#3: Rogue - Greatest Players of All Time - Page 9

On February 29 2024 05:07 ejozl wrote:
Rogue has this crazy bo7 record. But how do the stats look, if we just look at every finals? ex. TaeJa has incredible winrate in finals, but many were probably bo5's, I'd be interested to see this.


Patience defeated Zest to win that HSC, I know because I am a Patience fanboi.


I think he was the favourite after winning the GSL to win the World Championsship and he did. I don't really know if aura counts for anything, what if everyone is just wrong about a person? For instance, many called this guy a patch zerg, abuser, or simply lucky. But being the most consistent player in bo7's means that this is just all bullshit. Stephano had the aura, but how much did he really win. I dno, I just think many people hated Rogue, because they did not understand him, he's a super hard worker and he is obviously intelligent.


Does greatest mean that you have to be virtuous? if so, Fruitdealer can be the GOAT for winning for his family, or Duckdeok, because that guy seems really nice.

On February 29 2024 04:51 Locutos wrote:
Well, i guess we all knew Rogue was gonna be 3rd.

And we all know whos gonha be 2nd.

And 1st.

On February 29 2024 05:15 Mizenhauer wrote:


Yeah, but when your greatest achievement is stealing from your fellow pros by accelerating the death of proleague and committing the equivalent of a federal crime (gambling is illegal in Korea), you're not lacking in virtue, you're just a piece of shit and the sc2 community would have been better off if he never played.

On February 29 2024 07:43 Poopi wrote:
We know that whoever won latest Katowice wouldn’t change who is #1. That means it’s either Serral #1 because Maru has no WC (other than WESG which is not really WC) and even winning one Katowice isn’t enough.

Or it’s Maru #1 because of the absurd amount of star leagues + HotS success, including proleague, meaning Serral winning another WC wouldn’t be enough?

I lean towards Serral #1, but otoh having Rogue at #3 behind Maru might mean that WCs ain’t that important in this list and the absurd number of Maru’s KIL + proleague record is enough for him to be #1

Exciting either way

On February 29 2024 09:06 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:


I do feel Miz has high praise for Maru and seems to rate him higher in HotS than others do (he often cites his Proleague, his winrate, performance in GSL, etc.). As well as the criteria saying that WC tier events are only weighed slightly more than GSL/Starleague. Maru did win an OSL over Rain (#10 on this list), and a SSL over Dream. And then, he has 4 GSL wins in 2018-2019, before GSL started declining much. If you count these, it's 6 Starleague wins, vs Serral's 3 WC tier wins and other stuff (dunno which if any would qualify as something close to a Starleague by the criteria). Then you add Proleague which he sees as what KR players focused on in HotS, and HotS was the most competitive era with Kespa and all.

That and that 2nd place isn't as much worse than 1st place as other people weigh it. So, these are all potential reasons that could give Maru the edge over Serral.

I feel there's a 50% chance Maru gets #1 on this list. I think I would even lean towards betting on that than Serral - saying that the results of Katowice wouldn't affect it, I think makes me think that Maru is #1 on this list and any other WC win Serral gained wouldn't be enough because it's in a weaker era.

It would also line up with those weekenders not being weighed much, and Rain a Starleague/Proleague player being over Taeja for example.

@Pact
Enjoyed that post! Yeah Flash vs Life was an epic face off. I forgot MC beat MVP in that same tournament. So many GOATS were being surpassed symbolically. (Career wise, MC did outlast MVP and he even won the Gamers8 Legends haha.)

I didn't realize he was a minor at the time, and that he was only dropping games not matches. I do agree that it's much less worse if he felt, ok i will just drop this and that game, but still win the match, so the competitive integrity is still there and the result won't be changed. I do believe in forgiveness and redemption, especially for young people or people who don't have a bad record. (These things, like how well his friends and family perceived him in normal life, are all accounted for in court when deciding the punishment.)

I don't think he didn't make it cus of his career being cut short though (Rain and MVP made it, a la "Class is permanent, form is temporary"). I think the main reason is that Life didn't perform that well in Starleagues/Proleague, and was mainly a foreign weekender event player. I think that's the same reason there's a good chance Serral won't be #1.

For me though, I would put Life right above MVP on my list, and Taeja following close behind them.

On February 29 2024 08:55 Pact wrote:
Afaik this is my first post and I have been following TL since SC2 came out but I just wanted to make a post in regards to Life.

I don't think that anyone who believes that he deserves to be in the conversation for greatest player ever is saying he didn't cause a lot of damage to the game. What people are saying is that he was a minor and to try to have a little empathy. Given the nature of how much money there is in gambling, it would not surprise me that he was approached with a huge amount of money. Put yourself in his shoes: you're a minor, you are doing something incredibly hard in competing at the highest level of sc2 and probably not being paid by your team an amount commensurate to the difficulty of your achievements. Someone is offering you more money than you've ever seen just to drop a game, not even the whole set. A lot of people at that age would not be mature enough to make the right decision.

Not saying that it is the same thing but a large amount of US professional sports players end their careers with very little money. They were never taught to plan financially or to make decisions when it comes to large sums of money and these are people in their 20s. I think that there was a conversation at the time that the court wanted to make an example out of Life.

Like many, I read the elephants in the room article and was shocked, a little angry, and a little scared because maybe it was true? I came into the game with Wings so I never followed BW. Was it true that there existed an entire legion of pros who could at any point switch over and completely invalidate the achievements of MVP, Nestea, MC and others? This was at the height of SC2's popularity and I wanted to believe that what I was watching was the best that SC2 could be played at the moment, I didn't want the article to be true. But Artosis, Hotbid and others believed that Flash and Jaedong were just built different, that they were orders of magnitude better than MVP, that given a couple months to flesh out the game, they would completely dominate everyone.

So when the Kespa pros finally switched over and MLG Dallas happened, and Flash defeated Parting and Innovation to make grand finals. And Life stood in his way, having defeated MC, who had himself previously eliminated MVP - I needed Life to win. It felt like fate, as if MC and MVP fell because they knew that Life could defend the integrity of all of the Starcraft that had been played before. It was one of those series where you felt that something bigger was being decided here. And I cheered so much with every ling runbys and I must have lost it when those banelings rolled into Flash's worker lines on Cloud Kingdom. Life taking the win on that day felt symbolic. The energy of it felt similar to me as when Serral became the first foreigner to win a Starcraft world championship. Incontrol described on State of the Game watching Serral holding up that trophy and turning around and seeing Mike Morhaime, silent tears running down his face.

It's probably true that if he was considered under a very stats based methodology, he wouldn't make top 10 because his career was cut short by his actions. He might have needed more time like some in the currently written top 10. What he did have was that brilliance, genius, virtuosity. Every time that his handful of lings ran pass a lowered depot, it seemed that he understood the game on a level that other pros didn't yet. He seemed to have that ability to win.

I agree with others that any goat list is subjective and if your methodology rules Life out, that's fine. But I don't think it's ridiculous at all for him to be in the conversation, with the asterisk of all damage that his actions caused. It feels that anyone who brings up Life is treated as a troll or someone who doesn't understand what happened, but as a spectator with great love for the game, Life was that guy for awhile.

On February 29 2024 10:38 Perceivere wrote:
There is no telling whether Life's wins were also match-fixed. That alone should exclude him from any list.

Putting children who never played LotV on a GOAT list is a bit comical to me. It's well known in chess that players don't reach their plateau until at least their early twenties, and more typically their late twenties. Not only was the game in its juvenile state, the skill levels of players and their mental states were also in the juvenile states. I find it all just too absurd. One can argue that the rapid-pace SC2 game is different from classical chess, but Hikaru Nakamura shows that even in your thirties you can be the top dog of 1-min bullet chess.

There is no telling if Life or MVP's peaks would be significantly higher/lower than the peak of the current pool of players. Remember that after MVP had all of his success he petered off into the middle of the pack. His plateau was such that he just couldn't keep up with the front of the pack, and the ever rising skill floor. Or, perhaps HotS did him in, in which case the lack of ability to adjust is a mark against him. True greats should excel at adapting.

I mean, I get that you're pressed to include kids, because the life expectancy of SC2 seems closer than the farthest horizon, and a good chunk of players had left the game long ago. Still, meh...Comparing WoL or Hots to current level of play is like comparing high school league to major league baseball. I don't care what children accomplished in high school. This is just silly. No WoL-HotS-exclusive players should be anywhere near the top5, unless they were far and away dominant for their entire career, which none of these kids was.

On February 29 2024 10:51 JJH777 wrote:


Even if you're correct and players now are better (which I don't think is clear, guys like Maru/Dark are still top 2/top 5 in the world and are likely worse than their HotS selves, Dark directly stated that he considers himself worse) that isn't the only factor. The number one factor for how hard it is to compete in something is how many other people are competing in it. It's harder to be the best when there are several hundred other people trying to do the same thing than when there are only 30 others even if the skill level at the top is a bit higher.

On February 29 2024 09:26 Nasigil wrote:
It wouldn't make sense for him to say that while having Serral #1. One Katowice for Maru should be a huge swing in his favor since it's literally the only thing missing from his trophy cabinet.

On February 29 2024 11:37 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:


Yep exactly this, I was forgetting about this but I feel certain that Maru is going to be #1 now.
If Maru was #2, then a WC tier win would definitely call into question whether Serral should be #1.

Miz IIRC considers Maru above Taeja in HotS, meaning Maru was a top top HotS player, the most competitive era. And Maru also being a top LotV player, around Rogue's success and still close to Serral, would automatically make him the GOAT. (Other top HotS players like Life, Taeja, sOs, MC, Innovation, clearly fell off, and Inno is rated even below MVP).

Serral and Rogue both are players who made their careers in LotV, while Maru was strong since HotS.
IIRC Miz cited that despite players like Rain not winning a ton of Starleagues, the highest anyone won during HotS was 2. And that was a reason Rain's 1 GSL and 1 OSL win are valued as a lot, cus that relatively was the highest feat you could pull off in terms of Starleague performance. Hence why racking up tons of results like Dark over a long period isn't more.

On February 29 2024 12:53 Nasigil wrote:


In my eyes, Serral has the greatest peak out of any SC2 players (for a respectable 6 years too, that's longer than some player's whole career on this list), while Maru has a slightly lower peak but probably better overall career achievement, thanks to those extra few very elite HotS years. It really comes down to what you values the most in a GOAT ranking.

But considering Serral just won Katowice over Maru in dominant fashion, it's gonna be quite a scene if he really place Maru at #1 at this point of time. Together with the Dark omission, imagine the controversy it's gonna stir. Not gonna be pretty.