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It's the exact same as every sport. When you're at soccer practice, you run basic drills and conditioning all practice long to work on specific things, and at the very end you scrimmage. You can go down the line from sport to sport and the fundamentals are what you MUST emphasize first, strategy last.
I think the issue for the lowest level players is that they approach SC2 as a game to have fun and not a competitive sport. Maybe the problem is asking for help in the first place. For some of us we're having fun and our time is limited. I don't want to get out of silver by building a bunch of marines on 2 bases every game even though I can. I want to drop nukes.
So maybe the issue is people having fun playing who don't want to approach the game as a competitive sport. We don't want to learn how to pass the ball or make free throws; we want a trampoline so we can dunk.
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As a player who started out in silver league, ( im now a mid mastersplayer) i really found the advice macro better good, As the high level players here previously stated u don´t need to focus on strategy in the lower levels, instead you can win games by simply having more "stuff" . strategy of course matters but only to some extent and i found out that if i watch the pro´s stream and just copy their build orders as best as i can and then mainly focusing on macro you will not only become a better player but you will also rise in the league system quicker as well.
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United States22883 Posts
On October 12 2011 06:06 NM wrote:Show nested quote +It's the exact same as every sport. When you're at soccer practice, you run basic drills and conditioning all practice long to work on specific things, and at the very end you scrimmage. You can go down the line from sport to sport and the fundamentals are what you MUST emphasize first, strategy last. I think the issue for the lowest level players is that they approach SC2 as a game to have fun and not a competitive sport. Maybe the problem is asking for help in the first place. For some of us we're having fun and our time is limited. I don't want to get out of silver by building a bunch of marines on 2 bases every game even though I can. I want to drop nukes. So maybe the issue is people having fun playing who don't want to approach the game as a competitive sport. We don't want to learn how to pass the ball or make free throws; we want a trampoline so we can dunk.
I completely understand that and playing Slamball is fine (if not totally awesome). Like you said though, asking about a new technique to dunk higher is not the secret to winning HORSE.
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On October 12 2011 00:42 Zorkmid wrote:
I think that "Macro better" is fine as long as specific aspects about how they COULD macro better are pointed out.
Saying "Macro Better" without qualifying it is basically like saying "you suck"
My joke response (elsewhere not on TL) is generally to follow up "macro better" with similar advice. Such as
"Play less bad!"
"Do better than your opponent in terms of Starcraft"
"Build up an army that is stronger than your opponent while maintaining the potential for superior future armies and utilize those armies in a very efficient manner."
The "problem" is when your execution is off, a build order is not going to solve things and anything else is not a quick and simple fix. "Probes and pylons" sounds simple but its a lot more complicated than building a gate on 12 or 13
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This thread is important, but it seems to make at least one other thread redundant for a sticky. Could we have one sticky that links to the other stickies?
(or consolidate them in some way?)
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On October 12 2011 04:27 Jibba wrote:
Karate Kid analogy aside, there is an abundance of resources available on TL that should get anyone into Masters. The worst posters here have no willingness to work or research on their own and they drag the forum down, by looking for quick outs to win games when their number one problem is that their fundamental gameplay is rotten and needs to be rebuilt.
It's the exact same as every sport. When you're at soccer practice, you run basic drills and conditioning all practice long to work on specific things, and at the very end you scrimmage. You can go down the line from sport to sport and the fundamentals are what you MUST emphasize first, strategy last. Working on the complete package at once, which is what you're doing when you're delving into strategy and timings as a Gold player, is detrimental to your overall learning and will impede your progress. I think these people are being coddled, as we've seen with numerous threads about people who can't wrap their head around cheese or are intimidated by the ladder. You scout, you macro and you expand. People should be taught how to do those, but beyond that is somewhat superfluous until the upper levels and will be picked up naturally anyways through experience. I think 95% of strategy forum threads would be unnecessary if people used some elbow grease, so to speak.
'macro better' is a low content post that should not be tolerated in the Strategy forums, but likewise the people making threads should be putting a lot more effort in than they usually do, and not become indignant when people tell them that their fundamentals are extremely poor.
I feel like the normal response in Strategy when someone tells them to improve their macro is "yeah, but what about besides that", brushing it off as if it's only a minority share of the problem. The proper response should be "ok, I'll work on that first. Anything else?" taking ownership of their weakness and realizing it's the key to advancement, everything else is tertiary.
I really can't add anything, other than this post nails it right on the head.
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Thank you plexa for putting this on the front page! I've been seeing too many threads over the past year about lower level players asking for help and being shut down by the "macro better" comment. This should help the community out a lot if they follow your guidelines!
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Plexa, I'm going to need to see replays of this new style before I give it any consideration or feedback. Maybe try typing faster?
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I want your babies, well said
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I think more emphasis should be put on those giving advice. I see tons of broad advice that just doesn't really help anyone. There's no real point is saying "macro better" when the person doesn't understand what he/she can do to actually macro better. People just throw out "help" without thinking about the person they are talking to. A low quality OP with high quality posts is far better than a high quality OP with terrible posts.
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On October 12 2011 05:41 Jibba wrote:Show nested quote +On October 12 2011 05:35 Camail wrote:
You can't just tell a soccer/football player to juggle the ball better, just practice on juggling to ball.
Yes, you can. You don't need a shooting coach to be a good free throw shooter, you just need to practice it over and over, even if your form is bad. Even Day9 talks about it. You improve your APM by playing faster. You force yourself to play faster, and the rest of your brain activities will catch up. A prime example of this with TONS of evidence to back it up is speed reading.
And there are other prime examples with TONS of evidence to back it up that contradict what you are saying. You don't learn to play songs by playing them very fast, you learn by playing them slowly (and in separate parts). Macro isn't APM.
You're talking about practicing it over and over even if your form is bad -- but just playing games is not necessarily a good form of practice. You need more, you need goals, benchmarks, repeatable settings to compare your form against. Shooting a ball is easy to repeat a hundred times; but playing a Starcraft game takes much longer and (if laddering) is much less repeatable, every opponent is different (apart from the very early game).
Just playing is not an efficient way of improving; otherwise there would not be any bronze/silver players with hundreds of ladder games played (ignoring those who just cheese every time).
Practicing macro is not the same as "just playing". Your analogy would be to say that the best way of improving your free throws is to just play normal football games -- but it is not; the best way is to work on free throws specifically, ignoring all the time-consuming hum-ho that comes with actual games.
There is no way to play Starcraft while focusing only on macro without paying attention to anything else, especially since it is the "anything else" that throws lower-league players off so frequently (they get distracted and end up not actually focusing on macro). Saying "just macro" is not helpful because you're not removing any of the obstacles they're facing; it's much more useful to point out the obstacles, tell them how to work around them, and then let them work on it.
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Alot of ppl don't realize that RTS games isn't for everybody. If you play TONS and still struggle, perhaps play another genre. Starcraft 2 is all about macro, macro and more macro as you only use your micro to get ahead. It's not like you have to fend off dragoons with your factory not even finished yet. :D
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I always try to stay away from strategy threads, nonetheless I'd like to thank TL and Plexa for making this post. Really appreciated.
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This is actually something I've thought about myself. It has become some sort of degrading comment you can give anyone. While it's true that if you macro like MVP, you'll get masters without micro at all, it's not always the easiest improvement one can do in order to improve winrate, which is often what the posters are looking for! 
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Laying down the law~~~
THANK YOU PLEXA.
Obviously shitty advice is shitty, but not making units when you can make units and then bitching about how other people want you to make more units is simply retarded. Don't do that.
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On the one hand, "macro better" could be a lousy attempt at giving someone help (no specificity), and on the other hand it could be a mantra for every day living. How do I complete all my tasks in a day? Macro better. How can I be a better person? Macro better. How do I show Sally that I really care about her? Macro better.
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As a plea, if your going to quote Jibba (or less likely me) in our dialogue please read the entire thing rather than quoting something int he middle. We both made concessions and we don't want to argue anything that has already been argued.
And I haven't thanked you yet plexa, so thank you.
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Aw, no reference to a snippet from my guide? D:
I love Jibba's Karate Kid reference!
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I know a big thing about "Macro better" is that it's a very vague and broad statement for lower league people. Macro better could litterally mean anything from "You need to constantly be producing things from your buildings and structures", to "You could have actually afforded to make more buildings/you had too many buildings and they were idle; you couldn't support doing that in the least bit", to something as simple as "You stopped making probes at 24 and you were on three bases, you NEED to keep constantly making probes/workers (which is semi-inaccurate but if we're talking about just macroing better it's probably the right answer)".
So to me it's not the statement, because the issue very well might be that the person needs to macro better, but that by itself is generally too vague.
edit: at the same time i agree with the argument that in general if people want to improve they need to be researching on thier own, and then asking if they can't find something; simply running to the forum definitely isnt the right answer. the resources are there.
maybe just me though.
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I think a chief problem here is that there are serious and significant reasons people lose other than macro better and those parts of the game people want to have focused on better. It might be as simple as "hot key better" or "scout often, always, and continually" or don't telegraph your build.
A long time ago when I was training with a guy named Sosowac I lost a broodwar game against a map hacker where I should have won the game by all rights. I remember Sosowac's advice wasn't macro better it was "dude, go with a strat that wins when they KNOW it is coming not on one that relies on deception". I was just using my very common constant storm drop harass while expanding and massing...
That advice there was great.
I wish I had a vod of the Nada GSL game where he got totally outmacrod by a protoss player...was behind an expo, had no vikings, and was facing a larger protoss army with all marine/marauder and like 3 medivacs and yet he beat the army. He simply spread his guys in an arc on the opposite side of a choke and the protoss player with observer saw that his 3 colossi had an opening before vikings...nope, smaller army with stim and larger arc was able to beat the larger army with better tech without even focusing on the colossi. I seem to remember Artosis or Tasteless pointing out that nada was making a big mistake not focusing down the colossi.
This is the type of thing that players get upset about. They know things other than macro are the difference sometimes. They want to improve those parts of their games too. Or perhaps...if we see macro as improving from silver to gold to plat to diamond to masters then we can say what things improve my play within silver, within gold, within plat.
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EPT
