Game analysis - Replay #14886292

Hmm. @CorvathraNoob I think both sides of this are correct. I'll explain from my own personal experience.

Several months ago I decided to get into playing ladder. I was around ~900 ladder rating at the time iirc, which was massively underrated for me so I was winning basically every game even though each game I knew I was making massive and obvious mistakes. As long as I was able to leave each game knowing the huge mistakes I was making, I didn't bother watching the replay. I'm certainly not at the level of Arch or Turin for instance but my game knowledge and skill is still far better than a 900 rated ladder player's game knowledge, even at this time. I basically was just needing to get my muscle memory up to par with that in a game mode I never really played while coming from being mostly a Setoner.

I very quickly improved and I stopped making as many mistakes that were glaringly obvious to me in game. Up until I got up to about ~1300 ladder I basically didn't lose any games other than some purely cheesy cancer ones where I didn't adapt well or ones where I just completely messed up something basic for whatever reason - usually me first timing a map and not reading it correctly vs someone who played the map a lot.

Around this time I ran into a problem. I was still making glaringly obvious mistakes that I recognized in game, but the issue is that these mistakes were getting harder for me to fix. Things like general map awareness, spending apm on the right things, not over/under ecoing (huge one for me atm, but I digress), and misreading new maps are all mistakes I was easily able to recognize in game but have proven hard for me to fix. These are muscle memory flaws I have and need to address. While I work on these though there are a thousand other flaws in my gameplay that I can address. But at this point I have to watch replays to actually address them.

A lot of those things I mentioned, and the thousand more things plaguing my gameplay, are all things that have a bunch of tiny components that watching replays now all helps me improve on. Yes I know in game I'm making mistakes, I'm actually frustratingly good at recognizing mistakes in game at this point. It's a bit depressing to play knowing I'm playing like pure shit every game but I'm digressing again. The issue is often times these mistakes are things that happened before I recognized them. They often are coming about from different sources than what I realized. Watching replays helps me with this. This long winded rant now brings me to my point.

If you're able to leave the game with an immediate, obvious, and small thing you can do better in the future and quickly improve on, then watching the replay might not be that helpful while you work on that. If the main errors you're seeing are more nebulous and take reworking your muscle memory and a lot of time and effort, then it's important to watch replays so you can keep making the smaller improvements while working on the big stuff that'll take time and experience.

TL;DR: In my opinion people on both sides of this are correct, depending on which stage of ladder experience the player is in. If you can make easy and obvious improvements each game then watching replays might just take time away from making those improvements, if not then watching replays is important.

Edit: I am also coming from the perspective of someone who has played Supcom on and off since the first one came out in 2007. When I got into ladder earlier this year I had far more experience and game knowledge to call on than someone who is relatively new. A new player doesn't have this advantage, and therefore will most likely need to spend more time watching replays earlier on.

Edit part 2: Thought I'd give some more specific examples to illustrate my point using my comment about over/under ecoing. The over ecoing part isn't surprising to either myself or anyone who knows me: I'm a Setoner and ecoing is the name of the game there usually. The under ecoing is the more interesting one. One big reason that it happens is because I know I have a tendency to over eco, so I intentionally just try to make more and more units without ecoing to compensate - often times I'll go overboard there. However, outside of previous tendencies there were some glaring mistakes I was making leading to this happening that I had to use replays to discover. Lots of components here but the two big ones are: my early expansion was far too slow leading to me having less mass than I should early on, and two is that I didn't have enough engineers in the right places to get reclaim. I still have a lot of work to do, but I don't think I would have realized just how pathetically slow my expansion still was and that I was misplacing engineers as quickly as I did without replays. I knew the overall mistake, messing up eco, but couldn't identify all the components of it without replays.

@jip said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:

I did read what you wrote. And my metaphor fits. You want people to assess the game while playing. Similarly, it is telling a student to be able to assess a certain mathematical rule exists during an exam while he doesn't know about the rule, but lets get on with the next exam right after.

Not even close. Critical incorrect assumption: "while he doesn't know about the rule." If you return to my very first post, I said how can watching the replay help the noob understand what they did wrong, if they don't really understand what their mistakes even are? If you don't know power stalling or walking t1 tanks into walled t1 pd is very bad, watching the replay doesn't help. If you know they are bad, you see them in game and learn nothing by watching the replay.

Now you bring up talking with a trainer? Well of course that is useful to teach the noob what they are doing wrong. That's completely outside the discussion of whether a noob should watch their own replays WITHOUT a trainer (which is what I was clearly discussing before). The trainer gives them new knowledge, which is obviously helpful. I never said getting advice from a better player is bad. A noob watching their own replay when they don't know what the optimal strategies are is a far worse way of trying to figure it out. It's obviously a lot easier to learn math than to invent it. Again, this is why I said it's more useful to watch better players to learn from them than watching your own replays.

@Exselsior I understand everything you are saying, and thing only thing I would slightly disagree with is "They often are coming about from different sources than what I realized. Watching replays helps me with this." This would return to my point of just emphasizing that we need to first learn what things to focus on in game (or how much attention to pay to certain things, but you should at least notice when your units die from bad micro/formations and your eco balance). I still don't think replays should be too useful, but in any case I think they're less useful for noobs than players over about 1200 rating. This certainly is the case when you switch to ladder from teamgames and especially from setons. I'm terrible at a lot of things in ladder because there is a lot more to focus on that I'm not used to nor a good bo for most maps, and typically one of the most important takeaways is where to adjust your focus to be more efficient (sometimes you need more or less manual reclaiming and more micro, etc.). But I can typically understand what went wrong and where to adjust focus without watching the replay for my mistakes. And also a HUGE part of it is just learning good build orders for specific maps, which just takes practice and/or copying someone better than you. Also getting used to the ladder style/meta compared to teamgames...I also struggle significantly with the exact same things like over/under ecoing and not building enough spam on the very rare occasions I play ladder.
See, e.g. for laughs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghfY2626wbc&t=664s

P.S. Janus OP

Some interesting comments, and the thread is getting a little off the topic of this specific replay and more into a discussion on the best way to improve, and that's fine, and I think all the points being made are valid. I remember a math teacher saying that the reason we learn math in high school that we probably won't ever use is because we're learning how to learn, so a discussion on the best way to improve my play is at least as important on a discussion of the specific aspects of this specific replay.

I will say one thing, and this kind of relates to some discussions I've seen and participated in on this forum recently, about the struggle for player retention and the possibility that one of the main reasons it might be hard to keep players around is that this is actually an incredibly difficult game and new players often become frustrated and since it's not fun to get gutted, they leave. And this community does make an effort that is rarely seen in gaming to share knowledge and try to improve play in general, but I do think that there are perhaps some assumptions being made by those who feel they have something to offer other players in that attempt to improve, some bias among the high rated players.

@arma473 said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:

If Blackheart or Thomas wants to take ZappaZapper under his wing and play 1v1s against him for 6 hours a day and explain the right way to do things and the right way to understand the game, that would be the best way to get Zappa up to 1900 as fast as possible.

I think there's assumptions being made that
a) I'm/everybody's capable of being a 1900 rated player
b) It's important for me/everybody to be a 1900 rated player
c) That I want/everbody wants to be a 1900 rated player as fast as possible

I don't care what my rating is. I've been playing vanilla for 10 years and have dipped my toe into the FAF waters a few times over the past 3 or 4 years and have recently decided that I'm really cheating myself out of something special by allowing myself to be so frustrated as to abandon the best aspect of my favorite game - playing against other humans. And so my only goal is to improve so that I can play well enough to have the enthusiasm to keep playing, be continually learning and improving, and if I'm being honest, if I am actually ever capable of being a 1900 rated player, I hope it takes me 20 years to get there, because it will be 20 years of what I think this game really has to offer over most other games - a sense of accomplishment. And I think maybe a part of the overall player retention issue lies in the goals of those who seek to help others improve, versus the goals of those of us who would like to improve. Maybe we're not all trying to be 1900 rated players, and maybe it's not actually important to address every bad habit immediately, or maybe not ever. And maybe part of what frustrates new players is not just the game itself, but the message they're given when they seek advice - "this is what you need to do to become a 1900 rated player as soon as possible". That can be very intimidating.

Anyway, thanks so much to everybody for all the insight into things I need to work on and ways to work on them, and I hope to continue having these discussions into the future. Also, I hope I provided a little insight into the mindset of the low rated player, because I know part of this playing this game is being part of this community, and being part of a community means helping in whatever small ways one can.

@zappazapper said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:

Maybe we're not all trying to be 1900 rated players, and maybe it's not actually important to address every bad habit immediately, or maybe not ever. And maybe part of what frustrates new players is not just the game itself, but the message they're given when they seek advice - "this is what you need to do to become a 1900 rated player as soon as possible". That can be very intimidating.

I totally agree with you on this. I stopped trying to improve years ago, lol.
And I want to add another thing that I never explicitly stated, but I'm assuming pretty much everyone enjoys playing the game more than analyzing their replays for mistakes. So if that's the case then you especially should just play the game more and it will eventually come to you (with more enjoyment, AND faster, as long as you are consciously trying to improve on specific things).

@corvathranoob said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:

@zappazapper said in Game analysis - Replay #14886292:

Maybe we're not all trying to be 1900 rated players, and maybe it's not actually important to address every bad habit immediately, or maybe not ever. And maybe part of what frustrates new players is not just the game itself, but the message they're given when they seek advice - "this is what you need to do to become a 1900 rated player as soon as possible". That can be very intimidating.

I totally agree with you on this. I stopped trying to improve years ago, lol.
And I want to add another thing that I never explicitly stated, but I'm assuming pretty much everyone enjoys playing the game more than analyzing their replays for mistakes. So if that's the case then you especially should just play the game more and it will eventually come to you (with more enjoyment, AND faster, as long as you are consciously trying to improve on specific things).

Well, you yourself said it was an assumption, so I guess I can hardly fault you on it, but yes, I think that's just an assumption. I rather enjoyed watching the replay and writing this analysis. And I question the wisdom of presenting analysis like it's some kind of loathsome chore. To use another musical analogy, I usually enjoy rehearsing with my band more than I enjoy actually playing the gigs. We all kind of do. Most musicians kind of do. And similarly, I don't consider analysis as some kind of negative consequence of making a genuine attempt to improve; I look at it like "WHAT?! I get to write analyses of my games TOO?!" I dunno, maybe everybody just looks at this like it's a video game. I can think of no other game where anybody would even think of doing an analysis of how well they're playing and what they have to do to improve. Usually you play the game and either you're good or you're not, and mostly the rest of the people playing the game are happy when you're not. There's just something different going on with this game, and like I said, I just recently decided that I wasn't going to deny myself the experience anymore. I'm GOING to write analyses. Lots of them. I might write analyses more than I actually play. I might start writing analyses of YOUR games 😆

Seriously though, whether it's been beneficial or not is debatable, but what's not is that it CAN be genuinely enjoyable if you allow yourself to enjoy it. We're all different.