Pro Tips from dignitasmirz

Professional Starcraft II player dignitasMerz gives some advice for players in the higher ranked leagues on pushing themselves further.

Introduction

Normally in a game like Starcraft 2; a lot of the focus on how to improve only reaches out to the very beginners in the game. We’re talking mainly people who are in the leagues of Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. I have always felt like there is little or no guidance for those who start moving into the higher ranks of the leagues. We are talking about the diamond to low masters area. People who are not quite there yet, but they have got a fair bit of the way to becoming a solid and good Starcraft 2 player. Therefore, I would like to share with you my methods of self improving. We shall discuss and talk about what I think is important when you are looking to improve.

What are we looking for?

There are plenty of points to cover here for instance the most obvious one, self-analyzing your own replays. This is a no brainer and I’m pretty sure you’ve all heard that one before. However do you really know what to look for in your own replays? There is such things like, What mindset do I need? Do I need a special schedule? Where do I need to look for help? All in all, what I thought we will discuss in this article is pretty much:

Mindset
Schedule
Analysing your own replays
Build orders
Watching not for entertainment, but for learning.

Mindset

This particular point is important, but sometimes it’s also highly individual in terms of what mindset works best. When I say mindset, I’m talking mostly about points such as; How do I approach the game? Why do I want to keep improving, what are my goals? and so forth. There are typically two or three dominant mindsets that we see in people who are in masters league and upwards:

"I want to win big tournaments and be famous, therefore I must improve"

A lot of people hunger to prove themselves, to gain recognition, and use that as a motivator and mindset to keep on pushing for further improvement. There’s nothing wrong with this, and people have had success with a mindset like this. However, when you set goals such as this, there’s one thing to consider and that is the pressure you’re putting on yourself.

Saying I want to win and I want to become famous are hard words to live up to at the end of the day. I know this because I was of this mindset once I discovered that eSports actually existed. I looked at it and thought "I want to be there, I want to compete in these tournaments, I want to be on the big stage playing in the grand finals". For me, this helped me a great deal in the beginning, and it always kept me going, always had me practicing hard, always had me interested in the game. Then it eventually got me on Team Dignitas because I just kept striving for something exactly like that. Again though, the dangerous part of this mindset is once you start achieving these things, once you start getting recognition in the scene, there’s one big thing left which is probably the hardest part of it all; to win something BIG. This nearly destroyed me when I just got onto a pro team. I was nearly there, I was playing with the big boys, however, the pressure to actually win a big tournament started getting the best of me. It was all I could really think of, the final step, and instead of actually focusing on improving and being the best I could be, I was getting ahead of myself. Now, this was me personally. Some people can handle the pressure right off the bat, or simply don’t feel any pressure at all. It is a working mindset, but maybe not for everyone, which brings me to the next point.

"I just want to become as good as humanly possible"

This is more along the lines of the mindset I work with now. I figured out there is no point in trying to motivate myself only by tournament wins, in the end, you can’t have the wins if you’re not actually focusing entirely on your play and how to constantly improve. I actually realized this when I was watching Day[9]’s 100th Daily, where he talks about how upset he would be after losses because he was just chasing that big win. It made me realize, what I really want is to become as good as I can be at this game, because I like competing against others, I like the feeling of constantly improving at something or the feeling of actually putting all my effort into something and have it succeed. This takes the pressure off in a way, you’re always striving to be as good as possible and eventually, if you keep on improving, the wins will sort of just come. Which one is best? It’s up to you, try approaching the game with different mindsets and see what works best for you, in the end you’ll notice which is more suitable for you.

Schedule

I never really believed in having a schedule and I didn’t really have one for a long time. A schedule for your practice routine is not a necessity, it can however help you to keep yourself disciplined as well as maximizing your effectiveness. Without a set schedule of how many hours you want to practice and when you want to practice, you can find yourself in scenarios where you mess up your sleeping rhythm. Where you play a few games here, browse some websites there, play a few more games here and time runs away with you. I find it easier to keep the consistency of improving if I at least have some guidelines to work after. Things such as "I’m getting up at X hour, and I’m going to practice Y amount of hours". It doesn’t have to be anymore advanced than that, set up a time where you want to wake up, set up how many hours you want to put into practicing the game each day.

Analysing your own replays

Now, analysing your own replays is probably the most common thing ever pointed out when people advice others on how to improve. Often though it is just that. “Analyse your own replays”. Okay, but how? For the longest time I’d just go through my replays, and I’d just note every little mistake I made, and then try to fix it all. It is obviously good to always note as many mistakes as possible, but one thing I realized was this; There’s really no point in analysing further than the first mistake you make in a game. The reason for this is simply, everything beyond that mistake is just going to be a result of the first mistake you make. Sure you can identify them all and vow to fix them, but I find it much easier to just identify the first major mistake I see, and then I tell myself “Okay, this is not happening again” and I’ll focus on fixing that.

Since you’re focusing on one single mistake, it is a lot easier to remember what you need to think of in the next game. For example, say you got rushed early on and you took heavy damage as in you lost a lot of your workers, so you were really behind in economy, but you struggled on and the difference turned out to be quite even but you still lost in the end. What you do is you go back to that rush and you think, how do I defend this? The beautiful thing about this is, once you fix that first mistake or error in your play, you’ll notice that the first mistake in your next game is going to come later and eventually you can pretty much always assume that you made a mistake in the mid or late game. So it is in a sense a natural process, which I think is a nice way to deal with it.

I said above that I would talk about build orders, but I want to fit this one in here along with analysing your own replays. When struggling to get to high masters or even grand masters, it is my personal belief that you should focus on one build order or strategy and if you can for each race matchup too. This way you can always backtrack if you made a mistake in your build order, if something needs to be tweaked etc. If you play different strategies or do different build orders all the time, it leaves room for different mistakes early on, later on and so forth. So focus on one build versus each race at first! When you feel comfortable playing all three of them, then it is time to move onto mixing it up in the strategy department.

Watch to learn, not for entertainment

This title is a tip and is one of the most underrated and underused things in the current Starcraft II scene I think. When looking to improve, always remember that each high level game you see of Starcraft II, is an opportunity to learn something from the pros. Yes this might sound boring and of course if you feel like “No I would rather watch for entertainment” then fine, but it is a great tool nonetheless. When I say watch to learn, not for entertainment, I mean whenever you’re watching a game of Starcraft II between two professionals. Instead of being amazed by their plays or listening too much to the commentators, instead try to always analyse the situation. Why is player X choosing this build order on this map? Why did he make a decision to push at that certain time? Things to look out for when doing this is basically:

Why is he using the build order he’s using
Try to figure out the reasoning behind each attack, drop, defensive stance, expansion etc
Why did he lose, why did he win?

Now adding to this is also one thing that I cannot stress enough; never be too proud to learn from others. Some people in this game have the misguided belief that they need to be innovators and all their strategies need to be thought up from the get go by themselves. Yes, this is a nice thought, and if you actually manage that; Kudos! The actual truth is that what you see pro gamers in this game do, is basically a mixture that they’ve all contributed to. Terran help each other out, Protoss likewise and Zerg as well. You borrow ideas from each other and when you do, you maybe realize something can be done even better or in a different way. In a sense, swallowing your pride and actually using the ideas of others, might actually make you more creative and innovative in the end.

Summary

That is it for this time! I hope these tips give some guidance on what to do when you feel like you are out of ideas or lost in the sense that you don’t know what approach to take anymore. These are pretty much the things I do to constantly keep improving and it hasn’t failed for me so far. I didn’t always work like this, it's something that 10+ years of RTS experience and 2 years experience as a pro gamer has done. Much more can be said, but I would probably have to write an whole essay to cover everything in detail, this is just a little "guide" to start things off and lead you into the right direction!

Tim 'Merz' Olsson