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I've been playing this game called StarCraft II (henceforth "SC2") from the time it was released in July 2010, until now. Why am I still playing a 10 year old game?

SC2's 1v1 matchmaker imposes a total ordering over all players, a virtual pecking order, called "the ladder". You can climb the ladder one day with a new strategy that you've been practicing, or a great attitude, or just luck.

And then the next day you can come tumbling down because you stopped playing to that standard.

After you reap the easy improvements in your game, and you climb a little, the matchmaker starts to pit you against seemingly impossibly good players. If you stop improving, the fun can end there.

If you keep at it, eventually those players can seem pretty mediocre in hindsight. The feeling of "gitting gud" at SC2 is intoxicating. That's why it's been jokingly called "StarCrack".

An SC2 player's raw speed is measured in "actions per minute" (APM). A player with a few tens of games under their belt can expect to reach about 60 APM - or one action (click or keyboard press) per second. I play at a respectable 120 APM. Here's Losira, a (former) pro, playing at 400 APM:

Some of that clicking and typing is "APM spam", but the majority is productive work. SC2 players basically have two kinds of things they need to spend their APM doing: micromanagement ("micro") and macromanagement ("macro").

"Micro" is about getting the most out of your units. They shouldn't die needlessly, they should be moving so as to keep your opponent on their toes, they should attack opportunistically, and so on.

"Macro", also called "economy", is about spending your resources quickly and well. Money that isn't spent is called "floating" and unless there's a really specific reason for doing that, it's bad. Money that isn't spent doesn't do anything for you.

If you combine these two ideas together you get "mechanics". This is a good name for it, because good players just do these things without thinking much about it. It just happens, it's "mechanical".

The other big aspect to competitive SC2 is the mind game. The mind game is about making judgment calls ("do I win this fight or should I retreat?", "did he scout my army moving this way", "how many X should I make"), and reacting to what your opponent is doing, while fitting those decisions into your strategy. I don't have a good gif to illustrate this one.

If you are good at these two aspects then you are probably good at the game. Some pro players, like INnoVation, focus on crushing their opponent with superior mechanics, while others, like sOs, are masters of the mind game. If that has your curiosity piqued, these two players clashed in the 2017 GSL Season 3 finals in one of the best SC2 series of all time.

I'm playing much less now, but over the years, I estimate that I've played between 10,000 and 20,000 1v1 and 2v2 matches. If you do the math, I've played well in excess of 1000 hours of SC2. According to a popular saying, that's about ⅒ of the way to mastery.

But no, I'm not "good" on the absolute scale. I've been in "diamond league" for many years. That puts me at something around the 80th percentile of all players. Which brings me to my first, and probably most important, point.

Hours of practice don't directly translate to mastery. At any point in your journey, there is something you aren't doing as well as you could. Even if you know exactly what you need to improve, without structured, intentional practice you might never fix it.

In the SC2 community, the rudiments of structured practice are: replay review, finding practice partners, and sometimes getting coaching. I didn't do any of those things! I still noticed and fixed many problems with my play, but I didn't maximize my practice time and ultimately, my rank.

If you ever get stuck in SC2, and you look for help, you will probably be told to work on your macro. That's because until you reach diamond or master's, macro is usually the differentiator in your matches. They just had more stuff than you.

Macro, like tempo in music, is at one time the simplest part of your performance, but it also has the most negative impact if you mess it up.

It's easy to get sucked into the trap of believing things like "if I just improve my baneling splits then I'll get promoted!" because it feels like you are directly addressing an issue in your play. But usually, it's more important to build on the basics, since those will actually keep you alive in a higher league. The more subtle adjustments can wait.

Keeping yourself motivated can be tough if it feels like you're barely improving at all. I often tell myself things like "I would have made this kind of mistake a few months ago, but just now I didn't", to remind myself that I am actually improving.

It can be tempting, especially if you are early in the stages of improving, to default to low risk decisionmaking. That's because it can sometimes feel like the trick to winning is to avoid making big mistakes.

This can work out for a while, but at some level of play it will stop working. It starts becoming important to take calculated risks. Winning positions start to entail some initial risk that pays itself off.

"Cheese" is a strategy that straight up kills you, unless you can see it coming and react appropriately. Losing to cheese is frustrating, because it can feel like while you were trying to "play the game", your opponent was "just trying to win".

But cheese is part of the game. And sometimes, as a certain Starfleet captain would tell you, you can do everything right and still lose. That's life.

If you ever get mad at cheese, you should try doing the same cheese to someone else. In doing so, I've always learned something about the game, and what that particular cheese is weak to.

If you get bad sleep, or you just got in an argument with someone, or you haven't exercised lately, etc, it will put you off your game.

It's a good idea to figure out what will put you off your game and avoid that before you do something important. Similarly, it's a good idea to figure out shortcuts to feeling better. For me, that's usually laying down on the sofa and closing my eyes for a bit.

This is a saying attributed to Artosis, probably the most well-known SC2 commentator.

It's pretty much what it sounds like. You should always be looking to improve your position, even if you think you're dominating.