A Pretty Panda
fuckin' called it, man
I'm sure plenty of people thought they were hot stuff in SF2
Is this guy who played Smash for a year the most dominant eSports player in history?
- Thread starter Forkball
- Start date
I'm sure plenty of people thought they were hot stuff in SF2
SpacePirate Ridley
Member
Does he still play like a chicken like in the smash invitational? Is the only thing I saw him play.
Aaronrules380
Member
Yeah, that's the thing. Nobody's discounting Justin Wong, but he was also winning against a much smaller talent pool back then than Zero has been now. I mean, this year's smash 4 evo had almost 2000 participants
Teknopathetic
Member
"but he was also winning against a much smaller talent pool back then than Zero has been now"
Smaller, but not shallower.
Smaller, but not shallower.
Aaronrules380
Member
Yeah, but then you can't discount stuff like the weeklies ZeRo has won where he's been fighting the same talent he does at places like EVO. And smaller almost always means shallower to an extent, since more talent is going to be present in a 2000 man tournament than a 600 man one
Again, weeklies mean shit. Its not the same talent as a major.
For one thing, SoCal doesn't travel to the same events week in, week out. People have lives, work that interference with that. Zero doesn't go to eveey Socal weekly either, he's usually traveling so he can snipe some other region regional prize pot to make money.
For one thing, SoCal doesn't travel to the same events week in, week out. People have lives, work that interference with that. Zero doesn't go to eveey Socal weekly either, he's usually traveling so he can snipe some other region regional prize pot to make money.
Teknopathetic
Member
"Yeah, but then you can't discount stuff like the weeklies ZeRo has won where he's been fighting the same talent he does at places like EVO."
Some of the same talent, but not all.
"And smaller almost always means shallower to an extent, since more talent is going to be present in a 2000 man tournament than a 600 man one""
Only if you're unaware of how shark-infested the MVC2 tournament scene used to be.
Some of the same talent, but not all.
"And smaller almost always means shallower to an extent, since more talent is going to be present in a 2000 man tournament than a 600 man one""
Only if you're unaware of how shark-infested the MVC2 tournament scene used to be.
Aaronrules380
Member
Ok, but you're still ignoring that Zero has won 5 Major tournaments this year for Smash 4, all with player bases comparable to or much bigger than EVO back then
Flash dominated in the hardest game (it certainly used all those APMs, which doesn't apply as much in SC2 unless you play zerg or something), at the point of time where the skill and the popularity was the highest.
I mean, Boxer's a bonjwa yeah but the level of play was much lower because it was a newer game.
Flash tho
I mean, Boxer's a bonjwa yeah but the level of play was much lower because it was a newer game.
Flash tho
Teknopathetic
Member
"Ok, but you're still ignoring that Zero has won 5 Major tournaments this year for Smash 4, all with player bases comparable to or much bigger than EVO back then"
No one's ignoring it. It's just not as important as you make it out to be considering the relatively short time period.
No one's ignoring it. It's just not as important as you make it out to be considering the relatively short time period.
Tell that to the OP and everyone saying this kid is the best in the history.
Shining Sunshine
Banned
Bonjwa has been passed onto Flash.
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Bonjwa
Current Bonjwa is Faker.
Same could be said about Sm4sh with it's level of newness - especially given the level of competition is pretty week in terms of competitors. Nairo, Dabuz, Seagull (maybe) - that's it.
ãInaba Residentã
Banned
Sakurai actually won a 100 man tournament though.
Aaronrules380
Member
At which point this becomes a value judgement. Does winning every tournament you enter over the course of a year, including much bigger tournaments make you more dominant? Or does being able to stay on top of a changing (but smaller) scene for several years in a row, even if you had your losses here and there? That's honestly a value judgement though
And I'd personally argue that the number of gigantic tournaments he's won in a row is more important than there being a year between those tournaments. In the first place, the nature of the scene is far different now to back then, and there are far more and bigger tournaments with better talent nowadays than there were.
Teknopathetic
Member
"And I'd personally argue that the number of gigantic tournaments he's won in a row is more important than there being a year between those tournaments. In the first place, the nature of the scene is far different now to back then, and there are far more and bigger tournaments with better talent nowadays than there were."
I don't really think you can definitively say the Smash 4 scene is all around *stronger* at their game than the MVC2 scene was at theirs.
I don't really think you can definitively say the Smash 4 scene is all around *stronger* at their game than the MVC2 scene was at theirs.
Shining Sunshine
Banned
He has five major titles, equivalent to BoxeR.
He'll probably surpass Flash next year.
Aaronrules380
Member
But you can't say the other way either. Which scene is stronger is such a completely subjective and unmeasurable thing. The only real objective measure for the strength of a scene is the size, and while not foolproof by any means, it is significant. Having more talent means you're more likely to have more good talent. If 10% of the players in a 500 man scene could be considered amazing, there are half as many amazing players than if 5% could be considered amazing in a 2000 man scene.
Teknopathetic
Member
"But you can't say the other way either. Which scene is stronger is such a completely subjective and unmeasurable thing. The only real objective measure for the strength of a scene is the size, and while not foolproof by any means, it is significant. Having more talent means you're more likely to have more good talent. If 10% of the players in a 500 man scene could be considered amazing, there are half as many amazing players than if 5% could be considered amazing in a 2000 man scene."
Rather than make up fake numbers and percentages and "likelihoods" you could just look at what talent was actually present. Smash 4 is significantly larger than Third Strike used to be, but I wouldn't say the talent is better. Kuroda, Boss, RX, KO, MOV, Nuki, YSB, etc. Those guys are legitimately *monsters*. And not just because they had 1 good year. Same with MVC2. Justin, Yipes, Sanford, Clockw0rk, ShadyK, etc. Not just really good. Monsters.
Rather than make up fake numbers and percentages and "likelihoods" you could just look at what talent was actually present. Smash 4 is significantly larger than Third Strike used to be, but I wouldn't say the talent is better. Kuroda, Boss, RX, KO, MOV, Nuki, YSB, etc. Those guys are legitimately *monsters*. And not just because they had 1 good year. Same with MVC2. Justin, Yipes, Sanford, Clockw0rk, ShadyK, etc. Not just really good. Monsters.
It's a team game with far easier mechanics than Starcraft. Let's not devalue the term like that.
Shining Sunshine
Banned
League mechanics are far more complex than you think, and Faker has been the one pioneering the complexity of a lot of gameplays, constantly surprising the Riot themselves.
Much like how BoxeR did that for Starcraft.
Ghost is Bad
Banned
they aren't nearly as complex as brood war. if u think otherwise ur deluding urself lol.
Aaronrules380
Member
What does that even mean though? Now you're making arbitrary judgements on talent. It's impossible to make an objective comparison of the talent pools, because talent isn't measureable in any sense. Maybe those guys were only "monsters" because the rest of the talent was awful for their guys? Picking out the top 16 people in a scene is stupid because it ignores that they only became top 16 because the people below them were worse. You literally can't make any objective measures of talent, and at best you can only say how good people are relative to who else is there. That's why numbers are really the only metric we can use, because more players is almost certainly going to mean 2 things: More talent, and more competition, both of which raise the quality of a scene
Shining Sunshine
Banned
Just because you're controlling more units doesn't make it more complex.
Gaz Pwnage
Member
Teknopathetic
Member
"What does that even mean though? Now you're making arbitrary judgements on talent. It's impossible to make an objective comparison of the talent pools, because talent isn't measureable in any sense. Maybe those guys were only "monsters" because the rest of the talent was awful for their guys? Picking out the top 16 people in a scene is stupid because it ignores that they only became top 16 because the people below them were worse. You literally can't make any objective measures of talent, and at best you can only say how good people are relative to who else is there. That's why numbers are really the only metric we can use, because more players is almost certainly going to mean 2 things: More talent, and more competition, both of which raise the quality of a scene"
What this says to me is "I don't know any of those names, I've never watched any of those players play, and at best I've spent 30 minutes total playing those games" and we really can't have a serious discussion about talent pool and how good people are at their respective games when you're not even aware of the skill ceiling of those games compared to others.
What this says to me is "I don't know any of those names, I've never watched any of those players play, and at best I've spent 30 minutes total playing those games" and we really can't have a serious discussion about talent pool and how good people are at their respective games when you're not even aware of the skill ceiling of those games compared to others.
Snacks the sober sea lion
Member
No, Seagull doesn't even consistently win weeklies. He's not up there. The thing about Smash 4 is that everyone is pretty set on their characters. ZeRo is always going to main the #1 character, even if he still plays Diddy sometimes. Nobody dominates with half of the cast or has a plethora of characters for any situation. Nairo is really the closest to anything like that, since he seems to effortlessly win every non-major tournament with any character he wants, as well as one of maybe two people in all of NA reaching top 8 in majors as Zero Suit. There are some surprise characters like Abadango using Pac-Man or some Ike players, but most of the cast is pretty badly neglected and you're guaranteed to see Sheik, Mario, and likely Fox in every top 8. Smash 4 also has a comparatively weak international scene, as there just isn't enough money in it to make it feasible for Japanese players to compete regularly.
Yea that's what I was getting at - the majority of the scene is new and the talent levels just aren't there yet, especially for people who don't wanna make the plunge in a scene with less money.
Agreed on Seagull - only mentioned him because I heard he beat Zero. I don't know what his actual play looks like. This is comparable to Na'Vi during TI1 and TI2. They were a great team sure, but the overall pool of talent wasn't even built yet. There's like 1? team from TI1 that's still noticeable today. TI2 was better, but it's still nowhere near as developed as TI3 and TI4 onwards.
@Teknopathic - especially when you're taking overall skill ceilings into account. SF, BW, and other games have a much higher skill ceiling than Sm4sh. That doesn't make it a bad game (unless you value that, like I do), but it sure as hell lowers it when competing against the tougher games.
By this argument the entire concept of this thread is flawed since competitive RTS, MOBA, and FPS champions play against competition pool orders of magnitude larger than anything Smash has ever drawn, right?
I also think some Smash advocates are really short selling on what the fighting game community used to be. Just because old school fighting game tournaments didn't admit 2000 people into the actual competition doesn't mean there wasn't a far bigger fighting game scene in the past than there is today.
Justin Wong and Daigo Umehara came on the heels of a period when fighting games were the dominant genre. Every gamer kid in the 90's had their opinions on Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct, Tekken, Virtua Fighter, and MvC. They were the Call of Duty/DOTA of that era. The internet based social media needed to rally everyone together at competitions didn't exist but there were incredibly intense regional competitions the champions of whom moved on to the next tier, condensing the talent pool until you had the best of the best playing each other regularly, forcing each other to improve. That kind of phenomenon breeds moments like the Evo 2004 SFIII match between Wong and Daigo that is the stuff of legends in competitive gaming.
Smash is the fighting game equivalent of sumo. The analogy works in so many ways, from the actual competitive style (ring outs) to the entirely unique set of techniques it requires. Wong and Umehara are both highly competitive at other fighting games outside their primary franchises for example. That doesn't happen with highly competitive Smash players. That isn't meant to denigrate Smash, it's just a highly focused, comparatively small, scene.
So before saying someone who competes within a scene that might number in the tens of thousands is the best esports player in history lets not forget that there are RTS champions who have drawn that many spectators to watch them play in Korea. There are three times as many people logged into the latest CoD and Battlefield at this very moment and that has been true for some version of CS for over a decade.
He's doing quite well, that should be respected and hopefully him getting the credit he deserves leads to people having more respect for Smash as a competitive game in general, but comparing any esports player to Michael Jordan is just goofy.
SixMachine
Member
I'm gonna sound like an asshole for saying this, put I don't think Sakurai is as good as people make him out to be when they cite stuff like him winning a 100 man tournament and stuff like this. First of all, in the stone age of the internet, there really is no record of really old tournaments because they really didn't reach as much people like today. Japan also liked single elimination tournaments, so he probably only needed to face like 5-7 opponents, since there are no losers brackets. Not only that but scrub mentality was pretty prevalent within back then, stuff like tick throws and fireballs being cheap, and the fact that the genre being young had the base fundamentals of a player much weaker since they didn't understand the game as well (when a game comes out today, information about "tech" and the ins and outs of a character spread extremely fast. It takes much less time to "explore" a competitive game today than it was before). Not saying that any scrub would win an SF2 tournament back in the day, but I think SF2 tournament players will have less understanding of the game than something like modern day ST players for obvious reasons.
If you play a lot of fighting games, you will always face many players who are not up to your skill level. The people who play a lot will always run into situations where they might be facing someone who is new to the game, and after beating them, they shrug and move on. Hell it happens to Daigo Umehara a lot in exhibitions like this kid
Why would 1 event like this really stick with him so much? It's like dime a dozen that your run into newbies in the lifespan of a game. And it's not like landing Zanretsuken is an amazing achievement with Ryo. But I digress, no matter how much someone has accomplished in a tournament, it really has no bearing on what their skills are as a game designer, and in a way, I I think these comments were made when people questioned him on balance, but it really is sort of irrelevant (A lot of good fighting game players today don't necessarily have the best opinions on game balance when they are asked, everyone always has some form of bias in these things).
Aaronrules380
Member
Again, how can you compare how good they are at their fighting games to how good the top of smash 4 is at theirs? What you're arguing is literally impossible to prove either way. And honestly, it's irrelevant to the question at hand anyways, which is about whether any other fighting player has been as dominant within their own scene. It comes off more like "Well, ZeRo is only super dominant in Smash 4 because he faces weak competition". Which whether it's true or not, does not stop ZeRo from being dominant. Because the question the OP asked wasn't whether he was the most impressive esports player, but the most dominant within their own scene
Competitors are always measured by who their competition was.
Aaronrules380
Member
I'm not comparing Smash to scenes like MOBA because they're totally different genres and comparing them is pointless. And the fact that Smash players tend to stick to smash is also irrelevant, because it's not like guys from the other fighting gsames are coming into Smash and being dominant either.
And regardless, the issue at hand is how dominant a player is within their own scene, so the difficulty of the scene is largely irrelevant as long as the scene is big enough to justify being considered and called an esport
SaintMadeOfPlaster
Member
Some of you guys take this too seriously. Can't we just have fun watching people play video games?
The comparison to MOBAs, FPS, and RTS scenes matter because you're trying to make a statement about the dominance of a Smash player being more impressive than a greater period of dominance by a MvC2 (Wong) or SFIII (Daigo) player based on scene size. If scene size takes primacy then any achievement in Smash pales compared to a half dozen competitive Starcraft runs.
Also, guys from other fighting games play OTHER FIGHTING GAMES. Wong is best at MvC2 but he's been a high level competitor not just in the MvC series but also in SF, MK, KI, etc.. Same with Daigo who has been very good in other games outside of SF (Guilty Gear for example). The fact that those two were so good that they could simultaneously dominate one scene while being damn good in several other completely different scenes speaks volumes.
*edit* the reality is that esports/progamer rankings like this don't really mean anything. Just as with physical sports they're products of their time any every successive generation claims the man du jour in their favorite competitive outlet is the GOAT. It's irrelevant as it can't be quantified. What matters are the moments that define such a run. Something like Daigo's win over Wong at EVO 2004 will be talked about as long as there is a competitive 2D fighting game scene period. Moments of greatness define a legacy, now more than ever with the instant web streaming nature of competitive gaming.
Are any Smash 4 players besides Zero recognized as monsters? He feels like the only name I ever hear of in regards to the game which is a definite contrast to Melee.
Even when Justin dominated marvel, the other guys under him were legendary in their own right. Smash 4 feels like it's Zero and nobody else.
Even when Justin dominated marvel, the other guys under him were legendary in their own right. Smash 4 feels like it's Zero and nobody else.
Shuggananas
Banned
cashews of chaos ®
The Sarcastic Dude
Banned
Nairo is a really strong player and usually places top 3 and wins most tournaments that ZeRo isn't attending.
Smash Tournaments? I guess it's a joke thread, right?
It has to be.
Ghost is Bad
Banned
yeah, it does lol.
Shining Sunshine
Banned
No it doesn't.
Where Starcraft, you need to worry about micromanaging hundreds of units, League excels in strategies in team composition and being skilled in the 126 champion pool that's constantly growing. Compound that with having to work with or even carry teammates that adds even more complexity to being able to win the game.
Both games have resource management macro strategy.
Both games have objective play.
Both games have skill micromanagement.
League is as complex as Starcraft in terms of eSports.
Chopper Dave
Member
Party game only suggests multiplayer of some kind and is a poor descriptor of its core mechanic and thus seems unfit to define its genre. Most of the games I purchase anymore have multiplayer and they can be anything fighter/racer/RPG/RTS/shooter. Smash is game about Nintendo characters fighting. Fighting is the objective. If someone wants to dilute the games objective down to "it can be played with other people" I am amused to know why.
I don't what you mean by platform is the core mechanic honestly. A platformer generally is a game where one runs/jumps/advances through a series of separated masses of ground littered with various hazards. Final Destination is the definitive competitive stage. The focus and importance on advancing from platform to platform could easily be stronger on a COD map than final destination which is a single suspended plain. Maintaining control of your platform and moving to others is certainly part of the game but the objective is to hurt other players to score. I would not see why fighting plays second fiddle to how one maneuvers on these sometimes very simple stages.
I don't watch many commercials anymore so maybe I have some time before my face sticks in cringe position. I doubt it shocks you to reveal I don't physically cringe though. I am simply saying using CG fire/sparks/invisible angel wings/wolverine claw thing to make presenting a person more flashy and dramatic is humorously awkward and can look really stupid. You mention Old Spice and Late Night which are purposely comedic. If the gifs you posted were someone's attempt to make me laugh I simply didn't realize it. It worked though.
I mean...he was the best in several games at the height of fast paced FPS. Not the biggest fan of him either, but yeah...
I don't even know where to start with this. Are you really saying League "macro" is equal to Starcraft macro?
AnathemicOne
Banned
Must mean that Dota 2 is the most complex ESport of them all. Please man, I love MOBAs but the strategy/tactics involved pale in comparison to SC2.