Starcraft – the difference in APM calculation between WoL and HotS

starcraft-2

According to the WoL observer APM counter, I hovered around 90-100 APM when I was at my peak a year ago. Since then I made a long break, and now with HotS I did some matches against the AI to check out the new stuff and was very surprised to see my APM average go to 130 even though I just fooled around and didn't focus at all.

At first I thought, "Ok, maybe they switched to real-time APM", but even with 30% more it can't be as high as the APM counter showsm since I was clearly not playing that fast.

I know APM is worthless, and I don't actually care. I just wanted to see how much I slowed down in the year that I didn't ladder at all and was extremely surprised that HotS told me I got 30-40% faster, which is impossible.

So where is the difference? What counts now that didn't count before?

UPDATE:
It's clearly not just a conversion to real-time APM, the difference is far too huge. After some warming up I now easily reach 150+ APM in HotS where I had to really focus hard to even reach 90-100 APM in WoL.

Best Answer

Players are speculating that it has changed to game speed time, which is approximately 1.4x faster than real time, instead of real time which is what is contributing to your increased APM.

An official post from blizzard community manager Kaivax

Actions Per Minute (APM)

A number of players have noted that the APM calculation appears to have changed. We can confirm that there is an issue here, and we're working on a fix that should come with a patch after the release of Heart of the Swarm. Furthermore, we've long had a goal of changing APM so that it is perfectly accurate with regard to real time. We continue to work on that, and intend to have more to say about that in a few weeks.

--Edit--

The guys over on the team liquid forum have been doing some testing into what is going on

"There is some kind of the average APM inflation which occurs at specific moments in time. Effectively at those moments a multiplier to average APM is added with cumulative effect.The most prominent ones are at 4:15 (255 seconds), 8:31 (511),17:03 (1023), and probably 34:07 (2047). Usually at that time average APM is stable enough to see big swings and I also suspect the % value of APM inflation is higher (15-20%) than during earlier ones. Earlier moments of APM inflation are at 2:07 (127 seconds), 1:03 (63), 0:31, and maybe 0:15 and 0:07 but APM is too volatile at those points and the % of APM increase is probably less than at later periods." http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=399526

Personally, I don't bother using any of the after game stats provided by Blizzard as I find them mostly useless. If you're really interested in stats I'd suggest you check out SC2Gears.

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