On September 01 2011 07:40 Reithan wrote:
It's both 2 sides of the same coin. When you create a lexicon, internally or externally to quickly describe a given phenomenon, you often lose a lot of granularity of explanation that may be needed to explain the concept to a novice in the field. This is what people talk about when they use the term "jargon" or "techno-babble."
In this case, maybe it's craft-babble? I duno.
I have an understanding of what the terms macro and micro mean, but a lot of my fundamentals in accomplishing either are sorely lacking. In terms of how to streamline certain procedure, what's good or bad in terms of common practices I should or shouldn't use. When to box units, when to single-select, what to hotkey, when and how, etc.
Even though, as mentioned in a previous blog of mine, and also noted by Day[9] in his daily the day directly after that blog (LOL!) Macro and Micro are often used as answers to a question or discussion that should really have a lot more content.
Too often people, as you said, give advice such as "ok micro micro, macro macro." Even if you understand what those terms mean in broad strokes, you may not grasp the mechanics or execution of those tasks well enough to use that advice. (Not to mention APM or focus not being sufficient, which is a separate problem)
Sometimes you really DO need to break these terms back down to basics. Maybe you DO need to tell the person you're admonishing, "Hey, you need to stay on top of your larva injects, your queen energy is way too high. You're missing OLs all over the place, you need to work on not getting supply blocked. Your expansions are waaay late. Expand sooner." Or whatever. Just because you invoke the term macro, and they acknowledge that their macro is bad, they're floating resources, not getting expansions, have pitiful food counts, etc...doesn't mean they know the individual actions they need to take to fix these problems.
Additionally, even if they know the actions they need to take, especially in micro more than macro, they may not know the mechanics of how to accomplish those actions competently. Do they need to box units? Make more control groups? Set rally points? A-move, or normal move? Patrol??
While I do agree with what you're saying. It sounds like what you're looking for is a coach rather than some friends to explain things to you. Honestly the amount of time/effort it would take to go over teaching someone all of these things would take an incredible amount of time, unless they were very broad with it.
I think a big difference when you ask someone for help, or you ask someone to coach is you, if you just ask for help from a stranger, they will give you basic help. If you ask for coaching, you will get indepth coach-like help, going through mentality, execution etc..