You are completely wrong. There are diamond players with 300 apm. What they do is simply switching between binds all the time. Some of them even forget key buildings or do wrong movements, because all they focus on is switching binds to look, like they are good with 300 apm. APM is not the measure of how good you are. As GM player with 180 apm will be much better than 300 apm diamond player. It is really weird that a player like you doesn’t know how many people spam actions to have high apm.
Your statistics? Well, they don’t prove anything, as I watched a terran streamer with <100 apm in diamond. (90 + 300) / 2 = 180. I think you get the idea.
APM is more a measurement of how efficient you are with hot keys. For example I don’t use camera locations and I set my production to 7 8 and 9. That lowers my apm.
I agree with you but what you said is true mostly for WOL/HOTS (sadly). LOTV took strategical aspect nearly completely from the game and now SC2 is almost about how fast you can click. Strategy really plays minor role. Every game looks the same, the only strategy in current meta is how you open in a specific match up. The rest is just hardcore “carpal tunnel” stuff where pros are literally breaking their wrists to get maximum efficiency out of their units.
yes we all have seen players spamming apm for nothing. but i think most players play without the thought of pushing apm up unnecessarily.
statistical outliers.
Well I’m past the point of arguing with anyone but usually with battlecruisers or carriers my APM is only like 20-30 and I still win like 50% of my games. I even won 9 games in a row one time with my APM in the low 20’s. And with my APM in like 20-30 I’m often beating the teams that have apms with like 100+ APM and still getting a high amount of kills and often times the most kills! I just REALLY think that there’s not that much stuff to do??? Maybe I just have a different approach? IDK I just don’t think it’s fair to criticize my extremely low APM when I’m still winning games and doing my part. I’m not even super good at this game but I feel kind of good for having low APM and still holding my own!! Can’t stand cheese rushes though lol.
APM and MMR are so tightly correlated that APM can be fitted to MMR but will deviate at most +/- 26 APM in 95% of cases. In 99.7% of cases it will deviate no more than +/- 39 APM.
APM is equivalent to skill. That’s reality.
Why, because you said so? This isn’t the APM value after a game. This is their average APM value as a player across all their games. A player in diamond will have an average of 130.33 and the standard deviation for APM is roughly 13. In order to reach 300 APM, you’d need a player (300-130.33)/13=13 standard deviations from the mean. That means a diamond league player with 300 average APM will occur once in every trillion players. In other words, they don’t exist.
They have a hard time understanding what a natural distribution looks like compared to a manipulated one. IF players spammed to any significant degree, the APM distributions found in replays would look like this:
https://i.imgur.com/RidFDU4.png
This is called a “camel back” distribution. That’s because there is the natural distribution of APM that comes from playing the game superimposed on top of a secondary distribution of APM for spam. We can detect if there is APM spam, in other words. But, those “camel back” patterns don’t exist in the APM distributions available from Blizzard’s replay interface (AI researchers can mass-download replays through it). Some APM distributions are available in the AlphaStar paper (for example) and they don’t show a “camelback” distribution. APM spam doesn’t exist.
The idea that APM spam exists to any significant degree is simply totally false.
My apm at end screen correlates near perfectly to the platinum level in that chart across all three races I play, this is also about where I estimate the bulk of my opponents to be rated normally. However I am an unranked player and my peak apms ingame are not too much different from the unranked level in the chart.
I watch a lot of replays from my allies viewpoint and sure enough there is APM spam, players do it more often in the higher ranks or on a barcode account but what I mean here by spam is such: Switching meaninglessly and repetitively between control groups, or spamming commands on ground before the final command. Some level of this is intentional to see what is in the groups/to have greater precision, but as much as I like to try lately to speed mine at the start of the game for every time I slow down my worker instead of speed it up I lost efficiency a bot would otherwise have. You are not bots.
I dare you to build anything else and try to win with 20 apm. I love when people mention Winter’s APM challenge and miss the entire point about it being a challenge to play with less apm.
BC and especially carrier builds don’t take many actions to control, especially the carriers. Having an effective micro on the units doesn’t have to mean clicking all over the place. Even with hydras my APM is in the 30’s and I still win often… I just don’t understand why people think they need to work up a sweat clicking all over the place and smashing buttons. People need to just relax and enjoy the game. Heh.
That’s a totally useless metric. The average APM for a player across all games is tightly correlated to MMR. Individual games will vary. That’s like saying “oh it’s raining here therefore it’s raining everywhere.” That’s called a hasty generalization fallacy:
Hasty Generalization
Description: Drawing a conclusion based on a small sample size, rather than looking at statistics that are much more in line with the typical or average situation.
Even if there is only 1 guy in diamond with 300 apm, it does not change anything in my statement. Because my statement is: “APM matters only up to specific point and after that point, it has no impact on player performance”, what is contradiction to your statement:
I am one of those guys, because I like blink stalkers, so in all my games I have at least 200 APM and in some of my games I have the APM above 300. According to your stats, average APM for protoss in masters is 175. But sc2 shows 239 APM for me, across all my thousands of games.
So your argumentation already does not work in my case. But mine works still, because according to your stats, most of the protoss players are able to be in masters with 175 APM. This means, that to be in masters as protoss you don’t need more than 175 apm, which is the skill limit and everything above is just nonsense spam ⇔ “APM matters only up to specific point and after that point, it has no impact on player performance”
Just because sometimes I spam some buttons, I will not be GM.
You are Protoss. 75 APM is low
But I have a better idea, if your EPM is also that low (APM > EPM because APM includes more actions) and your opponent’s EPM is say 150. you are a low APMer Protoss. Basically a typical Protoss. A Protoss Plat Patrol
Keep in mind that pro players EPM is also like 200…
THIS IS A STRATEGY GAME, the effective strategy is more important than how fast you click click click
I have played modern warefare strategy games like you are some commander and tactical play. (like Heroes of might and magic and some RTS). Frankly, that slow pace bores me to hell. I’m glad SC2, Warcraft 3 are actually are where CLICK CLICK matters. In the other games some units cant die if they hide behind tactical defenses like destructible or environment props… and overall is slow battle pace
Yes, it is. It’s a real time video game for crying out loud. How fast you play is going to strongly affect the outcome of the game and the data proves that overwhelmingly. Yet here you are still saying otherwise with no counter argument and no data to support your conclusion. That’s frankly delusional. This conversation is a waste of time. If I wanted to hear flat-earth nonsense I would’ve given the flat-earth society a ring.
Delusional is bringing the real APM data from Alphastar into the topic, where people talk about the IN-GAME APM, which as you said is a different thing. Delusional is to first bring the argument that the APM is being used differently by bronze and gm’s https://i.imgur.com/lKowzyx.png , and then keep saying that the higher APM is, the better, even if the picture shows that APM can be used differently and the same apm does not result in the same skill (your own picture). Delusional is to say, that there are no APM spammers. And the most stupid thing you can do is to provide a paint pictures with no single link and call it a data or a proof.