how would you rank the top 10 aoe3 players of all time

[gibson]

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Well tournament results should be the most important metric when measuring how good someone is.

Not really.
You claimed above that I didn't deserve to be in the top 10 because I didn't win any major event, but if you look at it closely, the last big ESOC tourney I played in was the 2015 Winter tournament, where I was still quite far from my peak level and where I lost 1-4 to _H2O who then beat raphael 5-0.
Of course I am not in the top 10 aoe3 tournament players of all time, but you can't measure how good I am from tournament results.

What point are you trying to make? You can be a pugger and win qs and unrated 1v1s all day but ultimately if you don't have tournament results when a discussion comes up about the best players to play the game you(not you specifically) don't deserve to even be mentioned.

Well, if that's about aoe3 achievements then yes.

Still, if a guy doesn't play in tournaments but has a 90% win rate against the guy who won the tournaments (I'm not saying this is my case), then he's the best player.

This is obviously true, I don't know why anybody is discussing this.

I disagree with with it lol. Look at any sport, esport etc and the best team/player is the team/player that consistently performs in tourneys.

Not necessarily. Its basically the argument brought up to refute that messi is the best football player of all time. Hes amazing in club setting, but he has failed time and again to reach that level in the setting of international tournaments. Not just has he failed to win prizes, but he just never looked as impressive wearing the argentina jersey as he did the barcelona one. For me he's still the best, regardless though.

Well first off soccers a little different cause it's 11 people on a team not 1v1. Also for international events players just aren't as used to playing with each other than in league play. And it's not like Messi has no accomplishments lol, he's won a crazy amount of shit and has a crazy amount of records.

[Squamiger]

I have a serious request: could someone knowledgeable cast / recast one or two of the recs with the old pros for the ESOC channel? Sort of a feature episode, describing what the game was like back then, what was it that they were doing, why was that good, or just show some insane mechanics.
@Mitoe maybe? or @Kaiserklein

About a year ago I was thinking about doing a mini-documentary on AoE3 WCG 2007 & 2008; still have a lot of the stuff I was going to use (clips and recs mostly) saved somewhere. Sadly laziness and the unwillingness to invest money & time into figuring out how to use some solid video editing software have kinda killed the idea, though (remember a certain German guide anyone?).

Just commenting to say I would be super interested in this. Set up a patreon account. There must be tons of old recs lying around, I know I still have recs from back in 2007 when I played on gameranger on my old computer. It would be awesome to do live interviews with h2o, samwise, iamgrunt, anyone else. @Interjection could escapeAOE be a potential collaborator in this?

[Kaiserklein]

Well diarouga would 50-0 me for sure in a BO101 if he wanted to play that seriously, while you wouldn't for sure. (you would still shit very hard on me though :p)

[[Armag] diarouga]

He forgot about Otto :O

[Kaiserklein]

But according to him otto is bad, abus and jans are bad, and france is unbeatable

[[Armag] diarouga]

But according to him otto is bad, abus and jans are bad, and france is unbeatable

Well I got outplayed hard. He was just too agressive and too active on the map for me

[Hazza54321]

Well diarouga would 50-0 me for sure in a BO101 if he wanted to play that seriously, while you wouldn't for sure. (you would still shit very hard on me though :p)

Haha i wanted to quote this

[bwinner]

But according to him otto is bad, abus and jans are bad, and france is unbeatable

I have never said otto is bad. I wouldn't play them all the time if I though they were bad. I have never said jans are bad either. And for abus I said they aren't OP in age 2 (which doesn't mean they are bad). But I made them in age 3 so that's fine. Btw you should look at this game and see how an ff can be a good strat 21

[spadel]

I was not good enough to judge how strong the best players in 2007-2009 were, although I played against most of them. But just by watching old recs you can see that they had a way superior tactical understanding and micro than for example the top 8 players from the last tournament (at least from what I‘ve seen on the twitch stream). The build orders seem to be pretty crispy today, but the decision making is oftentimes really bad.The exceptions from that during the past years are in my opinion Blackstar, Rapha, diarouga and Irishfaithful. From the „older generation“ I would consider grunt, h2o, NP, Samwise, Challe and Ourk to be the most dominant. But I guess Sam already said it all - trust him, he has to know best (unless Ryan wants to give his 2 cents )

[gryphoon94]

In this thread: Salty 2019 AOE3 "pros" feeling disrespected for their current ability.

[deleted_user0]

its ez to make good decisions when u can see the whole map. #castersyndrome

[deleted_user]

It's also easy to think and strategize when you aren't doing a bunch of other tasks.

In-game mentality is far removed from spectator - even if you're watching just one player's POV, you can be cognizant of units versus time and what they're likely to be doing, and other timing related aspects.

[look]

Tier 1

Grunt
H2o
Samwise12
BlackstarOP
NaturePhoenix

Tier 2

StarSky
Flooky
Irishfaithfull
Maceanator
Lordraphael
TheDemon
LoOk_tOm

[Dolphincup]

The current meta (as defined by current top players) likely bashes old meta, else we'd still have the old meta. thus current top players likely have better understanding of the game than retired players. since game knowledge is half the battle, most likely current top would beat the retired top players. so easy to claim retired players are better than current best when nobody will ever get to see them play again, but the only substance to the argument is supposed mechanics as you remember. if you don't count game knowledge, then we are just talking about who is better at clicking (and since you've never even seen them move their mouses in most cases, so you don't even know). There's also an extreme observer bias since you've seen so many games played by current top, and you've only seen the games from old top players that were most likely to be impressive. You probably have no idea how often they made critical errors, but you get to see the current top mess up all the time. so of course everybody thinks the retired players were better.

IMO if you are going to bash the current top and claim their nowhere near as good as the retired top, you better have played against them all personally or your opinion isn't worth much. and also it's kind of toxic.

[deleted_user]

IMO if you are going to bash the current top and claim their nowhere near as good as the retired top, you better have played against them all personally or your opinion isn't worth much. and also it's kind of toxic.

A person based in practice! How refreshing.

[Dolphincup]

I'm not making claims. I would actually like to see some research done on the subject, as I do find it interesting. but unless there's some secret stockpile of old data, seems like the only tool we have to judge with is first-hand experience of whichever players played with the old players.

[gibson]

There's no research that can be done. All that can be said is that the larger the player base, the higher the level of play, for any sport or game. The player base was larger back in the old days so its likely the level of play was higher.

[deleted_user]

I mean, given context aka meta.

[[Armag] diarouga]

There's no research that can be done. All that can be said is that the larger the player base, the higher the level of play, for any sport or game. The player base was larger back in the old days so its likely the level of play was higher.

Please, stop being so stubborn lol, that's just wrong.
The larger the player base is, the more competitive the game is. However, while the game is less competitive, the level of play isn't lower because the game has evolved. Our meta is now smarter because we learnt a lot from old pros, and although we don't think that today's players are good mechanically, they also learnt from the older players and improved.

As a result, the level of play is overall higher today than it was before. The exceptions are the player who dominated in the past (Sam, H2O, grunt) because they were ahead of their time but that's it.
What you can say, however, is that the old pros were more talented because they learnt to play alone and they didn't copy the other players, but that doesn't make them stronger.
Just look at the old ratings, some trash guys were top 10 in 2007-2009, like Glouk_The_Boss who's barely pr20 today.

[flontier]

There is some old pov video on youtube of players like samwise, and in 2011-2012 for exemple.
No offense to all these old player, but when i look these videos i really dont see anything more impressive or better in their mechanic than i can see in top player's stream nowadays.

[tedere12]

Tier 1

Grunt
H2o
Samwise12
BlackstarOP
NaturePhoenix

Tier 2

StarSky
Flooky
Irishfaithfull
Maceanator
Lordraphael
TheDemon
LoOk_tOm

Where is kickass man? He is above everyone you listed

[Hazza54321]

Damn gibson when someone french tells you to stop being stubborn youre in trouble

[[Armag] diarouga]

Damn gibson when someone french tells you to stop being stubborn youre in trouble

Tbh American people are overall even more stubborn than French people.

[Goodspeed]

The current meta (as defined by current top players) likely bashes old meta, else we'd still have the old meta. thus current top players likely have better understanding of the game than retired players. since game knowledge is half the battle, most likely current top would beat the retired top players. so easy to claim retired players are better than current best when nobody will ever get to see them play again, but the only substance to the argument is supposed mechanics as you remember. if you don't count game knowledge, then we are just talking about who is better at clicking (and since you've never even seen them move their mouses in most cases, so you don't even know). There's also an extreme observer bias since you've seen so many games played by current top, and you've only seen the games from old top players that were most likely to be impressive. You probably have no idea how often they made critical errors, but you get to see the current top mess up all the time. so of course everybody thinks the retired players were better.

IMO if you are going to bash the current top and claim their nowhere near as good as the retired top, you better have played against them all personally or your opinion isn't worth much. and also it's kind of toxic.

This is like saying any current physics graduate is smarter than Einstein. We aren't comparing knowledge here, that would obviously be an unfair comparison since the meta has evolved a lot over the years. We are comparing relative talent. With how much larger the playerbase was back then, grunt's 95% win rate places him easily on top of most talented players in history. We can safely assume that if he was as active now as he was back then, he would have a >95% win rate.

The comparison is between the players' relative skill levels. Not their gameplay. Mechanics can tell you something, but even mechanics have evolved. It seems likely that people use hotkeys more efficiently nowadays, for example. So all we have to compare with are players' relative dominance (win rates, tournament victories) combined with the size of the player base. In both ways, current top players fall off because none of them is particularly dominant (except maybe raffle, if he was active), and the player base is much smaller, especially on higher levels.

And, honestly, I'm not at all convinced anyone currently active would beat peak grunt (or peak H2O) even on the current patch and with current knowledge.

[[Armag] diarouga]

The current meta (as defined by current top players) likely bashes old meta, else we'd still have the old meta. thus current top players likely have better understanding of the game than retired players. since game knowledge is half the battle, most likely current top would beat the retired top players. so easy to claim retired players are better than current best when nobody will ever get to see them play again, but the only substance to the argument is supposed mechanics as you remember. if you don't count game knowledge, then we are just talking about who is better at clicking (and since you've never even seen them move their mouses in most cases, so you don't even know). There's also an extreme observer bias since you've seen so many games played by current top, and you've only seen the games from old top players that were most likely to be impressive. You probably have no idea how often they made critical errors, but you get to see the current top mess up all the time. so of course everybody thinks the retired players were better.

IMO if you are going to bash the current top and claim their nowhere near as good as the retired top, you better have played against them all personally or your opinion isn't worth much. and also it's kind of toxic.

This is like saying any current physics graduate is smarter than Einstein. We aren't comparing knowledge here, that would obviously be an unfair comparison since the meta has evolved a lot over the years. We are comparing relative talent. With how much larger the playerbase was back then, grunt's 95% win rate places him easily on top of most talented players in history. We can safely assume that if he was as active now as he was back then, he would have a >95% win rate.

The comparison is between the players' relative skill levels. Not their gameplay. Mechanics can tell you something, but even mechanics have evolved. It seems likely that people use hotkeys more efficiently nowadays, for example. So all we have to compare with are players' relative dominance (win rates, tournament victories) combined with the size of the player base. In both ways, current top players fall off because none of them is particularly dominant (except maybe raffle, if he was active), and the player base is much smaller, especially on higher levels.

And, honestly, I'm not at all convinced anyone currently active would beat peak grunt (or peak H2O) even on the current patch and with current knowledge.

The old pros were more talented, I don't think anyone denies that.
The point is that still, today's players are better because they have more knowledge.

2008 _H2O would of course lose to the current top players. He wouldn't take TPs or get bashed by an Aztec FI and his mechanics wouldn't be enough to come back.
Of course, he would adapt after a few games but he definitely wouldn't win a tournament if he doesn't have time to learn the meta.

For exemple, in 2015, pr35rouga beat H2O in jap mirror on Siberia because mankle didn't know that the FI was superior. Likewise, he dropped a lot of games to nagayumi and blackstar in this MU.
After he adapted to the FI meta, he was of course better than naga and me in this MU but he dropped something like 10 games before.