This technique seems to be able to speed up some BOs by a few seconds, which may help greatly in aggressive openings. Additionally, this makes worker harass (i.e. attacking Probes with SCVs) a little more potent, as it would remove all queueing.
@ the people saying this will get patched;
A similar trick existed in WC3 with Orcs. The Orc Peon had a slightly faster movespeed than Human Peasants, and 4 Peons could saturate a gold mine (vs. 5 for every other race). Blizzard made Peons walk slower when returning cargo from a gold mine, so that their mining rates would be equal to all the other races. A trick to speed up Orc mining rates would be to manually "Return Cargo" on the Peons, which would make them walk at their normal, faster movespeed, slightly increasing mining at the beginning of the game. Obviously this required too much APM to do throughout the entire game, but it was a nice trick early on.
I haven't played WC3 in ages, but I believe this trick still exists. As such, there is reason to believe that Blizzard might not patch this trick away.
Reading this thread, I feel like people are blowing this way out of proportion. This 7% increase in mining efficiency in the first few minutes of the game is marginal at best, and unsubstantial at worst. I feel like this 'trick' is just a small bit of flavor that you can add at the beginning of the game without adversely affecting the 99.9% of players that can't use this to their advantage anyway. More players will be hurt by trying to do this at the expense of their build order, than people will be helped.
Just let the Flash's of the world worry about this sort of thing, and the rest of us can just go on playing the game as normal.
HuK doesn't like it because he knows that he would eventually HAVE to start using it to remain competitive and it could potentially interfere with his trademark Probe Harass (though I doubt it because this stops being useful close to the time where most people send their scout anyway).
Nazgul's reasons for disliking it are somewhat nonsensical if you ask me... It's not like there's anything else going on at that stage of the game. Casters don't really have anything else to be looking for, and often times don't have anything else to talk about. If they see it, they can comment on it and have something to fill the gap until a build order emerges. If they don't see it, nothing is lost and they can keep rambling on about the map or the metagame or making fun of the player's name.
Psy isn't a pro. He's better than me, sure. That's not hard to do, but he's not a pro.
I would say that a majority of the people who are bitching about this have some delusions that they themselves will someday be pros and that mastering this technique is another obstacle in their way...
On September 14 2010 10:08 Doomrok wrote: This is nonsense, it works by just hotkeying (or box selecting) all your workers, selecting them and holding down C.... profit.
Results: If you look at each mineral patch for any test, every single patch has the same amount of minerals missing from it. Every number will be the same no matter what the mineral model type is.
hey first of all good idea, I have never thought about this. But I wanted to test it out for myself and I found that the mineral models do not matter what so ever. The reason why I think you received different results was because you had 10 patches and only 6 command centers, meaning the mining path for some SCVs are different.
I took your good idea and just modified it to make sure that each SCV has it's own command center. I of course made sure to line everything up perfectly and tested it at close and far range. As well as having a test with the patch to the left of the CC and to the right of the CC (they don't let you put it directly in the middle of the CC). Every single test had the same results, that the mineral models do not matter.
I have never made recorded a video from a PC before so I apologize for the lack of quality/camera work.
Edit: Keep in mind that some SCVs do return the minerals a few steps ahead of the other SCV in my video. The reason for this is because when I was setting up the mineral sync I had to leave some SCV idle while I set up the others. When an SCV is idle they randomly turn left or right. So by the time I was done setting up, some SCV were facing left, others towards their CC and others towards the minerals. Because of this when I made them all return their cargo at the same time from the exact same distance some had to turn slightly less to return. This gave put them a tiny bit ahead, but this does not really affect the results at all.
Page 21, please just add this to the OP so there's no more misinformation about this.
On September 13 2010 10:23 SiNiquity wrote: Having done a ton of research on worker mechanics in this game, and since I haven't seen a full explanation of this technique, allow me to explain the game mechanics behind it.
How this trick works
Workers in the game go through 7 stages cyclically (that is, at the end of stage 7 the worker proceeds to stage 1) when harvesting resources. This is straight from the Galaxy Editor:
Approach Resource - The initial stage where the worker travels to the resource.
Wait at Resource - If the resource is already being harvested.
Harvest - The harvest stage where the unit either plays the harvest mineral animation, or disappears into the vespene geyser.
Wait to Return - The worker waits for some number of seconds which I shall refer to as N. This is a resource dependent stage (that is, it depends on a property of the resource). For minerals, N = 0.5, but for gas, N = 0.
Wait for Drop Off - This stage is only executed if a drop-off location is not available (i.e there is no reachable Nexus, or the last Command Center is lifted).
Approach Drop Off - Worker travels back to the base
Drop Off - Worker deposits the resources into the base.
At the beginning of stage 4, the "Gather" ability changes into the "Return Cargo" ability, as the unit now has cargo in its possession. Thus by spamming C / Right-click repeatedly into the worker's action queue, one can skip stage 4 and jump immediately to stage 5.
Theory does not lie. This technique works. However, as a result, it will not work for gas.
On September 14 2010 10:08 Doomrok wrote: This is nonsense, it works by just hotkeying (or box selecting) all your workers, selecting them and holding down C.... profit.
Everything else is unnecessary.
NO. IT. DOESN'T.
For the love of GOD, that's been posted and debunked dozens of times already.
Results: If you look at each mineral patch for any test, every single patch has the same amount of minerals missing from it. Every number will be the same no matter what the mineral model type is.
hey first of all good idea, I have never thought about this. But I wanted to test it out for myself and I found that the mineral models do not matter what so ever. The reason why I think you received different results was because you had 10 patches and only 6 command centers, meaning the mining path for some SCVs are different.
I took your good idea and just modified it to make sure that each SCV has it's own command center. I of course made sure to line everything up perfectly and tested it at close and far range. As well as having a test with the patch to the left of the CC and to the right of the CC (they don't let you put it directly in the middle of the CC). Every single test had the same results, that the mineral models do not matter.
I have never made recorded a video from a PC before so I apologize for the lack of quality/camera work.
Edit: Keep in mind that some SCVs do return the minerals a few steps ahead of the other SCV in my video. The reason for this is because when I was setting up the mineral sync I had to leave some SCV idle while I set up the others. When an SCV is idle they randomly turn left or right. So by the time I was done setting up, some SCV were facing left, others towards their CC and others towards the minerals. Because of this when I made them all return their cargo at the same time from the exact same distance some had to turn slightly less to return. This gave put them a tiny bit ahead, but this does not really affect the results at all.
On September 14 2010 04:28 HuK wrote: i personally hope they remove this, would hinder my probe harass to much
Well if you just master the multi-task, it should improve probe harass, since any workers they pull to chase off your probe would lose their shift+action queue, making probe harass slightly more effective.
I like this find i've been able to keep constant probe production while teching early game don't need to stop probes for gateway or even come close to missing a second or 2 on a probe for assim thanks
I don't get why people are calling this hard. You only really need to do this 8 times the whole game pretty much. because this goes away once SCVs start lining up at minerals:-\
If you are really fast, you can do this before you actually have to even build anything.
Results: If you look at each mineral patch for any test, every single patch has the same amount of minerals missing from it. Every number will be the same no matter what the mineral model type is.
hey first of all good idea, I have never thought about this. But I wanted to test it out for myself and I found that the mineral models do not matter what so ever. The reason why I think you received different results was because you had 10 patches and only 6 command centers, meaning the mining path for some SCVs are different.
I took your good idea and just modified it to make sure that each SCV has it's own command center. I of course made sure to line everything up perfectly and tested it at close and far range. As well as having a test with the patch to the left of the CC and to the right of the CC (they don't let you put it directly in the middle of the CC). Every single test had the same results, that the mineral models do not matter.
I have never made recorded a video from a PC before so I apologize for the lack of quality/camera work.
Edit: Keep in mind that some SCVs do return the minerals a few steps ahead of the other SCV in my video. The reason for this is because when I was setting up the mineral sync I had to leave some SCV idle while I set up the others. When an SCV is idle they randomly turn left or right. So by the time I was done setting up, some SCV were facing left, others towards their CC and others towards the minerals. Because of this when I made them all return their cargo at the same time from the exact same distance some had to turn slightly less to return. This gave put them a tiny bit ahead, but this does not really affect the results at all.
Odd numbers are getting mined faster than even
My mind is blown
This post backs up my point that you must have a CC for each SCV to obtain accurate results.
You can see that the odd numbers are more in sync with each other than the even numbers and vise versa. This is because the odd numbered patches are at the same angle as the other odd patches, just like with the even numbers.
It just turns out that the odd numbered patches have a shorter path to the CC. Even though the minerals are lined up exactly and so are the CC. The reason why the paths can differ is because the patches and CC's are at an angle. This is why I redid the test having 1 CC per patch to make sure each patch had the same exact angle to its CC.
EPT
