Overview: ascpraiise here bringing you PraiiseTV where we discuss all things Protoss and some of the big controversies in StarCraft today. I am super siked to bring you all my latest episode: "The Greatest Tragedy of all Time: The Flawed Nature of StarCraft Players." This is a topic I don't think anyone has discussed in great detail and so I'm anxious to see everyones view on it.
Now before you listen to half the video and go straight to the comment box unpack this content with caution. I took alot of information in and player feedback before I dove into this topic with the goal of creating REAL practical solutions for any gamer trying to improve. Every gamer has flaws and inconsistencies and we have to properly understand them before we can prescribe practical solutions. I've done all the work for you, this may in fact be the best use of 15 minutes for your improvement in the game.
Goal: I want to support our community with high level content and bring back the Hype to StarCraft again. Everyone is important to the movement so I encourage you all to share this video and even consider creating content for this amazing game!
I put my heart into this episode. I hope you enjoy it!
ascpraiise- "The Greatest Tragedy of all Time: The Flawed Nature of StarCraft Players": Show Breakdowns: -The nature of the game -The SC2 Gamer type -Flaws of this Gamer type -Real Solutions for consistent Improvement -A Chart/Gameplan for hyper-growth in SC2
Want to improve? From bronze to Grandmaster this is a journey you will NOT want to miss!
***EDIT, I can't wait for the comments at 8:40 where I meant to say, "Two minds are better than one!" When I get the editing equipment in the future I'll fix errors like this so bare with me. Thanks guys!
Find this video helpful? Subscribe, Comment, and Share this video with others. Lets bring back the Hype to the Greatest game ever made!
There is this guy (who sometimes post on reddit) that went from bronze to high masters in 7 months. His secret? Playing 1k+ games per season.
Then there are these guys who suffer from ladder anxiety and instead look for some type of secret so they think they can improve without actually putting in the hard work.
Greatest tragedy (if you want to improve) is not playing enough games but spending time reading forums and watching too many games.
The great tragedy therefore is definitely not if you don't have optimized hotkeys. A ton of pro's don't have that and its really not that big of a deal in the larger perspective.
@ Talk to players on forums
Another great tragedy is that people want to socialize and socializing - to be frank - hinders your progress because time you spent talking to randoms is time you could spend playing/improving builds/analyzing your own replays.
I am sure that 7-months bronze to masters guy does not have thousands of forums posts on TL or has a lot of practice partners that he talks to.
If you are a low level player and want to learn (while interacting) w/ other people, search for a free master league coach. Don't waste time talking to other gold leaguers who don't know what they are talking about and also mainly are just interested in socializing. ¨
(usually there is a reason why these guys are gold leaguers in the first place).
@ Watching pro games because professional commentators commentate the game
The only worthwhile commentators to listen to are those on homestory cups (actual pro's). No other commentators have any clue what they are talking about. Watching tournaments should be seen as entertainment but is usually a waste of time if you want to improve.
It's much better to watch streams on the other hand as you can see exactly what the player is doing and how he is reacting.
@ Don't try to reinvent the wheel
Depending on how you should interpret this, I also disagree with that. I think making your own builds is extremely important for understanding how the early game works in Sc2. If you copy builds, you never acutally learn to develop critical skills, you never know why you need to scout or how you should react to different types of timings.
By making your own builds and working on improving them over time, they will eventually start to look more like the builds pro's use. However, know you understand why the pro's open the way they do. You won't do that if you just blindly copy builds.
It's much better to try, fail and learn than to never learn in the first place.
On June 27 2016 01:41 hellokitty[hk] wrote: Was a little long. You know, nobody on YouTube watches anything longer than 4 minutes these days.
I completely understand where your coming from and I couldn't agree more. But if we applied that same truth to our school system no one would learn... Videos under 4 minutes can't bring you depth, and when talking about meaty subjects giving people a bag of chips just won't cut it. I know I'm going against the grain and I'm willing to sift through the masses to find the small minority of people who want to improve in their gaming experience. I will absolutely make some short videos down the road though thank you so much for your comment.
@Hider first and foremost thank you a TON for watching my video. I can tell you have some level of passion as I do for the game. You have also brought up a few points that have gone a degree deeper into some of the concepts I generally talked about which is cool.
I can't address everything you said because I think the forum style would make it fruitless, but here's what I will try to explain.
See, if you look at the "overall" point to the video, everything builds off of the concept that players of Starcraft are constantly tempted to collect bad habits and repeat them over and over without recognizing them, or even dealing with them appropriately. I call this issue, "The Addict." It is not an all-consuming truth for every player but I would argue every single player shows at least one of the symptoms I discussed. When you try to pick a couple of things and say, "THIS IS HOW YOU GET BETTER" you are far more likely to run into error and boredom.
Here's one message you can grab from my video: "Identify bad habits in your practice, create concrete solutions, diversify your learning/practice models, and always keep your eye out in the community to absorb hundreds of free materials that are at your finger-tips.
If your solution for getting better carries those themes, I wouldn't attempt to disagree with your points, and we can share different ideas that both point to success.
On June 27 2016 03:09 Hider wrote: @ Greatest tragedy in relation to improving
There is this guy (who sometimes post on reddit) that went from bronze to high masters in 7 months. His secret? Playing 1k+ games per season.
The great tragedy therefore is definitely not if you don't have optimized hotkeys. A ton of pro's don't have that and its really not that big of a deal in the larger perspective.
Grinding is an absolutely terrible way to learn anything, Starcraft included. There is a reason normal sports don't just scrimmage all the the time during practice.
And there is a great tragedy in not using optimized hotkeys, because then you learn a system that you later have to forget and completely retrain your muscle memory in order to improve once you get good enough. And that goes for builds and such too. The more you grind low level games, the more time you need to spend fixing the bad habits you learned while grinding.
Such terrible advice. I got to Masters from low Plat in less than 100 games but I did so by practicing in custom games with partners and training build orders over and over. I spent a lot time doing that, and research shows it is the proper way to learn for a variety of reasons, mostly so you learn the right way to do something from the start.
Nice to see your content Praiise, I like how you approach the game and your mentality, it is great for people to understand more than just what is in front of them, good job~
Grinding is an absolutely terrible way to learn anything, Starcraft included.
I am pretty sure some people learn differently than others, and are able to understand things faster / better than others. I think in StarCraft it requires you to do both, Grinding is the essential part of this and anything else.
Grinding is an absolutely terrible way to learn anything, Starcraft included.
I am pretty sure some people learn differently than others, and are able to understand things faster / better than others. I think in StarCraft it requires you to do both, Grinding is the essential part of this and anything else.
If we were in the 1950's, sure. But years of sports psychology and such has proven that grinding (just playing the game in itself) is ineffective. Because E-Sports is in its infancy, it makes sense that people would revert to the simple method of just playing a lot.
But as I said, look at any other sport, at any level, and practice doesn't consist of simply scrimmaging for a reason. Pro Koreans don't just grind ladder, they have practice partners that they ask to throw builds at them over and over.
And Stephano, I think most people would agree was easily the best foreigner, wasn't a ladder grinder either.
But I want to clarify because what Korean pros do is grinding in the sense they throw builds at one another all day until they perfect what they are trying to learn, and that is good. I was speaking specifically about grinding on ladder and just playing 1k games for the sake of playing 1k games.
You are much better off learning proper hotkeys and being able to execute pro level builds by perfecting them in a practice setting before grinding on ladder than just grinding on the ladder.
Grinding is an absolutely terrible way to learn anything, Starcraft included.
I am pretty sure some people learn differently than others, and are able to understand things faster / better than others. I think in StarCraft it requires you to do both, Grinding is the essential part of this and anything else.
Couldn't agree with you more. I think this was simply folks who didn't read the fine print on my video. One of my MAIN points in the opener is that "Un-intentional ladder grinding" is dangerous. This is the guy that grinds on the ladder very frequently and doesn't hold himself accountable to set-goals and rarely changes his practice. I was hoping that people would catch my implication that INTENTIONAL ladder grinding is absolutely beneficial.
Grinding is an absolutely terrible way to learn anything, Starcraft included.
I am pretty sure some people learn differently than others, and are able to understand things faster / better than others. I think in StarCraft it requires you to do both, Grinding is the essential part of this and anything else.
If we were in the 1950's, sure. But years of sports psychology and such has proven that grinding (just playing the game in itself) is ineffective. Because E-Sports is in its infancy, it makes sense that people would revert to the simple method of just playing a lot.
But as I said, look at any other sport, at any level, and practice doesn't consist of simply scrimmaging for a reason. Pro Koreans don't just grind ladder, they have practice partners that they ask to throw builds at them over and over.
And Stephano, I think most people would agree was easily the best foreigner, wasn't a ladder grinder either.
But I want to clarify because what Korean pros do is grinding in the sense they throw builds at one another all day until they perfect what they are trying to learn, and that is good. I was speaking specifically about grinding on ladder and just playing 1k games for the sake of playing 1k games.
You are much better off learning proper hotkeys and being able to execute pro level builds by perfecting them in a practice setting before grinding on ladder than just grinding on the ladder.
Wonderful insight, you all are so bright! I may even have to make a few mini-series videos expanding on these great points.
Yeah, people learn differently. I learn faster when I spend less time on forums and less time watching pro games. Because then I absorb this concept of SC2 that I try to mimic rather than actually playing the game. In HotS I researched the game so much before practicing but I didn't have any game sense. At a certain point I was stuck in Diamond and had no idea how to improve other than practicing builds which got infuriating very quickly.
In LotV I didn't research the metagame and just memorized a 17 h/18 g/18 p/19 ov/20-2q, 4z build and improvised from there. And I finally developed the game sense I was severely lacking and broke into masters from the diamond league in HotS. It's only now that I'm here that I'm looking into what pros are doing and seeing how they react to things.
But either way, one of the fastest ways to improve is to look at your replays, see what you did wrong, see what your opponent did well, how you could counter it, and keep that in mind for next game. And scout, scout, scout. Builds don't promote scouting and just mindless following and I really only REALLY value scouting ever since I started freestyling and had to react well to the opponent.
Edit: I also feel like freestyling is easier for Zerg since the build I listed is actually viable in all three matchups unlike Terran and Protoss from what I hear. So there's that as well.
I'm a total noob but here's my theory.. The learning curve depends entirely on the player, everyone "ticks" differently and responds better to certain methods of learning. Grinding isn't of any benefit if it means doing the same thing over and over until you can pull it off perfectly. Playing each game with concentation and awareness is probably the way to go. Grinding makes the player reach a cerain skill level where the learning curve turns almost horizonal due to habbits gained by repetition. About they guy getting high in ladder in just7 months: I'd say his learning curve was high because he could process experiences of each game faster than others.
Here is a fun fact for those who don't know it - after 90 min of concentration, people become unproductive, whether it's learning or some other brain straining activity. It's important to relax after such a period.
The worst way of trying to get better, imo, is mindlessly charging into game after game, this only creates frustration, while a relaxed mind can process information much better/faster.
I haven't watched the video, I'll surely will when I get onmy PC. Before rage critics of my "theories" please remember it's just my opinion. I'm always fascinated by anything that involves learning and I like to discuss it
On June 27 2016 08:45 MoosyDoosy wrote: Builds don't promote scouting and just mindless following
I guess that depends on how you define a build. I had an excellent winrate in WOL PvP opening with a 10 gate build. If he didn't scout and went two gasses, I'd do a really fast 10 gate 3 gate and kill him. If he did scout, I'd steal his second gas and go for DT's with my Probe scout, all while watching if he killed the stolen gas. If he did not, I'd know he was 4 gating me or possibly taking a quick expand, and I'd confirm that with another Probe scout.
If he killed the gas, I'd sacrifice a Probe to see his composition (if I saw a bunch of gas units, I knew he couldn't afford DT's) at the timing I'd need to build a Robo in case he was saving gas DT's. If I saw no gas units, then I'd obviously get an Obs and win if he went DT's because he wouldn't be able to afford DT's and Obs. If I saw gas units I'd skip the Robo and I'd just kill him with DT's if he went Stargate. If he went Robo, I'd do a Zealot/Archon all-in and win the game, because Immortals are bad versus Zealots and Archons.
So, I see a build as a branching network of choices that is dependent on scouting. And then I incorporate new branches as times goes on by mixing in elements from other pro "build orders," always cognizant that I can revert to some other older "build order" at any time as a reaction since everything branched off my start.
On June 27 2016 08:45 MoosyDoosy wrote: Yeah, people learn differently. I learn faster when I spend less time on forums and less time watching pro games. Because then I absorb this concept of SC2 that I try to mimic rather than actually playing the game. In HotS I researched the game so much before practicing but I didn't have any game sense. At a certain point I was stuck in Diamond and had no idea how to improve other than practicing builds which got infuriating very quickly.
In LotV I didn't research the metagame and just memorized a 17 h/18 g/18 p/19 ov/20-2q, 4z build and improvised from there. And I finally developed the game sense I was severely lacking and broke into masters from the diamond league in HotS. It's only now that I'm here that I'm looking into what pros are doing and seeing how they react to things.
But either way, one of the fastest ways to improve is to look at your replays, see what you did wrong, see what your opponent did well, how you could counter it, and keep that in mind for next game. And scout, scout, scout. Builds don't promote scouting and just mindless following and I really only REALLY value scouting ever since I started freestyling and had to react well to the opponent.
Edit: I also feel like freestyling is easier for Zerg since the build I listed is actually viable in all three matchups unlike Terran and Protoss from what I hear. So there's that as well.
I would highly recommend you watching the VOD, you bringing up phenomenal points, all of which were mentioned in the VOD. thanks for your your comments though.