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Valorant 34: Deathmatch

Byjack

My initial attempt at deathmatch:

Watching Tenz’s deathmatch

Some reflections:

  • I’m not back at deathmatch at all
  • I need to get better at flicking
  • Tenz tries to micro adjust to one tap, strafes for 1-3 shots then crouch sprays
  • Takes more time on the people who arent looking at him

My second attempt:

Its much better, but I do feel more pain in my finger from the pressing the mouse and it my biceps.

Some more thoughts:

  • Add more movement into the aiming to make it more smooth
  • Flick faster
  • Work on using less force when pressing the shoot button

Some thoughts:

  • I definitely have a really good feel for DM and my mechanics are fairly good
  • I can use DM to practice thinking about angle advantage
  • Tenz is calmer, moves a little slower and intentionally moves crosshair to hold specific angles instead of swinging everything
  • I need to keep a focused crosshair on one area unless I’m swinging
  • Think of everything as holding angles, even swinging, you are swinging to hold another angle
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Valorant 33: Brimstone Pearl

Byjack

This idea of finding the same type of gameplay in a pro or radiant player was really interesting, and so I decided to take it into my next vod review.

My vod:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T05HsudTzvQ

Main takeaways:

  • I’m mad about getting one tapped, but that actually happens at all ranks, Valorant is a quick time to kill game
  • Controllers don’t smoke as quickly as I do, and they often use them selfishly (smoking mid if they play mid to establish control over the parts they want to take control over)
  • The smoke on B site creates a wall from pushing onto site, I guess I didn’t know what kinds of smokes would be useful
  • In terms of playing around smokes, they move quite slowly in and out of smokes
  • Generally play wide and out in the open for better angle advantage, I play scared and close to the wall
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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.

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Valorant 31: Class in Session – Unit 1 Day 1

Byjack

UNIT 1: VOD Review | Day 1 – TenZ

Exercise: Imitate Tenz and imagine I am him

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsgDk8ojQjg&ab_channel=ValorantDAILY

Lessons learned:

  • I’m exhausted – fell asleep for a long time after watching and imitating for a short period of time
  • Knife to gun transition – keeping knife out until dangerous angles, then switch to gun or do a jump peak while switching if no room
  • Hold for peeks – clear where they might peek, not where they might be, continue to hold it or switch to another angle they can push you from
  • Set graphics to low
  • Don’t push smokes unless with flashes or off of someone else’s contact
  • Spray with good spray control – pulling down
  • Fall after spraying to reload
  • Jiggle if holding close to an angle
  • Warm up at the start of each round by flicking onto teammate heads

In game what I did very successfully:

  • Spamming through smokes – I got many headshots through the smoke
  • Holding peekable angles – I felt I got a lot more intentional to where I was staring
  • Holding off angles when watching for the flank (specifically I utilized the place Tenz hid on Pearl in the first round to get kills
  • Being more intentional of when the knife is out, I rarely got caught out with my knife. I figured out how much time it takes to pull out the gun, and I always timed it so that I pulled out my gun before peeking anything.

What I can improve on:

  • Pulling out the knife more often when I know no one is close
  • Spam more boxes
  • Utilizing jump peeking more
  • Making sure my peeks are still tight and clean and fast
  • Being much more focused on holding specific peeks when slowly scaling up
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Valorant 30: Resetting

Byjack

Rank got reset yesterday. I am sliding back into gold 1.

I thought about a few things today:

  1. Creating a Valorant learning course syllabus
  2. Focusing on playing the perfect game
  3. Focusing on effort and energy
  4. Focusing on the personal journey I am going on and the lessons I learn about myself
  5. Alex Hormzi approach of making it impossible for you to fail

Lessons I’ve learned about myself so far:

  1. Success means love to me
  2. Anger and rage covers hopelessness and out of control feeling of something that is uncontrollable or difficult
  3. I yell at myself because I’m afraid of failing

UNIT 1: VOD Review

  • Day 1 – TenZ – 3/9/23
  • Day 2 – CNED – 3/10/23
  • Day 3 – Yay – 3/11/23

UNIT 2: Map Understanding

  • Day 1 – Icebox – 3/12/23
  • Day 2 – Split – 3/13/23
  • Day 3 – Ascent – 3/14/23

UNIT 3: Mechanical Breakdown

  • Day 1 – Crosshair Placement – 3/15/23
  • Day 2 – Flicking – 3/16/23
  • Day 3 – Spray Control – 3/17/23
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Valorant 29: My Valorant Fears and Emotions

Byjack

I wanted to do a bit of a post to understand how I am feeling right now about the Valorant challenge. I know I feel incredibly stressed, angry, and depressed because I feel like I wasted all my time on Valorant. So much time trying so hard to be good, but nothing seems to really come of it. Sometimes looking at my VODs I feel like my gameplay is the same as it was before.

I don’t really know what is going on and why it seems like I’m new to the game every time. I don’t know why I’m overthinking everything. Why is everything so hard?

I wish I could see major mistakes in my old gameplay.

I guess watching more VOD reviews will help me understand. But that takes so damn long. Maybe it means that there are still opportunities to play much much better. I feel that I maybe have gotten much better but it doesn’t seem to translate over to comp. Maybe it’s also something about understanding the maps better. I really get the sense that I got to plat last time by playing more comfortably on agents and on maps. I think I understood just how to play each map better. But I want to be a more complete player. I want to play with better movement and peeking.

Something else that I feel that I missed out on was just having more posts about the emotions I was feeling. It makes me sad that all my Valorant posts were about techniques and none of them were about emotions.

Valorant has a lot of nice emotions for me. I met my girlfriend on Valorant, I had a lot of friends on Valorant. These days I play mostly alone, but I still like the world. Cool agents and fun to get on to all these different teams. I love it when I have some really fun crazy game sense timing lurks. I guess that is one way that I got significantly better than before.

I wish I had VODs from when I was in iron. I feel that jump from iron to silver was the large one. The jump from silver to plat is weirdly small.

Ok. So I just spent a good hour or so just watching my VODs from bronze until plat then back to gold. I actually feel my overall movement is better and more consistent. The only difference in plat is that I was calmer and held an angle for longer. I also did more wide jiggles. I know for gold I held a lot more angles, and made sure to hold them wide because they would often wide swing everything.

Looking forward, I would be so happy if I kept calm and held angles for longer when moving around the map, held for the wide swing more often. Then when fighting an angle, I want to be more aggressive, swinging very fast and hard, but stopping at the edge and fighting, not leaving until I try to kill them, maybe just letting go of movement keys or crouch spraying. I would love to see my fundamentals get really really good, to a level I know they can get to.

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Valorant 28: How to Get the Feeling for Something

Byjack

This might fall into my Valorant challenge but it goes much deeper.

I started trying to find a way to multitask in Valorant, which led me to thinking about confidence. This led me down a whole path where I was trying to understand how to focus on the game and get into the game, and get into flow.

I finally arrived at a technique that looks something like this:

  1. See the enemy
  2. Imagine their head getting shot
  3. Aim
  4. Shoot

This works for drills, deathmatch anything. The point is that you visualize the outcome first, then take some action (aiming). You don’t immediately aim, you don’t shoot as soon as you visualize.

This does a couple of things:

  • Visualizing hitting the headshot removes anxiety because in my head I can hit the shot
  • Visualization makes me focus on one target and give it my full attention
  • Aiming makes sure I actually hit the shot

On top of this, I can do anything to aim, I can use my movement to aim, I can center my screen, I can do literally anything, the important part is to visualize the headshot before it happens.

In a very interesting turn of events, I’ve actually found this super helpful in music too.

Oftentimes my singing is muddy and unclear. I’ve done something similiar:

  1. Chop the notes into shorter more enunciated syllables
  2. Savor and taste each note
  3. Imagine how I want the note to taste

This does something similar where I am more aware of each note and can sing it with more intention and emotion. I don’t skip ahead too fast, I focus on each word as it comes.

It seems that a combination of a focus on a small step, and visualization helps bring me into the present moment.

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Valorant 27: Confidence

Byjack

I’ve been thinking more about confidence in Valorant and it actually made me think a lot more about what makes confidence. I originally was interested in how to multitask because I thought that was what would make me stronger in Valorant, but I wasn’t able to find any useful information on it.

I ended up searching multitasking in sports, and I was specifically in interested in the basketball videos when they talked about confidence.

The first video was this:

Ideas:

  • Confidence is not about positive or negative thinking
  • There are two ways of thinking
    • Logically and analytically
    • Intuitively
  • Confidence is about trusting the second type of thinking
  • Timing cannot be thought

Ideas:

  • People often rely on outside sources of confidence
    • Success
    • External Validation
    • Comparing ourselves with others
  • These outside sources of validation are not reliable
  • Confidence comes from being able to trust yourself
  • Trustworthiness is from people who follow a code
    • Ex: Warrior code “no man left behind” (inspires confidence in your unit because other people won’t leave you behind)
    • Ex: Courage over success, valuing courage over failure or success validation
  • Code must be specific and have specific actions you take to fulfill it
  • Mantras can be helpful

So as they say in the video to do, I am writing down the things I use for confidence in Valorant:

  • Success – high KDA, increasing elo
  • Comparison – high KDA compared to others, higher rank
  • Knowledge and practice – learning techniques and practicing them
  • Performance – being able to predict moves, hitting my shots

What I admire in other players:

  • Clarity in thinking
  • Creative plays
  • Fast reactions
  • Precise mechanics
  • Boldness/confidence

I’ll take each of these a step further to draft out my code. I’m going to see if I can break down what I make each of these things mean:

  • I make success mean that I’m smart that I’m special
  • I make comparison mean that I’m special, that I’m a valuable or worthy person
  • I make knowledge and practice mean I’m smart and that I deserve to be heard
  • I make performance mean that I’m special and I’m capable

For the second list:

  • I make clarity mean that someone is smart
  • I make creativity mean intelligence, specialness, worthy of love and admiration
  • I make fast reactions means someone is attractive
  • Precise mechanics I make it mean someone is capable, valuable and worth a lot
  • Boldness and confidence I make it mean someone is valuable and special

To think about it further my code might need to address:

  • Inner value – what is valuable about myself
  • Inner specialness – what do I think is special about myself
  • Inner love and admiration – what do I love and admire about myself
  • Inner capability – what makes myself capable

I don’t really know what my code can be but one aspect that keeps coming up for all of these things are valuing feelings and focusing on radical permission.

Those are two things that I feel make me unique, I value myself and are a way to find freedom and give myself love and admiration.

I suppose I can also focus on the challenge in life, the idea of courage or challenge over success is something else that I admire about value about myself. Deep thinking, letting the answer of hard questions come to me as well.

The ways that I could act out this code in Valorant:

  • Check in to how I’m feeling
  • Vocalize my feelings
  • Check in to how others are feeling
  • Let the energy carry action
  • Let the plan form in my mind
  • Create a challenge at the start of every round

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Valorant 26: Back to Basics

Byjack

So I’ve been stuck in Silver 3 forever after the rank reset and it seems that I need to do a second climb to Plat again. Perhaps I just need to relearn the basics better.

So there is a peeking guide by Noted that I’ve been trying to apply for the longest time and I think I finally understand a good mentality and visualization that can make the peeks good. It is interesting because I’ve been feeling so down about Valorant recently but I always tell myself that the lower elo I go, the more freedom I have to innovate, and innovation is definitely the thing I like to do.

So here is Noted’s peeking guide:

He talks in the peeking guide that its just something you “get used to”. But I wanted to find a way to break it down do that anyone could learn it and that you would never overpeak and angle even if you are not far away enough. This idea of drawing a line to the contested “fighting area” allows for a simple visualisation that will ensure you don’t overpeak, and to do noted’s peek, you simply have to think about drawing a longer line.

I demonstrate it here:

Another note, the best way to peak safely with this method is to have the “line” end close to the edge of the wall, allowing you to peek back in if you miss your shot.

The next piece I might need to refine is just counter strafing because that still isn’t that solid for me, especially for moving targets that I need to constantly adjust for. The initial research into this yields that miyagi-do/looking at distance between crosshair and head is the best solution so far. Results have been good, but it hurts my wrist. I am experimenting with a looser grip and using more of the arm to aim.

Here is a good video on it:

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Valorant 25: Blunder Chess

Byjack

So today, my girlfriend and I were discussing how to make better decisions in Valorant and it made me think that we are playing low level blunder chess. Blunder chess at 200-800 elo is simply playing chess with these main ideas:

  • Check for blunders (hanging queen, bishop, knight or rook)
  • Check for checks on king
  • Look only one move ahead
  • If no clear threats, work on positioning

The idea behind blunder chess is simply that people at low elo will make a lot of mistakes and you can simple wait for them to make a mistake.

I strongly believe my elo (below diamond) that “blunder chess” is highly effective since a lot of simple mistakes are made.

I wonder if I can do the same simple ideas in Valorant where I don’t strategize too much, but check for very simple positioning and big mistakes:

  • If I pull my util or knife out, can I be shot?
  • Am I under time pressure?
  • Positional advantage:
    • Taking space or map control
      • In order of lowest to highest risk
        • Utility/teammates
        • Shoulder peak
        • Jump peak
        • Jiggle peak
        • Wide swing
    • Defending map control
      • In order of lowest to highest risk
        • Utility/teammates
        • Hold and fall off method
        • Spraying
        • Jiggle peak
  • Treat teammates as utility