One replay tells you what went wrong in one game. Three hundred replays tell you what keeps going wrong. Most players have that history sitting on their hard drive already, and never look at it as a whole. This guide sets up your Player dashboard in Repalyzer and shows you how to read it.
None of this needs StarCraft installed. The dashboard works from the replay files alone.
Step 1: Import everything
Open Local Explorer and import the game's replay folder in one click. Then drag in any other folders you have: old installs, backups, replays saved from tournaments or friends. The more games, the more honest the picture.
Choose how Repalyzer stores them. Index mode keeps your files where they are. Copy mode makes managed copies, which is handy if your replays are scattered across drives.
Step 2: Let background analysis run
Background analysis works through your newest 300 games, a single folder or the whole library. You can set it to Gentle, Normal or Fast, and it pauses while StarCraft is open or your laptop is on battery. Start it before you go to bed and the dashboard is ready in the morning.
While you wait, run the clean-up. It finds very short games (usually dodges or early leaves) and missing files. Short games skew your win rate and APM, so it is worth removing them. Deletions go to the Recycle Bin after a hash check, so nothing is lost by mistake.
Step 3: Tell Repalyzer who you are
If you have played on several accounts or renamed yourself, your games are split across names. Known Players fixes this by linking every nickname one person has used, so all your accounts count as one player. Add your own names to a Known Players entry before you read the dashboard.
The same lists work for your opponents. With the Korean and Foreigner progamer lists turned on, a pro playing on a smurf shows up under their real name.
The quickest way happens on first launch. Once your replays are imported, Repalyzer looks for the name that appears in most of your games and asks Is this you? Click Yes, that's me and it creates your Known Players entry, marks it as you and opens your dashboard.
To add your other accounts, or if you skipped that step:
- Open Known Players from the header and pick yourself under Players, or choose Add a player.
- Under Seen in your replays, Repalyzer suggests names from your library that look like your nickname, with how many games each has. Click one to add it, or type any other name under Add a replay name. Matching ignores case and accents.
- Click This is me, so your own games are highlighted and used as the baseline in comparisons.
Many names to sort out? The Replay names tab lists every name in your library, most played first, and Review unassigned one by one walks you through them with suggestions and keyboard shortcuts. Nothing is linked unless you choose it.
Step 4: Read the dashboard
Open the Player dashboard and pick yourself. The top shows your win rate, record, recent form, typical game length and APM. Below that are three breakdowns. Here is what to look for in each.
By matchup. Repalyzer highlights your strongest and toughest matchup. A gap of more than 10 percentage points between your best and worst matchup is common, and it is usually the fastest place to gain rating. Check the number of games too: a 40% win rate over 12 games could be bad luck, over 120 games it is a pattern.
By map. Your strongest and toughest map are highlighted here too. A bad map in an otherwise good matchup often points to one specific problem, such as a rush distance you do not respect or an expansion you cannot hold. That is far easier to fix than "I am bad at ZvT".
By month. This is your trend line. Look for a rise or fall after something changed: a new build, a break from the game, a new map pool. If your win rate dropped the month a new map entered the pool, you have found your answer.
Step 5: Go from "where" to "why"
The dashboard tells you where you lose. Patterns helps you see why. It compares your wins with your losses on things like supply blocks and idle workers, the openings you used and faced, and even the best time of day and day of the week for you to play.
A typical finding looks like this: in your losses you spend twice as long supply blocked as in your wins. That is not a matchup problem or a strategy problem. It is one macro habit, and it costs you games everywhere.
From there, open two or three of the worst games in Repalyze and use the routine from Your first replay review in 10 minutes to see it happen.
Practice task
Write down three lines from your dashboard: your toughest matchup, your toughest map in that matchup, and the biggest difference Patterns finds between your wins and losses. Play your next ten games with that one difference in mind, then check the dashboard again.