faker is the goat right but let's actually have the argument

Hextech.40

Hextech.40

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fell down a faker career video essay rabbit hole and now i can't stop thinking about this. my position:
faker is the greatest player ever and the argument is basically closed. 6 world titles. 13 years at the highest level. still relevant. the longevity case alone is almost unanswerable. ik the cs guys are going to show up with s1mple and zywoo and someone's going to crawl out of a cave to tell me about flash. ready for it. make the case
 
zywoo is better than anyone active right now by clear gap. s1mple at his peak probably better than faker at his peak. individual skill in cs is different thing - 5v5, one life, you carry alone or team loses. faker wins with good teammates around him. s1mple was dragging teams to results they had no business winning.
different caliber of individual performance
 
going to get destroyed for this but flash not faker. flash!
brood war is the most mechanically demanding competitive game ever made. flash had a career win rate around 70% in a scene where 60% is considered elite. played random in one proleague tournament and still reached the semifinals. the man operates on a completely different level to anyone being named in this thread
 
hd_toxic said:
None of these. Shroud picks up any fps and hits pro level within a week. That's your best gamer not someone who's been clicking the same buttons in the same game for 13 years straight
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shroud is a great streamer. his peak competitive cs was top 20 north america which at its height wasn't close to top 20 in the world. being impressive to an audience isn't the same category as being the best.
 
pixelboi said:
going to get destroyed for this but flash not faker. flash!
brood war is the most mechanically demanding competitive game ever made. flash had a career win rate around 70% in a scene where 60% is considered elite. played random in one proleague tournament and still reached the semifinals. the man operates on a completely different level to anyone being named in this thread
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don't want dismissing flash just know nothing about thta one honestly
 
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@pixelboi 70% is off by a decent margin, flash's brood war win rate was closer to 80% ran some numbers on the main candidates anyway
faker: ~66% game win rate across 13 years in lck, 6 world titles, first player ever to reach 100 wins at worlds
flash: ~80% career win rate in brood war, primarily domestic korean scene
s1mple: 21 tournament mvps - record in cs history - hltv #1 three times, 1 major title, 1.23 career rating
zywoo: 1.27 career hltv rating, highest of any player ever, currently active flash leads on raw win rate but opponent pool and geographic scope are different factors. faker leads on longevity and global scope. zywoo leads on individual output. s1mple's mvp count is the most insane single number on the list and he did most of it without a major.
no statistically clean answer
 
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ok i genuinely know nothing about brood war or else but faker is literally famous outside of gaming? my friends who have never touched league in their lives know who faker is. that has to count for something ✨
 
gamebandit39 said:
yes. also zywoo doing this in era when cs is most globally competitive ever. every region serious now, not like early years when it was basically scandinavia plus small everyone else
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yea 2018 to 2021 s1mple was playing a completely different game from everyone else in the server. the gap between him and the second best player during those years was larger than anything faker has had in league. people also forget how bad his teams were. navi during that run was held together with tape and individual highlights
 
s1mple had 3-4 years at that level. faker has been top 5 at his position for over a decade. peak vs sustained is a fundamentally different argument and greatness isn't measured by your best 3 years in isolation. like nobody evaluates jordan solely on the 92-93 season. the full body of work is what the argument is actually about
 
the flash argument deserves more than a passing mention and a couple of people saying they don't know who he is
80% career win rate across the most competitive era brood war ever had. six individual starleague titles. won his first at fifteen - youngest ever to do it. the gap between him and the second best player during his peak wasn't the kind of gap you see between faker and other midlaners or s1mple and other awpers. it was a different category of separation entirely.
also worth knowing that terran in brood war is considered the hardest race to play by a significant margin. the mechanical load - production management, army micro, build order precision all running simultaneously - isn't comparable to anything in league or cs. he mastered it at a level nobody before or since has matched.
not claiming he beats faker in the overall conversation. just that he belongs in it properly, not as a throwaway name that gets one confused reply
 
ok now im hooked bout who is flash. is he still playing as definitly never heard this name before. is he still playing?
 
Newbie said:
ok now im hooked bout who is flash. is he still playing as definitly never heard this name before. is he still playing?
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Lee Young Ho. Korean player, brood war. played terran for KT Rolster his whole career. dominated the scene for years - nearly 80% win rate, six starleague titles which were the individual championships that actually mattered in that scene
reason most people outside korea have no idea who he is - coverage was almost entirely in korean, and the scene wound down when sc2 came in around 2012. but brood war in korea was televised, huge arenas, treated like a proper sport for over a decade
he actually came back to brood war after sc2 and kept winning tournaments into the 2020s. still competing apparently
 
pixelboi said:
Lee Young Ho. Korean player, brood war. played terran for KT Rolster his whole career. dominated the scene for years - nearly 80% win rate, six starleague titles which were the individual championships that actually mattered in that scene
reason most people outside korea have no idea who he is - coverage was almost entirely in korean, and the scene wound down when sc2 came in around 2012. but brood war in korea was televised, huge arenas, treated like a proper sport for over a decade
he actually came back to brood war after sc2 and kept winning tournaments into the 2020s. still competing apparently
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so great at a dead game nobody outside one country watched. flash might be technically impressive but best gamer ever needs some actual cultural reach attached to it dont you think? by this logic there's a quake player from 2002 who's the greatest of all time and nobody knows his name either
 
hd_toxic said:
so great at a dead game nobody outside one country watched. flash might be technically impressive but best gamer ever needs some actual cultural reach attached to it dont you think? by this logic there's a quake player from 2002 who's the greatest of all time and nobody knows his name either
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you're using present day visibility as a criterion and that's not the same thing as being the best. nobody watching outside korea doesn't make the skill level less real or the dominance less real.
and on quake - fatal1ty was winning world titles in 5 different games. quake, unreal tournament, aliens vs predator, doom 3, painkiller. rapha dominated for over a decade straight. if those names aren't on your list you haven't looked hard enough mate
 
im more curios more if faker is actually the best player right now or is the goat argument basically all legacy at this point
 
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