I want to take a minute and help people to understand just what APM is, and maybe debunk a few myths that come from the stories of high apm.
High APM is often associated with skill, as it can indicate that a player both knows what to do in the game and has the manual dexterity to carry it out but there is many loop holes to this..
The majority of APMs are repetitions of orders already given, so that APM is not considered a good indication of skill.
A player’s APM value is determined by the number of actions performed in a given minute. Many actions like repeated selection, and right-click Move/Attack actions, are easier to carry out than others, and players may repeatedly perform (or “spam”) these actions, making them redundant in terms of their usefulness.
“Spamming” is sometimes used as a way to warm up in ladder games and maintain speed for later phases of the game, or it may be used simply to increase a player’s recorded APM in order to improve the perception of their gameplay skills (AKA False positives).
But lets not forget accuracy is another factor determining a player’s APM.
Accuracy is the coordination of precise mouse clicks and keystrokes. Greater accuracy will result in fewer mis-clicks and mis-strokes; thus the player’s efficiency increases resulting in a more accurate valid APM. Players who have greater accuracy can perform other vital tasks during game-play and can multitask without losing efficiency which allows them to do the same takes with fewer APM.
So to sum it all up.. People with anything higher than 180apm are wasting their time and should become more accurate with their microing and clicking ability.
They also are spamming the movement of their units too much or over selecting units. That repetitive nature gives false readings on ppls APM and if you are clicking more than 3 times a second the things you are doing are nonsense.
In fact over clicking to send a unit somewhere actually hurts efficiency since it creates time delays in the game engine with unit order reaction delays.
It is physically impossible to do more than 3 completely non-related and non-repetitive actions per minute for any length of time. So (depending on game length) anything over 85 is probably pro and anything over 180 is just for show.
There shouldn’t be any bragging of higher APM than 180 ever again. To have higher is almost an insult rather than a good thing.
