APM measurements changes in 1.4.0 - Page 41

On September 27 2011 23:40 ZarMulix wrote:


I agree with most of this. I see that the main argument against the new APM calculation is that certain actions taken by players is not "spamming," and that these count as actions too because a player will perform them more often when they're playing better.

But I think we should take a step back and analyze what your goals are as a player, and what function tapping performs.

If you were to be the perfect player, you would have perfect macro with your build; that is, you would always produce with the maximum efficiency that the strategy you're implemented has allowed for. If your build was one barracks all game long, and that one barracks produced a marine every 15 seconds over the course of a 10 min game, you would have produced a marine 40 times. You would have selected your barracks 40 times, and 80 overall APM would have gone towards marine production.

A player that has difficulty remembering when to produce marines or if they were producing one in the first place (amidst the chaos, horrible memory, horrible timing, etc) would probably randomly tap his barracks to look at it a few times.
This means that a player that's worse at remembering to do stuff will have higher APM. The player that's better at remembering will have lower APM. Why? Because in the end they're accomplishing the same goals. Macrowise they're doing the same thing.

Tapping is a crutch. Some might argue that it's a necessary one, and that might be true for a while. But that doesn't change what tapping accomplishes. Which is absolutely nothing unless you don't have perfect timings.

Perfection in this game is what we're trying to reach. What this current APM calculation does is show us how much is being done in game. Yes, this is not how much YOU are doing. But this is irrelevant to the game. What matters is how much you get done, not how inefficient you are at doing the same thing your opponent is. If a zerg double taps his queens twice in an injection cycle, that's wasted time that zerg could be using to scout, attack, micro, etc. A better zerg will be accomplishing more and double tapping at the exact moment they need to inject.

Remember when the game first came out and everyone had shitty injects? Now it's pretty normal for my lower leagued friends to have perfect injects up until at least the 12 min mark. Pros are obviously way better.

This APM indication is not punishing anyone unless you care about a statistic that actually shows how inefficient you are. The argument that multiple clicking raises this APM is silly, because you know that not only is this difficult to implement but mass clicking has its own punishment. You can only click on your screen. Mass clicking is a waste of time and vision (not factoring in minimap vision here, it's sometimes the only thing needed, other times it's not useful - scouting etc).

So yes, now you see players with decent macro have APM closer to pros, and you have people with subpar macro drop significantly in APM. You have players who have decent macro but did a lot of double, triple, infinite checking to keep that up have APM similar to someone with decent timings and equivalent macro.

I don't see how this is a bad thing.

On September 27 2011 10:12 Joey Wheeler wrote:

That probably means you use one control group for your army

Also, I'd like to see what pros think about this. Many of the people that used the poll could possibly be in lower leagues so it's indifferent to them.

On September 29 2011 04:18 Sein wrote:


Last night's SOTG seemed to suggest that most of the pros really hate this change. At least there was an unanimous consensus among Inc, Tyler, Day9, and Artosis.

On September 29 2011 04:27 arsenic wrote:
APM stands for Actions per Minute. If you remove actions or filter actions from that calculation, it is no longer an accurate measure of APM. In addition, it is a per Minute calculation, something that is defined by the entire world, yet for some reason APM is based on some silly Blizzard minute due to the way they programmed the clock to work in 'Normal' mode which no one seriously plays at anyways. I really don't understand why Blizzard feels it is necessary to stick their fingers into what is already clearly defined in the acronym itself - "APM = Actions Per Minute".

If they want to do what they are doing, they can create some other measure, 'EAPM' or 'Blizzard APM' or something along those lines where they try to filter stuff out but to go and change an APM standard that's been in place since BW... it's just silly.

On September 29 2011 05:38 RevoNinja wrote:
spamming isnt only for apm it also keeps your hands warm so there not all tense in the later game.

On September 29 2011 05:33 Xapti wrote:

One can say that the BW standard was silly in the first place. Just because something existed before in a certain way doesn't mean that something better doesn't exist. As you may know, EAPM was created for BW precisely because people felt it was a pretty meaningless statistic. A very good argument against an unfiltered APM is that it's not indicative of any actual motor skills or gaming skills. You can hold a hotkey down and get 1000 APM. You can spam a few buttons and get 600 APM. You can be a terrible overall player and still do it effectively. Adding filters to the actions recorded as a statistic puts much more merit to the actual statistic.

I'm not saying that a filtered APM system is overall the best way to go about things, but you certainly shouldn't be so ignorant about stuff. If EAPM is more effective than APM, there isn't much point in including the APM. Blizzard likes to keeps stats/controls/etc. simple (so much so that I find it problematic), so it's no surprise that they would just change one value to have more meaning as opposed to adding a new one.

On September 27 2011 11:59 nanaoei wrote:

i think that depends also. for 1v1 players, maybe.
lower league team-match players barely even think about looking at their own replays, that much i can tell you--such that team players blame their teammate's bad build or control, and a 1v1 player will blame luckiness or the race they're playing against.
at a certain point, a player comes away from blaming other people to saddle down and improve on their own play instead... yet i know some players who take years to do so.

On September 29 2011 04:18 Sein wrote:


Last night's SOTG seemed to suggest that most of the pros really hate this change. At least there was an unanimous consensus among Inc, Tyler, Day9, and Artosis.

On September 27 2011 23:40 ZarMulix wrote:
If you were to be the perfect player, you would have perfect macro with your build; that is, you would always produce with the maximum efficiency that the strategy you're implemented has allowed for. If your build was one barracks all game long, and that one barracks produced a marine every 15 seconds over the course of a 10 min game, you would have produced a marine 40 times. You would have selected your barracks 40 times, and 80 overall APM would have gone towards marine production.