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On September 17 2011 09:33 HTODethklok wrote:
One of the patch notes for 1.4 is that spamming will no longer count towards your in game APM. If spamming no longer artificially increases your APM that means that any increase in APM that a player gains through the course of practice will mean that they are able to complete more useful actions per minute than they did before. This means that after 1.4 goes live you can now watch a pro level replay and measure your apm vs a pros and get a good idea of how many more things you should be doing per minute.
I thought they were just changing command group spamming by not making it contribute to apm? I believe you can still select units and cursor box them to spam APM, which is what a lot of pros do anyways during the lulls in the game.
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You might be right actually I forgot about box spamming I dont do it so I cant comment on if its changed in the new patch as well.
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The number of "rotations" that you define can vary on different stages of the game and would not make for a useful measurement.
If you don't have many minerals, you're not going to be making very much and have lower rotations. A Zerg waiting for larva to pop out would have low rotations. Protoss waiting for warp cooldown to finish would have lower rotations - but if he warps in a bunch of units, rotations would sky rocket. RPM wouldn't make much sense to base a players skill on, assuming it could even be measured.
I also agree with the poster that said APM is a good indicator of good mechanics. I don't even know why Blizz bothered with tweaking the APM calculation, it's like the bunker nerf... unneeded.
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On September 17 2011 09:44 Hypnotic42 wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On September 17 2011 09:33 HTODethklok wrote:
One of the patch notes for 1.4 is that spamming will no longer count towards your in game APM. If spamming no longer artificially increases your APM that means that any increase in APM that a player gains through the course of practice will mean that they are able to complete more useful actions per minute than they did before. This means that after 1.4 goes live you can now watch a pro level replay and measure your apm vs a pros and get a good idea of how many more things you should be doing per minute. I thought they were just changing command group spamming by not making it contribute to apm? I believe you can still select units and cursor box them to spam APM, which is what a lot of pros do anyways during the lulls in the game.
Repeated control group and selection commands will no longer count as unique actions for APM calculation purposes.
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I guess RPM is another way of looking at it...
I like to tell all the newbies I tutor, that instead of APM to use UAPM (useful actions per minute).
I figure if you refined all your spam into the actual action being done is your actual UAPM. A player with 60 UAPM can outplay someone with 300 APM... Especially if the 60UAPM is consistant.
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Now that I think some more about it, I've noticed that if I get very flustered early in the game by losing a battle I sometimes start rotating too quickly. As a result I start to queue units (I guess because I'm desperate to get them out), which in turn messes up my build.
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people overvalue apm so heavily... just play the game
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Don't focus on RPM or APM, they may both correlate with skill and winning, but why not just focus on the other side of things i.e. figure out why you are losing, different build orders, how to scout. With more games and more skill comes APM and RPM. I doubt the opposite is true at all (The only way I can get better is if I increase my APM/RPM.... yeah right)
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tldr version:
RPM is not something you will try to increase as a measure for improvement, RPM is something you will use as a conceptual framework to help identify the most efficient use of your time with the components of the rotation and the time required to perform each part of the rotation and the rotation as a whole forming your boundaries.
As a quick thought exercise, consider the cool-down on inject, the recharge time on nexus/orbitals, and the production time of units. With these things in mind it is clear you cannot complete a full rotation more than 1.something times a minute for any race, so the key is to identify the ideal RPM for YOU, and then examine your game play for times when you deviate from this RPM and figure out why.
The long version:
+ Show Spoiler +
This is a useful lens which I have seen discussed before, the idea of setting up a task rotation is discussed in various learning guides (And of course by Day 9), and adding in the layer of "RPM" is definitely a valuable learning tool. APM really is an outgrowth of increased efficiency of action, as you develop muscle memory for a task such as stutter stepping you are able to perform the same mouse movement and keystrokes faster and more accurately, this is the nature of muscle memory. As many have said, trying to increase APM directly is a very futile task, you may be able to spoof the calculations but it wont translate into wins unless those actions actually accomplish something for you.
RPM on the other hand IS something you can directly focus on to improve your game. The first step is to establish an action cycle which ensures that you are not missing critical actions such as mules, injects, or unit construction. Then you should figure out how often each component of that cycle takes to "reset" and ensure that you are able to perform that action and rotate through the rest of your cycle before that element of your rotation is active again.
Now with this rational foundation in place you can start working on making those actions completely automatic. They NEED to happen at that time, every time, and as you drill that cycle this will begin to happen. As you settle in you will start to see that you have time in between certain actions in your cycle, these little gaps are where you will start to fit in extra actions like pre-splitting your marines or setting camera hotkeys, and they are also the gaps in which you will execute micro during combat.
Now as many have said RPM itself is unmeasurable and is actually pretty useless as a measure if you think of it as a number to increase, as I explained above it is important to identify the "hard" limits inherent in your rotation, so you will be inherently capped at how frequently you can cycle through your full rotation in any given time period. It makes very little sense to return to the Mule portion of your rotation every 10 seconds just so you can hit 6 RPM instead of 1.3. It is also worth noting that the RPM potential will increase as a game goes on since you will end up with multiple orbitals/queens/nexus/units/production facilities that all need to be checked, so the rotation you set up should leave room for more actions within it as the game goes on.
What the idea of RPM really does for us is provide a tool for examining our own gameplay after the fact and refining our use of our actions. When you are watching your replay you can watch your own actions and see whether you are missing actions due to distractions during the game, which in turn provides a lens through which you can observe the impact of these distractions on your overall macro timing, as each delayed action pushes the entire remainder of the cycle back AND every cycle that follows. By adding the "per minute" to the idea of setting up a task rotation you add the idea of putting this rotation into the overall time based framework of the game.
The biggest difference between APM and RPM is that APM will always be seen as a "more is better" measurement, even if you can win with lower APM, having a higher APM (or more accurately uAPM as one of the other posters puts it) would be handy. With RPM you WILL hit a wall with how many rotations are actually useful. That being the case, RPM acts as a tool for both improving the efficiency of your rotation to help fit more actions in, and also as a tool for REDUCING the number of actions you are taking which serve no purpose. Why select your production when it still has 10 seconds before it even COULD be useful to do so? Place a creep tumor, build a supply depot or give a scout another queued order instead.
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I see what you are saying OP and I totally agree with everything said.
RPM is a solid concept to keep in the back of your mind, even if you cannot actually measure it.
It would be a solid idea to drill into the head of anyone who is new to the game.
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I don't think the objective of this post was to say that we have to start MEASURING rpm, but it should instead be what players strive for. I agree completely, especially since day9 goes over this in one of his mechanic dailies. Check your 4,5,6 (ex. rax, upgrades, cc)
Good post!
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Well, I'm a quantitative psychologist, M.S., working on PhD in it (to the leyman, a statistician), and I know a thing or two about Theory of Measurement. First, there are two things to understand, the abstract construct (the thing you want to measure) and the concrete operational definition (OD) of said construct (how you measure it). E.g., intelligence is a construct, and the IQ test (pick any version, doesn't really matter for this demonstration) is its OD. Now, not all OD's of any given construct incapsulate the whole of the construct, and many OD's have "construct irrelevant variance". For example, imagine I want to measure SC2 expertise, and my OD is APM. First, does this OD incapsulate all of the construct of SC2 expertise? No, there's more to it, e.g. knowing your build order, proper timing sense/scouting, knowing how and when to react, etc. So, APM isn't the whole story. Also, does APM have construct irrelevant variance? Yes! By this I mean, you can be in the bronze league, select a worker and your first building (nexus/cc/hatch), assign hotkeys 1 and 2 to them, respectively, and spam 12121212... all game long till it's over (you'll likely lose unless they dc  ). So, APM may not measure SC2 expertise at all, and in more tangible cases, maybe someone is addicted to spamming, and plays as normal, but with an extra 121212... in between thoughtful actions.
Now to consider your idea, RPM... This is in theory an OD of "SC2 expertise". This seems to me to be an attempt to take APM, but polish it in a way that attempts to remove some of this construct irrelevant variance. I like it, though unfortunately I can't think of a way using the current built-in measures Blizzard provides, to measure this, short of going through each replay and hand-coding.
Despite this huge issue of work-intensive measurement (and who knows, maybe some 3rd-party add-on could achieve this, though I wouldn't have it running during a ladder game, but rather during replay, in order to avoid being flagged as a potential cheater, or worse, wrongly labeled one), I do feel that this is a important conversation to consider, and I think this idea is a great way to measure one's own improvement, given the stamina to measure it and the ability to put the data garnered to good use.
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Because it is impossible to measure, this is more of something that is good to just keep in your head as a mental reminder that you need to again cycle through the things you need to do. More of a self development thing more than anything I would say. Just keeps you conscious of these things.
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What really needs to happen is that the idea that APM isn't really a measure of skill needs to be implemented. What happens is that if you forget about your APM and try to spend time getting better, your APM will go up naturally and just naturally you will play faster than before. If you start to concentrate on raising your APM so you can "play like a pro", nothing will happen. Most people who say they "don't have the APM" to do something actually do, it's just that they don't have enough practice for their APM to go up since they are way to occupied with thinking, when the pros who have hours and hours of practice don't need to think as often, but instead most of what they do is second nature. It was a lot like what was done on Xellos, where they analyzed his brain while he was playing and saw that most of his decisions were second nature.
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RPM is roach per minute and it's usually higher than APM*
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If only we had something that took everything into account- APM, RPM, decision making, preparation, micro, macro, etc. Something maybe where you would match 2 players together and compare them by letting them express the different avenues of skill and intelligence they have with respect to the game. O yea, WINS.
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On September 17 2011 02:16 PolSC2 wrote:
There is no clear way to judge someone's "rpm". Not going to work.
True, there is no way to measure RPM as there is with APM, but it is still helpful as it highlights the need for a mental checklist for lower leveel players. You can't measure it but if you are aware of it and you can increase the rate at which you go through your checklist then you are obviously going to improve as you will not get supply blocked, forget to make works, forget to make units etc.
Doing this will also keep your money low and allow you to see what you can afford off X number of bases. I played a game against a protoss yesterday who went 5 gate chargelot blink stalker off 1 base, then went for 7 gate collosus when he expanded after a failed push. If he had better RPM then he would know he could not afford those 5 gates and research off 1 base but because he did not keep up with his check list he had extra resouces.
On a side note, in the OP there is a typical RPM for Terran. For me Protoss RPM checklist would would go something like this:
Probes > Pylones > Warpin > Robo/Stargate > Upgrades/Tech > Micro
and for Zerg it goes:
Inject > Spread creep > Am i about to die? No, make a drone. Yes, make a unit > Overlord > Scout > React > upgrades/tech > Micro
I add more into Zerg because i main as Zerg and thats my checklist. Scouting could be put in with 'Micro' but it's so important for Zerg i feel it needs it's own point
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EPT
