Damn it feels like yesterday that list was coming out. Wild to think that it was made before any of the Resupp, RGL, or Fireside Lans happened.

The list was outdated the moment it was published and aged like milk. At the time it was published, some placements felt like they were decided 1 year or more before the published date. The bias towards older players is intense in tery's list. Some placements I thought were especially egregious:

Underrated: alex.exe, soapy (both omitted), muma (95, multiple championships and an international LAN), lolguy (91, already had a championship), branslam (84, already had a championship), marmaloo (45), corsa (41), yight (35), jay (30, the most ridiculous placement by far), arekk (14, despite having 13 championships at the time)

Overrated: alexwut (100), saber07 (99, got his championship by subbing in for enigma on complexity in grand finals), Hubris (89, only played 29 matches in 2008), yaug(65, only ever made playoffs twice?) Mackey (58), indust (57), destro (50), oPlaid (46), SolidSnake (44), boomer (42), jaeger (39), tyrone (38), pyyour (23), dummy (19, makes no sense with duwatna at 40), carnage (18, among the most ridiculous placements)

First time I have logged into this site in years, had to respond to this BS post.

First off, no list in any sport or competitive setting will ever be perfect. There will always be people hurt by this or that ranking for whatever reason. Was tery's list perfect? Absolutely not, even he said that many times, but he got way more things correct than incorrect.

To say it was outdated when he posted it is total bullshit. He had a ton of input from many sources and old players. I was even personally involved in some of the discussions (not the rankings) but more for information purposes because I had my TF2 Database going around that time and it was a source of concrete stats.

I'm not going to go into everything you said but you must be fucking high to try and compare branslam's resume to Carnage's resume at the time of this list and say he was overrated. Do you know anything of that time frame or the past? Same for guys like oPlaid, dummy and pyyour. Are you actually serious trying to say that any of those players didn't have a clearcut legacy over alex.exe and muma? Sorry but fucking Soapy? Was he even in invite at the time of this list? All of a sudden, he is ranked over who on soldier? Tyrone and Mackey destroy him in career achievements and the list goes on and on.

I'd say to stop drinking or smoking and do your own research and put a new list out. Let's see how you make heads or tails out of careers from different era's. Tery is my friend, and I am not blinding supporting him because of that, but he did a fucking amazing job.

Listen to Ggglygy's suggestion and bump Carnage Johnson up into the top 10.

tyrone and mackey both made their team actively worse by playing on it and that is the dream

Yeah I was for sure high when i came to the conclusion that dummy (won invite once) shouldn't be ranked 20 ranks higher than duwatna (3 invite wins and back to back international lan wins). Did you react the same way when botmode made his own top 100 in which he came to many of the same conclusions that I did?

This post actually illustrates my point more than anything from your initial post. You seem to be basing everything on a simple statistic of how many championships did someone win. You say it over and over again

A whole hell of a lot more went into the rankings than just those stats and who won the most championships. If it was that simple, he would have posted a stat page instead. You clearly have no idea of the whole picture of the comparison and what different levels were involved.

You seem to think that the only reason I think duwatna is better than dummy is the amount of championships. The championships are meant to be a supplement to my subjective opinion that duwatna is a better player than dummy. At the very least, I think most would agree that dummy isn't enough of a better player to be 20 placements higher than duwatna. Please, tell me what makes you think he is

There was still over 1000 blockbuster stores when some of these players you named were in their prime. Just because carnage was influential on the game 15 years ago does not mean he should be weighted higher than someone like Jay, who played in an era where the skillfloor was astronomically higher and still put up unbelievable results (not to mention if we’re bringing legacy into this who was it who kicked off the market gardener shenanigans, hmm? :) )

This is a ‘greatest’ list. In no world should alexwut be on the list with 1 ring in 2008 and Alex.exe get snubbed

edit: i was a bit grumpy writing this. fyg is right :)

You know this was just Tery’s passion project based on his opinion right? This isn’t any sort of official ranking or tool used to decide who was better, it’s literally just a series of free content that he made…

i feel like even resup.gg's top 50 list could use a touch up as well. everyone on the g6 core could easily be argued to at least be placed somewhere around the 30-40 range

What's the point of getting so mad ? Like oh no somebody thinks branslam is better than SolidSnake and mackey ... oh the horror ! It's like getting mad that someone has a different favorite color

Really good point. Being at the top in a more competitive era is more impressive than being at the top when you're playing against hunter-gatherers and typewriter repairmen. Saying corsa and duwatna should be ranked over people who literally played in 2008 is like the most mild take ever

https://www.teamfortress.tv/60695/na-invite-top-100-hub-post#8

if you go to the "unholy trinity" section and read it, you will see that there is no reason to be upset about anything. You have something to point out? no you dont. It has already been addressed.

tyrone and mackey played against plumbers
lebron plays against real athletes

i'm lebron

Who is better John dribble (the inventor of dribbling) or lebron james?

please stop being reasonable fyg, we need to farm arguments here so there's more than one new post a week

Put b4nny on shade's spot

dd5f rolls in his grave

B4nny should be relegated to 5th place.

the top 19 ordering was insane, move the newer players up and the older down.

I never thought I'd read a thread and the only person I agree with is SpaceCadet, but here we are.

It feels like a lot of players want to really undervalue past players compared to current players for whatever reason, to me at least. I've never understood how people can value being better now compared to in the past, when the whole point of comparing eras is to rank players relative to the skill level at the time they played. I guess part of why people find it difficult to grasp the concept here is because our top player has been the same person for ~15 years. Try to imagine a world where b4nny quit at the same time as mix^, or consider the fact nobody has any significant problem with clockwork's ranking, despite not seriously playing since I was in high school. B4nny would obviously still be our goat. I'd also like any of the people who act like older players just sucked compared to people like Jay, to consider that a significant number of players were using 60 hz monitors, wired mice, trash mousepads, and didn't even know what a mechanical keyboard is. The setups we used to play maplestory and pubs on, people were unironically trying to compete in tf2 with lol. Seriously, play a pub now with your old dell mouse, monitor, and keyboard, and let me know how it goes. Also, for the zoomers, please keep in mind when tf2 had lan finals at esea, the game was objectively more competitive. There were way more people playing and way more people trying really hard, just to go to lan. Nowadays our best players don't even play most of the time... look at the current state of invite.

Players like Tyrone and Mackey are incredibly overrated, not because they played in an era where people were way worse mechanically (no shit), but because they actually just sucked in their era lol. Or, like in the case of alexwut, they were only good for a short amount of time (sorry alex it you're reading this, I don't actually know if you were good for more than just 2008). Just like how a player who was only good in 2015, 2020, or 2025 probably shouldn't be in consideration for "top 100 player of all time". I'd rate someone like kobe, or soapy higher than those people because they showed that they can reach the pinnacle of our game, and sustain that for a consistent period of time, not because the years they've been dominant in is in the 2020s. In my opinion at least, it'd be equally as impressive if G6 replicated their success in 2014.

Edit: holy nerd essay, sorry, been playing this game since I was a kid so I had a lot of thoughts

Gameplay was less refined back then as well. If you want to take into account the era they were playing in that’s fine, but the fact is that regardless of the competition, the level of skill and execution required to play was far lower than it is now, and that should be a deciding factor in of itself. Relative to the players around them, putting players like jay (who was provably one of the most talented players in invite (having also had several placement seasons (and wins) at the time the list was written) under players like dummy solely because of unc status and longevity is a bit preposterous.

Even as someone who wasn’t there at all for what would be considered the “golden era” of the game, keeping players out of the top list (or the list at all as is the case for soapy and Alex.exe) for being newcomers while shoehorning in uncs with a similar or worse/shorter resume made a lot of the list feel like filler, even if you could technically spin their careers to seem outstanding.

I'd like to add that while I don't know all the details, Tery stopped writing for tftv following this project.

The tf2 scene has not really grown financially or even just in size to really make the “newer players have harder competition” argument carry much. Yes, Yz50 played against worse scouts at the time, but all the scouts only became better over time because they watched Yz50 play. Without player salaries or prize pools increasing, the only thing causing the gradual improvement in the scene has been the transformative players on the list pushing the rest of the scene up like a rising tide.

I should probably not post anymore but after mmrarkte #23 post, I had some of those same thoughts for a while but just didn't post. Sorry for long incoming post probably my last for a long time.

IMO it's very important to properly define the word "competition" when doing a comparison like this that spans players and teams from vastly different eras. It's one of the factors that Tery got mostly right in his list and seems to be lost on some posters in this thread. Don't confuse the word competition with skill level. It's not about comparing skill levels at all. That is a useless comparison in this setting. It's more about asking how hard it was to win or be generally successful against a lot more high-quality competition.

Players today are far superior in skill to players 10-15 years ago, that is not up for debate. Just like in any athletic sport or online game, the discussion should be based around the competition level for the player at the time they played and what they achieved. Mostly all backup NHL goalies right now would be better physically, mechanically and more technical than say Martin Brodeur or Patrick Roy. Are those backup goalies to be ranked above them on that basis? Hell no, they need time to develop and prove themselves against the competition of the times they play.

No offense to anyone but to say RGL era players have or had more competition is just flawed thinking.

The fact is that the ESEA era players from say Season 3 thru 7 saw 4 teams close at the top of the division most of the time and always at least 3 teams. Anyone could have won back then, and it was extremely competitive. Season 8 thru 19 was around when Froyo went crazy and undefeated, but they still had 3-4 team competition for the most part and some legendary finals were played during those times. Competition was quite high, and you can even go farther into ESEA later seasons 25 thru 30 and still see 3-4 teams right at the top together almost interchangeable every season.

Compared to RGL era, I don't see the same comparison on competition at all with the exception of maybe a few seasons here and there. The fact is many players simply left after ESEA and it hurt the overall competition level vastly. Yes, new players stepped up and are insanely good now 10-15 years later, but most RGL seasons are 2 team races from the start of the season until the end. Some RGL seasons had 3 or maybe 4 teams in the mix here and there but even those had an invite division with 10 teams, compared to ESEA's 8 team division, so the RGL W/L records are inflated a bit.

A new list today would clearly show many older players bumped out or lowered in ranking for newer RGL players who have had time to achieve results. When the list came out, some great players now had just started their invite career's so it just insane to think they were snubbed or whatever at the time of the list.
My thing was about someone just randomly posting that Tery's list was out of date the day it was posted is why I initially posted. Thats an ignorant BS comment from someone who has no real insight at all or did any research or any facts to stand on. I hate when someone shits on other people's work like that, just my issue I guess.

The original list was surely not perfect, it reflected the biases and idiosyncrasies of the people who worked on it (for example, I think my input is pretty much the main reason Bdonski is crazy high because I always had a really high opinion of him, whereas I know botmode disagreed even at the time when he went over the list). It also probably had a bias towards any player that had been on the very top, even if it was literally just for a year in 2008. But, as others have said, some of these criticisms are unfair, for three main reasons:

1) People are underestimating just how much has changed in 4 years. The G6 dynasty is obviously the best example of this.

2) As market said, there is a big difference between evaluating the objective skill of players vs. evaluating everyone in the context of their era. I think we're all comfortable giving a boost to players who are the best in the modern era when the skill level is the highest (and I think any reasonable person would agree it's the highest now), but that's still only one facet of evaluating players. Jokic might just be the most skilled center in NBA history, but you won't see many people rank him over Kareem yet, because we're just too early in his career to write the full story.

3) A point that I think has gone unaddressed: I think everyone has a bit of rose-colored glasses for the era when they first started watching competitive, while they were still a giant noob compared to the best of the best. For Tery or SpaceCadet or myself, that era was very early on in the game's lifespan. But for a lot of the naysayers here, that era was like 2015-2018, and I think there's some of that going on here too. For instance, hannah said in her post that she thought corsa being 'only' 41st was egregiously low. We're talking about a player who, results-wise, never won a single season of ESEA/RGL, or made the finals of a major international tournament.

Of course, that's not the whole story; corsa was a highly respected player who was considered one of the most skilled scouts in his time period, and that was probably the period that hannah started watching. If we're talking objective results, for instance, corsa would be clearly behind someone like cyzer or tyrone, who won multiple seasons of ESEA and got 2nd place at i46. Yet, talk to anyone around at the time, and neither of them were considered as elite on their class as corsa. That's why you need a blend of criteria, right? But I think that sort of color is kind of lost when you're talking about the earlier eras of tf2, where old farts might remember, say, how influential a roamer like jaeger was, on top of him being on the most dominant team.

On the flip side, hannah complains that Muma is too low, and points to his accomplishments. But we could just as easily point out that he was on the rebuilt froyo after everyone left, one of the weakest versions of the team, and that he totally imploded at that international LAN to the point that b4nny was literally trying to get WARHURYEAH to replace him at the event. If you go by placements, maybe 95 IS far too low. But would you apply that same standard to a tyrone or a Mackey, who won FAR more but who were probably even more tarred with the 'carried by b4nny' label? It's easy to pick whichever criteria supports a particular player the most, but it gets more complicated when you weigh everything for every player.

Ultimately, you'd run into the same conflict if you did this list today, just with the timelines moved up a couple years. How could anyone compare corsa or duwatna to caps or logan? At that point, it'll be the people who really grew up in that middle period of tf2 who are trying to explain just how good the previous generation was

competition was definitely way better way back in the day, i don't really even see much competition in invite now compared to how it was

is this list any better? https://sorter.social/60/top-tf2-players? image
might do another list with all rgl invite players...