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Well, for the first time in years, I'm going to do the former instead of the latter, which makes this Diary of a Noob, Day One.
Dear diary, I have awful, awful APM. Like, people talk about their bad APM. "Oh, I only have 120!" "Oh that's nothing, I'm barely above 100!"
Diary, I average 60 apm.
I view this as the most important obstacle to my skill improving. I know plenty of builds for plenty of matchups. I know how to scout and when to do it. I know why I do everything I do, from scout timing to carrier switches (making Terrans rage, obviously).
But I can't actually DO it and still micro my units. I have about enough hand speed to keep my money zeroed for the entire game, and nothing else. So for a long time, I've just said "fine", and focused on strategies where I don't NEED to micro all that much (why do you think I play protoss?) in serious games.
It's time to change that. So, diary, this is my plan, inspired by a recent Day[9] daily comment about how to get better. I'm going to focus on spamming above all else when I play. Every spare second that I'm not making new goons or probes or telling them to attack move somewhere, I'll spam. I'll click around the minimap while I spam and see if maybe there's somewhere I can do some micro, and I'll do it if it's there. But the focus is just going to be on making my hands do things.
However, spamming alone isn't going to help, because the real problem is my awful mouse skills. I'm one of those guys who uses keyboard shortcuts for EVERYTHING, and a terminal for everything else. My mouse is exclusively for playing games, which means I'm nowhere near as good with it as I could be.
To fix that, I'm playing a Flash game called Ninja Glove. The basic premise is that a puzzle appears and you have to click really fast to solve it. When I started, I could only do about 4 or 5 of the 21 puzzles with any sort of reliability. Then I practiced a bit and finally realized that I should slow down my mouse speed, and a couple tries after that suddenly I'm solving 18 or 19 of them every time.
The one I've still never managed to beat without cheating is the one where you have to click 25 times in something like four or five seconds. If I don't mess up a single click (I'm riding the edge of where my mouse recognizes each time, so sometimes I fall short) I get exactly 24 inside the time limit. More often, I'll mess up one of them and get 23. I'm not sure if this is just due to my mouse or if I'll start getting it if I work on my fingers just a little more, but it's frustrating either way.
I played a game (1v3 AI on BGH, because I'm currently too embarrassed to play actual humans and too focused on macro to bother with real maps) right after this little flash gaming session and was pleasantly surprised by the results. When all three protoss AIs did their little weirdly timed 3 gate attack, and I had something like forty zealots charging down my neck, I managed to actually micro against them. Of course, since there was only room for one at a time to come through my choke, I didn't really need to, but I focused goon fire on that one manually anyway and didn't take more than two or three hits in the whole battle. From there it was just a struggle just to move my units around the map and still macro, because I was up to like 12 gates, but I kept my money zeroed the whole game - and, obviously, I royally kicked their asses.
What I realized during this awful shambles of a game was that I don't use hotkeys anywhere near as much as I should. I don't even know how to set the F1-F4 keys, and after the extreme early game I was just too frantic to think of hotkeying my units. So, next game, my goal is to have my gates, nexus, and units hotkeyed for the early game, and my nexuses, army, and robo hotkeyed for the late game, with F1 and F2 set to my mineral lines and F3 set to my gates. F4 will be unused unless I feel like taking a third and making my macro take up even more of my time.
I switched over to playing against three Zerg AIs on Fighting Spirit at this point, and failed on four separate occasions to survive - fast expanding when the three opponents are far more likely to 4 pool or do some sort of shitty timing attack (that is far less shitty when its power is multiplied by three) than 12 hatch is pretty suicidal. However, barring the game where I got triple 4 pooled (in which I had 324 APM, because it lasted about a minute before I said "fuck this" and I'd been spamming my ass off), my APM was up from ~60 to 80-85, so I think I'm doing something right. It definitely feels like I'm playing faster.
Anyway, this has been Diary of a Noob Day 1. Quite honestly, I'm amazed I ever managed to hold steady at D on ICCUP playing worse than I did today. I guess Protoss really is imba.  Hopefully, tomorrow will bring some satisfactory outnumbered-three-to-one-by-awful-AI games on some real maps, and I'll move over to ICCUP to lose terribly. Who knows, maybe I'll even make it a TSL account, so I can take the last place trophy.
 
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You generally raise your apm by thinking "What could I be doing right now" and then doing it.
"I wonder if that zerg has expanded here, I better scout/scan"
"My army is better positioned right here and like this"
"I need to macro from my barracks"
"I'm not spending money fast enough, I need more barracks"
etcetc.
It doesn't matter if you are slow. As long as you do everything you can possibly think of as fast as you can, you'll start to get faster and faster at it.
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apm is developed through muscle memory and repitition. a good tip to train yourself to use hotkeys is to look at the unit icon before you build it and press the corresponding hotkey. using hotkeys alone to build units will raise your apm by at least 50.
don't focus too much on flash games like ninja glove. your thought process is already ahead of your mechanics and the biggest thing you can do to improve is train yourself to become more independent from using the mouse.
good luck, i'm looking forward to reading your future diaries.
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lol F1 cant be used, and setting them goes like this:
move to where the F2 hotkey should lead you
press shift-F2
same for F3, F4
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I'm a musician. When it comes to spamming, I find that I play 1000% better and twice as fast if, when I'm spamming, I focus on spamming three keys in a triplet pattern. The more consistent 'beat' I keep with this triplet pattern, the faster I execute commands and the less overall I think about execution.
However, if I get thrown off and my spamming gets out of sync with the timing in my head, things go bad. The key for me is to get back into my timing.
I actually started doing the triplet pattern fairly slowly when spamming since I would sometimes accidentally double-tap a hotkey and change the screen off something I was looking at. Doing it slower and in a more mechanical and deliberate fashion fixed this immediately.
You really should try this method because this has improved my game a lot - just by doing useless spamming! There are psychological and biological factors that come with spamming that just seem to work. The fact that you get faster is just a nice side-effect.
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I used to have 60+ apm when I started too. Now I have about 180-190 apm on average. It just rises as you get better and learn to make the correct decisions. Ain't no thang.
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APM just develop with your skill, usually you won't know much about the game with low apm and the other way around, tho of course there is exeptions.
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i have like 200-250apm in zvp, and like 180 in zvt. dunnoman. when i play protoss i only have like 120 lol
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On December 06 2009 02:27 Terranist wrote:
apm is developed through muscle memory and repitition. a good tip to train yourself to use hotkeys is to look at the unit icon before you build it and press the corresponding hotkey. using hotkeys alone to build units will raise your apm by at least 50.
don't focus too much on flash games like ninja glove. your thought process is already ahead of your mechanics and the biggest thing you can do to improve is train yourself to become more independent from using the mouse.
good luck, i'm looking forward to reading your future diaries.
In bold : Correct.
Go into singleplayer vs a compter and practice a preferred build for a matchup.
from start to 200 supply. Try to hit all the timings in the build.
Start with the SCV split and try to get it down perfectly. Go through your build until you slip up or miss a timing, then restart all the way from the beginning.
Tip : Use poweroverwhelming to keep the AI in its base.
Then just try to execute as fast as possible(keep repeating over and over, build units, but don't micro them, just send them to a rally point somewhere. After you learned the build, go play on iccup. Focus on your build primarily, and incorporate micro when you have time.
In the beginning you're gonna suck big time because you can't multitask well enough. As you start becoming proficient with multitasking(macro/micro) you'll see your APM naturally rise.
I recommend Stylish FP vods if you play Terran.
I went from like 80 apm to 220 apm in 2 weeks of practice.
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On December 06 2009 05:25 Mobius wrote:
i have like 200-250apm in zvp, and like 180 in zvt. dunnoman. when i play protoss i only have like 120 lol
Matchups differs indeed, I can hardly go over 200 with protoss but while I play TvZ I almost always go above 300.
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On December 06 2009 02:27 Terranist wrote:
apm is developed through muscle memory and repitition. a good tip to train yourself to use hotkeys is to look at the unit icon before you build it and press the corresponding hotkey. using hotkeys alone to build units will raise your apm by at least 50.
don't focus too much on flash games like ninja glove. your thought process is already ahead of your mechanics and the biggest thing you can do to improve is train yourself to become more independent from using the mouse.
good luck, i'm looking forward to reading your future diaries.
I already use hotkeys for building units and stuff. I'm talking more about the 1-9 keys for control groups of units here. And no seriously, in my case it really is my mechanics that are behind. I'm constantly thinking "I need to select this and then select this and select this" and my hand speed is where the bottleneck occurs. Thanks for the advice and support, though. 
On December 06 2009 02:33 DefMatrixUltra wrote:
I'm a musician. When it comes to spamming, I find that I play 1000% better and twice as fast if, when I'm spamming, I focus on spamming three keys in a triplet pattern. The more consistent 'beat' I keep with this triplet pattern, the faster I execute commands and the less overall I think about execution.
However, if I get thrown off and my spamming gets out of sync with the timing in my head, things go bad. The key for me is to get back into my timing.
I actually started doing the triplet pattern fairly slowly when spamming since I would sometimes accidentally double-tap a hotkey and change the screen off something I was looking at. Doing it slower and in a more mechanical and deliberate fashion fixed this immediately.
You really should try this method because this has improved my game a lot - just by doing useless spamming! There are psychological and biological factors that come with spamming that just seem to work. The fact that you get faster is just a nice side-effect.
That's actually quite brilliant. I'm going to try this out.
On December 06 2009 05:52 ruXxar wrote:Show nested quote +On December 06 2009 02:27 Terranist wrote:
apm is developed through muscle memory and repitition. a good tip to train yourself to use hotkeys is to look at the unit icon before you build it and press the corresponding hotkey. using hotkeys alone to build units will raise your apm by at least 50.
don't focus too much on flash games like ninja glove. your thought process is already ahead of your mechanics and the biggest thing you can do to improve is train yourself to become more independent from using the mouse.
good luck, i'm looking forward to reading your future diaries. In bold : Correct. Go into singleplayer vs a compter and practice a preferred build for a matchup. from start to 200 supply. Try to hit all the timings in the build. Start with the SCV split and try to get it down perfectly. Go through your build until you slip up or miss a timing, then restart all the way from the beginning.Tip : Use poweroverwhelming to keep the AI in its base. Then just try to execute as fast as possible(keep repeating over and over, build units, but don't micro them, just send them to a rally point somewhere. After you learned the build, go play on iccup. Focus on your build primarily, and incorporate micro when you have time. In the beginning you're gonna suck big time because you can't multitask well enough. As you start becoming proficient with multitasking(macro/micro) you'll see your APM naturally rise. I went from like 80 apm to 220 apm in 2 weeks of practice.
I'm also going to try this out. I'm a big fan of starting over from the beginning when I screw up with music and things, so I don't see why this should be any different. Obviously, if there's one specific bit you aren't getting, you do that bit over and over, but if all you're trying to do is improve your reliability, starting over from the beginning for each error is very important.
Several of you mentioned having higher APM when you play races other than Protoss. I'm going to try out some Terran (I hate the whole concept of larva management or I'd try both other races) and see if that makes a difference.
Of course, dirty whore that I am, I'll probably go back to Protoss afterwards even if playing Terran drastically improves my play.
Thanks so much for the suggestions and encouragement, everybody, and I'll let you know how it turns out in Diary of a Noob Day Two: coming soon.
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i got 313 apm in a zvp yesterday and I was really in a groove of playing well. Sadly friends came over and I had to gg and cut it short.
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you can kick the computer during countdown in melee games if you don't want him to be harassing you while practicing builds. just make sure to account for your scouting worker.
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EPT
