Over the years I have been fascinated by what it takes to be great at something. My definition of great is top 5% in any field. For this reason (and a few others, like playing video games is always fun!), I returned to video games, and almost exclusively StarCraft II (learn more), in the midst of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
What makes StarCraft II special to me:
- It has an effective ranking system (using matching-making rating (MMR)) so I can easily measure my progress and where I am compared to other players
- My 1v1 was ranked around the top 30% (Platinum 1 league) last time I played. Lots of room for improvement
- I used to and still find this game difficult and even intimidating. In fact, StarCraft II is considered one of the most difficult competitive multiplayer games ever (reference). It goes without saying that I enjoy challenges.
I wanted to apply my latest learning techniques and mindset on this game and see how far I can move the needle. I will discuss some of them in the rest of this post.
Be Analytical
As the saying goes “you can’t improve what you don’t measure”, I rely on tools like https://sc2replaystats.com/ to measure my performance over time. Even though my top-level metrics like win rate and MMR have their ups and downs, other numbers tell me that things are moving in the right direction.
For example, my “supply blocked time” is trending down which means I’m balancing between making units and creating more supply (think of building more houses so that more people can live in) more efficiently. My SPM (screen per minute) is rising and that tells me I’m able to handle multitasking better in StarCraft II.
It was quite a shock for me to learn that I had decent win rates (>50%) in any game lengths except 9 – 12 min. For those of you who are not familiar with StarCraft II, you open your game by optimizing either army (more aggressive in early-to-mid game) or economy (weaker in early-to-mid game, but more likely to win in late game since your economy is better). After some digging I realized that I had been greedy and over optimistic about how efficiently I can optimize my economy regardless of what strategies my opponents adopted. Therefore, I lost many games when opponents tried to all-in me before I had a chance to fully tap into the economy and build a better army.
This insight is even more invaluable because it connects those dots I had little awareness of . Every time I lost one of those games, it did not occur to me that there is a pattern. Instead, I attributed the loss to other reasons like my execution was not ideal, or I got matched to a player way better than me, etc.
You Can’t Win If You are Afraid to Lose
It could be extremely tempting to stay at a career-high record and not make further attempts because things might go downhill from there. It’s not a comfort zone per se, but more like an ego zone. In early April 2021, I hit by-then the highest ranking score 3850. There were moments when I thought to myself – “ok I will not play ranked games any more so this number looks good on my profile”. I did not end up doing so because 3850 is far from my expectation of greatness (it’s about top 15%), but the inertia was real.
Break Old Habits
I firmly believe that if you hit a plateau, the only way out is to make changes. My recent journey in StarCraft II never lacks plateaus. To get past them, adjustments were made everywhere, even at the cost of losing more games for the short term.
Here are 2 examples (for the record, I learned both tricks from Vibe’s B2GM series)
- I realized miss clicking was common in my games especially during crunch fights. I learned that disabling mouse acceleration in Windows OS is recommended so that my hand can better remember the travel distance of the mouse, hence more precision. The effect is hard to measure but I do feel I can click on a unit, even one of small size (marine, zergling, etc), more frequently after I adopted this change.
- For the race I play, there are 3 types of buildings that produce armies (Stargate, Gateway, and Robotics Facility). I used to assign hotkey 3 for Stargate, 4 for Gateway, and 5 for Robotics Facility so that I can access them faster separately. Oftentimes I tunnel-visioned into one building group (Gateway, for instance) and forgot to produce units from others, which ultimately resulted in fewer and weaker armies. Now all of them are combined into one control group so I can easily tell which building is idle at any moment and make units from there.
At the worst time, my MMR took a nosedive and plummeted 500 (that’s a lot in StarCraft II) over a few weeks, as I was adjusting to the new habits. Eventually, the investments paid off and my ranking bounced back and beyond the previous high.
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