EPTAnyways looking forward to playing from the Brood War side!
SC4ALL II: SC2 Player Announcement 6/8 - Maru - Page 4
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art_of_turtle
United States1208 Posts
Anyways looking forward to playing from the Brood War side! | ||
Mizenhauer
United States1958 Posts
On August 28 2026 12:35 art_of_turtle wrote: It never ceases to amaze me that people don't understand how tournament seeding works, or what the actual benefit is. It just means the lower level players play each other for the chance to play vs the better players. While the better seeded players don't need to absolutely destroy someone who just isn't as skilled in the first round making it a more enjoyable experience at least for the first round. Better players don't waste their time destroying someone well under skilled while your best players get right into the competitive side. Anyways looking forward to playing from the Brood War side! Ill be casting a bunch of the bw games that weekend. Make sure to swing by and say hello! | ||
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ejozl
Denmark3544 Posts
On August 28 2026 03:17 Balnazza wrote: That's just crap, sorry. TaeJa beat all the top players who WANTED to attend. Same is true for Serral. Or do you honestly think in 2018, when Serral won his first one, Take didn't invite Maru because he wanted to have uThermal and souL? No, of course not. Maru didn't want to play, neither did TY, so they weren't there. Qualifier wouldn't have changed anything about that. We have Oliveira as an example, he would've never been the primary invite. And wanting to attend is part of the recipe to be a winner, mc flew everywhere and had the backing of teams and sponsors, this made him one of the goats. I think maru even declined an iem wc, is this now not an eligible tournament because one of the best didn't want to try? Should we exclude ewc because maxpax is an online god?! | ||
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Balnazza
Germany1355 Posts
On August 29 2026 06:54 ejozl wrote: We have Oliveira as an example, he would've never been the primary invite. And wanting to attend is part of the recipe to be a winner, mc flew everywhere and had the backing of teams and sponsors, this made him one of the goats. I think maru even declined an iem wc, is this now not an eligible tournament because one of the best didn't want to try? Should we exclude ewc because maxpax is an online god?! This is far offtopic, so I will try to wrap it up: You are cross-connecting things that do not have anything to do with your original statement, because you want to uphold that original statement. Your statement was "Taejas HSC runs are more impressive than Serrals because of qualifiers". I showed you that these qualifiers were essentially meaningless, since they a)made up only a fraction of the player field, b)the number of "qualified players" was even higher in Serrals run than in TaeJas and c)that everyone who wanted to attend HSC and was "up there" would have gotten the chance, since the qualifier was clearly only there to fill slots that elite players didn't take. An example for that would be I believe TaeJas second HSC win, in which only three players attended that would eventually play Blizzcon. These arguments I've made are only valid while we talk about HSC. Has nothing to do with "declining an invite" or even the question if qualifiers are important or not. If qualifiers are this super high elite thing you claim, BlizzCon becomes worthless, because Blizzcon doesn't have qualifiers. And hey, if I recall correctly, to play the qualifiers for IEM you had to be atleast Master. Maybe the best player in the world is a lazy egyptian who just can't be bothered to ladder up his rank above Diamond, but he would totally Royal Road GSL! ...which is of course an absurd statement, but it is true. Qualifiers can be important and they can guarantee that players don't get complacent, but that doesn't mean everything without qualifiers is "less valid". In almost all of its iteration, HSC is an invite tournament, with a few slots being filled qualifiers. Even the invites themselves were clearly a bit biased, with inviting some "regulars". Which isn't bad, because that is just the kind of tournament HSC is, was and probably will always will be. Serrals last HSC is the absolute exception from that rule, because it was a WCS tournament with the most qualifiers that actually mattered. So if you want to name the most "legit" HSC win for whatever reason...it would be Serrals fourth win. | ||
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PremoBeats
608 Posts
On August 29 2026 06:54 ejozl wrote: We have Oliveira as an example, he would've never been the primary invite. And wanting to attend is part of the recipe to be a winner, mc flew everywhere and had the backing of teams and sponsors, this made him one of the goats. I think maru even declined an iem wc, is this now not an eligible tournament because one of the best didn't want to try? Should we exclude ewc because maxpax is an online god?! Going back to my post from last page: Oli could have been kicked out in a multi-layered Bo3-qualifier as well. The only example where a super wild card won a WC further doesn't have anything to do with your original argument. You first basically made the point that Serral's win isn't worth as much as pure invites could miss out on "potential gsl caliber qualifier going into it." (rating the tournament). You followed up with arguing that TaeJa beat the best from several regions, which you implied was only possible because of the qualifiers (arguing to find the best). So if the question is how the best player is found, a layered Bo3 qualifier - though inherently being more variance based - isn't the best way as I showed in my previous post. You could argue that qualifiers based on the whole season are different, but there we also saw players with strong current form miss out, while others underperformed, despite having good seasons. Your follow up arguments also basically don't address the core issue. It is not about being the primary invite, but about inviting the supposed best players or a wide enough range. Your argument acts like TaeJa's wins are more valuable than Serral because there was qualifier for 3 regions of which 6 out of the 32 players in the tournamnent hailed. You completely ignore the variance aspect of these qualifiers or that they represent a super low number of participants. You can't even make sure that the tournament actually misses out on those 6 players in the main event, if they are for example incorporated in the invite list. Hence, if your goal is to truly find the best player, you invite a large enough group of the best players of each region and give them a big prize pool to feast upon. And if you want to retrospectively want to "rate the value" of a given tournament, you can weigh different kind of qualifiers. That is why GSL was so brutal and hyped and favorites could get eliminated so early: Because you could face monsters super early in a Bo3. But it doesn't automatically follow that thus all tournaments with some kind of Bo3-qualifier are tougher, as there are other factors as well. The road there could be harder (accumulating season points) or the invite field is super stacked (PiG 8 )... so finding the best and rating the value of a tournament are completely different things which you seem to conflate here as well as - imo - arguing wrongly that to find the best multi-layered Bo3 are the optimal way. | ||
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ejozl
Denmark3544 Posts
You have to actually leave your house, have qualified, and win in a field of players who are in it for this prestige and prize pool. The pool of players in invite only hsc might be way stronger, and thereby make the tournament harder, but in its abstraction it's not, since the mere 2 qualified players that might even be replaced because others didn't bother to go, still represents the larger potential pool of high caliber players, and this for me is one of the aiding factors to giving prestige to the tournament. As the other guy said, inviting is almost basically rigging. I will concede that taejas runs are probably weaker, if that's what I said, but I rate those tournaments higher. Blizzcons have their own qualifiers that they went with. | ||
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PremoBeats
608 Posts
And there is even another very important element that is central to SC2 besides "toughness of an event" and "finding the strongest": Hype. And with several different types of ways to get to an event, you are able to create hype. Who will make it through the league system? Can player X book a ticket through a last ditch effort qualifier? Will that person beat group stage (in Oli's case only extremly close)? Make it far in the group stage? Or even win? Ah shit, player x and y already face off in the qualifier... who will make it? Invites, especially with paid trip costs, can also add quality or caliber to a tournament. So I guess all of these formats serve different purposes. I'd still have to push back on the argument that 2 mere qualified players represent the larger potential of high caliber players, as there are too many factors and variances though, especially with smaller Bo-qualifiers. For example, if your field is 64, you simply the 62 best standing players across various ladders / Aligulac. Adding these last 2 through a qualifier of 16 players with 4 Bo3s adds simply too much variance that you can say with certainty thta the strongest player for longer knockout stages will qualify / or that the quality of the tournament itself has gonve up meaningfully. That is why I think the best way to rate a tournament is through a mix of qualifiers, format and strength of the player field. | ||
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ejozl
Denmark3544 Posts
I personally put a lot of merit into the way sOs won in hots, but as we saw it didn't work as well, when game became more mechanically demanding, and bo3's and bo5's became bo5's, bo7's and even bo9's. But imo, there's also a point where you take away too much of this quality, a bo69 is more akin to finding the best ladder player, which has its own merit. Sorry for derailing the thread. | ||
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Mizenhauer
United States1958 Posts
On August 30 2026 18:37 ejozl wrote: Yeah, it's just from which outlook you take. Here, I assume that the winner of the world championship is the best player in the world, because everyone was able to attend, the money, prestige is all there, there's not rly an excuse one can give. But realistically you're right, and Oli probably wasn't the best player, there's a lot of luck involved, heck organizers could've chosen to go with bo3's with one coin flip win, or bo1's. I personally put a lot of merit into the way sOs won in hots, but as we saw it didn't work as well, when game became more mechanically demanding, and bo3's and bo5's became bo5's, bo7's and even bo9's. But imo, there's also a point where you take away too much of this quality, a bo69 is more akin to finding the best ladder player, which has its own merit. Sorry for derailing the thread. I think it's perfectly fair to say Time was the best player in the world that weekend. I don't think anyone thought those type of results would continue, but you can't argue that he kicked the shit out of everyone he played after the group stages. I don't think it's fair to ascribe sOs' success to the fact that he played shorter series during his run of 3 WC in two(ish) years. The mechanics of the game certainly favored him in hots compared to Lotv, but he did manage to reach Code S finals in 2016 and 2017 (which had bo7 in the semis and finals)-something he never did during Heart of the Swarm. | ||
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Balnazza
Germany1355 Posts
On August 30 2026 18:37 ejozl wrote: Yeah, it's just from which outlook you take. Here, I assume that the winner of the world championship is the best player in the world, because everyone was able to attend, the money, prestige is all there, there's not rly an excuse one can give. But realistically you're right, and Oli probably wasn't the best player, there's a lot of luck involved, heck organizers could've chosen to go with bo3's with one coin flip win, or bo1's. I personally put a lot of merit into the way sOs won in hots, but as we saw it didn't work as well, when game became more mechanically demanding, and bo3's and bo5's became bo5's, bo7's and even bo9's. But imo, there's also a point where you take away too much of this quality, a bo69 is more akin to finding the best ladder player, which has its own merit. Sorry for derailing the thread. You essentially start to go into a rabbit hole that never ends. A few years ago, there was a german chess tournament on Youtube an someone complained about the format, because "A bracket doesn't determine the best player!!!!!!!1". Which is technically true. In an 8-player bracket, you only have to be better than three other players to win. For example, we all know Clems "weakness" in TvT. So maybe he would lose a TvT in that bracket, but because he never faces any Terran, he wins the tournament. "Bracket luck" will always be a thing. And it will also be a thing in double-elimination aswell. So maybe we should do Round-robin? But what if we spread that over two days, but the "best player" has a wankers cramp on Day 2? Mhm...maybe we should do like double Round-Robin? Or triple? Or... If you go on HLTV and read the comments, you will see that according to the "experts", basically no tournament win (except the ones from Vitality at the moment) are legit, because there is always *something*. Some minor detail that somehow apparently delegitimizes the entire run. And it is absurd. You will always have to accept that there are factors in a tournament that the players can't control. And that should never be used against those players in my opinion. And the same can be applied to qualifiers: You will never find the perfect system for qualification and you can argue for days which is better and what is more "legit". Actually, I already did that on this site with people when we argued during the GOAT-wars about what is harder to win, GSL or Blizzcon. And while they have different systems, the main difference in my opinion is actually the path going into both tournaments. But again, that is my opinion that I can hardly declare as ultimate truth (though I will obviously do it anyway, BECAUSE I'M RIGHT!). | ||
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ejozl
Denmark3544 Posts
On August 30 2026 19:23 Mizenhauer wrote: I think it's perfectly fair to say Time was the best player in the world that weekend. I don't think anyone thought those type of results would continue, but you can't argue that he kicked the shit out of everyone he played after the group stages. I don't think it's fair to ascribe sOs' success to the fact that he played shorter series during his run of 3 WC in two(ish) years. The mechanics of the game certainly favored him in hots compared to Lotv, but he did manage to reach Code S finals in 2016 and 2017 (which had bo7 in the semis and finals)-something he never did during Heart of the Swarm. It might be that sOs is falsely recognized as the big series stud. In lotv, the period you mentioned, he was feared the most, and often had multiple accounts occupying the top ladder spots. | ||
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Mizenhauer
United States1958 Posts
On August 31 2026 21:28 ejozl wrote: It might be that sOs is falsely recognized as the big series stud. In lotv, the period you mentioned, he was feared the most, and often had multiple accounts occupying the top ladder spots. sOs was the underdog in both of his Code S finals (though, I remember feeling strongly that sOs was going to clutch up and beat byun) and he actually made the second final against Inno far closer than it should have been. As far as his reputation, that peaked in 2013 at Blizzcon and remained steady pretty much until his original retirement. Even when his skills diminished he still played the same way because it's the only way he knows how to play the game. | ||
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