[+]

I didn't realize this got uploaded! I thought it was just a draft!

Either way, I'm done with the article and updated it slightly with a bunch more data. It captures the rise of Evil & Quake Champions a bit better.

Great article. I don't think the way czm dominated aerowalk will be repeated again. The only similar case I can think of is ZeRo4 on T4. It was crazy just how much better they were than the rest of the pack.

[+] Error: The target user can't receive judgements

Glad you liked it! I think I included a link to an ESR prediction for "will czm lose a match on hub" at some point in that article...

Wow this is crazy good. I sign this. Your Top10 is mine. This belongs to the Quake history. This is scientific work. Well done.

haha glad you liked it. I actually just revised it to put rapha first because my data/article better captures the rise of evil and how rapha beats him. Plus more QC data makes Cypher look less dominant.

Though i like cypher more i have to admit that rapha looks more dominant. I really thought it was amazing how he managed to beat evil this fucking beast, especially in this 20+ minutes match on Elder.

Though i also think, cyhper did not really care about QC in the beginning? Not sure since i don't follow QC since i dont like that game at all.

Excluding QC it is very undecided if cypher or rapha. Sad that Quake, especially in the form of Q3, did not have a 20 year reign like Counterstrike. The data is always flawed because players had to switch games or did not had the motivation and so on. What a pitty, a waste of my precious lifetime, but Quake is the only sport that i find interesting, any other sport is boring to me.

evil won that Elder game; rapha won the series.

ah did he? thx to refresh my memory. was a great game anyway :)

The problem for cooller was that when he git gud Q3 was declining. And yes, Q3 was a game with a lot of tactical depth and after that it was decreasing from game to game. Q4, QL, QC. Then new players came which had an edge with what is called micro management in this article and cooller had to play catch up.

What about cooller vs rapha though?

I think Cooller is a great player and his longevity, style and influence is amazing. But can you really be number one if you... haven't actually won a tournament for long stretches of your career?

You are right...

I know there are many fans of dumb Rapha and Pothead Cypher

but let's be realistic they far off the skill tier

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/6170...height=577

we will be here to support you when you finally have a mental breakdown

My mental state has been honed in bloody wars, it is indomitable.

It is one of the reasons I am so dominant in Quake.

"When"? Lol.

XD

One of the best written articles in the last decade regarding top Quake players.

Much deserved [+] Nicidob !!

haha Thanks I'm glad you liked it!

nice

milton deserves a spot here somehow

I think these sort of lists are best done per-game, that way you can have better context for the list.

Milton is definitely the greatest QuakeWorld player ever.

I totally would love to have Milton on here. I added 2 QHLANs to Liquipedia to get some Milton data but I just don't have enough. I do link to Milton in my Thresh comments, because although I put Thresh top 10, Milton is supernatural compared to how people played QuakeWorld before 2000.

doing the same kind of statistics with the QW data would be very interesting :-)

Fatal1ty still to this day.

SANCHEZ
SANCHEZ
SANCHEZ

SANCHEZ
SANCHEZ
SANCHEZ

good stuff :> thanks !

Wait... how did you get QC player's elo? You're not using the official ones, are you?

Because that's completely pointless. Some players, like Cooller or Cypher don't take random public practice seriously or use it to try different things.
Other players, like american ones, or australian ones, enjoy a massive elo boost from being smaller and self contained communities.

Only official tournaments results should count

I built my own Elo ratings using tournament data going back to 1995. It uses all events, but place more priority on predicting Offline Tier-1 events between high rated players.

so it's got all those nice little quirks figured out.

I have no idea how to even get "official Elo" nor would I want to. I'm only using matches from tournaments.

Ok. But what does "predicting" means, in this context:

"but place more priority on predicting Offline Tier-1 events between high rated players."

Retrospectively. Elo maintains a running estimate of how strong each player is at all times. When they play, it has an estimate of how likely each player is to win. So you can run the algorithm through all of history and say "how good of a job did it do?"

Elo doesn't have access to "future" information, so you can evaluate it based on those historical matches. I optimized the 20 settings in the algorithm so the probabilities generated by the model were as accurate as possible. I scored matches on LANs, at high tier events, between good players, with more weight than other matches.

Nobody's coming even close to Sanchez

That's not true, a lot of men come inside Sanchez's ass on friday and saturday evenings in Moscow gay nightclubs

You didn’t read the article a bit, did you?

You suspect he is capable of reAding?

The greatest player in FPS cannot be someone from 2000, where nobody knew how to play FPS.

The greatest player right Is twitch.tv/LordSanchez

never seen anyone of "quake pros" coming even remotely close to this level of gaming

I'm sure you would be ranked #1 at least, but that's the perils of playing a handful of people in q4. Poor guy has no data on you. It's like you are hidden or something.

Why can't I plus the shit out of this thread? WHYYY?

Great thread. I used to practice with most of them I'm Pasidasi btw.
I plus'd the thread btw def worth it

Edit i cant plus it also ban this "Godservant" guy hes spamming sanchez everywhere and noone cares. Hes also toxic af. Get rid of him

Do it, get him banned. Less talk, more action

He should try public protests on street

You cant win so you try to ban.

Typical of a noob loser whore cunt bitch.

I don't actually hate you but you bring nothing to the site, if you got banned the site would improve by having less spam. You're just wasting your life spamming the same old replies and insults.

Call me what you want but provem e wrong

Ye because I care about the opinion of people like you who hit 20% LG on their best day, and replaced their brain cells with protein power and steroids.

You just proved my point

On my best day I'd cave your skull in with one hand tied behind my back

understimating your opponents is exactly the reason why you remain 5th sort grade trash in quake and never win anyone worthy

and don't mention that lame ass pracc game with rapha, who was not being any serious

+1 for banning Godservant - he's like an annoying little bum child who's constantly begging for a dollar. After a couple of 'mister mister, give me a dollar' you just want to put him in a garbage can

Lmfao, you will be put in a garbage can with your lackluster skills, 10% LG trash noob

Show me a single pro in the world who can do stuff Like this, please.

Sanchez in reality:

I see a lot of people with various interests on ESR,

you are interested in sitting on bottles,
quite a few people have coprophilia,
some are obsessed with cheating in online games,
some have violence maniacal disorder,

you all guys suck, want to prove your skill? come q4, and shoot that 10% LG you have trained for the past 10-15-20 years in quake.

Worthless Garbage

- Don't lie to yourself! Coprophilia, bottlesitting, total homosexuality, slavery, schizophrenia etc - it's all kinds of scum called "russians".
Half cheaters of the world are from "RF", and that's a fact.
Nobody now interest Q4, and your poor attempts to seize noobs into it only makes us laugh.
Also nobody interest about eating russian roosters from manure, if only you where not trying to spread your moronic "culture" all around the World.

where is your proof of cheating yet?

- Say first where is Kobra whore.

ZeRo4?? Seriously! Dude is not even top 20! Other than that nice work!

Well at least he become the best esport manager of all time!! Which is nice i guess.

zer04 had and has more than most top players. if he dedicated himself an didnt have to work like rapha. watch him start to take the maps and series off him again

thats cool, do u use discord by any chance? i wanna ask some stuff

Biggest retard in quake, ins, aka 20% lg, aka serious's girlfriend

Yeah I'm mostly on the liquipedia #arenafps channel because that's the data source I'm using (and adding to!) to make this article. But I'm nicidob#1428

Holy shit this is great. Such insight! Big +!

Very nice read, pretty much agree with the rankings although probably I'd put Cooller over Fatality, I feel his strong period of Q3 domination plus the 15 year period after that where he was still consistenly strong and competitive in all consecutive quakes outweighs Fat's accomplishments in AFPS, impressive as they are.

I'd also swap Vo0 and Zero4, Zero4 was afaik only really good in a certain era of Q3 (obviously quite strong in QL as well) whereas vo0 was a clear first in PK and cpm, solid QL player too and dominant in early QC.

If the list excluded the UT player (sorry I do not care for UT at all) for sure I'd put Avek in there, he's won quite some tournaments in Q4 and QL and I believe q3 as well, was really strong from a very young age and stayed quite strong in recent years. And also he's got the coolest and most unique style of all, arguably.

For me this was more about doing some analysis, getting everyone on one graph and trying to write a compelling narrative. I think your points are totally valid, z4's peak may have been short and at a weird time.

I think I put fat over cooller just because fat won the most prize money (still!) and the biggest tournament (still!) and was the first dominant player when 1v1 FPS took off with international tournaments and large prize money (Q3 in 2000).

But yeah, Cooller has 4 top time periods: 2002 to 2004 Q3, early Q4, 2011 QL, and QC when he wins a QPL Stage. He's got a great case for top 3.

I definitely had av3k in consideration, he's in the honorable mentions section ("Av3k is probably on the list for many people."). Vo0's definitely would be higher on mine if he'd beat fatal1ty and clawz in big finals for PK and QC. Those seem like narrow margins but they'd matter.

I actually updated my algorithm settings and got some more data and re-ran the results and got this graph
https://i.imgur.com/B01ia4l.png
where fatal1ty's 2000 looks stronger, as does cooller's 2003 to 2005, which makes z4's dominance look weaker.

Here's a version with av3k

Really good read

++++++

This is really excellent. Well done!
Hoony

Good job on compiling this list in what appears to be a scientific approach.

This however, feels like some AI from the future calculated some numbers and output a list it thinks is correct.

Comparing 128-player tournaments with 16-player tournaments is skewing things a bit. Comparing year 2000 activity when the whole planet was playing Quake to 2010 when nobody under 25 knew what Quake was is also biased. Comparing netQuake players to Q4 players to players who tried all Quake-clones in other to fit the image of the 'modern e-sports player' and make money is also not correct. Comparing an era where Quake activity was so low that TDM players were turning duelers in order to find some action is also not right.

My opinion is that the strongest players are those who dominate the era when a game has the largest talent pool. The reasoning is simple: a game's skill ceiling will continuously rise from day 0 even if only 2 players are playing it, however it will rise the quickest when the talent pool is largest.

In fact, I consider the skill required to be the best in a game is a product of its time, therefore you can't compare 2015 skillset to 1999 skillset on even terms. All players in Dreamhack 2010 have 2010 skills and would absolutely smoke a player with year 1999 skills.

The above assumption takes skill completely out of the equation, so we're left with how many players of similar skill level a winner has to beat in order to be considered the best. Late players like rapha and DaHang had to beat a lot less talented players than fat and ZeRo4 had. Apheleon had to beat 127 players to be crowned the best CPM player at the time. Vo0 beat 5 players to win some Dreamhack CPMA cup.

Finally, it's the money. From a point onward, as e-sports progressed, players started selecting games based on what would bring in the cash. Just look at the Painkiller CPL. Players from all sorts of action FPS jumped on the Painkiller train as money was simply too much to pass up. Was wombat so enamoured with Painkiller that he started playing it? Was LeXeR? The few players that did take Painkiller seriously are rewarded with a lot of points for a game nobody played.

There are many references to real sports in the article. Unlike basketball and tennis though which largely remain the same for decades (including tournament structure, talent pool, revenue) what's being compared here is games which require different skills through different eras with big fluctuations in popularity (hence fluctuations in total tournaments, money, talent pool).

So all in all, a nice effort but flawed to my eyes.

PS. Vo0 has won 2? minor duel tournaments in CPMA. Clearly a good player but not #1, not by a long shot.

Nice read, loved it :)
Im only missing the combined elo list with top1000, just reading the names will make people nostalgic.