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Valorant 17: Choosing My Own Path

Byjack

I’ve looked at multiple things recently:

  • My lesson with a CS Go / Valorant coach
  • A excellent video of someone reaching radiant from silver
  • A video of how to aim well by Scream a team liquid professional valorant player

What I realized is that there are many ways to improve and win valorant games and climb to plat. There are somethings that will make it easier but you don’t need to do all of them.

Valorant, like life, is a game with specific rules, but how you play it is up to you.

A few different examples:

  • You can play only solo queue (deciding to team up with random people)
  • You can play only with people you know
  • You can play the game to gain rank
  • You can play the game to try out the different agents
  • You can play the game for the high reaction time and mechanical skill like aiming
  • You can play the game for the strategy required

I decided to make a list of how I want to play Valorant in the context of this challenge.

  1. I want to play with people who are fun to hang out with
  2. I want to make the entire game comfortable to play for me
  3. I want to focus on the actual objective, killing all the enemies and winning each round

Step 1: Finding people to play with

The most efficient way is just to focus on playing with people I already like playing with and try to meet new people by adding new people from games I play. I should also focus on unadding people I don’t like playing with.

Step 2: Making the game comfortable for me

The areas I need to focus on being more comfortable:

  • Minimap
    • Being able to visualize where everyone is just looking at the map
  • Aiming
    • Being able to comfortably get the physical mechanics of aim and crosshair placement down
  • Movement
    • Knowing the different ways and distances to peek comfortably
  • Abilities
    • Knowing lineups and ability planning
  • Clearing
    • Knowing how to path through a site properly
  • Switching weapons
    • Knowing the physical coordination of switching knife, pistol and main weapon

Step 3: Focusing on winning rounds

Usually, I am laser-focused on two things:

  • Abilities
  • Killing people and not getting killed

I want to reframe Valorant for me.

Generally, you want to either play for a plant/defuse or try to kill every member of the enemy team. 

As a result, I want to think about Valorant in the following plays:

  1. Brute force brawl with team, if team is pushing site together
  2. Try to get the enemy to trip up and make a mistake by confusing them and holding weird angles or lurking
  3. Try to set myself up for an ace by having my abilites and pathing planned out

Overall I think Valorant meets the following needs for me:

Growth: Getting better over time

Significance: The chance to practice my learning techniques in a measurable area

Love and connection: Playing with people who I like hanging out with

Here is what I think my routine should generally be:

  1. Warmup physically, and stretch, get pumped up with music
  2. Warmup in deathmatch, get a feeling for the mouse
  3. Warmup in the range and spike rush and defuse
  4. Meditate
  5. Play a game, focus on winning rounds
  6. Vod review, focus on the minimap awareness
  7. Practice in custom game lineup and setups to win next time or win by more
  8. Meditate, reflect and write blog post

 

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Fitness Challenge 2: Increasing Appetite

Byjack

So I’m most of the way through my second part of my challenge – Week 2: Big appetite (increase hunger throughout day) and I’m having a huge amount of issues.

I try to eat a lot but I don’t seem to be able to find a way to digest the food.

Several things seem to be standing in my way:

  • Extreme chronic stress
  • Lack of exercises and energy
  • Poor sleep

I’m going to do what I always did in these situations of great stress. I’m going to simplify and try to find something very small to focus on. And that thing will be breathing.

Whether or not I feel full, hungry stressed, tired or anxious, I am going to strive to do only one thing. To breathe. I find that breathing has tremendous effects for all the of things I listed above as obstacles standing in my way.

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Artistic Life Challenge

Byjack

I don’t really know much about what I want from this challenge yet just so as to say that there was a part of my life when I felt really connected to visual art. I used to draw all the time, I used to think about ideas for paintings and dream of illustrating children’s books and graphic novels.

A part of me is still excited by those things but for whatever reason, maybe it was going to a school without passionate artists, maybe it was pushing myself to be more logical and working in logical STEM fields for years, or maybe it was just a part of growing up – I lost touch with art somewhere along the way.

The challenge is simple but difficult to define. I will have succeeded if I feel that I am meeting my need to be creative and finding that joy, wonder, and creativity in my life again like I did when I was younger.

I will try to express the feelings through a poem:

Anything Was Possible

Anything was possible back then

And by anything I don’t mean that I ever dreamed of anything as boring as a seven-figure salery

I felt the worlds of magic at my fingertips

The rush and pull of sorcery

A great clash between good and evil

And a bond between friends, unwavering

Of great courage and great sacrifice

I think now

In what my younger self could have only described

As old age

30 years old is practically ancient

I know that the only way I can do this challenge

Is not through an arbitrary goal or metric

But rather it has to be a portal to another world

A graphic novel

Like I always wanted

Or an illustrated book

It doesn’t matter

Because it is the world that matters

The world that I can escape to

Like the little mouse hole my six year old self would crawl into

To read frog and toad books at the library

Perhaps this has all come full circle after all

Because 30 years old is precisely the age

My younger self would expect to be the time

When people stopped being readers

And started being writers

The creators of the worlds

Like the ones I used to like to escape to

When I was young

It’s actually both fantastic and sad that it took a poem for me to understand what my focus will be for my art challenge. I think I will rename this challenge. I wanted to find myself reinspired by art, and I forget how art inspired me in the first place – by entering and creating other worlds.

This will now be known as the “The Other World” challenge and I will dedicate a year to it.

One year to develop another world that I can dive into, be comforted by, and be lost in.

That means by October 9th, 2024 I will endeavor to have created a miracle. Shaped and molded a whole new universe out of words, images, and maybe even music.

I’m excited because I thought this challenge was going to be like the rest of them, so difficult and challenging. I thought it was going to be about doing Inktober and drawing for an art competition. I realize now that those goals are meaningless to me, and using them as goals, made me feel directionless in art.

This feels more true to my love for art. I remember crying to my girlfriend today about a beautiful book I read when I was young, called the Power of Un. It was a world that I fell into, just like all the others. It was all these worlds that made me feel excited for life. And it is the absence of these worlds that have left me feeling like some part of me was lost and never quite found.

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Profit in Peace 3: Asking Questions

Byjack

I just had a realization. I was thinking about what I “should” be doing in the mornings with this new blog commitment. But I think that EXACTLY what I “should” be doing.

I want to spend my time asking questions. And if an action speaks to me, I will do it.

In fact, this was a major technique in Connection Theory that I forgot about. Connection Theory is about understanding is the pathway to change.

One technique for understanding is to ask many many questions. Very good, specific questions. Questions that beget more questions.

Through questioning, we begin to understand.

Another technique I used to do was to ask myself questions. Imagine myself older and wiser, and come up with questions to ask my current day self, and then answer those questions.

Anyway, I have to transition to work, so this will have to wait for now.

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Aim Training Myths

Byjack

Some really interesting ideas I saw when watching this video about aim training:

My main takeaways:

  1. Aim training is not the main practice but rather isolates specific techniques such as hitting A D targets (people strafing from left to right) or flicking.
  2. Sens and muscle memory doesn’t matter.
    1. Sensitivity just changes what muscle groups you use and to be a good aimer you need to be able to use all muscle groups. Low sens is using the arm and wrist, high sens is using the wrist and fingers. When you know how to use all muscles groups by changing your sens around, when you stick to one sens you will have superior mouse control to use that sens in all situations.
    2. Muscle memory doesn’t exist since you cannot memorize a specific shot, it is always changing depending on the game you are in.
  3. Keep warmups really short. 5-10 minutes max for strictly a warmup and 10-15 minutes for a warmup + some longterm aim group/training.
    1. If you warmup for an hour its a training session not a warmup. It causes you to be tired out and overthink the aiming.
  4. Higher DPI mean lower input delay. 800-1600 is desired but it isn’t that important.
  5. Raw reaction time doesn’t matter as much as awareness. If you don’t expect something, raw reaction time matters much more. 190-180 milliseconds is normal.
  6. Higher sens is technically better because it is faster, but it is harder to be consistent and be in control
  7. Voltaic guides are good aim guides