are hotkeys really that great? - Page 5

On April 15 2004 10:41 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I've often been above 200. only with zerg though. and I'm below 20% hotkey even then.

obsolete you should be smart enough to realize that when every other thing you do is press a hotkey, that's obviously not useful, considering just pressing a hotkey and then not doing anything is really not a useful thing to do unless you have every single unit you ever use for anything and every single building you ever use for anything hotkeyed, you can't get 50% hotkey use without having a bunch of useless hotkey mashings.

basically, if hotkey+select adds up to more than 50%, it means you're spending more time hotkeying/selecting than you should, as it means you are selecting a unit or using a hotkey without doing anything with the unit/building you selected, which IS VERY RARELY USEFUL. (occasionally, like if you have your lord hotkeyed early game and you see a unit on the minimap and he randomed, pressing the lord's hotkey twice so you can instantly be relocated and see his race, is useful, and then you only press hotkey without doing anything else. ) but in almost all other situations, pressing the hotkey is not useful unless you also do something with the unit(s)/building you selected, and if you always do something with the unit you selected, you won't end up with 50% hotkey use.

I just checked the two nada replays I have on my computer and he had 35% and 42% hotkey use, and 49% and 54% hotkey/select use. 35% hotkey and 49% hotkey/select is pretty close to optimal, imo.. 54% is *slightly* too much, but not close to a "big deal". when people are like 50% hotkey and 15% select however, they really should start spamming less, as it makes them waste time doing useless clicks. early game it's of course acceptable as you're not doing anything more useful then..

also obsolete I think you're dead wrong about my reaction, the fact that I avoided playing with sound for a 3 year period made me focus so much on watching the minimap that it's one of the things I'm best at, and you have hardly ever watched me play..

On March 27 2004 09:04 STIMEY d okgm fish wrote:
imagine if it told you the "per minute" of each action (next to the graph)... i've suggested this before. for example: (yes these are from actual replays)

nada tvz 363 action per minute
179 hotkey per minute
54 move per minute
41 select per minute
28 rally per minute
18 attack move per minute
12 train per minute
5 stop per minute
5 shift select per minute
5 heal per minute

boxer tvt 217 action per minute
72 move per minute <-- both nada and boxer 50+
54 hotkey per minute <-- both nada and boxer 50+
43 select per minute <-- both nada and boxer 40+
12 rally per minute <-- both nada and boxer 10+
6 train per minute <-- both nada and boxer 5+
5 attack move per minute <-- both nada and boxer 5+
5 shift select per minute <-- both nada and boxer 5
3 unload per minute
3 build per minute

On April 15 2004 15:24 stFz wrote:
this may sounds dumb, but why do you use the attack button? isn't right clicking easier? :D

and yes, im a noob, 70apm and i play since january

I'm a toss user of course, so I won't speak for zerg and terran, but for me I think that hotkeys are an inferiour choice to just using your mouse and keyboard shortcuts for 90% of the common applications.

It's far easier for me to click on my minimap than it is to use an Fkey to center on my procution centers. My fingers are too short to reach the Fkeys without moving my whole arm. To do it with my mouse I only need to flick my wrist.

When it comes to actually producing units, I'd much rather click my gateways and then hit z/d/t/k than hit 1 then z then 2 then d and so on. It's way more efficient to do stuff with both hands at once than it is to let one hand sit idle while the other has to move twice as quickly to make up. Obviously, you can use both hands on your keyboard to ameliorate that problem, but is that better? Hell no, then you have to move your whole hand again, twice, there and back, and furthermore you won't have enough hotkeys to run every gate anyways past the early-mid game.

When it comes to controlling armies, you cannot use attack move shortcut when you're selecting your army with hotkeys. Again, it's a waste of hand movement, because you have to press a number then a letter then a number and so forth. It's the same problem as construction, even Progamers don't bother to attack move, they just use right click move. That has a lot of drawbacks though. You waste units and lose the first attack any time you move to a spot that you didnt know the enemy was there. Progamers are fast enough that they can retreat, but even they fuck up and lose stuff occasionally. To me, there's just no sense in it unless you have like 30+ troops that you want to move from one side of the map to the other without actually facing any of his units. How often do you have to do that? Is it worth the extra seconds you wasted setting up your hotkeys? Almost never, I say.

I think that most people use hotkeys just for the hell of it, but there isn't actually any good reason to do so 90% of the time.

I still use hotkeys for a lot of stuff. I hotkey shuttles and carriers of course. I also hotkey my scouting probe of course. And, I also hotkey my first 12 units, be they rushing zealots vs toss or zerg, or my first set of goons vs terran. It's the other situations that I was talking about that hotkeys are pointless in.

For example, why hotkey nexus to produce probes? You can always go back to your nexus by pressing space key. If I hotkey my nexus to 0, I never use it anyways.

Hotkey gateways to produce units in the middle of the battle? Who are you kidding? If you're building units in the middle of the battle you obviously arent controlling your units so you might as well not be looking at them either. I can click my minimap to go to my gates and select them and press the keyboard shortcut, and then press space bar to go back to the fight, than you can press 1-z 2-d 3-z 4-k etc, I guarantee it.

What's the point of hotkeying only a half or a quarter of your gates anyways? If you aren't going to use them all, why even build them? When I go to build something, I do it with all my gates.

And Wax, when you call me slow, are you referring to my low apm? APM means nothing, what matters is how quickly you accomplish tasks. I accomplish the same number of tasks as you, I just use fewer clicks because I'm not wasting time setting hotkeys and cycling through them. Personally I'd say I'm faster than you, despite having lower apm. I think the pvp games that we play, where I consistantly outharass you, bear me out on that score.

Amat I use both hands of course, in fact I use my hands far more equally than more people. I'd say that most of you are the one handed players, because you do so much more with your keyboard than you need to.

On April 15 2004 09:28 STIMEY d okgm fish wrote:



the distinction between the speed of accomplishing tasks and APM is absurd? what the fuck? apm doesn't count minimap, f2 f3 f4, alt+c, it counts many things the same despite that some are much easier to do quickly (despite that one needs to do both of them) ... it's so easy to imagine an example where one raises their apm while the speed at which they accomplish tasks remains the same or is lowered, i won't even give you one.

On April 15 2004 20:56 STIMEY d okgm fish wrote:
the point is that you can be doing things with your mouse that are very important to do yet are "reducing your apm" ... you click the minimap less, you scroll less, you use f2 f3 f4 less, your apm goes up! duh.. wtf.

and furthermore, among things that are counted they are not all counted the same, and some things people are generally faster at than others. let's say someone is faster at pressing 11 22 33 44 but sucks at selecting things with the mouse or giving move commands. so what do they do to boost their apm? select things less, move less, hotkey spam more.

On April 15 2004 21:02 RuGbUg wrote:
Are you going to turn this into a fake APM debate instead of a debate about speed?
What about a person who is not good at using hotkeys? Does he just select his units over and over?

On April 15 2004 21:21 hasuwar wrote:
I tried playing with no hotkeys today, and it's not very hard to get 200apm. Using fkeys to click macro keeps apm about the same I think, if you're checking on the buildings as often as you do normally. Controlling units is alittle harder, but still doable. I was playing 3v3 as terran though, so massing marines which build fast played a big role in clicking. Maybe I'll try fkey macroing with hotkey unit control. Using fkeys to macro seemed kinda good