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I've been playing SC2 since the WOL Beta. I've never excelled at it, and found myself floating between Plat and Diamond. I've done coaching and replay analysis, talked with pros and everything seemed to point to one conclusion, I suck at mechanics. My macro is fine, until a fight happens. Then it tanks... which makes me think about my slipping macro.. which makes my unit micro bad... which combine to get me killed. The way I was using my keyboard was not helping me maximize my keypress efficiency. I knew that I could find the largest gains by focusing on that.
I've used Grid for a long time now, but it was simply not helping me properly macro and micro at the same time. Units went unhotkeyed as did most buildings. Camera locations were an afterthought, at best. And no matter how much I worked at it, I'd fat finger or simply not be able to hit the hotkeys fast enough to actually get anything done.
So since I don't have much to lose, I thought that perhaps if I focused on my hotkeying and camera position, I'd get somewhere. That search lead me to try Darkgrid, which while much better than Grid, still didn't "feel right." Not that I gave it much of a chance... but that didn't matter because I soon found TheCore.
For those of you that don't know, TheCore is a hotkey arrangement which places your left hand near the right shift key. Which means you can bring one extra digit into the equation. A ton of work went into analysis of the most commonly used hotkeys and TheCore places them all on the resting position of your finger. The keyboard is even angled to best minimize the distance needed for the fingers to travel. It even retains sane hotkeys for offracing, something I enjoy greatly. It immediately felt "smart" and "well thought out". There is a great TL thread on it that you should at least read the first post of.
But "I think" and real data need to meet for me to progress. So I've decided to start learning TheCore to see if it helps.
I downloaded 0.6.3 and tried it out some with unit and building testers. It seemed "great" but not "perfect". So I waded into the hundred page thread to see if something was up. And that's when I discovered all of the work that has gone into TheCore 1.0 Alpha. It looks basically perfect from a theoretical point of view. (As of the writing they are basically finishing up how to make Zerg inject/creep spread work perfectly, which matters little to me as a Protoss) One of the things I didn't like about 0.6.3 was that the hotkey on mouse4/5 would never get used. I know myself well enough to realize that I'd just end up forgetting about them or misclicking them at the wrong time, I still would have to "tab" in the sense that my finger would need to move away from the keys needed to do abilities to select the right unit to perform these actions. TheCore Alpha solves that by moving them to mouse4/5, where I always felt it belonged.
So I grabbed a mechanical keyboard, popped off every unused key and the surrounding keys, and got to work. First, I started on a structure building trainer on battle.net. Within a 1/2 hour I could build all buildings faster than I could with grid and with fewer errors. I then fired up UNIT_TEST_MAP to start playing around with hotkeys. Honestly this didn't give me as much great information because the pressure to get all the hotkeys right isn't really there. But I got the basics down (but poorly).
I fired up an easy computer and fumbled around to defend the first push and get up 2 bases with some colo for an easy victory. The structure building training transferred 100% over. Only one mistake on my first time through. However I was always trying to remember what control group and camera group did what and learn a new macro cycle. I felt SLOW. I hotkeyed things wrong. My base cams were not set well. I made so many mistakes and had a moment of doubt.
After the game I clicked the APM tab. I was expecting that maybe I was at 1/2 of my normal APM (130's) as I did no spam and only issued intentional orders. I was SHOCKED to find that I matched my old APM! And this was with me fumbling for hotkeys, looking at my cheat sheet, and learning to use my thumb. The raw efficiency of TheCore overcame all of that.
I felt like I was terrible but I was doing just as well as I had been with my hotkeys that I have been using for 2 years. I am still completely flabbergasted that this is even possible. I have been immediately converted and I intend to dedicate the next month to fully learning the core and ingraining it into my muscle memory.
This blog will serve as a diary of that progress. If I make personal changes to TheCore, I'll list them. When I start laddering again, I'll post my progress on the ladder. I'll try to stream and put links with vods so you can cringe at first and hopefully be impressed as I grow. If you are interested in a personal story of how an improved hotkey setup can help your game, please come back to follow my progress.
Day 1 and 2 of TheCore are over but I feel many more productive days will soon follow. I hope you join me on this journey!
Onward TheCore!
 
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Reminds me of learning bumper jumper for H3... that was a brutal learning curve to say the least.
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I personally learned to use Darkgrid, long before it inspired TheCore to be created. I found Darkgrid great, but when it stopped being supported, I realized the big danger in adapting to weird keyboard schemes: You become reliant on them. Unless you feel it worth the risk that you might have to recreate the whole setup from scratch one day, I recommend sticking to default hotkey setups with personal changes.
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On April 17 2013 22:00 Tobberoth wrote:
I personally learned to use Darkgrid, long before it inspired TheCore to be created. I found Darkgrid great, but when it stopped being supported, I realized the big danger in adapting to weird keyboard schemes: You become reliant on them. Unless you feel it worth the risk that you might have to recreate the whole setup from scratch one day, I recommend sticking to default hotkey setups with personal changes.
When would you have to recreate the whole setup from scratch? I could see having to make some modifications (e.g. when LotV is released), but I don't think that's a strong reason for not using a custom layout, especially one like TheCore. The development process for TheCore is collaborative and open source ( TheCore Generation Script GitHub), so even if all of the people currently working on it were to completely stop, it still could be picked up and worked on by others.
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On April 17 2013 23:23 JDub wrote:Show nested quote +On April 17 2013 22:00 Tobberoth wrote:
I personally learned to use Darkgrid, long before it inspired TheCore to be created. I found Darkgrid great, but when it stopped being supported, I realized the big danger in adapting to weird keyboard schemes: You become reliant on them. Unless you feel it worth the risk that you might have to recreate the whole setup from scratch one day, I recommend sticking to default hotkey setups with personal changes. When would you have to recreate the whole setup from scratch? I could see having to make some modifications (e.g. when LotV is released), but I don't think that's a strong reason for not using a custom layout, especially one like TheCore. The development process for TheCore is collaborative and open source ( TheCore Generation Script GitHub), so even if all of the people currently working on it were to completely stop, it still could be picked up and worked on by others.
Very true. Then again, I felt the same about darkgrid, when I used it it was used by a ton of people and the thread was very active. Then boom, one day it wasn't supported anymore and the thread fell into obscurity, I have no idea where all the people using it went (I know quite a few switched to The Core though), but it somehow went from active to dead very quickly. Obviously, that doesn't stop anyone from using it if they want, but then suddenly it won't get updated for LotV etc and the burden is put on the user.
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On April 17 2013 21:33 KillerSOS wrote:
Reminds me of learning bumper jumper for H3... that was a brutal learning curve to say the least.
boxer representtttttt
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I'm not worried about support. If people abandon TheCore (which they won't but still), I can keep updating it to meet my own needs. It isn't rocket science. And the tools and analytically techniques that they've shown can be easily applied by myself to extend it. For example, I'm unconvinced that the "all unit" key is the worst thing ever. I'm going to not use it so I can learn the default core but I'm thinking that I may bind it to something that isn't a 4 finger chord after. I'm not perfect and something that can draw all the army together to get re-hotkeyed could be useful.
I'm concerned with efficiency and improving my game. And from my initial results, I'm liking TheCore. I'll keep on posting on it and let you know how it goes.
Thanks for the feedback!
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Great to hear that you're now using TheCore, EntropyFails! It's definitely a completely different world from pretty much any other layout, with my favorite feature of TheCore/Chameleon (which I use, as I'm on a laptop) is that you can execute almost all of your macro from the home keys alone...no other way of playing can beat that! As far as support goes, there is simply no reason that should be a problem. Even if you put no effort except to add new units/abilities to the next best keys available to you, well, guess what? It'll still be more efficient than the Blizzard-supported Standard, by miles.
Good luck on your journey, your improvement will be well-earned!
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EPT
