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Comment by rfnslyr | Hacker News Reader

Top 100 world ranked grand master here. The amount of time I have poured into this game is absolutely unreal, I could have probably raised a family of 5 in the time I spent playing StarCraft.

I found myself better at a lot of games after being so intense in SCII. Co-ordination, decision making, a better understanding of strategy, all improved. I got better at Chess, was able to pick things up quicker.

Great experience but I'm too burnt out to keep going in SC2. It got so hard you had to treat it like a job.

The thing about SCII competitive is, once you seriously get competitive, every single game you play is such an absolute mental drain. I used to have to do pushups / run a few KM before a few games. I had to mentally prepare myself for every single game.

Once you play at top competitive tier in SC2, every other game is honestly a joke (videogames, not boardgames). What other games REQUIRE you to have 300APM? None, that's how many.

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SC2 does not require you to have 300 APM. Maximizing APM is to SC2/BW as pre-optimizations are to programming in my opinion.

I do agree with the rest of your points though. I never got much into SC2 (became #1 in my Diamond league within the first month of the game being out) as it lacks several playability characteristics that the first SC had. I played BW for about 8 years and went to several tournaments and was B or better in a few early WGTour seasons.

I have kept in touch with some of the other top players from my time and it is interesting to see a lot of us have moved onto things where skills we gained from playing BW definitely translate. Finance, poker and programming seem to be a common theme among most of us.

I have to respectfully disagree. When you get into the upper top X of world player, you won't find many without a high APM.

A lot of that 300 APM is from the early stages of the game where people are spamming actions like crazy. As the game goes on the average tends to come down. I do envy the players that are able to maintain 220+ in big battles though, but I only envy them if they're microing well and queueing units at the same time.

Actually no, the beginning APM isn't long enough to have a lasting impact on the next 30 minutes of the game. I have around 250 constant, no spam. Once you master hotkeys and mechanics it's second nature.

It's like how when we see a piano player playing at like 500 APM. She can just hit the chords and it will still sound beautiful. That's not the point though. While you can still execute strategy at a lower APM, that extra APM helps to execute it on a new level.

Am I making any sense? I feel like I'm not lol.

All the top guys in SC I'd heard of had APM in the high 200s at least.

Maximizing APM is more like agility drills in football: a basic foundational skill whose lack will prevent you from executing even if you have a great meta game.

Yes, unless you specialize in cheesy builds, you have to have a great APM. I think there used to be at least 2 GMs in WoL who were just cannon rushing or 6pooling every game with 100 or so APM.

Yeah that was me, sorry. I tried, for fun, to cheese my way into GM and it's entirely possible.

For us non-StarCraft players, what is a "cheesy build"? <:)

It's cheesy cause it "smells" :) If enemy is scouting on time he will notice your cheese and if he reacts properly he is almost guaranteed to win no matter what. But many people don't scout (or don't understand what they see even when they scout) and then cheesy strategy is easy win.

It's usually very gimmicky strategy - for example building your barracks near enemy base at the start of the game and pumping army instead of workers, or attacking with your soldiers AND workers before opponent has army to defend.

Most players look down on cheese, cause it's much easier than to play a regular ("macro") game - you only need to learn a few first minutes of game and then either you won or you lost, you don't need to react to enemy, and you don't need to multitask much (you have few units and only one base at the beginning of the game).

On the other hand people say that cheese keeps others "honest" - people often play greedy (skip scouting and defense to get economy faster) and cheese punish that.

In tournaments when players play each other a few times choosing to cheese or not is another level of metagame.

Interesting how different strategies within the same set of rules are looked down on. Thanks for the explanation.

Anything extensively on 1base when you should be on 2base. If 1basing, your limited resources all go towards one attack, or one attack with a small follow up.

If you defend against it, you pretty much win as they sunk all their resources into early low tier army, instead of economic balanced expansion.

To cpeterso: (HN has a reply depth limit) A cheesy build has a couple definitions depending on who you are, but it generally refers to an "all or nothing" style build that usually depends on a gimmick that goes undetected.

For example, one race of Starcraft has early access to a building that can fire upon enemies. If they can build these building strategically near an enemy's base without the enemy noticing, they can effectively box an enemy in, preventing them from expanding or attack until they commit a large enough force to destroy those buildings.

The same race in Starcraft can build permanently cloaked units that can only be detected with an "observer" class unit/building. If you can obtain the requirements for building said cloaked units without your opponent noticing and then build a few, you can send in these invisible units to damage your opponent until they have the proper response.

Basically, it's a strategy that can be overwhelming if it works, but it has a few tells and being discovered committing one of these strategies early enough is basically a loss.

> Once you play at top competitive tier in SC2, every other game is honestly a joke (videogames, not boardgames). What other games REQUIRE you to have 300APM? None, that's how many.

There are plenty of other highly competitive games that are just as difficult as Starcraft, but in different ways.

Dota 2 and Counter-strike are highly team-focused games. You need a crazy amount of teamwork and strategy to compete at high levels.

Quake is a game that requires a godly amount of spatial awareness and ultra-precise twitch precision. Most shots made in the game are faster than the limits of human reaction time to visual stimulus. They are possible because they are responding not only to visual stimulus, but to intuition. Cues like footstep sounds, knowledge of the map, thinking in the mind of your opponent, are all enough information to deduce where exactly to shoot your gun.

Imagine being given 50 milliseconds to click exactly on a single flashing pixel on your screen. People make those type of shots all the time in top-level Quake matches.

Here is a video of a compilation of clips of the two best Bulgarian Quake CPMA players fighting other players, and each other, in 1vs1 matches: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q76UNcuKSVY

Most of the shots are made before the enemy is even visible on the screen! And the railgun shots at 1:10 and 3:12 are examples of those one-pixel hits. Not to mention their mastery of the difficult movement system gives them added speed and agility.

Wow. I got completely addicted to SC2, and I never even approached competitive levels before I realized that it was JUST TOO MUCH for a hobby. It ceased being relaxing or even fun, and turned into all out, balls to the walls competition. The day I found myself practicing keyboard commands to get my APM up is the day I decided that I needed to do something that was more physical fitness oriented if I was going to risk injury (RSM is a big deal in SC2).

I think you hit the nail on the head though: SC2 is of course a strategy game, but the real-time aspect of it makes the speed with which a player can chain together commands and movements much more important than the overall strategy. A well executed yet poorly chosen strategy will often defeat a poorly executed yet well chosen strategy.

>A well executed yet poorly chosen strategy will often defeat a poorly executed yet well chosen strategy.

The absolute BANE of my early SC2 Days. Kept questioning and getting discouraged by strategy until I realized my problem was literally just mechanics.

>Once you play at top competitive tier in SC2, every other game is honestly a joke.

You could say this about top-level play for a lot of games. You just happen to prefer SC2.

I play competitive Counterstrike:GO. People often think that FPS games are simple, just a bunch of people running around trying to shoot each other in the face. That's like saying a game like SC2 is about gathering resources, building bases, and raising armies. It isn't entirely inaccurate, but it's definitely an oversimplification.

There is actually quite a bit of strategic depth to games like Counterstrike, and being able to shoot accurately is less important than knowing what you are supposed to do in any specific situation.

Can you email me your Steam username? I'd love to get a solid team of 5's in CS. I'm super serious if the other four are serious.

I play competitively, but I'm not top 100 caliber or anything, though I was pretty close as a teenager. I normally sit around Master Guardian II, which means I'm really good, but there are still quite a few people that are much better.

Can you tell me your Steam username? I'd love to get a solid team of 5's in CS. I'm super serious if the other four are serious.

> What other games REQUIRE you to have 300APM

sort of tangential point here, but this usage of 'require' is exactly why I dropped starcraft 2 and possibly will never come back. When a game stops being a game and starts being a... work, it loses all the fun.

Back in the days of WoL I toyed with the idea of playing with less APM and winning with more strategy, like pincer-attacks or enclosure; it worked up till Diamonds but when I found myself training for some micro, I knew it was time to give it up.

I'm still looking forward for the LoV, but probably will only play the single campaign and quit.

EDIT: I still fancy a competitive games against my friends, but that's a completely different story.

I play probably 4 or 5 ladder games a week - I slowly have improved (although moving last month made my ability drop noticeably), and I'm investing about as much time per week as watching a movie each week.

Then again, I'm in Gold and happy to stay there. The ladder system seems to do a good job of putting me up against reasonable opponents.

> When a game stops being a game and starts being a... work, it loses all the fun.

Unless your only aspiration was to play professionally, this isn't a reason to stop you, and even the professionals don't need 300 apm (and many don't have it). I was pretty comfortable playing Terran in Diamond league in North America (I stopped playing about 6 months ago) with 90-100 apm, and I never specifically worked on increasing my apm.

Around 50% of the games I play, are micro practice. There are a lot of tiny mechanics, that when worked into real games and executed flawlessly, put you ahead.

For example, spent a few weeks trying to defeat the 30 level terran baneling micro map. I got to a point where I was able to get to the near end every single time I played. Then I tried working it into real games. It took a bit of practice but now I have near perfect marine splitting micro which puts me ahead of a lot of players.

Then dropship/heal micro. Worker fighting micro and tricks.

SC2 is so much more than just strategy, so many tiny little unit tricks to do. If you nail the mechanics and you're also decent in strategy you will make it so far.

>when I found myself training for some micro, I knew it was time to give it up.

What why? It's just another facet of the game. 50% mechanics 50% strategy.

At the upper echelons of SC2 it's less about builds and micro, but more of knowing who you are playing. I play the same people over and over again for the past 4 years. I know what works with some players, I know what doesn't with others. Strategy migrates into pure mind game play.

You don't need to be a top player to enjoy the game and take full advantage of it in terms of exercise. I switched to play on a MBP laptop (no Fs, no camera hotkeys, general crippled feel). In a way this was my excuse to myself for losing at high levels. And it was fine. You can make peace with it in a few days and after that it was pure joy.

I often think about SC problems and apply a lot of these thoughts in real world work problems. For example imagine you have all the ladder data from the servers like all build orders or replays of the games ever. How would you estimate if the game is balanced between the races? Thinking about problems like this gave me enough experience to tackle some jobs that used to be way outside my field.

What do you mean by "world ranked grand master"? What region do you play on?

Maybe something like: http://www.sc2ranks.com/

They attempt to rank across regions - not familiar enough with their ( / SC2's) ranking system to know how reasonable it is.

Top 100 global highest ranked players on sc2ranks.com. I'm top 15 in NA.

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