Why do pro-gamers spam hotkeys?

[Edwardo Piet]

I've heard a pro gamer explain that doing this early on in the game keeps your fingers moving and more prepared for when you actually need to execute lots of commands later in the game

Ah! So that is why then. I heard this from players but I never heard it from one of the actual pro-gamers themselves. I wondered if it was a rumor and people were just guessing that was why.

So it's to keep them alert is the best way of thinking of it for me. Easier to stay fast from the beginning than speed up when required, I guess.

[The Grand Nudger]

Because apm is correlated with winrate.  One of the long standing ways to raise your winrate, particularly in SC, was to raise your apm.  It had nothing to do with anything else, it was biblical info for the longest, later rationalized a hundred ways.

[bennyboy]

If screaming 'faggot' over the internet is you're idea of fun.

Who doesn't like doing that?

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When I'm on LoL, it's much more preferable than trying to perfectly time hotkey presses constantly. If I spam the button eight times a second it will then activate the move as soon as it's able to

Yeah and if you have 200 ping like me, that predictive skill spam can actually let you hit more skills in a short time.

[Edwardo Piet]

I adore Starcraft and I adore Age of Empires 2.

As soon as my keyboard stops messing up I'll be back to AoE2 HD on Steam

[Autumnlicious]

I found that the more I clicked, the better I got at making decisions. Every click was a reminder to do something.

I often see people get surprised with a fast moving situation and freeze. It happens to me. I try to moderate that by ensuring I am always doing something, even it's a busy-wait.

[Edwardo Piet]

That makes a lot of sense.

I think the best way to summarise hotkey spamming is "it keeps the mind alert and the hands moving".

[I_am_not_mafia]

I never knew about it myself but I reckon it makes sense. Neurons don't just fire once, they fire trains of spikes. The frequency of these spike trains change in frequency over time and need to coincide with the firing rate of other neurons. If you're reacting to something fast then it would make sense if the appropriate neurons are already firing at a fast rate.

I can see that it would work for some games where how fast you press keys make all the difference. Not sure how you could do it with a game like Counter Strike where it depends how quickly you hit the mouse button.

[dyresand]

when you spam hot keys it gets you prepared for stuff later in the game. I do that a lot in games
i used to CS Source some what competitively and it really does help with your reflexes.

[The Grand Nudger]

No it doesn't.  hehehe.

The reason that the advice exists, the reason that the correlation between apm and winrate exists, is that low apm is an indicator of inactivity.  Inactivity loses games.  High APM, otoh, while it is an indicator of activity, is not an indicator of effective activity.  You could be spamming "move here" 10 times a second, while moving there is the worst possible decision you could have made.  GG. The notion that raising your apm effect your winrate is based around the idea of equalizing contributing factors. It doesn't have anything to do with anything else, necessarily...rapid fire clicking buttons - hotkey spam, doesn't, in and of itself, get you ready for anything enhance your reflexes or change anything other than how often you click buttons.

It's not a useless metric, because any metric is useful in a competitive scenario, but it's one of those things where the attribution and explanation of correlation (plenty of people flirt with causation) has become a matter of gamer folklore since i exploded as an issue - spurring the creation and mass employment of utilities designed to measure it, twenty years ago, in the competitive SC scene. Effectively, the genesis of modern e-sports. From there it spread to other burgeoningly lucrative titles and genres in that scene, such as CS(fps) at cal-i+. People (particularly nascent "e-athletes" - proto pro-gamers and those who emulated them) looking for a competitive advantage, or some way to measure their performance or predict outcomes.