EPTHistorically, my biggest struggle with competitive video games has been maintaining a strong, positive mindset and not succumbing to bitterness and childish self-pity. This has been a constant throughout the many games I've played - and SC2, being as hard as it is, is no exception.
About 5 months ago I made an honest run at GM, and despite doing pretty well and getting very close, eventually was defeated by myself. I became incredibly unhappy and stopped playing, vowing to quit SC2 once and for all. It turns out I can't even quit correctly though, and after spending a few months playing Civ5 and various single player games, I found myself booting up Starcraft, one more time. But this time was going to be different.
Mindset
I concluded that my problem, if I was being honest, had never really been with any of the technical aspects of the game. I'm not a particularly fast player, but I'm faster than say, Goody, Sjow, etc, so that's not really a limiting factor if my goal was to get to NA gm. I'm not the smartest player, but I think I might be described as at least a little clever, at least some of the time. Everything else is more or less the same. My problem, is a cripplingly negative internal dialogue, which, if left unchecked, grows from a quietly derisive voice in the back of my head to a full blown, raging, mutant beast devouring everything in it's path, and consuming me entirely.
![[image loading]](http://www.japankino.de/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/vlcsnap-29336.jpg)
My unchecked negativity
So - what's to be done? I decided that I was going to focus specifically on what our Korean friends call "mind-control" (although this is probably just a translation artifact). Maintaining a positive mindset, staying focused, and forbidden my mind to wander away from the actuality of what I'm trying to do. So far I've been pretty successful in this regard. The rules by which I've been operating are straight-forward:
- I'm not allowed to think about prior games when I'm in a game
- I start every game with a (somewhat cheesy) self-affirmation about how I am going to try my very best, and this game is going to by my best game so far
- If my mind starts to wander, I bring myself back to the game by reminding myself "Here and now", and I clear my mind
- If I start to have negative dialogue, particularly imaginary conversations with others, I take a deep breath, relax my shoulders, and repeat my self-affirmation
- If I'm really struggling to stay in control of myself, I take a short break and return when I'm feeling better
Goal Setting
A casual glance at any decent sports-psych book will tell you that it's important to set goals, and a particular type of goal, too - "SMART" goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound. In some activities, this is really quite easy. If you play basketball and your free-throw % is 40%, you might set a goal to raise that to 50% by the end of the season, and your plan to achieve that would be to practice free-throws 3 hours per week on your own. In starcraft, it's surprisingly difficult to make goals like this. The reason why I say it's difficult is that while there any many metrics by which you can quantize your performance, none of them really necessarily correlate to actual success.
So, let's talk about some sort of decent metrics.
APM - a seemingly great metric. The broodwar legend Nada described apm as "A rate that shows how quickly you can draw your picture in the game with a keyboard and mouse". In general, having more APM is probably a good thing. However, there any many successful players with very low apm (in SC2). The afformentioned terrans Goody, Sjow are very slow, playing with around 120 apm, and to that list we cannot omit the glorious Protoss God Elfi, who plays even slower, with about 90-100apm.
So if I have 190 apm, and I increase my APM to 195, 200, or 210 - does this actually help me? If I say, I want to increase my APM by 10 each month, is this a relevant goal? How would I even go about doing this, other than by "playing faster". If I focus on clicking more, does that count? If I increase my APM, but make worse strategic decisions as a result, have I improved? It's not so encouraging.
Spending Quotient
This is getting a bit more useful, I think. As far as I understand, it basically is some kind of metric which shows your ratio of income gathering to spending (or something like this). In general, better players have more. My personal hero and role model, Flash, plays with around 110-115 SQ in most of his games that I have replays of. My SQ is about 90, ±5. If I get totally rekt in a macro game, typically my opponents SQ is alot higher. But at the same time, many games which are very short, or involve abnormal conditions will have wonky SQ's. As a vague average of macro-ability, this seems like a decent metric, but I'm not sure how one would focus on developing it, separated from other things.
Screens per Minute
Probably the best metric of actual multitasking. How often do you switch screen locations? Flash and Zest play at between 25 and 30 spm, meaning they spend an average of 2 seconds per screen. Pretty fast. My average SPM is around 16-20, on a good day, with more like 15 spm on a bad day. So I'm spending roughly 50% longer per screen than flash is. I'm guessing this is because I'm doing about 50% less stuff (at least!) Again though, how does one improve this? Multi-tasking trainers are kinda sparse, and they don't really help much anyways. More SPM seems better, but we're in the same situation as with APM.
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So what does that actually leave us with? MMR? This seems like the absolute worst possible way to incentivize yourself, a direct path to the dark side and to negative emotions. Win rate? Obviously useless with the way the ladder operates. Hitting build benchmarks? Tricky - and useless. I can probably execute flash's 3 base bio/hellbat/thor timing properly vs a bronze leaguer, or an AI, but vs a good GM zerg who is harassing with lings ,mutas, denying scouting, faking an allin, and generally running me in circles, I have more trouble. Alot more.
I have been tracking these metrics, just for fun, but mostly just to try to understand the correlation between how I feel, and how I perform. So far, it seems that if I would self-describe my condition as "tired", "distracted", or "negative emotions", my SPM drops by about 25% and my apm by about 10. My % supply capped increases by 1-2% too. Fun facts, but not super useful.
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So, my question to any readers - do you set goals for yourself in SC2? What kind of goals are they, and how do you feel that they contribute to your success?
