i think the biggest thing u fail to recognize is that is very hard to frag highly or get a good rating when u lose a game, especially by a large measure. for example i think we can all agree zekken is a great player.
in this game against loud (https://www.vlr.gg/314645/sentinels-vs-loud-champions-tour-2024-americas-stage-1-w4) he got a significantly lower rating than qck. does this mean he is a worse player or even had a worse game? no. its a team game. if the team plays bad, generally the individual players will have bad stats. this is why i think looking at stats is kinda pointless and the only way to truly tell a players skill is to watch them play. again, flor could flop in t2, but using her stats when shes playing for a team that u guys call t3 or lower doesnt really prove if she is a t1 talent or not.
sexism/transphobia
in this game against loud he got a significantly lower rating than qck. does this mean he is a worse player or even had a worse game?
It does mean he had a worse game than qck, that's the whole point of the "rating". But Looking at a singular match doesn't tell an entire story, with more data, we can reduce that variability. Here's the full story of that split for zekken and qck, go find their names. I'll give you a hint, one will be at the top and the other will be at the bottom:
https://www.vlr.gg/event/stats/2004/champions-tour-2024-americas-stage-1
As for Flor, I went through every one of Flor's games in the top 32 of (both) Open Quals and compared the stats to the opposite duelist(s). If you have a serious methodological dispute with this, address that instead of just going with the whole "stats are bad" schtick, and regarding that...
why i think looking at stats is kinda pointless and the only way to truly tell a players skill is to watch them play
Far from pointless, stats are actually records of past events, that quantify them in an objective way. When we say "aspas has been playing out of his mind this split", the rating stat is a perfectly reasonable way to quantify this and allow us to discuss it in a comparative manner. No stat can ever tell an entire story, but saying stats are pointless and watching someone play is the best test of skill is braindead.
As for the whole "its a team game" point:
It's obviously a team game and nobody denies this, but there's no way to perfectly control every factor that can affect a performance. What we do know is that Flor's team is full of signed professionals who have built their careers on setting up Flor in gc. What we also know, is that with this team, Flor has not put up stats (ooh a super dirty word, I know) which would suggest a level of play that is good enough for Franchising, and is probably not even good enough for Challengers (4/5 players in that winthrop match were higher rated than Flor, ie: the smokes and senti players on the worst t2 team played better than Flor in that matchup)
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