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APM is spamming for most of the players... may be yes. I'm a player which spam a lot of task. But, my hand goes warmer and this is very important for my finger speed. Then, this is spam YES ... but not only.
I can add one thing I saw recently looking at some VODs of very good players (Team SLAYERS / OGS). I saw a surprising thing. Indeed, during the kitting, they built some SCV/Probes.
The Terran guy did his kitting with his Marines and between 2 shots, we could see the CC and a scv... same thing with the Protoss guy who did some kitting with stalkers... and built between 2 shot some Probes.
DOn't ask me how they did that........ but they really did it. The most impressive was the Terran... so so so fast! This is not Spam... this is just ultra fast tasks!
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I feel like APM is one of those things that only the people who does not have it care so much about it. I never heard any of the pros saying you need to have over 9000 APM or gtfo. Even ret said you should not focus on raising your APM but it should just come naturally as you play.
Of course, we all know that most of the APM are spam. For the Korean pros that have constant 300-400 APM only a small fraction of that are actually contributed to performing a task, but then why do they bother with it? It's because you CANNOT perform 400 tasks per minute if you do not have 400 APM or higher. The pros realize this fact so they train themselves to be able to continuously perform high APM so that when they actually need to make 400 tasks per minute, they actually have the capacity to and they simply turn those 90% spam APM and switch to full crazy marine split mode.
It's kinda like computer memory in a sense. How many times do you actually need all those 4GB of RAM in your memory? I bet most of the time your 4GB are just sitting idle. However, you know that if you have more memory you are capable of performing faster computation during peak performance. To me, a player's APM is like computer RAM. If two computers have similar specs but one has larger memory I'm going to bet that that one is faster overall (given the entire computation involves some peak performance).
Also,
your Actions per Minute in Starcraft 2 is the amount of times you depress a key with a relevant hotkey, right click, or left click every 1.39 minutes.
Why 1.39 minutes? This is utterly wrong, whether that refers to in game or real life minute. Unless you want to measure APM in real life minute which no one does and then translate that into how many times you click in 1.39 game minutes, which would be super weird.
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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)?
For me, personally, I very much dislike using my pinky except to make marines, so I've remapped attack to space. I also hate having control groups past 6, so I've remapped 7,8,9,0 to Tab, Q, W, E. And then, Patrol is R, and Banshees got mapped somewhere else (forget off the top of my head) and the camera hotkeys I remapped to Shift+Z, Shift+X, Shift+C, and Shift+V. That's just my personal hotkey set up, it'll obviously change for what works for you. You could also look into Grid hotkeys (maps all actions to QWERT/ASDFG/ZXCVB), but for control groups, that's completely up to you (Tab, Q, W, E units, 1 scout, 2 Starport, 3 Fact, 4 Rax, 5 CC, 6 E-Bay). Also, you can try searching "Terran Hotkeys" on TL for some inspiration, like this .
On August 01 2011 20:16 rtsAlaran wrote:Show nested quote +On August 01 2011 15:20 bonerificus wrote: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? Show nested quote +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
lol that absolutely sounds like being "in the zone". XD
I agree that it may be difficult to translate numbers to in-game actions, but I've found it useful for a) practicing openings in my head, and making sure I'm macro-ing well for at least the first 7 minutes; and b) macro-ing in the middle of micro-intensive situations (position siege tanks, oh shit I need to macro, leapfrog more tanks, macro macro macro, etc). Associating "macro" with a series of key combinations makes the concept of "tapping" a lot easier for me. I also played the cello and piano, so practicing fingerings comes more naturally to me. Not saying that'd be the case for everyone, or that I'm doing it correctly though. Also, I'm still only a high-Bronze leaguer, so I'll anticipate that this'll change as I get better.
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Best way to train your ACT and APM is to learn to play piano.
Nuff said 
Watch some gosu piano player and you will see what a beautfiul symphony ACT and APM can create if used together in the right way.
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I completely understand the whole "tennis swagger" mentality (and do it myself), where a player spams at the beginning of a game to get his/her fingers moving fast because its hard to increase the rhythm your fingers are moving at during the game, but I think that spamming in mid-late game ends up hurting you more than helping.
How often do you spam move commands to units that could easily just have had a 1 click move command? I think the OP is aiming at how to effectively USE your APM, rather than just spamming the same thing, and I think its a very good point. Look at players like Vibe who have 400 APM some games, yet still can lose to players with 100-ish APM. It becomes very apparent that effective APM (as the OP says ACTs per minute) > APM measured in game.
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The problem isn't apm, but instead it is how people try to improve it. Higher apm does not correlate to better skill, but there will be a raise in apm as skill rises, eventually peaking at a certain point
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On August 03 2011 05:50 yourself2k8 wrote:
I think the OP is aiming at how to effectively USE your APM, rather than just spamming the same thing, and I think its a very good point. Look at players like Vibe who have 400 APM some games, yet still can lose to players with 100-ish APM. It becomes very apparent that effective APM (as the OP says ACTs per minute) > APM measured in game.
I think it's not quite "effective APM" that's being discussed, but rather how long it takes to perform certain specific tasks in real time.
Suppose you take a task like selecting a zergling, sending it to an expansion, burrowing it there then rehotkeying your army to exclude that zergling. In theory we can use a stopwatch and measure how long it takes someone to do that. If you practice something specific like that, you should eventually be able to execute it at the maximum speed your dexterity will allow, which in APM numbers should be much higher than your average APM in the course of the game.
It gets a bit trickier when you start analyzing the task itself. Any complex task is composed of many actions, and sometimes you can cut out. For instance, clicking only once instead of three times will reduce the action time by a few milliseconds. However, mouse accuracy is inversely proportional to movement speed (Fitt's law), so someone concerned with making only 1 accurate click might spend more time seeking the right location, whereas the spam clicker might prefer to get the unit moving in the right direction immediately before clicking on the specific location.
So let's say that a player has a peak APM of 600 for these common tasks, and has trained most tasks in game to execute at this speed. This doesn't mean his in game APM is 600, but rather that you'll see these "bursts" of 600 APM in the APM graph, and consequently more empty space of low APM. If he doesn't add more tasks to do, his average APM hasn't increased at all. Obviously, he will probably add more tasks to do, which will increase his average APM (total actions/game time) and overall he will be able to do more in the game. I think the key difference here is going from a specific, task-economization approach compared to using generic finger-exercises to improve "general hand speed."
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On August 02 2011 16:18 Typho wrote:Show nested quote +your Actions per Minute in Starcraft 2 is the amount of times you depress a key with a relevant hotkey, right click, or left click every 1.39 minutes. Why 1.39 minutes? This is utterly wrong, whether that refers to in game or real life minute. Unless you want to measure APM in real life minute which no one does and then translate that into how many times you click in 1.39 game minutes, which would be super weird.
1.39 minutes in Starcraft time is one minute IRL time...
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Well, I think this thread will certainly help people new to the game differentiate between playing fast and playing efficiently. However I feel paying special attention to your ACT is just as useless advice as focusing on APM. Both are equally important in determining how you, the player, executes actions within the game.
Just because you're fast doesn't mean you're efficient. And just because you're efficient doesn't mean you're fast. Both improve through practice anyway, dont worry about it.
I like the idea of the OP because players can always play more efficiently. In the same breath I will say players can always play faster.
With all of this in mind, I can deduce this post to a reminder to play efficiently and not just quickly. Oh and I learned some sweet new acronyms. Good effort but there's just not much meat to the OP despite its deceptive length.
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EPT
