|

Valorant 7: Embracing Death (and Improving Movement)

Byjack

I’ve been thinking about what small exercise I can do right now to level up my gameplay and progress in Valorant since I haven’t had much time to play or practice recently.

After meditating on it a little bit, I settled on something that I know has held me back in Valorant since I first started playing the game – the fear of death.

The fear of dying in the game:

  • Makes me stressed out, and not think clearly
  • Makes me shoot too fast without aiming
  • Makes me frustrated when I lose
  • Makes me exhausted after playing for a few games

I’ve decided to learn how to accept death in the game, and to understand it better overall.

For example, understanding the “time to death” from an intuitive sense (and knowing how to extend that time) could be a GAMECHANGER.

It will intuitively let me know:

  • When to peek
  • If I whiff, whether I should peek back, crouch down, or keep spraying
  • How much time do I have to aim before I get killed by the enemy
  • Stay focused even after dying a frustrating number of times

So I hopped into a couple of deathmatches and gave it a shot!

I started out just trying to predict when I would die, but dying stresses me out too much to tap into my intuition (you need to be relatively clear-headed to feel things intuitively). I focused then on saying “die” aloud every time I died or predicting when I died. This is taken from a sports exercise of intentionality (you vocalize what will happen, for example, if you are playing badminton, you say “hit” when you hit the birdie, and “miss” if you miss). This exercise is supposed to train your intuition and powers of prediction and anticipation.

Some takeaways:

  • Crouching can make most people miss if they are shooting at you.
  • The direction you run and bunny hop is very important, need to figure out the most evasive ways. Sometimes running directly at them has zero chance of success. I need to work on sometimes facing the side not just forward to be more evasive.
  • The timing of peeking is important, how they have been spraying bullets is important.
  • When you are running behind a wall, before you peek, you don’t need to bunnyhop, just run normally, feel out intuitively, the moment you should peek out
  • I should start just by shouting out dead, every time I actually die, then try to predict
  • I need to aim higher to knife to the head, I keep knifing the body.
  • What I should try next is to stay alive for as long as I can.
  • I should also focus on letting the shock and frustration from dying play out before going again so quickly.

 

My intuition also tells me that I should focus on what I’m missing or losing when I’m dying and focus on those feelings right after dying.

Similar Posts

|

Valorant 32: Washed

Byjack

Yesterday I returned to Valorant and I wanted to learn a few things since being washed before I get back fully into the Valorant grind.

  1. I want to learn how to have comfortable hand positioning
  2. I want to have greater certainty of where all the enemies are at any point in time and a clearer understanding of the game

Class One: Hand positioning (90 minutes)

UNIT ONE: Figure out why

UNIT TWO: Explore Movements

UNIT THREE: Explore aids and relief

Class Two: Greater certainty (3 hrs)

UNIT ONE: Document VOD areas of stress and find equivalent situations in ranked

UNIT TWO: Try to predict decision making

UNIT THREE: Document another VOD

Class One: Hand positioning (90 minutes)

UNIT ONE: Figure out why

I’d say I have a little golfers elbow along with just muscle fatigue. No carpal tunnel syndrome or trigger finger syndrome thankfully.

UNIT TWO: Explore Movements

My perfect position seems to be legs balanced on the floor, chest forwards, armrest angled outwards and level with the desk and pushed backward so I can sit farther forwards.

The results on my sheriff-only account:

I feel mild soreness in my hand and forearm. My whole body feels a bit cramped as well. Overall, massive improvement.

I used a new aiming mentality, which I call the “Zoom In” Method where you pretend you are zooming into where your crosshair is and on the target, sort of getting mental blinders on. It seems to help especially with aiming for very far shots.

Then I played a rank match:

My “greater certainly” class was me looking up at how Som played vs me.

I was really helpful to see the util usage. I ended up using a lot of this information in future matches.

However, I spiraled after playing ranked because I was so frustrated with how I was performing. I ended up playing non-stop from Friday until Sunday sleeping not as much as I would like and always livid from anger that all my opponents were so hard to beat.

|

I Figured Out Arm Aiming

Byjack

Did they tai chi method I mentioned in the previous post. Went really slow and relaxed.

I noticed that there is a natural way to aim.

Here are the steps:

  1. Get into the mood my swishing the mouse across the screen in broad strokes
  2. Slow down and control the movement more
  3. Focus on pivoting on your wrist
  4. First focus on your elbow moving close and far away from your body
  5. Then focus on the micro adjust aim with your wrist

Voila! Amazing pain free aim!

Core Beliefs 5

Byjack

I don’t know exactly if this is a core wound, but I strongly believe that I am responsible for people’s emotions and that I am a bad person.

In order to process this (a rebalance my emotions), I am going to focus on a time when I hurt someone and focus on the part right before it so I can remember that there is a good reason for doing what I did and perhaps have a little more compassion for myself.

The Phone Call

She was a lonely girl

Quiet and shy

I wanted to be kind

By being a good friend

But she seemed to want more

When she asked me

If she could sleep in my bed

What to do

If she was sexually frustrated

I did my best to set my boundaries

I did my best to be firm

But she kept pushing

And it was too much

I knew too little

To do anything than

To push her away hard

After years

Of sending me letters and emails

She must have know

I didn’t want to talk

I just wish

She knew

It wasn’t her fault

That I didn’t like her

But I needed

To be able to say no

Vision Exam Challenge 1

Byjack

Today I booked at eye exam.

The date of the exam is Tuesday May 25th, which gives me about 6 days to prepare.

What I’m looking for this exam to do is to validate where I am visionwise and jumpstart my journey to better vision.

I’m going to be using the following ideas.

  • Feel the feelings
    • Don’t need to try to relax or try to tense, just notice the feelings and sensations
  • Feedback loop
    • Lots of vision tests to understand whether or not I’m improving or not
  • Analogies
    • Understand how vision works and try to strengthen and stretch where needed
    • Use the same knowledge from stretching a good posture here (muscles work in groups)

Understing the Eye

According to this article, it says:

“When you look at things that are far away, muscles in your eye relax and your lens looks like a slim disc.

When you look at things that are close, muscles in your eye contract and make your lens thicker.”

So the key is to relax right? Well, yes and no. Muscles always work in groups. If certain muscles are constantly too tense, then there are certain muscles that must be weak (since if one set of muscles never relaxes, the other set must always be weak).

After researching further, I found the muscle responsible for focusing the lens of the eye. It’s called the ciliary muscle and it looks like it doesn’t actually work in pairs but is like smooth muscle tissue of the stomach.

An interesting article is here and I signed up for the guys course to see what was up.

|

It’s Valorant Time

Byjack

I love gaming. The competition. The graphics. The speed, the maps, abilities. The headshots, the camaraderie.

Today I asked myself a question. How do I get to the level of gameplay that I want to get to? How do I play Valorant in the way I want to play it?

I listened to my body and I used connection theory. Your body is tired. It’s aching. Your mind is cloudy and distracted. Your eyes are dry and tired.

I need to feel the magic that Valorant can be.

I turn on the Dark and Dangerous playlist:

It is time to turn off all the lights. To go into my closet. To let everything go silent.

I feel scared and anxious and my head hurts, but my body knows it’s okay to relax now.

I lay on my bed to meditate. Long enough to wonder when I should stop. Long enough for my mind to wander to think of my colleague who left today and wrote a very nice email. Long enough for the magic of nighttime to sink in, for me to want a hot drink and settle down for a night of gaming.

Turned off the lights again. Fired up the playlist again. It feels like the mood.

Had a good few games where I team MVPed every single game until the last one with a smurfing reyna on both teams. The one on my team was classic only, the one on the enemy team was not. Didn’t really like my duo, he annoyed me. Also bottom fragged every game.

Pretty pissed off about that last game.

|

Valorant 6: Feeling Out Aiming

Byjack

I realized something today. While deathmatch and the practice range are a time to focus on hand-mouse-crosshair connection (basically pure aim), that doesn’t work in competitive game practice.

When I practice Valorant in a comp game, I should be feeling out everything including game sense, movement, and ability usage. See, aim in a real game only matters if the other aspects are set up correctly. It matters which agent you play. It matters how your enter, what your ability usage and game sense tell you. I was able to get so many more headshots when I was starting feeling out the entire game not just my aim.

The one area I realized I need the most practice with is game sense – feeling out where the enemies are hiding and being ready for multiple to peak out at once. I either don’t check corners, keep my crosshair super low or lower my guard after killing just one enemy.

I was able to ace with just game sense, ability usage and a little aim.

In the clutch clip, the one area I can clearly see room for improvement is the use of my ult. It was good for the first shot, but the next two shots should have been very intentionally trying to clear out the enemy hiding spots.

Also, in the clip below for the last round, I can see my decision-making skills need work.

  • I need to do something with phoenix and reyna inevitably who were going to rush me. I also had my ult.
  • I could have jiggled the wall, then try to make my way to long.
  • I could have dodged the phoenix flash by hiding in the corner and facing the left.
  • Or I could have peeked hard and try to make my way to long.

Here are the full game clips.