On September 08 2011 06:12 Jayrod wrote: I've gotta say Tyler's advice on getting faster is probably the worst way to get faster in anything in life. We're talking about muscle memory and if you are going fast for the sake of going fast you will become sloppy and not fast. An incremental increase in speed is a much better and much more controlled way to get faster at anything... instruments.. gaming... anything. Accuracy and speed are in bed together... accuracy for speed you're going to become worse than you could be... even if you become better than you are. Definitely disagree.
No, when it comes to muscle development, including fine motorics which we are talking about here, you need to increase the resistance in order to progress. This is all true of all the things you listed.
I don't think Tyler was saying "go from 70 apm to 400 apm". I think he meant "be aware of your speed and try to push the limit of how fast you can act when you practice". Doing this consistently eventually leads you to see progress in speed and muscle memory.
On September 08 2011 06:12 Jayrod wrote: I've gotta say Tyler's advice on getting faster is probably the worst way to get faster in anything in life. We're talking about muscle memory and if you are going fast for the sake of going fast you will become sloppy and not fast. An incremental increase in speed is a much better and much more controlled way to get faster at anything... instruments.. gaming... anything. Accuracy and speed are in bed together... accuracy for speed you're going to become worse than you could be... even if you become better than you are. Definitely disagree.
No, when it comes to muscle development, including fine motorics which we are talking about here, you need to increase the resistance in order to progress. This is all true of all the things you listed.
I don't think Tyler was saying "go from 70 apm to 400 apm". I think he meant "be aware of your speed and try to push the limit of how fast you can act when you practice". Doing this consistently eventually leads you to see progress in speed and muscle memory.
Exactly
I started playing the beta at about 80-90 apm (sc2 apm). I felt that I needed to speed up in order to be more competitive so I gradually pushed my limits each game. Adding a new hot key 1 at a time, and playing countless games till the motion of clicking it was ingrained in me.
After about 10 months of doing this I'm at 200apm average, and I'm able to maintain this speed in very long (45min +) macro games.
On September 08 2011 06:12 Jayrod wrote: I've gotta say Tyler's advice on getting faster is probably the worst way to get faster in anything in life. We're talking about muscle memory and if you are going fast for the sake of going fast you will become sloppy and not fast. An incremental increase in speed is a much better and much more controlled way to get faster at anything... instruments.. gaming... anything. Accuracy and speed are in bed together... accuracy for speed you're going to become worse than you could be... even if you become better than you are. Definitely disagree.
That's a pretty terrible interpretation of my method so I guess I disagree too.
I dont understand why people tend to give Incontrol so much shit when it comes down to it he is just a guy trying to live his dream and contribute to the community as much as he can. Why do we feel the need to jump on everything he says and try to put him down like that? From what ive seen of him he is a really good guy with a great heart who actually cares what some people say about him, showing just how much he is invested into this game this community and growing Esports. So before people just decide to flame him because you dont agree with one of his opinions, take a second and just realize all the awesome things he's done for us all.
Incontrol if you read this keep working hard and doing what youre doing, you're the shit and i really appreciate what you do.
On September 08 2011 06:12 Jayrod wrote: I've gotta say Tyler's advice on getting faster is probably the worst way to get faster in anything in life. We're talking about muscle memory and if you are going fast for the sake of going fast you will become sloppy and not fast. An incremental increase in speed is a much better and much more controlled way to get faster at anything... instruments.. gaming... anything. Accuracy and speed are in bed together... accuracy for speed you're going to become worse than you could be... even if you become better than you are. Definitely disagree.
First off I would argue that you don't quite understand or maybe you just didn't want to understand what tyler was saying.
I might be off base here as well, but I'll try to give some real life, sports related examples to support tyler's idea for speed training. What tyler suggested was to exaggerate the speed increase he was trying to gain, so that when you pull it back to the actual speed you want to play at, it feels more comfortable.(If I summarized that wrong, I apologize).
Running: Have you ever seen someone attach a chute to themselves and run 40s? Providing resistance makes you faster and stronger much quicker than just running 40s and trying to pump your arms a bit faster every time. Exaggerating the resistance makes running without the exaggeration easier and better overall.
Hitting: Hitting a baseball is the considered the hardest thing to do in professional sports. I think this might be the most apt comparison, since the issue of "speed with accuracy" is a big part of your argument. Bat head speed and accuracy are the two most important factors when trying to hit a baseball. Going outside the science, you don't see a baseball player picking up a 34oz bat for practice when their normal bat is 33oz. They put on 2-5lb donuts to exaggerate the weight. This makes it feel much lighter and when you swing the normal bat, and lets you get higher bat head speed. When I was playing college baseball, we used something called a thunderstick:
Basically, it's an overweight undersized(circumference) bat used to train bat head speed and accuracy. If you can hit a ball with that, hitting a ball with a normal bat is magnitudes easier.
tldr; You exaggerate your practice so that the real thing is easier in comparison. It's a proven technique.
Of course it's all moot if I misinterpreted tyler's comments.
On September 08 2011 17:10 tWuKrameR wrote: I dont understand why people tend to give Incontrol so much shit when it comes down to it he is just a guy trying to live his dream and contribute to the community as much as he can. Why do we feel the need to jump on everything he says and try to put him down like that? From what ive seen of him he is a really good guy with a great heart who actually cares what some people say about him, showing just how much he is invested into this game this community and growing Esports. So before people just decide to flame him because you dont agree with one of his opinions, take a second and just realize all the awesome things he's done for us all.
Incontrol if you read this keep working hard and doing what youre doing, you're the shit and i really appreciate what you do.
Great first post
Stopped by this thread to say I loved the most recent show and love the fact incontrol is back and they had demuslim on as well. It was amusing to see demuslim behind geoff.
Loved Demuslim being on the show, hope he becomes a regular.
Loved Artosis's take on the Marauder
Do wish they'd talked about the SixJax Major situation a bit more, guess theres not much else they could really say on it though. Hope the guy gets his act together as he sounds like a player I'd want to watch more often.
I junst wanted to say i really liked that last episode. The previews for NASL and the Valencia Invitational are the things that make me want to watch Sotg (and it's why I'm bummed when it sometimes is so MLG centric while other big events are just around the corner).
Demuslim was great, I missed him on ESL.TV since his departure to NA (but since Mr. Bitter is there it's great, eventually even better, again). Gotta love that english english .
I for one am glad to see Geoff back on the show, I felt there was something missing when he did Inside the game exclusively, there wasn't quite enough interaction between the pillars. But now that he is back, the conversations and arguments are a lot funnier/interesting again.
On September 07 2011 21:55 dtz wrote: Aw the artosis story is really touching. I hope someday we'll know the full story and really appreciates the man and the sacrifices he made the game.
No doubt everyone will when the documentary comes out. :D
regarding stepping up your apm: the obvious method is try to play faster, but are there any others? For example on the piano I see people practising certain chain of notes to increase the speed and the flexibility of their hands, is there anything similar in starcraft? Maybe just repeatedly practise cycling through your production facilities and build units?
Shawn Lane (considered the most impressive guitarist of the 80's/90's in terms of speed/technique) on how to increase your play speed.
To all the know-it-all's in this thread, he recommends playing fast sloppy then gradually cleaning it up instead of increasing slowly. Mostly because playing slow and gradually increasing speed creates mental blocks. It's close to what Tyler was saying about APM in SC2.
And yeah, i know shredding on the guitar and SC2 APM isn't exactly the same thing but both require loads of practice and routine so the advice seems solid to me.
For what it's worth, I teach guitar and I generally advise to start slow, practice that endlessly, then go a bit faster and so on, but this is for people that are just starting out. When you're already at a fairly high level you will have a good grasp at all the techniques on a slow level and really in general you will know how to play properly no matter what speed. It's just about getting to that speed and then it could really help to try to get used to like a higher level of playing, to make that step and challenge yourself. But I do think you can only do this if you're already very skilled at the basics.
By the way, I don't know if Shawn Lane is a good example for this. He's literally the fastest known guitarist and obviously way faster than any person could expect to be. Improving his speed might have worked for him because he had so much potential to play faster anyway, but who is to say this will work for Sjow? I do think Sjow needs to work on his mechanics, as when I saw his MLG games he lost sometimes simply because he couldn't control his army quickly enough, but there is a danger in just experimenting with your play. It might work, it might not.
For most players, not talking pros, there is not much of a point to "train" your APM. Pretty much anyone "used" to the controls of SC2 "can" get 120-150 APM or higher... yet many players only spike to these amounts (and higher) when a battle happens... Why?
After the release of SC2 my own avg. APM over about 180 Games increased from ~60-70 to 100-110 but I have not gotten actually "faster". The difference was just, that I actually know better what I should do and what I wanted to do. At the beginning my APM only in battles got to the point which actually "is" my APM (I don't spam much/not at all) because that was the only point in the game were I truly "knew" what to do (micro ). You also could see this really good when live observing an SC1 player of (nowadays) low skill... He would comfortably sit on terribly low APM until he realized.. "I NEED TO REBUILD" --> Suddenly the APM skyrockets.. Why? He is rebuilding as fast as possible, he knows exactly what to do and how to do it. EVERYONE familiar with the controls can do this fast.
Or another example: I've got a friend which spams like mad... When the game starts he instantly sits at 2XX APM, sometimes ever 3XX and stays there... UNTIL the game actually turns into "a game"... His APM (I saw this in several games) sinks down to about 60 as soon as he hits lategame... Why? Well, he's a terrible player... He just does not know what he should/needs to do after a certain point (for him this is after his "copied BO" is executed... If the game is not over his whole gameplay, including his APM, falls totally apart. He begins to think about what he needs to do and doesn't even find "time to spam".
The first step to "decent" APM is actually at every point in the game, in every situation "knowing" what you should do. If you constantly do all the things you should do as fast as you can there is no way in hell you will stay under 1XX APM... The trick is actually knowing/remembering all the stuff that you should do at all times... That’s why you see players with really good micro with not really high APM, they totally forget to macro (and therefore automatically spend more time on controlling their units).
This is probably different for absolute top players... But for 90% of the playerbase?... Nah, it's just people focusing on the wrong stuff/neglecting other stuff/thinking about what to do which keeps the APM "low"...
EPT
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