How to Improve at Starcraft Efficiently [pdf]

I do, from time to time. But it is rather boring since i don't comment, just the raw game stream http://www.twitch.tv/kwaynesc2

I used to play 4-5 games daily, but now i just a play every few days.

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.

Presumably he is a Starcraft player in the "Master League" tier of ranked play, not a League of Legends player.

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.

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.

> should a near-perfect version just be frozen for competitive play?

This. Balancing the game is hard work and it took Blizz many years and patches go get it right.

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.

You can find the course at http://bepaw.com

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 :)

> they'll stretch it in to dozens of videos

I feel the same about certain lectures, but sometimes it's just the prof's fault.