|
On October 29 2025 22:23 rwala wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2025 21:44 Admiral Yang wrote:Serral dominated in an era with ~1/10th the active pro player base, tournaments with a couple dozen competitors, against a handful of title contenders, in tournaments with much easier paths to qualification and victory, against an aging, retiring, and increasingly injured player base that didn't include most previous title contenders, with almost no new talent to challenge him (other than Clem, who has been dominating him recently). I'm not sure why you think Mvp was "forced" out of the top because he couldn't hang. It's well-known that his injuries forced his early retirement. I'm also not sure why you think beating "many of the same players" who were dominant in an earlier era is a substitute for actually dominating in an earlier era. Clem 5-0'ed Serral and has been dominating him ever since. This is not a substitute for Clem showing tournament results and achievements, and it also doesn't take away from Serral's results and achievements. Serral dominated the field of new talent that had supplanted and replaced the old guard, though. And while his subsequent longevity has certainly been helped by the lack of influx of new blood, when he broke out in 2018, and was already the best player in the world, there was plenty of competition, at a much higher level than what MVP had to play. I am not going to give MVP handicap points for leaving for injury, unlike, say, DRG and Classic, his exact contemporaries, who stuck around to see where their skill ceiling was. If anything, Classic has the more impressive career there. TLDR: The first movers did not have the most competitive environment. If anything, they had it easier. You can see this in how few of them stuck around into HotS. No one is asking you to give Mvp handicap points for his injuries, but I think it's fair to ask you to be accurate. He was not forced out by stiffer competition, but rather because of his injuries. Are you disputing this? No one is evaluating Mvp on hypothetical results that he might have achieved had he not retired early. This convo tends to have a "pre- versus post-2018" vibe to it, but I probably wouldn't lump all those earlier pre-2018 eras into one in terms of level of competition. I think you're making the same conceptual mistake re: absolute versus relative skill that others are making here when you say Serral was facing "much higher" levels of competition in 2018 than in earlier eras. Again, this logic is not used in evaluating levels of competition in literally any other game or sport (if you can name one, I'll be quite surprised). There's a really easy way to understand this via a stylized hypo. Say in 2029 Serral and Classic are the only two remaining full-time SC2 pros and say they are playing at a "higher level" than any pro players before them due to continued skill improvements over time. And say we arrange 25 world championship matches with huge prize pools. Classic wins them all. Is Classic your GOAT? I assume not. But once you concede that he is not, the rest of your argument unravels.
Even without injuries mvp wouldn’t have achieved much
His basic fundamentals were not that impressivr. Sure he played in an era with the most “competition” , but let’s be honest majority of them were low skilled players at best current diamond league.
He lucked out playing during WOL when the game was fresh and when terran was heavily imba and majority of the maps were terran favoured.
No one is going to convince anyone that mvp would have be just as good as current Clem mechanically if he wasn’t injured. MVP probably have at best can only do half what Clem does ( and that’s being generous)
|
On October 29 2025 23:17 PremoBeats wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2025 21:57 rwala wrote:On October 29 2025 15:40 PremoBeats wrote:On October 27 2025 22:28 rwala wrote:On October 27 2025 02:07 PremoBeats wrote:On October 27 2025 01:03 rwala wrote:
especially if he was fighting through the brutal KIL tournament formats and KR region nerf for world championship qualification. Wasn't it you who said that it isn't a nerf/buff when things are done to be equaled out or to approximate a "perfect" modifier, which this exact rule was meant to do? So how can you call this a nerf? It is not so hard to imagine that players like Soulkey or Rain or Mvp or Byun or SOS or Zest or Soo or Taeja or Life or Dream or Flash or Jaedong or whoever in their prime posing major problems for Serral if he was battling for results
Well, if Mvp is your GOAT, he faces an even harder "challenge" than the one you are pointing out for Serral. As I wrote before, Mvp is most likely the GOAT contender who played the least against other GOAT contenders. So, do the same arguments that you throw at Serral also apply to Mvp? If so, how can he be your GOAT? If not, why? Can you make some arguments why you are inconsistent in applying your metrics? See, this is my issue with you... it seems like you throw out unfounded accusations or proclaim arguments, but you rarely follow them through as an argument as well as coherently in applying logic. It happened again in this very thread. You misquote others, you put words in their mouth and you make claims without backing them up. So far, I am still waiting for you to write at least one thing about your notion that Maru had "many stints pre-2018" where he was supposedly the best. I am further waiting for you to prove the unfounded accusation that I said that "proleague doesn’t matter at all".
But to assume that he would have
Who here does?? Stop having arguments in your head. The only thing that was being said is that it would statistically be reasonable to assume that he would have been the best player if all players gathered in their prime. Not that he would have been equally dominant.
I don’t agree with Miz on everything he writes but the central theory of his GOAT analysis avoids the pitfalls of a lot of these heuristics and biases by not trying to diminish the more competitive earlier eras of the game just to justify crowning his preferred players.
Do you accuse anyone in particular when you talk about people justify crowning their preferred player? Are you even aware that there is no more transparent list out there than mine, as I demonstrated every little detail of how I arrived at each and every number, without obfuscating, for all of you guys to double check? I don’t apply metrics because I don’t invent math equations to crown my preferred candidate the GOAT. Mvp won the most competitive tournaments against the most competitive pools during the most competitive eras in the most competitive region. As Artosis said, you should be able to make your argument clearly, simply, and succinctly. When you can’t, you’re probably confused and likely seeking to confuse others. Just change the word "metric" with the word "logic": Well, if Mvp is your GOAT, he faces an even harder "challenge" than the one you are pointing out for Serral. As I wrote before, Mvp is most likely the GOAT contender who played the least against other GOAT contenders. So, do the same arguments that you throw at Serral also apply to Mvp? If so, how can he be your GOAT? If not, why? Can you make some arguments why you are inconsistent in applying your LOGIC? As you didn't answer these: 1. You said in another thread that it doesn't make sense to call it a buff for Koreans/nerf for Serral when one discounts region locks, as that is a means to simply level the playing field and thus more an "equalizer" than a buff/ nerf. I agreed. But why do you now call region locks a nerf for Koreans? Again, this shows how you change wording/framing depending on your acute need, not on a set of principles or based on consistent logic. 2. I am further waiting for you to prove your unfounded accusation that I said that "proleague doesn’t matter at all". 3. As you wrote: "I am not saying Serral would not have been equally dominant in earlier, more competitive eras and tournaments and regions. But to assume that he would have... ". Who assumed he would have? Which user here made this assumption that you are arguing against? So according to you, Mvp won in the most competitive era? You think the most competitive era in SC2 was from its beginning up to 2012? Correct? The chess comparison is off on so many accounts (a world champion being the defender, thus making it much easier to get back-to-back streaks) and Serral also fulfills achievements that were listed, hence I will not address all of them one by one. To be honest, you kind of remind me of Don Quixote. In your replies you lament about things no one said or argue against issues no one raised. It seems to me that you are fighting wind mills in your head, rather than actually engaging with the other side. No one said that Serral would be equally dominant had he played in 2012-2016. No one said that Proleague doesn’t matter in GOAT-discussions. In the meantime you wrote that it would be fair to say that Maru was the best in the world when he won a KIL. Then following that logic: Wasn’t Serral the best more than any other player - including Maru - for the most stints than any other player when he won tournaments, including all the best players of the world - not only Korans - with win rates that no one thought to be possible? If no, are you able to explain why? On October 28 2025 18:12 Argonauta wrote:
Biggest reason why Rotti and most of SC2 commentators call Serral the goat is because they want this esport to keep going so they need to spin this narrative to try to make the game appealing, they really don't care about being objective or recall past glories. Or perhaps because he is the GOAT based on all statistics, including regression models that let us compare contenders even cross-era? On October 28 2025 18:19 Charoisaur wrote:On October 28 2025 12:23 rwala wrote:On October 27 2025 23:12 Admiral Yang wrote:Mvp won the most competitive tournaments against the most competitive pools during the most competitive eras in the most competitive region What is this claim based on? Surely the subsequent eras were much more competitive, given that the players who had dominated previously weren't good enough to continue dominating. This is is a really fair question actually, and I think where a lot of the “modernists” slip. The first thing to say is that no one—including Serral, the most dominant player—has dominated SC2 on the level of a Magnus Carlsen in Chess (#1 player in all formats for a decade, consensus favorite to win every tournament, undisputed best player for over a decade, highest ELO ever, longest streak without a loss, 9 consecutive super tournament victories, 17 world championship titles, etc.). Carlsen’s dominance is actually a study in contrast to Serral’s. Unlike Serral, whose dominance came as the game and level of competition was declining due to retirements, injuries, and lack of new talent, Carlsen’s dominance maintains to this day as the level of competition at the super GM level grows at a faster rate than ever before in Chess’s history. Just in the last few years we have the youngest GM ever, the youngest player to reach 2800 ELO, and the youngest world champion. 4 of the top 10 players are under the age of 23. SC2 hasn’t had anything remotely like a young prodigy since Clem in broke out in 2019/2020. Chess has more and more Clems every year. The thing is that in the earlier years, SC2 was like this, and that’s fundamentally what I mean when I say the level of competition was higher. Making it to the top of a field of hundreds of active pros practicing non-stop to navigate an endlessly evolving and shifting ecosystem of metas and strategies is a different thing than maintaining your dominance over an increasingly dwindling pool of a couple of dozen pros, most of whom are diminished at least somewhat in their speed or skill execution due to age or injury (older chess players struggle with blitz and especially bullet formats as well). I think sometimes people forget (or maybe didn’t even know), that in prior eras of SC2 GSL, SSL and other KILs there were hundreds of players from all around the world competing in various qualification tournaments for a chance at a main tournament group stage for a chance at a second group stage for a chance to make the tournament bracket for a chance at the title. Other than like the World Series of Poker main event or like the Olympics, which are insane, I honestly cannot think of a level of competition in tournament play that’s more intense than this (I’m sure there are some other examples, just struggling to think of them off the top). So it’s not surprising that there weren’t any really dominant players during these earlier eras, other than maybe Mvp. If you follow other sports or games like chess that are growing rather than declining, it’s just bizarre to see these SC2 fans claim that the game got more competitive over time. The justification that’s sometimes offered is that absolute skill levels have improved (everyone now is better than before). But this has nothing to do with the level of competition. If anything, as the game gets figured out and metas settle, execution becomes much more important than strategy and tactics, which diminishes the rate at which less skilled pros can upset higher skilled pros. In earlier eras, rank 50 players upset top 10 players regularly. These days Serral and Clem are posting like 80-90% win rates in certain matchups and could probably beat rank 50 players easily with a Uthermal troll build. Anyways, the TLDR is that other than Serral, I don’t think SC2 has really ever had a truly dominant player compared to some other games and sports, and while Serral’s dominance is ridiculously impressive, it’s certainly in part a product of a diminished level of competition. This isn’t to take anything away from Serral, who I think is the “best” player to ever play the game. Yeah the skill level argument isn't a good one, mainly because the skill level rising is due to the combined effort of all players playing since then, and not Serral or Clem's sole credit. It's like in swimming where techniques are constantly evolving and thus michael phelps isn't holding a single world record anymore, but still what he did back then was more impressive than what swimmers are doing today. But it still is... higher, no? And some players were not able to keep up with the new influence. Do we seriously believe that all the prime players simply lost their combined skill in 2018, so that Serral can defeat them with win rates of over 85%? While they still delivered against other foreigners or other Koreans? Why is it so hard to accept that one player simply is above the others? And these others were the best of the prime era. And can you elaborate why you think (honest question) what Phelps did is more impressive than what swimmers do today? Is it because he dominated his competition much more than any other swimmer? On October 29 2025 05:18 Charoisaur wrote:
Maru never was the best in HotS, however I don't think that's the gotcha some people think it is considering how competitive the era back then was, and the only players who really had a period during that time where they were considered the best are Inno, Zest and Life, and even for them it only was a very short period.
Imo being top 5 in that era is probably a bigger feat than being #1 in the modern era (in terms of how many S tier players you have to be able to regularly beat, etc.).
After that he was definitely considered the best during 2018 and in late 2021 when he won all the online tournaments with his lategame-style In my opinion (and as far as I remember for many others as well), Serral's 2018 made him at least equal if not better than Maru, especially because of the WC. We have years in which there is a more or less similar distribution of different names as winners of tournaments post-2018, despite the fact that there were a lot less tournaments, which from my perspective means, that 1st place was sufficiently fought for. I argued based on Monte Carlo simulations in the other thread, that it would be harder for player X, who is ahead of the curve, to win a tournament in the modern era, as there, you would have to beat prime Serral and prime Maru who have higher win rates than anything what came before. Meaning you have a skill level you didn't have to fight before. It seems to me, that people always argue from Serral's perspective, which is - at least in my opinion - not the correct approach. It can be helpful to see when looking at certain player achievements to determine - for example - that Serral never won in the most competitive time but I fail to see why it wouldn't account for anything that he played these exact players and other players in better versions than their selfs from 2012-2016 and still beat them with unprecedented results. Brother, you need to spend more than 1 second trying to understand the chess analogy. Notice how Magnus's 5 classical WCs are only part his case for dominance and GOATyness, and Magnus himself doesn't think it's the most competitive competition (which is why he's basically inventing a new world championship circuit). You could learn from Magnus in this regard! I included his 5 classical word championships among his 17 world championships, sure, but this is not why he is so dominant or the GOAT. It's also ironic how you make excuses for Serral's region-lock qualification buffs to get into premier and world championship tournaments, but all of a sudden have major issues with FIDE's classic world championship tournament format. In any event, I (and Magnus) agree with you about the FIDE WC tournament format for sure, and I've also explained why I have issues with the SC2 region-lock qualification process for WC and premier tourneys. This is what it means to be consistent. Try it out  I really encourage you to engage deeply with the chess analogy because it will help you understand what a GOAT looks like, which really should be the first step. And by engaging deeply I don't mean crashing out and writing 10K words with every random argument against it. I mean putting your biases to the side and just sitting down and thinking. Try not to let yourself get triggered or become defensive of your model. Ask yourself simple questions like what can I learn about GOATs knowing that a player can maintain dominance in a growing and increasingly competitive 1v1 strategy game, across all game and tournament formats, when there are like 5 new Clems that emerge every year? If you reversed the chess timeline--meaning if time went backwards in the history of the game of chess--Serral is in many ways like Bobby Fisher (many people's chess GOAT). See if you can understand why! If you've done the deep thinking I'm recommending, you should be able to I don't need to spend even one second for analogies that don't apply. Especially not on the GOAT as in that regard many sports differ by insane amounts. Where did I make excuses for Serral's region lock qualification buffs? So you think that Serral should get a penalty for getting into tournaments through supposed easier qualifiers? Is that correct? Thinking about a penalty for a player, simply because they hail from a region with an easier qualifier in a GOAT discussion is... I don't know... are you seriously under the assumption that Serral of all players wouldn't have qualified for the tournaments he subsequently won, if he played the qualifier in a different region? Is that your argument? Just to compare that to the Candidates: The top 8 of the world duke it out in a knockout style tournament and one of them is able to challenge the defender. These are utterly different mechanisms. So to sum it up: You think Maru winning 2 KILs and having a couple of good days in Proleague is a proof to the claim that he had many stints where he was the best pre 2018, right? Why is that important to you? And you don't have any proof of me thinking/saying that Proleague doesn't matter at all? Any response to the question to whom you replied when talking about Serral's supposed dominance in the prime era? You can stop the condescending attitude, as long as you aren't able to answer pretty straightforward easy to answer questions. It's not like you've got some deep, hidden understanding about chess that I am unable to grasp and which leads to being an epiphany why Serral can't be the GOAT. Until you apply the same logic of criticism to your contender, there is simply no consistency. And to even compare the Candidates to a European qualifier, where Serral still had to play in a group stage and the whole knockout brackets of the actual World Championship is simply delusional. My position applies the same logic to every players - yours shifts depending on who you attack/cheer for.
I can’t tell if you’re trolling or not but are you really saying winning a European qualifier in SC2 is harder than winning the Candidates in chess? You really should keep offering your opinions on these matters. It’s helping you greatly in your quest to appear objective and reasonable. I’m not sure why you think you can’t learn anything from the most competitive 1v1 tournament strategy game in history, which also happens to now be an e-sport.
Serral can be the GOAT and is a great GOAT pick and most people’s GOAT pick as far as I can tell. But not because you decided he was and then created a calculator to prove it. A lot of us spent more time than we care to pointing out all the flaws and I appreciate that you admitted to many of your mistakes and the issues with outsourcing your weightings to ChatGPT, etc. I’m not really interested in engaging with your model any further until you’re open to thinking through some basic GOAT concepts firsts.
|
On October 30 2025 00:55 Admiral Yang wrote:Show nested quote +No one is asking you to give Mvp handicap points for his injuries, but I think it's fair to ask you to be accurate. He was not forced out by stiffer competition, but rather because of his injuries. Are you disputing this? No one is evaluating Mvp on hypothetical results that he might have achieved had he not retired early.
This convo tends to have a "pre- versus post-2018" vibe to it, but I probably wouldn't lump all those earlier pre-2018 eras into one in terms of level of competition. I think you're making the same conceptual mistake re: absolute versus relative skill that others are making here when you say Serral was facing "much higher" levels of competition in 2018 than in earlier eras. Again, this logic is not used in evaluating levels of competition in literally any other game or sport (if you can name one, I'll be quite surprised).
There's a really easy way to understand this via a stylized hypo. Say in 2029 Serral and Classic are the only two remaining full-time SC2 pros and say they are playing at a "higher level" than any pro players before them due to continued skill improvements over time. And say we arrange 25 world championship matches with huge prize pools. Classic wins them all. Is Classic your GOAT? I assume not. But once you concede that he is not, the rest of your argument unravels. This logic only really applies if MVP or anyone else from his era had simply been too old to compete from 2018 onwards. They weren't. Plenty of them are still around. The fact that out of all the players from that era, the only one still in contention is Classic demonstrably proves that the skill level was much lower. Putting those players on the pedestal I'm seeing here reeks of nostalgia goggles. They weren't good enough to stick around.
In other words you won’t engage the hypo because it would force you to concede the point.
|
In other words you won’t engage the hypo because it would force you to concede the point.
I prefer not to engage these hypotheticals, because, much like the sports analogies, they seem like a way for people to reduce the parameters of a debate to a narrow scope where they think they are ahead. Inevitably, what happens is that you end up debating the validity of the hypothetical, much like the useless debates we are seeing in this thread over the validity of increasingly contrived chess analogies. It's simply bad argumentation and poor reasoning. You are substituting what did happen, the current pros are the last men standing because they were simply the best - a strong buff to their GOAT claim, with some bizarre headcanon where the previous GOAT candidates are all 60 years old and simply couldn't continue because you can't be an SCII pro with gout.
|
On October 30 2025 11:04 rwala wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2025 23:17 PremoBeats wrote:On October 29 2025 21:57 rwala wrote:On October 29 2025 15:40 PremoBeats wrote:On October 27 2025 22:28 rwala wrote:On October 27 2025 02:07 PremoBeats wrote:On October 27 2025 01:03 rwala wrote:
especially if he was fighting through the brutal KIL tournament formats and KR region nerf for world championship qualification. Wasn't it you who said that it isn't a nerf/buff when things are done to be equaled out or to approximate a "perfect" modifier, which this exact rule was meant to do? So how can you call this a nerf? It is not so hard to imagine that players like Soulkey or Rain or Mvp or Byun or SOS or Zest or Soo or Taeja or Life or Dream or Flash or Jaedong or whoever in their prime posing major problems for Serral if he was battling for results
Well, if Mvp is your GOAT, he faces an even harder "challenge" than the one you are pointing out for Serral. As I wrote before, Mvp is most likely the GOAT contender who played the least against other GOAT contenders. So, do the same arguments that you throw at Serral also apply to Mvp? If so, how can he be your GOAT? If not, why? Can you make some arguments why you are inconsistent in applying your metrics? See, this is my issue with you... it seems like you throw out unfounded accusations or proclaim arguments, but you rarely follow them through as an argument as well as coherently in applying logic. It happened again in this very thread. You misquote others, you put words in their mouth and you make claims without backing them up. So far, I am still waiting for you to write at least one thing about your notion that Maru had "many stints pre-2018" where he was supposedly the best. I am further waiting for you to prove the unfounded accusation that I said that "proleague doesn’t matter at all".
But to assume that he would have
Who here does?? Stop having arguments in your head. The only thing that was being said is that it would statistically be reasonable to assume that he would have been the best player if all players gathered in their prime. Not that he would have been equally dominant.
I don’t agree with Miz on everything he writes but the central theory of his GOAT analysis avoids the pitfalls of a lot of these heuristics and biases by not trying to diminish the more competitive earlier eras of the game just to justify crowning his preferred players.
Do you accuse anyone in particular when you talk about people justify crowning their preferred player? Are you even aware that there is no more transparent list out there than mine, as I demonstrated every little detail of how I arrived at each and every number, without obfuscating, for all of you guys to double check? I don’t apply metrics because I don’t invent math equations to crown my preferred candidate the GOAT. Mvp won the most competitive tournaments against the most competitive pools during the most competitive eras in the most competitive region. As Artosis said, you should be able to make your argument clearly, simply, and succinctly. When you can’t, you’re probably confused and likely seeking to confuse others. Just change the word "metric" with the word "logic": Well, if Mvp is your GOAT, he faces an even harder "challenge" than the one you are pointing out for Serral. As I wrote before, Mvp is most likely the GOAT contender who played the least against other GOAT contenders. So, do the same arguments that you throw at Serral also apply to Mvp? If so, how can he be your GOAT? If not, why? Can you make some arguments why you are inconsistent in applying your LOGIC? As you didn't answer these: 1. You said in another thread that it doesn't make sense to call it a buff for Koreans/nerf for Serral when one discounts region locks, as that is a means to simply level the playing field and thus more an "equalizer" than a buff/ nerf. I agreed. But why do you now call region locks a nerf for Koreans? Again, this shows how you change wording/framing depending on your acute need, not on a set of principles or based on consistent logic. 2. I am further waiting for you to prove your unfounded accusation that I said that "proleague doesn’t matter at all". 3. As you wrote: "I am not saying Serral would not have been equally dominant in earlier, more competitive eras and tournaments and regions. But to assume that he would have... ". Who assumed he would have? Which user here made this assumption that you are arguing against? So according to you, Mvp won in the most competitive era? You think the most competitive era in SC2 was from its beginning up to 2012? Correct? The chess comparison is off on so many accounts (a world champion being the defender, thus making it much easier to get back-to-back streaks) and Serral also fulfills achievements that were listed, hence I will not address all of them one by one. To be honest, you kind of remind me of Don Quixote. In your replies you lament about things no one said or argue against issues no one raised. It seems to me that you are fighting wind mills in your head, rather than actually engaging with the other side. No one said that Serral would be equally dominant had he played in 2012-2016. No one said that Proleague doesn’t matter in GOAT-discussions. In the meantime you wrote that it would be fair to say that Maru was the best in the world when he won a KIL. Then following that logic: Wasn’t Serral the best more than any other player - including Maru - for the most stints than any other player when he won tournaments, including all the best players of the world - not only Korans - with win rates that no one thought to be possible? If no, are you able to explain why? On October 28 2025 18:12 Argonauta wrote:
Biggest reason why Rotti and most of SC2 commentators call Serral the goat is because they want this esport to keep going so they need to spin this narrative to try to make the game appealing, they really don't care about being objective or recall past glories. Or perhaps because he is the GOAT based on all statistics, including regression models that let us compare contenders even cross-era? On October 28 2025 18:19 Charoisaur wrote:On October 28 2025 12:23 rwala wrote:On October 27 2025 23:12 Admiral Yang wrote:Mvp won the most competitive tournaments against the most competitive pools during the most competitive eras in the most competitive region What is this claim based on? Surely the subsequent eras were much more competitive, given that the players who had dominated previously weren't good enough to continue dominating. This is is a really fair question actually, and I think where a lot of the “modernists” slip. The first thing to say is that no one—including Serral, the most dominant player—has dominated SC2 on the level of a Magnus Carlsen in Chess (#1 player in all formats for a decade, consensus favorite to win every tournament, undisputed best player for over a decade, highest ELO ever, longest streak without a loss, 9 consecutive super tournament victories, 17 world championship titles, etc.). Carlsen’s dominance is actually a study in contrast to Serral’s. Unlike Serral, whose dominance came as the game and level of competition was declining due to retirements, injuries, and lack of new talent, Carlsen’s dominance maintains to this day as the level of competition at the super GM level grows at a faster rate than ever before in Chess’s history. Just in the last few years we have the youngest GM ever, the youngest player to reach 2800 ELO, and the youngest world champion. 4 of the top 10 players are under the age of 23. SC2 hasn’t had anything remotely like a young prodigy since Clem in broke out in 2019/2020. Chess has more and more Clems every year. The thing is that in the earlier years, SC2 was like this, and that’s fundamentally what I mean when I say the level of competition was higher. Making it to the top of a field of hundreds of active pros practicing non-stop to navigate an endlessly evolving and shifting ecosystem of metas and strategies is a different thing than maintaining your dominance over an increasingly dwindling pool of a couple of dozen pros, most of whom are diminished at least somewhat in their speed or skill execution due to age or injury (older chess players struggle with blitz and especially bullet formats as well). I think sometimes people forget (or maybe didn’t even know), that in prior eras of SC2 GSL, SSL and other KILs there were hundreds of players from all around the world competing in various qualification tournaments for a chance at a main tournament group stage for a chance at a second group stage for a chance to make the tournament bracket for a chance at the title. Other than like the World Series of Poker main event or like the Olympics, which are insane, I honestly cannot think of a level of competition in tournament play that’s more intense than this (I’m sure there are some other examples, just struggling to think of them off the top). So it’s not surprising that there weren’t any really dominant players during these earlier eras, other than maybe Mvp. If you follow other sports or games like chess that are growing rather than declining, it’s just bizarre to see these SC2 fans claim that the game got more competitive over time. The justification that’s sometimes offered is that absolute skill levels have improved (everyone now is better than before). But this has nothing to do with the level of competition. If anything, as the game gets figured out and metas settle, execution becomes much more important than strategy and tactics, which diminishes the rate at which less skilled pros can upset higher skilled pros. In earlier eras, rank 50 players upset top 10 players regularly. These days Serral and Clem are posting like 80-90% win rates in certain matchups and could probably beat rank 50 players easily with a Uthermal troll build. Anyways, the TLDR is that other than Serral, I don’t think SC2 has really ever had a truly dominant player compared to some other games and sports, and while Serral’s dominance is ridiculously impressive, it’s certainly in part a product of a diminished level of competition. This isn’t to take anything away from Serral, who I think is the “best” player to ever play the game. Yeah the skill level argument isn't a good one, mainly because the skill level rising is due to the combined effort of all players playing since then, and not Serral or Clem's sole credit. It's like in swimming where techniques are constantly evolving and thus michael phelps isn't holding a single world record anymore, but still what he did back then was more impressive than what swimmers are doing today. But it still is... higher, no? And some players were not able to keep up with the new influence. Do we seriously believe that all the prime players simply lost their combined skill in 2018, so that Serral can defeat them with win rates of over 85%? While they still delivered against other foreigners or other Koreans? Why is it so hard to accept that one player simply is above the others? And these others were the best of the prime era. And can you elaborate why you think (honest question) what Phelps did is more impressive than what swimmers do today? Is it because he dominated his competition much more than any other swimmer? On October 29 2025 05:18 Charoisaur wrote:
Maru never was the best in HotS, however I don't think that's the gotcha some people think it is considering how competitive the era back then was, and the only players who really had a period during that time where they were considered the best are Inno, Zest and Life, and even for them it only was a very short period.
Imo being top 5 in that era is probably a bigger feat than being #1 in the modern era (in terms of how many S tier players you have to be able to regularly beat, etc.).
After that he was definitely considered the best during 2018 and in late 2021 when he won all the online tournaments with his lategame-style In my opinion (and as far as I remember for many others as well), Serral's 2018 made him at least equal if not better than Maru, especially because of the WC. We have years in which there is a more or less similar distribution of different names as winners of tournaments post-2018, despite the fact that there were a lot less tournaments, which from my perspective means, that 1st place was sufficiently fought for. I argued based on Monte Carlo simulations in the other thread, that it would be harder for player X, who is ahead of the curve, to win a tournament in the modern era, as there, you would have to beat prime Serral and prime Maru who have higher win rates than anything what came before. Meaning you have a skill level you didn't have to fight before. It seems to me, that people always argue from Serral's perspective, which is - at least in my opinion - not the correct approach. It can be helpful to see when looking at certain player achievements to determine - for example - that Serral never won in the most competitive time but I fail to see why it wouldn't account for anything that he played these exact players and other players in better versions than their selfs from 2012-2016 and still beat them with unprecedented results. Brother, you need to spend more than 1 second trying to understand the chess analogy. Notice how Magnus's 5 classical WCs are only part his case for dominance and GOATyness, and Magnus himself doesn't think it's the most competitive competition (which is why he's basically inventing a new world championship circuit). You could learn from Magnus in this regard! I included his 5 classical word championships among his 17 world championships, sure, but this is not why he is so dominant or the GOAT. It's also ironic how you make excuses for Serral's region-lock qualification buffs to get into premier and world championship tournaments, but all of a sudden have major issues with FIDE's classic world championship tournament format. In any event, I (and Magnus) agree with you about the FIDE WC tournament format for sure, and I've also explained why I have issues with the SC2 region-lock qualification process for WC and premier tourneys. This is what it means to be consistent. Try it out I really encourage you to engage deeply with the chess analogy because it will help you understand what a GOAT looks like, which really should be the first step. And by engaging deeply I don't mean crashing out and writing 10K words with every random argument against it. I mean putting your biases to the side and just sitting down and thinking. Try not to let yourself get triggered or become defensive of your model. Ask yourself simple questions like what can I learn about GOATs knowing that a player can maintain dominance in a growing and increasingly competitive 1v1 strategy game, across all game and tournament formats, when there are like 5 new Clems that emerge every year? If you reversed the chess timeline--meaning if time went backwards in the history of the game of chess--Serral is in many ways like Bobby Fisher (many people's chess GOAT). See if you can understand why! If you've done the deep thinking I'm recommending, you should be able to I don't need to spend even one second for analogies that don't apply. Especially not on the GOAT as in that regard many sports differ by insane amounts. Where did I make excuses for Serral's region lock qualification buffs? So you think that Serral should get a penalty for getting into tournaments through supposed easier qualifiers? Is that correct? Thinking about a penalty for a player, simply because they hail from a region with an easier qualifier in a GOAT discussion is... I don't know... are you seriously under the assumption that Serral of all players wouldn't have qualified for the tournaments he subsequently won, if he played the qualifier in a different region? Is that your argument? Just to compare that to the Candidates: The top 8 of the world duke it out in a knockout style tournament and one of them is able to challenge the defender. These are utterly different mechanisms. So to sum it up: You think Maru winning 2 KILs and having a couple of good days in Proleague is a proof to the claim that he had many stints where he was the best pre 2018, right? Why is that important to you? And you don't have any proof of me thinking/saying that Proleague doesn't matter at all? Any response to the question to whom you replied when talking about Serral's supposed dominance in the prime era? You can stop the condescending attitude, as long as you aren't able to answer pretty straightforward easy to answer questions. It's not like you've got some deep, hidden understanding about chess that I am unable to grasp and which leads to being an epiphany why Serral can't be the GOAT. Until you apply the same logic of criticism to your contender, there is simply no consistency. And to even compare the Candidates to a European qualifier, where Serral still had to play in a group stage and the whole knockout brackets of the actual World Championship is simply delusional. My position applies the same logic to every players - yours shifts depending on who you attack/cheer for. I can’t tell if you’re trolling or not but are you really saying winning a European qualifier in SC2 is harder than winning the Candidates in chess? You really should keep offering your opinions on these matters. It’s helping you greatly in your quest to appear objective and reasonable. I’m not sure why you think you can’t learn anything from the most competitive 1v1 tournament strategy game in history, which also happens to now be an e-sport. Serral can be the GOAT and is a great GOAT pick and most people’s GOAT pick as far as I can tell. But not because you decided he was and then created a calculator to prove it. A lot of us spent more time than we care to pointing out all the flaws and I appreciate that you admitted to many of your mistakes and the issues with outsourcing your weightings to ChatGPT, etc. I’m not really interested in engaging with your model any further until you’re open to thinking through some basic GOAT concepts firsts.
It is not that I am trolling... it is you not being able to understand what I actually say. I never tried to make the point that winning the European SC2 qualifier is harder than the Candidates in chess. If you actually paid attention you'd notice that I wrote:
"analogies that don't apply"
"These are utterly different mechanisms"
My point is that a reigning Starcraft 2 world champion historically had to play through a qualifier, had to play through a group stage and had to reach the finals through at least 2, if not 3 knockout matches.
A reigning chess champion in contrast is seeded automatically into the finals. This makes defending the title overall a lot easier.
That is my claim.
Do you understand that claim?
If so: Do you agree or disagree?
If you disagree: why?
until you’re open to thinking through some basic GOAT concepts firsts.
Which concepts?
You so far presented one concept in this thread (something along the lines of Serral having not played some names from mostly Mvp's time, meaning a metric to look at which contender played whicht top dogs of SC2's greats) that is even worse fulfilled by the player that is your proclaimed GOAT (Mvp) than the one that you attack (Serral). So I ask again: How do you reconcile this rather obvious first check on your consistency/logic?
I mean, I am open to discuss this concept... but I would first need to understand your take on it, as it doesn't seem to make sense.
As you further are (since roughly half a dozen replies) ignoring follow-ups on actual words you put in my mouth (me supposedly saying that Proleague doesn't matter at all) and you don't answer when being pressed on which actual user made certain arguments you argue against (making it seem like you invent arguments in your head that no one actually is making), I can only conclude that you are not being honest in your approach to discussing this topic. At this point, not answering these, can't be seen as a slip up.
Another inconsistency would be you calling out my wording in the other thread when I named adjusting Serral's achievements a nerf, to which I agreed. But now you call the region lock a nerf to the Korean region. It is either or. Either we call adjustments a penalty/buff, although we simply want to level the playing field, or we don't and we simply call them adjustments to a "perfect" state/equilibrium. I don't really care (although in a logical sense I'd probably prefer the latter) which one it is, but there needs to be a consistent approach.
If you are done arguing with me that is fine. I find this exchange utterly unsatisfying as well, when main questions are not being answered, despite repeated reminders.
So I just want to point out that you haven't addressed the inherent logical disputes in your own argumentation.
If I am misrepresenting or misunderstanding you, please point out where the actual misunderstanding is located.
|
I'm not sure current players are even better than back then, I mean in terms of they having spent 6-8 years in the game, yes.
But are top players putting more effort in on a daily basis than back then, no. Are they better strategically, mentally, mechanically?, I mean yes mechanically, but only in certain areas, 'disregarding the areas they are weaker, and it's only 4-5 players we're talking about, is that even comparable at all?
Give back mma his passion, dedication and youth, and 6-8 years and he would not be weaker than anyone.
You can only win this with a hypothetical where the two timelines are not allowed to mix and influence each other. Yes, serral could win in hots with hindsight, and life would be mechanically weaker with only 4 years of play, but let young life have time to catch up, same amount of play time, or remove that playtime from serral and it's another game.
Old man mvp was 21, sharp top 3 in the world herO is 10 years past his peak.
|
Northern Ireland25960 Posts
On October 31 2025 00:15 ejozl wrote:
I'm not sure current players are even better than back then, I mean in terms of they having spent 6-8 years in the game, yes.
But are top players putting more effort in on a daily basis than back then, no. Are they better strategically, mentally, mechanically?, I mean yes mechanically, but only in certain areas, 'disregarding the areas they are weaker, and it's only 4-5 players we're talking about, is that even comparable at all?
Give back mma his passion, dedication and youth, and 6-8 years and he would not be weaker than anyone.
You can only win this with a hypothetical where the two timelines are not allowed to mix and influence each other. Yes, serral could win in hots with hindsight, and life would be mechanically weaker with only 4 years of play, but let young life have time to catch up, same amount of play time, or remove that playtime from serral and it's another game.
Old man mvp was 21, sharp top 3 in the world herO is 10 years past his peak.
But MMA had that opportunity and couldn’t keep up eventually? It’s not even a hypothetical. I mean it’s just what happened. Guys like MC remained dangerous but dropped off being elite.
Passion and dedication is what separates the great from the good, and the GOATs from the great. You can’t just go ‘ok x player didn’t have the burning motivation, but let’s assume they did’. It’s a huge part of the equation
It’s not as competitive now, sure. But Serral and Maru have been at the top of the game for basically half its life, or longer as in the case of Maru. Some of the old legends only really managed that for a few years and then fell off.
Mvp and Taeja IMO could have remained elite players but for injury, which is obviously unfortunate for them.
Voldemort definitely could have, obviously. Although I’d contend that his willingness to do what he did maybe showcased that his motivation was already waning.
Most the rest just got surpassed by superior players and couldn’t keep up, and it’s a feedback loop really.
A player like Serral stands on the shoulders of giants, he obviously hasn’t figured out the whole game himself, he’s leaning on what went before.
On the flipside if Serral raises the bar, you can also copy what he’s doing. But few can do that.
|
the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked after 1,321,958 pages of heated debate,
|
On October 31 2025 23:36 Telephone wrote:
the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked after 1,321,958 pages of heated debate,
I wish the mods would lock every thread that devolves into the same GOAT arguments we've seen 1000 times before.
printf is the GOAT.
Who else has done so much with so little?
|
On October 30 2025 11:00 TeamMamba wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2025 22:23 rwala wrote:On October 29 2025 21:44 Admiral Yang wrote:Serral dominated in an era with ~1/10th the active pro player base, tournaments with a couple dozen competitors, against a handful of title contenders, in tournaments with much easier paths to qualification and victory, against an aging, retiring, and increasingly injured player base that didn't include most previous title contenders, with almost no new talent to challenge him (other than Clem, who has been dominating him recently). I'm not sure why you think Mvp was "forced" out of the top because he couldn't hang. It's well-known that his injuries forced his early retirement. I'm also not sure why you think beating "many of the same players" who were dominant in an earlier era is a substitute for actually dominating in an earlier era. Clem 5-0'ed Serral and has been dominating him ever since. This is not a substitute for Clem showing tournament results and achievements, and it also doesn't take away from Serral's results and achievements. Serral dominated the field of new talent that had supplanted and replaced the old guard, though. And while his subsequent longevity has certainly been helped by the lack of influx of new blood, when he broke out in 2018, and was already the best player in the world, there was plenty of competition, at a much higher level than what MVP had to play. I am not going to give MVP handicap points for leaving for injury, unlike, say, DRG and Classic, his exact contemporaries, who stuck around to see where their skill ceiling was. If anything, Classic has the more impressive career there. TLDR: The first movers did not have the most competitive environment. If anything, they had it easier. You can see this in how few of them stuck around into HotS. No one is asking you to give Mvp handicap points for his injuries, but I think it's fair to ask you to be accurate. He was not forced out by stiffer competition, but rather because of his injuries. Are you disputing this? No one is evaluating Mvp on hypothetical results that he might have achieved had he not retired early. This convo tends to have a "pre- versus post-2018" vibe to it, but I probably wouldn't lump all those earlier pre-2018 eras into one in terms of level of competition. I think you're making the same conceptual mistake re: absolute versus relative skill that others are making here when you say Serral was facing "much higher" levels of competition in 2018 than in earlier eras. Again, this logic is not used in evaluating levels of competition in literally any other game or sport (if you can name one, I'll be quite surprised). There's a really easy way to understand this via a stylized hypo. Say in 2029 Serral and Classic are the only two remaining full-time SC2 pros and say they are playing at a "higher level" than any pro players before them due to continued skill improvements over time. And say we arrange 25 world championship matches with huge prize pools. Classic wins them all. Is Classic your GOAT? I assume not. But once you concede that he is not, the rest of your argument unravels. Even without injuries mvp wouldn’t have achieved much
His basic fundamentals were not that impressivr. Sure he played in an era with the most “competition” , but let’s be honest majority of them were low skilled players at best current diamond league.
Mvp achieved more than almost any other SC2 player in the history of the game. And that's even with injuries. He's not the greatest of all time (anymore), but he's absolutely still on most people's Top 10 list.
Also, saying that the best WoL tourneys were full of "low skilled diamond league players" is a wild take.
|
Northern Ireland25960 Posts
On November 01 2025 01:07 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On October 30 2025 11:00 TeamMamba wrote:On October 29 2025 22:23 rwala wrote:On October 29 2025 21:44 Admiral Yang wrote:Serral dominated in an era with ~1/10th the active pro player base, tournaments with a couple dozen competitors, against a handful of title contenders, in tournaments with much easier paths to qualification and victory, against an aging, retiring, and increasingly injured player base that didn't include most previous title contenders, with almost no new talent to challenge him (other than Clem, who has been dominating him recently). I'm not sure why you think Mvp was "forced" out of the top because he couldn't hang. It's well-known that his injuries forced his early retirement. I'm also not sure why you think beating "many of the same players" who were dominant in an earlier era is a substitute for actually dominating in an earlier era. Clem 5-0'ed Serral and has been dominating him ever since. This is not a substitute for Clem showing tournament results and achievements, and it also doesn't take away from Serral's results and achievements. Serral dominated the field of new talent that had supplanted and replaced the old guard, though. And while his subsequent longevity has certainly been helped by the lack of influx of new blood, when he broke out in 2018, and was already the best player in the world, there was plenty of competition, at a much higher level than what MVP had to play. I am not going to give MVP handicap points for leaving for injury, unlike, say, DRG and Classic, his exact contemporaries, who stuck around to see where their skill ceiling was. If anything, Classic has the more impressive career there. TLDR: The first movers did not have the most competitive environment. If anything, they had it easier. You can see this in how few of them stuck around into HotS. No one is asking you to give Mvp handicap points for his injuries, but I think it's fair to ask you to be accurate. He was not forced out by stiffer competition, but rather because of his injuries. Are you disputing this? No one is evaluating Mvp on hypothetical results that he might have achieved had he not retired early. This convo tends to have a "pre- versus post-2018" vibe to it, but I probably wouldn't lump all those earlier pre-2018 eras into one in terms of level of competition. I think you're making the same conceptual mistake re: absolute versus relative skill that others are making here when you say Serral was facing "much higher" levels of competition in 2018 than in earlier eras. Again, this logic is not used in evaluating levels of competition in literally any other game or sport (if you can name one, I'll be quite surprised). There's a really easy way to understand this via a stylized hypo. Say in 2029 Serral and Classic are the only two remaining full-time SC2 pros and say they are playing at a "higher level" than any pro players before them due to continued skill improvements over time. And say we arrange 25 world championship matches with huge prize pools. Classic wins them all. Is Classic your GOAT? I assume not. But once you concede that he is not, the rest of your argument unravels. Even without injuries mvp wouldn’t have achieved much
His basic fundamentals were not that impressivr. Sure he played in an era with the most “competition” , but let’s be honest majority of them were low skilled players at best current diamond league. Mvp achieved more than almost any other SC2 player in the history of the game. And that's even with injuries. He's not the greatest of all time (anymore), but he's absolutely still on most people's Top 10 list. Also, saying that the best WoL tourneys were full of "low skilled diamond league players" is a wild take.
Mvp was a good BW talent. No Flash, but he was featuring in Proleague and Starleagues.
He had a better pro BW career than many who transitioned, or a similar one. Outside of the obvious Flash/Jaedong/Bisu level player, and a handful of others, he was nae bad. And indeed some players with very mediocre BW careers outdid those with good-excellent ones.
I think the idea Mvp was lacking in fundamentals is daft. You’re not a BW pro and SC2’s first real MVP without being solid.
What I think goes under the radar is Mvp was basically the complete player. He had the mechanics in his day, but he had set planning, he had the tactical reads, he had the clutch factor. Something I think really sets Serral apart from most. Across the board I think those two have the highest overall score if we’re doing Top Trumps cards.
I’m not saying they’re massively lacking in other departments, but I think Inno, Reynor, Clem are players who’ve really relied on bludgeoning opponents with their better mechanics.
Mvp could still hang even with his injuries because of his other assets.
An uninjured Mvp for me would absolutely have been a big threat in any bracket in HoTS. Legacy, I think it’s harder, it’s a game that rewards raw mechanics that bit more. But a player like Gumigod who isn’t a mechanics wizard has still been intermittently dangerous, so I think at worst Mvp would do something similar.
|
On October 30 2025 14:30 Admiral Yang wrote:Show nested quote +In other words you won’t engage the hypo because it would force you to concede the point. I prefer not to engage these hypotheticals, because, much like the sports analogies, they seem like a way for people to reduce the parameters of a debate to a narrow scope where they think they are ahead. Inevitably, what happens is that you end up debating the validity of the hypothetical, much like the useless debates we are seeing in this thread over the validity of increasingly contrived chess analogies. It's simply bad argumentation and poor reasoning. You are substituting what did happen, the current pros are the last men standing because they were simply the best - a strong buff to their GOAT claim, with some bizarre headcanon where the previous GOAT candidates are all 60 years old and simply couldn't continue because you can't be an SCII pro with gout.
I don't disagree at all that contemplating 60-year-old SC2 players with gout is ridiculous and useless. Is there a reason you're contemplating that when one else is?
I picked 2029 because it's quite possible to imagine the SC2 competitive scene continuing with some pros competing at the highest level the game has ever seen, albeit with the scene itself being a shadow of its former self in that the number of pros competing fulltime being like 1/10th or whatever of what it is today. Does this sound familiar? If so, forget the 2029 hypo and just apply whatever logic you'd normally provide on the hypo to the current state of affairs. To give you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps you feel there's simply no threshold at which the fulltime pro player pool has diminished too much to consider achievements to be meaningful in a GOAT convo, which would be strange. Or more likely maybe you think there is, but we are just a long ways away from that. That would be a more reasonable position. What's not particularly reasonable is to say that the scene has been getting more and more competitive as fewer and fewer fulltime pros are competing.
I'm not sure what's so challenging about the chess analogy. It's a 1v1 strategy game--now an e-sport--with tournament structures that are very similar to, and in some cases mirror, SC2 tournament structures. It's top-level pro player pool has grown just as SC2's has shrunk (for the same reasons), though on different time scales obviously. In chess, like in SC2, there has been and continues to be significant overlap in the top talent across the eras, and the absolute skill level of top players has grown over time, just as in SC2. This poses similar problems for comparing across eras. Basically the games are comparable in almost every way that you and others have said is important in a GOAT analysis. The one big difference is that in chess none of the big, premier tournaments are explicitly designed to give players from certain regions a leg up to qualify. I personally don't think this should be a knock against Serral because the guy's just such a baller, but seeing GOATs in chess that are able to maintain dominance in increasingly competitive player pools without marketing-driven concepts like region lock helping them seed into premier tournaments and world championships provides some important context.
If there's a better analogy to some other 1v1 competitive strategy game other than Broodwar or WC3 (both of which I think are great analogies), I'd love to hear it. If your position is that analogies as a tool for making meaning of things are useless, well, I don't really buy that because I assume you're not a bot and your own reasoning in this thread is rife with them, whether explicit or implied.
|
On October 30 2025 15:53 PremoBeats wrote:Show nested quote +On October 30 2025 11:04 rwala wrote:On October 29 2025 23:17 PremoBeats wrote:On October 29 2025 21:57 rwala wrote:On October 29 2025 15:40 PremoBeats wrote:On October 27 2025 22:28 rwala wrote:On October 27 2025 02:07 PremoBeats wrote:On October 27 2025 01:03 rwala wrote:
especially if he was fighting through the brutal KIL tournament formats and KR region nerf for world championship qualification. Wasn't it you who said that it isn't a nerf/buff when things are done to be equaled out or to approximate a "perfect" modifier, which this exact rule was meant to do? So how can you call this a nerf? It is not so hard to imagine that players like Soulkey or Rain or Mvp or Byun or SOS or Zest or Soo or Taeja or Life or Dream or Flash or Jaedong or whoever in their prime posing major problems for Serral if he was battling for results
Well, if Mvp is your GOAT, he faces an even harder "challenge" than the one you are pointing out for Serral. As I wrote before, Mvp is most likely the GOAT contender who played the least against other GOAT contenders. So, do the same arguments that you throw at Serral also apply to Mvp? If so, how can he be your GOAT? If not, why? Can you make some arguments why you are inconsistent in applying your metrics? See, this is my issue with you... it seems like you throw out unfounded accusations or proclaim arguments, but you rarely follow them through as an argument as well as coherently in applying logic. It happened again in this very thread. You misquote others, you put words in their mouth and you make claims without backing them up. So far, I am still waiting for you to write at least one thing about your notion that Maru had "many stints pre-2018" where he was supposedly the best. I am further waiting for you to prove the unfounded accusation that I said that "proleague doesn’t matter at all".
But to assume that he would have
Who here does?? Stop having arguments in your head. The only thing that was being said is that it would statistically be reasonable to assume that he would have been the best player if all players gathered in their prime. Not that he would have been equally dominant.
I don’t agree with Miz on everything he writes but the central theory of his GOAT analysis avoids the pitfalls of a lot of these heuristics and biases by not trying to diminish the more competitive earlier eras of the game just to justify crowning his preferred players.
Do you accuse anyone in particular when you talk about people justify crowning their preferred player? Are you even aware that there is no more transparent list out there than mine, as I demonstrated every little detail of how I arrived at each and every number, without obfuscating, for all of you guys to double check? I don’t apply metrics because I don’t invent math equations to crown my preferred candidate the GOAT. Mvp won the most competitive tournaments against the most competitive pools during the most competitive eras in the most competitive region. As Artosis said, you should be able to make your argument clearly, simply, and succinctly. When you can’t, you’re probably confused and likely seeking to confuse others. Just change the word "metric" with the word "logic": Well, if Mvp is your GOAT, he faces an even harder "challenge" than the one you are pointing out for Serral. As I wrote before, Mvp is most likely the GOAT contender who played the least against other GOAT contenders. So, do the same arguments that you throw at Serral also apply to Mvp? If so, how can he be your GOAT? If not, why? Can you make some arguments why you are inconsistent in applying your LOGIC? As you didn't answer these: 1. You said in another thread that it doesn't make sense to call it a buff for Koreans/nerf for Serral when one discounts region locks, as that is a means to simply level the playing field and thus more an "equalizer" than a buff/ nerf. I agreed. But why do you now call region locks a nerf for Koreans? Again, this shows how you change wording/framing depending on your acute need, not on a set of principles or based on consistent logic. 2. I am further waiting for you to prove your unfounded accusation that I said that "proleague doesn’t matter at all". 3. As you wrote: "I am not saying Serral would not have been equally dominant in earlier, more competitive eras and tournaments and regions. But to assume that he would have... ". Who assumed he would have? Which user here made this assumption that you are arguing against? So according to you, Mvp won in the most competitive era? You think the most competitive era in SC2 was from its beginning up to 2012? Correct? The chess comparison is off on so many accounts (a world champion being the defender, thus making it much easier to get back-to-back streaks) and Serral also fulfills achievements that were listed, hence I will not address all of them one by one. To be honest, you kind of remind me of Don Quixote. In your replies you lament about things no one said or argue against issues no one raised. It seems to me that you are fighting wind mills in your head, rather than actually engaging with the other side. No one said that Serral would be equally dominant had he played in 2012-2016. No one said that Proleague doesn’t matter in GOAT-discussions. In the meantime you wrote that it would be fair to say that Maru was the best in the world when he won a KIL. Then following that logic: Wasn’t Serral the best more than any other player - including Maru - for the most stints than any other player when he won tournaments, including all the best players of the world - not only Korans - with win rates that no one thought to be possible? If no, are you able to explain why? On October 28 2025 18:12 Argonauta wrote:
Biggest reason why Rotti and most of SC2 commentators call Serral the goat is because they want this esport to keep going so they need to spin this narrative to try to make the game appealing, they really don't care about being objective or recall past glories. Or perhaps because he is the GOAT based on all statistics, including regression models that let us compare contenders even cross-era? On October 28 2025 18:19 Charoisaur wrote:On October 28 2025 12:23 rwala wrote:On October 27 2025 23:12 Admiral Yang wrote:Mvp won the most competitive tournaments against the most competitive pools during the most competitive eras in the most competitive region What is this claim based on? Surely the subsequent eras were much more competitive, given that the players who had dominated previously weren't good enough to continue dominating. This is is a really fair question actually, and I think where a lot of the “modernists” slip. The first thing to say is that no one—including Serral, the most dominant player—has dominated SC2 on the level of a Magnus Carlsen in Chess (#1 player in all formats for a decade, consensus favorite to win every tournament, undisputed best player for over a decade, highest ELO ever, longest streak without a loss, 9 consecutive super tournament victories, 17 world championship titles, etc.). Carlsen’s dominance is actually a study in contrast to Serral’s. Unlike Serral, whose dominance came as the game and level of competition was declining due to retirements, injuries, and lack of new talent, Carlsen’s dominance maintains to this day as the level of competition at the super GM level grows at a faster rate than ever before in Chess’s history. Just in the last few years we have the youngest GM ever, the youngest player to reach 2800 ELO, and the youngest world champion. 4 of the top 10 players are under the age of 23. SC2 hasn’t had anything remotely like a young prodigy since Clem in broke out in 2019/2020. Chess has more and more Clems every year. The thing is that in the earlier years, SC2 was like this, and that’s fundamentally what I mean when I say the level of competition was higher. Making it to the top of a field of hundreds of active pros practicing non-stop to navigate an endlessly evolving and shifting ecosystem of metas and strategies is a different thing than maintaining your dominance over an increasingly dwindling pool of a couple of dozen pros, most of whom are diminished at least somewhat in their speed or skill execution due to age or injury (older chess players struggle with blitz and especially bullet formats as well). I think sometimes people forget (or maybe didn’t even know), that in prior eras of SC2 GSL, SSL and other KILs there were hundreds of players from all around the world competing in various qualification tournaments for a chance at a main tournament group stage for a chance at a second group stage for a chance to make the tournament bracket for a chance at the title. Other than like the World Series of Poker main event or like the Olympics, which are insane, I honestly cannot think of a level of competition in tournament play that’s more intense than this (I’m sure there are some other examples, just struggling to think of them off the top). So it’s not surprising that there weren’t any really dominant players during these earlier eras, other than maybe Mvp. If you follow other sports or games like chess that are growing rather than declining, it’s just bizarre to see these SC2 fans claim that the game got more competitive over time. The justification that’s sometimes offered is that absolute skill levels have improved (everyone now is better than before). But this has nothing to do with the level of competition. If anything, as the game gets figured out and metas settle, execution becomes much more important than strategy and tactics, which diminishes the rate at which less skilled pros can upset higher skilled pros. In earlier eras, rank 50 players upset top 10 players regularly. These days Serral and Clem are posting like 80-90% win rates in certain matchups and could probably beat rank 50 players easily with a Uthermal troll build. Anyways, the TLDR is that other than Serral, I don’t think SC2 has really ever had a truly dominant player compared to some other games and sports, and while Serral’s dominance is ridiculously impressive, it’s certainly in part a product of a diminished level of competition. This isn’t to take anything away from Serral, who I think is the “best” player to ever play the game. Yeah the skill level argument isn't a good one, mainly because the skill level rising is due to the combined effort of all players playing since then, and not Serral or Clem's sole credit. It's like in swimming where techniques are constantly evolving and thus michael phelps isn't holding a single world record anymore, but still what he did back then was more impressive than what swimmers are doing today. But it still is... higher, no? And some players were not able to keep up with the new influence. Do we seriously believe that all the prime players simply lost their combined skill in 2018, so that Serral can defeat them with win rates of over 85%? While they still delivered against other foreigners or other Koreans? Why is it so hard to accept that one player simply is above the others? And these others were the best of the prime era. And can you elaborate why you think (honest question) what Phelps did is more impressive than what swimmers do today? Is it because he dominated his competition much more than any other swimmer? On October 29 2025 05:18 Charoisaur wrote:
Maru never was the best in HotS, however I don't think that's the gotcha some people think it is considering how competitive the era back then was, and the only players who really had a period during that time where they were considered the best are Inno, Zest and Life, and even for them it only was a very short period.
Imo being top 5 in that era is probably a bigger feat than being #1 in the modern era (in terms of how many S tier players you have to be able to regularly beat, etc.).
After that he was definitely considered the best during 2018 and in late 2021 when he won all the online tournaments with his lategame-style In my opinion (and as far as I remember for many others as well), Serral's 2018 made him at least equal if not better than Maru, especially because of the WC. We have years in which there is a more or less similar distribution of different names as winners of tournaments post-2018, despite the fact that there were a lot less tournaments, which from my perspective means, that 1st place was sufficiently fought for. I argued based on Monte Carlo simulations in the other thread, that it would be harder for player X, who is ahead of the curve, to win a tournament in the modern era, as there, you would have to beat prime Serral and prime Maru who have higher win rates than anything what came before. Meaning you have a skill level you didn't have to fight before. It seems to me, that people always argue from Serral's perspective, which is - at least in my opinion - not the correct approach. It can be helpful to see when looking at certain player achievements to determine - for example - that Serral never won in the most competitive time but I fail to see why it wouldn't account for anything that he played these exact players and other players in better versions than their selfs from 2012-2016 and still beat them with unprecedented results. Brother, you need to spend more than 1 second trying to understand the chess analogy. Notice how Magnus's 5 classical WCs are only part his case for dominance and GOATyness, and Magnus himself doesn't think it's the most competitive competition (which is why he's basically inventing a new world championship circuit). You could learn from Magnus in this regard! I included his 5 classical word championships among his 17 world championships, sure, but this is not why he is so dominant or the GOAT. It's also ironic how you make excuses for Serral's region-lock qualification buffs to get into premier and world championship tournaments, but all of a sudden have major issues with FIDE's classic world championship tournament format. In any event, I (and Magnus) agree with you about the FIDE WC tournament format for sure, and I've also explained why I have issues with the SC2 region-lock qualification process for WC and premier tourneys. This is what it means to be consistent. Try it out I really encourage you to engage deeply with the chess analogy because it will help you understand what a GOAT looks like, which really should be the first step. And by engaging deeply I don't mean crashing out and writing 10K words with every random argument against it. I mean putting your biases to the side and just sitting down and thinking. Try not to let yourself get triggered or become defensive of your model. Ask yourself simple questions like what can I learn about GOATs knowing that a player can maintain dominance in a growing and increasingly competitive 1v1 strategy game, across all game and tournament formats, when there are like 5 new Clems that emerge every year? If you reversed the chess timeline--meaning if time went backwards in the history of the game of chess--Serral is in many ways like Bobby Fisher (many people's chess GOAT). See if you can understand why! If you've done the deep thinking I'm recommending, you should be able to I don't need to spend even one second for analogies that don't apply. Especially not on the GOAT as in that regard many sports differ by insane amounts. Where did I make excuses for Serral's region lock qualification buffs? So you think that Serral should get a penalty for getting into tournaments through supposed easier qualifiers? Is that correct? Thinking about a penalty for a player, simply because they hail from a region with an easier qualifier in a GOAT discussion is... I don't know... are you seriously under the assumption that Serral of all players wouldn't have qualified for the tournaments he subsequently won, if he played the qualifier in a different region? Is that your argument? Just to compare that to the Candidates: The top 8 of the world duke it out in a knockout style tournament and one of them is able to challenge the defender. These are utterly different mechanisms. So to sum it up: You think Maru winning 2 KILs and having a couple of good days in Proleague is a proof to the claim that he had many stints where he was the best pre 2018, right? Why is that important to you? And you don't have any proof of me thinking/saying that Proleague doesn't matter at all? Any response to the question to whom you replied when talking about Serral's supposed dominance in the prime era? You can stop the condescending attitude, as long as you aren't able to answer pretty straightforward easy to answer questions. It's not like you've got some deep, hidden understanding about chess that I am unable to grasp and which leads to being an epiphany why Serral can't be the GOAT. Until you apply the same logic of criticism to your contender, there is simply no consistency. And to even compare the Candidates to a European qualifier, where Serral still had to play in a group stage and the whole knockout brackets of the actual World Championship is simply delusional. My position applies the same logic to every players - yours shifts depending on who you attack/cheer for. I can’t tell if you’re trolling or not but are you really saying winning a European qualifier in SC2 is harder than winning the Candidates in chess? You really should keep offering your opinions on these matters. It’s helping you greatly in your quest to appear objective and reasonable. I’m not sure why you think you can’t learn anything from the most competitive 1v1 tournament strategy game in history, which also happens to now be an e-sport. Serral can be the GOAT and is a great GOAT pick and most people’s GOAT pick as far as I can tell. But not because you decided he was and then created a calculator to prove it. A lot of us spent more time than we care to pointing out all the flaws and I appreciate that you admitted to many of your mistakes and the issues with outsourcing your weightings to ChatGPT, etc. I’m not really interested in engaging with your model any further until you’re open to thinking through some basic GOAT concepts firsts. It is not that I am trolling... it is you not being able to understand what I actually say. I never tried to make the point that winning the European SC2 qualifier is harder than the Candidates in chess. If you actually paid attention you'd notice that I wrote: "analogies that don't apply" "These are utterly different mechanisms" My point is that a reigning Starcraft 2 world champion historically had to play through a qualifier, had to play through a group stage and had to reach the finals through at least 2, if not 3 knockout matches. A reigning chess champion in contrast is seeded automatically into the finals. This makes defending the title overall a lot easier. That is my claim. Do you understand that claim? If so: Do you agree or disagree? If you disagree: why? Which concepts? You so far presented one concept in this thread (something along the lines of Serral having not played some names from mostly Mvp's time, meaning a metric to look at which contender played whicht top dogs of SC2's greats) that is even worse fulfilled by the player that is your proclaimed GOAT (Mvp) than the one that you attack (Serral). So I ask again: How do you reconcile this rather obvious first check on your consistency/logic? I mean, I am open to discuss this concept... but I would first need to understand your take on it, as it doesn't seem to make sense. As you further are (since roughly half a dozen replies) ignoring follow-ups on actual words you put in my mouth (me supposedly saying that Proleague doesn't matter at all) and you don't answer when being pressed on which actual user made certain arguments you argue against (making it seem like you invent arguments in your head that no one actually is making), I can only conclude that you are not being honest in your approach to discussing this topic. At this point, not answering these, can't be seen as a slip up. Another inconsistency would be you calling out my wording in the other thread when I named adjusting Serral's achievements a nerf, to which I agreed. But now you call the region lock a nerf to the Korean region. It is either or. Either we call adjustments a penalty/buff, although we simply want to level the playing field, or we don't and we simply call them adjustments to a "perfect" state/equilibrium. I don't really care (although in a logical sense I'd probably prefer the latter) which one it is, but there needs to be a consistent approach. If you are done arguing with me that is fine. I find this exchange utterly unsatisfying as well, when main questions are not being answered, despite repeated reminders. So I just want to point out that you haven't addressed the inherent logical disputes in your own argumentation. If I am misrepresenting or misunderstanding you, please point out where the actual misunderstanding is located.
Brother, you literally excluded any consideration of Proleague from your original GOAT analysis in that it provided no numerical value in an exclusively numbers-based approach. This is, quite literally, the definition of Proleague not mattering. You corrected this after several people pointed out that it was ridiculous. I give you credit for that. But don't try to pretend you had some thoughtful inclusion of Proleague results in your model from the get-go. For a guy that thinks this entire conversation can be reduced to numbers, this is a shockingly bizarre defense of the value of the number "0".
|
On November 01 2025 01:43 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On November 01 2025 01:07 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On October 30 2025 11:00 TeamMamba wrote:On October 29 2025 22:23 rwala wrote:On October 29 2025 21:44 Admiral Yang wrote:Serral dominated in an era with ~1/10th the active pro player base, tournaments with a couple dozen competitors, against a handful of title contenders, in tournaments with much easier paths to qualification and victory, against an aging, retiring, and increasingly injured player base that didn't include most previous title contenders, with almost no new talent to challenge him (other than Clem, who has been dominating him recently). I'm not sure why you think Mvp was "forced" out of the top because he couldn't hang. It's well-known that his injuries forced his early retirement. I'm also not sure why you think beating "many of the same players" who were dominant in an earlier era is a substitute for actually dominating in an earlier era. Clem 5-0'ed Serral and has been dominating him ever since. This is not a substitute for Clem showing tournament results and achievements, and it also doesn't take away from Serral's results and achievements. Serral dominated the field of new talent that had supplanted and replaced the old guard, though. And while his subsequent longevity has certainly been helped by the lack of influx of new blood, when he broke out in 2018, and was already the best player in the world, there was plenty of competition, at a much higher level than what MVP had to play. I am not going to give MVP handicap points for leaving for injury, unlike, say, DRG and Classic, his exact contemporaries, who stuck around to see where their skill ceiling was. If anything, Classic has the more impressive career there. TLDR: The first movers did not have the most competitive environment. If anything, they had it easier. You can see this in how few of them stuck around into HotS. No one is asking you to give Mvp handicap points for his injuries, but I think it's fair to ask you to be accurate. He was not forced out by stiffer competition, but rather because of his injuries. Are you disputing this? No one is evaluating Mvp on hypothetical results that he might have achieved had he not retired early. This convo tends to have a "pre- versus post-2018" vibe to it, but I probably wouldn't lump all those earlier pre-2018 eras into one in terms of level of competition. I think you're making the same conceptual mistake re: absolute versus relative skill that others are making here when you say Serral was facing "much higher" levels of competition in 2018 than in earlier eras. Again, this logic is not used in evaluating levels of competition in literally any other game or sport (if you can name one, I'll be quite surprised). There's a really easy way to understand this via a stylized hypo. Say in 2029 Serral and Classic are the only two remaining full-time SC2 pros and say they are playing at a "higher level" than any pro players before them due to continued skill improvements over time. And say we arrange 25 world championship matches with huge prize pools. Classic wins them all. Is Classic your GOAT? I assume not. But once you concede that he is not, the rest of your argument unravels. Even without injuries mvp wouldn’t have achieved much
His basic fundamentals were not that impressivr. Sure he played in an era with the most “competition” , but let’s be honest majority of them were low skilled players at best current diamond league. Mvp achieved more than almost any other SC2 player in the history of the game. And that's even with injuries. He's not the greatest of all time (anymore), but he's absolutely still on most people's Top 10 list. Also, saying that the best WoL tourneys were full of "low skilled diamond league players" is a wild take. Mvp was a good BW talent. No Flash, but he was featuring in Proleague and Starleagues. He had a better pro BW career than many who transitioned, or a similar one. Outside of the obvious Flash/Jaedong/Bisu level player, and a handful of others, he was nae bad. And indeed some players with very mediocre BW careers outdid those with good-excellent ones. I think the idea Mvp was lacking in fundamentals is daft. You’re not a BW pro and SC2’s first real MVP without being solid. What I think goes under the radar is Mvp was basically the complete player. He had the mechanics in his day, but he had set planning, he had the tactical reads, he had the clutch factor. Something I think really sets Serral apart from most. Across the board I think those two have the highest overall score if we’re doing Top Trumps cards. I’m not saying they’re massively lacking in other departments, but I think Inno, Reynor, Clem are players who’ve really relied on bludgeoning opponents with their better mechanics. Mvp could still hang even with his injuries because of his other assets. An uninjured Mvp for me would absolutely have been a big threat in any bracket in HoTS. Legacy, I think it’s harder, it’s a game that rewards raw mechanics that bit more. But a player like Gumigod who isn’t a mechanics wizard has still been intermittently dangerous, so I think at worst Mvp would do something similar.
Yeah totally agree. Mvp really had it all, and set the bar extremely high.
|
Post 2016 competition is much weaker than post-Kespa Broodwar competition when all broodwar players were forced to play sc2.
Nobody is calling Killer or Sea the GOAT because they dominated literal amateurs without a programing licence and washed up 40 year old uncs in 2013. There is not even a discussion on that.
If Serral would be korean, y'all also wouldn't have had this discussion.
|
|
|
On November 01 2025 05:47 rwala wrote:Show nested quote +On October 30 2025 15:53 PremoBeats wrote:On October 30 2025 11:04 rwala wrote:On October 29 2025 23:17 PremoBeats wrote:On October 29 2025 21:57 rwala wrote:On October 29 2025 15:40 PremoBeats wrote:On October 27 2025 22:28 rwala wrote:On October 27 2025 02:07 PremoBeats wrote:On October 27 2025 01:03 rwala wrote:
especially if he was fighting through the brutal KIL tournament formats and KR region nerf for world championship qualification. Wasn't it you who said that it isn't a nerf/buff when things are done to be equaled out or to approximate a "perfect" modifier, which this exact rule was meant to do? So how can you call this a nerf? It is not so hard to imagine that players like Soulkey or Rain or Mvp or Byun or SOS or Zest or Soo or Taeja or Life or Dream or Flash or Jaedong or whoever in their prime posing major problems for Serral if he was battling for results
Well, if Mvp is your GOAT, he faces an even harder "challenge" than the one you are pointing out for Serral. As I wrote before, Mvp is most likely the GOAT contender who played the least against other GOAT contenders. So, do the same arguments that you throw at Serral also apply to Mvp? If so, how can he be your GOAT? If not, why? Can you make some arguments why you are inconsistent in applying your metrics? See, this is my issue with you... it seems like you throw out unfounded accusations or proclaim arguments, but you rarely follow them through as an argument as well as coherently in applying logic. It happened again in this very thread. You misquote others, you put words in their mouth and you make claims without backing them up. So far, I am still waiting for you to write at least one thing about your notion that Maru had "many stints pre-2018" where he was supposedly the best. I am further waiting for you to prove the unfounded accusation that I said that "proleague doesn’t matter at all".
But to assume that he would have
Who here does?? Stop having arguments in your head. The only thing that was being said is that it would statistically be reasonable to assume that he would have been the best player if all players gathered in their prime. Not that he would have been equally dominant.
I don’t agree with Miz on everything he writes but the central theory of his GOAT analysis avoids the pitfalls of a lot of these heuristics and biases by not trying to diminish the more competitive earlier eras of the game just to justify crowning his preferred players.
Do you accuse anyone in particular when you talk about people justify crowning their preferred player? Are you even aware that there is no more transparent list out there than mine, as I demonstrated every little detail of how I arrived at each and every number, without obfuscating, for all of you guys to double check? I don’t apply metrics because I don’t invent math equations to crown my preferred candidate the GOAT. Mvp won the most competitive tournaments against the most competitive pools during the most competitive eras in the most competitive region. As Artosis said, you should be able to make your argument clearly, simply, and succinctly. When you can’t, you’re probably confused and likely seeking to confuse others. Just change the word "metric" with the word "logic": Well, if Mvp is your GOAT, he faces an even harder "challenge" than the one you are pointing out for Serral. As I wrote before, Mvp is most likely the GOAT contender who played the least against other GOAT contenders. So, do the same arguments that you throw at Serral also apply to Mvp? If so, how can he be your GOAT? If not, why? Can you make some arguments why you are inconsistent in applying your LOGIC? As you didn't answer these: 1. You said in another thread that it doesn't make sense to call it a buff for Koreans/nerf for Serral when one discounts region locks, as that is a means to simply level the playing field and thus more an "equalizer" than a buff/ nerf. I agreed. But why do you now call region locks a nerf for Koreans? Again, this shows how you change wording/framing depending on your acute need, not on a set of principles or based on consistent logic. 2. I am further waiting for you to prove your unfounded accusation that I said that "proleague doesn’t matter at all". 3. As you wrote: "I am not saying Serral would not have been equally dominant in earlier, more competitive eras and tournaments and regions. But to assume that he would have... ". Who assumed he would have? Which user here made this assumption that you are arguing against? So according to you, Mvp won in the most competitive era? You think the most competitive era in SC2 was from its beginning up to 2012? Correct? The chess comparison is off on so many accounts (a world champion being the defender, thus making it much easier to get back-to-back streaks) and Serral also fulfills achievements that were listed, hence I will not address all of them one by one. To be honest, you kind of remind me of Don Quixote. In your replies you lament about things no one said or argue against issues no one raised. It seems to me that you are fighting wind mills in your head, rather than actually engaging with the other side. No one said that Serral would be equally dominant had he played in 2012-2016. No one said that Proleague doesn’t matter in GOAT-discussions. In the meantime you wrote that it would be fair to say that Maru was the best in the world when he won a KIL. Then following that logic: Wasn’t Serral the best more than any other player - including Maru - for the most stints than any other player when he won tournaments, including all the best players of the world - not only Korans - with win rates that no one thought to be possible? If no, are you able to explain why? On October 28 2025 18:12 Argonauta wrote:
Biggest reason why Rotti and most of SC2 commentators call Serral the goat is because they want this esport to keep going so they need to spin this narrative to try to make the game appealing, they really don't care about being objective or recall past glories. Or perhaps because he is the GOAT based on all statistics, including regression models that let us compare contenders even cross-era? On October 28 2025 18:19 Charoisaur wrote:On October 28 2025 12:23 rwala wrote:On October 27 2025 23:12 Admiral Yang wrote:Mvp won the most competitive tournaments against the most competitive pools during the most competitive eras in the most competitive region What is this claim based on? Surely the subsequent eras were much more competitive, given that the players who had dominated previously weren't good enough to continue dominating. This is is a really fair question actually, and I think where a lot of the “modernists” slip. The first thing to say is that no one—including Serral, the most dominant player—has dominated SC2 on the level of a Magnus Carlsen in Chess (#1 player in all formats for a decade, consensus favorite to win every tournament, undisputed best player for over a decade, highest ELO ever, longest streak without a loss, 9 consecutive super tournament victories, 17 world championship titles, etc.). Carlsen’s dominance is actually a study in contrast to Serral’s. Unlike Serral, whose dominance came as the game and level of competition was declining due to retirements, injuries, and lack of new talent, Carlsen’s dominance maintains to this day as the level of competition at the super GM level grows at a faster rate than ever before in Chess’s history. Just in the last few years we have the youngest GM ever, the youngest player to reach 2800 ELO, and the youngest world champion. 4 of the top 10 players are under the age of 23. SC2 hasn’t had anything remotely like a young prodigy since Clem in broke out in 2019/2020. Chess has more and more Clems every year. The thing is that in the earlier years, SC2 was like this, and that’s fundamentally what I mean when I say the level of competition was higher. Making it to the top of a field of hundreds of active pros practicing non-stop to navigate an endlessly evolving and shifting ecosystem of metas and strategies is a different thing than maintaining your dominance over an increasingly dwindling pool of a couple of dozen pros, most of whom are diminished at least somewhat in their speed or skill execution due to age or injury (older chess players struggle with blitz and especially bullet formats as well). I think sometimes people forget (or maybe didn’t even know), that in prior eras of SC2 GSL, SSL and other KILs there were hundreds of players from all around the world competing in various qualification tournaments for a chance at a main tournament group stage for a chance at a second group stage for a chance to make the tournament bracket for a chance at the title. Other than like the World Series of Poker main event or like the Olympics, which are insane, I honestly cannot think of a level of competition in tournament play that’s more intense than this (I’m sure there are some other examples, just struggling to think of them off the top). So it’s not surprising that there weren’t any really dominant players during these earlier eras, other than maybe Mvp. If you follow other sports or games like chess that are growing rather than declining, it’s just bizarre to see these SC2 fans claim that the game got more competitive over time. The justification that’s sometimes offered is that absolute skill levels have improved (everyone now is better than before). But this has nothing to do with the level of competition. If anything, as the game gets figured out and metas settle, execution becomes much more important than strategy and tactics, which diminishes the rate at which less skilled pros can upset higher skilled pros. In earlier eras, rank 50 players upset top 10 players regularly. These days Serral and Clem are posting like 80-90% win rates in certain matchups and could probably beat rank 50 players easily with a Uthermal troll build. Anyways, the TLDR is that other than Serral, I don’t think SC2 has really ever had a truly dominant player compared to some other games and sports, and while Serral’s dominance is ridiculously impressive, it’s certainly in part a product of a diminished level of competition. This isn’t to take anything away from Serral, who I think is the “best” player to ever play the game. Yeah the skill level argument isn't a good one, mainly because the skill level rising is due to the combined effort of all players playing since then, and not Serral or Clem's sole credit. It's like in swimming where techniques are constantly evolving and thus michael phelps isn't holding a single world record anymore, but still what he did back then was more impressive than what swimmers are doing today. But it still is... higher, no? And some players were not able to keep up with the new influence. Do we seriously believe that all the prime players simply lost their combined skill in 2018, so that Serral can defeat them with win rates of over 85%? While they still delivered against other foreigners or other Koreans? Why is it so hard to accept that one player simply is above the others? And these others were the best of the prime era. And can you elaborate why you think (honest question) what Phelps did is more impressive than what swimmers do today? Is it because he dominated his competition much more than any other swimmer? On October 29 2025 05:18 Charoisaur wrote:
Maru never was the best in HotS, however I don't think that's the gotcha some people think it is considering how competitive the era back then was, and the only players who really had a period during that time where they were considered the best are Inno, Zest and Life, and even for them it only was a very short period.
Imo being top 5 in that era is probably a bigger feat than being #1 in the modern era (in terms of how many S tier players you have to be able to regularly beat, etc.).
After that he was definitely considered the best during 2018 and in late 2021 when he won all the online tournaments with his lategame-style In my opinion (and as far as I remember for many others as well), Serral's 2018 made him at least equal if not better than Maru, especially because of the WC. We have years in which there is a more or less similar distribution of different names as winners of tournaments post-2018, despite the fact that there were a lot less tournaments, which from my perspective means, that 1st place was sufficiently fought for. I argued based on Monte Carlo simulations in the other thread, that it would be harder for player X, who is ahead of the curve, to win a tournament in the modern era, as there, you would have to beat prime Serral and prime Maru who have higher win rates than anything what came before. Meaning you have a skill level you didn't have to fight before. It seems to me, that people always argue from Serral's perspective, which is - at least in my opinion - not the correct approach. It can be helpful to see when looking at certain player achievements to determine - for example - that Serral never won in the most competitive time but I fail to see why it wouldn't account for anything that he played these exact players and other players in better versions than their selfs from 2012-2016 and still beat them with unprecedented results. Brother, you need to spend more than 1 second trying to understand the chess analogy. Notice how Magnus's 5 classical WCs are only part his case for dominance and GOATyness, and Magnus himself doesn't think it's the most competitive competition (which is why he's basically inventing a new world championship circuit). You could learn from Magnus in this regard! I included his 5 classical word championships among his 17 world championships, sure, but this is not why he is so dominant or the GOAT. It's also ironic how you make excuses for Serral's region-lock qualification buffs to get into premier and world championship tournaments, but all of a sudden have major issues with FIDE's classic world championship tournament format. In any event, I (and Magnus) agree with you about the FIDE WC tournament format for sure, and I've also explained why I have issues with the SC2 region-lock qualification process for WC and premier tourneys. This is what it means to be consistent. Try it out I really encourage you to engage deeply with the chess analogy because it will help you understand what a GOAT looks like, which really should be the first step. And by engaging deeply I don't mean crashing out and writing 10K words with every random argument against it. I mean putting your biases to the side and just sitting down and thinking. Try not to let yourself get triggered or become defensive of your model. Ask yourself simple questions like what can I learn about GOATs knowing that a player can maintain dominance in a growing and increasingly competitive 1v1 strategy game, across all game and tournament formats, when there are like 5 new Clems that emerge every year? If you reversed the chess timeline--meaning if time went backwards in the history of the game of chess--Serral is in many ways like Bobby Fisher (many people's chess GOAT). See if you can understand why! If you've done the deep thinking I'm recommending, you should be able to I don't need to spend even one second for analogies that don't apply. Especially not on the GOAT as in that regard many sports differ by insane amounts. Where did I make excuses for Serral's region lock qualification buffs? So you think that Serral should get a penalty for getting into tournaments through supposed easier qualifiers? Is that correct? Thinking about a penalty for a player, simply because they hail from a region with an easier qualifier in a GOAT discussion is... I don't know... are you seriously under the assumption that Serral of all players wouldn't have qualified for the tournaments he subsequently won, if he played the qualifier in a different region? Is that your argument? Just to compare that to the Candidates: The top 8 of the world duke it out in a knockout style tournament and one of them is able to challenge the defender. These are utterly different mechanisms. So to sum it up: You think Maru winning 2 KILs and having a couple of good days in Proleague is a proof to the claim that he had many stints where he was the best pre 2018, right? Why is that important to you? And you don't have any proof of me thinking/saying that Proleague doesn't matter at all? Any response to the question to whom you replied when talking about Serral's supposed dominance in the prime era? You can stop the condescending attitude, as long as you aren't able to answer pretty straightforward easy to answer questions. It's not like you've got some deep, hidden understanding about chess that I am unable to grasp and which leads to being an epiphany why Serral can't be the GOAT. Until you apply the same logic of criticism to your contender, there is simply no consistency. And to even compare the Candidates to a European qualifier, where Serral still had to play in a group stage and the whole knockout brackets of the actual World Championship is simply delusional. My position applies the same logic to every players - yours shifts depending on who you attack/cheer for. I can’t tell if you’re trolling or not but are you really saying winning a European qualifier in SC2 is harder than winning the Candidates in chess? You really should keep offering your opinions on these matters. It’s helping you greatly in your quest to appear objective and reasonable. I’m not sure why you think you can’t learn anything from the most competitive 1v1 tournament strategy game in history, which also happens to now be an e-sport. Serral can be the GOAT and is a great GOAT pick and most people’s GOAT pick as far as I can tell. But not because you decided he was and then created a calculator to prove it. A lot of us spent more time than we care to pointing out all the flaws and I appreciate that you admitted to many of your mistakes and the issues with outsourcing your weightings to ChatGPT, etc. I’m not really interested in engaging with your model any further until you’re open to thinking through some basic GOAT concepts firsts. It is not that I am trolling... it is you not being able to understand what I actually say. I never tried to make the point that winning the European SC2 qualifier is harder than the Candidates in chess. If you actually paid attention you'd notice that I wrote: "analogies that don't apply" "These are utterly different mechanisms" My point is that a reigning Starcraft 2 world champion historically had to play through a qualifier, had to play through a group stage and had to reach the finals through at least 2, if not 3 knockout matches. A reigning chess champion in contrast is seeded automatically into the finals. This makes defending the title overall a lot easier. That is my claim. Do you understand that claim? If so: Do you agree or disagree? If you disagree: why?
until you’re open to thinking through some basic GOAT concepts firsts.
Which concepts? You so far presented one concept in this thread (something along the lines of Serral having not played some names from mostly Mvp's time, meaning a metric to look at which contender played whicht top dogs of SC2's greats) that is even worse fulfilled by the player that is your proclaimed GOAT (Mvp) than the one that you attack (Serral). So I ask again: How do you reconcile this rather obvious first check on your consistency/logic? I mean, I am open to discuss this concept... but I would first need to understand your take on it, as it doesn't seem to make sense. As you further are (since roughly half a dozen replies) ignoring follow-ups on actual words you put in my mouth (me supposedly saying that Proleague doesn't matter at all) and you don't answer when being pressed on which actual user made certain arguments you argue against (making it seem like you invent arguments in your head that no one actually is making), I can only conclude that you are not being honest in your approach to discussing this topic. At this point, not answering these, can't be seen as a slip up. Another inconsistency would be you calling out my wording in the other thread when I named adjusting Serral's achievements a nerf, to which I agreed. But now you call the region lock a nerf to the Korean region. It is either or. Either we call adjustments a penalty/buff, although we simply want to level the playing field, or we don't and we simply call them adjustments to a "perfect" state/equilibrium. I don't really care (although in a logical sense I'd probably prefer the latter) which one it is, but there needs to be a consistent approach. If you are done arguing with me that is fine. I find this exchange utterly unsatisfying as well, when main questions are not being answered, despite repeated reminders. So I just want to point out that you haven't addressed the inherent logical disputes in your own argumentation. If I am misrepresenting or misunderstanding you, please point out where the actual misunderstanding is located. Brother, you literally excluded any consideration of Proleague from your original GOAT analysis in that it provided no numerical value in an exclusively numbers-based approach. This is, quite literally, the definition of Proleague not mattering. You corrected this after several people pointed out that it was ridiculous. I give you credit for that. But don't try to pretend you had some thoughtful inclusion of Proleague results in your model from the get-go. For a guy that thinks this entire conversation can be reduced to numbers, this is a shockingly bizarre defense of the value of the number "0".
No, I did not exclude Proleague from my first analysis. That is a false statement. At this point I truly have to assume that you are intellectually unable to discuss this topic or that you are having discussions in your mind that lead you to make such obviously wrong statements, instead of engaging with what others or I are actually writing and more importantly what we are meaning.
I explained it several times... in my article, other comment sections and even in this very thread a couple of pages ago... I don't know how else to deliver the information to you:
https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/642247-rotterdam-serral-is-the-goat-and-its-not-close?page=2#32
In my very first article, I included match win rates of Proleague to not let Maru miss out on his phenomenal season. Proleague simply didn't make it into the tournament score, where its impact is rather small anyway (especially for Maru and Serral who dominate and outshine all the others in that metric through mostly individual achievements).
I further didn't fix this because others complained, I adjusted the model in the 2nd article because I found a principled way to account for team events that addressed the methodological issues for the tournament score (see link). It was also the correct thing to do, even though the effect was rather small. This decisions made the follow-up piece less vulnerable to rather unnecessary criticism.
This was shown when you - and others - tried to discredit the 2nd article over semantics (buff/nerf/perfect equilibrium) and the Chat GTP weighting, which I immediately conceded as that wasn't the main discovery and completely unimportant to me or the result. Had there be any possible substantial critique about methodology or the findings, I'd have heard them by now.
So, not only are you - again - factually wrong here, you also still haven't attempted to explain the logical contradictions of Mvp having fulfilled a potential concept to look at a GOAT way less than Serral and how we should treat buffs/nerfs/adjustments to a perfect equilibrium.
Oh yeah... and I still haven't seen an explanation on who you were arguing with when saying that people argue how Serral would have dominated in the prime era the same way he did post 2018. So did you simply have arguments in your head there or what is going on?
And again: Until you apply your criteria consistently to all players or decide which kind of way you want to follow, your argumentation remains self-contradictory and irresolvable.
|
On November 01 2025 15:46 PremoBeats wrote:Show nested quote +On November 01 2025 05:47 rwala wrote:On October 30 2025 15:53 PremoBeats wrote:On October 30 2025 11:04 rwala wrote:On October 29 2025 23:17 PremoBeats wrote:On October 29 2025 21:57 rwala wrote:On October 29 2025 15:40 PremoBeats wrote:On October 27 2025 22:28 rwala wrote:On October 27 2025 02:07 PremoBeats wrote:On October 27 2025 01:03 rwala wrote:
especially if he was fighting through the brutal KIL tournament formats and KR region nerf for world championship qualification. Wasn't it you who said that it isn't a nerf/buff when things are done to be equaled out or to approximate a "perfect" modifier, which this exact rule was meant to do? So how can you call this a nerf? It is not so hard to imagine that players like Soulkey or Rain or Mvp or Byun or SOS or Zest or Soo or Taeja or Life or Dream or Flash or Jaedong or whoever in their prime posing major problems for Serral if he was battling for results
Well, if Mvp is your GOAT, he faces an even harder "challenge" than the one you are pointing out for Serral. As I wrote before, Mvp is most likely the GOAT contender who played the least against other GOAT contenders. So, do the same arguments that you throw at Serral also apply to Mvp? If so, how can he be your GOAT? If not, why? Can you make some arguments why you are inconsistent in applying your metrics? See, this is my issue with you... it seems like you throw out unfounded accusations or proclaim arguments, but you rarely follow them through as an argument as well as coherently in applying logic. It happened again in this very thread. You misquote others, you put words in their mouth and you make claims without backing them up. So far, I am still waiting for you to write at least one thing about your notion that Maru had "many stints pre-2018" where he was supposedly the best. I am further waiting for you to prove the unfounded accusation that I said that "proleague doesn’t matter at all".
But to assume that he would have
Who here does?? Stop having arguments in your head. The only thing that was being said is that it would statistically be reasonable to assume that he would have been the best player if all players gathered in their prime. Not that he would have been equally dominant.
I don’t agree with Miz on everything he writes but the central theory of his GOAT analysis avoids the pitfalls of a lot of these heuristics and biases by not trying to diminish the more competitive earlier eras of the game just to justify crowning his preferred players.
Do you accuse anyone in particular when you talk about people justify crowning their preferred player? Are you even aware that there is no more transparent list out there than mine, as I demonstrated every little detail of how I arrived at each and every number, without obfuscating, for all of you guys to double check? I don’t apply metrics because I don’t invent math equations to crown my preferred candidate the GOAT. Mvp won the most competitive tournaments against the most competitive pools during the most competitive eras in the most competitive region. As Artosis said, you should be able to make your argument clearly, simply, and succinctly. When you can’t, you’re probably confused and likely seeking to confuse others. Just change the word "metric" with the word "logic": Well, if Mvp is your GOAT, he faces an even harder "challenge" than the one you are pointing out for Serral. As I wrote before, Mvp is most likely the GOAT contender who played the least against other GOAT contenders. So, do the same arguments that you throw at Serral also apply to Mvp? If so, how can he be your GOAT? If not, why? Can you make some arguments why you are inconsistent in applying your LOGIC? As you didn't answer these: 1. You said in another thread that it doesn't make sense to call it a buff for Koreans/nerf for Serral when one discounts region locks, as that is a means to simply level the playing field and thus more an "equalizer" than a buff/ nerf. I agreed. But why do you now call region locks a nerf for Koreans? Again, this shows how you change wording/framing depending on your acute need, not on a set of principles or based on consistent logic. 2. I am further waiting for you to prove your unfounded accusation that I said that "proleague doesn’t matter at all". 3. As you wrote: "I am not saying Serral would not have been equally dominant in earlier, more competitive eras and tournaments and regions. But to assume that he would have... ". Who assumed he would have? Which user here made this assumption that you are arguing against? So according to you, Mvp won in the most competitive era? You think the most competitive era in SC2 was from its beginning up to 2012? Correct? The chess comparison is off on so many accounts (a world champion being the defender, thus making it much easier to get back-to-back streaks) and Serral also fulfills achievements that were listed, hence I will not address all of them one by one. To be honest, you kind of remind me of Don Quixote. In your replies you lament about things no one said or argue against issues no one raised. It seems to me that you are fighting wind mills in your head, rather than actually engaging with the other side. No one said that Serral would be equally dominant had he played in 2012-2016. No one said that Proleague doesn’t matter in GOAT-discussions. In the meantime you wrote that it would be fair to say that Maru was the best in the world when he won a KIL. Then following that logic: Wasn’t Serral the best more than any other player - including Maru - for the most stints than any other player when he won tournaments, including all the best players of the world - not only Korans - with win rates that no one thought to be possible? If no, are you able to explain why? On October 28 2025 18:12 Argonauta wrote:
Biggest reason why Rotti and most of SC2 commentators call Serral the goat is because they want this esport to keep going so they need to spin this narrative to try to make the game appealing, they really don't care about being objective or recall past glories. Or perhaps because he is the GOAT based on all statistics, including regression models that let us compare contenders even cross-era? On October 28 2025 18:19 Charoisaur wrote:On October 28 2025 12:23 rwala wrote:On October 27 2025 23:12 Admiral Yang wrote:
[quote]
What is this claim based on? Surely the subsequent eras were much more competitive, given that the players who had dominated previously weren't good enough to continue dominating. This is is a really fair question actually, and I think where a lot of the “modernists” slip. The first thing to say is that no one—including Serral, the most dominant player—has dominated SC2 on the level of a Magnus Carlsen in Chess (#1 player in all formats for a decade, consensus favorite to win every tournament, undisputed best player for over a decade, highest ELO ever, longest streak without a loss, 9 consecutive super tournament victories, 17 world championship titles, etc.). Carlsen’s dominance is actually a study in contrast to Serral’s. Unlike Serral, whose dominance came as the game and level of competition was declining due to retirements, injuries, and lack of new talent, Carlsen’s dominance maintains to this day as the level of competition at the super GM level grows at a faster rate than ever before in Chess’s history. Just in the last few years we have the youngest GM ever, the youngest player to reach 2800 ELO, and the youngest world champion. 4 of the top 10 players are under the age of 23. SC2 hasn’t had anything remotely like a young prodigy since Clem in broke out in 2019/2020. Chess has more and more Clems every year. The thing is that in the earlier years, SC2 was like this, and that’s fundamentally what I mean when I say the level of competition was higher. Making it to the top of a field of hundreds of active pros practicing non-stop to navigate an endlessly evolving and shifting ecosystem of metas and strategies is a different thing than maintaining your dominance over an increasingly dwindling pool of a couple of dozen pros, most of whom are diminished at least somewhat in their speed or skill execution due to age or injury (older chess players struggle with blitz and especially bullet formats as well). I think sometimes people forget (or maybe didn’t even know), that in prior eras of SC2 GSL, SSL and other KILs there were hundreds of players from all around the world competing in various qualification tournaments for a chance at a main tournament group stage for a chance at a second group stage for a chance to make the tournament bracket for a chance at the title. Other than like the World Series of Poker main event or like the Olympics, which are insane, I honestly cannot think of a level of competition in tournament play that’s more intense than this (I’m sure there are some other examples, just struggling to think of them off the top). So it’s not surprising that there weren’t any really dominant players during these earlier eras, other than maybe Mvp. If you follow other sports or games like chess that are growing rather than declining, it’s just bizarre to see these SC2 fans claim that the game got more competitive over time. The justification that’s sometimes offered is that absolute skill levels have improved (everyone now is better than before). But this has nothing to do with the level of competition. If anything, as the game gets figured out and metas settle, execution becomes much more important than strategy and tactics, which diminishes the rate at which less skilled pros can upset higher skilled pros. In earlier eras, rank 50 players upset top 10 players regularly. These days Serral and Clem are posting like 80-90% win rates in certain matchups and could probably beat rank 50 players easily with a Uthermal troll build. Anyways, the TLDR is that other than Serral, I don’t think SC2 has really ever had a truly dominant player compared to some other games and sports, and while Serral’s dominance is ridiculously impressive, it’s certainly in part a product of a diminished level of competition. This isn’t to take anything away from Serral, who I think is the “best” player to ever play the game. Yeah the skill level argument isn't a good one, mainly because the skill level rising is due to the combined effort of all players playing since then, and not Serral or Clem's sole credit. It's like in swimming where techniques are constantly evolving and thus michael phelps isn't holding a single world record anymore, but still what he did back then was more impressive than what swimmers are doing today. But it still is... higher, no? And some players were not able to keep up with the new influence. Do we seriously believe that all the prime players simply lost their combined skill in 2018, so that Serral can defeat them with win rates of over 85%? While they still delivered against other foreigners or other Koreans? Why is it so hard to accept that one player simply is above the others? And these others were the best of the prime era. And can you elaborate why you think (honest question) what Phelps did is more impressive than what swimmers do today? Is it because he dominated his competition much more than any other swimmer? On October 29 2025 05:18 Charoisaur wrote:
Maru never was the best in HotS, however I don't think that's the gotcha some people think it is considering how competitive the era back then was, and the only players who really had a period during that time where they were considered the best are Inno, Zest and Life, and even for them it only was a very short period.
Imo being top 5 in that era is probably a bigger feat than being #1 in the modern era (in terms of how many S tier players you have to be able to regularly beat, etc.).
After that he was definitely considered the best during 2018 and in late 2021 when he won all the online tournaments with his lategame-style In my opinion (and as far as I remember for many others as well), Serral's 2018 made him at least equal if not better than Maru, especially because of the WC. We have years in which there is a more or less similar distribution of different names as winners of tournaments post-2018, despite the fact that there were a lot less tournaments, which from my perspective means, that 1st place was sufficiently fought for. I argued based on Monte Carlo simulations in the other thread, that it would be harder for player X, who is ahead of the curve, to win a tournament in the modern era, as there, you would have to beat prime Serral and prime Maru who have higher win rates than anything what came before. Meaning you have a skill level you didn't have to fight before. It seems to me, that people always argue from Serral's perspective, which is - at least in my opinion - not the correct approach. It can be helpful to see when looking at certain player achievements to determine - for example - that Serral never won in the most competitive time but I fail to see why it wouldn't account for anything that he played these exact players and other players in better versions than their selfs from 2012-2016 and still beat them with unprecedented results. Brother, you need to spend more than 1 second trying to understand the chess analogy. Notice how Magnus's 5 classical WCs are only part his case for dominance and GOATyness, and Magnus himself doesn't think it's the most competitive competition (which is why he's basically inventing a new world championship circuit). You could learn from Magnus in this regard! I included his 5 classical word championships among his 17 world championships, sure, but this is not why he is so dominant or the GOAT. It's also ironic how you make excuses for Serral's region-lock qualification buffs to get into premier and world championship tournaments, but all of a sudden have major issues with FIDE's classic world championship tournament format. In any event, I (and Magnus) agree with you about the FIDE WC tournament format for sure, and I've also explained why I have issues with the SC2 region-lock qualification process for WC and premier tourneys. This is what it means to be consistent. Try it out I really encourage you to engage deeply with the chess analogy because it will help you understand what a GOAT looks like, which really should be the first step. And by engaging deeply I don't mean crashing out and writing 10K words with every random argument against it. I mean putting your biases to the side and just sitting down and thinking. Try not to let yourself get triggered or become defensive of your model. Ask yourself simple questions like what can I learn about GOATs knowing that a player can maintain dominance in a growing and increasingly competitive 1v1 strategy game, across all game and tournament formats, when there are like 5 new Clems that emerge every year? If you reversed the chess timeline--meaning if time went backwards in the history of the game of chess--Serral is in many ways like Bobby Fisher (many people's chess GOAT). See if you can understand why! If you've done the deep thinking I'm recommending, you should be able to I don't need to spend even one second for analogies that don't apply. Especially not on the GOAT as in that regard many sports differ by insane amounts. Where did I make excuses for Serral's region lock qualification buffs? So you think that Serral should get a penalty for getting into tournaments through supposed easier qualifiers? Is that correct? Thinking about a penalty for a player, simply because they hail from a region with an easier qualifier in a GOAT discussion is... I don't know... are you seriously under the assumption that Serral of all players wouldn't have qualified for the tournaments he subsequently won, if he played the qualifier in a different region? Is that your argument? Just to compare that to the Candidates: The top 8 of the world duke it out in a knockout style tournament and one of them is able to challenge the defender. These are utterly different mechanisms. So to sum it up: You think Maru winning 2 KILs and having a couple of good days in Proleague is a proof to the claim that he had many stints where he was the best pre 2018, right? Why is that important to you? And you don't have any proof of me thinking/saying that Proleague doesn't matter at all? Any response to the question to whom you replied when talking about Serral's supposed dominance in the prime era? You can stop the condescending attitude, as long as you aren't able to answer pretty straightforward easy to answer questions. It's not like you've got some deep, hidden understanding about chess that I am unable to grasp and which leads to being an epiphany why Serral can't be the GOAT. Until you apply the same logic of criticism to your contender, there is simply no consistency. And to even compare the Candidates to a European qualifier, where Serral still had to play in a group stage and the whole knockout brackets of the actual World Championship is simply delusional. My position applies the same logic to every players - yours shifts depending on who you attack/cheer for. I can’t tell if you’re trolling or not but are you really saying winning a European qualifier in SC2 is harder than winning the Candidates in chess? You really should keep offering your opinions on these matters. It’s helping you greatly in your quest to appear objective and reasonable. I’m not sure why you think you can’t learn anything from the most competitive 1v1 tournament strategy game in history, which also happens to now be an e-sport. Serral can be the GOAT and is a great GOAT pick and most people’s GOAT pick as far as I can tell. But not because you decided he was and then created a calculator to prove it. A lot of us spent more time than we care to pointing out all the flaws and I appreciate that you admitted to many of your mistakes and the issues with outsourcing your weightings to ChatGPT, etc. I’m not really interested in engaging with your model any further until you’re open to thinking through some basic GOAT concepts firsts. It is not that I am trolling... it is you not being able to understand what I actually say. I never tried to make the point that winning the European SC2 qualifier is harder than the Candidates in chess. If you actually paid attention you'd notice that I wrote: "analogies that don't apply" "These are utterly different mechanisms" My point is that a reigning Starcraft 2 world champion historically had to play through a qualifier, had to play through a group stage and had to reach the finals through at least 2, if not 3 knockout matches. A reigning chess champion in contrast is seeded automatically into the finals. This makes defending the title overall a lot easier. That is my claim. Do you understand that claim? If so: Do you agree or disagree? If you disagree: why?
until you’re open to thinking through some basic GOAT concepts firsts.
Which concepts? You so far presented one concept in this thread (something along the lines of Serral having not played some names from mostly Mvp's time, meaning a metric to look at which contender played whicht top dogs of SC2's greats) that is even worse fulfilled by the player that is your proclaimed GOAT (Mvp) than the one that you attack (Serral). So I ask again: How do you reconcile this rather obvious first check on your consistency/logic? I mean, I am open to discuss this concept... but I would first need to understand your take on it, as it doesn't seem to make sense. As you further are (since roughly half a dozen replies) ignoring follow-ups on actual words you put in my mouth (me supposedly saying that Proleague doesn't matter at all) and you don't answer when being pressed on which actual user made certain arguments you argue against (making it seem like you invent arguments in your head that no one actually is making), I can only conclude that you are not being honest in your approach to discussing this topic. At this point, not answering these, can't be seen as a slip up. Another inconsistency would be you calling out my wording in the other thread when I named adjusting Serral's achievements a nerf, to which I agreed. But now you call the region lock a nerf to the Korean region. It is either or. Either we call adjustments a penalty/buff, although we simply want to level the playing field, or we don't and we simply call them adjustments to a "perfect" state/equilibrium. I don't really care (although in a logical sense I'd probably prefer the latter) which one it is, but there needs to be a consistent approach. If you are done arguing with me that is fine. I find this exchange utterly unsatisfying as well, when main questions are not being answered, despite repeated reminders. So I just want to point out that you haven't addressed the inherent logical disputes in your own argumentation. If I am misrepresenting or misunderstanding you, please point out where the actual misunderstanding is located. Brother, you literally excluded any consideration of Proleague from your original GOAT analysis in that it provided no numerical value in an exclusively numbers-based approach. This is, quite literally, the definition of Proleague not mattering. You corrected this after several people pointed out that it was ridiculous. I give you credit for that. But don't try to pretend you had some thoughtful inclusion of Proleague results in your model from the get-go. For a guy that thinks this entire conversation can be reduced to numbers, this is a shockingly bizarre defense of the value of the number "0". No, I did not exclude Proleague from my first analysis. That is a false statement. At this point I truly have to assume that you are intellectually unable to discuss this topic or that you are having discussions in your mind that lead you to make such obviously wrong statements, instead of engaging with what others or I are actually writing and more importantly what we are meaning. I explained it several times... in my article, other comment sections and even in this very thread a couple of pages ago... I don't know how else to deliver the information to you: https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/642247-rotterdam-serral-is-the-goat-and-its-not-close?page=2#32In my very first article, I included match win rates of Proleague to not let Maru miss out on his phenomenal season. Proleague simply didn't make it into the tournament score, where its impact is rather small anyway (especially for Maru and Serral who dominate and outshine all the others in that metric through mostly individual achievements). I further didn't fix this because others complained, I adjusted the model in the 2nd article because I found a principled way to account for team events that addressed the methodological issues for the tournament score (see link). It was also the correct thing to do, even though the effect was rather small. This decisions made the follow-up piece less vulnerable to rather unnecessary criticism. This was shown when you - and others - tried to discredit the 2nd article over semantics (buff/nerf/perfect equilibrium) and the Chat GTP weighting, which I immediately conceded as that wasn't the main discovery and completely unimportant to me or the result. Had there be any possible substantial critique about methodology or the findings, I'd have heard them by now. So, not only are you - again - factually wrong here, you also still haven't attempted to explain the logical contradictions of Mvp having fulfilled a potential concept to look at a GOAT way less than Serral and how we should treat buffs/nerfs/adjustments to a perfect equilibrium. Oh yeah... and I still haven't seen an explanation on who you were arguing with when saying that people argue how Serral would have dominated in the prime era the same way he did post 2018. So did you simply have arguments in your head there or what is going on? And again: Until you apply your criteria consistently to all players or decide which kind of way you want to follow, your argumentation remains self-contradictory and irresolvable.
Right, so you gave no value to Proleague achievements, many of us explained how that was ridiculous, you tried to defend your original position for a while, and then you caved when you realized it wasn’t defensible. You also admitted that outsourcing your weightings—the most important part of your model—to ChatGPT was a mistake. I pointed out many other ways in which you claimed your model was nerfing Serral when it was explicitly designed to buff him. You never addressed those points. You admitted that Mvp’s “numbers” weren’t even good enough to pass your pre-screening test, which instantly condemned your model to irrelevance. And on and on and on. I don’t know why you can’t admit that you’re a Serral fanboy and so tried to create a model to prove he’s the GOAT. It’s a totally acceptable and fair thing to do, even if your model is deeply flawed and biased. “Biased” in this context is not even a bad thing, it’s a reality that applies to any model. Any model will necessarily reflect the biases of the specific criteria and weightings that are chosen. You never understood this basic concept. I’m not sure why. It’s a commonly accepted concept in economics and various other social sciences that derived value from modeling.
|
On November 01 2025 21:42 rwala wrote:Show nested quote +On November 01 2025 15:46 PremoBeats wrote:On November 01 2025 05:47 rwala wrote:On October 30 2025 15:53 PremoBeats wrote:On October 30 2025 11:04 rwala wrote:On October 29 2025 23:17 PremoBeats wrote:On October 29 2025 21:57 rwala wrote:On October 29 2025 15:40 PremoBeats wrote:On October 27 2025 22:28 rwala wrote:On October 27 2025 02:07 PremoBeats wrote:
[quote]
Wasn't it you who said that it isn't a nerf/buff when things are done to be equaled out or to approximate a "perfect" modifier, which this exact rule was meant to do? So how can you call this a nerf?
[quote]
Well, if Mvp is your GOAT, he faces an even harder "challenge" than the one you are pointing out for Serral.
As I wrote before, Mvp is most likely the GOAT contender who played the least against other GOAT contenders. So, do the same arguments that you throw at Serral also apply to Mvp? If so, how can he be your GOAT? If not, why? Can you make some arguments why you are inconsistent in applying your metrics?
See, this is my issue with you... it seems like you throw out unfounded accusations or proclaim arguments, but you rarely follow them through as an argument as well as coherently in applying logic.
It happened again in this very thread.
You misquote others, you put words in their mouth and you make claims without backing them up.
So far, I am still waiting for you to write at least one thing about your notion that Maru had "many stints pre-2018" where he was supposedly the best.
I am further waiting for you to prove the unfounded accusation that I said that "proleague doesn’t matter at all".
[quote]
Who here does?? Stop having arguments in your head.
The only thing that was being said is that it would statistically be reasonable to assume that he would have been the best player if all players gathered in their prime. Not that he would have been equally dominant.
[quote]
Do you accuse anyone in particular when you talk about people justify crowning their preferred player?
Are you even aware that there is no more transparent list out there than mine, as I demonstrated every little detail of how I arrived at each and every number, without obfuscating, for all of you guys to double check? I don’t apply metrics because I don’t invent math equations to crown my preferred candidate the GOAT. Mvp won the most competitive tournaments against the most competitive pools during the most competitive eras in the most competitive region. As Artosis said, you should be able to make your argument clearly, simply, and succinctly. When you can’t, you’re probably confused and likely seeking to confuse others. Just change the word "metric" with the word "logic": Well, if Mvp is your GOAT, he faces an even harder "challenge" than the one you are pointing out for Serral. As I wrote before, Mvp is most likely the GOAT contender who played the least against other GOAT contenders. So, do the same arguments that you throw at Serral also apply to Mvp? If so, how can he be your GOAT? If not, why? Can you make some arguments why you are inconsistent in applying your LOGIC? As you didn't answer these: 1. You said in another thread that it doesn't make sense to call it a buff for Koreans/nerf for Serral when one discounts region locks, as that is a means to simply level the playing field and thus more an "equalizer" than a buff/ nerf. I agreed. But why do you now call region locks a nerf for Koreans? Again, this shows how you change wording/framing depending on your acute need, not on a set of principles or based on consistent logic. 2. I am further waiting for you to prove your unfounded accusation that I said that "proleague doesn’t matter at all". 3. As you wrote: "I am not saying Serral would not have been equally dominant in earlier, more competitive eras and tournaments and regions. But to assume that he would have... ". Who assumed he would have? Which user here made this assumption that you are arguing against? So according to you, Mvp won in the most competitive era? You think the most competitive era in SC2 was from its beginning up to 2012? Correct? The chess comparison is off on so many accounts (a world champion being the defender, thus making it much easier to get back-to-back streaks) and Serral also fulfills achievements that were listed, hence I will not address all of them one by one. To be honest, you kind of remind me of Don Quixote. In your replies you lament about things no one said or argue against issues no one raised. It seems to me that you are fighting wind mills in your head, rather than actually engaging with the other side. No one said that Serral would be equally dominant had he played in 2012-2016. No one said that Proleague doesn’t matter in GOAT-discussions. In the meantime you wrote that it would be fair to say that Maru was the best in the world when he won a KIL. Then following that logic: Wasn’t Serral the best more than any other player - including Maru - for the most stints than any other player when he won tournaments, including all the best players of the world - not only Korans - with win rates that no one thought to be possible? If no, are you able to explain why? On October 28 2025 18:12 Argonauta wrote:
Biggest reason why Rotti and most of SC2 commentators call Serral the goat is because they want this esport to keep going so they need to spin this narrative to try to make the game appealing, they really don't care about being objective or recall past glories. Or perhaps because he is the GOAT based on all statistics, including regression models that let us compare contenders even cross-era? On October 28 2025 18:19 Charoisaur wrote:On October 28 2025 12:23 rwala wrote:
[quote]
This is is a really fair question actually, and I think where a lot of the “modernists” slip. The first thing to say is that no one—including Serral, the most dominant player—has dominated SC2 on the level of a Magnus Carlsen in Chess (#1 player in all formats for a decade, consensus favorite to win every tournament, undisputed best player for over a decade, highest ELO ever, longest streak without a loss, 9 consecutive super tournament victories, 17 world championship titles, etc.). Carlsen’s dominance is actually a study in contrast to Serral’s. Unlike Serral, whose dominance came as the game and level of competition was declining due to retirements, injuries, and lack of new talent, Carlsen’s dominance maintains to this day as the level of competition at the super GM level grows at a faster rate than ever before in Chess’s history. Just in the last few years we have the youngest GM ever, the youngest player to reach 2800 ELO, and the youngest world champion. 4 of the top 10 players are under the age of 23. SC2 hasn’t had anything remotely like a young prodigy since Clem in broke out in 2019/2020. Chess has more and more Clems every year.
The thing is that in the earlier years, SC2 was like this, and that’s fundamentally what I mean when I say the level of competition was higher. Making it to the top of a field of hundreds of active pros practicing non-stop to navigate an endlessly evolving and shifting ecosystem of metas and strategies is a different thing than maintaining your dominance over an increasingly dwindling pool of a couple of dozen pros, most of whom are diminished at least somewhat in their speed or skill execution due to age or injury (older chess players struggle with blitz and especially bullet formats as well).
I think sometimes people forget (or maybe didn’t even know), that in prior eras of SC2 GSL, SSL and other KILs there were hundreds of players from all around the world competing in various qualification tournaments for a chance at a main tournament group stage for a chance at a second group stage for a chance to make the tournament bracket for a chance at the title. Other than like the World Series of Poker main event or like the Olympics, which are insane, I honestly cannot think of a level of competition in tournament play that’s more intense than this (I’m sure there are some other examples, just struggling to think of them off the top). So it’s not surprising that there weren’t any really dominant players during these earlier eras, other than maybe Mvp.
If you follow other sports or games like chess that are growing rather than declining, it’s just bizarre to see these SC2 fans claim that the game got more competitive over time. The justification that’s sometimes offered is that absolute skill levels have improved (everyone now is better than before). But this has nothing to do with the level of competition. If anything, as the game gets figured out and metas settle, execution becomes much more important than strategy and tactics, which diminishes the rate at which less skilled pros can upset higher skilled pros. In earlier eras, rank 50 players upset top 10 players regularly. These days Serral and Clem are posting like 80-90% win rates in certain matchups and could probably beat rank 50 players easily with a Uthermal troll build.
Anyways, the TLDR is that other than Serral, I don’t think SC2 has really ever had a truly dominant player compared to some other games and sports, and while Serral’s dominance is ridiculously impressive, it’s certainly in part a product of a diminished level of competition. This isn’t to take anything away from Serral, who I think is the “best” player to ever play the game. Yeah the skill level argument isn't a good one, mainly because the skill level rising is due to the combined effort of all players playing since then, and not Serral or Clem's sole credit. It's like in swimming where techniques are constantly evolving and thus michael phelps isn't holding a single world record anymore, but still what he did back then was more impressive than what swimmers are doing today. But it still is... higher, no? And some players were not able to keep up with the new influence. Do we seriously believe that all the prime players simply lost their combined skill in 2018, so that Serral can defeat them with win rates of over 85%? While they still delivered against other foreigners or other Koreans? Why is it so hard to accept that one player simply is above the others? And these others were the best of the prime era. And can you elaborate why you think (honest question) what Phelps did is more impressive than what swimmers do today? Is it because he dominated his competition much more than any other swimmer? On October 29 2025 05:18 Charoisaur wrote:
Maru never was the best in HotS, however I don't think that's the gotcha some people think it is considering how competitive the era back then was, and the only players who really had a period during that time where they were considered the best are Inno, Zest and Life, and even for them it only was a very short period.
Imo being top 5 in that era is probably a bigger feat than being #1 in the modern era (in terms of how many S tier players you have to be able to regularly beat, etc.).
After that he was definitely considered the best during 2018 and in late 2021 when he won all the online tournaments with his lategame-style In my opinion (and as far as I remember for many others as well), Serral's 2018 made him at least equal if not better than Maru, especially because of the WC. We have years in which there is a more or less similar distribution of different names as winners of tournaments post-2018, despite the fact that there were a lot less tournaments, which from my perspective means, that 1st place was sufficiently fought for. I argued based on Monte Carlo simulations in the other thread, that it would be harder for player X, who is ahead of the curve, to win a tournament in the modern era, as there, you would have to beat prime Serral and prime Maru who have higher win rates than anything what came before. Meaning you have a skill level you didn't have to fight before. It seems to me, that people always argue from Serral's perspective, which is - at least in my opinion - not the correct approach. It can be helpful to see when looking at certain player achievements to determine - for example - that Serral never won in the most competitive time but I fail to see why it wouldn't account for anything that he played these exact players and other players in better versions than their selfs from 2012-2016 and still beat them with unprecedented results. Brother, you need to spend more than 1 second trying to understand the chess analogy. Notice how Magnus's 5 classical WCs are only part his case for dominance and GOATyness, and Magnus himself doesn't think it's the most competitive competition (which is why he's basically inventing a new world championship circuit). You could learn from Magnus in this regard! I included his 5 classical word championships among his 17 world championships, sure, but this is not why he is so dominant or the GOAT. It's also ironic how you make excuses for Serral's region-lock qualification buffs to get into premier and world championship tournaments, but all of a sudden have major issues with FIDE's classic world championship tournament format. In any event, I (and Magnus) agree with you about the FIDE WC tournament format for sure, and I've also explained why I have issues with the SC2 region-lock qualification process for WC and premier tourneys. This is what it means to be consistent. Try it out I really encourage you to engage deeply with the chess analogy because it will help you understand what a GOAT looks like, which really should be the first step. And by engaging deeply I don't mean crashing out and writing 10K words with every random argument against it. I mean putting your biases to the side and just sitting down and thinking. Try not to let yourself get triggered or become defensive of your model. Ask yourself simple questions like what can I learn about GOATs knowing that a player can maintain dominance in a growing and increasingly competitive 1v1 strategy game, across all game and tournament formats, when there are like 5 new Clems that emerge every year? If you reversed the chess timeline--meaning if time went backwards in the history of the game of chess--Serral is in many ways like Bobby Fisher (many people's chess GOAT). See if you can understand why! If you've done the deep thinking I'm recommending, you should be able to I don't need to spend even one second for analogies that don't apply. Especially not on the GOAT as in that regard many sports differ by insane amounts. Where did I make excuses for Serral's region lock qualification buffs? So you think that Serral should get a penalty for getting into tournaments through supposed easier qualifiers? Is that correct? Thinking about a penalty for a player, simply because they hail from a region with an easier qualifier in a GOAT discussion is... I don't know... are you seriously under the assumption that Serral of all players wouldn't have qualified for the tournaments he subsequently won, if he played the qualifier in a different region? Is that your argument? Just to compare that to the Candidates: The top 8 of the world duke it out in a knockout style tournament and one of them is able to challenge the defender. These are utterly different mechanisms. So to sum it up: You think Maru winning 2 KILs and having a couple of good days in Proleague is a proof to the claim that he had many stints where he was the best pre 2018, right? Why is that important to you? And you don't have any proof of me thinking/saying that Proleague doesn't matter at all? Any response to the question to whom you replied when talking about Serral's supposed dominance in the prime era? You can stop the condescending attitude, as long as you aren't able to answer pretty straightforward easy to answer questions. It's not like you've got some deep, hidden understanding about chess that I am unable to grasp and which leads to being an epiphany why Serral can't be the GOAT. Until you apply the same logic of criticism to your contender, there is simply no consistency. And to even compare the Candidates to a European qualifier, where Serral still had to play in a group stage and the whole knockout brackets of the actual World Championship is simply delusional. My position applies the same logic to every players - yours shifts depending on who you attack/cheer for. I can’t tell if you’re trolling or not but are you really saying winning a European qualifier in SC2 is harder than winning the Candidates in chess? You really should keep offering your opinions on these matters. It’s helping you greatly in your quest to appear objective and reasonable. I’m not sure why you think you can’t learn anything from the most competitive 1v1 tournament strategy game in history, which also happens to now be an e-sport. Serral can be the GOAT and is a great GOAT pick and most people’s GOAT pick as far as I can tell. But not because you decided he was and then created a calculator to prove it. A lot of us spent more time than we care to pointing out all the flaws and I appreciate that you admitted to many of your mistakes and the issues with outsourcing your weightings to ChatGPT, etc. I’m not really interested in engaging with your model any further until you’re open to thinking through some basic GOAT concepts firsts. It is not that I am trolling... it is you not being able to understand what I actually say. I never tried to make the point that winning the European SC2 qualifier is harder than the Candidates in chess. If you actually paid attention you'd notice that I wrote: "analogies that don't apply" "These are utterly different mechanisms" My point is that a reigning Starcraft 2 world champion historically had to play through a qualifier, had to play through a group stage and had to reach the finals through at least 2, if not 3 knockout matches. A reigning chess champion in contrast is seeded automatically into the finals. This makes defending the title overall a lot easier. That is my claim. Do you understand that claim? If so: Do you agree or disagree? If you disagree: why?
until you’re open to thinking through some basic GOAT concepts firsts.
Which concepts? You so far presented one concept in this thread (something along the lines of Serral having not played some names from mostly Mvp's time, meaning a metric to look at which contender played whicht top dogs of SC2's greats) that is even worse fulfilled by the player that is your proclaimed GOAT (Mvp) than the one that you attack (Serral). So I ask again: How do you reconcile this rather obvious first check on your consistency/logic? I mean, I am open to discuss this concept... but I would first need to understand your take on it, as it doesn't seem to make sense. As you further are (since roughly half a dozen replies) ignoring follow-ups on actual words you put in my mouth (me supposedly saying that Proleague doesn't matter at all) and you don't answer when being pressed on which actual user made certain arguments you argue against (making it seem like you invent arguments in your head that no one actually is making), I can only conclude that you are not being honest in your approach to discussing this topic. At this point, not answering these, can't be seen as a slip up. Another inconsistency would be you calling out my wording in the other thread when I named adjusting Serral's achievements a nerf, to which I agreed. But now you call the region lock a nerf to the Korean region. It is either or. Either we call adjustments a penalty/buff, although we simply want to level the playing field, or we don't and we simply call them adjustments to a "perfect" state/equilibrium. I don't really care (although in a logical sense I'd probably prefer the latter) which one it is, but there needs to be a consistent approach. If you are done arguing with me that is fine. I find this exchange utterly unsatisfying as well, when main questions are not being answered, despite repeated reminders. So I just want to point out that you haven't addressed the inherent logical disputes in your own argumentation. If I am misrepresenting or misunderstanding you, please point out where the actual misunderstanding is located. Brother, you literally excluded any consideration of Proleague from your original GOAT analysis in that it provided no numerical value in an exclusively numbers-based approach. This is, quite literally, the definition of Proleague not mattering. You corrected this after several people pointed out that it was ridiculous. I give you credit for that. But don't try to pretend you had some thoughtful inclusion of Proleague results in your model from the get-go. For a guy that thinks this entire conversation can be reduced to numbers, this is a shockingly bizarre defense of the value of the number "0". No, I did not exclude Proleague from my first analysis. That is a false statement. At this point I truly have to assume that you are intellectually unable to discuss this topic or that you are having discussions in your mind that lead you to make such obviously wrong statements, instead of engaging with what others or I are actually writing and more importantly what we are meaning. I explained it several times... in my article, other comment sections and even in this very thread a couple of pages ago... I don't know how else to deliver the information to you: https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/642247-rotterdam-serral-is-the-goat-and-its-not-close?page=2#32In my very first article, I included match win rates of Proleague to not let Maru miss out on his phenomenal season. Proleague simply didn't make it into the tournament score, where its impact is rather small anyway (especially for Maru and Serral who dominate and outshine all the others in that metric through mostly individual achievements). I further didn't fix this because others complained, I adjusted the model in the 2nd article because I found a principled way to account for team events that addressed the methodological issues for the tournament score (see link). It was also the correct thing to do, even though the effect was rather small. This decisions made the follow-up piece less vulnerable to rather unnecessary criticism. This was shown when you - and others - tried to discredit the 2nd article over semantics (buff/nerf/perfect equilibrium) and the Chat GTP weighting, which I immediately conceded as that wasn't the main discovery and completely unimportant to me or the result. Had there be any possible substantial critique about methodology or the findings, I'd have heard them by now. So, not only are you - again - factually wrong here, you also still haven't attempted to explain the logical contradictions of Mvp having fulfilled a potential concept to look at a GOAT way less than Serral and how we should treat buffs/nerfs/adjustments to a perfect equilibrium. Oh yeah... and I still haven't seen an explanation on who you were arguing with when saying that people argue how Serral would have dominated in the prime era the same way he did post 2018. So did you simply have arguments in your head there or what is going on? And again: Until you apply your criteria consistently to all players or decide which kind of way you want to follow, your argumentation remains self-contradictory and irresolvable. Right, so you gave no value to Proleague achievements, many of us explained how that was ridiculous, you tried to defend your original position for a while, and then you caved when you realized it wasn’t defensible. You also admitted that outsourcing your weightings—the most important part of your model—to ChatGPT was a mistake. I pointed out many other ways in which you claimed your model was nerfing Serral when it was explicitly designed to buff him. You never addressed those points. You admitted that Mvp’s “numbers” weren’t even good enough to pass your pre-screening test, which instantly condemned your model to irrelevance. And on and on and on. I don’t know why you can’t admit that you’re a Serral fanboy and so tried to create a model to prove he’s the GOAT. It’s a totally acceptable and fair thing to do, even if your model is deeply flawed and biased. “Biased” in this context is not even a bad thing, it’s a reality that applies to any model. Any model will necessarily reflect the biases of the specific criteria and weightings that are chosen. You never understood this basic concept. I’m not sure why. It’s a commonly accepted concept in economics and various other social sciences that derived value from modeling.
Lol, what kind of reality distortion is that, hahaha.
Only 1 person was actually trying to meaningfully engage (Charoisaur) and his critic mostly wasn't based on the excemption of team results anyway. Some users even argued that team results shouldn't count at all.
You can check the pages of the first article easily by looking for the keywords "proleague" and "team". Most of the discussion didn't involve this topic.
The rest of the critics didn't reply after 1 or 2 follow ups, including you. You do realize that the thread still exists and can be looked at, right?
Or that others also made verdicts about the exchange:
On July 30 2024 12:37 sc2turtlepants wrote:
While I admire your willingness to continue running in the same circles, rwala straight up said that he prefers subjective metrics (ie he's redefined 'GOAT' as 'My favorite player'), Chariosaur's comments have run in all the same veins, and Poopi won't even engage with the content because then he'd have to state a position that could be refuted when he'd rather just chime in every few pages with a 2-line quip that allows him to maintain an air of smugness. They aren't here to discuss metrics, they're here to complain about them.
Plus, I was open to critic's input from the beginning, before actually thinking deeper about the issue:
"7. So any replies to the difficulties on how to factor in Proleague/Team results? Or how to actually do it? This still has not been addressed."
https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/628786-the-starcraft-2-goat-an-in-depth-analysis?page=9#165
And I'd be really interested to hear about this "biased" model and where exactly "my bias" trumped statistical analysis. So far, I mostly heard irrelevant talking points about weighting (again), or utterly irrelevant things.
And yes. Mvp would not be in the top 4, unless I massively tweak the era-modifier to complete absurd dimensions. The pre-screen suggested this outcome and thus I didn't include Mvp in the first detailed analysis. That much didn't change in the 2nd iteration and - small head's up - won't change in the up and coming third. Mvp massively benefits from the Aligulac- and Efficiency-score, but as these have been rightfully deemed by the TL- and reddit-community to be massively overtuned in my Chat GTP rating, he will only fall behind more when the final weighting is applied. So far, the suggestion was 44-36-5-5-5-5 in favor of tournament score over tournament win participation.
So yeah... consistency... some tried to attack Serral's case by going after Aligulac. Fair enough, but then you have to deal with the consequence that Mvp's case also drops.
That is the value of such an analysis... realizing that you can't get Maru ahead of Serral because of pre-2018-results, without at the same time having him be overtaken by Life or INnoVation.
- I gave FULL value to Proleague in the match win rates and I gave 0 value to it, in the tournament score. Stop trying to frame or mischaracterize your way out of this. I won't let you.
- The things you mentioned didn't turn buffs into nerfs, lol. We agreed that calling something a buff/nerf when we approximate it to a "perfect equilibrium" is only an adjustment, not a buff/nerf. A logic, you turned on its head in this very thread and so far didn't explain.
- You - again - didn't explain the logical contradictions of Mvp having fulfilled a potential concept to look at a GOAT way less than Serral and how he can be your GOAT
- I still haven't seen an explanation on who you were arguing with when saying that people argue how Serral would have dominated in the prime era the same way he did post 2018. So did you simply have arguments in your head there or what is going on?
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
