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On June 21 2025 15:05 PremoBeats wrote:Show nested quote +On June 21 2025 09:22 lokol4890 wrote:On June 21 2025 06:05 Balnazza wrote:On June 21 2025 04:12 lokol4890 wrote:On June 21 2025 01:40 TheDougler wrote:These are the weightings CHAT GTP suggested:
Aligulac Rank: 20%
Match Win Rate: 15%
Tournament win %: 17,5%
Average placement: 15%
Tournament Score: 22,5%
Efficiency Score: 10%
Although I don’t fully agree with all of the suggested weights, I adopted them as-is - both for simplicity and because the final outcome would only shift significantly under an extreme weighting of efficiency.
So finally, here is the normalized and weighted final result of this analysis. Bro, why!? I agree with your conclusion, but "I used AI because it sounded cool" is just terrible methodology. You didn't make the case for why you needed ChatGPT for this, and so of course people are going to critique this. Also Aligulac being scored higher than tournament % and match win rate is dumb for multiple reasons. You're going to have massive colinearity between match win % and aligulac, in short you're double counting match win % there. That being said, I do think that the conclusion holds up despite the flawed methodology, which is evidence of just how dominant Serral is. Lastly, this was clearly a lot of work and I thank you for that. But, yeah you're double counting and the use of ChatGPT was pretty questionable here. Claiming the conclusion holds up despite acknowledging the methodology is flawed is classic confirmation bias. If you're arguing the methodology is flawed, you can't on the same brush accept the conclusion, much less that the conclusion is somehow indicative of how "dominant Serral is." Of course you can. If you ask 100 people without tastebuds if sugar tastes sweet and they say yes, you can absolutely demolish the metholodogy of this experiment, but you can't really argue that the conclusion is still correct. In no professional field would anyone accept a conclusion of a statistical study with a flawed conclusion. That just doesn't happen, ever. But I guess things are different when the conclusion is serral = goat, got it. @WombaT: I think Maru now won 18 and Serral 17 when locked tournaments are excluded, although both were tied in Premier Tournament wins at the time of the article. But context here is important: Maru won 10 of these tournaments (all his GSLs, StarsWar 11, Africa GSL) without Serral as well as mostly Clem and Reynor participating.
That's about as relevant as the fact that most of Serral's wins are missing at least half the top Koreans.
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Isn't tournament % and efficiency the same thing?, similar to win rate and aligulac rating. It seems strange why win % should count for 36%. Why not 5% aligu/5% win rate, 5% tournament%/5% efficiency, 50% tournament score, and 10% for the other results or thereabouts.
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On June 22 2025 04:38 JJH777 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 21 2025 15:05 PremoBeats wrote:On June 21 2025 09:22 lokol4890 wrote:On June 21 2025 06:05 Balnazza wrote:On June 21 2025 04:12 lokol4890 wrote:On June 21 2025 01:40 TheDougler wrote:These are the weightings CHAT GTP suggested:
Aligulac Rank: 20%
Match Win Rate: 15%
Tournament win %: 17,5%
Average placement: 15%
Tournament Score: 22,5%
Efficiency Score: 10%
Although I don’t fully agree with all of the suggested weights, I adopted them as-is - both for simplicity and because the final outcome would only shift significantly under an extreme weighting of efficiency.
So finally, here is the normalized and weighted final result of this analysis. Bro, why!? I agree with your conclusion, but "I used AI because it sounded cool" is just terrible methodology. You didn't make the case for why you needed ChatGPT for this, and so of course people are going to critique this. Also Aligulac being scored higher than tournament % and match win rate is dumb for multiple reasons. You're going to have massive colinearity between match win % and aligulac, in short you're double counting match win % there. That being said, I do think that the conclusion holds up despite the flawed methodology, which is evidence of just how dominant Serral is. Lastly, this was clearly a lot of work and I thank you for that. But, yeah you're double counting and the use of ChatGPT was pretty questionable here. Claiming the conclusion holds up despite acknowledging the methodology is flawed is classic confirmation bias. If you're arguing the methodology is flawed, you can't on the same brush accept the conclusion, much less that the conclusion is somehow indicative of how "dominant Serral is." Of course you can. If you ask 100 people without tastebuds if sugar tastes sweet and they say yes, you can absolutely demolish the metholodogy of this experiment, but you can't really argue that the conclusion is still correct. In no professional field would anyone accept a conclusion of a statistical study with a flawed conclusion. That just doesn't happen, ever. But I guess things are different when the conclusion is serral = goat, got it. @WombaT: I think Maru now won 18 and Serral 17 when locked tournaments are excluded, although both were tied in Premier Tournament wins at the time of the article. But context here is important: Maru won 10 of these tournaments (all his GSLs, StarsWar 11, Africa GSL) without Serral as well as mostly Clem and Reynor participating. That's about as relevant as the fact that most of Serral's wins are missing at least half the top Koreans.
Well, having the player missing that dunked on everyone (especially 2nd half of 2018 and 2024), to me seems a little bit more relevant... especially in the time frame of 100% match win rates versus Koreans.
On June 22 2025 15:29 ejozl wrote:
Isn't tournament % and efficiency the same thing?, similar to win rate and aligulac rating. It seems strange why win % should count for 36%. Why not 5% aligu/5% win rate, 5% tournament%/5% efficiency, 50% tournament score, and 10% for the other results or thereabouts.
Tournament % is efficiency at winning the whole tournament, efficicency score is efficicency based on tournament score, thus including place 2-4. It gives more resolution.
Win rate only included matches versus Koreans (and for the Koreans plus Serral), while Aligulac incorporated other nations as well (and an algorithm that compares players at a reasonable quality overall).
10% for average place seems a bit much, as Tournament Score also scouts for good placements. Having one metric (Tournament score) for the whole career and one (tournament win %) for efficiency seemed like a natural thing to do, to keep balance between the overall characteristic relation. Thus, I kept the relation that Miz used in his intro and proposed the other 4 metrics at 5% each to add more resolution.
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I'm interested about efficiency for the longer career players if they're not punished by their long careers. Say, if you took rogue, serral, maru and inno and looked at their best period of a scope that's as long as life's scope. It's not entirely fair because life literally starts out his career royal roading, which the other players didn't, but would they be able to eclipse life in his best catagory?
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Northern Ireland26225 Posts
On June 23 2025 23:45 ejozl wrote:
I'm interested about efficiency for the longer career players if they're not punished by their long careers. Say, if you took rogue, serral, maru and inno and looked at their best period of a scope that's as long as life's scope. It's not entirely fair because life literally starts out his career royal roading, which the other players didn't, but would they be able to eclipse life in his best catagory?
Serral has a 90% match win year under his belt in 2018, and his 2019 offline is 86.25%. A mere 83.46% overall in 2020, 81.13% in 2021, 83.88% in 2022 when offline events became unviable, 80% offline in 2023.
2024 he went 47–6 (88.68%) in matches with Maru the only person not named Clem to beat him in the entirety 2024.
Even Serral’s weaker years stack up pretty well against the best years of other players, and he’s been chaining them together year after year.
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On June 23 2025 23:45 ejozl wrote:
I'm interested about efficiency for the longer career players if they're not punished by their long careers. Say, if you took rogue, serral, maru and inno and looked at their best period of a scope that's as long as life's scope. It's not entirely fair because life literally starts out his career royal roading, which the other players didn't, but would they be able to eclipse life in his best catagory?
Efficiency in winning tournaments or in achieving tournament score?
The problem is if you look at roughly 3 years (Life's career span), player 1 could have two phenomenal years, then one subpar year, followed by two phenomenal years and another subpar year, another two phenomenal years and one subpar year. Meaning 6 out of 9 phenomenal years. Player 2 could have had 3 consecutive phenomenal years followed by 6 subpar ones, meaning 3 out of 9.
Looking only at 3 consecutive good years, player 2 will outperform, despite his overall career being less impressive.
But as WombaT said: Serral outperforms here as well. Without looking perfectly at time spans, as I made the calculations on a yearly basis, these are the best results for 3 years for tournament win%:
Serral
- 2018-2020 (only non-locked): 37.30%
- 2022-2024 (only non-locked): 52.62%
Maru
- 2018-2020: 25.18%
- 2022-2024: 23.92%
Rogue
- 2017-2019: 22.75%
INnoVation
- 2015-2017: 34.09%
Mvp
- 2011-2013: 26.57%
Rain
- 2013-2015: 12.23%
If we only look at Serral's prime years, he sits at a win rate of 38.10% from 2018-2024. His lifetime win rate is better than even 2 year time periods of any other player and only Maru, Rogue, INnoVation, Mvp and Life in 1 year are above Serral's 2018-2024 result. As I said in the article... in such a volatile game as SCII, this is absolutely insane.
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United States1906 Posts
On June 24 2025 01:59 PremoBeats wrote:Show nested quote +On June 23 2025 23:45 ejozl wrote:
I'm interested about efficiency for the longer career players if they're not punished by their long careers. Say, if you took rogue, serral, maru and inno and looked at their best period of a scope that's as long as life's scope. It's not entirely fair because life literally starts out his career royal roading, which the other players didn't, but would they be able to eclipse life in his best catagory? Efficiency in winning tournaments or in achieving tournament score? The problem is if you look at roughly 3 years (Life's career span), player 1 could have two phenomenal years, then one subpar year, followed by two phenomenal years and another subpar year, another two phenomenal years and one subpar year. Meaning 6 out of 9 phenomenal years. Player 2 could have had 3 consecutive phenomenal years followed by 6 subpar ones, meaning 3 out of 9. Looking only at 3 consecutive good years, player 2 will outperform, despite his overall career being less impressive. But as WombaT said: Serral outperforms here as well. Without looking perfectly at time spans, as I made the calculations on a yearly basis, these are the best results for 3 years for tournament win%: Serral - 2018-2020 (only non-locked): 37.30% - 2022-2024 (only non-locked): 52.62% Maru - 2018-2020: 25.18% - 2022-2024: 23.92% Rogue - 2017-2019: 22.75% INnoVation - 2015-2017: 34.09% Mvp - 2011-2013: 26.57% Rain - 2013-2015: 12.23% If we only look at Serral's prime years, he sits at a win rate of 38.10% from 2018-2024. His lifetime win rate is better than even 2 year time periods of any other player and only Maru, Rogue, INnoVation, Mvp and Life in 1 year are above Serral's 2018-2024 result. As I said in the article... in such a volatile game as SCII, this is absolutely insane.
This is a poor argument. Other than Rogue and Maru (with a bit of Inno) all of these players played in tournaments the others didn't or played in said events when the format was different. Mvp played when GSLs were run almost monthly. Rain never got a chance to play with offline events with foreigners as good as serral, reynor etc. The Maru/Rogue/Inno/ Rain group never played in Code S during Mvp's era and Serral never played in Code S at all.
There would need to be some heavy adjustments to get this metric to a reasonable point, but I tried to avoid that/stay away from subjective era based adjustments.
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The original analysis had many flaws and this analysis reproduces most of them (though somewhat amusingly claims all the flaws were all addressed). The author tries to maintain a veneer of objectivity and neutrality, but the bias inevitably reveals itself, often without the author being aware that it does. You can read the section "was the prime era harder?" and learn pretty much all you need to know about the author's perspective. Real quick on the main flaws tho:
1) This is not a statistical analysis. I can't see the results of any regression, monte carlo simulation, or any other modeling technique. I don't see any p-values or analysis of statistical significance. If you're not a numbers person, do not be fooled by the author slapping the label "statistical evaluation" on this.
2) If this is not a statistical analysis, what is it? This is a heavily-biased calculation designed to demonstrate that the author's favorite player is the GOAT. The author will say that he bent over backwards to nerf Serral and he is still the GOAT by nearly 2X points in his extremely objective and neutral GOAT calculator. Don't believe it. It all comes down to the fact that that the author chose to include specific criteria and specific weightings for those criteria that were designed to crown Serral the GOAT. I think everyone knows this but it's worth making the implicit explicit.
3) Many people pointed out that the Serral = GOAT calculator rated Rogue ridiculously low so clearly something must be wrong. The author's responses are interestingly defensive in how they justify Rogue's low rating, but many of us told him this would happen once he started ranking multiple players with the calculator. It's worth noting that while the calculator diminished Rogue to such an unbelievably low ranking, it's actually worse than simply rating Rogue lower than a guy like Rain or at a third of Maru's GOAT ranking. If you ran this calculator on all pros I suspect Rogue may not even be in the top 10 or top 20 GOAT list. That's how flawed the calculator is. Very good chance of even more bizarre results tbh.
4) Even if this were a proper statistical analysis, statistics do not explain GOATs. If they did, Shane Battier might be the NBA GOAT (seriously, look into it), and Muhammed Ali could not be the boxing GOAT (his 5 losses are simply too high for any objective weighted calculation to accomodate).
This point about Shane Battier and Muhammed Ali is the most important point, abstracted as follows: math equations do not understand greatness. They will always "undervalue" a player like Rogue in any GOAT convo because it does not know how to evaluate, for example, Rogue's jaw-dropping offline Bo7 grand finals performance record, which is among the greatest achievements in the history of e-sports. And they will always overvalue efficient and effective players that nonetheless seem to lack some of the incalculable qualities of greatness such as being clutch, resilient, or a great ambassador or leader for the game. Or even simply being lucky enough to be the right person, in the right place, at the right time to make history. With players like this, even when they seem to get lucky, it feels like a byproduct of their hard work.
Serral is indeed a great GOAT pick, just not for silly reasons like being high in Aligulac rankings for a long time. He's a great GOAT pick because he achieved what no one outside of South Korea was able to achieve, and is arguably the best player to ever play the game. At the same time, he simply never played in the most competitive tournaments and leagues, nor did he play in the most competitive era when over a thousand pros were spending 12+ hours a day trying to win premier tournaments and be the best player in the world. Lots of GOAT contenders achieved significant results in the toughest tournaments and in the competitive era, and if any of those guys are your GOAT, don't let any calculator say otherwise!
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On June 24 2025 07:13 Mizenhauer wrote:Show nested quote +On June 24 2025 01:59 PremoBeats wrote:On June 23 2025 23:45 ejozl wrote:
I'm interested about efficiency for the longer career players if they're not punished by their long careers. Say, if you took rogue, serral, maru and inno and looked at their best period of a scope that's as long as life's scope. It's not entirely fair because life literally starts out his career royal roading, which the other players didn't, but would they be able to eclipse life in his best catagory? Efficiency in winning tournaments or in achieving tournament score? The problem is if you look at roughly 3 years (Life's career span), player 1 could have two phenomenal years, then one subpar year, followed by two phenomenal years and another subpar year, another two phenomenal years and one subpar year. Meaning 6 out of 9 phenomenal years. Player 2 could have had 3 consecutive phenomenal years followed by 6 subpar ones, meaning 3 out of 9. Looking only at 3 consecutive good years, player 2 will outperform, despite his overall career being less impressive. But as WombaT said: Serral outperforms here as well. Without looking perfectly at time spans, as I made the calculations on a yearly basis, these are the best results for 3 years for tournament win%: Serral - 2018-2020 (only non-locked): 37.30% - 2022-2024 (only non-locked): 52.62% Maru - 2018-2020: 25.18% - 2022-2024: 23.92% Rogue - 2017-2019: 22.75% INnoVation - 2015-2017: 34.09% Mvp - 2011-2013: 26.57% Rain - 2013-2015: 12.23% If we only look at Serral's prime years, he sits at a win rate of 38.10% from 2018-2024. His lifetime win rate is better than even 2 year time periods of any other player and only Maru, Rogue, INnoVation, Mvp and Life in 1 year are above Serral's 2018-2024 result. As I said in the article... in such a volatile game as SCII, this is absolutely insane. This is a poor argument. Other than Rogue and Maru (with a bit of Inno) all of these players played in tournaments the others didn't or played in said events when the format was different. Mvp played when GSLs were run almost monthly. Rain never got a chance to play with offline events with foreigners as good as serral, reynor etc. The Maru/Rogue/Inno/ Rain group never played in Code S during Mvp's era and Serral never played in Code S at all. There would need to be some heavy adjustments to get this metric to a reasonable point, but I tried to avoid that/stay away from subjective era based adjustments.
I simply made it cause ejozl asked for it and it was kind of easy to collect the data from my set. In the original analysis I applied era-mulitpliers that seemed somewhat reasonable to me. I pointed out other flaws of this methodology too.
This small analsyis shows something pretty clearly nevertheless: Serral is way ahead of other players from his time (Maru, Rogue and to a lesser degree the overlap with a pretty good but not prime INnoVation). We could only look at tournaments, where all of them played as well to make it even more precise, as you mentioned though.
On June 24 2025 11:06 rwala wrote:
The original analysis had many flaws and this analysis reproduces most of them (though somewhat amusingly claims all the flaws were all addressed). The author tries to maintain a veneer of objectivity and neutrality, but the bias inevitably reveals itself, often without the author being aware that it does. You can read the section "was the prime era harder?" and learn pretty much all you need to know about the author's perspective. Real quick on the main flaws tho:
1) This is not a statistical analysis. I can't see the results of any regression, monte carlo simulation, or any other modeling technique. I don't see any p-values or analysis of statistical significance. If you're not a numbers person, do not be fooled by the author slapping the label "statistical evaluation" on this.
2) If this is not a statistical analysis, what is it? This is a heavily-biased calculation designed to demonstrate that the author's favorite player is the GOAT. The author will say that he bent over backwards to nerf Serral and he is still the GOAT by nearly 2X points in his extremely objective and neutral GOAT calculator. Don't believe it. It all comes down to the fact that that the author chose to include specific criteria and specific weightings for those criteria that were designed to crown Serral the GOAT. I think everyone knows this but it's worth making the implicit explicit.
3) Many people pointed out that the Serral = GOAT calculator rated Rogue ridiculously low so clearly something must be wrong. The author's responses are interestingly defensive in how they justify Rogue's low rating, but many of us told him this would happen once he started ranking multiple players with the calculator. It's worth noting that while the calculator diminished Rogue to such an unbelievably low ranking, it's actually worse than simply rating Rogue lower than a guy like Rain or at a third of Maru's GOAT ranking. If you ran this calculator on all pros I suspect Rogue may not even be in the top 10 or top 20 GOAT list. That's how flawed the calculator is. Very good chance of even more bizarre results tbh.
4) Even if this were a proper statistical analysis, statistics do not explain GOATs. If they did, Shane Battier might be the NBA GOAT (seriously, look into it), and Muhammed Ali could not be the boxing GOAT (his 5 losses are simply too high for any objective weighted calculation to accomodate).
This point about Shane Battier and Muhammed Ali is the most important point, abstracted as follows: math equations do not understand greatness. They will always "undervalue" a player like Rogue in any GOAT convo because it does not know how to evaluate, for example, Rogue's jaw-dropping offline Bo7 grand finals performance record, which is among the greatest achievements in the history of e-sports. And they will always overvalue efficient and effective players that nonetheless seem to lack some of the incalculable qualities of greatness such as being clutch, resilient, or a great ambassador or leader for the game. Or even simply being lucky enough to be the right person, in the right place, at the right time to make history. With players like this, even when they seem to get lucky, it feels like a byproduct of their hard work.
Serral is indeed a great GOAT pick, just not for silly reasons like being high in Aligulac rankings for a long time. He's a great GOAT pick because he achieved what no one outside of South Korea was able to achieve, and is arguably the best player to ever play the game. At the same time, he simply never played in the most competitive tournaments and leagues, nor did he play in the most competitive era when over a thousand pros were spending 12+ hours a day trying to win premier tournaments and be the best player in the world. Lots of GOAT contenders achieved significant results in the toughest tournaments and in the competitive era, and if any of those guys are your GOAT, don't let any calculator say otherwise!
1. The term statistical analysis can mean a lot of things. In sports it simply refers to a structured evaluation of empirical data using numeric methods, not necessarily inferential statistics (Elo systems, composite indices like FIFA or ATP or even sabermetrics-derived rankins in baseball). Calling this analysis statistical is perfectly valid, as it is a descriptive, statistical framework, not a regression or simulation similar to Aligulac. It is about ordering based on performance data, not modeling outcomes. If you want a Monte Carlo simulation and significance levels you're looking for something different. I simply used statistical tools that seemed necessary (data collection and organization, analyzing, using normalization to a common 0-100 scale, interpreting).
2. Well. Where exactly do you see this suppossed bias or design tailored towards Serral? I am completely transparent with my methodology and even referenced external ideas like the ones from Miz' list. I laid out all weightings and calculations transparently, so you are free to criticize the exact ones, where it turned sour in your opinion. As a matter of fact, you made the same accusation in this very thread before (me not addressing past criticism). But I incorporated the critiques from last time:
- Including Rain, Life, Mvp
- Including team events
- Including a complete analysis of the deterioration argument.
I simply did not include your critique of "all statistical analyses are flawed", as I still think that these analyses are important. Well, I kind of did, as I explain in the article why I think my methodology is fine.
Serral's scores have been lowered and the most impactful decisions I made were against him. If that's bias, it's an awfully stubborn one.
3. What about pointing out that Rogue was inconsistent is defensive? Wouldn't building a model to reward Bo7 offline GSLs do exactly what you accuse me of doing under #2?
I even talked to Miz in this very thread and via DM and a quick reverse-engineering of his list made Rogue come much better (although Serral still is way in all different calculations and I still don't understand how he was a close 2nd in the first list and a close 1st after a couple of months and Mvp is below INnoVation in my attempt to reverse-engineer). The issue mostly was the weighting at the end, which I conceded many times was bad, as well as the era-multiplier, which Miz did not use.
4. Anecdotes and nostalgia are fine too. But as neither numbers tell the whole story, nor do such subjective takes.
In my opinion, as I already said in this thread, subjective takes might shift a GOAT comparison where the end result is close. But no single SCII player has a "better story" than others and in my opinion no "story" can rival Serral's numbers.
And I completely agree with your last sentence, as point 9 of my statistical evaluation made pretty clear...
"Because different weightings yield different outcomes, it's possible to justify alternative GOATs - if one prioritizes specific metrics disproportionately. So if you value...
… efficiency above all else, your GOAT is Life.
… career duration and sheer persistence, your GOAT is Maru.
… accomplishments in the prime era, your GOAT might be INnoVation.
… winning GSLs (or your name is Artosis), your GOAT is Rogue.
… any subjective skill, personal charisma, or emotional weight, your GOAT is whoever resonates with you the most."
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United States1906 Posts
On June 24 2025 14:34 PremoBeats wrote:
2) If this is not a statistical analysis, what is it? This is a heavily-biased calculation designed to demonstrate that the author's favorite player is the GOAT. The author will say that he bent over backwards to nerf Serral and he is still the GOAT by nearly 2X points in his extremely objective and neutral GOAT calculator. Don't believe it. It all comes down to the fact that that the author chose to include specific criteria and specific weightings for those criteria that were designed to crown Serral the GOAT. I think everyone knows this but it's worth making the implicit explicit.
During one of my talks with Wax I asked if he thought the fact that soO was so high up was because he's my favorite player.
He told me that soO's ranking was consistent with my methodology, but that any person who makes a list like this probably creates a set of metrics that benefit their favorite player.
Something to ponder...
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On June 24 2025 20:08 Mizenhauer wrote:Show nested quote +On June 24 2025 14:34 PremoBeats wrote:
2) If this is not a statistical analysis, what is it? This is a heavily-biased calculation designed to demonstrate that the author's favorite player is the GOAT. The author will say that he bent over backwards to nerf Serral and he is still the GOAT by nearly 2X points in his extremely objective and neutral GOAT calculator. Don't believe it. It all comes down to the fact that that the author chose to include specific criteria and specific weightings for those criteria that were designed to crown Serral the GOAT. I think everyone knows this but it's worth making the implicit explicit.
During one of my talks with Wax I asked if he thought the fact that soO was so high up was because he's my favorite player. He told me that soO's ranking was consistent with my methodology, but that any person who makes a list like this probably creates a set of metrics that benefit their favorite player. Something to ponder...
Shall I check soO as well 
As our lists are mostly the same ranking outcome, when I take out the era-amplifier (which was bad for Serral) and apply your relation that you explained in "great career versus great peaks", I don't know where exactly I could have done that.
Serral is the player benefiting the least when looking at overall career versus peak years. I didn't include the inflation-problem, which massively disadvantaged him and the biggest criticism so far was directed at Aligulac and the weighting. But as I said... even when leaving Aligulac completely out and the weighting is adjusted, I don't see Serral losing his number one spot, as he is too consistent across the board.
Plus, I think my era-multiplier was reasonable, as Life would utterly destroy the claim of most other modern contenders except Serral, if I'd tune it up more. I'd be happy, if people could point out specific issues that might benefit Serral unfairly, so I could have a look at them.
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Northern Ireland26225 Posts
Controversial opinion in some quarters, I feel there’s too many caveats on Rogue’s much-vaunted offline Bo7 finals record for it to be as compelling as some make it. The stat itself, not Rogue’s claim, as he absolutely does show some clutch stuff.
Serral’s numbers are all pretty straightforward. He wins more matches, he wins tournaments at a quicker rate, his average place is higher.
Rogue in specifically offline, specifically finals and specifically Bo7s, I mean he has to get to a final in the first place. It’s still an impressive stat, but I think apart from the clutchness, what it’s telling you is when Rogue’s in top form, he does well. If you’re a more streaky player, it’s almost singling out the upswings. You’re also reducing clutchness to solely winning finals, and not clutchness in getting to them.
Bringing home the bacon in finals is, of course a big factor in greatness, and at the opposite end of the scale soO (sorry Miz!) would feature higher if he’d converted at a reasonable rate. But aside from some of Serral’s numbers you’ve already given, he’s also rocking a 20% better match win in offline Bo5+s. Crude and I haven’t filtered out region-locked tournaments, but I think it bears mentioning
If nout else there’s a bunch of numbers to augment one’s own arguments and understanding. Serral’s numbers are of course, bonkers, but Inno did better in terms of wins:tournaments played than I’d have assumed versus some others. To take just one example.
Or in the opposite direction, I think people are surprised at say, Rogue lagging quite as far behind some of the others in terms of raw numbers.
Before this breakdown, from my memory and eyeballs and internal weighting, I’d bounce between Inno and Rogue swapping places at #3/4 in my WombaT GOAT rank (ETA on publication next century). My calculus was weighing up that IMO Inno has the scarier peak relative to competition, and was stronger in the Kespa era versus Rogue having the World Champs.
Almost a toss-up for me, depending what side of the bed I got out of. But with some of the numbers in this analysis, Inno was actually more consistent than I’d assumed, and Rogue a bit less so. Not a huge swing but enough for me to more firmly settle on Inno at #3.
And some factoids and stats are just fun to me. Premo did you ever get to posting some of the odd or quirky ones you had lying around but didn’t really fit in neatly to your article. Would be interested to see those ones not go to waste!
I know I keep bugging you :p
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On June 24 2025 01:59 PremoBeats wrote:Show nested quote +On June 23 2025 23:45 ejozl wrote:
I'm interested about efficiency for the longer career players if they're not punished by their long careers. Say, if you took rogue, serral, maru and inno and looked at their best period of a scope that's as long as life's scope. It's not entirely fair because life literally starts out his career royal roading, which the other players didn't, but would they be able to eclipse life in his best catagory? Efficiency in winning tournaments or in achieving tournament score? The problem is if you look at roughly 3 years (Life's career span), player 1 could have two phenomenal years, then one subpar year, followed by two phenomenal years and another subpar year, another two phenomenal years and one subpar year. Meaning 6 out of 9 phenomenal years. Player 2 could have had 3 consecutive phenomenal years followed by 6 subpar ones, meaning 3 out of 9. Looking only at 3 consecutive good years, player 2 will outperform, despite his overall career being less impressive. But as WombaT said: Serral outperforms here as well. Without looking perfectly at time spans, as I made the calculations on a yearly basis, these are the best results for 3 years for tournament win%: Serral - 2018-2020 (only non-locked): 37.30% - 2022-2024 (only non-locked): 52.62% Maru - 2018-2020: 25.18% - 2022-2024: 23.92% Rogue - 2017-2019: 22.75% INnoVation - 2015-2017: 34.09% Mvp - 2011-2013: 26.57% Rain - 2013-2015: 12.23% If we only look at Serral's prime years, he sits at a win rate of 38.10% from 2018-2024. His lifetime win rate is better than even 2 year time periods of any other player and only Maru, Rogue, INnoVation, Mvp and Life in 1 year are above Serral's 2018-2024 result. As I said in the article... in such a volatile game as SCII, this is absolutely insane.
So, Life has 33% win rate at the most competitive era, inno 34% at a very slightly weaker era, and serral rockets ahead with 37%, at a competiive era, but you could say zerg was hella imbalanced, and 52% at a waaay weaker era, but where zerg was not the strongest race. It should be pretty close.
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United States1906 Posts
On June 26 2025 02:32 ejozl wrote:Show nested quote +On June 24 2025 01:59 PremoBeats wrote:On June 23 2025 23:45 ejozl wrote:
I'm interested about efficiency for the longer career players if they're not punished by their long careers. Say, if you took rogue, serral, maru and inno and looked at their best period of a scope that's as long as life's scope. It's not entirely fair because life literally starts out his career royal roading, which the other players didn't, but would they be able to eclipse life in his best catagory? Efficiency in winning tournaments or in achieving tournament score? The problem is if you look at roughly 3 years (Life's career span), player 1 could have two phenomenal years, then one subpar year, followed by two phenomenal years and another subpar year, another two phenomenal years and one subpar year. Meaning 6 out of 9 phenomenal years. Player 2 could have had 3 consecutive phenomenal years followed by 6 subpar ones, meaning 3 out of 9. Looking only at 3 consecutive good years, player 2 will outperform, despite his overall career being less impressive. But as WombaT said: Serral outperforms here as well. Without looking perfectly at time spans, as I made the calculations on a yearly basis, these are the best results for 3 years for tournament win%: Serral - 2018-2020 (only non-locked): 37.30% - 2022-2024 (only non-locked): 52.62% Maru - 2018-2020: 25.18% - 2022-2024: 23.92% Rogue - 2017-2019: 22.75% INnoVation - 2015-2017: 34.09% Mvp - 2011-2013: 26.57% Rain - 2013-2015: 12.23% If we only look at Serral's prime years, he sits at a win rate of 38.10% from 2018-2024. His lifetime win rate is better than even 2 year time periods of any other player and only Maru, Rogue, INnoVation, Mvp and Life in 1 year are above Serral's 2018-2024 result. As I said in the article... in such a volatile game as SCII, this is absolutely insane. So, Life has 33% win rate at the most competitive era, inno 34% at a very slightly weaker era, and serral rockets ahead with 37%, at a competiive era, but you could say zerg was hella imbalanced, and 52% at a waaay weaker era, but where zerg was not the strongest race. It should be pretty close.
At this point let's not even pretend we're aiming for objectivity. 
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On June 24 2025 14:34 PremoBeats wrote:Show nested quote +On June 24 2025 07:13 Mizenhauer wrote:On June 24 2025 01:59 PremoBeats wrote:On June 23 2025 23:45 ejozl wrote:
I'm interested about efficiency for the longer career players if they're not punished by their long careers. Say, if you took rogue, serral, maru and inno and looked at their best period of a scope that's as long as life's scope. It's not entirely fair because life literally starts out his career royal roading, which the other players didn't, but would they be able to eclipse life in his best catagory? Efficiency in winning tournaments or in achieving tournament score? The problem is if you look at roughly 3 years (Life's career span), player 1 could have two phenomenal years, then one subpar year, followed by two phenomenal years and another subpar year, another two phenomenal years and one subpar year. Meaning 6 out of 9 phenomenal years. Player 2 could have had 3 consecutive phenomenal years followed by 6 subpar ones, meaning 3 out of 9. Looking only at 3 consecutive good years, player 2 will outperform, despite his overall career being less impressive. But as WombaT said: Serral outperforms here as well. Without looking perfectly at time spans, as I made the calculations on a yearly basis, these are the best results for 3 years for tournament win%: Serral - 2018-2020 (only non-locked): 37.30% - 2022-2024 (only non-locked): 52.62% Maru - 2018-2020: 25.18% - 2022-2024: 23.92% Rogue - 2017-2019: 22.75% INnoVation - 2015-2017: 34.09% Mvp - 2011-2013: 26.57% Rain - 2013-2015: 12.23% If we only look at Serral's prime years, he sits at a win rate of 38.10% from 2018-2024. His lifetime win rate is better than even 2 year time periods of any other player and only Maru, Rogue, INnoVation, Mvp and Life in 1 year are above Serral's 2018-2024 result. As I said in the article... in such a volatile game as SCII, this is absolutely insane. This is a poor argument. Other than Rogue and Maru (with a bit of Inno) all of these players played in tournaments the others didn't or played in said events when the format was different. Mvp played when GSLs were run almost monthly. Rain never got a chance to play with offline events with foreigners as good as serral, reynor etc. The Maru/Rogue/Inno/ Rain group never played in Code S during Mvp's era and Serral never played in Code S at all. There would need to be some heavy adjustments to get this metric to a reasonable point, but I tried to avoid that/stay away from subjective era based adjustments. I simply made it cause ejozl asked for it and it was kind of easy to collect the data from my set. In the original analysis I applied era-mulitpliers that seemed somewhat reasonable to me. I pointed out other flaws of this methodology too. This small analsyis shows something pretty clearly nevertheless: Serral is way ahead of other players from his time (Maru, Rogue and to a lesser degree the overlap with a pretty good but not prime INnoVation). We could only look at tournaments, where all of them played as well to make it even more precise, as you mentioned though. Show nested quote +On June 24 2025 11:06 rwala wrote:
The original analysis had many flaws and this analysis reproduces most of them (though somewhat amusingly claims all the flaws were all addressed). The author tries to maintain a veneer of objectivity and neutrality, but the bias inevitably reveals itself, often without the author being aware that it does. You can read the section "was the prime era harder?" and learn pretty much all you need to know about the author's perspective. Real quick on the main flaws tho:
1) This is not a statistical analysis. I can't see the results of any regression, monte carlo simulation, or any other modeling technique. I don't see any p-values or analysis of statistical significance. If you're not a numbers person, do not be fooled by the author slapping the label "statistical evaluation" on this.
2) If this is not a statistical analysis, what is it? This is a heavily-biased calculation designed to demonstrate that the author's favorite player is the GOAT. The author will say that he bent over backwards to nerf Serral and he is still the GOAT by nearly 2X points in his extremely objective and neutral GOAT calculator. Don't believe it. It all comes down to the fact that that the author chose to include specific criteria and specific weightings for those criteria that were designed to crown Serral the GOAT. I think everyone knows this but it's worth making the implicit explicit.
3) Many people pointed out that the Serral = GOAT calculator rated Rogue ridiculously low so clearly something must be wrong. The author's responses are interestingly defensive in how they justify Rogue's low rating, but many of us told him this would happen once he started ranking multiple players with the calculator. It's worth noting that while the calculator diminished Rogue to such an unbelievably low ranking, it's actually worse than simply rating Rogue lower than a guy like Rain or at a third of Maru's GOAT ranking. If you ran this calculator on all pros I suspect Rogue may not even be in the top 10 or top 20 GOAT list. That's how flawed the calculator is. Very good chance of even more bizarre results tbh.
4) Even if this were a proper statistical analysis, statistics do not explain GOATs. If they did, Shane Battier might be the NBA GOAT (seriously, look into it), and Muhammed Ali could not be the boxing GOAT (his 5 losses are simply too high for any objective weighted calculation to accomodate).
This point about Shane Battier and Muhammed Ali is the most important point, abstracted as follows: math equations do not understand greatness. They will always "undervalue" a player like Rogue in any GOAT convo because it does not know how to evaluate, for example, Rogue's jaw-dropping offline Bo7 grand finals performance record, which is among the greatest achievements in the history of e-sports. And they will always overvalue efficient and effective players that nonetheless seem to lack some of the incalculable qualities of greatness such as being clutch, resilient, or a great ambassador or leader for the game. Or even simply being lucky enough to be the right person, in the right place, at the right time to make history. With players like this, even when they seem to get lucky, it feels like a byproduct of their hard work.
Serral is indeed a great GOAT pick, just not for silly reasons like being high in Aligulac rankings for a long time. He's a great GOAT pick because he achieved what no one outside of South Korea was able to achieve, and is arguably the best player to ever play the game. At the same time, he simply never played in the most competitive tournaments and leagues, nor did he play in the most competitive era when over a thousand pros were spending 12+ hours a day trying to win premier tournaments and be the best player in the world. Lots of GOAT contenders achieved significant results in the toughest tournaments and in the competitive era, and if any of those guys are your GOAT, don't let any calculator say otherwise!
1. The term statistical analysis can mean a lot of things. In sports it simply refers to a structured evaluation of empirical data using numeric methods, not necessarily inferential statistics (Elo systems, composite indices like FIFA or ATP or even sabermetrics-derived rankins in baseball). Calling this analysis statistical is perfectly valid, as it is a descriptive, statistical framework, not a regression or simulation similar to Aligulac. It is about ordering based on performance data, not modeling outcomes. If you want a Monte Carlo simulation and significance levels you're looking for something different. I simply used statistical tools that seemed necessary (data collection and organization, analyzing, using normalization to a common 0-100 scale, interpreting). 2. Well. Where exactly do you see this suppossed bias or design tailored towards Serral? I am completely transparent with my methodology and even referenced external ideas like the ones from Miz' list. I laid out all weightings and calculations transparently, so you are free to criticize the exact ones, where it turned sour in your opinion. As a matter of fact, you made the same accusation in this very thread before (me not addressing past criticism). But I incorporated the critiques from last time: - Including Rain, Life, Mvp - Including team events - Including a complete analysis of the deterioration argument. I simply did not include your critique of "all statistical analyses are flawed", as I still think that these analyses are important. Well, I kind of did, as I explain in the article why I think my methodology is fine. Serral's scores have been lowered and the most impactful decisions I made were against him. If that's bias, it's an awfully stubborn one. 3. What about pointing out that Rogue was inconsistent is defensive? Wouldn't building a model to reward Bo7 offline GSLs do exactly what you accuse me of doing under #2? I even talked to Miz in this very thread and via DM and a quick reverse-engineering of his list made Rogue come much better (although Serral still is way in all different calculations and I still don't understand how he was a close 2nd in the first list and a close 1st after a couple of months and Mvp is below INnoVation in my attempt to reverse-engineer). The issue mostly was the weighting at the end, which I conceded many times was bad, as well as the era-multiplier, which Miz did not use. 4. Anecdotes and nostalgia are fine too. But as neither numbers tell the whole story, nor do such subjective takes. In my opinion, as I already said in this thread, subjective takes might shift a GOAT comparison where the end result is close. But no single SCII player has a "better story" than others and in my opinion no "story" can rival Serral's numbers. And I completely agree with your last sentence, as point 9 of my statistical evaluation made pretty clear... "Because different weightings yield different outcomes, it's possible to justify alternative GOATs - if one prioritizes specific metrics disproportionately. So if you value... … efficiency above all else, your GOAT is Life. … career duration and sheer persistence, your GOAT is Maru. … accomplishments in the prime era, your GOAT might be INnoVation. … winning GSLs (or your name is Artosis), your GOAT is Rogue. … any subjective skill, personal charisma, or emotional weight, your GOAT is whoever resonates with you the most."
I'm not sure why this is so complicated to understand, it's pretty simple. My core point here is that every numerical model like this is inherently biased simply based on which criteria you decide to include, and what weights you decide to give those criteria. For example, your inclusion of Aligulac score at 20% weight (second only to tournament score) reveals an incredible bias for Serral, and in fact reproduces in an amplified manner some of the problems you claim to address such as only counting his performances against top players outside of Europe, etc.
Do you dispute that based on your weighted calculation a guy like Rogue would likely not be in the top 10 or even top 20 if you were to run the calculation on all pros? I think it's important to be honest about this, because a single conclusion like this is much more revealing that the thousands of words of justification you put into defending your Serral = GOAT calculator. You created a calculator to justify giving a guy who never played in the most competitive era or most competitive tournaments or leagues nearly 2X the GOAT points as the next highest GOAT, all while claiming you were nerfing him. I'd be curious if you didn't "nerf Serral" how many GOAT points he'd get. 3X the next guy? 4X? 5X? Your existing model already has Serral at 5X GOATier than Rogue. Do you really think this is credible?
I know what you're going to say because we've had this debate before. You'd like me to point out the specific flaws in your methodology. Candidly there are dozens and I don't really have time to explain them all especially when the one I offer here re: Aligulac has been offered many times before and was ignored.
But the bigger point is that if your model doesn't pass the smell test, you need to go back to the drawing board and think about the possibility that you are making some major conceptual errors. The biggest one here is that you think computers can calculate greatness. You reduce my definition of greatness to "anecdotes and nostalgia" but this only further reveals a lack of understanding of greatness. Greatness is about doing what no one thought was possible, overcoming insurmountable odds, facing the fiercest possible competition and finding a way to win, and marking your place in history. Numbers and stats can inform this, but they simply cannot calculate it, because the exercise requires subtle human judgements that are admittedly just as biased as a calculator.
Beyond the Mouhammed Ali and Shane Battier examples, here's one that might be more relatable to you. Flash. Clearly the BW GOAT, most would agree. A calculator could be created to demonstrate this, I'm sure. But you know what it would leave out? His top 4 Random ASL run. This might be the greatest thing any gamer has ever accomplished but in any event it's certainly in the pantheon of greatest gamer moments in e-sports history. Calculators simply cannot understand these things.
I did not agree with every one of Miz's placements on his GOAT list, but the reason it was so enjoyable to me is that it was full of story and really captured the arcs of history and greatest moments of this e-sport in narrative format. It's not that he didn't utilize numbers and stats, it's just that he placed them in their appropriate supporting context of a human understanding of greatness.
The best example of this is SOS. This was my favorite article because although Miz himself acknowledged that his inclusion in the top 10 was an anomaly from a pure numbers perspective, it was nonetheless 100% justified when you understand what SOS accomplished and brought to the game. Absolute legend, and definitely a GOAT, and you can only understand this by carefully analyzing the subtleties of SCII as an e-sport and SOS's place in that story arc.
I assume SOS would place very, very low in your calculator list, maybe not even in the top 40, which is fine. But maybe thinking about some of these examples might help broaden your understanding of what a GOAT is.
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United States1906 Posts
On June 26 2025 21:48 rwala wrote:Show nested quote +On June 24 2025 14:34 PremoBeats wrote:On June 24 2025 07:13 Mizenhauer wrote:On June 24 2025 01:59 PremoBeats wrote:On June 23 2025 23:45 ejozl wrote:
I'm interested about efficiency for the longer career players if they're not punished by their long careers. Say, if you took rogue, serral, maru and inno and looked at their best period of a scope that's as long as life's scope. It's not entirely fair because life literally starts out his career royal roading, which the other players didn't, but would they be able to eclipse life in his best catagory? Efficiency in winning tournaments or in achieving tournament score? The problem is if you look at roughly 3 years (Life's career span), player 1 could have two phenomenal years, then one subpar year, followed by two phenomenal years and another subpar year, another two phenomenal years and one subpar year. Meaning 6 out of 9 phenomenal years. Player 2 could have had 3 consecutive phenomenal years followed by 6 subpar ones, meaning 3 out of 9. Looking only at 3 consecutive good years, player 2 will outperform, despite his overall career being less impressive. But as WombaT said: Serral outperforms here as well. Without looking perfectly at time spans, as I made the calculations on a yearly basis, these are the best results for 3 years for tournament win%: Serral - 2018-2020 (only non-locked): 37.30% - 2022-2024 (only non-locked): 52.62% Maru - 2018-2020: 25.18% - 2022-2024: 23.92% Rogue - 2017-2019: 22.75% INnoVation - 2015-2017: 34.09% Mvp - 2011-2013: 26.57% Rain - 2013-2015: 12.23% If we only look at Serral's prime years, he sits at a win rate of 38.10% from 2018-2024. His lifetime win rate is better than even 2 year time periods of any other player and only Maru, Rogue, INnoVation, Mvp and Life in 1 year are above Serral's 2018-2024 result. As I said in the article... in such a volatile game as SCII, this is absolutely insane. This is a poor argument. Other than Rogue and Maru (with a bit of Inno) all of these players played in tournaments the others didn't or played in said events when the format was different. Mvp played when GSLs were run almost monthly. Rain never got a chance to play with offline events with foreigners as good as serral, reynor etc. The Maru/Rogue/Inno/ Rain group never played in Code S during Mvp's era and Serral never played in Code S at all. There would need to be some heavy adjustments to get this metric to a reasonable point, but I tried to avoid that/stay away from subjective era based adjustments. I simply made it cause ejozl asked for it and it was kind of easy to collect the data from my set. In the original analysis I applied era-mulitpliers that seemed somewhat reasonable to me. I pointed out other flaws of this methodology too. This small analsyis shows something pretty clearly nevertheless: Serral is way ahead of other players from his time (Maru, Rogue and to a lesser degree the overlap with a pretty good but not prime INnoVation). We could only look at tournaments, where all of them played as well to make it even more precise, as you mentioned though. On June 24 2025 11:06 rwala wrote:
The original analysis had many flaws and this analysis reproduces most of them (though somewhat amusingly claims all the flaws were all addressed). The author tries to maintain a veneer of objectivity and neutrality, but the bias inevitably reveals itself, often without the author being aware that it does. You can read the section "was the prime era harder?" and learn pretty much all you need to know about the author's perspective. Real quick on the main flaws tho:
1) This is not a statistical analysis. I can't see the results of any regression, monte carlo simulation, or any other modeling technique. I don't see any p-values or analysis of statistical significance. If you're not a numbers person, do not be fooled by the author slapping the label "statistical evaluation" on this.
2) If this is not a statistical analysis, what is it? This is a heavily-biased calculation designed to demonstrate that the author's favorite player is the GOAT. The author will say that he bent over backwards to nerf Serral and he is still the GOAT by nearly 2X points in his extremely objective and neutral GOAT calculator. Don't believe it. It all comes down to the fact that that the author chose to include specific criteria and specific weightings for those criteria that were designed to crown Serral the GOAT. I think everyone knows this but it's worth making the implicit explicit.
3) Many people pointed out that the Serral = GOAT calculator rated Rogue ridiculously low so clearly something must be wrong. The author's responses are interestingly defensive in how they justify Rogue's low rating, but many of us told him this would happen once he started ranking multiple players with the calculator. It's worth noting that while the calculator diminished Rogue to such an unbelievably low ranking, it's actually worse than simply rating Rogue lower than a guy like Rain or at a third of Maru's GOAT ranking. If you ran this calculator on all pros I suspect Rogue may not even be in the top 10 or top 20 GOAT list. That's how flawed the calculator is. Very good chance of even more bizarre results tbh.
4) Even if this were a proper statistical analysis, statistics do not explain GOATs. If they did, Shane Battier might be the NBA GOAT (seriously, look into it), and Muhammed Ali could not be the boxing GOAT (his 5 losses are simply too high for any objective weighted calculation to accomodate).
This point about Shane Battier and Muhammed Ali is the most important point, abstracted as follows: math equations do not understand greatness. They will always "undervalue" a player like Rogue in any GOAT convo because it does not know how to evaluate, for example, Rogue's jaw-dropping offline Bo7 grand finals performance record, which is among the greatest achievements in the history of e-sports. And they will always overvalue efficient and effective players that nonetheless seem to lack some of the incalculable qualities of greatness such as being clutch, resilient, or a great ambassador or leader for the game. Or even simply being lucky enough to be the right person, in the right place, at the right time to make history. With players like this, even when they seem to get lucky, it feels like a byproduct of their hard work.
Serral is indeed a great GOAT pick, just not for silly reasons like being high in Aligulac rankings for a long time. He's a great GOAT pick because he achieved what no one outside of South Korea was able to achieve, and is arguably the best player to ever play the game. At the same time, he simply never played in the most competitive tournaments and leagues, nor did he play in the most competitive era when over a thousand pros were spending 12+ hours a day trying to win premier tournaments and be the best player in the world. Lots of GOAT contenders achieved significant results in the toughest tournaments and in the competitive era, and if any of those guys are your GOAT, don't let any calculator say otherwise!
1. The term statistical analysis can mean a lot of things. In sports it simply refers to a structured evaluation of empirical data using numeric methods, not necessarily inferential statistics (Elo systems, composite indices like FIFA or ATP or even sabermetrics-derived rankins in baseball). Calling this analysis statistical is perfectly valid, as it is a descriptive, statistical framework, not a regression or simulation similar to Aligulac. It is about ordering based on performance data, not modeling outcomes. If you want a Monte Carlo simulation and significance levels you're looking for something different. I simply used statistical tools that seemed necessary (data collection and organization, analyzing, using normalization to a common 0-100 scale, interpreting). 2. Well. Where exactly do you see this suppossed bias or design tailored towards Serral? I am completely transparent with my methodology and even referenced external ideas like the ones from Miz' list. I laid out all weightings and calculations transparently, so you are free to criticize the exact ones, where it turned sour in your opinion. As a matter of fact, you made the same accusation in this very thread before (me not addressing past criticism). But I incorporated the critiques from last time: - Including Rain, Life, Mvp - Including team events - Including a complete analysis of the deterioration argument. I simply did not include your critique of "all statistical analyses are flawed", as I still think that these analyses are important. Well, I kind of did, as I explain in the article why I think my methodology is fine. Serral's scores have been lowered and the most impactful decisions I made were against him. If that's bias, it's an awfully stubborn one. 3. What about pointing out that Rogue was inconsistent is defensive? Wouldn't building a model to reward Bo7 offline GSLs do exactly what you accuse me of doing under #2? I even talked to Miz in this very thread and via DM and a quick reverse-engineering of his list made Rogue come much better (although Serral still is way in all different calculations and I still don't understand how he was a close 2nd in the first list and a close 1st after a couple of months and Mvp is below INnoVation in my attempt to reverse-engineer). The issue mostly was the weighting at the end, which I conceded many times was bad, as well as the era-multiplier, which Miz did not use. 4. Anecdotes and nostalgia are fine too. But as neither numbers tell the whole story, nor do such subjective takes. In my opinion, as I already said in this thread, subjective takes might shift a GOAT comparison where the end result is close. But no single SCII player has a "better story" than others and in my opinion no "story" can rival Serral's numbers. And I completely agree with your last sentence, as point 9 of my statistical evaluation made pretty clear... "Because different weightings yield different outcomes, it's possible to justify alternative GOATs - if one prioritizes specific metrics disproportionately. So if you value... … efficiency above all else, your GOAT is Life. … career duration and sheer persistence, your GOAT is Maru. … accomplishments in the prime era, your GOAT might be INnoVation. … winning GSLs (or your name is Artosis), your GOAT is Rogue. … any subjective skill, personal charisma, or emotional weight, your GOAT is whoever resonates with you the most." I'm not sure why this is so complicated to understand, it's pretty simple. My core point here is that every numerical model like this is inherently biased simply based on which criteria you decide to include, and what weights you decide to give those criteria. For example, your inclusion of Aligulac score at 20% weight (second only to tournament score) reveals an incredible bias for Serral, and in fact reproduces in an amplified manner some of the problems you claim to address such as only counting his performances against top players outside of Europe, etc. Do you dispute that based on your weighted calculation a guy like Rogue would likely not be in the top 10 or even top 20 if you were to run the calculation on all pros? I think it's important to be honest about this, because a single conclusion like this is much more revealing that the thousands of words of justification you put into defending your Serral = GOAT calculator. You created a calculator to justify giving a guy who never played in the most competitive era or most competitive tournaments or leagues nearly 2X the GOAT points as the next highest GOAT, all while claiming you were nerfing him. I'd be curious if you didn't "nerf Serral" how many GOAT points he'd get. 3X the next guy? 4X? 5X? Your existing model already has Serral at 5X GOATier than Rogue. Do you really think this is credible? I know what you're going to say because we've had this debate before. You'd like me to point out the specific flaws in your methodology. Candidly there are dozens and I don't really have time to explain them all especially when the one I offer here re: Aligulac has been offered many times before and was ignored. But the bigger point is that if your model doesn't pass the smell test, you need to go back to the drawing board and think about the possibility that you are making some major conceptual errors. The biggest one here is that you think computers can calculate greatness. You reduce my definition of greatness to "anecdotes and nostalgia" but this only further reveals a lack of understanding of greatness. Greatness is about doing what no one thought was possible, overcoming insurmountable odds, facing the fiercest possible competition and finding a way to win, and marking your place in history. Numbers and stats can inform this, but they simply cannot calculate it, because the exercise requires subtle human judgements that are admittedly just as biased as a calculator. Beyond the Mouhammed Ali and Shane Battier examples, here's one that might be more relatable to you. Flash. Clearly the BW GOAT, most would agree. A calculator could be created to demonstrate this, I'm sure. But you know what it would leave out? His top 4 Random ASL run. This might be the greatest thing any gamer has ever accomplished but in any event it's certainly in the pantheon of greatest gamer moments in e-sports history. Calculators simply cannot understand these things. I did not agree with every one of Miz's placements on his GOAT list, but the reason it was so enjoyable to me is that it was full of story and really captured the arcs of history and greatest moments of this e-sport in narrative format. It's not that he didn't utilize numbers and stats, it's just that he placed them in their appropriate supporting context of a human understanding of greatness. The best example of this is SOS. This was my favorite article because although Miz himself acknowledged that his inclusion in the top 10 was an anomaly from a pure numbers perspective, it was nonetheless 100% justified when you understand what SOS accomplished and brought to the game. Absolute legend, and definitely a GOAT, and you can only understand this by carefully analyzing the subtleties of SCII as an e-sport and SOS's place in that story arc. I assume SOS would place very, very low in your calculator list, maybe not even in the top 40, which is fine. But maybe thinking about some of these examples might help broaden your understanding of what a GOAT is.
Thank you for the kind words.
The soO/sOs conundrum is one of the biggest quandaries I've ever encountered. I could write/talk about it forever if someone let me.
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Northern Ireland26225 Posts
On June 27 2025 02:51 Mizenhauer wrote:Show nested quote +On June 26 2025 21:48 rwala wrote:On June 24 2025 14:34 PremoBeats wrote:On June 24 2025 07:13 Mizenhauer wrote:On June 24 2025 01:59 PremoBeats wrote:On June 23 2025 23:45 ejozl wrote:
I'm interested about efficiency for the longer career players if they're not punished by their long careers. Say, if you took rogue, serral, maru and inno and looked at their best period of a scope that's as long as life's scope. It's not entirely fair because life literally starts out his career royal roading, which the other players didn't, but would they be able to eclipse life in his best catagory? Efficiency in winning tournaments or in achieving tournament score? The problem is if you look at roughly 3 years (Life's career span), player 1 could have two phenomenal years, then one subpar year, followed by two phenomenal years and another subpar year, another two phenomenal years and one subpar year. Meaning 6 out of 9 phenomenal years. Player 2 could have had 3 consecutive phenomenal years followed by 6 subpar ones, meaning 3 out of 9. Looking only at 3 consecutive good years, player 2 will outperform, despite his overall career being less impressive. But as WombaT said: Serral outperforms here as well. Without looking perfectly at time spans, as I made the calculations on a yearly basis, these are the best results for 3 years for tournament win%: Serral - 2018-2020 (only non-locked): 37.30% - 2022-2024 (only non-locked): 52.62% Maru - 2018-2020: 25.18% - 2022-2024: 23.92% Rogue - 2017-2019: 22.75% INnoVation - 2015-2017: 34.09% Mvp - 2011-2013: 26.57% Rain - 2013-2015: 12.23% If we only look at Serral's prime years, he sits at a win rate of 38.10% from 2018-2024. His lifetime win rate is better than even 2 year time periods of any other player and only Maru, Rogue, INnoVation, Mvp and Life in 1 year are above Serral's 2018-2024 result. As I said in the article... in such a volatile game as SCII, this is absolutely insane. This is a poor argument. Other than Rogue and Maru (with a bit of Inno) all of these players played in tournaments the others didn't or played in said events when the format was different. Mvp played when GSLs were run almost monthly. Rain never got a chance to play with offline events with foreigners as good as serral, reynor etc. The Maru/Rogue/Inno/ Rain group never played in Code S during Mvp's era and Serral never played in Code S at all. There would need to be some heavy adjustments to get this metric to a reasonable point, but I tried to avoid that/stay away from subjective era based adjustments. I simply made it cause ejozl asked for it and it was kind of easy to collect the data from my set. In the original analysis I applied era-mulitpliers that seemed somewhat reasonable to me. I pointed out other flaws of this methodology too. This small analsyis shows something pretty clearly nevertheless: Serral is way ahead of other players from his time (Maru, Rogue and to a lesser degree the overlap with a pretty good but not prime INnoVation). We could only look at tournaments, where all of them played as well to make it even more precise, as you mentioned though. On June 24 2025 11:06 rwala wrote:
The original analysis had many flaws and this analysis reproduces most of them (though somewhat amusingly claims all the flaws were all addressed). The author tries to maintain a veneer of objectivity and neutrality, but the bias inevitably reveals itself, often without the author being aware that it does. You can read the section "was the prime era harder?" and learn pretty much all you need to know about the author's perspective. Real quick on the main flaws tho:
1) This is not a statistical analysis. I can't see the results of any regression, monte carlo simulation, or any other modeling technique. I don't see any p-values or analysis of statistical significance. If you're not a numbers person, do not be fooled by the author slapping the label "statistical evaluation" on this.
2) If this is not a statistical analysis, what is it? This is a heavily-biased calculation designed to demonstrate that the author's favorite player is the GOAT. The author will say that he bent over backwards to nerf Serral and he is still the GOAT by nearly 2X points in his extremely objective and neutral GOAT calculator. Don't believe it. It all comes down to the fact that that the author chose to include specific criteria and specific weightings for those criteria that were designed to crown Serral the GOAT. I think everyone knows this but it's worth making the implicit explicit.
3) Many people pointed out that the Serral = GOAT calculator rated Rogue ridiculously low so clearly something must be wrong. The author's responses are interestingly defensive in how they justify Rogue's low rating, but many of us told him this would happen once he started ranking multiple players with the calculator. It's worth noting that while the calculator diminished Rogue to such an unbelievably low ranking, it's actually worse than simply rating Rogue lower than a guy like Rain or at a third of Maru's GOAT ranking. If you ran this calculator on all pros I suspect Rogue may not even be in the top 10 or top 20 GOAT list. That's how flawed the calculator is. Very good chance of even more bizarre results tbh.
4) Even if this were a proper statistical analysis, statistics do not explain GOATs. If they did, Shane Battier might be the NBA GOAT (seriously, look into it), and Muhammed Ali could not be the boxing GOAT (his 5 losses are simply too high for any objective weighted calculation to accomodate).
This point about Shane Battier and Muhammed Ali is the most important point, abstracted as follows: math equations do not understand greatness. They will always "undervalue" a player like Rogue in any GOAT convo because it does not know how to evaluate, for example, Rogue's jaw-dropping offline Bo7 grand finals performance record, which is among the greatest achievements in the history of e-sports. And they will always overvalue efficient and effective players that nonetheless seem to lack some of the incalculable qualities of greatness such as being clutch, resilient, or a great ambassador or leader for the game. Or even simply being lucky enough to be the right person, in the right place, at the right time to make history. With players like this, even when they seem to get lucky, it feels like a byproduct of their hard work.
Serral is indeed a great GOAT pick, just not for silly reasons like being high in Aligulac rankings for a long time. He's a great GOAT pick because he achieved what no one outside of South Korea was able to achieve, and is arguably the best player to ever play the game. At the same time, he simply never played in the most competitive tournaments and leagues, nor did he play in the most competitive era when over a thousand pros were spending 12+ hours a day trying to win premier tournaments and be the best player in the world. Lots of GOAT contenders achieved significant results in the toughest tournaments and in the competitive era, and if any of those guys are your GOAT, don't let any calculator say otherwise!
1. The term statistical analysis can mean a lot of things. In sports it simply refers to a structured evaluation of empirical data using numeric methods, not necessarily inferential statistics (Elo systems, composite indices like FIFA or ATP or even sabermetrics-derived rankins in baseball). Calling this analysis statistical is perfectly valid, as it is a descriptive, statistical framework, not a regression or simulation similar to Aligulac. It is about ordering based on performance data, not modeling outcomes. If you want a Monte Carlo simulation and significance levels you're looking for something different. I simply used statistical tools that seemed necessary (data collection and organization, analyzing, using normalization to a common 0-100 scale, interpreting). 2. Well. Where exactly do you see this suppossed bias or design tailored towards Serral? I am completely transparent with my methodology and even referenced external ideas like the ones from Miz' list. I laid out all weightings and calculations transparently, so you are free to criticize the exact ones, where it turned sour in your opinion. As a matter of fact, you made the same accusation in this very thread before (me not addressing past criticism). But I incorporated the critiques from last time: - Including Rain, Life, Mvp - Including team events - Including a complete analysis of the deterioration argument. I simply did not include your critique of "all statistical analyses are flawed", as I still think that these analyses are important. Well, I kind of did, as I explain in the article why I think my methodology is fine. Serral's scores have been lowered and the most impactful decisions I made were against him. If that's bias, it's an awfully stubborn one. 3. What about pointing out that Rogue was inconsistent is defensive? Wouldn't building a model to reward Bo7 offline GSLs do exactly what you accuse me of doing under #2? I even talked to Miz in this very thread and via DM and a quick reverse-engineering of his list made Rogue come much better (although Serral still is way in all different calculations and I still don't understand how he was a close 2nd in the first list and a close 1st after a couple of months and Mvp is below INnoVation in my attempt to reverse-engineer). The issue mostly was the weighting at the end, which I conceded many times was bad, as well as the era-multiplier, which Miz did not use. 4. Anecdotes and nostalgia are fine too. But as neither numbers tell the whole story, nor do such subjective takes. In my opinion, as I already said in this thread, subjective takes might shift a GOAT comparison where the end result is close. But no single SCII player has a "better story" than others and in my opinion no "story" can rival Serral's numbers. And I completely agree with your last sentence, as point 9 of my statistical evaluation made pretty clear... "Because different weightings yield different outcomes, it's possible to justify alternative GOATs - if one prioritizes specific metrics disproportionately. So if you value... … efficiency above all else, your GOAT is Life. … career duration and sheer persistence, your GOAT is Maru. … accomplishments in the prime era, your GOAT might be INnoVation. … winning GSLs (or your name is Artosis), your GOAT is Rogue. … any subjective skill, personal charisma, or emotional weight, your GOAT is whoever resonates with you the most." I'm not sure why this is so complicated to understand, it's pretty simple. My core point here is that every numerical model like this is inherently biased simply based on which criteria you decide to include, and what weights you decide to give those criteria. For example, your inclusion of Aligulac score at 20% weight (second only to tournament score) reveals an incredible bias for Serral, and in fact reproduces in an amplified manner some of the problems you claim to address such as only counting his performances against top players outside of Europe, etc. Do you dispute that based on your weighted calculation a guy like Rogue would likely not be in the top 10 or even top 20 if you were to run the calculation on all pros? I think it's important to be honest about this, because a single conclusion like this is much more revealing that the thousands of words of justification you put into defending your Serral = GOAT calculator. You created a calculator to justify giving a guy who never played in the most competitive era or most competitive tournaments or leagues nearly 2X the GOAT points as the next highest GOAT, all while claiming you were nerfing him. I'd be curious if you didn't "nerf Serral" how many GOAT points he'd get. 3X the next guy? 4X? 5X? Your existing model already has Serral at 5X GOATier than Rogue. Do you really think this is credible? I know what you're going to say because we've had this debate before. You'd like me to point out the specific flaws in your methodology. Candidly there are dozens and I don't really have time to explain them all especially when the one I offer here re: Aligulac has been offered many times before and was ignored. But the bigger point is that if your model doesn't pass the smell test, you need to go back to the drawing board and think about the possibility that you are making some major conceptual errors. The biggest one here is that you think computers can calculate greatness. You reduce my definition of greatness to "anecdotes and nostalgia" but this only further reveals a lack of understanding of greatness. Greatness is about doing what no one thought was possible, overcoming insurmountable odds, facing the fiercest possible competition and finding a way to win, and marking your place in history. Numbers and stats can inform this, but they simply cannot calculate it, because the exercise requires subtle human judgements that are admittedly just as biased as a calculator. Beyond the Mouhammed Ali and Shane Battier examples, here's one that might be more relatable to you. Flash. Clearly the BW GOAT, most would agree. A calculator could be created to demonstrate this, I'm sure. But you know what it would leave out? His top 4 Random ASL run. This might be the greatest thing any gamer has ever accomplished but in any event it's certainly in the pantheon of greatest gamer moments in e-sports history. Calculators simply cannot understand these things. I did not agree with every one of Miz's placements on his GOAT list, but the reason it was so enjoyable to me is that it was full of story and really captured the arcs of history and greatest moments of this e-sport in narrative format. It's not that he didn't utilize numbers and stats, it's just that he placed them in their appropriate supporting context of a human understanding of greatness. The best example of this is SOS. This was my favorite article because although Miz himself acknowledged that his inclusion in the top 10 was an anomaly from a pure numbers perspective, it was nonetheless 100% justified when you understand what SOS accomplished and brought to the game. Absolute legend, and definitely a GOAT, and you can only understand this by carefully analyzing the subtleties of SCII as an e-sport and SOS's place in that story arc. I assume SOS would place very, very low in your calculator list, maybe not even in the top 40, which is fine. But maybe thinking about some of these examples might help broaden your understanding of what a GOAT is. Thank you for the kind words. The soO/sOs conundrum is one of the biggest quandaries I've ever encountered. I could write/talk about it forever if someone let me.
You’re not forbidden! Least as far as I know…
It’s a pretty interesting one, if you flip the results of a literal handful of series soO is right up there at the upper echelons of the GOAT conversation, and $o$ isn’t in the conversation at all.
Interesting contrast across eras for sure. soO despite deserved Kong status was so damn consistent and doing things nobody else was, still good enough for a high GOAT placing. Same with sOs for having a knack at huge wins but not being a consistent winner
One has to parse it through how SC2 was at the time. Not just Serral, but especially Serral has kind of normalised being in champ contention every tournament, that just wasn’t the case in that era. So I think that leads people to downplay some of the achievements of those players when looking at it through the 2025 lens
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Northern Ireland26225 Posts
On June 26 2025 21:48 rwala wrote:Show nested quote +On June 24 2025 14:34 PremoBeats wrote:On June 24 2025 07:13 Mizenhauer wrote:On June 24 2025 01:59 PremoBeats wrote:On June 23 2025 23:45 ejozl wrote:
I'm interested about efficiency for the longer career players if they're not punished by their long careers. Say, if you took rogue, serral, maru and inno and looked at their best period of a scope that's as long as life's scope. It's not entirely fair because life literally starts out his career royal roading, which the other players didn't, but would they be able to eclipse life in his best catagory? Efficiency in winning tournaments or in achieving tournament score? The problem is if you look at roughly 3 years (Life's career span), player 1 could have two phenomenal years, then one subpar year, followed by two phenomenal years and another subpar year, another two phenomenal years and one subpar year. Meaning 6 out of 9 phenomenal years. Player 2 could have had 3 consecutive phenomenal years followed by 6 subpar ones, meaning 3 out of 9. Looking only at 3 consecutive good years, player 2 will outperform, despite his overall career being less impressive. But as WombaT said: Serral outperforms here as well. Without looking perfectly at time spans, as I made the calculations on a yearly basis, these are the best results for 3 years for tournament win%: Serral - 2018-2020 (only non-locked): 37.30% - 2022-2024 (only non-locked): 52.62% Maru - 2018-2020: 25.18% - 2022-2024: 23.92% Rogue - 2017-2019: 22.75% INnoVation - 2015-2017: 34.09% Mvp - 2011-2013: 26.57% Rain - 2013-2015: 12.23% If we only look at Serral's prime years, he sits at a win rate of 38.10% from 2018-2024. His lifetime win rate is better than even 2 year time periods of any other player and only Maru, Rogue, INnoVation, Mvp and Life in 1 year are above Serral's 2018-2024 result. As I said in the article... in such a volatile game as SCII, this is absolutely insane. This is a poor argument. Other than Rogue and Maru (with a bit of Inno) all of these players played in tournaments the others didn't or played in said events when the format was different. Mvp played when GSLs were run almost monthly. Rain never got a chance to play with offline events with foreigners as good as serral, reynor etc. The Maru/Rogue/Inno/ Rain group never played in Code S during Mvp's era and Serral never played in Code S at all. There would need to be some heavy adjustments to get this metric to a reasonable point, but I tried to avoid that/stay away from subjective era based adjustments. I simply made it cause ejozl asked for it and it was kind of easy to collect the data from my set. In the original analysis I applied era-mulitpliers that seemed somewhat reasonable to me. I pointed out other flaws of this methodology too. This small analsyis shows something pretty clearly nevertheless: Serral is way ahead of other players from his time (Maru, Rogue and to a lesser degree the overlap with a pretty good but not prime INnoVation). We could only look at tournaments, where all of them played as well to make it even more precise, as you mentioned though. On June 24 2025 11:06 rwala wrote:
The original analysis had many flaws and this analysis reproduces most of them (though somewhat amusingly claims all the flaws were all addressed). The author tries to maintain a veneer of objectivity and neutrality, but the bias inevitably reveals itself, often without the author being aware that it does. You can read the section "was the prime era harder?" and learn pretty much all you need to know about the author's perspective. Real quick on the main flaws tho:
1) This is not a statistical analysis. I can't see the results of any regression, monte carlo simulation, or any other modeling technique. I don't see any p-values or analysis of statistical significance. If you're not a numbers person, do not be fooled by the author slapping the label "statistical evaluation" on this.
2) If this is not a statistical analysis, what is it? This is a heavily-biased calculation designed to demonstrate that the author's favorite player is the GOAT. The author will say that he bent over backwards to nerf Serral and he is still the GOAT by nearly 2X points in his extremely objective and neutral GOAT calculator. Don't believe it. It all comes down to the fact that that the author chose to include specific criteria and specific weightings for those criteria that were designed to crown Serral the GOAT. I think everyone knows this but it's worth making the implicit explicit.
3) Many people pointed out that the Serral = GOAT calculator rated Rogue ridiculously low so clearly something must be wrong. The author's responses are interestingly defensive in how they justify Rogue's low rating, but many of us told him this would happen once he started ranking multiple players with the calculator. It's worth noting that while the calculator diminished Rogue to such an unbelievably low ranking, it's actually worse than simply rating Rogue lower than a guy like Rain or at a third of Maru's GOAT ranking. If you ran this calculator on all pros I suspect Rogue may not even be in the top 10 or top 20 GOAT list. That's how flawed the calculator is. Very good chance of even more bizarre results tbh.
4) Even if this were a proper statistical analysis, statistics do not explain GOATs. If they did, Shane Battier might be the NBA GOAT (seriously, look into it), and Muhammed Ali could not be the boxing GOAT (his 5 losses are simply too high for any objective weighted calculation to accomodate).
This point about Shane Battier and Muhammed Ali is the most important point, abstracted as follows: math equations do not understand greatness. They will always "undervalue" a player like Rogue in any GOAT convo because it does not know how to evaluate, for example, Rogue's jaw-dropping offline Bo7 grand finals performance record, which is among the greatest achievements in the history of e-sports. And they will always overvalue efficient and effective players that nonetheless seem to lack some of the incalculable qualities of greatness such as being clutch, resilient, or a great ambassador or leader for the game. Or even simply being lucky enough to be the right person, in the right place, at the right time to make history. With players like this, even when they seem to get lucky, it feels like a byproduct of their hard work.
Serral is indeed a great GOAT pick, just not for silly reasons like being high in Aligulac rankings for a long time. He's a great GOAT pick because he achieved what no one outside of South Korea was able to achieve, and is arguably the best player to ever play the game. At the same time, he simply never played in the most competitive tournaments and leagues, nor did he play in the most competitive era when over a thousand pros were spending 12+ hours a day trying to win premier tournaments and be the best player in the world. Lots of GOAT contenders achieved significant results in the toughest tournaments and in the competitive era, and if any of those guys are your GOAT, don't let any calculator say otherwise!
1. The term statistical analysis can mean a lot of things. In sports it simply refers to a structured evaluation of empirical data using numeric methods, not necessarily inferential statistics (Elo systems, composite indices like FIFA or ATP or even sabermetrics-derived rankins in baseball). Calling this analysis statistical is perfectly valid, as it is a descriptive, statistical framework, not a regression or simulation similar to Aligulac. It is about ordering based on performance data, not modeling outcomes. If you want a Monte Carlo simulation and significance levels you're looking for something different. I simply used statistical tools that seemed necessary (data collection and organization, analyzing, using normalization to a common 0-100 scale, interpreting). 2. Well. Where exactly do you see this suppossed bias or design tailored towards Serral? I am completely transparent with my methodology and even referenced external ideas like the ones from Miz' list. I laid out all weightings and calculations transparently, so you are free to criticize the exact ones, where it turned sour in your opinion. As a matter of fact, you made the same accusation in this very thread before (me not addressing past criticism). But I incorporated the critiques from last time: - Including Rain, Life, Mvp - Including team events - Including a complete analysis of the deterioration argument. I simply did not include your critique of "all statistical analyses are flawed", as I still think that these analyses are important. Well, I kind of did, as I explain in the article why I think my methodology is fine. Serral's scores have been lowered and the most impactful decisions I made were against him. If that's bias, it's an awfully stubborn one. 3. What about pointing out that Rogue was inconsistent is defensive? Wouldn't building a model to reward Bo7 offline GSLs do exactly what you accuse me of doing under #2? I even talked to Miz in this very thread and via DM and a quick reverse-engineering of his list made Rogue come much better (although Serral still is way in all different calculations and I still don't understand how he was a close 2nd in the first list and a close 1st after a couple of months and Mvp is below INnoVation in my attempt to reverse-engineer). The issue mostly was the weighting at the end, which I conceded many times was bad, as well as the era-multiplier, which Miz did not use. 4. Anecdotes and nostalgia are fine too. But as neither numbers tell the whole story, nor do such subjective takes. In my opinion, as I already said in this thread, subjective takes might shift a GOAT comparison where the end result is close. But no single SCII player has a "better story" than others and in my opinion no "story" can rival Serral's numbers. And I completely agree with your last sentence, as point 9 of my statistical evaluation made pretty clear... "Because different weightings yield different outcomes, it's possible to justify alternative GOATs - if one prioritizes specific metrics disproportionately. So if you value... … efficiency above all else, your GOAT is Life. … career duration and sheer persistence, your GOAT is Maru. … accomplishments in the prime era, your GOAT might be INnoVation. … winning GSLs (or your name is Artosis), your GOAT is Rogue. … any subjective skill, personal charisma, or emotional weight, your GOAT is whoever resonates with you the most." I'm not sure why this is so complicated to understand, it's pretty simple. My core point here is that every numerical model like this is inherently biased simply based on which criteria you decide to include, and what weights you decide to give those criteria. For example, your inclusion of Aligulac score at 20% weight (second only to tournament score) reveals an incredible bias for Serral, and in fact reproduces in an amplified manner some of the problems you claim to address such as only counting his performances against top players outside of Europe, etc. Do you dispute that based on your weighted calculation a guy like Rogue would likely not be in the top 10 or even top 20 if you were to run the calculation on all pros? I think it's important to be honest about this, because a single conclusion like this is much more revealing that the thousands of words of justification you put into defending your Serral = GOAT calculator. You created a calculator to justify giving a guy who never played in the most competitive era or most competitive tournaments or leagues nearly 2X the GOAT points as the next highest GOAT, all while claiming you were nerfing him. I'd be curious if you didn't "nerf Serral" how many GOAT points he'd get. 3X the next guy? 4X? 5X? Your existing model already has Serral at 5X GOATier than Rogue. Do you really think this is credible? I know what you're going to say because we've had this debate before. You'd like me to point out the specific flaws in your methodology. Candidly there are dozens and I don't really have time to explain them all especially when the one I offer here re: Aligulac has been offered many times before and was ignored. But the bigger point is that if your model doesn't pass the smell test, you need to go back to the drawing board and think about the possibility that you are making some major conceptual errors. The biggest one here is that you think computers can calculate greatness. You reduce my definition of greatness to "anecdotes and nostalgia" but this only further reveals a lack of understanding of greatness. Greatness is about doing what no one thought was possible, overcoming insurmountable odds, facing the fiercest possible competition and finding a way to win, and marking your place in history. Numbers and stats can inform this, but they simply cannot calculate it, because the exercise requires subtle human judgements that are admittedly just as biased as a calculator. Beyond the Mouhammed Ali and Shane Battier examples, here's one that might be more relatable to you. Flash. Clearly the BW GOAT, most would agree. A calculator could be created to demonstrate this, I'm sure. But you know what it would leave out? His top 4 Random ASL run. This might be the greatest thing any gamer has ever accomplished but in any event it's certainly in the pantheon of greatest gamer moments in e-sports history. Calculators simply cannot understand these things. I did not agree with every one of Miz's placements on his GOAT list, but the reason it was so enjoyable to me is that it was full of story and really captured the arcs of history and greatest moments of this e-sport in narrative format. It's not that he didn't utilize numbers and stats, it's just that he placed them in their appropriate supporting context of a human understanding of greatness. The best example of this is SOS. This was my favorite article because although Miz himself acknowledged that his inclusion in the top 10 was an anomaly from a pure numbers perspective, it was nonetheless 100% justified when you understand what SOS accomplished and brought to the game. Absolute legend, and definitely a GOAT, and you can only understand this by carefully analyzing the subtleties of SCII as an e-sport and SOS's place in that story arc. I assume SOS would place very, very low in your calculator list, maybe not even in the top 40, which is fine. But maybe thinking about some of these examples might help broaden your understanding of what a GOAT is.
In what sport does the following not get annointed the GOAT?
Most tournament wins, highest conversion rate of entry to wins. Highest average placement. Top of ELO rankings for forever, highest match win percentage, winning record against basically every contemporary. For, at this stage a span that’s basically over half of the entirety of the game’s existence.
Serral isn’t lacking in intangibles either. He’s just some Finnish bloke doing his own thing and he didn’t only get to the level of hanging with Kespa graduates, but clearly surpassed them.
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On June 27 2025 05:27 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On June 26 2025 21:48 rwala wrote:On June 24 2025 14:34 PremoBeats wrote:On June 24 2025 07:13 Mizenhauer wrote:On June 24 2025 01:59 PremoBeats wrote:On June 23 2025 23:45 ejozl wrote:
I'm interested about efficiency for the longer career players if they're not punished by their long careers. Say, if you took rogue, serral, maru and inno and looked at their best period of a scope that's as long as life's scope. It's not entirely fair because life literally starts out his career royal roading, which the other players didn't, but would they be able to eclipse life in his best catagory? Efficiency in winning tournaments or in achieving tournament score? The problem is if you look at roughly 3 years (Life's career span), player 1 could have two phenomenal years, then one subpar year, followed by two phenomenal years and another subpar year, another two phenomenal years and one subpar year. Meaning 6 out of 9 phenomenal years. Player 2 could have had 3 consecutive phenomenal years followed by 6 subpar ones, meaning 3 out of 9. Looking only at 3 consecutive good years, player 2 will outperform, despite his overall career being less impressive. But as WombaT said: Serral outperforms here as well. Without looking perfectly at time spans, as I made the calculations on a yearly basis, these are the best results for 3 years for tournament win%: Serral - 2018-2020 (only non-locked): 37.30% - 2022-2024 (only non-locked): 52.62% Maru - 2018-2020: 25.18% - 2022-2024: 23.92% Rogue - 2017-2019: 22.75% INnoVation - 2015-2017: 34.09% Mvp - 2011-2013: 26.57% Rain - 2013-2015: 12.23% If we only look at Serral's prime years, he sits at a win rate of 38.10% from 2018-2024. His lifetime win rate is better than even 2 year time periods of any other player and only Maru, Rogue, INnoVation, Mvp and Life in 1 year are above Serral's 2018-2024 result. As I said in the article... in such a volatile game as SCII, this is absolutely insane. This is a poor argument. Other than Rogue and Maru (with a bit of Inno) all of these players played in tournaments the others didn't or played in said events when the format was different. Mvp played when GSLs were run almost monthly. Rain never got a chance to play with offline events with foreigners as good as serral, reynor etc. The Maru/Rogue/Inno/ Rain group never played in Code S during Mvp's era and Serral never played in Code S at all. There would need to be some heavy adjustments to get this metric to a reasonable point, but I tried to avoid that/stay away from subjective era based adjustments. I simply made it cause ejozl asked for it and it was kind of easy to collect the data from my set. In the original analysis I applied era-mulitpliers that seemed somewhat reasonable to me. I pointed out other flaws of this methodology too. This small analsyis shows something pretty clearly nevertheless: Serral is way ahead of other players from his time (Maru, Rogue and to a lesser degree the overlap with a pretty good but not prime INnoVation). We could only look at tournaments, where all of them played as well to make it even more precise, as you mentioned though. On June 24 2025 11:06 rwala wrote:
The original analysis had many flaws and this analysis reproduces most of them (though somewhat amusingly claims all the flaws were all addressed). The author tries to maintain a veneer of objectivity and neutrality, but the bias inevitably reveals itself, often without the author being aware that it does. You can read the section "was the prime era harder?" and learn pretty much all you need to know about the author's perspective. Real quick on the main flaws tho:
1) This is not a statistical analysis. I can't see the results of any regression, monte carlo simulation, or any other modeling technique. I don't see any p-values or analysis of statistical significance. If you're not a numbers person, do not be fooled by the author slapping the label "statistical evaluation" on this.
2) If this is not a statistical analysis, what is it? This is a heavily-biased calculation designed to demonstrate that the author's favorite player is the GOAT. The author will say that he bent over backwards to nerf Serral and he is still the GOAT by nearly 2X points in his extremely objective and neutral GOAT calculator. Don't believe it. It all comes down to the fact that that the author chose to include specific criteria and specific weightings for those criteria that were designed to crown Serral the GOAT. I think everyone knows this but it's worth making the implicit explicit.
3) Many people pointed out that the Serral = GOAT calculator rated Rogue ridiculously low so clearly something must be wrong. The author's responses are interestingly defensive in how they justify Rogue's low rating, but many of us told him this would happen once he started ranking multiple players with the calculator. It's worth noting that while the calculator diminished Rogue to such an unbelievably low ranking, it's actually worse than simply rating Rogue lower than a guy like Rain or at a third of Maru's GOAT ranking. If you ran this calculator on all pros I suspect Rogue may not even be in the top 10 or top 20 GOAT list. That's how flawed the calculator is. Very good chance of even more bizarre results tbh.
4) Even if this were a proper statistical analysis, statistics do not explain GOATs. If they did, Shane Battier might be the NBA GOAT (seriously, look into it), and Muhammed Ali could not be the boxing GOAT (his 5 losses are simply too high for any objective weighted calculation to accomodate).
This point about Shane Battier and Muhammed Ali is the most important point, abstracted as follows: math equations do not understand greatness. They will always "undervalue" a player like Rogue in any GOAT convo because it does not know how to evaluate, for example, Rogue's jaw-dropping offline Bo7 grand finals performance record, which is among the greatest achievements in the history of e-sports. And they will always overvalue efficient and effective players that nonetheless seem to lack some of the incalculable qualities of greatness such as being clutch, resilient, or a great ambassador or leader for the game. Or even simply being lucky enough to be the right person, in the right place, at the right time to make history. With players like this, even when they seem to get lucky, it feels like a byproduct of their hard work.
Serral is indeed a great GOAT pick, just not for silly reasons like being high in Aligulac rankings for a long time. He's a great GOAT pick because he achieved what no one outside of South Korea was able to achieve, and is arguably the best player to ever play the game. At the same time, he simply never played in the most competitive tournaments and leagues, nor did he play in the most competitive era when over a thousand pros were spending 12+ hours a day trying to win premier tournaments and be the best player in the world. Lots of GOAT contenders achieved significant results in the toughest tournaments and in the competitive era, and if any of those guys are your GOAT, don't let any calculator say otherwise!
1. The term statistical analysis can mean a lot of things. In sports it simply refers to a structured evaluation of empirical data using numeric methods, not necessarily inferential statistics (Elo systems, composite indices like FIFA or ATP or even sabermetrics-derived rankins in baseball). Calling this analysis statistical is perfectly valid, as it is a descriptive, statistical framework, not a regression or simulation similar to Aligulac. It is about ordering based on performance data, not modeling outcomes. If you want a Monte Carlo simulation and significance levels you're looking for something different. I simply used statistical tools that seemed necessary (data collection and organization, analyzing, using normalization to a common 0-100 scale, interpreting). 2. Well. Where exactly do you see this suppossed bias or design tailored towards Serral? I am completely transparent with my methodology and even referenced external ideas like the ones from Miz' list. I laid out all weightings and calculations transparently, so you are free to criticize the exact ones, where it turned sour in your opinion. As a matter of fact, you made the same accusation in this very thread before (me not addressing past criticism). But I incorporated the critiques from last time: - Including Rain, Life, Mvp - Including team events - Including a complete analysis of the deterioration argument. I simply did not include your critique of "all statistical analyses are flawed", as I still think that these analyses are important. Well, I kind of did, as I explain in the article why I think my methodology is fine. Serral's scores have been lowered and the most impactful decisions I made were against him. If that's bias, it's an awfully stubborn one. 3. What about pointing out that Rogue was inconsistent is defensive? Wouldn't building a model to reward Bo7 offline GSLs do exactly what you accuse me of doing under #2? I even talked to Miz in this very thread and via DM and a quick reverse-engineering of his list made Rogue come much better (although Serral still is way in all different calculations and I still don't understand how he was a close 2nd in the first list and a close 1st after a couple of months and Mvp is below INnoVation in my attempt to reverse-engineer). The issue mostly was the weighting at the end, which I conceded many times was bad, as well as the era-multiplier, which Miz did not use. 4. Anecdotes and nostalgia are fine too. But as neither numbers tell the whole story, nor do such subjective takes. In my opinion, as I already said in this thread, subjective takes might shift a GOAT comparison where the end result is close. But no single SCII player has a "better story" than others and in my opinion no "story" can rival Serral's numbers. And I completely agree with your last sentence, as point 9 of my statistical evaluation made pretty clear... "Because different weightings yield different outcomes, it's possible to justify alternative GOATs - if one prioritizes specific metrics disproportionately. So if you value... … efficiency above all else, your GOAT is Life. … career duration and sheer persistence, your GOAT is Maru. … accomplishments in the prime era, your GOAT might be INnoVation. … winning GSLs (or your name is Artosis), your GOAT is Rogue. … any subjective skill, personal charisma, or emotional weight, your GOAT is whoever resonates with you the most." I'm not sure why this is so complicated to understand, it's pretty simple. My core point here is that every numerical model like this is inherently biased simply based on which criteria you decide to include, and what weights you decide to give those criteria. For example, your inclusion of Aligulac score at 20% weight (second only to tournament score) reveals an incredible bias for Serral, and in fact reproduces in an amplified manner some of the problems you claim to address such as only counting his performances against top players outside of Europe, etc. Do you dispute that based on your weighted calculation a guy like Rogue would likely not be in the top 10 or even top 20 if you were to run the calculation on all pros? I think it's important to be honest about this, because a single conclusion like this is much more revealing that the thousands of words of justification you put into defending your Serral = GOAT calculator. You created a calculator to justify giving a guy who never played in the most competitive era or most competitive tournaments or leagues nearly 2X the GOAT points as the next highest GOAT, all while claiming you were nerfing him. I'd be curious if you didn't "nerf Serral" how many GOAT points he'd get. 3X the next guy? 4X? 5X? Your existing model already has Serral at 5X GOATier than Rogue. Do you really think this is credible? I know what you're going to say because we've had this debate before. You'd like me to point out the specific flaws in your methodology. Candidly there are dozens and I don't really have time to explain them all especially when the one I offer here re: Aligulac has been offered many times before and was ignored. But the bigger point is that if your model doesn't pass the smell test, you need to go back to the drawing board and think about the possibility that you are making some major conceptual errors. The biggest one here is that you think computers can calculate greatness. You reduce my definition of greatness to "anecdotes and nostalgia" but this only further reveals a lack of understanding of greatness. Greatness is about doing what no one thought was possible, overcoming insurmountable odds, facing the fiercest possible competition and finding a way to win, and marking your place in history. Numbers and stats can inform this, but they simply cannot calculate it, because the exercise requires subtle human judgements that are admittedly just as biased as a calculator. Beyond the Mouhammed Ali and Shane Battier examples, here's one that might be more relatable to you. Flash. Clearly the BW GOAT, most would agree. A calculator could be created to demonstrate this, I'm sure. But you know what it would leave out? His top 4 Random ASL run. This might be the greatest thing any gamer has ever accomplished but in any event it's certainly in the pantheon of greatest gamer moments in e-sports history. Calculators simply cannot understand these things. I did not agree with every one of Miz's placements on his GOAT list, but the reason it was so enjoyable to me is that it was full of story and really captured the arcs of history and greatest moments of this e-sport in narrative format. It's not that he didn't utilize numbers and stats, it's just that he placed them in their appropriate supporting context of a human understanding of greatness. The best example of this is SOS. This was my favorite article because although Miz himself acknowledged that his inclusion in the top 10 was an anomaly from a pure numbers perspective, it was nonetheless 100% justified when you understand what SOS accomplished and brought to the game. Absolute legend, and definitely a GOAT, and you can only understand this by carefully analyzing the subtleties of SCII as an e-sport and SOS's place in that story arc. I assume SOS would place very, very low in your calculator list, maybe not even in the top 40, which is fine. But maybe thinking about some of these examples might help broaden your understanding of what a GOAT is. In what sport does the following not get annointed the GOAT? Most tournament wins, highest conversion rate of entry to wins. Highest average placement. Top of ELO rankings for forever, highest match win percentage, winning record against basically every contemporary. For, at this stage a span that’s basically over half of the entirety of the game’s existence. Serral isn’t lacking in intangibles either. He’s just some Finnish bloke doing his own thing and he didn’t only get to the level of hanging with Kespa graduates, but clearly surpassed them.
Serral doesn't have the most tournament wins though.
If you regard all tournaments without any exclusions probably some online cup hero like Clem has the most.
Now you will probably say you meant only offline tournaments or only liquipedia premier tournaments, to which I answer that region-locked events that aren't open to everyone shouldn't count in this, which would make Maru have the most tournament wins.
Serral only has the most tournament wins if you draw a very specific line which includes region-locked events but excludes online-cups. Which is fine I guess, but it's too specific and arbitrary for me to support the statement "Serral has the most tournament wins"
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Northern Ireland26225 Posts
On June 27 2025 06:06 Charoisaur wrote:Show nested quote +On June 27 2025 05:27 WombaT wrote:On June 26 2025 21:48 rwala wrote:On June 24 2025 14:34 PremoBeats wrote:On June 24 2025 07:13 Mizenhauer wrote:On June 24 2025 01:59 PremoBeats wrote:On June 23 2025 23:45 ejozl wrote:
I'm interested about efficiency for the longer career players if they're not punished by their long careers. Say, if you took rogue, serral, maru and inno and looked at their best period of a scope that's as long as life's scope. It's not entirely fair because life literally starts out his career royal roading, which the other players didn't, but would they be able to eclipse life in his best catagory? Efficiency in winning tournaments or in achieving tournament score? The problem is if you look at roughly 3 years (Life's career span), player 1 could have two phenomenal years, then one subpar year, followed by two phenomenal years and another subpar year, another two phenomenal years and one subpar year. Meaning 6 out of 9 phenomenal years. Player 2 could have had 3 consecutive phenomenal years followed by 6 subpar ones, meaning 3 out of 9. Looking only at 3 consecutive good years, player 2 will outperform, despite his overall career being less impressive. But as WombaT said: Serral outperforms here as well. Without looking perfectly at time spans, as I made the calculations on a yearly basis, these are the best results for 3 years for tournament win%: Serral - 2018-2020 (only non-locked): 37.30% - 2022-2024 (only non-locked): 52.62% Maru - 2018-2020: 25.18% - 2022-2024: 23.92% Rogue - 2017-2019: 22.75% INnoVation - 2015-2017: 34.09% Mvp - 2011-2013: 26.57% Rain - 2013-2015: 12.23% If we only look at Serral's prime years, he sits at a win rate of 38.10% from 2018-2024. His lifetime win rate is better than even 2 year time periods of any other player and only Maru, Rogue, INnoVation, Mvp and Life in 1 year are above Serral's 2018-2024 result. As I said in the article... in such a volatile game as SCII, this is absolutely insane. This is a poor argument. Other than Rogue and Maru (with a bit of Inno) all of these players played in tournaments the others didn't or played in said events when the format was different. Mvp played when GSLs were run almost monthly. Rain never got a chance to play with offline events with foreigners as good as serral, reynor etc. The Maru/Rogue/Inno/ Rain group never played in Code S during Mvp's era and Serral never played in Code S at all. There would need to be some heavy adjustments to get this metric to a reasonable point, but I tried to avoid that/stay away from subjective era based adjustments. I simply made it cause ejozl asked for it and it was kind of easy to collect the data from my set. In the original analysis I applied era-mulitpliers that seemed somewhat reasonable to me. I pointed out other flaws of this methodology too. This small analsyis shows something pretty clearly nevertheless: Serral is way ahead of other players from his time (Maru, Rogue and to a lesser degree the overlap with a pretty good but not prime INnoVation). We could only look at tournaments, where all of them played as well to make it even more precise, as you mentioned though. On June 24 2025 11:06 rwala wrote:
The original analysis had many flaws and this analysis reproduces most of them (though somewhat amusingly claims all the flaws were all addressed). The author tries to maintain a veneer of objectivity and neutrality, but the bias inevitably reveals itself, often without the author being aware that it does. You can read the section "was the prime era harder?" and learn pretty much all you need to know about the author's perspective. Real quick on the main flaws tho:
1) This is not a statistical analysis. I can't see the results of any regression, monte carlo simulation, or any other modeling technique. I don't see any p-values or analysis of statistical significance. If you're not a numbers person, do not be fooled by the author slapping the label "statistical evaluation" on this.
2) If this is not a statistical analysis, what is it? This is a heavily-biased calculation designed to demonstrate that the author's favorite player is the GOAT. The author will say that he bent over backwards to nerf Serral and he is still the GOAT by nearly 2X points in his extremely objective and neutral GOAT calculator. Don't believe it. It all comes down to the fact that that the author chose to include specific criteria and specific weightings for those criteria that were designed to crown Serral the GOAT. I think everyone knows this but it's worth making the implicit explicit.
3) Many people pointed out that the Serral = GOAT calculator rated Rogue ridiculously low so clearly something must be wrong. The author's responses are interestingly defensive in how they justify Rogue's low rating, but many of us told him this would happen once he started ranking multiple players with the calculator. It's worth noting that while the calculator diminished Rogue to such an unbelievably low ranking, it's actually worse than simply rating Rogue lower than a guy like Rain or at a third of Maru's GOAT ranking. If you ran this calculator on all pros I suspect Rogue may not even be in the top 10 or top 20 GOAT list. That's how flawed the calculator is. Very good chance of even more bizarre results tbh.
4) Even if this were a proper statistical analysis, statistics do not explain GOATs. If they did, Shane Battier might be the NBA GOAT (seriously, look into it), and Muhammed Ali could not be the boxing GOAT (his 5 losses are simply too high for any objective weighted calculation to accomodate).
This point about Shane Battier and Muhammed Ali is the most important point, abstracted as follows: math equations do not understand greatness. They will always "undervalue" a player like Rogue in any GOAT convo because it does not know how to evaluate, for example, Rogue's jaw-dropping offline Bo7 grand finals performance record, which is among the greatest achievements in the history of e-sports. And they will always overvalue efficient and effective players that nonetheless seem to lack some of the incalculable qualities of greatness such as being clutch, resilient, or a great ambassador or leader for the game. Or even simply being lucky enough to be the right person, in the right place, at the right time to make history. With players like this, even when they seem to get lucky, it feels like a byproduct of their hard work.
Serral is indeed a great GOAT pick, just not for silly reasons like being high in Aligulac rankings for a long time. He's a great GOAT pick because he achieved what no one outside of South Korea was able to achieve, and is arguably the best player to ever play the game. At the same time, he simply never played in the most competitive tournaments and leagues, nor did he play in the most competitive era when over a thousand pros were spending 12+ hours a day trying to win premier tournaments and be the best player in the world. Lots of GOAT contenders achieved significant results in the toughest tournaments and in the competitive era, and if any of those guys are your GOAT, don't let any calculator say otherwise!
1. The term statistical analysis can mean a lot of things. In sports it simply refers to a structured evaluation of empirical data using numeric methods, not necessarily inferential statistics (Elo systems, composite indices like FIFA or ATP or even sabermetrics-derived rankins in baseball). Calling this analysis statistical is perfectly valid, as it is a descriptive, statistical framework, not a regression or simulation similar to Aligulac. It is about ordering based on performance data, not modeling outcomes. If you want a Monte Carlo simulation and significance levels you're looking for something different. I simply used statistical tools that seemed necessary (data collection and organization, analyzing, using normalization to a common 0-100 scale, interpreting). 2. Well. Where exactly do you see this suppossed bias or design tailored towards Serral? I am completely transparent with my methodology and even referenced external ideas like the ones from Miz' list. I laid out all weightings and calculations transparently, so you are free to criticize the exact ones, where it turned sour in your opinion. As a matter of fact, you made the same accusation in this very thread before (me not addressing past criticism). But I incorporated the critiques from last time: - Including Rain, Life, Mvp - Including team events - Including a complete analysis of the deterioration argument. I simply did not include your critique of "all statistical analyses are flawed", as I still think that these analyses are important. Well, I kind of did, as I explain in the article why I think my methodology is fine. Serral's scores have been lowered and the most impactful decisions I made were against him. If that's bias, it's an awfully stubborn one. 3. What about pointing out that Rogue was inconsistent is defensive? Wouldn't building a model to reward Bo7 offline GSLs do exactly what you accuse me of doing under #2? I even talked to Miz in this very thread and via DM and a quick reverse-engineering of his list made Rogue come much better (although Serral still is way in all different calculations and I still don't understand how he was a close 2nd in the first list and a close 1st after a couple of months and Mvp is below INnoVation in my attempt to reverse-engineer). The issue mostly was the weighting at the end, which I conceded many times was bad, as well as the era-multiplier, which Miz did not use. 4. Anecdotes and nostalgia are fine too. But as neither numbers tell the whole story, nor do such subjective takes. In my opinion, as I already said in this thread, subjective takes might shift a GOAT comparison where the end result is close. But no single SCII player has a "better story" than others and in my opinion no "story" can rival Serral's numbers. And I completely agree with your last sentence, as point 9 of my statistical evaluation made pretty clear... "Because different weightings yield different outcomes, it's possible to justify alternative GOATs - if one prioritizes specific metrics disproportionately. So if you value... … efficiency above all else, your GOAT is Life. … career duration and sheer persistence, your GOAT is Maru. … accomplishments in the prime era, your GOAT might be INnoVation. … winning GSLs (or your name is Artosis), your GOAT is Rogue. … any subjective skill, personal charisma, or emotional weight, your GOAT is whoever resonates with you the most." I'm not sure why this is so complicated to understand, it's pretty simple. My core point here is that every numerical model like this is inherently biased simply based on which criteria you decide to include, and what weights you decide to give those criteria. For example, your inclusion of Aligulac score at 20% weight (second only to tournament score) reveals an incredible bias for Serral, and in fact reproduces in an amplified manner some of the problems you claim to address such as only counting his performances against top players outside of Europe, etc. Do you dispute that based on your weighted calculation a guy like Rogue would likely not be in the top 10 or even top 20 if you were to run the calculation on all pros? I think it's important to be honest about this, because a single conclusion like this is much more revealing that the thousands of words of justification you put into defending your Serral = GOAT calculator. You created a calculator to justify giving a guy who never played in the most competitive era or most competitive tournaments or leagues nearly 2X the GOAT points as the next highest GOAT, all while claiming you were nerfing him. I'd be curious if you didn't "nerf Serral" how many GOAT points he'd get. 3X the next guy? 4X? 5X? Your existing model already has Serral at 5X GOATier than Rogue. Do you really think this is credible? I know what you're going to say because we've had this debate before. You'd like me to point out the specific flaws in your methodology. Candidly there are dozens and I don't really have time to explain them all especially when the one I offer here re: Aligulac has been offered many times before and was ignored. But the bigger point is that if your model doesn't pass the smell test, you need to go back to the drawing board and think about the possibility that you are making some major conceptual errors. The biggest one here is that you think computers can calculate greatness. You reduce my definition of greatness to "anecdotes and nostalgia" but this only further reveals a lack of understanding of greatness. Greatness is about doing what no one thought was possible, overcoming insurmountable odds, facing the fiercest possible competition and finding a way to win, and marking your place in history. Numbers and stats can inform this, but they simply cannot calculate it, because the exercise requires subtle human judgements that are admittedly just as biased as a calculator. Beyond the Mouhammed Ali and Shane Battier examples, here's one that might be more relatable to you. Flash. Clearly the BW GOAT, most would agree. A calculator could be created to demonstrate this, I'm sure. But you know what it would leave out? His top 4 Random ASL run. This might be the greatest thing any gamer has ever accomplished but in any event it's certainly in the pantheon of greatest gamer moments in e-sports history. Calculators simply cannot understand these things. I did not agree with every one of Miz's placements on his GOAT list, but the reason it was so enjoyable to me is that it was full of story and really captured the arcs of history and greatest moments of this e-sport in narrative format. It's not that he didn't utilize numbers and stats, it's just that he placed them in their appropriate supporting context of a human understanding of greatness. The best example of this is SOS. This was my favorite article because although Miz himself acknowledged that his inclusion in the top 10 was an anomaly from a pure numbers perspective, it was nonetheless 100% justified when you understand what SOS accomplished and brought to the game. Absolute legend, and definitely a GOAT, and you can only understand this by carefully analyzing the subtleties of SCII as an e-sport and SOS's place in that story arc. I assume SOS would place very, very low in your calculator list, maybe not even in the top 40, which is fine. But maybe thinking about some of these examples might help broaden your understanding of what a GOAT is. In what sport does the following not get annointed the GOAT? Most tournament wins, highest conversion rate of entry to wins. Highest average placement. Top of ELO rankings for forever, highest match win percentage, winning record against basically every contemporary. For, at this stage a span that’s basically over half of the entirety of the game’s existence. Serral isn’t lacking in intangibles either. He’s just some Finnish bloke doing his own thing and he didn’t only get to the level of hanging with Kespa graduates, but clearly surpassed them. Serral doesn't have the most tournament wins though. If you regard all tournaments without any exclusions probably some online cup hero like Clem has the most. Now you will probably say you meant only offline tournaments or only liquipedia premier tournaments, to which I answer that region-locked events that aren't open to everyone shouldn't count in this, which would make Maru have the most tournament wins. Serral only has the most tournament wins if you draw a very specific line which includes region-locked events but excludes online-cups. Which is fine I guess, but it's too specific and arbitrary for me to support the statement "Serral has the most tournament wins"
He has more wins in open international events that are considered S-tier, to the extent if you entirely exclude foreign/EU Premiers he’s still pretty neck and neck with Maru overall.
He does lose out, if we make that exclusion, and we don’t consider Code S a soft-locked tournament that’s also lacking some big hitters in recent years.
Although personally I wouldn’t count Maru’s Code S titles minus the best player in the world at 100% while counting Serral’s regionals at zero. Especially since Clem joined the party.
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EPT
