Then again, if he were registered he'd easily be past 2000 and possibly 2100 by now and I'm not sure I could dispute it on the same basis so who knows?
I doubt it. If he were registered AND played more games he'd likely be over 2000. Just from the rated games his two forays here had, I think he'd be 1900's.
My memory has played me false a little bit, but I went off and got accurate stats on Justix's runs from the Wayback machine.
His first run, the learning run, left him at 1889.
The second run featured 25 games without a loss to take him to 1780, not thirty-something as I've previously stated, and it was the 26th he surrendered through not having enough time to devote to it. Many of these were against decent players - his last 3 games got him from 1749 ELO to 1780 ELO, suggesting he was playing players averaging about 1750 over those 3 games.
He would most certainly have broken 1900. I suspect he would have been within 25 ELO of 2000 at the very least, but cannot be sure - it would depend how many highish ELOs he counted in that run, as it's very slow progress toward 2000 if you're just mauling high 1700s.
"consistent with how past "masters" achieved the title."
Can someone please tell how past "masters" achieved the title? Totally unclear for a young warlock like me.
Pig achieved the title over a period of a number of months of total dominance (approx Sept 2003 to Feb 2004). This was before ELO, and he ascended to 25 ladder points or so by wreaking complete carnage on the people who could beat the rest of the ladder. It was difficult to get within range of Pig, and when you did, he beat you. In this period he was not playing a large number of games, but was winning every important game he played against people who had to destroy their way up the ladder over and over. In actuality, there were at this stage just two capable of climbing to match him - Tchichi and myself - and there was a notable gulf between us and everyone else.
Pig was defeated, I took his place at the top. In this period ExDeath was beginning to really come into his own. From about Feb 2004 to June 2004 I climbed to the greatest height yet achieved on the ladder, staying at 28 points for a while before a brief push to 29 and a fall. These points were largely gained at the expense of ExDeath and Tchichi who were similarly capable of blowing through everyone else and repeatedly achieving the high ladder scores. Again, we had a strict tiering of ability.
In the latter reaches of that period, though, new threats were rising: Yaron and Prioli. We were now in the ELO era, and, Pig apart, there was about a hundred clear ELO between Prioli at the bottom of the ExDeath-Taliesin-Yaron-Prioli clump at the top and reds and Qwertyphob, the best of the rest, by August (Tchichi, having slumped some, disappeared for a bit). That's a hell of a gap - each of these warlocks were that dominant over the warlocks under the gap. It was the persistence of that large ELO gap over the next few months that led to the perception of "master warlocks". There was the handful at the top, Pig trailing a little, and then everyone else a long way behind.
By the end of the year I was slumping badly, and disappeared from the game for a while. Prioli meanwhile had become the first warlock to crack 2000. Slartucker was a fairly green new warlock on the scene at that point, not even in the 1800s. Shortly after, Pig, Prioli and Yaron and ExDeath slid into inactivity, leaving only Tchichi in charge of the ladder.
And, I imagine, if at this point Tchichi had got his ass kicked, we'd be talking about the era of the Master Warlocks as a quaint historical curiosity. He didn't. Instead we have what Slarty poetically called "The Winter of Tchichi" as the last Master Warlock left destroyed all opposition and rose to the giddy heights of 2048 ELO, mostly at the expense of Toyotami and Asgardian, stuck at a hundred points or more below him. The Gulf remained intact.
And then I returned. I ran into Slarty, we started talking strategy seriously about then, and significantly expanded the theory of the game. I whittled down the gap significantly by preying on Tchichi and taking his ELO in a very one-sided series of games which saw me overtaking him on the ladder as well before we ice stormed our way back to zero. Slarty, his abilities kick-started by the discussion, became formidable in his own right and started laying waste to all, Tchichi included. In the Wayback Machine snapshot for October 2005, we have:
Taliesin - 2070 ELO
Slartucker - 1986 ELO
Tchichi - 1957 ELO
Toyotami - 1911 ELO
Surial - 1885 ELO
xade - 1866 ELO
Justix - 1861 ELO
The Tchichi-Toyotami gap looks small here, enough perhaps to make you question the Master Warlock thing - but only a few months before Tchichi, without other Master Warlocks to prey on him, had increased that gap between him and everyone else to over a hundred ELO.
Slarty and I held the top for a number of months. Yaron made a brief return. I reached 2100 and retired. Slarty continued climbing, smoothly went past 2000 himself. Yaron faced all comers save Slarty in the 2006 Warlocks Tournament, and won.
Then Slarty and Yaron retired. Spacca, Tchichi's alt, who'd arisen in the background, seems to have taken over for a bit - the Wayback Machine for July 2006 shows him back to his old dominance in the absence of predatory masters:
Spacca - 2009 ELO
Toyotami - 1905 ELO
Citanest - 1875 ELO
Qwertyphob - 1873 ELO
And then even Spacca vanished.
Months of challenging play were had between people who didn't completely dominate each other. There were even periods with no-one over 1900 ELO!
December 2006 Wayback Machine snapshot, ranked by ELO:
Toyotami - 1881
theLEGION - 1851
Freesoul - 1836
xade - 1826
March 2007, ExDeath returned. Despite everyone having not much ELO to speak of, he casually went past 2000 himself. By mid-April there was over a hundred ELO between him and his nearest rivals.
And so we come to the last year. The masters weren't really playing any more, after their sophisticated analysis had finally led to the D/P mirror jam. Other warlocks have risen in that time. None of those have achieved significant dominance over the pack, except maybe Toyo at his peak. Given Toyo's history of being "the best of the rest" when Tchichi and ExDeath were a hundred points ahead, though, I'd have to see him holding his own for a period against one of the acknowledged masters to consider him for a position among the greats.
Being the next master is absolutely up for grabs, though. Get a 70 ELO point gap between you and the rest of the pack, hold it for two or three months of active play without retiring, and you've got an excellent shot at being added. I feel that the current crowd at the top are strong enough that dominating them would be meaningful.