to me would not suffice to lift you up to the Greatest of All Time overall. There was a time, when Serral's dominance was not clear yet and Maru had a good take. But that was also when people still thought that he would push through internationally to claim Worlds, which eventually never happened. Serral achieved an equal amount of Premier Tournament wins with Top Korean participation in much less time when their occurrence was less frequent (hence his insane tournament participation win ratios). Plus Maru could "farm" Premier Tournaments in the form of GSL, often without the top of the world interfering as Serral, Max, Reynor and Clem were simply not there. No questions asked, most people would see Maru as the GOAT had Serral never existed, even though most of his achievements were in the same period that Serral made his, namely non-prime-SC2. Thus, the question who else would be your GOAT seems legit. Either you pick someone from 2013-2015 (most likely INnoVation) or it is Serral, in my opinion, as the same arguments that discredit Serral's take, also for the most part discredit Maru's. Personally, I think the whole goat debate around SC2 is rather pointless in general. To me, there's no real goat because nobody was dominant enough to really rise head and shoulders above the rest for a larger period of time than all of their peers when the game was actually thriving; and whomever is dominating the scene now is largely irrelevant because of how much the scene has shrunk. I'm not going to say that MVP or Innovation or Nestea or whatever would have ruled today's scene had they been around, and it's entirely possible that Serral could have been better than all of them had he been around back then -- but he wasn't, and declaring someone who has never faced the greats of the game in their prime as the bestest ever just seems, idk, almost offensive in a way. It's like if some dude started dominating the BW scene today and half a decade later folks go on to crown them as one true bonjwa and the greatest BW player to have ever lived, that'd be straight up silly no matter what sort of stats and tournament wins they rack up. As far as Maru vs Serral goes, Maru at least has the proven ability to go toe to toe with the absolute best, in the most competitive period of SC2, and even if he wasn't actually the bestest at any given period of time, he has the unmatched longevity at or near the top going for him. Serral is basically the best of the rest. Not to throw shade on him or his accomplishments, it's just a matter of timing. I mean, is it really just a coincidence that non-Korean players only became competitive after all the Korean SC2 teams disbanded?
There is a flipside to that, which is that Koreans broadly couldn’t keep up with what Serral was bringing, who didn’t have the benefit of that team environment.
In 2025 I think it’s a little different, the problem is that existing titans have declined and the production line never replaced them.
But in 2018 you’ve still got a lot of those players, plenty of tournament winnings available and this new kid on the block, but folks largely didn’t consistently rise to the challenge.
Edit - Now I’ll say it’s still hard, nay impossible to compare across eras, especially eras where the game itself changed, tournaments and wider scenes changed etc.
Just I find there’s another side of the coin with many arguments. I find neglecting one tends to be done in order to make the case for one’s favourite, and factoring both in make it bloody difficult!
The collapse of Proleague and then subsequently all of those teams undoubtedly damaged Korean StarCraft, but on the other hand Serral never had the benefit of in-house training with absolutely elite players.
Etc etc.
|
Finally justice for Serral! He was always the GOAT !
|
On January 23 2025 22:40 Mizenhauer wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2025 22:05 rwala wrote:On January 23 2025 21:12 Salazarz wrote:On January 23 2025 16:16 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 08:31 Charoisaur wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
If Serral was even good enough to play maru in 2010 - 2017 Maru would beat him every single time; Meanwhile if maru was bad enough to not be able to play in finals in 2024 he won't have losing records to serral. Being a consistently top-tier player hurts Maru's resume? If we talk about greatest of ALL TIME it's Maru. Let alone how Maru saved terran race multiple times as the last terran and the 4th race. This guy's logic: "Oh Maru kept getting crushed by Serral since 2018? I'd just imagine Maru beat him every time in 2010-2017. oh I feel so much better as a Maru fan now. " It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I can do that too: "if Serral was born earlier and got out of school sooner to play Maru in 2010-2017 he would beat Maru every single time and ended up having a longer and more successful career than Maru, because Serral doesn't shrink in international offline tournaments." I can do it too - Serral has a negative record against Jaedong? Yeah but if Jaedong sticked with sc2 Serral surely would've beaten him over and over. It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I don't think the "what if Maru and Serral frequently played each other before 2018" hypothetical is stupid at all, it shows the problem with using all time H2H records as a metric. H2H between players who peaked at different times just doesn't mean anything, and then it just comes down to luck who happened to be closer to their peak when they played But are there truly serious users who have a somewhat deep understanding of SC2 and argue around a H2H in the GOAT debate when it comes to Maru versus Serral? Not die hard fanboys, but people who try to look at this discussion as unbiased as possible (which still leaves a lot of bias)? I don't think so to be honest... In H2H the only thing I think is worthy of being mentioned is the fact that Serral doesn't have a negative win rate against anyone he played regularly as that is a testament to his dominance. Everyone else has 1 or 2 players that got the better of them at one period or another, mostly due to what you mentioned: Different peak timings. But I think the only one who seems to be able to par his record with Serral seems to be Clem, as they stand at 31:20 at the moment with hopefully more games to come. On January 23 2025 08:45 rwala wrote:On January 23 2025 06:37 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
If Serral was even good enough to play maru in 2010 - 2017 Maru would beat him every single time; Meanwhile if maru was bad enough to not be able to play in finals in 2024 he won't have losing records to serral. Being a consistently top-tier player hurts Maru's resume? If we talk about greatest of ALL TIME it's Maru. Let alone how Maru saved terran race multiple times as the last terran and the 4th race. This guy's logic: "Oh Maru kept getting crushed by Serral since 2018? I'd just imagine Maru beat him every time in 2010-2017. oh I feel so much better as a Maru fan now. " It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I can do that too: "if Serral was born earlier and got out of school sooner to play Maru in 2010-2017 he would beat Maru every single time and ended up having a longer and more successful career than Maru, because Serral doesn't shrink in international offline tournaments." +1 These hypotheticals are so tiring. We simply know Maru wasn't the GOAT pre-2018. And in 2018 came the emergence of the most dominant player StarCraft 2 has ever seen. Don't get me wrong: Seeing the little kid who at the time was the youngest player to ever win a Premier Tournament in 2013 grow into the monster he became in 2018 and stay at the top so long is incredible... but Serral simply came, saw and conquered after finishing school in an unprecedented manner no one ever thought possible. I didn't think doing what Mvp did was possible but Serral's record in tournaments that were probably 10X easier to win in a scene about 1/10th the size is also incredibly impressive. I know it sounds like I'm trolling, but the early days of this e-sport were just so insanely competitive that I genuinely mean it when I say Serral is balling real hard even in a scene that's a shadow of what it was. Sometimes I think people don't realize that you had to qualify for a tournament that you had to win to then get into a tournament that you had to win to then qualify for a tournament that featured two or three group stages and a bracket composed of the 64 best players in the world out of a pool of 1,000+ gamers that were playing this game pretty much 24/7. It's true that it relatively quickly winnowed down to the few hundred that were serious and good enough to compete professionally but being at the top of a game with 500+ active pros is a different thing than being at the top of a game with 50+ active pros. Anyways, we've had these convos before. I know some people in this forum think Proleague didn't matter and that Blizzcon was the most competitive tournament. Just gonna have to agree to disagree! True about Mvp. I agree that the prime era of 2013-2015 was much, much harder, but having compiled and looked at various data sets, I still think that the metric I used in my article (double the amount in points) was slightly too big of a multiplier for this era. With pretty high probability, the better player won. Yes, there were upsets, but they were upsets, because they made for a surprise. Data showed that there were 1 or 2 players you didn't think could do it, would end up having a deep run, or 1 occasional favorite would drop to Code A, but overall it actually was pretty reasonable in terms of predictability and average ranks in the Ro16 and Ro8. Plus, you had much more tournaments. Some of them colliding with dates or packed so closely that people couldn't attend both because of time zones or qualifiers. This means that your chances compared to now were worse because of more players, but better because of more tournaments that spread this bigger player base (yes, I know not in a 1:1 ratio, but remember that usually the best players advanced). I took your critique about Proleague to heart and included it in my update. I also never thought it didn't matter, I simply found it hard to factor it in because of the points I mentioned. But I figured out a way to circumvent the influence of other players, players being carried by their team or not participating much in the season to account for that. On January 23 2025 10:41 Salazarz wrote:On January 23 2025 10:03 Blitzball04 wrote:On January 22 2025 10:14 WombaT wrote:On January 22 2025 09:02 Charoisaur wrote:On January 22 2025 08:23 WombaT wrote:On January 22 2025 05:40 Charoisaur wrote:
[quote]
I mean... that's the point of his comment as I understood it. The argument that Maru can't be the Goat because he loses vs Serral is as reasonable as the argument Serral can't be the Goat because he lost 5-0 to Clem.
I’m not a big fan of head-to-heads, generally it’s how you do versus the overall field that’s more important by far. But I think it can become meaningful, even if it’s a tie-breaker. Player A with very similar achievements to B otherwise wins off H2H as a tiebreaker. I don’t think Serral’s winning H2H necessarily is that tiebreaker, but I do think it’s indicative of why he’s the greater player, for me. If you can’t be the all-conquering, dominant player, well another path to greatness is peaking when it counts, it’s those underdog wins, it’s you set planning to conquer the superior foe on paper. Maru’s overall performance I think is better than some give him credit for, for me he’s comfortably been the second best player in the world overall for the past half-decadish. But it’s been a long time since he pulled out the latter from his locker. It would be one thing if the match H2H was as it is now, but it’s full of all-time great series that could have gone either way. Mostly he’s just been battered over a long period of time, playing much the same way. Hey old man Mvp ultimately lost to Life, but his greatness rep was still enhanced for even getting there, testing Life to his limits despite injury really hampering his game. Lower stakes tournament sure, but Serral in recent times lost his first ZvP in forever in a patch Zergs aren’t enjoying the matchup on to out it mildly. Then another one immediately. Then come Masters Colosseum a few days later he loses to MaxPax. A day to sleep on it and make a few tweaks and he comes back and batters both him and herO to win the thing. I think it’s quite illustrative of their relative strengths and weaknesses I will add the caveat that I’m judging Maru incredibly harshly only because it’s the top end of the GOAT ranking, he’s an incredibly talented player and a pleasure to watch. But is he clutch? Can he grind it out to get over the line on the rare occasions he isn’t more skilled than an opponent? Sure, sometimes. But I’ve long thought JAGW papered over the very few cracks in his game and in this era you’re seeing them. Cracks Serral just doesn’t have. It is also worth noting that Serral still has a winning record against Clem overall, from quite a few encounters. It’s a shame the scene is as it is now because for me the two most intriguing storylines are, ‘can Clem maintain that level?’ and ‘can Serral figure out a way to live with that Clem?’ and we may never get an answer to that which is a crying shame. I see where you're coming from but Maru is now already in his 16th year as a fulltime pro and I don't think it's fair to judge his career by his losses to Serral at this stage of his career, he may just lack the drive now to overcome the problem after such a long time in the business. The much better argument against him imo is the lack of a world championship, which he could win at no stage in his career. Had Maru won at least one I'd still back him as the Goat, but with Serrals continous success I agree that he finally has surpassed Maru due to the latters failure to succeed in this particular domain. Maru’s claim is also hugely predicated on his longevity and what he’s accumulated from it. Which yeah 100% you have to give credit for. But what if Inno didn’t lose motivation, or what if other of Maru’s peers didn’t have to go to military? I’m not judging him on the head to head itself as I think I said, but if not I’ll make it more clear. It’s that it exposes the weaknesses he has that have seen him unable to take a WC. Oliveira was a crazy run, and an underdog and Maru was nigh-on impregnable in TvT at the time. He’s had Reynor on the ropes and thrown it away. In GSL we’ve seen Rogue a fair while ago, or Dark more recently come up with game plans to snipe a Maru who’s been consistently better than them at those times. Players have upset the odds, came up with gameplans to counter Maru in the last few years. But Maru has singularly failed to do so on the rare case where he’s the underdog versus Serral. It’s not about that head to head really to me, it’s that it showcases his inability to replicate the kind of snipes he sometimes suffers from, against someone else. Hey he’s still a lock for the upper GOAT echelons, but I think most of his honours come from his sheer talent and skill and being better than opponents at that time. When he doesn’t have that buffer I think you see some of the results come from there. Maru longevity is overrated. Prior to his success in 2018 his accomplishment was nothing worthy. I know his fans like to claim he won SSL and that the field was super competitive. But if we take a closer look his run. His opponents were not impressive You can even make a strong claim that the only reason Maru had success after 2018 was because the Korean pros were getting old / out of their prime or going to military. It's the Schrödinger's GOAT -- results achieved after 2018 don't matter because the scene became weaker, yet simultaneously are sufficient to make one the GOAT. To me, the argument always went like this: A player who was not considered the best pre-2018 could not become the GOAT when he wasn't considered the best in the period post-2018 either. Being the 2nd or 3rd or whatever best in two time spans to me would not suffice to lift you up to the Greatest of All Time overall. There was a time, when Serral's dominance was not clear yet and Maru had a good take. But that was also when people still thought that he would push through internationally to claim Worlds, which eventually never happened. Serral achieved an equal amount of Premier Tournament wins with Top Korean participation in much less time when their occurrence was less frequent (hence his insane tournament participation win ratios). Plus Maru could "farm" Premier Tournaments in the form of GSL, often without the top of the world interfering as Serral, Max, Reynor and Clem were simply not there. No questions asked, most people would see Maru as the GOAT had Serral never existed, even though most of his achievements were in the same period that Serral made his, namely non-prime-SC2. Thus, the question who else would be your GOAT seems legit. Either you pick someone from 2013-2015 (most likely INnoVation) or it is Serral, in my opinion, as the same arguments that discredit Serral's take, also for the most part discredit Maru's. Personally, I think the whole goat debate around SC2 is rather pointless in general. To me, there's no real goat because nobody was dominant enough to really rise head and shoulders above the rest for a larger period of time than all of their peers when the game was actually thriving; and whomever is dominating the scene now is largely irrelevant because of how much the scene has shrunk. I'm not going to say that MVP or Innovation or Nestea or whatever would have ruled today's scene had they been around, and it's entirely possible that Serral could have been better than all of them had he been around back then -- but he wasn't, and declaring someone who has never faced the greats of the game in their prime as the bestest ever just seems, idk, almost offensive in a way. It's like if some dude started dominating the BW scene today and half a decade later folks go on to crown them as one true bonjwa and the greatest BW player to have ever lived, that'd be straight up silly no matter what sort of stats and tournament wins they rack up. As far as Maru vs Serral goes, Maru at least has the proven ability to go toe to toe with the absolute best, in the most competitive period of SC2, and even if he wasn't actually the bestest at any given period of time, he has the unmatched longevity at or near the top going for him. Serral is basically the best of the rest. Not to throw shade on him or his accomplishments, it's just a matter of timing. I mean, is it really just a coincidence that non-Korean players only became competitive after all the Korean SC2 teams disbanded? Very reasonable take. Very unfun take.
True! I tried to bait people earlier but didn’t work. You’re the number #1 fun-ruiner tho in putting out such a uncontroversial update!
|
It's very hard to argue Serral as the GOAT from a gameplay standpoint. He's just been so dominant -- he came out showing the best defensive/reactive macro zerg play we've ever seen, and even adjusted over the years to add variety and timings to his game.
The way he thinks the game is next-level, really the best answer SC2 has to Brood War Flash, and he combines that with god-level mechanics and attention to detail -- things like never missing upgrades, getting his workers to the most recent expansion, just flawless transitions from early-game to mid-game to late-game. He's a problem-solver, and we saw that just recently in the adjustments he made to 4-1 MaxPax in their rematch.
However, there's an element of tragedy to Serral being the GOAT to me. I think the Starleague format is easily the best way for SC2 players to show their skill, and no "weekend" tournament can really compare to the demands of making it through two group stages, then having to make it through a Bo5/Bo7 bracket when both opponents have time to prep for each other. The team dynamics added another element to this, and the KeSPA era really was SC2 at its peak in so many ways.
Serral being the GOAT is a testament to his skill, hard work, and game understanding, and I don't want to take anything away from him -- never going over to Korea to participate in the Starleagues was a choice he made for a number of reasons, by the time he came around it was every bit as lucrative to dominate the European circuit and weekend global tournaments as it was to grind out GSLs (SSL and Korean Teamleagues were already gone). And he proved himself against the top Koreans over and over again.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that Serral being the GOAT is just a bit sad for the fans -- the best comparison I can make is if Ohtani or someone else spent his career dominating NPB, then beating the best the US/MLB had to offer in World Baseball Classics. Doesn't make him any less great as a player, but boy it would have been great to see him consistently tested in the top SC2 leagues.
|
On January 23 2025 21:12 Salazarz wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2025 16:16 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 08:31 Charoisaur wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
If Serral was even good enough to play maru in 2010 - 2017 Maru would beat him every single time; Meanwhile if maru was bad enough to not be able to play in finals in 2024 he won't have losing records to serral. Being a consistently top-tier player hurts Maru's resume? If we talk about greatest of ALL TIME it's Maru. Let alone how Maru saved terran race multiple times as the last terran and the 4th race. This guy's logic: "Oh Maru kept getting crushed by Serral since 2018? I'd just imagine Maru beat him every time in 2010-2017. oh I feel so much better as a Maru fan now. " It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I can do that too: "if Serral was born earlier and got out of school sooner to play Maru in 2010-2017 he would beat Maru every single time and ended up having a longer and more successful career than Maru, because Serral doesn't shrink in international offline tournaments." I can do it too - Serral has a negative record against Jaedong? Yeah but if Jaedong sticked with sc2 Serral surely would've beaten him over and over. It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I don't think the "what if Maru and Serral frequently played each other before 2018" hypothetical is stupid at all, it shows the problem with using all time H2H records as a metric. H2H between players who peaked at different times just doesn't mean anything, and then it just comes down to luck who happened to be closer to their peak when they played But are there truly serious users who have a somewhat deep understanding of SC2 and argue around a H2H in the GOAT debate when it comes to Maru versus Serral? Not die hard fanboys, but people who try to look at this discussion as unbiased as possible (which still leaves a lot of bias)? I don't think so to be honest... In H2H the only thing I think is worthy of being mentioned is the fact that Serral doesn't have a negative win rate against anyone he played regularly as that is a testament to his dominance. Everyone else has 1 or 2 players that got the better of them at one period or another, mostly due to what you mentioned: Different peak timings. But I think the only one who seems to be able to par his record with Serral seems to be Clem, as they stand at 31:20 at the moment with hopefully more games to come. On January 23 2025 08:45 rwala wrote:On January 23 2025 06:37 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
If Serral was even good enough to play maru in 2010 - 2017 Maru would beat him every single time; Meanwhile if maru was bad enough to not be able to play in finals in 2024 he won't have losing records to serral. Being a consistently top-tier player hurts Maru's resume? If we talk about greatest of ALL TIME it's Maru. Let alone how Maru saved terran race multiple times as the last terran and the 4th race. This guy's logic: "Oh Maru kept getting crushed by Serral since 2018? I'd just imagine Maru beat him every time in 2010-2017. oh I feel so much better as a Maru fan now. " It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I can do that too: "if Serral was born earlier and got out of school sooner to play Maru in 2010-2017 he would beat Maru every single time and ended up having a longer and more successful career than Maru, because Serral doesn't shrink in international offline tournaments." +1 These hypotheticals are so tiring. We simply know Maru wasn't the GOAT pre-2018. And in 2018 came the emergence of the most dominant player StarCraft 2 has ever seen. Don't get me wrong: Seeing the little kid who at the time was the youngest player to ever win a Premier Tournament in 2013 grow into the monster he became in 2018 and stay at the top so long is incredible... but Serral simply came, saw and conquered after finishing school in an unprecedented manner no one ever thought possible. I didn't think doing what Mvp did was possible but Serral's record in tournaments that were probably 10X easier to win in a scene about 1/10th the size is also incredibly impressive. I know it sounds like I'm trolling, but the early days of this e-sport were just so insanely competitive that I genuinely mean it when I say Serral is balling real hard even in a scene that's a shadow of what it was. Sometimes I think people don't realize that you had to qualify for a tournament that you had to win to then get into a tournament that you had to win to then qualify for a tournament that featured two or three group stages and a bracket composed of the 64 best players in the world out of a pool of 1,000+ gamers that were playing this game pretty much 24/7. It's true that it relatively quickly winnowed down to the few hundred that were serious and good enough to compete professionally but being at the top of a game with 500+ active pros is a different thing than being at the top of a game with 50+ active pros. Anyways, we've had these convos before. I know some people in this forum think Proleague didn't matter and that Blizzcon was the most competitive tournament. Just gonna have to agree to disagree! True about Mvp. I agree that the prime era of 2013-2015 was much, much harder, but having compiled and looked at various data sets, I still think that the metric I used in my article (double the amount in points) was slightly too big of a multiplier for this era. With pretty high probability, the better player won. Yes, there were upsets, but they were upsets, because they made for a surprise. Data showed that there were 1 or 2 players you didn't think could do it, would end up having a deep run, or 1 occasional favorite would drop to Code A, but overall it actually was pretty reasonable in terms of predictability and average ranks in the Ro16 and Ro8. Plus, you had much more tournaments. Some of them colliding with dates or packed so closely that people couldn't attend both because of time zones or qualifiers. This means that your chances compared to now were worse because of more players, but better because of more tournaments that spread this bigger player base (yes, I know not in a 1:1 ratio, but remember that usually the best players advanced). I took your critique about Proleague to heart and included it in my update. I also never thought it didn't matter, I simply found it hard to factor it in because of the points I mentioned. But I figured out a way to circumvent the influence of other players, players being carried by their team or not participating much in the season to account for that. On January 23 2025 10:41 Salazarz wrote:On January 23 2025 10:03 Blitzball04 wrote:On January 22 2025 10:14 WombaT wrote:On January 22 2025 09:02 Charoisaur wrote:On January 22 2025 08:23 WombaT wrote:On January 22 2025 05:40 Charoisaur wrote:On January 22 2025 04:25 Balnazza wrote:On January 22 2025 04:18 Telephone wrote:
But how can he be the GOAT if he gets stomped in the finals of the biggest tournament of the season by someone not even on the GOAT list? How can Maru be the GOAT if he constantly gets stomped by someone who got stomped in one tournament by someone who is not even on the GOAT list? I mean... that's the point of his comment as I understood it. The argument that Maru can't be the Goat because he loses vs Serral is as reasonable as the argument Serral can't be the Goat because he lost 5-0 to Clem. I’m not a big fan of head-to-heads, generally it’s how you do versus the overall field that’s more important by far. But I think it can become meaningful, even if it’s a tie-breaker. Player A with very similar achievements to B otherwise wins off H2H as a tiebreaker. I don’t think Serral’s winning H2H necessarily is that tiebreaker, but I do think it’s indicative of why he’s the greater player, for me. If you can’t be the all-conquering, dominant player, well another path to greatness is peaking when it counts, it’s those underdog wins, it’s you set planning to conquer the superior foe on paper. Maru’s overall performance I think is better than some give him credit for, for me he’s comfortably been the second best player in the world overall for the past half-decadish. But it’s been a long time since he pulled out the latter from his locker. It would be one thing if the match H2H was as it is now, but it’s full of all-time great series that could have gone either way. Mostly he’s just been battered over a long period of time, playing much the same way. Hey old man Mvp ultimately lost to Life, but his greatness rep was still enhanced for even getting there, testing Life to his limits despite injury really hampering his game. Lower stakes tournament sure, but Serral in recent times lost his first ZvP in forever in a patch Zergs aren’t enjoying the matchup on to out it mildly. Then another one immediately. Then come Masters Colosseum a few days later he loses to MaxPax. A day to sleep on it and make a few tweaks and he comes back and batters both him and herO to win the thing. I think it’s quite illustrative of their relative strengths and weaknesses I will add the caveat that I’m judging Maru incredibly harshly only because it’s the top end of the GOAT ranking, he’s an incredibly talented player and a pleasure to watch. But is he clutch? Can he grind it out to get over the line on the rare occasions he isn’t more skilled than an opponent? Sure, sometimes. But I’ve long thought JAGW papered over the very few cracks in his game and in this era you’re seeing them. Cracks Serral just doesn’t have. It is also worth noting that Serral still has a winning record against Clem overall, from quite a few encounters. It’s a shame the scene is as it is now because for me the two most intriguing storylines are, ‘can Clem maintain that level?’ and ‘can Serral figure out a way to live with that Clem?’ and we may never get an answer to that which is a crying shame. I see where you're coming from but Maru is now already in his 16th year as a fulltime pro and I don't think it's fair to judge his career by his losses to Serral at this stage of his career, he may just lack the drive now to overcome the problem after such a long time in the business. The much better argument against him imo is the lack of a world championship, which he could win at no stage in his career. Had Maru won at least one I'd still back him as the Goat, but with Serrals continous success I agree that he finally has surpassed Maru due to the latters failure to succeed in this particular domain. Maru’s claim is also hugely predicated on his longevity and what he’s accumulated from it. Which yeah 100% you have to give credit for. But what if Inno didn’t lose motivation, or what if other of Maru’s peers didn’t have to go to military? I’m not judging him on the head to head itself as I think I said, but if not I’ll make it more clear. It’s that it exposes the weaknesses he has that have seen him unable to take a WC. Oliveira was a crazy run, and an underdog and Maru was nigh-on impregnable in TvT at the time. He’s had Reynor on the ropes and thrown it away. In GSL we’ve seen Rogue a fair while ago, or Dark more recently come up with game plans to snipe a Maru who’s been consistently better than them at those times. Players have upset the odds, came up with gameplans to counter Maru in the last few years. But Maru has singularly failed to do so on the rare case where he’s the underdog versus Serral. It’s not about that head to head really to me, it’s that it showcases his inability to replicate the kind of snipes he sometimes suffers from, against someone else. Hey he’s still a lock for the upper GOAT echelons, but I think most of his honours come from his sheer talent and skill and being better than opponents at that time. When he doesn’t have that buffer I think you see some of the results come from there. Maru longevity is overrated. Prior to his success in 2018 his accomplishment was nothing worthy. I know his fans like to claim he won SSL and that the field was super competitive. But if we take a closer look his run. His opponents were not impressive You can even make a strong claim that the only reason Maru had success after 2018 was because the Korean pros were getting old / out of their prime or going to military. It's the Schrödinger's GOAT -- results achieved after 2018 don't matter because the scene became weaker, yet simultaneously are sufficient to make one the GOAT. To me, the argument always went like this: A player who was not considered the best pre-2018 could not become the GOAT when he wasn't considered the best in the period post-2018 either. Being the 2nd or 3rd or whatever best in two time spans to me would not suffice to lift you up to the Greatest of All Time overall. There was a time, when Serral's dominance was not clear yet and Maru had a good take. But that was also when people still thought that he would push through internationally to claim Worlds, which eventually never happened. Serral achieved an equal amount of Premier Tournament wins with Top Korean participation in much less time when their occurrence was less frequent (hence his insane tournament participation win ratios). Plus Maru could "farm" Premier Tournaments in the form of GSL, often without the top of the world interfering as Serral, Max, Reynor and Clem were simply not there. No questions asked, most people would see Maru as the GOAT had Serral never existed, even though most of his achievements were in the same period that Serral made his, namely non-prime-SC2. Thus, the question who else would be your GOAT seems legit. Either you pick someone from 2013-2015 (most likely INnoVation) or it is Serral, in my opinion, as the same arguments that discredit Serral's take, also for the most part discredit Maru's. Personally, I think the whole goat debate around SC2 is rather pointless in general. To me, there's no real goat because nobody was dominant enough to really rise head and shoulders above the rest for a larger period of time than all of their peers when the game was actually thriving; and whomever is dominating the scene now is largely irrelevant because of how much the scene has shrunk. I'm not going to say that MVP or Innovation or Nestea or whatever would have ruled today's scene had they been around, and it's entirely possible that Serral could have been better than all of them had he been around back then -- but he wasn't, and declaring someone who has never faced the greats of the game in their prime as the bestest ever just seems, idk, almost offensive in a way. It's like if some dude started dominating the BW scene today and half a decade later folks go on to crown them as one true bonjwa and the greatest BW player to have ever lived, that'd be straight up silly no matter what sort of stats and tournament wins they rack up. As far as Maru vs Serral goes, Maru at least has the proven ability to go toe to toe with the absolute best, in the most competitive period of SC2, and even if he wasn't actually the bestest at any given period of time, he has the unmatched longevity at or near the top going for him. Serral is basically the best of the rest. Not to throw shade on him or his accomplishments, it's just a matter of timing. I mean, is it really just a coincidence that non-Korean players only became competitive after all the Korean SC2 teams disbanded?
I agree that results in 2025 shouldn't count for much because of the state of the scene, but when Serral had its initial breakthrough in 2018 the scene was still quite healthy and active
Especially this statement has never faced the greats of the game in their prime
isn't really true as Maru, Stats, Rogue and Dark are generally considered top 10 players of all time and had their peak around 2017-2019 where they competed with Serral. I admit it's not the same as playing in the Kespa era with teamhouses analyzing your weaknesses, but in the absense of a truly dominant player during that time, Serrals success in 2018/19 (and onwards) is enough for me to put him above any other player
|
On January 22 2025 15:56 onPHYRE wrote:Show nested quote +On January 22 2025 14:35 Balnazza wrote:On January 22 2025 13:52 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Any list without TaeJa is bunk. So don't waste time on this. He said, wasting time on this. But in all honesty: These kind of comments always remind me of a meme-list I once saw. It was about "ten mild inconveniences that are the worst", with No. 10 being "your mild inconvenience that is the worst not being on this list, making this list a mild inconvenience that is just the worst" TaeJa is nowhere near the GOAT discussion. You can debate if he is #9/10 or whatever.. but to invalidate a list just because you like someone that peaked for barely 2 years.. to each their own I guess.
That is literally Rain and MVP though.
|
United States1809 Posts
On January 28 2025 03:27 ejozl wrote:Show nested quote +On January 22 2025 15:56 onPHYRE wrote:On January 22 2025 14:35 Balnazza wrote:On January 22 2025 13:52 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Any list without TaeJa is bunk. So don't waste time on this. He said, wasting time on this. But in all honesty: These kind of comments always remind me of a meme-list I once saw. It was about "ten mild inconveniences that are the worst", with No. 10 being "your mild inconvenience that is the worst not being on this list, making this list a mild inconvenience that is just the worst" TaeJa is nowhere near the GOAT discussion. You can debate if he is #9/10 or whatever.. but to invalidate a list just because you like someone that peaked for barely 2 years.. to each their own I guess. That is literally Rain and MVP though.
NesTea's peak only lasted eight months, but it was enough to make him a top 15 player in my book. You're on the right track. 
|
|
|
Serral is not the goat lmao, he has become relevant ever since the competitiveness of starcraft 2 has decreased, the more it decreased the stronger serral became, it's easy to be the best when there is literraly nobody playing, everyone has either retired, went back to broodwar or went to the military, one proof of that ? Just look at the size of the gsl, the last few ones in comparison to gsl in 2017, 2016, 2015
there is not even enough players to make a full tournament, it's sad, gsl now : ![[image loading]](https://i.ibb.co/C7wkj7J/gsl.png)
gsl before : https://ibb.co/Csj3Lt0
Competitive starcraft has been dead for a few years, if you want to name a starcraft 2 greatest of all times, it should probably be someone like innovation, maybe maru could be in the discussion but it's hard, he won is first gsl in 2018, 2018 !! but he had some starleagues so he is definetely up there but not serral
And don't confuse skill with competitiveness, some users on this website always confuse those 2 things, the level of skill of players increases with time but the level of competitiveness (the number of talent around, in the scene) has severly decreased, GOAT is not a title you give to someone at the dying stage of a game when there is nobody left playing and this guy is the best, GOAT is the guy who has dominated and has been the most accomplished at the peak of competitiveness of the game.
And yes Serral has beaten innovation, when he stopped caring about the game and was a shadow of himself not when he was a champion. (even in 2019 innovation beat him at wesg when he was washed up lol)
And i see posts above me talking about the fact that Serral has been dominant in 2018 for instance when the scene was still pretty healthy and thats true but he was not as dominant as you think, he dominated 2018 but dark was the world champion in 2019, reynor was the world champion after that and serral lost many times during that period in 2020-2021 to rogue, dark, reynor, clem etc basically his dominance from 2018 to 2022 is good but not enough to claim GOAT status and AFTER THAT thats where the scene started really decreasing, gsl in 2022 looked like that : https://ibb.co/X2006j4 so granting him goat status because he wins over a scene thats looks like that ?
Also BTW, Serral is not even the greatest skill of all times, thats Clem
|
Your goat list and the discussion brought about around it, had me rethink the debate. Before I had serral as a clear no. 1, but now I have maru, you have to take balance into account to hold this position though, imo. So for the second time I disagree with you on no. 1 and 2
The best part about the update is Rain out of top 10, it feels a bit like the cheeky pick, but now that you've shown your fanboyism of rain and soo, you can switch it up and have a real list, but I might be reading too much into it.
|
it's easy to be the best when there is literraly nobody playing, everyone has either retired, went back to broodwar or went to the military
If it's so easy then why has no other player come close to being as dominant as Serral?
Listen I agree with a lot of what you're saying but you can't just completely disregard Serrals achievements like that. Even in 2018 he probably showed the best / most consistent macro Zerg play we've ever seen, and while yes, he lost way more matches/games than today he was still the overall best player in the period from 2018-2022. And from then on by far the best player.
He will probably never be a completely undisputed Goat like Flash due to the arguments you mentioned but he's just by far the most reasonable pick. Can you really call Innovation the Goat who was barely ahead of his competitors at the time (if at all due to Life, Zest and 3x world champion sOs around). Maru who consistently choked at the biggest stage?
GOAT is the guy who has dominated and has been the most accomplished at the peak of competitiveness of the game.
Agreed but there is no such guy
|
Before LotV it was Life, and if you continue till let's say 2019, the end of blizzcon, it's inno or sos I'd say.
|
Northern Ireland24682 Posts
On January 28 2025 18:36 Charoisaur wrote:Show nested quote +it's easy to be the best when there is literraly nobody playing, everyone has either retired, went back to broodwar or went to the military
If it's so easy then why has no other player come close to being as dominant as Serral? Listen I agree with a lot of what you're saying but you can't just completely disregard Serrals achievements like that. Even in 2018 he probably showed the best / most consistent macro Zerg play we've ever seen, and while yes, he lost way more matches/games than today he was still the overall best player in the period from 2018-2022. And from then on by far the best player. He will probably never be a completely undisputed Goat like Flash due to the arguments you mentioned but he's just by far the most reasonable pick. Can you really call Innovation the Goat who was barely ahead of his competitors at the time (if at all due to Life, Zest and 3x world champion sOs around). Maru who consistently choked at the biggest stage? Show nested quote +GOAT is the guy who has dominated and has been the most accomplished at the peak of competitiveness of the game. Agreed but there is no such guy
Indeed aye, I don’t think one can dispute the competitive depth was deeper in previous epochs.
But it’s not like the prize pools collapsed. ‘Man there’s less competition now, and sure hey this new Serral kid is pretty good, but yanno what I am going to grind my ass off, win a bunch of titles and money and retire after a year or two.’
Motivation is a curious thing, burnout is real etc etc. Fully get that and sympathise with it, but it does stand to reason that this is an attractive proposition for any great player, or even nearly great player in a similarishly lucrative tournament circuit if the level has notably dropped. If it’s for the glory and you’ve a Starleague or especially World Championship-shaped hole in your resume, it’s a great time to fill it.
But folks largely didn’t do it, and greatness is about doing things ultimately. ‘It so was motivated…’. Well I mean, they weren’t, so they aren’t, as we say in my neck of the woods ‘And if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle.’
Inno is one of my all-time favourites but even at his peak he was streaky and inconsistent season to season. Add in his latter years, he probably has more mediocre seasons than great ones.
In a hypothetical world where SC2 limped along, all these staples and legends of the scene retired, and Serral popped along in a few years and started hoovering up all these titles and showing those numbers. Sure I think yeah 100% it’s almost impossible to compare him with other GOAT candidates. But there’s significant overlap, he’s played those same players.
Hey it’s not unanimous by any means but a fair few of Korea’s finest consider Serral the guy, and they’re the ones who have to play him and have a pro player’s insight into his strengths.
|
On January 23 2025 21:12 Salazarz wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2025 16:16 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 08:31 Charoisaur wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
If Serral was even good enough to play maru in 2010 - 2017 Maru would beat him every single time; Meanwhile if maru was bad enough to not be able to play in finals in 2024 he won't have losing records to serral. Being a consistently top-tier player hurts Maru's resume? If we talk about greatest of ALL TIME it's Maru. Let alone how Maru saved terran race multiple times as the last terran and the 4th race. This guy's logic: "Oh Maru kept getting crushed by Serral since 2018? I'd just imagine Maru beat him every time in 2010-2017. oh I feel so much better as a Maru fan now. " It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I can do that too: "if Serral was born earlier and got out of school sooner to play Maru in 2010-2017 he would beat Maru every single time and ended up having a longer and more successful career than Maru, because Serral doesn't shrink in international offline tournaments." I can do it too - Serral has a negative record against Jaedong? Yeah but if Jaedong sticked with sc2 Serral surely would've beaten him over and over. It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I don't think the "what if Maru and Serral frequently played each other before 2018" hypothetical is stupid at all, it shows the problem with using all time H2H records as a metric. H2H between players who peaked at different times just doesn't mean anything, and then it just comes down to luck who happened to be closer to their peak when they played On January 23 2025 08:45 rwala wrote:On January 23 2025 06:37 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
How can Maru be the GOAT if he constantly gets stomped by someone who got stomped in one tournament by someone who is not even on the GOAT list? I mean... that's the point of his comment as I understood it. The argument that Maru can't be the Goat because he loses vs Serral is as reasonable as the argument Serral can't be the Goat because he lost 5-0 to Clem.
[/u]
[/QUOTE]
[/QUOTE]
...I mean, is it really just a coincidence that non-Korean players only became competitive after all the Korean SC2 teams disbanded?[/QUOTE]
There's no coincidence. It's just the time that the non korean scene took to develop a competitive scene of its own. Before SCII, competitive play was mostly lan based, offline. So Korean scene had an enormous advantage from the SCII getgo.
So, by 2010, if you were already mature (or almost) and you were in Korea, you obviously had a great advantage, because it meant you spent your developing years in that more competitive scene.
But people started practicing worldwide, which meant that if you were YOUNG enough, you would mature whilst practicing online (from AM/EU), having way more of a shot to play against the best at that time than as of 8-10 years earlier, in BW.
SCII knowledge simply became more democratic in SCII. So the prodigies had true opportunities to develop (which takes time). By 2017-2019 they were maturing and flourishing. That also means that Korean gaming houses started to not impact as much as they did before, which is one of the causes for their disbandment.
Also worth noting: Maru and Serral did peak at the same time. From 2018 on. And he clearly was toppled by Serral from that same moment on.
|
On January 28 2025 20:48 Locutos wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2025 21:12 Salazarz wrote:On January 23 2025 16:16 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 08:31 Charoisaur wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
If Serral was even good enough to play maru in 2010 - 2017 Maru would beat him every single time; Meanwhile if maru was bad enough to not be able to play in finals in 2024 he won't have losing records to serral. Being a consistently top-tier player hurts Maru's resume? If we talk about greatest of ALL TIME it's Maru. Let alone how Maru saved terran race multiple times as the last terran and the 4th race. This guy's logic: "Oh Maru kept getting crushed by Serral since 2018? I'd just imagine Maru beat him every time in 2010-2017. oh I feel so much better as a Maru fan now. " It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I can do that too: "if Serral was born earlier and got out of school sooner to play Maru in 2010-2017 he would beat Maru every single time and ended up having a longer and more successful career than Maru, because Serral doesn't shrink in international offline tournaments." I can do it too - Serral has a negative record against Jaedong? Yeah but if Jaedong sticked with sc2 Serral surely would've beaten him over and over. It's so easy to win in the imaginary scenarios with no evidence backing it up. I don't think the "what if Maru and Serral frequently played each other before 2018" hypothetical is stupid at all, it shows the problem with using all time H2H records as a metric. H2H between players who peaked at different times just doesn't mean anything, and then it just comes down to luck who happened to be closer to their peak when they played On January 23 2025 08:45 rwala wrote:On January 23 2025 06:37 PremoBeats wrote:On January 23 2025 05:13 Nasigil1 wrote:On January 23 2025 02:29 dedede wrote:
How can Maru be the GOAT if he constantly gets stomped by someone who got stomped in one tournament by someone who is not even on the GOAT list? I mean... that's the point of his comment as I understood it. The argument that Maru can't be the Goat because he loses vs Serral is as reasonable as the argument Serral can't be the Goat because he lost 5-0 to Clem. [/u]
[/QUOTE]
...I mean, is it really just a coincidence that non-Korean players only became competitive after all the Korean SC2 teams disbanded?
Also worth noting: Maru and Serral did peak at the same time. From 2018 on. And he clearly was toppled by Serral from that same moment on.
Disagree with that statement though. Yeah Maru had his best year in 2018 where Serral had his breakthrough year, but Maru at that point was already a full-time player for 8 years while Serral just started, so logically Maru started to decline earlier + could practice less due to injuries.
Which is visible in their results as Serral only really distanced himself from Maru from 2022 on, in 2018-2021 it was quite even between the two (in H2H as well as achievements)
|
Holy shit
New GOAT article. GOAT sequel
It's been 1 year since the GOAT series?!
We'll get to open up discussions about GOAT again after the last threads got closed
EWC SC2 confirmed
SC2 alive
Serral #1, Dark in top 10
Serral vs Clem 2025 in ALIEV GAME SC2???
Edit: Nvm no EWC SC2 news yet but if it's happening then this article is a great way to reboot SC2 hype
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
