Do you think most people could reach such a high level through practice and dedication, or do you think without talent/natural ability that one would plateau well before reaching the master league?
My game of choice is Counterstrike, and I'm beginning to wonder whether or not I should move on. I keep getting to "Master Guardian Elite", but I can't seem to break through to the higher levels. I often wonder whether I simply lack the reflexes necessary to improve anymore.
This is an intriguing question, one I hope I might be able to shed some light on:
I am no good at starcraft, at least in comparison to those I play with, but I once was a grand master tetris player that played the world circuit for a time, and this is what I discovered:
Practice yields results. These results give you a rush, and you start to ascend, the more you play the better you play, the higher your score, or the better your results.
Now your opponents are more skilled, for they too have been going on the same cycle, and you find for every match you win, there is another you loose: 50 - 50 ratio.
This is where the gameplay gets interesting: if you want to advance you will have to realize some things.
Energy and time output. The further you want to advance the longer it will take, for example: going from the skills to achieve master tetris player rank to grandmaster in the world circuit was much more difficult than getting the skills to be of 'master' rank.
What I learned when I plateaued as an advanced player at an advanced rank was that, in order to continue, I needed to unlearn everything I knew about playing tetris and relearn how to play the game from the ground up using my experience in the execution of the game and going from there; this got me to master, and when I hit master I also plateaued, and in order to get to grandmaster, I had to completely relearn how to play the game for a third time, at this point i had retaught it to myself 4 different times, each succeeding time with more rules, theories, and how to best capitalize on luck.
This is why I say: Practice yields results. Practice does not make perfect; perfect practice (I.E. that thing you learn once you reteach the art of play to yourself for the umpteeinth time) makes perfect.
If you have plateaued, I would recommend taking everything you have learned about the game up to now, archiving it for reference, but focus on coming at the game with a new perspective. A friend of mine plays MLG fps's and destroys everyone he plays against outside of upper competitive gameplay, and he can't aim. His aim is absolutely abysmal, but he makes up for it by knowing how fast his character moves in each of the maps, he has researched the button magnetism per game, he knows the distance from one place to another and calculates the resulting probabilities of death and luck; but generally he relies on plain trickery, solid reflexes and many hours of gameplay.
Well, with Starcraft i belive any smart person can get in to Diamond with decent execution speed and a good knowledge of standard builds. But for Master league and above it really is all about extremly fast decision making and very good execution speed.
Anyway, Counterstrike is very different from RTS/MOBAS so i can really say.
Thanks for answering. I might give SCII a try. I've played RTS games casually on a few occasions, just never long enough to get good at them. I just want to play a game where I can feel like I'm making progress.
I have a follow-up. What would you say your APM rate is as a master league player?
*APM as shown on the ingame summary scoreboard. There a different ways to measure APM and Blizzard has adjusted the way APM is calculated multiple times (for example, repetitive pressing a hotkey will not increase APM.)
By the way: the Starter Edition is free. Give it a try.
Do you think the game would be more interesting if it were continuously rebalanced (always adding units, omitting old ones every year or so) or should a near-perfect version just be frozen for competitive play?
Do you like the LoL community? I've only seen bad-to-horrible sides of it which has kept me far from the game. I assume there has to be some good sides of it...
This. However i do play a little Dota2 from time to time, but the game frustrated me too much. Being in a game that is OVER and still have to stay in there for 10-15minutes drives me crazy.
Theres i a _huge_ gap between a good master player and Grandmaster. But i guess im just too lazy to get to that level, just too many tiny flaws that add up to compete with the very best.
Hasn't been updated in years, but still relevant if you don't mind reading the wall of text.
I think nowadays, the proliferation of educational streams on Twitch.tv could easily supplant the utility of this document. Streamers like Winter (twitch.tv/wintergaming) or pro-gamers like Grubby (twitch.tv/followgrubby) or CatZ (twitch.tv/CatZ) or Minigun (twitch.tv/colminigun) are a great resource, and are usually pretty good at answering specific questions and providing good tips to newbies.
My problem with videos is that to cover a ~30 page document of material, they'll stretch it in to dozens of videos and take >2-3 hours of time.
I can read such a document in <1 hour of time, and find it much less fatiguing than trying to deal with a several hour lecture on the same topic.
In general, I find that videos are good to relay a particular skill by demonstration, and discuss one topic, but that very often, they're a poor medium to convey a large amount of material I want to learn all of at once, especially if I'm going to want to jump around or cross reference at all.
Ed: Case in point, I've already skimmed the whole document (I skipped over the details of some specific exercises), and would feel much more comfortable picking a video to start with, because I have a general sense of the recommended training path, the exercises involved, etc. I just find it hard to get the same general sense of something from a video.
I started SC2 about a year ago and I wrote down everything I learned during this year. Now I am top gold with low APM but I can play macro and I have a startegy at the beginning of the game. I play about 2 games per day and I have fun all the time :) I started to store this information in a Moodle course.
I'm still working on the course content when I have time (creating a course content takes aaages) and I am often using the site to create Moodle prototypes so the design may change regularly. But the good thing is that I do provide a full methodology path, I organized the course into different lessons. I also took some lessons with few progamers and even got the course reviewed by a pro SC2 coach with more than 1000 hours of coaching. I don't know anyone who followed my course but if you do, contact me I would be interested to know if it works for others :)
