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On August 01 2011 15:14 whoopingchow wrote:
To me, APM has always seemed more of how many things you can keep track of, more than a measurement of physical ability. I've definitely found that isolating the problem, like you mention in your OP, to absolutely help me. Like Day9 says, making things automatic drastically frees up my mind to think about things that require more of my focus, like decision making or micro-ing. To this end, I've taken to opening up blank Notepad documents when I'm at work and just spamming hotkeys and sequences (I'm T, so 5s5s4a4a4a3s3s3s557bs115s5s etc). Practicing this automaticity frees up some space in my brain to process scouting information, tactics, etc. Obviously, I have a long way to go, but I've definitely found myself forgetting fewer things and keeping up my macro, and gradually increasing my APM as I've gotten better at doing things automatically and focusing on other things.
TLDR: I absolutely agree with your "isolate the problem and focus on it" adage. I open up a blank text files at work and spam hotkey combinations I know I need to do in-game to practice and it's definitely helped me a ton.
This is a great way to practice, and a lot more convenient to a lot of people (like you said, all you need is wordpad  ). One thing I would like to say, however, is that having relevant visual cues is very important to maintaining a good speed throughout the initiation and completion of a task.
One thing I don't talk about above is a space between mental interpretation and physical action. There is a short period where your nerves have to find a starting point, and if you practice too much without receiving the stimuli you would in a regular game, this time begins to increase dramatically (this is for a lot of reasons that would take quite a while to explain, PM me if you're really interested)!
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On August 01 2011 15:18 integral wrote:
Unfortunately, as smart as this post is, until there is a measurable metric for how to compare ACT between players, people are going to cling to the old model of APM simply because it's familiar. It's obvious to any broodwar fan that APM isn't everything -- Flash is hands down the best starcraft player and he's not even close to being the highest APM player. Despite his lower average APM though, I'd feel quite comfortable saying that flash's ACT is significantly faster than probably every other player -- his processing speed, decision-making, and execution is often flawless.
I'd suggest editing your post to remove the controversial claim that APM is "useless", you're going to get a hundred people in here arguing why it isn't who didn't even read what you wrote.
Everything you say is correct, in my opinion. I've had the privilege of seeing a couple FPVoDs of Flash, and I can tell you the speed at which he reacts to what he sees is mind blowing.
As to your suggestion, I'm perfectly content discussing peoples views for days, as long as they stay open to new ideas and are willing to listen to what I propose. If it gets too bad, I promise I'll remove that statement
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On August 01 2011 15:18 integral wrote:
Unfortunately, as smart as this post is, until there is a measurable metric for how to compare ACT between players, people are going to cling to the old model of APM simply because it's familiar. It's obvious to any broodwar fan that APM isn't everything -- Flash is hands down the best starcraft player and he's not even close to being the highest APM player. Despite his lower average APM though, I'd feel quite comfortable saying that flash's ACT is significantly faster than probably every other player -- his processing speed, decision-making, and execution is often flawless.
I'd suggest editing your post to remove the controversial claim that APM is "useless", you're going to get a hundred people in here arguing why it isn't who didn't even read what you wrote.
Well said.
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OP nailed it, if you disagree with the content of his post at any moment you need to go back and read it again until you fully understand it.
THat or take a couple of psychology classes :D
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I don't want to sound like an ass but it's already been said a couple of times. No one really cares about apm, there's not really a need to write a whole thread about it.
I can comfortably play at 200+ apm the first 5-7 minutes of a game, as can most people. Everyone knows that apm in the beginning is all spam. If i lose to a silly cheese, herp derp, my apm was clearly not indicative of my ability to play well. Thus apm is clearly not a good measure of skill in that regard. However there is still a STRONG correlation between apm and skill, which is obviously why there is hype concerning it.
obvious obvious obvious.
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On August 01 2011 15:28 yiodee wrote:
OP nailed it, if you disagree with the content of his post at any moment you need to go back and read it again until you fully understand it.
THat or take a couple of psychology classes :D
Thanks so much!
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On August 01 2011 15:29 phiinix wrote:
I don't want to sound like an ass but it's already been said a couple of times. No one really cares about apm, there's not really a need to write a whole thread about it.
I can comfortably play at 200+ apm the first 5-7 minutes of a game, as can most people. Everyone knows that apm in the beginning is all spam. If i lose to a silly cheese, herp derp, my apm was clearly not indicative of my ability to play well. Thus apm is clearly not a good measure of skill in that regard. However there is still a STRONG correlation between apm and skill, which is obviously why there is hype concerning it.
obvious obvious obvious.
The pieces of the OP regarding APM and the invalidity of the relevant statistic are really there to prevent possible confusion and provide a basis point for ACT, a metric I'm sure most aren't familiar with.
As far as I know, no one has gone in-depth regarding ACT or the relevant components, no one has consolidated fair and accurate definitions for terms that are frequently thrown around a lot (in the context of very technical terminology), and no one has provided some of the advice and background information regarding isolation like I did.
Please don't call the whole OP obvious without reading the whole op 
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APM is and always will be a tool for measuring mechanical skill in the game such as multitasking and over all speed (Micro/Macro)
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On August 01 2011 15:14 whoopingchow wrote:
To me, APM has always seemed more of how many things you can keep track of, more than a measurement of physical ability. I've definitely found that isolating the problem, like you mention in your OP, to absolutely help me. Like Day9 says, making things automatic drastically frees up my mind to think about things that require more of my focus, like decision making or micro-ing. To this end, I've taken to opening up blank Notepad documents when I'm at work and just spamming hotkeys and sequences (I'm T, so 5s5s4a4a4a3s3s3s557bs115s5s etc). Practicing this automaticity frees up some space in my brain to process scouting information, tactics, etc. Obviously, I have a long way to go, but I've definitely found myself forgetting fewer things and keeping up my macro, and gradually increasing my APM as I've gotten better at doing things automatically and focusing on other things.
TLDR: I absolutely agree with your "isolate the problem and focus on it" adage. I open up a blank text files at work and spam hotkey combinations I know I need to do in-game to practice and it's definitely helped me a ton.
i want to start practicing like this. what's the most optimal hotkey setups? also, should i use my pinky on a(attack, marine)?
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On August 01 2011 15:37 AustinCM wrote:
APM is and always will be a tool for measuring mechanical skill in the game such as multitasking and over all speed (Micro/Macro)
Did you even read the OP? :[
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On August 01 2011 15:43 Levistus wrote:Show nested quote +On August 01 2011 15:14 whoopingchow wrote:
To me, APM has always seemed more of how many things you can keep track of, more than a measurement of physical ability. I've definitely found that isolating the problem, like you mention in your OP, to absolutely help me. Like Day9 says, making things automatic drastically frees up my mind to think about things that require more of my focus, like decision making or micro-ing. To this end, I've taken to opening up blank Notepad documents when I'm at work and just spamming hotkeys and sequences (I'm T, so 5s5s4a4a4a3s3s3s557bs115s5s etc). Practicing this automaticity frees up some space in my brain to process scouting information, tactics, etc. Obviously, I have a long way to go, but I've definitely found myself forgetting fewer things and keeping up my macro, and gradually increasing my APM as I've gotten better at doing things automatically and focusing on other things.
TLDR: I absolutely agree with your "isolate the problem and focus on it" adage. I open up a blank text files at work and spam hotkey combinations I know I need to do in-game to practice and it's definitely helped me a ton. i want to start practicing like this. what's the most optimal hotkey setups? also, should i use my pinky on a(attack, marine)?
It matters almost none what "setup" you use. Frankly, if you can get used to custom hotkeys, do, and bind everything to Q-T. The less distance your hand travels, the better.
More importantly, just stay consistent. It is imperative that when you begin working intently on finger speed and accuracy, you do not change your hotkeys; all of your work will be lost. Also, be sure not to practice for more than 3 to 4 minutes, as the benefits begin to really fall off.
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I like this post. There is so much discussion on these boards about APM, but it is simply an averaged number from a whole game that can last 20+ minutes long. Consider the 100m race, the equivalent of APM would be average speed, but go to any track/fitness board and people will break it down into the start, the acceleration, peak velocity and speed endurance, and discuss the secondary training exercises for developing each aspect
Similarly, it makes sense to break starcraft down into tasks that can be analyzed separately. Given its non-linear nature, there's also that element of mental processing, which you assign to MCT, which I believe is the most critical.
For instance, if we consider the task of injecting larvae, first we consider the few different methods available and choose one that requires relatively few actions and mental attention required to execute. I think something like this can be learned very quickly, and can be brought to less than a few seconds within a few practice sessions if drilled properly. However, the ability to recognize that a larva injection is due while under various game circumstances is much more difficult. Basically you're presented with a variety of stimuli from the game, and your mind has to identify, classify, prioritize then make decisions on what to do and execute.
As for your suggestion on improving MCT time, I would say that instead trying to use a more open-ended training method (playing games where your opponent varies his builds), it is probably quite beneficial to play many games where he does the same build over and over. My reasoning for this is as follows:
Suppose you work on defending a 2 rax opening with a hatch first build. By repeating the same scenario over and over again, with the same input stimuli (the 2 rax), you can refine your response so that you feel confident about the situation. For instance, how many drones do you pull? When do you pull them? Where do you engage? How many lings to make? Do you need a spine crawler? When do you get your gas? etc. With systematic practice, you'll know what your answer is to all of those questions, so you won't have to think at all in that situation. Once you get thrown into an open-ended situation when your opponent can do anything, not having to think about what decisions to make is going to make you seem like you make them much faster.
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On August 01 2011 16:11 zylog wrote:
As for your suggestion on improving MCT time, I would say that instead trying to use a more open-ended training method (playing games where your opponent varies his builds), it is probably quite beneficial to play many games where he does the same build over and over. My reasoning for this is as follows:
Suppose you work on defending a 2 rax opening with a hatch first build. By repeating the same scenario over and over again, with the same input stimuli (the 2 rax), you can refine your response so that you feel confident about the situation. For instance, how many drones do you pull? When do you pull them? Where do you engage? How many lings to make? Do you need a spine crawler? When do you get your gas? etc. With systematic practice, you'll know what your answer is to all of those questions, so you won't have to think at all in that situation. Once you get thrown into an open-ended situation when your opponent can do anything, not having to think about what decisions to make is going to make you seem like you make them much faster.
In my opinion, having a friend do the same thing over and over is a great way to find out what the proper response is (this is where almost everyone should really start). I do feel, however, that if you know those responses having a chance of variance is much more applicable to an actual game of Starcraft, and therefore will provide better training mentally for making those decisions instantaneously upon seeing information. This is all, of course, assuming that the player in question knows all the correct responses.
One reason I really believe in variance (even in practice) is because it helps to include the decisions that filter out the information you want from the info you don't want; if you know what he's doing, chances are you aren't going to want any information regardless. Ultimately, it helps you practice that step as well as the ones before it.
I definitely agree that playing against the same build is the right way to start, not only because you can become very familiar with the correct responses that will leave you in the best position, but also because it is a smaller chunk of decisions to make and thus nicely isolates those decisions from other similar ones.
Thanks so much for the thought out response!
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I have to go to bed, I will check back tomorrow : )
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453 Posts
I am a bit skeptical about the demonstration on why APM is not an adequate indicator... It just says it is not good because it doesn't measure your "true speed". Of course it does! it just counts the number of actions per minut, nothing deep or strange there... if you can give 300 orders per minut and control what you are doing, then you are going fast. When you are driving a car, speed is in miles or kilometers per hour. When you're in front of your computer, it's actions per minut...
Then of course, high apm doesn't mean you play the most efficient way, in the same way that you can drive a car faster and yet take more time to get to a certain point, because you made a detour. But that doesn't mean your car wasn't going fast...
And what does that mean??
Therefore, using common sense, we can deduce APM is actually a measure of [(Number of completed tasks * average actions included per task) completed per 1.39 minutes], which makes it basically a rough measure of how many tasks you assign yourself. You can't really improve this number (it's pretty much defined by how mentally "quick" you are; if you can find a way to make yourself smarter, be sure to tell me), and you definitely don't want to increase the length of each task, so APM is down the shitter as far as a measure of speed.
APM is a poor and inconsistent measure of hand speed, because many players do not utilize the entirety of their handspeed (none are required to) for a significant portion of the game, so APM sucks again here.
Poor common sense, he must be suffering when reading that...
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I sympathize with you about all the people who blindly comment about APM on here without reading your detailed/well thought out post.
Stay strong, and keep coming up with well presented/organized posts like these :D
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On August 01 2011 16:50 Macpo wrote:
I am a bit skeptical about the demonstration on why APM is not an adequate indicator... It just says it is not good because it doesn't measure your "true speed". Of course it does! it just counts the number of actions per minut, nothing deep or strange there... if you can give 300 orders per minut and control what you are doing, then you are going fast. When you are driving a car, speed is in miles or kilometers per hour. When you're in front of your computer, it's actions per minut...
Then of course, high apm doesn't mean you play the most efficient way, in the same way that you can drive a car faster and yet take more time to get to a certain point, because you made a detour. But that doesn't mean your car wasn't going fast...
APM can be used to measure your speed, as long as you do not make any useless clicks.
Now watching streams i see player clicking 30 times to move a unit instead of one time.
APM shows 300, (bad) caster says "insane APM, this guy is soooo fast".. but after all he is just moving one unit.
What the OP said is right, but i doubt anyone who didnt know that before will read this post and really understand it.
You could sum up the full OP with:
1.) APM includes spam, and therefore doesnt measure your speed.
2.) To get faster you need to practice the action you want to be faster at.
3.)+ Show Spoiler +
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well before i reply, i just wanna say that your whole concept is stupid because you're saying APM should be replaced by this alleged measurement in which there is no legitimate way to calculate. WTF? if you don't care about APM, just ignore it, it's not a huge deal, but this is pretty much useless theorycrafting.
Therefore, using common sense, we can deduce APM is actually a measure of [(Number of completed tasks * average actions included per task) completed per 1.39 minutes], which makes it basically a rough measure of how many tasks you assign yourself. You can't really improve this number (it's pretty much defined by how mentally "quick" you are; if you can find a way to make yourself smarter, be sure to tell me) The only real use for APM would be to measure the MCT and PCT (moreso the PCT) of one player against the other; keep in mind this statistic is really, really skewed as well, because of that same lack of full mental and physical application across the board for the whole duration of measurement.
random bronze zerg player has 40 total APM (200+ at one point if he spams), but at any given passive moment during the game (after 10 minutes), he only has 20-40 current APM during passive moments, and 60-100 during active situations where all the tasks he assigns himself are called upon to be completed simultaneously. the tasks that he assigns himself are building units, rallying, managing queens, spreading creep, scouting, positioning overlords, army movement, and developing tech when necessary.
idra has 200 total APM, but at any given passive moment during the game (after 10 minutes), he has 150-200 curent APM, and 200-300+ during active situations. idra assigns himself the same exact tasks as the bronze player.
both of these are averages taken from many games i've watched both of idra and of random bronze players. the bronze player is able to complete the tasks he's given to some extent. you asked how to make yourself smarter, i.e. improve your APM? do what random bronze player does, but do it consistently, accurately, and quickly, like idra does. that's what APM shows. your math formula is poor and based off of that i would assume your understanding of APM in general is incredibly poor.
people who talk about APM being useless usually only talk about total APM because they're stupid and they're stupid because they know total APM is easily inflated, yet they try to act like people arguing that APM matters are actually referring to total APM. actually good players demonstrate how good their mechanical skills are with their current APM which you can check sporadically during different paces of the game and different scenarios of the game (i.e. managing 1 base vs 2 vs 3, etc).
it is not a 100% accurate indicator of any specific skill, but it is a solid general indicator of a player who is potentially weak in an area, and conversely that a player is competent in all the necessary areas to play high level SCBW/2. usually once you develop most of your skills, your APM will reach an "average current" APM of a certain level depending on your race, usually 130-200+ during passive play at the current stage of SC2, though Nada has a similar amount of APM in BW as he does in SC2 for example. some players inflate this by performing actions with extreme excess even well into mid-game like ViBE, but most don't.
strong players who have low APM are usually notoriously poor multi-taskers, including players like Axslav, Minigun and Sjow. they cannot handle the tasks which get your APM high, such as complex army movement. they often crumble when they are not setting the pace of the game and they are being harassed in multiple locations or having to deal with an army with a diverse set of threats happening on separate parts of the minimap. they also lack the multi-tasking to harass multiple locations at once if they have to deal with a split army that can potentially defend both threats.
if you pay attention to players' APMs enough during games at different moments, you learn to understand what the number is telling you. it isn't obvious and it isn't accurate but it is not useless, and it's certainly infinitely more practical than your measurement considering your measurement can't even be used.
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I'm still reading (and so far I like the post) but I just wanted to point out that you've defined APM as the amount of actions taken in a Starcraft 2 minute and you have said that a Starcraft 2 minute is 1.39 (83.4s) minutes, when in actuality a starcraft 2 minute is something more like ~43 seconds (I believe, you may want to check this out before editing it to another possibly incorrect number  ).
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On August 01 2011 15:20 bonerificus wrote:Show nested quote +On August 01 2011 15:14 whoopingchow wrote:
To me, APM has always seemed more of how many things you can keep track of, more than a measurement of physical ability. I've definitely found that isolating the problem, like you mention in your OP, to absolutely help me. Like Day9 says, making things automatic drastically frees up my mind to think about things that require more of my focus, like decision making or micro-ing. To this end, I've taken to opening up blank Notepad documents when I'm at work and just spamming hotkeys and sequences (I'm T, so 5s5s4a4a4a3s3s3s557bs115s5s etc). Practicing this automaticity frees up some space in my brain to process scouting information, tactics, etc. Obviously, I have a long way to go, but I've definitely found myself forgetting fewer things and keeping up my macro, and gradually increasing my APM as I've gotten better at doing things automatically and focusing on other things.
TLDR: I absolutely agree with your "isolate the problem and focus on it" adage. I open up a blank text files at work and spam hotkey combinations I know I need to do in-game to practice and it's definitely helped me a ton. This is a great way to practice, and a lot more convenient to a lot of people (like you said, all you need is wordpad ).
I tried that thing with notepad too. Although it feels quite hard for me to imagine what to do when I don't have my SC2 screen in front of me - and only with notepad if feels like my hand does not work as fast as ingame. Thats why I gave up on this method. Someone else recognized something similar?
On August 01 2011 15:20 bonerificus wrote:
One thing I would like to say, however, is that having relevant visual cues is very important to maintaining a good speed throughout the initiation and completion of a task.
One thing I don't talk about above is a space between mental interpretation and physical action. There is a short period where your nerves have to find a starting point, and if you practice too much without receiving the stimuli you would in a regular game, this time begins to increase dramatically (this is for a lot of reasons that would take quite a while to explain, PM me if you're really interested)!
And maybe this is THE important thing! When only having notepad and a line that fills with numbers and letters it means nothing to me. When im ingame my brain knows that my fingers do something useful. Also I'm at a point where my hand can do certain actions after my brain says sth like: "go build probes.go build units." without further thinking which keys are needed to be pressed.
I know Day[9] brought this up a couple of times and I read it somwhere else: If you have sparetime, just to the motions with you fingers to build/keep up muscle memoy. BUT I feel like I can NOT do it (properly fast) without being IN the game - now: is that good, because I connect certain actions with specific moments and I can trigger keystroke-chains - OR is this BAD because its not totally imprinted to my body/hand/muscles and there is still that need to trigger it first before it works fast enough?
Maybe this is what is meant by "being in the zone" - not sure...
just my 2cents about that... ;p
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EPT
