How often do we hear a universal reply "practice more" answering any question from "how can I defeat a bunker rush" to "how to play late 200/200 bc tvt".
But, how do you define "practice"? 25/7 mass ladder? 25/7 with the same good opponent, polishing a strategy? a schedule with ladder/ rep analysis and some weird resting techniques? (please explain more in this) or perhaps some obscure technique?
For example, one of WCG preparation technique in Russia was saving a game at a certain moment of a strategy (say, terran just built a CC and protoss went goon shuttle) and then load this save state, playing the whole day long with a dedicated opponent. Saving like five minutes from the save file instead of starting a new game added a good value, when you play 30~50 a day.
Ideally if you can find a practice partner and just grind the strategies, it should be helpful. Playing full games is pretty important too, e.g. a lot of the times learning to play late game is getting more ahead/setting up better in the midgame
Ladder is probably a last resort. It really helps your "how do I tell which strategy he is going" but less so your "how do I beat strategy X in particular"
Play for years. Understand why you lost and learn from your mistakes. This game has been around for 20 years and is still active - there are plenty of players to ask for advice as well as thousands of posts in forums. Also, be aware of the attributes required to play at a high level: hand/eye coordination, speed, decision making, discipline and patience.
Shouldn’t it be “practice better”? A lot of the community plays for a long time without getting better. I played for many many years as old C- player until I tried incredibly hard to get better. You have to research the game, watch videos, and ask questions to better players. Basically you have to think really hard which is putting more effort in the game than someone who just plays for fun.
I think theres a few archtypes of how people approach the game, youve got:
1) The pathological: This is the kind of person who just has an OCD element to their brain, they play the same map, same matchup, all the time. The same build. The same style. The same exact timings, exactly. They run and hide and cry when new maps come out, or old maps, or builds they didnt know of. The refrain of the pathological is "thats not a real build!!!"
The pathological often becomes a very strong player in a mechanical sense, when playing fs or cb. Otherwise weak as dirt.
2) The victim: This is often nothing more than a subset of the pathological, with one exception: No gumption. They cant take defeats, imagine themselves to be great players, if only it werent for X, and often switch races when they "realize" they picked a weak race, or refuse to play maps once they've taken a bad loss on them. They go no where, are nothing, and haunt these forums with perpetual whining.
3) The Creative: Always trying to look at the game from another angle, try out new builds, maps, styles, different responses. These are the player types that originally lamented the rise of cookie cutters, the all encompassing dominance of "The" map, whatever that is for the era. They're competitive enough to take the game seriously, like enough variety that they naturally explore many facets of broodwar and all the psychological ins and outs of how to pick a player apart. They might adopt some of the pathologicals playing habits-- focusing on repetitiously nailing the use of camera keys until its second nature, for instance, but they dont rely on dumbly out muscling their opponent. Mechanical excellence is a matter of function and not form.
4) Funsies: These are players to who practice and playing are synonyms, and they dont even take it that seriously when they do. As rare as a unicorn, and twice as cute.
I am not a great player by any means but I would like to say that watching high level fpvods/streams was really helpful for me. Watching higher level players play so quickly with so many screens motivated me to try harder during the game by playing faster than the speed that I was once comfortable with. Also, I found it helpful to take breaks from the game instead of playing it nonstop.
- consistency in practice is key. E.g everyday, x amount of hours, always. - practice partners are soo important. Being able to play same build vs same build on a same map 5 times gives you sooo much learning. It's impossible to get the same outcome by playing ladder. Think about sports.. in sports you'll practice the same element for tenths of hours for years to make it consistent in real games. Same goes for practice partners.. you cut the amount of variation to focus on things you really need to improve (e.g "build order exectuion", "zealot pressure defence", "reaver micro" etc.) - some elements (especially specific mechanics) just have to be taken out of the game and practiced seperatly. Example are optimized hotkeys, or macro cycles, or micro with air units (e.g mutas), or building placement. There is no time to do these things right during a match, and there is too few iterations to get the right brain/muscle memory created. (moreover, you can get those things really wrong if you just believe you'll get it right by spaming games) - My favourite thing: "If I need to cut the tree in 8 hours, I would spend 6 hours on sharpening my axe". This is so ture, "bad practice" on things that are just wrong is worst than no practice. Make sure your builds are optimized.. your army movement is thought through.. your unit composition makes sense.. your scouting requirements are defined etc. That can obviously always be improved, but at least set a minimal level for practice before jumping straigth into practice.
On February 21 2019 11:39 yubo56 wrote: Shouldn't it be 24/7? haha
quitter's attitude
jeez, 44k posts, are you a bot or something?
on topic:
(The WC3-ex-pro) Grubby said on his stream many times when asked this question: Best way to get good is to never make the same mistake twice, and that kind of translates into a global principle to organize the content of your practice (that said, it still leaves some questions of how you practice, the stuff that kogeT pointed out, like e.g. with practice partners, regularly, etc).
Obviously Grubby's approach requires that you have researched enough or have enough knowledge to be able to identify your mistakes, but then I think what he said is one of the most important things: Whenever you can identify something as wrong/flawed, never just let it slide and play the next game and repeat the mistake. Don't let it become a pattern. Play the next game (ladder, custom, whatever) with this one goal in mind to not make that one mistake again, fix it at all costs, don't move on before you have it down.
The nice thing about this principle is that your practice is very focussed on one thing at a time, and that your skill will grow kind of organically around your current most obvious flaws, and not along a set-in-stone practice-plan that might not be the right thing for you at the moment. Whether it's the worker-split, forgetting the 3rd depot or the 4th production cycle, to scout for hidden bases, to move your army better during a push, to take your 4th base at the right time, whatever.
Hell, out of my head I could name a number of mistakes that I make every day that I play... Sometimes they just happen because your opponent is pushing you to the limit, obviously. But I know that if I sat down and worked hard on one of these things at a time I could become a better player in a week or so... it's just hard work.
I think the most relevant comment I read is the one that koget said about finding a way to have a practice partner, being able to train the same thing for an extended period of time is crucial for "fast" improvement. Ladder is good but you can hardly focus on something.
For example I improved a lot my z v p watching Jaedong 2009 reppack. This dataset is incredible because he spams the same standard build for an entire month, so you get to see all variants of the build and how he reacts to opponent. This provides incredible knowledge because you get the full reasoning behind a strategy and it is to date by far my most solid bo. So to summarize you need to achieve that and the best way is to have a practice partner with who you can repeat the same builds over and over again to get that extended knowledge. If you get bored then switch to something else, ladder should be a way to apply this knowledge. As Bruce Lee said, he is more scared of a guy who practiced one technique 10 thousands time than a guy who practiced 10 thousands techniques one time.
Practicing (starcraft) is painful. You eat dirt and may not reap any rewards. The best either withstand the pain, focused on some vague goal they will probably never reach, or enjoy their practice, out of love of the hobby or out of some masochistic feeling.
For starcraft, I think the first task of the player is to become mechanically proficient, to practice hand speed until enough APM to execute the most common and simple builds is achieved, just like a musician. At this point, APM grants you time. Have more time than your opponent and win by doing more things. Knowing things like how to clone scourges is useless if between each shiftclick one half of a second is wasted.
Only when one reaches his mechanical threshold is it worth to spend time on dedicated practice and mistake fixing.
How to practice hand speed? No idea. Just playing the game didn't do the trick for me. Maybe spending one hour each day on multitask UMS maps.
On March 18 2019 08:41 TwiggyWan wrote: Practicing (starcraft) is painful. You eat dirt and may not reap any rewards. The best either withstand the pain, focused on some vague goal they will probably never reach, or enjoy their practice, out of love of the hobby or out of some masochistic feeling.
For starcraft, I think the first task of the player is to become mechanically proficient, to practice hand speed until enough APM to execute the most common and simple builds is achieved, just like a musician. At this point, APM grants you time. Have more time than your opponent and win by doing more things. Knowing things like how to clone scourges is useless if between each shiftclick one half of a second is wasted.
Only when one reaches his mechanical threshold is it worth to spend time on dedicated practice and mistake fixing.
How to practice hand speed? No idea. Just playing the game didn't do the trick for me. Maybe spending one hour each day on multitask UMS maps.
This is a good point but I would say if you spend 100 hours on mechanics or 50 hours on mechanics and 50 hours on game strategy etc., the second player would be much better. Obviously if you aim at Flash level your argument is probably right, spend 1000 hours on mechanics 1st and another 1000 hours on building on top. If you don't aim at Flash level though, but maybe you want to achieve A rank or S rank, or win vs your friend, a much more fun and efficient method would be to focus on "low hanging fruits".
One also has to realize that not all styles require same mechanical capabilities. A great example for me is yesterday BSL matche vs Dragon and Nyoken. Both extremely strong players, very focused on their mechanics, e.g macro and build order execution and due to that relatively low APM. Contrary you have eonzerg who in my eyes is relatively week at his macro and build order execution, but focuses his 300+ APM on unit control and tactics, making him for many an even more dangerous player.
Whole that balance, micro vs macro, APM management, strategical vs tactical play makes SC such a unique game from a player perspective. And those that masters all the concepts (Flash, Bisu, Jaedong) become the gods.
i dont think mechanical proficiency ought to be the first thing to focus on; its boring, repetitive, and without knowledge of what your doing your mechanics will suffer anyway. If you have to stop and think about what your doing, your not going to be doing it as efficiently, and if you know or begin to know what your doing and you enjoy it, you will play more often and with more confidence. I've definitely run into over the course of playing broodwar a lot of players who had 200 apm, better micro and macro than me and yet they were also the kind of players who i never dropped a game against. Because they had, at best, a shallow understanding of one build. I think its important to develop as a player as evenly as you can, if you focus on mechanics you will rise above your strategical level beating bad players, and you will develop bad habits.
i.e typical ladder scenario; a player makes 2 cannons after a forge fe, he continues to make middle of the road strategical and tactical decisions throughout the game. No *serious* risks, and he loses, and he doesnt know why. I had better micro! Better macro! I made the "correct" decisions! That scenario arises imo because the player in question got a lot better than his initial competition with mechanics only, he learned to win in an essentially condescending manner-- no risks, hes playing for the late game, his superior mechanics will see him through. That stops working a lot sooner than people think, but they've already developed incorrect assumptions about the game and themselves. Deconstructing all of your instincts and habits in broodwar is very hard to do, and not necessary if you dont obsess on one element.
On March 19 2019 01:38 Dazed. wrote: i dont think mechanical proficiency ought to be the first thing to focus on; its boring, repetitive, and without knowledge of what your doing your mechanics will suffer anyway. If you have to stop and think about what your doing, your not going to be doing it as efficiently, and if you know or begin to know what your doing and you enjoy it, you will play more often and with more confidence. I've definitely run into over the course of playing broodwar a lot of players who had 200 apm, better micro and macro than me and yet they were also the kind of players who i never dropped a game against. Because they had, at best, a shallow understanding of one build. I think its important to develop as a player as evenly as you can, if you focus on mechanics you will rise above your strategical level beating bad players, and you will develop bad habits.
i.e typical ladder scenario; a player makes 2 cannons after a forge fe, he continues to make middle of the road strategical and tactical decisions throughout the game. No *serious* risks, and he loses, and he doesnt know why. I had better micro! Better macro! I made the "correct" decisions! That scenario arises imo because the player in question got a lot better than his initial competition with mechanics only, he learned to win in an essentially condescending manner-- no risks, hes playing for the late game, his superior mechanics will see him through. That stops working a lot sooner than people think, but they've already developed incorrect assumptions about the game and themselves. Deconstructing all of your instincts and habits in broodwar is very hard to do, and not necessary if you dont obsess on one element.
This all reminds me of one of my best friends that I sparred in Smash bros melee with on a near daily basis. We both got pretty damn good at reading each other, and games were split 50-50...until he decided he wanted to learn to wavedash.
If you don’t know melee, it basically equates to better mechanics/APM. When he started this, I crushed him pretty regularly, especially while he was messing up frequently. As he got better, I even adjusted my strategy/style to accommodate occasional bursts of better mobility from him, and I still had the upper hand. Even when he did it right every single time, it was still 50-50. I had figured my progression in strategy matched his progression in mechanics...
...until he started developing his strategy with his improved mechanics. He was able to do things that I just could not keep up with, and once he set his mind to countering me he leapt far ahead of me and never looked back. Now it’s probably 75-25 or 80-20 in his favor.
Moral of the story is the “low-hanging fruit” post gets it. You can develop your strategies and play styles given your current mechanics to the point where you can defeat players with much higher mechanical skill, but if/when those players start developing their strategies and play styles, they’re going to make you feel...obsolete.
I think along the same lines. It's not "mechanics or thinking about the game", it's both that you need right from the start if you aim to become a good player.
On March 19 2019 01:38 Dazed. wrote: i dont think mechanical proficiency ought to be the first thing to focus on; its boring, repetitive, and without knowledge of what your doing your mechanics will suffer anyway. If you have to stop and think about what your doing, your not going to be doing it as efficiently, and if you know or begin to know what your doing and you enjoy it, you will play more often and with more confidence. I've definitely run into over the course of playing broodwar a lot of players who had 200 apm, better micro and macro than me and yet they were also the kind of players who i never dropped a game against. Because they had, at best, a shallow understanding of one build. I think its important to develop as a player as evenly as you can, if you focus on mechanics you will rise above your strategical level beating bad players, and you will develop bad habits.
[...]
You could tell a similar story about all the guys who skipped mechanics at first. Some of those might actually have invested more time to think about the game, while many will just end up with a set of cheesy or hanbang-builds that win them games onlow/medium ranks. Meanwhile they developed bad mechanical habits, and as you wrote, those habits are pretty hard to fix once they sunk in. These guys are also stuck at C or B rank at some point, pulling the same bunch of tricks and strategies again and again, and will lose any game to players who understand the game and cared for their mechanics, like Ryzel pointed out in his post before mine here.
So you really need both: - You should definitelly practice the mechanical basics right from the start: 1a2a3a4a5a6a, hotkeys, F-keys, ctrl-key and shift-key. It's not really boring because you don't have to do this for ages in the singleplayer, give it a few days and you can keep practicing it in real games. Also, it makes you better and you will win games, that's not boring. - At the same time you should pick one build to learn at a time and really sit down for a while without playing at all, just reading and gathering information about the build, watching replays/VoDs and what not. Once you have played a few games yourself, always sit down and analyse them and try to find out what went wrong.
One also has to consider that different people have different strengths: some find their strength in clean mechanical play and others have a trump in understanding the game in depth. I assume only few have those two things equally balanced, and maybe those are the ones who can become really good players.
One more thing as far as that debate goes; strategies become obsolete as your fundamental mechanical skill improves and more effective game options become available to you, but the reverse is never true. No strategy exists that will make camera hotkeys or nailing build orders precisely obsolete.
How to practice hand speed? No idea. Just playing the game didn't do the trick for me. Maybe spending one hour each day on multitask UMS maps.
Regarding the handspeed thing, it's more mental than physical. The quickness of your fingers depends on the quickness of your mind. Without sounding too philosophical, I find that handspeed is strongly correlated to having a sense of where the game is(where your units are, what upgrades are finishing, what you need to do next) as well as having a direction of what you want to do in the next 1-2 minutes of the game as the the game progresses. The reason why people are so quick in the first 5 minutes is because they know exactly what they have to do i.e., build workers, build supply, scout, etc. After 10 minutes it gets really confusing and a passive player will usually drop in APM drastically. But if you take what you did in the first 5 minutes and apply it to the after 10 minute mark, your APM should be higher.
It all comes down to knowing what you want to do and executing it, and then moving on to the next set of instructions. Rinse. Repeat.
EPT
