On March 19 2019 01:38 Dazed. wrote:
i dont think mechanical proficiency ought to be the first thing to focus on; its boring, repetitive, and without knowledge of what your doing your mechanics will suffer anyway. If you have to stop and think about what your doing, your not going to be doing it as efficiently, and if you know or begin to know what your doing and you enjoy it, you will play more often and with more confidence. I've definitely run into over the course of playing broodwar a lot of players who had 200 apm, better micro and macro than me and yet they were also the kind of players who i never dropped a game against. Because they had, at best, a shallow understanding of one build. I think its important to develop as a player as evenly as you can, if you focus on mechanics you will rise above your strategical level beating bad players, and you will develop bad habits.
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i dont think mechanical proficiency ought to be the first thing to focus on; its boring, repetitive, and without knowledge of what your doing your mechanics will suffer anyway. If you have to stop and think about what your doing, your not going to be doing it as efficiently, and if you know or begin to know what your doing and you enjoy it, you will play more often and with more confidence. I've definitely run into over the course of playing broodwar a lot of players who had 200 apm, better micro and macro than me and yet they were also the kind of players who i never dropped a game against. Because they had, at best, a shallow understanding of one build. I think its important to develop as a player as evenly as you can, if you focus on mechanics you will rise above your strategical level beating bad players, and you will develop bad habits.
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You could tell a similar story about all the guys who skipped mechanics at first. Some of those might actually have invested more time to think about the game, while many will just end up with a set of cheesy or hanbang-builds that win them games onlow/medium ranks. Meanwhile they developed bad mechanical habits, and as you wrote, those habits are pretty hard to fix once they sunk in. These guys are also stuck at C or B rank at some point, pulling the same bunch of tricks and strategies again and again, and will lose any game to players who understand the game and cared for their mechanics, like Ryzel pointed out in his post before mine here.
So you really need both:
- You should definitelly practice the mechanical basics right from the start: 1a2a3a4a5a6a, hotkeys, F-keys, ctrl-key and shift-key. It's not really boring because you don't have to do this for ages in the singleplayer, give it a few days and you can keep practicing it in real games. Also, it makes you better and you will win games, that's not boring.
- At the same time you should pick one build to learn at a time and really sit down for a while without playing at all, just reading and gathering information about the build, watching replays/VoDs and what not. Once you have played a few games yourself, always sit down and analyse them and try to find out what went wrong.
One also has to consider that different people have different strengths: some find their strength in clean mechanical play and others have a trump in understanding the game in depth. I assume only few have those two things equally balanced, and maybe those are the ones who can become really good players.