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I believe it was Artosis who said that APM measure by SC2 is around 30% lower than in BW. Hearing that, I figured that maybe it was because SC2 doesn't require as much APM to be successful as is needed for Brood War pros, and I left it at that.
Then I started to wonder just how fast I could click, and from there I discovered exactly why APM is ~30% lower, and it's actually not the player's faults.
The questions to ask.
1) How do I produce a perfectly reproducible test bed for APM?
2) Does computer performance impact APM readings?
3) Does internet connectivity (latency) impact APM readings?
4) Does game speed impact APM readings?
1) To make this test as accurate as possible, I used two keyboard macros on my Razer Blackwidow.
To get the maximum APM possible, the first I used a macro that spams 1, 2, 1, 2 as long as I hold the button down (1 and 2 are control-grouped workers), with 0 delay between presses. My keyboard has a polling rate of 1000Hz, so the maximum APM it can output is 60,000 per minute, or 1000 per second.
The second macro was set to put a 0.2 second delay between every keystroke, giving the player exactly 300APM.
Below is a thumbnail and a link to the full-size image of the 'Infinite APM' macro:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Hz8T8l.jpg)
http://imgur.com/Hz8T8
2) Below are two tests using the "Infinite" APM macro key. The test is running on Q6600 with GTX260 at 1920x1200 on high and 1024x768 on low. The reason I'm using such extreme APM for these tests is that at higher APM, the difference in APM for each settings should be more obvious.
High Settings, Slowest Game Speed: 46488 APM
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/OICxgl.jpg)
http://imgur.com/OICxg
Low Settings, Slowest Game Speed: 50256 APM
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/syY2Ol.jpg)
http://imgur.com/syY2O
What can be concluded here is that while computer performance may have an impact on APM, the difference is only slight, and is irrelevant at more natural APM.
3) For this test I compared the Low Settings Test above to a test done on single-player.
Low Settings/Online, Slowest Game Speed: 50256 APM
http://imgur.com/syY2O
Low Settings/Offline, Slowest Game Speed: 50940 APM
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/qGilbl.jpg)
http://imgur.com/qGilb
Internet connection also appears to have a negligible impact on APM readings. Lets move on.
4) Having eliminated variables, we now have the final experiment, and the part that will probably make some people angry. The following are results from the 300 APM timing experiments:
Low Settings, Normal Game Speed (which is equal to real time):
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/MOl0jl.jpg)
http://imgur.com/MOl0j
Low Settings, Faster Game Speed (what we all play at):
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Xs1rkl.jpg)
http://imgur.com/Xs1rk
Conclusions: Why people should be annoyed at Blizzard about this.
Test 4 demonstrates that APM is calculated relative to GAME time instead of REAL time. In the Broodwar days, 3rd party APM calculators read APM in real-time.
If we take the 216 APM of 'Faster Speed' and divide by the 300 APM of 'Normal Speed', we get:
216 / 300 = .72, meaning SC2 APM = 72% of your actual APM, which is nearly a 30% decrease in APM, hence why SC2 players are 30% slower.
I would hope that someone at Blizzard will read this post and change the APM system to measure APM in real-time instead of game time. Means those 300 APM players should actually have 417 APM.
Thanks for reading!
-Veratule
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I dont want to be rude, but istn this common knowledge ?
But nice test anyways 
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On March 24 2011 06:01 RmpL wrote:I dont want to be rude, but istn this common knowledge ? But nice test anyways
I actually didn't know if it was common or not. Either way I think Blizz should fix it.
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The reason why its lower, is because we play at Faster modus, which is the normal speeld x1.38. But yeah, its kinda common knowledge but thanks for the efford 
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Good job OP, I was unaware of this.
Seems silly to have the M in APM not stand for "minute" but "blizzard minute." I just assumed the were using real units of time.
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This has been known since beta, where do you think Artosis got the 30% figure from?
Anway, it's a nice experiment you did, and I definitely agree that APM should be gauged on fastest game speed.
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I think what you've found is that because time is accelerated in the faster game mode, APM calculated based on game time is bound to be less, but their realtime APM will be the same as it's always been (as we see, a gosu gosu 300); Not because they are slower, but just SC2 players are being measured by differing time scales.
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Cool test, but this was known since March or April of last year (search function). Your actual APM is 1.33 times faster than the displayed APM.
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Yea this is common knowledge since the beta. Program like SC2gears can also convert your game APM to real APM. Or you can multiplie your in game APM by 1.398 .
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People have been bringing this up since the beta. Blizzard hasn't done anything so far, so I wouldn't expect it to change for a while, if at all.
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On March 24 2011 06:04 TrickyGilligan wrote:
Good job OP, I was unaware of this.
Seems silly to have the M in APM not stand for "minute" but "blizzard minute." I just assumed the were using real units of time.
Thanks
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. Doesn't make sense.
I didnt post it, but that test with 50940 APM, I did the same test on faster instead of slower and got around 21000, and normal was just under 30000.
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United States12235 Posts
Yeah this was already known. Faster speed runs at 1.3999x speed, and so your APM is measured at that speed. Your reported APM is equal to 1/1.3999 of your actual APM. This has been known since beta.
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Yep, this was known throughout beta. I think it's better this way. It's good to have a separation between Game Seconds and Real Seconds. Otherwise, everything gets confusing.
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The problem is that everything in the game is based on the "blizzard minute". So do you have APM completely unrelated to the clock time and build times? Or do you readjust everything, which would completely ruin all the even 30/40/50 ect. build times.
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1 - Everyone knows this already.
2 - It doesn't really matter. I mean unless you are just trying to feel super good about yourself and your 80 APM is actually 110 or whatever, we are usually comparing APM's with players being measured by the same system.
So what we know - Anything 150-200 is high. Anything about 200 is really high(at least in my opinion).
If you compare 2 players and one has an APM of 150 and the other 200, the one with 200 is doing more APM. If it is actually 200 and 250 in real time it doesn't change the fact that the player at 200 is doing more and that is really all you need to know.
So does it really matter if it is exact real time or not? As long as the point of comparison is the same we get everything we need. This to me is a non-issue and something everyone already knows and is brought up often when talking about SC2 APM. Just don't compare 3rd party APM counters from BW(real time) with SC2(game time) APM because you are then comparing 2 different measurements at that point, again something we all know which is why people don't do it.
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It was kinda established that APM was approximately 30% lower, but I haven't actually seen anyone do an in depth test regarding it, so good job on that.
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everyone knew this but it is still a good demonstration and good op, it makes no sense to show a decreased apm.
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Known to people or not, i have always believed Blizzard implemented APM in a wrong way. If a game is played at "Faster" speed, APM be interpreted in terms of Faster speed, not Normal. Calculating apm based on a magic number called ingame minutes is just plain dumb. This shouldnt be too much of a fix, and would reflect the true meaning of APM.
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On March 24 2011 06:07 FLuE wrote:
1 - Everyone knows this already.
2 - It doesn't really matter. I mean unless you are just trying to feel super good about yourself and your 80 APM is actually 110 or whatever, we are usually comparing APM's with players being measured by the same system.
So what we know - Anything 150-200 is high. Anything about 200 is really high(at least in my opinion).
If you compare 2 players and one has an APM of 150 and the other 200, the one with 200 is doing more APM. If it is actually 200 and 250 in real time it doesn't change the fact that the player at 200 is doing more and that is really all you need to know.
So does it really matter if it is exact real time or not? As long as the point of comparison is the same we get everything we need. This to me is a non-issue and something everyone already knows and is brought up often when talking about SC2 APM. Just don't compare 3rd party APM counters from BW(real time) with SC2(game time) APM because you are then comparing 2 different measurements at that point, again something we all know which is why people don't do it.
I understand that it's all relative, I agree with your point, but I would rather the APM be right instead of relative.
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So if my apm is 140... that means its really 200? Cool. I'll take it 
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I was completely unaware. Very informative OP, and hopefully this will be changed.
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Nice post, it sure explains it but indeed it was common knowledge for a long time.
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On March 24 2011 06:31 Valckrie wrote:
Nice post, it sure explains it but indeed it was common knowledge for a long time.
Yeah I'm reading now and realizing just how common knowledge this was :/
Thanks for reading
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This is common knowledge, but i dont think anyone ever did a test before with an autoclicker.
we got the 30% from beta because we knew blizzard game second is 30% shorter than a real second.
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im pretty sure he ment apm in sc2 is measured at a speed faster than an actual minute thus the apm shown in sc2 is lower than the equivalent in sc:bw
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On March 24 2011 06:20 Beef Noodles wrote:So if my apm is 140... that means its really 200? Cool. I'll take it
Its the other way around
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The game time thing was known before, but obviously some people didn't know based on replies, now we have 'proof' to cite on the issue. The tests on connection speed and graphics settings were interesting. I'd like to see those same tests with your 300apm button to see if there's any difference at all for a realistic APM.
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On March 24 2011 06:42 frodoguy wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 06:20 Beef Noodles wrote:So if my apm is 140... that means its really 200? Cool. I'll take it Its the other way around
Wait what? Now I'm confused. Is the amp indicator in replays higher or lower than it is supposed to be?
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On March 24 2011 06:47 Beef Noodles wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 06:42 frodoguy wrote:On March 24 2011 06:20 Beef Noodles wrote:So if my apm is 140... that means its really 200? Cool. I'll take it Its the other way around Wait what? Now I'm confused. Is the amp indicator in replays higher or lower than it is supposed to be?
If your SC2 apm is 140, that's 140 over roughly 40 seconds, so your real apm (as in per minute) is actually 200.
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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.
On March 24 2011 06:49 chenchen wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On March 24 2011 06:47 Beef Noodles wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 06:42 frodoguy wrote:On March 24 2011 06:20 Beef Noodles wrote:So if my apm is 140... that means its really 200? Cool. I'll take it Its the other way around Wait what? Now I'm confused. Is the amp indicator in replays higher or lower than it is supposed to be? If your SC2 apm is 140, that's 140 over roughly 40 seconds, so your real apm (as in per minute) is actually 200.
You told him he was wrong, then corrected him by saying the exact same thing just so you know.
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Common knowledge refers to the fact that we all know "Real Time APM" and "Starcraft 2 APM" are different.
What he explains here, through his experiment, is where this discrepancy comes from.
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good thread; i hope blizzard takes notice and fixes this. I agree it is extreemly frustrating.
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I thought I was just a bit slow
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I've never seen the explanation before, so this was a great read. Very detailed and organized too.
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United States13896 Posts
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.
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On March 24 2011 06:03 Veratule wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 06:01 RmpL wrote:I dont want to be rude, but istn this common knowledge ? But nice test anyways I actually didn't know if it was common or not. Either way I think Blizz should fix it.
Ya, this has been common knowledge since beta, and has always annoyed me. Blizz doesnt seem to care at all.
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I think fixing the build time indicators should be more important 
Releasing patch notes and say "xxx time increased by x seconds" calculated in different speed that the actual speed we play the game at is just wrong.
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On March 24 2011 06:07 FLuE wrote:
1 - Everyone knows this already.
2 - It doesn't really matter. I mean unless you are just trying to feel super good about yourself and your 80 APM is actually 110 or whatever, we are usually comparing APM's with players being measured by the same system.
So what we know - Anything 150-200 is high. Anything about 200 is really high(at least in my opinion).
If you compare 2 players and one has an APM of 150 and the other 200, the one with 200 is doing more APM. If it is actually 200 and 250 in real time it doesn't change the fact that the player at 200 is doing more and that is really all you need to know.
So does it really matter if it is exact real time or not? As long as the point of comparison is the same we get everything we need. This to me is a non-issue and something everyone already knows and is brought up often when talking about SC2 APM. Just don't compare 3rd party APM counters from BW(real time) with SC2(game time) APM because you are then comparing 2 different measurements at that point, again something we all know which is why people don't do it.
1. Lets keep the problem because everyone knows about it. If everyone knows it's broken it's exactly like it's not.
2. It doesn't really matter. Things like comparing your APM over time correctly between two games shouldn't be done anyway and as long as the game is taking measurements incorrectly ALL the time, it's almost like it's correct some of the time!
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nice read. thx for the post! funny Ive actually looked into my apm less as time goes on. i think everyone's apm will get somewhat faster in the coming months, but i love numbers so a quick peak at sc2 gears once inna while can put some perspective in your play. thx again!
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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.
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On March 24 2011 06:47 Beef Noodles wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 06:42 frodoguy wrote:On March 24 2011 06:20 Beef Noodles wrote:So if my apm is 140... that means its really 200? Cool. I'll take it Its the other way around Wait what? Now I'm confused. Is the amp indicator in replays higher or lower than it is supposed to be?
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.
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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
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South Africa198 Posts
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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 +On March 24 2011 06:49 chenchen wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On March 24 2011 06:47 Beef Noodles wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 06:42 frodoguy wrote:On March 24 2011 06:20 Beef Noodles wrote:So if my apm is 140... that means its really 200? Cool. I'll take it Its the other way around Wait what? Now I'm confused. Is the amp indicator in replays higher or lower than it is supposed to be? If your SC2 apm is 140, that's 140 over roughly 40 seconds, so your real apm (as in per minute) is actually 200. 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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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United States12235 Posts
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).
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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.
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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"
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+ Show Spoiler +On March 24 2011 07:33 Excalibur_Z wrote:Show nested quote +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).
Hmmm...I wonder what's delaying them so much...
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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.
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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.
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It'd be nice if blizzard made the in game APM relate to actual minutes instead of game minutes.
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damn bro , sorry you did those tests. but
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Does that mean my situational 300+ APM peak with Bio micro is actually 400+ ó_Õ
Furious clicking Batman.
I wonder sometimes if they even calculated or designed the game with real-time in mind, as it would only be played on fastest, I mean man the DPS units do in this game is insane and battles are over in 5 real-time sec :S
On March 24 2011 06:59 p4NDemik wrote:
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.
I never understood why it wasn't implemented from the get go, I mean it was a standard feature on Bnet since the patch and a social event. Bnet 2.Fail is so dumbed down blerk...
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reminds me of Mario time
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I would rather see the game timer switch to "game ticks" that counts up from 0 and go on the decimal system (so instead of it saying 9:00 it would say 540). APM could instead be listed as action per 100 ticks.
This doesn't really help the problem of APM not being comparable to War3 or BW (since 1.4 is about ~85 ticks) but it does bother me that the game timer is still in minutes & seconds but at an accelerated time. A minute is a pretty standard unit of measurement and not cool to throw it out when it doesn't mean a minute.
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On March 24 2011 07:42 Leeto wrote:
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.
That's great but i didn't know about it either.
What actually doesn't help is so many people saying that sc2 players are 30% slower, which is not accurate at all.
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I don't understand how your getting lower APM with faster time, APM is supposed to be higher.
If your doing 180 actions in 60 seconds then your apm is 3 however if blizzard time were twice as fast then your blizzard APM would be half your actual APM, 1.5 in this case.
You either got the screen shots mixed up or your test is invalid. I'm 99% sure you just got the screen shots mixed up and then did your calculations based off that.
edited cuz im bad at math but still right lol
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On March 24 2011 08:29 TrainFX wrote:
I don't understand how your getting lower APM with faster time, APM is supposed to be higher.
If your doing 180 actions in 60 seconds then your apm is 3 however if blizzard time were twice as fast then you would be doing 180 actions in 30 blizzard seconds and would therefore have 6 APM.
You either got the screen shots mixed up or your test is invalid. I'm 99% sure you just got the screen shots mixed up and then did your calculations based off that.
your apm is lower recorded by blizzard because their game time is faster. This means you are only able to "fit" so many actions in their shorter minute.
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regardless of this being known since beta, this is a really nice writeup with some screenshots that clearly illustrates for those who didnt know
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Ok so if blizzards minute is 72% of an actual minute and my real APM was 180 then my blizzard APM 129.6
I still don't understand how he is getting lower actual APM when the game time is faster.
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APM really is not that important to patch it =/ effects nothing really
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TrainFX, you are going in reverse. You do not calculate it by multiplying your "real APM" by 72%.
A starcraft2 minute is not 60 real seconds because it's faster. A starcraft 2 minute is roughly ~43 real seconds. That gives you only 43 real seconds to do however many actions you do. Same number of actions, less time to do it in.
Starcraft1APM / 1.39 = Starcraft2APM
Starcraft 2 APM * 1.39 = Starcraft1APM
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March 2nd, 2010: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=113568¤tpage=8#151
Kinda funny that I posted that in the Tips and Tricks thread since I didn't think it deserved its own thread. Since then, we've had a dozen threads about it...
Blizzard really should have made the game speeds "normal, slow, slower, slowest" instead of what we have now. It's counter-intuitive that the game clock, build times, and the entire replay/spectator interface is not based on real time.
EDIT: Oh yeah, what was really funny is that back then, normal speed didn't even exist in replays. The game stats were normalized to a speed you couldn't even select. At least they fixed that, haha.
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On March 24 2011 08:51 mockturtle wrote:
TrainFX, you are going in reverse. You do not calculate it by multiplying your "real APM" by 72%.
A starcraft2 minute is not 60 real seconds because it's faster. A starcraft 2 minute is roughly ~43 real seconds. That gives you only 43 real seconds to do however many actions you do. Same number of actions, less time to do it in.
Starcraft1APM / 1.39 = Starcraft2APM
Starcraft 2 APM * 1.39 = Starcraft1APM
Your agreeing with what I am saying...
I can go in reverse if I'm using the reverse number lol.
If sc1 APM = real APM then in SC2 your real APM is higher than what SC2 says it is.
so I'll go forwards this time just so you can see.
If my sc2 apm is 129.6 and my real apm is 129.6*1.39 then my actual APM is 180.144 and not 72% of 129.6...
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I think it was common knowledge that the time conversion from normal to faster was ~0.72, but I'd never seen it tested with APM like this. Nice initiative, even if you could have just looked it up.
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I dont see why we need to change the whole system. I like that it is relevant to game time because it makes watching a game to see what my actions are and stuff like that a lot easier.
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On March 24 2011 08:46 TrainFX wrote:
Ok so if blizzards minute is 72% of an actual minute and my real APM was 180 then my blizzard APM 129.6
I still don't understand how he is getting lower actual APM when the game time is faster.
I don't think he means actual APM is lower when the game time is faster. He states the APM recorded by SC2 is less because the minute is less. Therefore, if the minute is increased to normal (139%), then the actual APM is your SC2 APM multiplied by 1.39 (as you noticed in your later post).
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On March 24 2011 08:46 TrainFX wrote:
Ok so if blizzards minute is 72% of an actual minute and my real APM was 180 then my blizzard APM 129.6
I still don't understand how he is getting lower actual APM when the game time is faster.
Because faster game speed -> shorter game minutes -> lower APM
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yeah, i've heard this mentioned alot before, but thanks for the effort i guess :>
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Yeah IMO so many people already know this.
But then again, so many people DO NOT know this.
I think the way blizzard implemented APM is absolutely ridiculous. Just because the game is happening at a slower pace doesn't mean the person is any faster.... it makes no sense — they should be reading actions per minute, not actions per "my own little unit of time based off game speed".
Another thing that should be changed for APM measurement is repetition of the same 1 command in succession (which occurs most notably from holding down a hotkey) should be completely ignored. This is not really intended to remove APM spam per se, just to remove what isn't even really APM at all because it's holding down a button.
I am quite sure that my average APM for zerg goes up anywhere from 30 to 80 just from holding down hotkeys to build units (namely zerglings and banelings)
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On March 24 2011 09:29 GrapeD wrote:
I dont see why we need to change the whole system. I like that it is relevant to game time because it makes watching a game to see what my actions are and stuff like that a lot easier. You mean relative? Even then, WTF do you mean by "it makes watching a game to see what my actions are and stuff like that a lot easier"?
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On March 24 2011 08:29 TrainFX wrote:
I don't understand how your getting lower APM with faster time, APM is supposed to be higher.
If your doing 180 actions in 60 seconds then your apm is 3 however if blizzard time were twice as fast then your blizzard APM would be half your actual APM, 1.5 in this case.
You either got the screen shots mixed up or your test is invalid. I'm 99% sure you just got the screen shots mixed up and then did your calculations based off that.
edited cuz im bad at math but still right lol
Ummmmm
180 actions in 60 seconds is 180 APM buddy (you know, 60 seconds = 1 minute, so 180/1 = 180 APM.... It's not 180/60 as you did...). You should probably stop arguing this point because the conclusion (ie that SC2's in-game APM x ~1.39 = "Real" APM) is definitely correct.
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It's also because SC2's APM counter is different, like, it doesn't count EVERY mouseclick and keyboard stroke unlike BW's, if you right click on the ground 3 times it would count 3 times in BW, now it'll count once, unless the area you select on the ground has a different enough degree of change from the first one.
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cool story brah.
does it really matter how high your apm is?
User was temp banned for this post.
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On March 24 2011 10:25 Mykill wrote:
cool story brah.
does it really matter how high your apm is?
Wouldn't you rather the game told you the truth?
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On March 24 2011 10:25 Mykill wrote:
cool story brah.
does it really matter how high your apm is?
kind of, yes, depends how low it really is
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On March 24 2011 06:20 Beef Noodles wrote:So if my apm is 140... that means its really 200? Cool. I'll take it
of course, everyone's else is bigger also
and i am talking about APM here
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On March 24 2011 10:22 Zlasher wrote:
It's also because SC2's APM counter is different, like, it doesn't count EVERY mouseclick and keyboard stroke unlike BW's, if you right click on the ground 3 times it would count 3 times in BW, now it'll count once, unless the area you select on the ground has a different enough degree of change from the first one.
It doesn't record everything in BW.
For example placing a building is recorded as 1 action, even though you have to select the build menu, select the building and then click to place(3 button presses/clicks).
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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.
And here lies the problem with Starcraft 2.
Who was the idiot who thought the game speed we play at should be faster than real time?
It's not simple and it complicates timings for new players who have to do the math to determine how long an upgrade actually takes or how long a structure actually takes to build in real time. Why did they create an entirely new system of time instead of conforming to REAL TIME?!
It's annoying.
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For those who don't know, you can check your real time APM with replay analysis programs like sc2gear.
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On March 24 2011 10:20 Brett wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 08:29 TrainFX wrote:
I don't understand how your getting lower APM with faster time, APM is supposed to be higher.
If your doing 180 actions in 60 seconds then your apm is 3 however if blizzard time were twice as fast then your blizzard APM would be half your actual APM, 1.5 in this case.
You either got the screen shots mixed up or your test is invalid. I'm 99% sure you just got the screen shots mixed up and then did your calculations based off that.
edited cuz im bad at math but still right lol Ummmmm 180 actions in 60 seconds is 180 APM buddy (you know, 60 seconds = 1 minute, so 180/1 = 180 APM.... It's not 180/60 as you did...). You should probably stop arguing this point because the conclusion (ie that SC2's in-game APM x ~1.39 = "Real" APM) is definitely correct.
lol I guess I misread the OP and am just arguing against myself.
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On March 24 2011 10:25 Mykill wrote:
cool story brah.
does it really matter how high your apm is?
User was temp banned for this post.
Matters and a lot, why would someone even ask that.
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Good work bro very insightful.
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people say: Actions Per Minute
blizzard says: Actions Per ingameMinute
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mmh. ok, funnily enough my sc2 apm is higher than my BW apm. So, did I get faster lol.
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nice testing, but people should stop obsessing so much over apm... i can play with like sc2 apm of about 100 but that doesnt make me play better at all... somehow people have gotten into their heads that skill is determined by how fast you can smash your keyboard... very weird...
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I've never understood why Blizzard didn't just fix this. What's even the point of showing people's APM when it's not actually actions per minute, but some other completely arbitrary measurement that nobody can relate to?
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Who was the idiot who thought the game speed we play at should be faster than real time?
It's not simple and it complicates timings for new players who have to do the math to determine how long an upgrade actually takes or how long a structure actually takes to build in real time. Why did they create an entirely new system of time instead of conforming to REAL TIME?!
I've already gone through this in another thread, but I'll do it one more time.
First, I'm not saying I agree with how they did it, or that it is done this way is good. Just explaining why, and the reason at this point issues would exist changing it.
To begin, the original intention when SC2 was designed was not to be played at faster speed, but the normal speed. SC was originally played at normal speed on ladder not faster as well. The players have decided faster speed was the preferred speed however at that point, I believe they were far enough into the production process that to make "faster" = normal, and normal "less faster" would be confusing. Normal is the baseline for which the game works off of. There are still people out there that play the game at normal speed that want to play at that speed(single player mostly).
So for simplicity reasons, the way they designed SC2 when changing speeds was not to change the build times, move speeds, attack speeds, of all units/buildings in the game. Instead, they simply speed up or reduce the speed of a second. Essentially taking the easy way out. It is much easier to keep a zealot at 35 second build time, and make a second go faster, than it is to make a zealot build in 31 seconds, and have a second stay constant. This is also important for watching and working with replays as well.
Something in the equation needed to stay constant, it was either all the unit attributes/times, or the rate of a second. One requires changing 1 thing, the other requires changing everything else.
Once they decided normal would be the baseline where time was 1:1 second to real time ratio it was to late to make Faster that 1:1 real time ratio. To make those changes now would open up a weird can of worms for players to adapt to.
Some people have suggested well why not just make the in game clock be normal seconds but just let everything else stay as is? Or APM work off a normal minute? Well then you are starting to change individual variables, and that would actually be more confusing to some extent(although the APM thing to a lesser degree). Like you wouldn't want the in game clock counting normal seconds, your upgrade saying it has 60 seconds left, but actually be counting up faster than the in game clock.
If they change it now to make the "faster" time work at a 1:1 time ratio they would basically be reprograming the timings of the entire game. Everything would be thrown off, you'd have to go back and rebalance the relationships between all the units, their build times, and they move/attack speeds.
tl;dr - Since they decided normal was the baseline we are working off of, since most of us play at faster we are stuck right now. And trying to change it would actually throw off a lot of timings, since we've all pretty much adapted to playing the game by the faster blizzard second, than a normal second to the point where nobody really thinks about it anymore.
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On March 24 2011 10:42 Veratule wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 10:25 Mykill wrote:
cool story brah.
does it really matter how high your apm is? Wouldn't you rather the game told you the truth?
I agree with you, they should make it based on real time, not game time.
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I remember day9 telling this to Dustin Browder something like halfway into the beta, so they've known about it for a while.
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I think it should be based on game time. It makes replays and such way less confusing. This way it can be recorded by a replay without the replay knowing which speed the game was in. If you watched the replay at speed x4 would you want all the APM to shoot up with it?
I actually thought this was common knowledge though.
Seriously, what matters is the speed of your clicks and such relative to the game, not some arbitrary counter of a "minute."
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Nice post! I remember when AhhBoxxah aka NrGMihai all-killed EG he had like almost 300 average apm in every match. Versus Machine he had like 297 so thats little bit over 400? Thats sick..
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Quality, over quantity. APM is such an arbitrary number, and I'll never understand why people have ever even bothered to measure it.
There's only one measurement that matters, and that's your win count.
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I believe it was Artosis who said that APM measure by SC2 is around 30% lower than in BW. Hearing that, I figured that maybe it was because SC2 doesn't require as much APM to be successful as is needed for Brood War pros, and I left it at that.
So basically, you're bored and don't know what to do, you didn't get something that everyone knows so you go on doing basic mathematics ?
I'm sorry but two sentence became four pages of my screen and all your day.
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Oh, I never knew this before hand. So this is the reason why my apm seems to always be lower when I play SC2 as compared to when I play BW.
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On March 24 2011 23:32 zvolim wrote:Show nested quote +I believe it was Artosis who said that APM measure by SC2 is around 30% lower than in BW. Hearing that, I figured that maybe it was because SC2 doesn't require as much APM to be successful as is needed for Brood War pros, and I left it at that. So basically, you're bored and don't know what to do, you didn't get something that everyone knows so you go on doing basic mathematics ? I'm sorry but two sentence became four pages of my screen and all your day.
Took me about 30 mins to test everything, another 15 to post...
Second, I had left it at that until I wanted to see just how high I could actually get my APM just for the sake of it.
I reached 1908 APM without any macros, just by spamming across 8 keys. When I went to test macros for higher speeds, I came across this problem of game-speed altering APM rate.
You don't need to change the speed of the game timer to calculate APM, just have a second (hidden) clock that measures times on a real-time basis to measure APM. It's really not that hard, and your condescension isn't appreciated by anyone interested in having an APM that gives a real APM rating (which appears to be a good number of people).
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On March 24 2011 10:22 Zlasher wrote:
It's also because SC2's APM counter is different, like, it doesn't count EVERY mouseclick and keyboard stroke unlike BW's, if you right click on the ground 3 times it would count 3 times in BW, now it'll count once, unless the area you select on the ground has a different enough degree of change from the first one.
Thank god! Finally someone got it right!! So let's summarize:
Not only is SC2-APM 1.39 x less than BW-APM due to the faster game speed - but ALSO in SC2 some actions are counted as only one action that were counted as separate actions in BW, e.g. if you hit a key repeatedly, in BW these key strokes were counted as separate actions whereas in SC2 they are counted as only one action. This leads to an even lower SC2-APM as compared to BW-APM! (so it's even more than 1.39x !)
I'm so tired of all this "BW is for Gosu - SC2 is for Chobo - as reflected by the lower APM needed in SC2" babble. This is pure BS! The difference is fully accounted for by the faster game speed and the aforementioned difference in APM-measurement!
And btw, the reasoning is entirely flawed as well: So SC2 needs less actions to do this and that - but WHY would anyone go and relax and play slower??? Of course, everybody plays at the same "real" speed (read "capabilities") as they did in BW only NOW they have more control over the game!
Can I get a witness?!
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Canada11322 Posts
Yeah, knew about this from Beta. But what I don't understand is why it hasn't been changed. I seem to recall that Browder was made aware of it, but why hasn't it changed? It's obviously not the biggest deal in the world, but it can't be that hard to correct. And why call it Action's Per Minute, when it is actually not?
Could call it APBM I guess (Action's Per Blizzard Minute).
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You completely butchered the data. In the first picture it is at 0:11, the second is at 0:14. Additionally, you are using the instantaneous APM. However, this does not mean the APM is relative at all - the data proves nothing.
However, if you used the same time period for the APM then you could actually prove something.
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On April 04 2011 04:21 Peterblue wrote:
You completely butchered the data. In the first picture it is at 0:11, the second is at 0:14. Additionally, you are using the instantaneous APM. However, this does not mean the APM is relative at all - the data proves nothing.
However, if you used the same time period for the APM then you could actually prove something.
Lol, you should read more carefully.
The games were played at different speeds, so the in game clocks ran at different rates.
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I have 50 bliz and 70 REAL apm, without any spamming at all...my goal is to get it to 120 real 85 bliz apm.
So 2 real actions per real minute without spamming is my short/medium term goal...
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EPT
