I'm DiaBoLuS, a german low-mid GM protoss player in HotS (3x HotS / 5x WoL). I play sc2 since the release of the beta and I watch a shitton of professional SC2 – basically all major tournaments, many online cups and ladderstreams as well. Also, im obsessed with rankings! Therefore, i post a foreigner rankings for about a year now, and i plan to keep posting rankings on a monthly basis in the future. When i talk about „Foreigners“, i exclude non-korean asian players (chinese, taiwanese), simply because I dont see enough of those scenes to rank them, and they dont participate in your regular major tournaments too often. So you may call it a „Western Foreigner Ranking“ if you so desire. --> no Jim, no Sen, no Xigua!
How do i make my ranking? Which criteria do i have? My personal ranking watches mostly on results, but also on how they where achieved. Also, ladder-performances as well as past, major results play a role in my ranking – as well as my general impression of a player (does he seem talented / cheesy / cant seem to show off his full potential somehow). Activity obviously also plays a role – you cant call a player you never get to see one of the absolute best in my opinion.
Ranking system: roughly 75% = my own rank /// 25% = aligulac.com rank. both ranks will be shown in the players pictures, comulating in one rank.
So when criticizing the ranking, please talk specifically about my personal rank given, not the comulated rank, since the aligulac rank isnt influenced by me
! little explanation ! :
D: = Diabolus, my own ranking A: = Aligulac, the aligulac.com ranking C = Challanger league P = Premier league
Edit: Will change the font / artwork of the big rank numbers - they are too shiny and you can see signs of the black background surrounding the "+/-" numbers. Maybe ill get to change that tomorrow already.
Fair enough, Scarlett has been the most impressive foreigner in the regional finals with the most consistent run, while Nani pays his failed opportunity against duckdeok...
What I find more concerning is that those two look pretty isolated from the rest atm. Lucifron, third man on the podium, had to go through Challenger League groups to remain in Premier League next season... and Scarlett is gonna slow down to rest her wrist.
Nice list, but It would be coll with some explanations to why the list is like it(mainly for like the 15-30 players since its obvious why the top is the top)
Nr 1 and 2 is almost in a league of their own when they play their A game right now.(Don't take this literally a lot of foreigners a game is friggin good))
On August 20 2013 12:34 Flench wrote: Has Scarlett won anything?
I've always seen this argument as flawed and I am Naniwa and Scarlett fan.
The simple truth is that Scarlett has never competed in a Dreamhack, Homestory Cup or any other EU tournament. The only tournaments that she has competed in are MLG, IPL and WCS all in NA. If she had competed in multiple EU tournaments I have no doubt that she would have one at least one of them as they are actually easier to win then any of the NA tournaments she has played in. In order to win a EU tournament you usually have to beat at moost 2 or 3 Koreans. In order to win a NA tournament you usually have to go through 5 to 10 Koreans (for instance she would have had to go through 7 Koreans and 1 Chinese player to have won WCS NA). The degree of difficulty needs to be taken into account.
On August 20 2013 10:02 RiSkysc2 wrote: suppy and demu are better than 20-30. In terms of results you could say this is accurate, but in terms of actual skill this is very inaccurate.
Demuslim has no business being top30 even, sorry to inform you of the fact that he has yet to win anything whatsoever and only performs adequatly on ladder. Now Suppy on the other hand..
That is a lot of zerg. Nice list, mostly agree with it all and I'm sure that if it's entirely based on results, it's accurate as hell. Well done , thanks for posting it.
I'm really sry because i thought "okay, he put some time into this. let's give this ranking at least a shot before destroying it with critics". But then i scrolled through it and was highly dissapointed how biased it is towards players that didn't accomplish anything.
In the past a ranking like this would have been way less attackable because you couldn't meassure a players success pointwise but these days things changed and people get points for every round they advance further in WCS. The WCS ranking system is very accurate itself when it comes to seperate good and bad players but i won't go into detail here.
A small example for some players you ranked very doubtfully in my opinion: Snute, Happy, Vortix and Nerchio are all ahead of Grubby when Grubby is the only one who really managed to make some noise in this seasons WCS and will be one of only 3 foreigners, who made it into WCS S2 Finals (the other two are Scarlett and Naniwa)
Not only are these 3 players the only 3 foreigners who made it to the S2-Finals, if look at the overall score, they are very accurately the top 3 foreigners when you actually compare points. Still you name 6 other players before even mentioning grubby which is a joke if you wanna make a good ranking. As said before i still think a ranking like you did is highly unproductive and not very viable because there is already a superior ranking system which is based on points for wins (WCS).
The thing about the WCS standings is: At this moment TLO (2025) is ahead of grubby (1750)... BUT grubby gets 500 points just for making it to the finals, he doesn't even need to win a single game so after next week grubby will be in the top 16 overall (surpassing the retired stephano) with scarlett and naniwa doing the same.
Everything i said is just a small example and i'm even tired of writing this small piece of text but i thought i wanted to give you some feedback on your very strange ranking. ____________
Conclusion: I think it's safe to say that the top 3 foreigners (at this very moment) are Naniwa, Scarlett and Grubby. While Scarlett and Nani are a bit seperated at the top 2, No. 3 (Grubby) is very closely followed by TLO i think.
Just wondering how the math works when HuK is in 17th place in your own ranking and in 20th place in Aligulac and how this adds up to a 16th place in the joint ranking?
On August 20 2013 10:09 Rhaegal wrote: Scareltt over Naniwa?
that is just insane...
I'm sure this will give Nani a good laugh.
She deserves it.
Sorry, she don't. Maybe it will change after global finals?
Scarlett should be on a solid 2nd but Naniwa is the number 1 foreigner right now. Only way to argue about that would be if you only looked at the last WCS season and then Grubby should be tied with Scarlett.
On August 20 2013 18:56 PerryHooter wrote: It should either say "westerner" instead of "foreigner", or jim and macsed should be pretty high up there if not at the top.
hm i should probably do that for the next month. confusion every time^^
thanks for all the positive feedback. Yes, it remains to be the opinion of one community member for the most part, I'm just having fun doing those and i happen to get a lot of response on them. There are no "correct" rankings out there (not even aligulac - just look at iaguz this month (rank13 foreigner - no offense to him but NO)) and there probably never will be, so i keep doing those^^
If there is anyone out there with enough knowledge, time and passion to do his own ranking on a monthly basis and share it with me before my post, i would be pretty happy, but there doenst seem to be anyone willing to do that (you would have to do a ranking for the first 70 players and send it to me within the first 2 weeks of the month every time).
On August 20 2013 18:07 MiND.GaMeS wrote:A small example for some players you ranked very doubtfully in my opinion: Snute, Happy, Vortix and Nerchio are all ahead of Grubby when Grubby is the only one who really managed to make some noise in this seasons WCS and will be one of only 3 foreigners, who made it into WCS S2 Finals (the other two are Scarlett and Naniwa)
Conclusion: I think it's safe to say that the top 3 foreigners (at this very moment) are Naniwa, Scarlett and Grubby. While Scarlett and Nani are a bit seperated at the top 2, No. 3 (Grubby) is very closely followed by TLO i think.
Snute has done more than Grubby in Hots: He won the Redbull training grounds and ESET UK Tournament, as well as finishing second in Homestory cup, and sixth in WCS America, as the highest placed foreigner. The ranking isn't based on results in August only, it takes older results into consideration as well.
Agree that Grubby should be higher ranked, but not over Lucifron and Snute who are better players imo.
I agree with the top 2, Scarlett then NaNiWa, but not the rest. For example SortOf should definitely be on the top 20 list. And there are several players i wouldn´t even rank top 50.
SortOf didnt do dogshit in the past 2 months honestly. Just because he trains in korea and has lag issues doesnt make him a top 20 player. I probably rank him higher than his results show
Hey thanks for posting it. I was looking forward to see it in the past week but where is the commentary? You know, your justification for why the players are where they are? I realized I read it mostly for your commentary
On August 21 2013 03:48 ggofthejungle wrote: Hey thanks for posting it. I was looking forward to see it in the past week but where is the commentary? You know, your justification for why the players are where they are? I realized I read it mostly for your commentary
its a ton of work to justify each and every ranking. i do justify -some- rankings when i completly disagree with critique of a players ranking in the thread.
it takes long enough to find a ranking im satisfy with, do the math to comulate it with the aligulac rankings as good as possible and do all the graphics. it probably takes me like 7-8 hours every time, especially when i do completly new graphics as this month (those with black background are easier to change for the upcoming months though).
thanks for all the feedback again, will try to put up VOTES for next month again.
On August 21 2013 03:48 ggofthejungle wrote: Hey thanks for posting it. I was looking forward to see it in the past week but where is the commentary? You know, your justification for why the players are where they are? I realized I read it mostly for your commentary
its a ton of work to justify each and every ranking. i do justify -some- rankings when i completly disagree with critique of a players ranking in the thread.
it takes long enough to find a ranking im satisfy with, do the math to comulate it with the aligulac rankings as good as possible and do all the graphics. it probably takes me like 7-8 hours every time, especially when i do completly new graphics as this month (those with black background are easier to change for the upcoming months though).
thanks for all the feedback again, will try to put up VOTES for next month again.
Wow, don't waste so much time on it. How about instead of posting a preliminary rating first, then you adjust it as many times as you want while reading the comments of the people?
On August 21 2013 01:05 KalWarkov wrote: SortOf didnt do dogshit in the past 2 months honestly. Just because he trains in korea and has lag issues doesnt make him a top 20 player. I probably rank him higher than his results show
Kind of funny, to hear this from you, after you kept Major in for so long.
Nani still is Nr.1 IMHO, but I guess you can argue for both. Also Hasu is the german number 1, he showed it twice by winning EPS and WCG Germany and having a much better SC2L-record than TLO as well, so either TLO is a bit overrated or Hasu is a bit underrated, probably a mixture of both.
Other than that evertything looks fine, one could probably argue bout BlinG, but whatever, it is´nt that big of a deal.
On August 21 2013 01:05 KalWarkov wrote: SortOf didnt do dogshit in the past 2 months honestly. Just because he trains in korea and has lag issues doesnt make him a top 20 player. I probably rank him higher than his results show
Kind of funny, to hear this from you, after you kept Major in for so long.
Nani still is Nr.1 IMHO, but I guess you can argue for both. Also Hasu is the german number 1, he showed it twice by winning EPS and WCG Germany and having a much better SC2L-record than TLO as well, so either TLO is a bit overrated or Hasu is a bit underrated, probably a mixture of both.
Other than that evertything looks fine, one could probably argue bout BlinG, but whatever, it is´nt that big of a deal.
well, MajOr was told by many foreigners to be "the best terran" even, not once or twice, several times.
well, TLO doesnt play EPS, so its hard to judge that. internationally, TLO showed amazing results (his worst was the last wcs), while Hasu didnt showcase all too much (despite last wcs :D ).
I was very unsure about BlinG either, but you have to respect his qualification for premier league in some way (although there are some premier league players who are not in the list - most of them through aligulac though)
On August 21 2013 01:05 KalWarkov wrote: SortOf didnt do dogshit in the past 2 months honestly. Just because he trains in korea and has lag issues doesnt make him a top 20 player. I probably rank him higher than his results show
Kind of funny, to hear this from you, after you kept Major in for so long.
Nani still is Nr.1 IMHO, but I guess you can argue for both. Also Hasu is the german number 1, he showed it twice by winning EPS and WCG Germany and having a much better SC2L-record than TLO as well, so either TLO is a bit overrated or Hasu is a bit underrated, probably a mixture of both.
Other than that evertything looks fine, one could probably argue bout BlinG, but whatever, it is´nt that big of a deal.
well, TLO doesnt play EPS, so its hard to judge that. internationally, TLO showed amazing results (his worst was the last wcs), while Hasu didnt showcase all too much (despite last wcs :D ).
Well, in the same way, TLO does´nt play EPS, HasuObs did´nt attend that much international tournaments. The last events, both of them played, were:
Acer Team League Challenge: Hasu 9-8, TLO 3-7
SC2L Hasu 4-2, TLO 2-3, Hasu beats TLO h2h
WCS Hasu ro8, TLO ro32
WCG Germany Hasu defeats TLO and wins the event
For me this looks pretty one-sided in favor of Hasu.