I thought that was for people who like to light money on fire?i love $ and teaching people.. msg me :-)
Extremely long, but also extremely valuable information... and I read every word of it. 1111. To have reached your level in less than 3 years is crazy impressive. Way to go, man. I plan to take all of this advice and apply it to my playing. Thanks x10 for the input, Viper.
Btw, I have been thinking very seriously about the clan thing since coming back to AoC. I have been looking around but not really having much luck; however, I have only been playing a month... So I think after enough time and enough games I will meet enough people (enough enoughs, 111111) to play some solid games and maybe even join a clan to help me grow as a player.
Again, thanks. Major appreciation.
i love $ and teaching people.. msg me :-)
THANK YOU viper...Hey,
I started playing this game for real at end of 2009. I started off being 16+, I didn't even use my scout to scout the first minutes. I've spent many hours playing, almost daily since then. That's the sacrifise you have to make if you want to become really, really good. My situation allowed me to do so, and I abused it and ended up making a jump from 1600-2700 in 2,5 years. This is how it happened:
1st. Play many types of maps, both teamgames and 1v1 and learn build orders.
- I started off playing only teamgames, only the map Land Nomad, which is a slower map that gives you time. I gained a 2000 rate in only LN in about 6 months, but once I tried another map like Arabia, or 1v1 I lost to 1650 rated players, even though my rating was 2000. The different playstyles from map to map is HUGE, so I started playing more maps, viewed recs of build orders on different maps and different strategies and slowly experimented to make them as comfortable for myself(I now feel that no build order of mine is a COPY, but it is my own way of doing it and something I feel comfortable with myself). For my part my favourite player back then was _Athena_, he was great on both LN and other maps, so I watched some of his records in detail to copy BO at first, then develop my own. I realized the first step to develop was THE DARK AGE. You need to pay attention to details in dark age, keep every villager as efficient as possible and reduce the idle villager time as much as possible. During the Dark Age you set up your economy before starting the battle, so you need to experiment and have diferent build orders to adapt to the map and the strategy you've chosen to go with. If this isn't in place, you'll simply be worse off than your opponent. - I can say that I've won many of my games simply due to a better dark age, yes, you can actually win games there.
2nd. Find partners on your own level to practice 1v1 with
- During my process of doing what I said in the first, I suddenly reached a point where I didn't feel any progress and didn't know how to improve from now on. I had achieved a rating of 2k, with 2k1-2k2 just within reach. That's where I suddenly felt a block, I just couldn't step it up and improve anymore. What I ended up doing, was having a long chat with one who has become a very close friend of mine, Ares. We discussed a lot, and ended up critizing eachother(in a good way). It was never BS, it was straight forward telling eachother what the other did wrong in your opinion, and sharing your view on what would be better to do for whatever area/point you felt insecure on. This ended up in us playing game after game against eachother, unlocking new and new eye openers of what we could do better, simply realizing more yourself, aswell as the other one pointing out every single mistake in detail. From this I can say I improved atleast 200-300 points in rating and A LOT in pure game knowledge and skill. This allowed me to make another jump to 2k2-2k3. - Getting your errors pointed out can be frustrating and annoying, but there is no better way to improve than being aware of your wrongs.
3rd. ALWAYS look for the greater challenge and don't care for points!
- Ever since I became a good 1v1 player, I always wanted to get better. Now I believe another good reason to why I managed to grow even more was my mentality and urge to become better. I always looked for the greater 1v1 challenges possible. If I was playing teamgame with friends, then saw Daut or any other 22/2300 player hosting a game, I ditched my friends to hunt them down. Whenever I found Daut hosting on a lower nickname, many people told me there was no point playing him because I would just lose my points. Now, this is a huge barrier aswell. You might lose points, but you WILL improve by playing the best and better players than yourself as long as your mentality is right and you don't think too much about the points. If you're looking to improve but also want to keep your rating, you're in trouble. I didn't mind losing points, I always viewed it as a payment to be able to play him and other top players just to be able to improve myself. This is a huge part of improving. Many times I was even about to go to bed, then see someone hosting and just couldn't resist trying, because I WANTED to improve. And it even got better when I started picking out wins here and there. If you don't want to get better, you won't get better, it's a simple as that. LOOK FOR CHALLENGES! - Don't care about rating, it will come naturally as you get better.
4th. Game Knowledge and Experience
- This was also a huge thing. I was over 2200 rating, but even then I found myself ending up in many situations where I simply didn't know what unit to make, how to counter something, how to attack that unit composition and basically what to do. I ended up reading through the game manual(didn't find much help there), viewing tech trees, and focused more on counters rather than blindly following a build order and strategy. I suddenly found myself remembering everything each civ could make in order to counter whatever the other civ could be doing. In order to know how and what unit to make to stop an attack or to execute an attack, you NEED to know what is available to you. I started executing more Economy Balance focused strategies in order to make different types of units. If you're making Skirms, you need more on food and wood instead of gold and so on. You have to have your economy set up to what you need to make in every situation. This helped me understanding the game and having an idea of how his economy would look like according to what units and what upgrades he had been able to do. This is also a big part Knowing the game, knowing what he could make, predict what he can make, SCOUT what he's doing and react accordingly with both your economy management and units produced. It also comes with Experience and playing a lot of games, experimenting yourself with unit compositions and how they work together, but knowing the tech tree and knowing what every upgrade does is crucial! - One can win games knowing the game and reading the development of a game better, even if you are the worse player in pure skill.
5th. Equipment, Hotkeys and Comfort
- This I found out in time played a huge role. I was first playing on a small screen, with a bad keyboard and a mouse that I wasn't completey comfortable with. I was also using some really ineffective hotkeys and was using the mouse acceleration option. As I started to improve, I realized some things were really, really ineffective. Like making an Unique Unit from a castle: Ctrl+V -> T. This really felt slow, and at some point I realized I HAD to change those parts that slowed me down in order to increase my speed. I changed it to E to go to castle and A to make a UU. This is now 2 steps of clicking instead holding one button, hitting one, then another one repeadetly and sort of hard to execute. EFFICIENCY! I ended up overviewing my whole hotkey setup, turning up the Scroll speed of my screen, and trying it out. At first I was like: "ehm.. no this doesn't feel good." But I kept using it for a week or so, and slowly got used to it, then really felt the more efficient hotkeys helped out A LOT! I also got myself a new keyboard and a new mouse. This is also a 'get used to' thing, but it felt a lot better. I also read about the mouse acceleration, and tried to turn it off, and hated it. Then I re-read it and read that every good player had it off. So I ended up trying it again, slowly got used to it, and then I felt how much better it was. - Set up your hotkeys in a way that you feel comfortable with, but always aim to make them as efficient and fast as possible. The equipment is also a comfort thing, but it's obvious some equipment fares better than others simply due to modern development.
6th. Tournaments, Clans and Goals
- Joining a clan and tournaments are good ways to speed up the improvement aswell. In tournaments you'll have everyone playing their best, causing everyone and yourself to have to step it up. You might get nervous and fail at times, but it is all a part of experience and it gets better the more experience you get. I was in BuzZ at first(still a true BuzZ!), it was more of a friendly clan not really looking to win anything big, but just having fun with good friends and friendly people. I enjoyed it there, but an offer came to me as WCL7 approached. I was offered by dogao to join RVK in order to fill out the squad for the WCL7 tournament. I was by far the worse player of the 4 of us in the A team of RVK at that point, so I knew I was backup. But by joining this team, I suddenly got another point of view in teamgames. We trained a lot, both strategies and maps, in order to be able to do as well as we could in the tournament. This was purely practice to WIN teamgames, which I had never had before. I had never been a part of any team training specially just to perform. As I was lucky to be invited, I got to play every day with players like RiuT, dogao and JorDan_23. Everyone knows who they are, and to find myself skyping with them and being on their team was a HUGE thing for me. It proved that I had reached a good level myself, and it helped me improve even more obviously, learning new things every day from them that I could bring into my own game. We had a goal to become WCL7 Champions, it didn't happen unfortunately, but we had a goal and we trained a lot to try and achieve it, and having that goal made all of us try even harder, causing obvious improvements. - Set yourself goals, practice hard to achieve them. Try to find a clan to join in order to get guidance or help to improve, it can speed up the development.
And at the end of this I got to join Tyrant, again one of the strongest clans. Getting to play with JorDan_23 again, and the two legends of DauT and kkab also even helped me more. Kkab with his mastermind and knowledge beyond anyone, Daut with his experience and constant good performances, and JorDan_23, who has become my both my worst and best opponent and a truly great friend. In the end, what I have written above has been my step-by-step sort of development, but I have also put down a huge amount of hours in order to become this good. I believe you need time at your hands to become good, and then paying for training without having enough time to practice yourself won't help. If you do however have a lot of time on your hands and really want to improve, having a greater player guide you towards greatness is a quicker way of improving. If you want the greater players to help you, you'll probably have to pay, simply because time is valuable. But keep in mind that there are also many players out there willing to lend a hand for free. But in the end, no practice or training is better than what you make it yourself.
I never payed anyone for training, nor did I have anyone to specially train me. It was always a two-way street and a learning curve that took time, so I do think that how good you want to become is all up to yourself, even with or without paying for training. However, paying for it can be a shortcut to improve faster.
Hope this helps both for you and others aiming to improve,
TheViper
(I realize it turned into a long post, and could probably be a topic of its own, but it's a response to this paying for aoc thingy, so 11)