Innovation Project: APM

I have been doing some research about how to measure the player's performance in RTS games.

So the main concept I am going to focus is APM: Actions per minute. This information can be seen in Wikipedia APM.

This concept originates from the game Starcraft, as a way to measure player skill. Actions per minute is the number of actions (such as selecting units or issuing an order) completed within a minute of gameplay in real strategy games.

A beginner can have around 50 APM in games like Starcraft while professional players have more than 300 APM.

A player's APM value is determined by the number of actions performed in a given minute. Some actions, such as repeated selection, are easier to carry out than others, and players may repeatedly perform (or "spam") these actions and are consequently redundant in terms of their usefulness.

Although, "spamming" may be used as a way to warm up 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. Because of this, more sophisticated measures of APM may attempt to filter out redundant actions by means such as ignoring re-selection of a group of units which was already selected and ignoring the very beginning of the game (when the typical relative lack of action facilitates spamming), in order to only measure a player's "efficient/effective" APM value. However, there is currently no standardization of what constitutes an "effective action" and APM is therefore typically recorded without any filtering.

In Starcraft II, the measure EPM (effective actions per minute) was created following the previous ideas. Instead of counting clicks or key strokes, it counts game commands. This way you can get a more accurate number.