Heres Snute. Oh, you never heard of him, you say? Snute is a professional gamer, meaning he plays StarCraft 2 for money, and quite a lot of money it is. Snute is special, however. Hes Norwegian, which isnt special until you realize that the absolute top elite of StarCraft 2 in the world is totally dominated by Koreans. In fact, of the 20 highest ranked players in the entire world, theres 19 Koreans, and Snute. Watching professional gamers is quite insane. You may think that your favorite athletes are impressive, because they run fast or throw high. However, you still understand the concepts of the sport; you can run, toss, or whatever yourself, just not entirely as good as the top athletes. In eSports, the achievements are beyond what you can imagine and let me give you one example. One way to track performance, albeit not always entirely relevant, is the number of actions a player does within a minute, called APM. I played a bit of StarCraft 2 and after a couple of days had an APM of around 30, meaning I did 30 distinct actions per minute. Cool I thought. I do shit every two seconds, thats quite OK. In pro eSports, it is common among contenders to have an APM of 200-300, meaning they do distinct things 4-5 times per second. Players like Snute are quite often in the 400+ range. The highest tracked real APM in a game has been measured at over 800, meaning that every second, the player does more than 12 unique distinct actions every second. In the video series below, you can watch Snute in an epic run up to his qualification to IEM ShenZhen, a big tournament in China in 2014. Youll see why hes called the Foreign Hope (foreign meaning anything that isnt Korean). https://youtube/watch?v=unR94xvwjLU&list=PLFPI2f9QSevvi04iVlGEbgx_UiGrqTuL9
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 18:57:05 +0000
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