Who is the SC2 GOAT? This is a discussion that will probably never end, but today I'll reveal the truth. I spent months ( including a lot of procrastination) gathering all the results and creating the graphs for this video.
A lot of effort was put into this, but if you disagree that is okay. Let me know down below your thoughts. We all experience players in different ways, and personally, and favourite player was
AND ABOUT THE OUTRO... Don't misunderstand me. This player can never be the GOAT. But it does need to be addressed.
00:00 - Intro
00:47 - Ranking Explained
01:39 - Stats
02:17 - Winrate Explained
03:00 - Tournament Wins
03:24 - World Championships
03:50 - Top 4 consistency
04:30 - Unique Medal Years
05:25 - Results
07:35 - Outro
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9/10 video, why am I left out?
You were too far above the rest it ruined the scale.
@@ProbeSC2 now we need a tier list of SC2 content creators. Except they have to fight to the death
@@mazhiwezakizo3513 Cmon, we all know who the greatest content creator is.
@@You-ul8qw harstem?
@@ghoch3 Probe, obviously :P
"The Protoss tier," lol that one broke my heart, always loved the toss players. Great video, I completely agree that Serral is in a league of his own in terms of consistency. We nicknamed Innovation "the machine" back in the day, but that's just because we hadn't seen Serral yet.
Serral is just good at abusing Queens though... like his whole thing is abusing Queens to stop all early game pressure and force late game where Zerg already have a big advantage
Great video ! I'm very impressed with all the work that went into this!
Truly excellent work on this, thank you Probe! This data driven approach curbs a lot of the bias and feelings that come into most arguments, and you even weighted the different categories the same so high peaks and longevity are counted equally. I like that method to ironing out favoritism. You’ve earned a sub from me!
Appreciate it mate. That was definitely the goal. It can be really tough to be objective and consider all metrics, but I tried my best :D
Just find it funny when people were behaving like they found jesus when Reynor accidently beat Serral to then lose to Dark. Reynor was like a kamikaze pilot only practicing to beat Serral whilst everyone else practiced to win the tournament
i remember that semi. reynor was coin flipping. serral would've beat dark that year.
@@madumlao Yeah for sure
@ 1:30 I laughed, you got me! Incredible research and video, thanks for this one!
beautilully put together , very nice analysis and I loved the Elefant. Good job dear Sir
Thanks love seeing these pros of different times analyzed
Putting yourself as B-roll while talking about "lesser opponents" lol. This was presented really well. Both in terms of visuals and in terms of your speaking. Subbed
This was an awesome watch, great work
Thanks mate
This was an awesome video. I really liked how you categorized them and thought of really meaningful stats. I'm sold; Serral is the goat.
TaeJa stan here. Nice to see him get more recognition in hindsight when back in the day all anyone could say was "bUt hE hASn'T wON a GsL". Was head and shoulders my favorite player to watch when he was in his prime. Feels like nobody has been his spiritual successor of extreme Terran talent until recently with Clem.
Great breakdown and explanation. Looking forward to lifes vod
Great video... I feel there was a lot of work behind the scenes here collecting all the data and stats. Could have a follow up going into how you did that??
Yeah I gotta clean up the spreadsheet before showing :)
Very nice video. It was interesting to see how some of the older players like taeja, rain and MVP were still able to hold up to this day in the GOAT discussion. I would have liked to see how Life would have fallen into these categories but it's understandable why it was left to be addressed in a separate video.
I took down all the same stats for life, but for obvious reasons he isn't included in this one.
@@ProbeSC2 Do you mind if I ask where about he would have placed in that pyramid at the end?
That'll have to wait till the next vid ;) (and also I didn't crunch it yet)
@@ProbeSC2 I'll be waiting ^_^
Oooh yay, can't wait to watch this video about Probe_SC2! :)))
As the creator of the list i can confirm I'm in a tier of my own
Two of my favorites in #1 and #2. Great analysis.
I think you were spot on with this dude. Fantastic job!!! 👏🏼👏🏼
Love the climax though !
Awesome. This was really well made. It summarized/contextualized the most common suggested goat candidates and parses through different phases of starcraft history and ranking metrics to arrive at a holistic comparison. I love this shit.
you clearly worked hard on getting those stats and putting it all together, these kinds of videos take a lot of work!
I think there's a category which is missing which is players winning tournaments when their races win rates were weak. If this is the case, both MC and Parting rank much much higher. It was almost a year where they were the only 2 protoss in most tournaments progressing. Parting did so many things to innovate sc2 I can't stress it enough. He's brought more builds and styles to sc2 than any other player. Also, I'm surprised not to see stats do well. Stats was the gatekeeper that stopped soo.
Yeah unfortunately Stats was also sort of a Kong, so it hurt him in a few categories.
Soo and Stats are 1-1 in H2H in the finals. Stats literally broke Soo's curse. Soo's peak was in HotS when he got 6 premier runner ups in a row. Stats started to see results since LotV. MC was good in the weakest era and couldn't win anything once kespa players joined the scene (except one regional in europe where no kespa player participated) and Parting won most stuff in 2012-2015 when protoss was not weak at all. Parting perfected the PvZ immortal sentry all in but otherwise in terms of inventing strong one-off builds or new meta builds and timing pushes, you just have to put sos and Zest above him.
I will always be impressed by Serral’s Championship run at IEM 2022. Top 2 of Korea in Maru and Rogue and Top 2 outside of Korea in Reynor. What more could you ask for?
For me, that event really solidified it, and was actually the driving force for me doing the research for this video.
@@ProbeSC2 No doubt. Great video btw!
For Top 4 Consistency, are you considering regional tournament? Because top 4 in EU-type tournament is WAY EASIER than top 4 in a global tournament or in the GSL. Most of the top EU player including Serral has a relatively easier path to top 4, in fact its a big shock whenever they cant make it. That also impract the winrate% agurment, because Serral probably has 90% winrate in EU until he hit the other top 3 players in Reynor-Clem or HM/Showtime occasionnaly. Meanwhile geting a 60-65% in a stacked GSL tournament is just better. In short, "strength of competition" should also be a factor when you try to tally the tournament win/top 4 and such.
The winrate vs top players is serral vs all the Koreans, in which he is 10% ahead of them. Premier tournaments won also has foreigner only tournaments removed, otherwise Serral would have 18 wins instead of 12. So I tried to include that in the stats.
@@ProbeSC2 What about the "Top 4 Consistency"? Are those counting all tournaments or only global tournament?
@@tigera6 yeah I think deep finisher was all premier tournaments. Mostly done because it was already a difficult and time consuming statistic to calculate. I had to manually remove all team leagues and awards from total tournaments for each player. So just out of convenience I did all. It obviously wouldn't change the overall GOAT result, but yeah maybe could have been done better.
@@ProbeSC2 I believe you still did an absolutely fantastic job, and while things might change a bit with how I suggest it, the end result would not likely to change much. Thanks for the time-consuming effort and organizing of the materials. Great content.
@@tigera6 yeah thanks for the criticism.
Wow life at the end epic. I was looking for him on the graphic
Nice video thank youu
Crazy how Serral was already miles ahead of Maru almost 2 years ago, and since this video was made Maru won 3 premier tournaments while Serral won 8. Yet we have the delusional koreaboo Miz GOAT list with Maru ahead of Serral.
Can't complain,did even need the stats to know who is the king.but thx for the vid tho 👍🏼
awsome video! Clem no where to be seen!
Unfortunately clem hasn't won any premier tournaments with Koreans allowed. So by my definition of premier tournaments in this video he wouldn't have got far. Amazing player though.
Nice job, so that Life video was never made? Or am I just not finding it?
Yeah I did all the research but didn't make it. Maybe I will do it in the next month or so.
The general skill level used to increase over time. Due to this I´d like to see all achievments being weighted, with older ones being less worth. Winning a tournament is worth more if the other players are stronger. I think some of the older players got a rating higher than their pure skill level can justify.
I wonder if maru had been able to take the elusive g5L by now, would that have been enough to overtake MVP? Seems like it would be a fitting milestone to decide who between them is the greater Korean terran.
Yes that would be enough. The difference is 0.3, and if he got 13 tournaments wins he overtakes mvp
@@ProbeSC2 Thats awesome. Heres to hoping that the G5L can finally be claimed.
loved this chart, well done, altough i prefer Reynor, there's no denial about Serral accomplishments
Yeah, and this should have no impact on who a person's favourite player is. Even after all these years mine is still Rain :D
I wonder if you include balance of numbers of races in each tournament like is there only 2 protoss 12 terran and 6 zerg if that would change the results as mirror matchups are the hardest.
Well yeah I don't think you can make an assumption that mirror matchups are the hardest. I understand what you mean though, just not sure the best way to measure it more than what I have already done.
@@ProbeSC2 well mirror matchups have the least number of counters. Take terran for example the counters to mmm are really your own mmm or to prevent drops in some manner like vikings or liberators but that usually fails in my experience watching. We can see cure has a 70 something win rate vs terran but it dips significantly when facing zerg. And serral has his lowest win rate when facing other zerg. So I wonder if some people who have bad matchups vs say terran benefit from having few terran in a tournament.
Having the least number of counters doesn't necessarily make it the hardest matchup. But yes, tracking the strength of the race at the time could be something you can do, but it is outside my ability.
@@ProbeSC2 fair enough thanks for responding
In 2022, we are fortunate to be able to watch Maru, Reynor, Serral and herO punch on in Starcraft 2. It is too early to declare a GOAT ... games are still there to be played !
Well you are not wrong, it can always change, and who knows what the future will hold. But just in a meta sense, there has been plenty of talk for years about this, so I don't mind chiming in 😆
@@ProbeSC2 Also, Serral's immortal game 2 against Maru at Katowize this year. That deserves a second by second breakdown of who knew what when.
Serral is a machine
Yes he is
The only thing that Serral misses to beeing the GOAT imo is his ability to overcome his rivals. (so basically the other top 5 zergs of the world, mainly rainor) As soon as he can win against them at least consistently for say > half a year I completely agree. This is whats missing for me personally here but besides that: Awesome work!
Yeah I don't disagree. It does seem to be the area where he gets caught out. Just quickly looking at aligulac, he is 27-16 against reynor in matches (97-76 in maps). So even against his 'rival' it's not like he is losing overall.
@@ProbeSC2 Ok I honestly thought it would be way closer but even then the argument holds: normally he has what right now, 70% winrate? And with his nemesis not even 60? Hm. Makes one think at least. Thanks for that Video and your comment Probius!
@@benjamineidamseems like he did that now :)
@@Joh00226 Because he went offline to the military? Hows that helping?
@@benjamineidam no bcs he totally destroyed everyone in the two biggest tournys as to date, the online one where he beat hero 5-0 and Katowice maru 4-0 and only lost a single map in the entire tourny. And before that dagens reynor a couple of times and all wins.
Marvellous watch sir
Appreciate it 👍
Really cool video, but I do think Starleagues should be weighted more than standard tournament wins.
gj!
What I think is crazy, that even the goat, only wins 2/3 of his games. Shows how competitive Starcraft is.
Well his winrate overall is 70%, and I believe that includes losses before he started to peak! I wish I knew the number over just the last 5 years. But yes even the GOAT loses :D
Perhaps a 70 % win rate sounds less impressive on a individual game basis - but please consider that competitive starcraft2 is played in series. 70 % win rate a game mean a per series win rate of: bo3 = 78 % bo5 = 84 % bo7 = 87 % bo9 = 90 % What does the above mean? Well, currently Serral has around a 67 % winrate against Maru, one of the other contender(s) for Goat. So if Serral met Maru in a bo7 he would win 85 % of the time (87 % in best of 9)! That is crazy impressive. That is obliterating the opposition.
No need to feel sorry for Jaedong! He's in contention for SC (overall, not just SC1) Goat, unlike... basically all of the others on this list. How many Brood War tournaments has anyone else won? ^-^
Haha fair. Honestly JD was also so great at sc2, he just couldn't win in the finals.
Excellent video. Now if we could make Artosis* watch AND understand** this - even better. * Who is a Serral hater. Artosis take on the whole Goat discussion is something like this: "I am a GSL fanboy, thus Serral cannot ever be the goat, as he has 0 GSL victories - who cares if he obliterates the players in the GSL" ** Not possible
I mean Serral just won another worlds so...
How do you, as a proplayer, rate Code S as a prestigieous tournament compared to the rest of the field?
Currently I personally would rate it kind of the same as the other global offline tournaments. I think probably a few years ago I would rate it higher. I'm not one of the people who believe Serral needs to play GSL.
@@ProbeSC2 Thank you for the answer and thank you for the video, While I dont agree with you it's the most effort anyone put in to the discussion since maybe Stuchiu but his lists are pre 2018. awesome :)
@@hugogustafsson4815 no worries. If it gets people thinking more about it and having good discussions then I think it's successful.
@@ProbeSC2 so gsl is just like the other offline weekend tournaments, and that serral if he ever decides to play in it, will mop the floor with kr asses? Or that any non-kr player who has won offline tournaments can just come to gsl and win 1 or 2?
@@Glass_Half_Full well not according to the stats I used. Foreigner only tournaments were removed, so... The winners so far from this year have been Serral, Dark, herO, Rogue, Maru, Zest. And so yeah any of those players could win a GSL.
Life, uh, finds a way
I do love this list, let’s shake it up a little, how much of it is due to him being Zerg? I joke, we all know Protoss OP :) 😂
As a Protoss player I can confirm Zerg is the true GOAT.
For me, that's a formal proof. Great video.
To think this is before the total destruction from serral in the 2 lastest tournoments with all best players in it. 5-1 agienst hero, in the final and 4-0 in the final in Katowice agienst maru
With all of Maru's gsl wins I'm not sure how much he benefits from it as well!
@@ProbeSC2 Well its a bit hard to tank gsl high now tho, considering top 4 gsl has a combind map score of 1-13 agienst serral in the latest biggest tournys
Life
lol Reynor being in the protoss tier
That cracked me up too
sOs GOAT protoss player. I can get behind that !
I was very happy to see rain up so high
didn't SOS win 2 and Rogue win 1?
1:28 lmao
If you witnessed the ‘Summer of Taeja’ first hand as he was poppin off, then you know what’s up. Just sayin.
You forgot the absolute top tier that is just Probe.
As the creator of this tier list I do indeed have ultimate power
#disrobe4probe
It’s gotta be Has or Bly
How did you factor in team wins? Many of the players on this list have "medals" that don't show up at the bottom of Liquipedia because they won them as part of a larger team. GSTL, IPLTA, WTL, and most importantly, Proleague. herO, Maru, sOs, Dark, Inno, and others have carried their teams, gotten all kills, and won finals in a format that Serral has barely even played. I think this dings players like Reynor, Serral, MVP, Taeja, and Life who have not excelled at the team format or, in some cases, haven't played it at all. To just put Maru's 2016 PL 22-4 performance including a finals win in his "wins and losses" category is bonkers. Maru and herO are co-GOATs of a format Serral has literally not played. Inno is also a 2x Proleague champion on 2 different teams. I can understand weighting them less, but to give world champions a bonus and team league gods nothing at all is cap.
I did not include any team performances. Manually removing all those results. A fair criticism, and I'll just say it's hard to add them in a fair and consistent way.
Insane work, thank you. Probably won't curb the delusions of some but it's clear as a day who the GOAT is.
There are many 'greatest players', problem is they can't play with each other at top point of their skill.
Yep. Different eras make it very tough. Tried my best with the selection of criteria.
No Clem?
Yeah he doesn't have the premier tournament wins that include Koreans. Just a definition I stuck with, otherwise Serral would have the most by far (18), instead of being equal first with 12 wins. Amazing player though.
JÜRGEN #1
Clem beats both Reynor and Serral few times in european championship... great job kid!
At least sOs is the top protoss. :D
$o$
It occurred to me this morning that your approach towards points actually really nerfs Serral in the standings (as well as Mvp). If I'm understanding correctly, Serral gets 25 points each for winning the first 2 categories, though he is as far above the next player (Rain) as Rain is above the rank 11 player. It could be argued that Serral could be credited an extra 10 points for each of the first 2 - that is what he would have if the distribution was normalized. Rogue takes conversion % though not by a mile, then in top 4 consistency Serral is again 10 points over the next player, Mvp. Mvp and Reynor are both again much higher than the rest of the pack, albeit with a much smaller pool of premier tournaments entered. IMO since their sample size is so small compared to the rest while Serral's is in the middle of the pack and his placement is almost 20(!) points over everyone except those 2, 10 more points to him here seems conservative. For wins/year Mvp could clearly be granted some extra points for his absolutely insane win rate - this would make his head to head v Maru less close. It's worth noting that taking out foreigner tournaments really handicaps Serral (and Reynor) in this metric, since he only has the opportunity to compete in a handful of Korean-attended events per year while for everyone else that is every tournament they can enter - at least twice as many. (If you really want to get into comparing eras, Mvp had far, far more tournaments to enter/year which does help explain his huge tournament win/year rate over LotV players) Accounting for their insane leads over their opponents, unless I'm misunderstanding something about your math, it would be completely fair to say Serral finished with not 172, but 202 points! Over 2nd place Mvp's ~148 points. Of course that's not how your ranking system was set up but if the players were ranked through points by absolute value in each metric rather than ordered ranking that's about the gap his results would show. Although, now that I get back to the end of your vid there's something I don't understand - how can Maru and Mvp have fractional points? If they get points based on their placement in the 8 rankings, shouldn't everyone have whole numbers? I might be completely misunderstanding how your point system works D:
Yeah it's not a perfect system. I'm not a stats major :D. My hope would be that if you did it another way it wouldn't reduce Serral's accomplishment, but maybe slightly change some ordering else where. They can have fractional points if they tied with someone. So they might get (20+21)/2 points so that one person is not advantaged. And yeah I removed EU tournaments because I wouldn't hear the end of it that he only gets wins against foreigners...
Please don’t get me wrong, I do love how you organized this! I only meant to say that your system declares Serral the GOAT (by a lot) even while essentially handicapping him in his best metrics. I’m just in awe right now of how head-and-shoulders he is over the rest. Again, thank you so much for the work you put in here :)
@@Benn1to yeah nah I understood you, I'm just happy to discuss/hear your thoughts! Serral is nuts
How many GSL has Serral won?
0 Which hurts him in some categories
can we get an update now that Maru won another 3 GSL's in a row and got 2nd at IEM Katowice?
Yeah I'll do an update soon (and one covering Life)
Serral has been sitting at #1 on Aligulac for nearly 90% of the past 4 years, and >95% of the past 3 years. People don't understand how Aligulac works and think Serral farms Europeans for points. In actuality, he gains few points from beating mid-tier Europeans, and even loses points if he wins only by 3-2. If they manage to beat him, he drops massive points. Some Kr fans are so biased, that they want to invent any and all kinds of lame reasons to make the Kr's look as strong or stronger than Serral. Remember the popular excuse-Maru gets affected by ping more? Offline results: Serral 3-1 Maru. Rest assured, they're still gonna try, though. Still sniffing out anything even remotely resembling a faint brown mist of an excuse from out of their buttholes.
I think it is fair to take aligulac with a grain of salt, but yeah it is a very passionate and important topic for a lot of people, so you'll get staunch defenders.
Blizzard intentionally split the league between EU and GSL years ago. Let's pretend the EU wins where serral mostly plays is the same as GSL wins...
I removed all foreigner only tournaments wins from Serral. He is on 12 wins, equal first, in premier tournaments that allow Koreans. With foreigner wins he would be on 18. I also address that with winrate, where his winrate vs the Koreans included, and foreigners except reynor excluded, in this video is 10% higher than the rest (67%).
Did you pay any attention to the stats? No, you came here to bitch before finishing the video. Serral’s 6 EU wins were removed entirely, as was his win% vs non koreans in at least the v top players stat This video is extremely well done
rogue never win serral in offline game，so serral is better than rogue all the time(serral 2:1 rogue in 2018 katowice，serral 3:1 rogue in 2018 wcs，serral 2:0 rogue in 2019 katowice and serral 3:0 rogue in 2022 katowice)
I was going to say Serral has never beaten me in a tournament , but that isn't true :D
actually，serral has a high winning rate against KR top player in offline game，including maru，innovation，ty，dark，rogue，soo，stats，zest，classic. It means serral is better than any top player.
@@xshen719 thank you for quoting the video :D
you are welcome
korean players have lower winrates b/c they're competing more often with each other, pretty bad stat to base off your video
It's a good thing serral hasn't played in the GSL then
Life = goat
Let me introduce the happiest and the intelligent country in the world finnland the country of where serral come from
Where is ST.Life? He is the GOAT! Most of the premier wins of Serral are the EU tournaments where he plays against farmers lol you should take in consideration the patch! Then your ranking will change…. How many Terrans have own a tournament this year? 0…
I removed the eu tournaments from Serral. He would be on 18 if I included foreigner only tournaments. Instead he has won 12, equal most. And for obvious reasons that player can never be the GOAT, so he will never be in *this* video.
@@ProbeSC2 Great job anyway! I would like to see Life stats because he was a monster and could be the GOAT if he was not greedy :( Also, it would be interesting to see the victories by patch. The last patch benefits a lot of zergs, and most of the winners are zergs. Keep up with the excellent work you got a new Sub!
@@Talento90 The fact that he committed match fixing puts all of his wins into question. We don't know how many of them were due to match fixing itself.
Only like 5,000 play this game still. After everyone that was competitive retired, why does it matter who the current GOAT is especially when major tournaments have a prizepool of $20k and gets the viewer number of 4k?
The fact Blizzard continues to fund SC2 tournaments yet retired HotS tournaments even though HotS likely had more players might be a hint of things in the pipeline. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking. I guess we'll see if they'll do anything at all SC related at the next BlizzCon
lollll
try 200k players and gsl alone gets 200k+ livestream views and another 100-300k in single match videos just on youtube, in english.
Actually it was mostly only the uncompetitive players that retired lol, the majority of players only retired when they were no longer competitive, majority of the best still play today and many even come back after military service. 5k players? Chinese and American servers alone have 50k + players each, never mind EU and the rest of the world. 4k viewers also, what are you even talking about? Live views are much higher across the world and major tournament VODS and even random matches regularly have 100,000+ viewers on youtube. IEM has over $100,000k prize pool... The standard of play and mechanical skill has only got higher over the years, the level of players like Nestea, MVP back in WOL was much lower than the skill level of current day players like Serral, Reynor, Rogue, Maru, TY, Hero, Zest, Trap etc. What is the point of talking total nonsense and just pulling numbers out your ass in your inability to face reality, I will never comprehend that level of self-delusion haha.
Serral fanboy