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The original was posted on /r/starcraft by /u/BumBumBenner on 2024-07-21 13:42:41+00:00.
The StarCraft 2 Greatest Of All Time - An in depth analysis
Table of content
- Introduction
- General methodology
- Aligulac rank analysis
- Analysis of Aligulac Hall of Fame
- Match win rates analysis
- Tournament Analysis 6.1 Percentage of won tournaments 6.2 Average place achieved 6.3 Tournament score 6.4 Efficiency score
- Discussion
- Opinion piece/hypotheticals
1. Introduction
Determining the greatest StarCraft 2 player of all time is no easy task. The challenges inherent in such an undertaking are manifold. StarCraft 2, a game of immense complexity and strategic depth, has seen numerous players rise to prominence through different eras, each contributing to the evolution of the game in unique ways. Moreover, the ever-changing meta, the introduction of new strategies, and the diverse range of opponents faced over the years make it difficult to establish a definitive benchmark for greatness.
My goal in this analysis is to sift through the myriad accomplishments and performances to identify who stands out as the ultimate StarCraft 2 player. This endeavor is driven by a desire to celebrate the extraordinary skill and dedication that these players bring to the game, and to offer a comprehensive evaluation that honors their contributions to the StarCraft 2 community. I will try to be as objective as possible, keeping subjective categorizations to a minimum, while accepting that there are subjective topics like difficulty of different eras that will always retain some sort of subjectivity. I will further give detailed explanations about my methodology and I will be as transparent as possible.
Who am I anyway? I am a long time StarCraft 2 fan and have a background in critical thinking as I was part of many debate clubs. I enjoy doing statistics and to analyze this subject was a long time goal of mine. Simply put - I am a number’s guy. But enough of me… let’s get to the interesting part: The players.
In a first screening I evaluated the players that come up most frequently in GOAT discussions. These pre-contenders are: ByuN, Dark, INnoVation, herO, Life, Maru, MMA, Mvp, Rain, Reynor, Rogue, Serral, soO, sOs, TaeJa, TY, Zest.
For the pre-screening I looked at the following metrics:
- World Championships won
- Premier Tournaments won
- Duration of career
- Win rate against top Korean players in any given year
It became obvious pretty soon that four players stand out without question among the 16 pre-contenders. The final contenders for my GOAT-discussion thus are: INnoVation, Maru, Rogue and Serral.
As you will see, I did extensive analyses of these player’s careers. The player’s results in the excel sheets will be listed in accordance to their first entrance into the top 10 ranks of the world. The order thus is INnoVation, Maru, Serral, Rogue.
2. General methodology
The 3 main metrics I analyzed are consistency, dominance and efficiency and all available data until the 30th of June 2024 was used in this article.
Consistency - A metric that is showing if players are able to perform over long periods of time at the same level or a similar quality. A sub-category would be duration, although duration by itself doesn’t say anything about quality.
Dominance - A quality that shows that a player is stronger or better than other players.
Efficiency - A metric to show that a player is able to generate the best results in a short period of time
At first glance efficiency and consistency might seem to contradict each other. Consistency is more like a base level that needs to be cleared. For my pre-screening I used 3 years of playing at the top level as an entrance barrier to the final contender list. Still, some players have more than a decade of playing at top level. Thus, players can be more efficient than others over long periods of time, amassing more titles in similar times frames.
Only looking at tournament placements like other GOAT discussions did in the past would leave out important context. Thus, I evaluated the following data in order to substantiate the 3 factors consistency, dominance and efficiency.
Aligulac rank analysis
- Percentage of occupying rank 1 on Aligulac
- Percentage of occupying rank 1 or 2 on Aligulac
Aligulac Hall of Fame
Match win rates
Tournament analysis (including an era analysis and in depth analysis of the tournaments played by these players)
- Percentage of won tournaments
- Average place achieved
- Tournament score
- Efficiency score
It is important to mention that I ONLY looked at match win rates or tournaments where top Koreans participated. I did this because of the correct notion that it would be easier for Serral to score points in these metrics as he played in tournaments that are region-locked which have heavy influence on match win rates, placement in tournaments or the percentage of won tournaments.
!The only exception for this is one sub-analysis (Tournament score) as I found no fair or objective way to make up for the time Serral would have lost by simply leaving out these tournaments completely. I addressed this issue by devaluing the region locked tournaments immensely, but more on that down below.!
All the data gathered is available online for free at aligulac.com and liqupedia.com so everyone is welcomed to double check if I made any mistakes to let me correct them in an update.
That being said, this is a very dry subject. I am also neither a native English speaker nor do I have a proper education in writing and on top I am also human - thus errors in form of grammar, bad wording, boring writing or even wrong countings at times can occur. I tried to analyze the topic of GOAT in StarCraft2 to the best of my ability and was attempting to look at every angle of argumentation in the discussion. Unfortunately I also have no skills whatsoever in presenting the gathered data in a nice fashion, thus excel needs to do.
It was a lot of work and I hope that you will enjoy this little discussion.
3. Aligulac rank analysisMethodology:
I clicked through all aligulac lists and made notes whether a given contender was ranked 1, 2, 3 or was placed inside the top 10. I then calculated their respective percentages of being either ranked 1 or ranked 1 or 2. I also made notes in regards to interesting events and thus this brief timeline was established.
May 2013/List 83 INnoVation enters Top 10
July 2013/List 89 INnoVation claims rank 1 for the first time
Jan 2015/List 127 Maru enters Top 10
June 2017/List 191 Serral enters Top 10
Dec 2017/List 203 Serral claims rank 1 for the first time
May 2018/List 214 Maru claims rank 1 for the first time
Sept 2017/List 197 Rogue enters Top 10
Nov 2022/List 332 Rogue leaves for Military Service
Sept 2021/List 301 INnoVation leaves for Military Service
March 2023/List 340 INnoVation returns from Military Service and re-enters on rank 18
June 2023/List 348 INnoVation ends his career on rank 25
April 2024/List 368 Rogue returns from Military Service and re-enters on rank 17
April 2024/List 369 Serral loses rank 1 due to inactivity (Military Service); Maru claims rank 1
May 2024/List 370 Maru loses rank 1 to ClemMay
2024/List 371 Serral reclaims rank 1 with a 276 points rating difference to Clem
Things that stood out:
- Serral has occupied either Rank 1 or 2 since Dec 2017/List 2023 when he claimed rank 1 for the first time (he only lost it on list 369 and 370 due to the start of his military service where a break in playing signed him as inactive).
- Maru lost rank 2 in that same time frame to several people including Dark, Reynor, Clem and MaxPax.
- Maru never reached INoVation’s rank 1 count (see tables below).
- Only a total of 5 players achieved to be the best of the world against all three races: Mvp, TaeJa, INnoVation, Byun and Serral who did so on several occasions over a period of 6 years (list 249, 262 and 317, 375). I did not include DIMAGA who was the best against all 3 races when the game still had under 100 players at the beginning of StarCraft 2.
Results
The table below shows what the counting and calculations ended up in. INnoVation for example played in the Top 10 for 167 Aligulac lists. Out of those 167 lists, he was ranked 1 32 times, ranked 2 38 times and ranked 3 20 times.
Aligulac rank analysis results
Serral by far is the best player in this comparison. He was either ranked 1 or 2 since December 2017 - this is a quota of 93,65% and occupied rank 1 71,43% of the time, since he first entered the top 10. The 2nd best player by percentage and absolute numbers if only looking at rank 1 is INnoVation as he beats Maru in absolute numbers (32 vs 30) as well as relatively to his amount in the top 10 (19,16% vs 13,95%). This only seems to be because of the emergence of Serral, as Maru would have been ranked 1 innumerable times more often, if it wasn’t for the Finnish player. Maru is placed 2nd if both rank 1 and 2 are taken into account.Rogue was never ranked 1 and was present in the top 3 only 4 times.
Which metrics does this analysis address?
Consistency and dominance are measured. We can safely deduct that all 4 players have a sufficient amount of time played at the top level. A counterexample to duration would be Mvp who was hyper dominant fo...
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