Starcraft Statistics

Another Starcraft Blog (and probably my nerdiest post ever!!)

I found this really cool tool to track your Starcraft Statistics called SC2Gears (or at least I think it's cool). I've been having it save my replays for the past several months and now I have a decent size number of replays (about 130) to do some analysis on.

My first question is whether or not my APM has increased over this span of time. APM stands for actions per minute, and as the name implies it counts each of the actions you make (every key you type, every mouse button you click) during the length of the game and divides it by the number of game minutes. Pro Starcraft 2 players consistently have APMs in the mid to upper 200s (meaning they literally make over 4 actions every game second--and a game second is less even slightly less time than a real second!). Here is my graph:



Based on the regression line, it looks like I have improved only very slightly (about 5 APM over the course of the 3 months). At least I didn't go down in APM.

Next, I decided to see how I'm doing when playing against each of the races. In case you didn't know Starcraft is a real time strategy game that consists of three intergalactic races--the Terran (exiled humans from earth--the race I play), the Protoss (a technically advanced alien species) and the Zerg (A bug like alien).

I suspected that I do worse against zerg and better against protoss, which was what I found.



This makes sense. I have a generally strong build order against Protoss and I am better at controlling the army composition that favors this match up (mostly bio play if you're familiar).

I thought that maybe my APM is higher against Protoss and so I checked that out:



Interestingly my highest APM(though it's pretty close)is against Zerg. Though this could also be a function of game length. Usually games against Zerg last longer, and since you do less in the very early portion of the game, it makes sense that the longer a game goes, the higher your average actions per minute would be. I'll have to do more analysis on this.

Lastly, I wanted to see how long the games I played were as well as how my APM is relative to my opponent:




I was surprised at how slow I am relative to the people I'm stacked up against. On average they are about 25% faster than I am. When you play online you are matched up against who it thinks you'll be most comparable to. This just makes me realize that my biggest shortfall is my speed. In order to be competing (and winning nearly 50% of games I play) with people 25% faster than I am, I must be doing ok in the other aspects of the game (at this level), namely in game decision making and overall strategy. Now I need to figure out ways to improve my speed, or maybe I can play this game with no APM.

SC2fail.com

Check out my new Starcraft 2 failure website!




www.sc2fail.com

Back on top

Woot!



I'm taking a few weeks off to prepare for my upcoming exam (on the 17th of June), so It was good to get the promotion before I went cold turkey. Note also in the background that I'm ranked #4 in my division. Woot!

If I get sick of studying and need a break in the next two weeks, I may create a blog post about how I got back to diamond. Maybe creating a blog segment called "strategy corner" or something stupid like that. I may be forbing myself from playing, but who says I can't write about playing?

andrew is the best **warning, contains mild thor movie spoilers**

last night andrew and i went to see thor in imax and 3d. it the first imax-3d movie we had ever seen and we pronounced it freaking awesome. we ate delicious burgers at this joint downtown called "uburger" and our only mistake was not also ordering a chocolate "frappe." altogether, a most excellent date night.

on the walk home from the porter t stop i asked andrew to help convince me of an afterlife. ever since i went through a period of fainting spells, i've had trouble believing in the afterlife. i want it to be true, and i hope it is with all of my heart. but for some reason, the absolute black nothingness i felt when i fainted has continued to haunt me. i cannot forget the disorientation of waking up from fainting, the gasp of breath and frantic pounding of my pulse as my body suddenly remembers it is still alive. in those moments it felt like i had ceased to exist, and according to my cardiologist, my heart was pretty convinced of that fact as well. so subconsciously i am convinced i know what death feels like (and perhaps birth?). since i'd much rather have unfailing belief in an afterlife, i routinely demand andrew comfort me and spread the warmth of his belief blanket around my subconscious. maybe if i believe in andrew's belief, i can somehow trick my subconscious back into believing that our souls will go on while our physical forms lie rotting in the earth. morbid much?

so andrew, being a good husband, always complies and tells me about why he thinks there is an afterlife and all the fun things we'll get to do there, like hang out with unicorns and hobbits. so last night i brought up that if he died before i did (god forbid) he must send me a sign that there is an afterlife (a similar bargain to what houdini and his wife struck). andrew said that still wouldn't convince me because i wouldn't realize that the sign was him. i said, well, what if you send me a butterfly in november, then i'll know it's you. in the end of thor, he cannot return to earth like he promised his love, natalie portman, because the road back was destroyed. and in response to my demand for a sign, andrew said, "but what if my way back to you is destroyed, and i cannot send you a butterfly?" and it struck me to my core because that is totally believable, i just saw that happen on thor! and i realized that just like in thor, we would both have to work hard to find the road back to each other but that eventually we would find one (hey, it happens in the sequel, right?).

so thanks again, andrew, for providing comfort to my conscious and even harder, for reaching my subconscious with pop culture references. i only hope that someday when we die it will be as in the notebook, clasping each other in our old age, one of us slightly demented, but our love allowing us to die at the exact same time.

quality time together

i granted andrew one birthday wish this year, in my attempt to make his birthday special and exciting. the birthday wish had some parameters: it had to be something i could do, not too extravagant, and just reasonable in general.

andrew decided his greatest reasonable wish was for me to play 2 hours of starcraft under his guidance and tutorial. i thought it was sweet that he wanted to spend time with me, but to be honest i wasn't super hyped about it. so on sunday we sat down together in front of his computer, me with my diet coke, andrew with a gleam in his eye, and we opened up starcraft. luckily for both of us, i have played early versions of warcraft and so real-time strategy was not a completely foreign concept. nevertheless, it was soon apparent that starcraft proficiency did not run in the family.

i played on casual, and actually advanced three levels (woot!) with andrew looking over my shoulder and basically micro-ing me. it was surprisingly enjoyable, mainly because andrew and i were there sort of working together. we might play a level every sunday just for kicks.

i also got a bit invested in the story. jim raynor is this bad a** rebel who is fighting the evil emperor of the universe. he had this hottie girlfriend who was infected by bugs and is now the bug queen, destroying worlds and attempting to eliminate humankind. i don't see a happy ending for raynor, but who knows, maybe joss whedon is not writing for them.

the "western outer-space" theme was prominent, and has been a favorite of mine ever since firefly. i do wish they had some more female marines and characters. the whole thing just seemed too male dominated for me. all the medics are female? all the marines are male? lame. i bet a woman could be as powerful in that huge space fighting suit that the marines wear.

in fact, i even dreamed about starcraft last night. i was with the ladies from our ward on an outlying planet. the zerg were fast approaching and raynor was calling all of us ladies in to fight the zerg or run simulations. it was up to us to save the planet, but we were still unsure if it was going to be possible. i woke up just as flying zerg thingies were entering our atmosphere.

i can't decide if that means i should never play starcraft again or if the dream was a prophecy for the future, and i need starcraft to hone the skills necessary to fight off bug like aliens who can infest humans...

What am I constantly studying?

Sometimes people ask me what I could be spending so much time studying, after all didn't I already graduate? I came across this sample exam problem that I thought I'd share to give you all some insight to problems actuaries are charged to solve.

For a tyrannosaur with a taste for scientists:

i) The number of scientists eaten has a binomal distribution with parameters q=0.6 and m=8
ii) The number of calories of a scientist is uniformly distributed on (7000, 9000)
iii) The number of calories of scientists eaten are independent, and are independent of the number of scientists eaten

Calculate the probability that two or more scientists are eaten and exactly two of those eaten have at least 8000 calories each.

Apparently actuarial science is just as much about dinosaur dietary habits as it is about financial models and life contingencies.

Drat

A new season begins and I get demoted. Makes sense because I lost my first 10 games in the diamond leage. At least I can tell my kids someday that I was in the diamond leage (even if it was only for a few weeks).