[D] Practice Myths and Methods - Page 8

On October 08 2011 10:39 ghol wrote:
Great post, first of all. Secondly, to those who continue to harp on "playing for fun", why does this topic concern you? If you want to play for fun then do so, and leave the people who are interested in developing their SC2 skill efficiently to discuss various strategies for doing so.

Now insofar as the OP claims that the advice to "play more macro games" to really polish your macro is unhelpful advice for people who have macro woes, he is absolutely correct. As anybody who has studied the development of expertise (or has achieved expertise in a competitive/highly developed field) likely knows, deliberate practice of specific sub-skills is paramount to the attainment of the solid base of technical proficiency that is necessary for expert performance. That is, continual and attentive drilling of basic skills in a controlled environment (read: NOT the activity in its totality as it would be performed in competition) is far and away the most effective way to teach beginners a new skill-set, for intermediates to shore up weaknesses in their game and make measurable improvement, and for experts to retain the sharpness and crispness that makes them as good as they are.

I enjoy the musical analogy, but I think there is an even better one given the competitive nature of SC2. I myself have been training Muay Thai (a form of kickboxing, for those unawares) nigh on 6 years now, and the analogy seems strong. How do expert trainers in martial arts teach their students? Do they throw them into sparring every hour of every single session and say "use your punches more" if their punches are lacking speed/power/timing/accuracy? Do they greet their students and tell them to start sparring and "work on their speed"? No, and with good reason. This is the proposed equivalent of the mass-gaming-only approach. If one just "plays a lot" or "fights a lot", you will inevitably get better, but the atrocious mistakes you are constantly making unawares will become habitual over time with this sort of approach. Your sense of how to engage with a live opponent will certainly improve dramatically in this way, and so will your ability to "think on the fly", but this benefit could just as easily be attained through a more deliberate, sensible regimen that is focused primarily on the attainment of solid fundamentals before throwing one into the flames, as it were. The flames will come in training, obviously, but they ought to be kept at bay until the player has some notion of what they should and should not be doing, and what they need to focus on, whether this or that is good/bad execution of some action, etc, etc.

Professional boxers still drill the jab and the cross every single training session. The majority of their training is typically not sparring with live opponents. Rather, it is a far more controlled and focused drilling of various sub-skills such as different combinations of punches, footwork, head movement, and so forth. There are few if any long-lived, well-developed competitive activities that are not approached in this fashion. Music, football, basketball, boxing, MMA, golf, wrestling, Muay Thai, and even activities like chess are trained in this fashion because, quite simply, it is far and away the most effective approach for improving quickly and avoiding the pitfalls of habituating bad/inefficient technique.

Why has it not seeped in SC2, then? Well, primarily because eSports is very young in the grand scheme of things, and this sort of wisdom has yet to work its way in except perhaps in small portions of the professional community. What is and is not efficient/appropriate technique has not yet been deeply explored and laid out by long decades of competition and thought on the subject. This will change with time, and more and more the training that a would-be professional gamer, or just plain old professional gamer receives will come to resemble in many respects the same broad kind of training structure that so many other, more developed skill-oriented activities already have.

Mass gaming has its place, undoubtedly. Just as a fighter who never spars is never going to be very good a SC2 gamer that never actually plays competitive 1v1 is not going to be very good either, regardless of much deliberate practice of sub-skills they engage in. However, focusing on mass gaming only, at any level of skill is a mistake. Once you stop drilling the fundamentals, even as a professional, progress will be slowed, halted, or even somewhat reversed on the many sub-skills that are now only receiving attention in-game. The key is balancing actual practice with the sort of precise, controlled practice that will shore up and make efficient different portions of the competitor's play.

Interestingly, the only place in the SC2 world where this sort of thing is occurring to any appreciable extent is Korea. Koreans have a system left over from Brood War that employs coaches who can watch over players as they play, point out certain things that they need to work on (and thus spur the focused practice of specific sub-skills that would have eluded somebody who simply "plays a lot") and so on. This practice can be as simple as playing a custom game against an AI that sits around and never attacks while focusing on some aspect of play, or it can involve specific builds or strategies with an informed practice partner. I don't think the system in Korea is at the level of a highly developed sport as of yet, but it is far better than what most foreigners have access to. This could well be a factor in the Korean superiority on average amongst the professionals.

In summary, I think the OP is largely correct in that there is a much better way to improve effectively and quickly than what is often pandered on the strategy forums. The literature on the development of expertise points in this direction as well; just doing the activity a lot is not enough when a field becomes developed and competitive enough.

Thanks if you managed to read this entire post!