EPThttp://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=292300
And of course, ForGG's (Fin's) stream.
http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/oGsForGG
On December 09 2011 13:09 Serpico wrote:
He just seems to always know exactly what he's doing and executes it so well. It's like he's playing half asleep in a sense. Doesnt get rattled or thrown out of whack.
He just seems to always know exactly what he's doing and executes it so well. It's like he's playing half asleep in a sense. Doesnt get rattled or thrown out of whack.
BINGO!
That's finger memory baby - something you only acquire after monstrous practice. It's the same for music, speaking as a pianist, it's the ability to carry out tasks without even having to think about it - my fingers just "know" which keys to press on the piano, the same way my fingers just "know" to "5sd6sd7sh8sh9sh" in Broodwar (5 hatch select make drone, 6 hatch select make drone, etc.) or 4dddaaaaaaTABdd playing as Terran in SC2.
Some heavily repeated rhythmic tasks such as a macro production round, or on a higher level a sequence of tasks (multitasking certain situations) become second nature to top Broodwar players, and to a lesser extent, top SC2 players. The analogy here would be: it's easy for me to play Chopin's Revolutionary Etude almost perfectly at any time, but it's infinitely harder for someone with lesser music training to do the same - even if he/she could read music well, she would spend 10x the amount of time playing the notes at 1/10 of my accuracy, and every time he/she makes a mistake he/she would probably get even more nervous and become more prone to further errors. Similarly, something such as managing a 2 front attacks while simultaneously defending a drop and macro'ing become routine and almost "automated" for Bisu, but it's something that's overwhelmingly difficult for me - I would spend 5x the amount of the time on overlapping attacking, macro'ing, scouting and defending tasks at probably 1/5 of his efficiency, becoming increasing frustrated if I mess up in one area and perform even worse in other areas.
On December 09 2011 13:08 KevinIX wrote:
Watching Fin play and I think that his APM is not what I expected. Everything he does looks very normal for a pro, and that's pretty surprising for me. It's his sick reaction time, precise unit control, and multitasking that makes him better than other pros. Fin makes SC2 look easy, and it gives me hope for becoming a good player someday.
Watching Fin play and I think that his APM is not what I expected. Everything he does looks very normal for a pro, and that's pretty surprising for me. It's his sick reaction time, precise unit control, and multitasking that makes him better than other pros. Fin makes SC2 look easy, and it gives me hope for becoming a good player someday.
Honestly I could not have asked for a better example for another related analogy. A world-class concert pianist plays on average about 20 keys (not counting chords) per second (1200 APM :D) for a relatively fast song comfortably, and that's as far as human limits can go even with liberal amounts of raw talent. However, I could probably mash keys at 30 keys per second "spamming" a useless bad-sounding repetitive sequence of notes, but clearly I'm still the worse piano player.
There is the related phenomenon when facing against a clearly superior opponent, the player in question seemingly "falls apart" and plays much worse, for example Polt, July, and Sage just crumbled and seemed to play much poorer than usual in their games against ForGG in Code A, eliciting posters in the ForGG thread to call July "a terrible zerg player who doesn't even have APM to spread creep", which obviously put a smile on my face because Julyzerg is known to have one of the highest APM ever in BW, where he peaked out at 800 something APM in a game once (vs. his opponents high 300ish?), and is known to have gotten into progaming by impressing the coaches of a BW team where he clocked in at 400 something APM in a friendly game against a progamer, as a complete amateur at the time himself.
With that said, it's time for me to wrap up this blog (because this is about the length where many people stop reading, so I'm buying more time with this randomly bracketed and excessive explanation), I believe that having good multitasking is in many ways heavily dependent on having efficient, well-practiced, routine/flow based rhythmic game play, essentially finger memory for SC. Stay tuned for an expanded guide on finger memory development for SC2, thanks for reading
Edit: ermm I just realized the 2nd last paragraph was 1 sentence:O Is it a run-on sentence? "...who doesn't even have APM to spread creep", which obviously put a smile...", would a period instead of the comma fix the whole thing? Sorry, I am not in my most sober state of mind ^_^
Having an amazing time listening to this on 100% volume with my floor shaking, hurray for psychoactives!
