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I've been watching my replays back over the past few months, just to see how much I've improved in regards to each match up. My knowledge and game sense I feel is improving and I'm even starting to get a better grasp of what's going on in pro matches, what their builds could be. Why they react the way they do to certain tidbits of information. My understanding of the game is definitely improving, I can see that and it makes me critical of things a lot more.
What it makes me especially critical of is my mechanics as a whole, which I feel have stayed around the same level for a while now. My play isn't getting any faster, my reaction times are still pretty slow and with my better knowledge and understanding I can see things happening but I can't respond correctly because my mechanics just aren't up to par. It's like seeing an incoming train wreck and not being able to do it, which is rather frustrating.
With this noted, I started wondering if there's a limit on how good someone's mechanics can get. A peak as it were, where once you hit the top, that's it, that's as good as you're ever going to get. Or whether there is always room to improve and it's just some kind of weird subconscious blockade I have going on that with more time I could overcome. There's this part of me that hopes it's the latter of course because I strive on improvement and being the best that I as a person can be.
I don't feel this is a mindset thing, I don't consciously attempt to focus solely on my mechanics, I just play naturally, doing as I feel comfortable. I don't go into a ladder match and go "well my mechanics are shit I'm probably going to lose." I don't go in too cocky, I'm gold league, I'm no Zest or Rain, I fuck up a lot and I'll happily admit that. I misread situations or react the wrong way, it happens to everyone.
If I lose (and even sometimes when I win) I sit there and get frustrated at myself watching several matches back for being not too good mechanically, I rewatch myself trying to do the correct thing but just not doing it right and I just get the feeling I've hit a brick wall and stagnated and I don't know why. The way I deal with this is trying to rationalise it, try and understand why; see if I can bring it under my control, which I guess is why I just posted some silly rambly blog on something silly.
 
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We cant see the limit but I feel like everyone (progamer) is slamming on limit at mechanical side so that other stuff are more important.
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I think it is like with most sports:
If you want to improve past a certain point, you have to do more pushups than you do easily.
So unless you actively learn better techniques to control your stuff and unless you actively feel your handsnbeing at their limit all the time, you won't improve mechanically.
It is about really trying instead of just playing.
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the thing that I always was so amazed by is how the smallest things in mechaniques can make a huge diffrence,
a top top gm will barely lose any game becuase the simplest push can kill a mid/low gm easily
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I don't feel this is a mindset thing, I don't consciously attempt to focus solely on my mechanics, I just play naturally, doing as I feel comfortable.
This is the issue.
Your mechanics won't improve if you don't push yourself to play harder, you need to knowledge/understanding to know what you should be doing at higher speeds with more precision, but you seem to have realized that, so you should actively focus on mechanical training.
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When I was playing BW and I was getting at B- in ICCUP I felt the same way. I can understand what I have to do but I just can't psychically do it. I made a conclusion this was due to the limited time I could invest in the game. Had I been able to invest more time, I'd get better. Maybe that's your issue too.
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you only stop getting better when you stop believing you can become better
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United States4883 Posts
Let me use a music reference:
I was a musician for 12 years playing piano, so I learned a lot about practicing and how to get things up to performance level. To be completely honest, most musicians look at a difficult piece of music and go, "Wow, I don't think I can play that anytime soon", but then play it proficiently after a few weeks of intensive focused practice. Of course there is a limit to what one can do physically and mentally, but no one is ACTUALLY bound at a mediocre level perpetually because of their capability to learn. Another comparison is a guy named Benny Lewis, look him up. He's a marvelous polyglot that didn't learn to speak another language until after he was in his mid 20s, after which science says it's "difficult for people to learn other languages because their speaking pattern is set"; now he gobbles up languages in weeks. And it's not from talent or "the language gene", but through consistent and focused practice.
So, end rant. The first part about learning is physical mechanics, which can always be improved. If you just tap 1-2-3 as fast as possible, you can reach 300 APM easy; there's nothing preventing your fingers from physically reaching 300 APM. Training things like hotkey combinations or inject/macro cycles and things like that are purely muscle memory. If you do them correctly 100,000,000 times, they will get faster and more efficient. For instance, for piano, we practice a lot of 5-finger exercises where we just try to attempt to gain "finger independence" and get our fingers used to recognizing patterns. This is also similar to scales and arpeggios, which attempt to also get us to recognize what each key signature feels like. In more specific examples, we can practice a difficult passage from a piece at a slow piece, slowly speeding up, until we achieve mechanical success. It's not that we can't do it, it's just that we need to train our muscles to do it and gradually speed it up.
Training things like minimap awareness and spending money, etc., are byproducts of having your eyes at the right places at the right times or doing the right things at the right times. Again, this is practiced through very deliberate practice and repetition. For instance, in music we're taught to read one measure ahead of what we're playing. This is an insanely difficult thing to pick up, but through constant awareness of what you're doing and actively practicing "reading ahead" as you're playing, you begin to do things like sightread a lot more easily. In SC2, this means that we can pair something like building units and looking at resources/supply; in order to practice this, just literally make yourself look at the resources and supply while building units EVERY SINGLE TIME until the two become inseparable. Injecting and minimap is a good pairing too.
The other major thing that speeds up play is planning. The more planned out your strategy is, the less thinking you're doing in game. this allows you to collapse the structure of your normal thought process into a bunch of "if -> then" statements and giving you a surprising amount of extra time in game to focus on micro/macro/positioning. In music, this is very similar to true memorization; practicing a Bach fugue measure by measure backwards until the entirety of the piece is forged into the memory, giving you tons of time to really think about the positioning of your hands and the tone of each individual note. For a lot of my strategies in SC2, I have literally the entire game planned out from start to finish so that I'm aware of exactly when I need to be expecting a drop, when I should be moving out vs defending, when I need to check the corners of maps for pylons, etc. It's almost second nature now to do some of the things that I used to spend a lot of time thinking about in the game and planning around.
In short: No, you don't have a limit on learning. Focused mechanics practice and strategy planning will greatly accelerate your in-game speed. By a lot.
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There was no limit in Broodwar. The limit is fairly low in Starcraft 2. Army control and decision making is more important than raw mechanics, which everyone at a professional level has at a sufficient level to compete. Some perhaps have slightly better multitasking, but the overall mechanical skill is very similar. Even in broodwar, certain pros are approaching a skill ceiling in certain matchups.
As far as practical advice:
If you make an effort to play at 300 APM, never miss a depot/pylon/overlord, start every upgrade exactly on time, and add rax/gates exactly as you have the money at the correct timing you'll be high masters in a very short time. Most people who are struggling despite having what they perceive as adequate mechanics to proceed actually have very bad mechanics. The key things that bad players have to not do to win a ton more games is:
1) watch your nexus and make sure you dont stop making probes until you reach saturation
2) never get supply capped
3) paying attention to harrassing and scouting units
4) never miss a production cycle of units, no matter what's going on on the map.
5) add rax or gates or whatever as soon as possible, so that they are not delayed by any time (can be well over 2 minutes at gold league)
Once you do these things, you'll hit your timings easier and have more units during them. Every seemingly small error that you make above can end up causing your timing to be delayed by 20+ seconds, which if you make 3-4 of them should lose you the game vs someone who doesn't make the mistakes, no matter how good your build countered his.
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EPT
