The Code – Part 6

1. Do whatever it takes to win
2. Be respectul to your opponent
3. Game balance is irrelevant
4. Stats are irrelevant
5. Approach your game without emotion
6. In practice, play to your weaknesses
   This is something that I take a lot of flak for from some of my clan mates, I think partly because they might be misunderstanding what I mean with this one. First of all let us acknowledge that there are two types of Starcraft 2 games, competitive games and practice games. The setting of the game you are playing does not at all decide which category it falls into, there are people who approach playhem tournaments as practice and there are those who see the ladder as their main source of competitive play. Whichever kind of player you are I think it is important to set aside time for both practice and competition and to actually draw a distinction between the two. If you are in a team or have practice partners then playing custom games with them is a good way to practice. If you participate in online tournaments it is probably a good idea to consider those 100% competition. For the ladder it is a grey zone. I think it is impossible to not compete on the ladder, most of us do not participate in enough tournaments to quench that competitive thirst but if you do compete on the ladder then I suggest having two accounts if you have that option. One where you compete to get a high rank, and one where you just don’t care about points.
   The reason why you need to separate these games is because competing and practicing have completely different goals and unless you know the goal before going into the game how can you possibly achieve it?
   When you are competing, winning the game is everything and that goes back to rule number one of the code. When practicing however the goal is to improve in whatever way we set out to.
   As I mentioned previously my clan mates tend to make fun of me for not vetoing maps that are unfavorable to my race, or for going with a build or play style that is harder than a different one. For example I prefer to play bio/tank in TvZ over mech, and I prefer to play on Tal’Darim Altar against zerg even though I have a horrible winrate on that map in that matchup.
   My reasoning for this is that while playing mech might give me plenty of wins, it is considerably easier to play, not suggesting that I am in no way a perfect mecher by any means. But bio/tank puts a lot more strain on my micro and multitasking and as a result, playing bio/tank FORCES me to improve on that. When I play mech that is not the case. The same goes for bad maps, people tend to be more creative when they have restrictions on them. I personally happen to think that old video games are often superior to new multi billion productions because back in the day the limitations of the systems that games were developed for forced the developers to be creative. In the same way I feel that occasionally playing on a map that does not favor me forces me to adapt and find different ways to deal with problems.
   This is not because I hate myself or want to make things as difficult for myself as possible. The reason is just that when you practice you should force yourself to play to your weaknesses. If multitasking is the weakest point of your game, then when playing practice games play a style that relies on multitasking.Winning should be irrelevant in practice games anyhow.

   There are so many aspects of your Starcraft play that you can constantly improve upon, if we were to make a list of every single “skill” in Starcraft 2 from hitting every scv cycle to engaging a ling/baneling army correctly then that list would grow quite long. We all have very varying levels of accomplishment on each little element of our play and reason dictates that we can’t practice all of them at the same time. So which one do you focus on? Well the rational choice is to pick whichever our improvement of will have the most impact on our game. This will almost always be whichever thing you are worst at. Generally when we practice something specific our skill does not grow evenly with time, when you start learning something new from scratch you will improve very fast with very little time and then the more we practice the more time it will take to get a little bit better, this is just because as we get better the things that can be improved becomes more technical and they have less impact on our overall talent.
   For example, let’s take the “skill” of scv production. The art of hitting your ideal number of workers (usually 70-75 for terran) in the shortest possible time, not letting a single cc be idle for a single second, and never queuing up a second one for more than a few seconds. Imagine that you always hit 70 scv’s and you just miss 1 second of procution here and there. At the same time imagine that you do not know how to control your army against a zerg going ling/baneling/muta. If you have one hour of practice time to invest which one should you go for? Quite obviously smoothing out the tiny flaw in your scv production will require way more time for much less impact on your game than learning to split your marines even moderately well and focus firing banelings with tanks.Yes you could say that my macro is my strong point and I can’t micro against zerg, so I will play a style that does not require me to split marines and you would probably have a lot of success but that does not really make you into a good player.
   The bottom line is that the things you are worst at will both be the things that if you improve will be noticed the most when you play, and will give you the most improvement in the shortest possible time. So focus on what you are worst at when practicing and playing to your weaknesses forces you to do just that. As soon as you improve enough to realize that something else is now your weakest point just keep switching your focus and in this way bring all of your talent up in unison. Perhaps you won’t win as much if you forces yourself to play to your weaknesses on the ladder, but then again if we only wanted to win games on the ladder, you could just all in every game and you would be the best all inner in the game, but most of us realize that this is not very sustainable.