SC2 skill "action latency" & "actions per minute"

General Discussion
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Serrals action: i should be going for 1:50 3 hatch (which has nothing to do with reaction time or anything; its a simple build order. build the third hatch at 1:50)

Everyone else in bronze: Maybe i should build 4 supply depots in a row with a single worker.

Serral wins after 5 minutes.

Serrals action: do 12 pool
Everybody in bronze: we dont have a unit out until 5 minutes
Serral wins in 3 minutes.

In short: you basically dont have to react to anything in this game when you play vs bronze. You can be the worst person mechanically and thinking about every step (btw you dont need to think about anything if you are serral thats why the whole argument of batzy playing with bronze latency is utter rubbish) and only playing with mouse selecting stuff but you will still beat bronze easily if you are serral. There is no way in denying that. Bronze players are bronze not because they cant spam keys on their keyboard but because they dont have any clue about what they are doing. Its like saying a five year old cant solve differential equations because he cant write. yesnt. I see your point but whats the bigger picture? Can he solve that once he knows how to write or if you just ask him to verbally solve it? NOPE.

I think every at least diamond player has:
Played with mouse only vs at least gold and won
Played only workers and won vs silver (even lategame vs bc)
Threw half eco away vs platinum and won
Built 5 expansion before a fighting unit and won vs silver.
Has worker rushed without any micro against at least gold and won.
Has planetary fortress rushed a zerg and won vs at least silver
Has played only ghosts and nuked everything and won vs silver/gold
Has placed 1 SINGLE dt in the enemy main at 10 minutes and won vs at least silver
Has played a 3v1 vs 1 platinum and 2 silvers and won.

Or was it just me having fun smurfing?
I can even continue…

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MaskedWords is Batz ? Damned, I’ve been far away for too long. I’m too innocent for these forums. XD

Jokes aside, I now understand where the mathematical knowledge come from. And the affection towards polemical opinions. ^^

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Yeah. Batzy has so many alts. He mostly doesnt even hide anymore. He doesnt care. He knows hes in the wrong but he has fun arguing lost points all day to make everyone miserable.

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Nope. They are yours just applied to a different context. You say APM isn’t efficient because people can spam and spend APM inefficiently, so I pointed out that airplanes aren’t safe because you can purposely crash them into the ground.

An unrealistic hyperbole does not represent the reality of how airplanes nor APM typically behaves.

Nope. I pointed out that it exists but that it averages out on a per league basis meaning it doesn’t contribute to the MMR distribution of the ladder. This is a very basic statistical concept. If a variable averages out before reaching the total size of the ladder, then it isn’t what causes the MMR distribution of the ladder. This is really simple stuff.

The vast majority of the skill in SC2 is measured in what league you are. As I pointed out, factors other than reaction latency come into effect in equal skill scenarios. So if there is a GM facing against a GM, then other factors impact the outcome. But what separates a GM from a Bronze is definitely the reaction speed. The mmr difference between bronze and GM is much bigger than the difference between GM and GM, so the reaction speed is definitely the vast majority of skill in SC2.

If a variable averages out on a per-league basis, then it isn’t what causes the differences between the leagues. Only variables that don’t average out could be driving the league distribution. Since APM’s correlation with league is near 1, it means there is ZERO scattering to the APM/league relationship meaning there is no other variable that hasn’t averaged out. If there were, APM/league would have scattering but it doesn’t.

Show me a player able to execute one of Byun’s famous strategies with 30 APM. If you think a player can do 3 rax reaper with 30 APM then you’re not living in reality. Strategies are designed to require high APM and to force a high APM response from your opponent and that’s typically what makes one strategy beat another. That’s why Immortals hard-counter stalkers: the APM needed to control mass blink stalker well enough to beat mass immortal is just too darn high, but AlphaStar can do it because it has the APM. Forcing mistakes from your opponent by requiring high-APM responses from them is literally the entire point of the strategy in SC2.

Exactly. The objectively better strategy depends not on the actual unit stats and how those units typically behave, but what your APM budget is, because it’s your APM budget that decides how good those units are.

Having a high APM budget is 99% of the skill in SC2.

The only reason discussing the skill mechanics of SC2 is a controversial topic is because SC2 players are egotistical. So, pointing out that the majority of the skill in the game is how fast you can click obviously will rub them the wrong way because it violates their superiority complex. I think most SC2 players wouldn’t care, but the people on these forums definitely have some mental illness issues (narcissism for example) which is what makes them so sensitive to a topic about what SC2 skill actually is.

Well sorry to burst your bubble but SC2 is a game of fast clicking and that’s about it. If that makes you mad, you might want to talk to a therapist.

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Furthermore your reaction latency is your most valuable resource in the game. It’s not minerals, it’s not gas, it’s how fast you can react to the game. 99% of the strategy in the game boils down to piling so many problems on top of your opponent that he can’t keep up and makes a mistake. This happens naturally as the game progresses, since you are forced to manage more and more infrastructure and more and more units across more and more terrain. So the game is already designed to climax until one of the two players breaks, and the players have an enormous amount of control over that process. The person with a lower reaction latency will be less likely to make mistakes and will quickly accrue a better position for himself which allows him to lean even harder onto his opponent. A strategy that minimizes your reaction stress and maximizes the reaction stress of your opponent is what makes a strategy “good”. That’s what all the strategies in SC2 boil down to.

I find it so interesting that people can find “good” strategies by mapping out which ones win and which ones don’t, while being completely unaware of the mechanics that make those strategies good. It’s like in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when they build a super computer to find the answer to everything. It finds that answer and it’s 42. But they were so baffled they had to build a second super computer to compute what the question is for that answer. This is actually highly accurate for how things work. There are some problems that are extremely complicated like chess. And you can have a computer output what the best move is, but asking it WHY that is the best move is an EXTREMELY complicated question and the answer to that is basically impossible to answer.

It goes to show how human problem solving is usually a statistical process that maps repeated trial and error to a spectrum of outcomes and that’s really all it is for most people.

That’s an excellent illustration on the differences between reaction and reflex. Although I’d make the argument that SC2 actually starts to blur the border between the two. There are times where I will need to select a group of units so I will click the minimap and then immediately box-select the region of the screen I expect them to be on based on where I clicked the minimap. What’s interesting is that when I misclick the minimap I still execute the box-select maneuver and part of the way through doing that is when I realize I misclicked. SC2 causes you to spam actions so incredibly fast that it actually reduces your brains ability to regulate impulsive thoughts. This has been measured by researchers in the “stop signal delay”. Players are given a task to do then given a stimulus that is supposed to trigger them to stop. People who play SC2 have a higher delay, meaning their conscious brain has less control over their actions. They are in a mode where the brain is queuing chains of actions as fast as it can, and to speed things up it cuts out the regulatory oversight of the conscious brain.

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You sir, are why we can’t have nice things!

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Guilty. Im only human.

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I say APM matters just as much as the way which you spend it. Efficiency which is at least partly strategy related, and which is why the player with the highest APM doesn’t always win.

That’s no hyperbole, but direct ingame examples. Alphastar has played on the ladder, the insane AI is available to whoever can start a custom game. No hypothesis here, Alphastar is superior to the regular AI despite a lower APM cap, there is no denying it.

You can keep arguing if you want though.

Why my bubble ? If SC2 players are conceited about something compared to MOBA or other type of strategy games, it’s precisely not about strategics, but about their APM. Never read players arguing how LoL could be played with 80 APM whereas SC2 could require 300 or 500 ?

I’m not among those. I’m low APM in fact, though the absence of spam makes the result lower than the opponent would suppose (at least they told me so).
If you check the post of my smurfs threads, there are screens of a 200+ APM player we’ll call “smurf OK” , super fast reacted. He was twice as fast as me, and playing at a level vastly inferior to his. So he got confident, and did not scout. Guess what ? Reacting in half a second instead of one, and boasting twice the APM of the opponent didn’t change the fact his reaper couldn’t give him the info before being produced and crossing the map. APM don’t change the fact a reaper scout will be later than an SCV one. And so, by the time he saw the problem, the marines were already at his ramp. He then made a second tactical mistake, and from there no matter the mechanical superiority, he still lost miserably. Tactics, my friend.

So yeah, past some point, APM can only do so much if you let yourself get placed into a tactical deadlock. No hyperbole either, just real ingame footage. :slight_smile:

As for the psychiatric accusations, can’t you just debate normally ? We’re just sharing thoughts here, there’s no hot balance considerations, no one’s honor at stake. I didn’t even know who you were at the start of this debate, and I’m not particularly hostile to you. Why would your argumentations require ad hominem in the first place ?

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:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

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Here you are making my argument for me, while thinking you are disproving it. Someone is playing faster, with a faster scout, and the faster scout beats the slower scout, and this is supposed to disprove the fact that playing faster is the majority of the strategy in SC2? Truly an argument made by the Gods.

But you fail to demonstrate that there is any difference between how players tend to spend it. Pointing to the SC2 “hard” AI is an example of how far you have to stretch to find any example where APM is spent inefficiently (see note #1).

I have said this a hundred times. IF there were some other factor, other than APM, there would be significant scattering between the APM/league correlation. APM/League has a near 1:1 correlation and no scattering exists. Whatever you are imagining has no bearing on the distribution of the leagues. On an individual basis there is scattering between the MMR/APM correlation. At most APM correlates at about 0.65 on an individual level, which still means it’s majority of skill but other factors play a much bigger role on a small, localized scale. My argument is not addressing the localized scale and never has. The majority of skill is in the grand scale and on that scale APM is definitely the driving force that separates a bronze from a gm.

Note #1: I am letting you attack a weaker version of my argument. My argument does not rely on APM being spent efficiently since ANY management of units is better than no management so a player that spends APM inefficiently will still be better off than a player whose APM budget falls short and his units behave according to their default behaviour, which usually results in something to the effect of a few banelings killing 50 marines. My argument is not contingent on APM efficiency.

Those aren’t direct in game examples. You had to turn to the SC2 AI to make your case that APM isn’t spent efficiently while completely ignoring all the data in the charts listed above that prove that AI you are citing does not behave like a typical human player in the slightest. So yes you are using a hyperbolic argument and making sweeping generalizations from niche case scenarios in contradiction to the available evidence. So when your “argument” hinges on ignoring all human data and citing an AI as proof of how humans behave all I can do is face palm.

Yes, you can crash an airplane into a mountain if you wanted to. No, that is not typically how airplanes behave. Yes, you can spam useless apm. No, that is not how apm is typically spent.

They’re not accusations. If you decide to put yourself into that box is entirely your choice. Either you can have a rational conversation about the facts or you can keep thumping your chest like an ape about the SC2 hard ai.

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See any KingCobra game (even PvP) where he with half APM trades in 200-400% better than his opponent.
Every BS that you spew is rejected by his games.
APM is a stupid metrics because without judgement and game-sense all the 300-500APM of your GSL Player is irrelevant.
Take that game of Zest where he instead of immediately killing the Nydus-Worm, decided to deal with …2-3 Lurkers, precisely because he decided to do one thing (the foolish thing) he lost the game.
After the fateful mistake, no amount of APM (Zest has APM to sell) would change the result.
He lost.

As Trias said: APM and the way one spend the APM is what matters.
I tend to go even further: The way one spends the APM is what’s matters.

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Usually high level lol players have at least 150 apm, 80 is little more than 1 click a second.

Secondly, they do complain, although they don’t usually reference apm, instead referencing mechanical requirements. One example is the support role in lol which is agreed upon by most high level players to be the easiest because it’s the least mechanically intensive. This is something that has been complained about, particularly from adc’s, to the point where it became common knowledge that bot lanes were won by the support, which was problematic because it meant the role with the least mechanics required could disproportionately influence on how the game would play out. Proportional to their adc that is, as the adc can’t access the lategame without a competent support in the early game.

Third, comparing sc2 to mobas is funny because in the former you control a lot of units while in the latter you are mostly controlling one. It’s analogous to comparing terran/zerg to protoss since the toss will control less units because they cost more supply. But we can take it a step beyond comparing sc2 to mobas in general and look at the varying skill requirements in the individual heroes. Take for instance the dota character meepo, a hero many believe to be the hardest in the game. This is because Meepo’s ultimate ability is creating an extra copy of himself, letting him do all sorts of unique tactics like being able to clear his jungle while invading the enemy’s, or laning while sending a weak meepo back to heal. But doing these tactics requires more and more apm as the game goes on because he gains an extra clone per rank of his ultimate, up to a total of 4. This causes meepo to require an insane amount of apm and multitasking to be played optimally. Contrast this with a hero like ursa, similar to meepo in that he can hard carry games, but so much easier that he’s often the recommended hero to noobs because of his point and click playstyle. The primary factor that determines the disparity in these heroes’ skill requirements is the apm required. Don’t believe me? Just ask any high level dota player why meepo is harder to play than ursa.

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You can make these comparisons to any game with a real-time component. Chess for example. If you add a real-time component to chess, such as blitz chess, the difficulty of the game scales dramatically as the time allowed for a turn is reduced. The number and magnitude of mistakes grows exponentially as you get closer to 0. Even Magnus Carlson goes from chess GOD to total newb when he only has 3 seconds to make a move.

It simply takes time to do everything in the game. Every process in the game requires time. Whether it’s computing the best micro move, planning the next best strategical step, or even simple things like the time to box-select your units - ALL OF IT TAKES TIME. So when you force the player to use less time, they either have to be faster or make more mistakes. That’s true for EVERY aspect of the game. That’s just how it is. SC2 puts this effect onto steroids. Instead of 32 chess pieces, you instead have to manage hundreds of units, and your APM load will be decided by how hard your opponent hammers you with his own APM. People who think the real-time component isn’t the largest component of the game are utterly delusional.

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Cool story, bro.

Oh no, what am I, and all my statistics, charts, facts and proof supposed to do against pure conjecture! How am I supposed to win the argument!

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Yes I agree. Blitz chess is a good example I didn’t think of.

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I mean, it’s interesting how in a much simpler game, that involves only 32 pieces and 1 move of 1 piece per turn, the real-time component becomes the dominant factor in the game by simply reducing the amount of time for turns to about <10 seconds. In SC2 you have hundreds of units and multiple commands to execute every second. A typical 300 apm GM is doing 50x more moves per second. It stands to reason that if simpler games like chess become dominated by the real-time component at 1 move every 10 seconds, then SC2 is definitely dominated by the real-time component with 1 move every 0.2 seconds.

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You can stick your half-backed “statistics, charts, facts and proof” in a place that you know.
Your issue with mathematic is that you simply gobble mathematic without digesting it.
There is something more important that you lack: common sense and sense of proprtion.
Till then…

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Absolutely. Your APM can’t change the fact a reaper is produced in 32s, from a 46s construction rax, and a 21s supply. APM can’t change those facts. That’s why an SCV scouting after the supply will always be earlier than a reaper.

I’ve just mentioned me beating a player twice faster than me. As for the AI, so long it has ingame APM it’s relevant to ingame APM efficiency.

The real face palm here is why did I even expect you’d actually answer a debate rather than just dismissing logical thinking in a more or less theatrical manner. Specially when your pseudo was actually revealing about your intentions. You act like a comedian, Batz ; but unlike one, you’re not funny.

Anyway, the point is you’re not interested about the truth, but about trying to kill time by defending statements ranging from polemical to outright illogical. I have led some of those bouts to their conclusion, and my current one is that you’re only interested in seeing how far your sophism can lead you against the odds. Since entertaining yourself is your sole goal, and since valid arguments were made, that conversation is now over. Contrary to you, I do not find my fun in wasting the time of others.

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Last month this guy tried to argue that a human being (a girl) after being hit by a truck with fatal consequences would have fared better if she had been more …fit.

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That confirms my suspicions. He does start debates Gorgias style : find something polemical or unlikely in order to create a reaction ; and then defend the most unlikely position. It’s a sophism challenge in fact. And he finds his fun in seeing for how long he can send his interlocutors in a wild goose chase…

It’s possible to debunk that kind of arguer by segmenting your points to the extreme, so that he can only validate each step by yes or no. And then you assemble the points back into a logical conclusion, that therefore he will be forced to validate.

Yet, it takes at great deal of time to do so… I’ve spend pages reaching that stage in other debates. And as we’re suspecting the main objective of the joke is seeing how much time he can make fun of us… well I’m not up for that kind of challenge anymore. Too much of a loss of time just to prove the obvious.

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