The indicator in the replays actually doesnt matter. What matters is the speed of the game being played. The reason it is on normal is because it is easier to screenshot the best APM values at lower replay speeds.

Veratule

United States105 Posts

March 23 2011 22:12 GMT

#42

On March 24 2011 06:58 garlicface wrote:
I've never seen the explanation before, so this was a great read. Very detailed and organized too.

Thank you! I appreciate that

NoodleFish

South Africa198 Posts

March 23 2011 22:13 GMT

#43

I agree with 1st post, I thought it was common knowledge. However this is the 1st I've seen proof of it, so awesome that you did the tests for this. +1 to you sir :D

TedJustice

Canada1324 Posts

March 23 2011 22:19 GMT

#44

Maybe someone could make an application that reads APM from replays and multiplies it by 1.3999 in real time as you watch. Seems like it wouldn't be too hard to do, provided they were able to access that information, which judging from a lot of replay sharing sites extracting info from replays, I'd guess they could.

Vintlocke

Netherlands18 Posts

March 23 2011 22:20 GMT

#45

On March 24 2011 07:08 McCain wrote:
What people may not be aware of is that the in-game clock feature is also calculated incorrectly. A 25 minute game according to the in-game clock is actually a 18 minute game in real life.

That's because the ingame clock also "ticks" at the faster game speed. Basically everything runs on normal time when you play the game on normal. Makes sense no?

Or am I the only one who thinks it'd be pretty weird to play the game on normal and have time actually go slower?

Anyway, when you play faster everything goes faster, including the game time. The ingame clock shows the ingame time. Handy that, because your buildings and units build at gametime too! For some reason however Blizz hooked their APM meter up to their ingame clock instead of a normal one.

Veratule

United States105 Posts

March 23 2011 22:24 GMT

#46

On March 24 2011 07:20 Vintlocke wrote:

For some reason however Blizz hooked their APM meter up to their ingame clock instead of a normal one.

It's sort of like if a Biologist found a new species of Woodpecker, but instead of saying that it taps it's beak into a tree 15 times a second, it taps 17 times every 1.133 seconds.

15 per second is clearly a lot more useful information.

Jesushooves

Canada553 Posts

March 23 2011 22:26 GMT

#47

I think almost everyone knew this, this is like the /dance thing that a few people probably still don't know about (sksyen) lol, or that banshees take 3 supply, lol pokebunny.

Nice of you to go to such lengths to prove this though

, just too bad everyone already knew it. D:

chenchen

United States1136 Posts

March 23 2011 22:28 GMT

#48

On March 24 2011 06:49 Rkie wrote:
the only thing that i never understood about all of this isnt why APM is adjusted, but rather why is the fastest setting not normal seconds? I realize this was not the case in BW, but was it only made this way in SC2 to be nostalgic? The standard playing speed is going to be the fastest speed, so why not make that the "normal"? I guess you could make the speeds below that ratios like normal (what is fastest) is 1, the next fastest is .8 and so on.

Show nested quote +

You told him he was wrong, then corrected him by saying the exact same thing just so you know.

I didn't tell anyone that he was wrong. Some guy was right. Another guy told him that he was wrong. I cleared up everything.

FabledIntegral

United States9232 Posts

March 23 2011 22:29 GMT

#49

lol apparently Artosis explained it poorly when you heard it, but I think almost all of us knew that it what he meant was by game time as opposed to real time. Knew about this a longggg time ago.

peekn

United States1152 Posts

March 23 2011 22:31 GMT

#50

Great testing and great post! Although most people already knew this, it's good to see the facts and some hard data behind it. Thanks!

Veratule

United States105 Posts

March 23 2011 22:32 GMT

#51

On March 24 2011 07:29 FabledIntegral wrote:
lol apparently Artosis explained it poorly when you heard it, but I think almost all of us knew that it what he meant was by game time as opposed to real time. Knew about this a longggg time ago.

Lol no offense to Artosis then. I wish I could meet him in person and give him a big hug for being awesome.

Excalibur_Z

United States12235 Posts

March 23 2011 22:33 GMT

#52

On March 24 2011 06:59 p4NDemik wrote:
I think we'd all like to see APM be calculated in real time, but honestly this is not something I'm going to get up in arms about at all. Whatever constitutes a "high" apm is entirely relative, having less to do with the actual number and more to do with how it stacks against other peoples' APM. If measurements are artificially a little low I'm not going to complain just to satiate people's desire to measure something that is largely extraneous to actual skill anyways.

The only time this is really annoying is when we are trying to compare APMs of SC2 players with APMs of players from different games (BW/WC3/etc), and there is little practical use for that.

So yeah it would be nice but I'd rather have Blizzard focus on getting us the most important features. Such as replay watching with friends over Bnet and the like.

Dustin Browder was made aware of it in the livechat shortly before the game launched, and he said he wanted to get it fixed. Every patch I'm expecting it to be fixed =) All they would have to do is multiply the APM value by X where X is the game speed (which is a constant that's found in the game replay file, I found it in a crash log yesterday when my game crashed).

Leeto

United States1320 Posts

March 23 2011 22:42 GMT

#53

It's pretty cool how you did all that work for testing it. Unfortunately this has been known since like the first week of beta. It's a bit disappointing all that effort was spent in for nothing.

barkles

United States285 Posts

March 23 2011 22:47 GMT

#54

Yeah I think this was sort of "common knowledge" already...but it's nice to know exactly what the difference is. Thanks for illustrating this.

Although I don't think it's really necessary for Blizzard to change the way APM is displayed. I mean, it's all relative, right? Maybe there is some psychological factor associated with seeing a higher number, but you could do that by just scaling all of the numbers by 1000 too...

And in a way it makes sense, if you look at it from the perspective of "actions per game-minute" instead of "actions per real-time minute"

Veratule

United States105 Posts

March 23 2011 22:53 GMT

#55

+ Show Spoiler +

On March 24 2011 07:33 Excalibur_Z wrote:

Show nested quote +

Hmmm...I wonder what's delaying them so much...

eVolvE342

157 Posts

March 23 2011 22:59 GMT

#56

Even if the majority of people knew about this I like your initiative to hash it out through experimentation. Nice work. Thanks for the nice visually appealing evidence.

T0fuuu

Australia2275 Posts

March 23 2011 23:04 GMT

#57

Sc2 Gears Can convert game time to realtime if you want. It can also give game apm and reatime apm. Try it out and donate! its a really good tool!!

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=124689

Noak3

United States236 Posts

March 23 2011 23:04 GMT

#58

Despite it being common knowledge, it's good that you brought this issue to light. It's kind of weird that it works the way it does and it should be fixed.