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NXZ's thoughts - efficient practice
 

Practicing and playing efficiently.

Ok so, personally I always try to be very efficient in how I play the game of starcraft. However, this doesn't stop me from always falling into old habits and the trap of making the same mistakes time and time again. An example of this would be when HotS was first released. I'm bad at using spell casters. Quite simply, my unit control is one of the weakest parts of my gameplay and when offered units that can't just be added to your main control group and forgotten about it is oftentimes very difficult to adjust. So I ignored vipers and swarm hosts.

Yeah, I entirely went muta ling in all matchups for a very long time. Naturally, thanks to the existence of Protoss, I did have to start learning the new units. Along with this came the never ending dilemma of how to hotkey the units. I asked ninja, I asked pig, I thought about it for long periods of time. Even recently, catz said on meta how ret wouldn't use vipers and infestors together because it's so hard to have good hotkeys for both and also your main army. Eventually, I came up with my own personal way of hotkeying the units. And then, I never learnt it fully so that it was seamless. Sure I can use vipers pretty well. I can use swarm hosts pretty well. However, throw in infestors with vipers or corruptors with swarm hosts and all of a sudden I've got no idea. It gets even worse when you add those 4 altogether. Now, tell me how many games you have to control viper/infestor/swarm host in? Yeah, not a lot. Especially when as a player you prefer muta or anything when you're not sitting back doing nothing for 25 minutes. So, from this comes my question.

What can we do to make changes to how you practice to play more efficient and seamless? The example I just used is a big issue but even zerg players who don't hotkey eggs. Sure you'll do that a lot every game but people still don't want to change to the superior rallying method. So what's the solution here. My thinking would be maybe resuming from replay and grinding this out time and time again with a practice partner. But this brings us to the next issue of fun in regards to playing. Resuming from replay to play swarm host turtle 20 times in a row isn't fun. People will play sc2 ladder for huge periods of time because inherently playing the game is enjoyable. Unfortunately this sucks for improvement. Slowly, your game will improve but you'll get good at the things you do a lot (eg muta ling bane vs Terran) and bad at things you don't do (primarily specific strategies against Protoss).

To use the swarm host example again let's say that as a player you've played 1000 games since HotS came out. 300 of them were against Protoss, of those 300 maybe 100 were early game wins or losses. Another 150 were everything but swarm host style. So that leaves us with maybe 50 odd games with swarm hosts. Of those 50 games maybe 10-15 actually go to a late game scenario with both players on equal footing, if that. Wow, 10-15 games across 5 months is nothing. Absolutely nothing. So we need to practice specifically for a certain late game scenario so that we are always playing as best as we can.

However, now we need to find someone to spend several hours to play those games with us. So if we say Zerg vs Protoss is where we want the most specific practice to occur; who do we get for games? In SEA we have blysk, pezz, megafonzie, arze and a few others. Of those 4 I would only ever really practice with fonzie and pezz. So, hypothetically, I ask pezz to play for a few hours where we run through an equal footing late game swarm host vs air game. Now, if pezz is super confident with his mass air control then crushing an inferior player in that specific area of the game for hours straight doesn't help him at all. It becomes inefficient practice for him, even worse than ladder would be. And therein lies our dilemma. Unlike a musical instrument you can't practice alone for things like unit control. We need another player and rarely in our environment can that be delivered upon.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that if I want to get really good control in a certain scenario so that I can outplay my opponents in that part of the game; I have to practice it from something like resume from replays and a LOT of times. Even grabbing a practice partner and playing 10 games with him with both of you trying to force the game to go a certain way is not good practice and won't have the biggest effect on your skill in that area. However, the resume from replay method just isn't possible. So then we're all stuck playing ladder and getting better in one of the worst ways possible.

This is something that interests me a lot because I don't have the time that other players might have. How can I arrange my practice so that it is as time efficient as possible? Is a question I ask myself a lot. Perhaps you guys have a solution? Or even just what you do to be as efficient as possible with your practice and play.

My apologies for any lack of flow that may have occurred because I'm essentially thinking about starcraft and having those thoughts thrown onto the page and what might make sense in my head, doesn't necessarily make sense here so if you do want me to reword a particular section I can try do that.

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Thanks for reading,

x5 NXZ