



keep pumping workers!

the wonderful article Do you macro like a pro? is a study of stats from 2,100 games showing that pros make more workers than noobs, consistently, all through the game.

lesson: to improve your game, you should improve your worker production.

but, how can you tell if your worker production is really improving?

we made ggtracker to solve problems just like this. to let you track your stats, coach yourself and get a proper full-on nerd handle on your self-improvement.

how it works: you upload your replays to ggtracker, and it keeps track of your stats, including win/loss, apm and workers per minute (wpm).

here’s my workers per minute over the past 250 games:

1.3 average, 1.5 recently

the x-axis is the game number. my first game is on the left, and my most recently played game is on the right. you can see, i’ve been slowly but steadily improving. you can see all of my stats on my ggtracker profile page.

my recent average of 1.5 wpm puts me in the middle of the pack of players in diamond and below:

% of players

this chart draws from the 34,000 matches and 41,000 players currently in the ggtracker system, the vast majority of which are public replays made available through a partnership with drop.sc.

some players make lots of workers in the first few minutes, and then just get too distracted after that. so it might be helpful to see your typical worker production per game minute:

this chart shows the average over all the games i’ve played. the x-axis is the game time in minutes. the green line is for me. the red line is the average of players in diamond and below. the blue line is players who are masters and above.

check out EGMachine, the grandmaster zerg. note that his worker production has a second peak around 4:30.

if you look at the other two lines in that graph – “diamond and below” and “masters and above” you’ll see that the biggest difference between the pros and the noobs is around that 4:30 mark. the pros ramp up their worker production around then. perhaps due to early fast expand being more common at the pro level?

for the super nerds out there, a technical note. due to limitations of the replay file format, we cannot measure worker production exactly; we can only measure when the player attempts to create a worker. in some cases the player can spam worker-creation commands that do not correspond to actual worker production. therefore we put a 3-second anti-spam filter into the measurement. it’s not perfect. it’s at its worst when a player will queue up probe production or make six drones in a second. despite these problems, there’s a clear relationship between wpm as we measure it and league, so for that reason i’d argue you’re pretty safe using this wpm as a metric to measure your own improvement as a player.

bottom line, these tens of thousands of games affirm what was discovered by whatthefat in “Do you macro like a pro?”: pros make more workers than noobs.

what do you think? do you need to start pumping more workers?