I realized recently that having really insane movement is better for certain types of guns. Specifically the phantom.
I tested this theory today, by playing phantom and I think the results speak for themselves.
A couple of notes:
The Vandal will require a different mindset to play (the catch them on the crosshair, holding angles type of mindest)
Movement is really good but need to peek tighter angles still
Overall, I need to pick the weapon best suiting my mood and the map. Vandal for slower smoother headshots, phantom for more energetic aggressive plays.
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:
To summarize my goals in order of how much they resonate with me:
Be able to communicate and connect on a deeper level with my girlfriend, her friends and family
Discover a whole new undiscovered world, the French world
Understand and empathize with others better, understand and empathize with myself better
Challenge myself to do the impossible
Maybe win some cool points in learning French written language
Learn more about French food
Timeline: 31 days (not counting today) from December 15th to January 15th
I’ve always wanted to learn French in a way that isn’t conventional. Not the Duolingo or the Rosetta Stone or Pimsleur way. None of those programs really worked for me. Maybe on the surface level they work…like if I spent enough time learning and studying those programs it would work but the way they were structured was all wrong for me. It just felt so dry and boring and something alive about the language was lost. I love how personal language can be. I want it to be personal for me.
But in order to do so, I’m going to have to rely a huge amount on connection theory because learning a language is incredibly difficult and I will need to really come up with something next level to learn a language without following one of these programs.
So let’s think about it. While I would love to plan out all 31 days of this, I simply cannot. That is too damn hard. Because I don’t have enough experience in learning languages, I need to try to learn it in different ways and understand and feel the feelings.
Some things I want to try:
Write a story in French. Get help from a large language model in doing it.
Write a comic in French, and also get help from AI.
Learn through mimicry. Watch a YouTube video or movie in pure French. No subtitles, no explanation. Just imitate and copy the entire language. Don’t even try to understand what is being said.
This is how babies learn and how large language models learn
This might be my entire strategy in the challenge
What I train on might be important, for example, if I watch a lot of comedy, I might end up being a very jokey person in French
This is probably by far the hardest but most profound way to learn a language, need to be extremely comfortable with feeling the feeling of confusion (one of the most painful feelings for humans)
Leave a message to my girlfriend in French every day. Let go of pronunciation or grammar. Focus only on trying to communicate as much as possible without looking any French up. When I need to look something up, don’t try to memorize it. The point is to communicate a lot, not memorize or get things perfectly right.
This makes a lot of sense because my primary goal is to connect with my girlfriend.
It makes sense to let go of anything that would prevent me from wanting to leave a message, namely
Being afraid to pronounce something wrong
Annoyed at having to look something up
Annoyed at having to memorize words I look up
By talking a lot, expressing a lot every day, and potentially looking up the same words over and over, I will start to absorb them
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.
Today I had a strategy session with my brother who is almost at the rank I want to be (Plat) about major mindset shifts I need to do to get out of Bronze and Silver.
Here are the main areas we came up with:
Learn to play off of contact better:
Swing when you see teammates swinging
If you see someone holding, pre-aim and get ready to trade
Crosshair placement and preaiming
Holding for wide swing vs close
Methodical clearing
Ability usage
Have gameplan for ability usage for the beginning of every attack and defending round
Aspas aim is much more similar to mine, less smooth, but distinctly clears and preaims angles
Barely counterstrafes, taps a lot and them spray
Does a lot of widepeeks as well
Like to hold angles a lot more
Good attempt to wide swing, need to hold angles more until the swing
Wide swing needs good crosshair placement
Make sure you are ready for them to be visible at the edge of your swing
Good practice holding angles
Good overall but prefire is a bit messy, might be from pain and uncomfortable elbow position
Crosshair can also get a bit unstead, not using movement to aim
My games today were frustrating. I felt I was moving too fast when it was dangerous (I have a feeling enemies are nearby). I tend to rush my aim and my peek. What helped a lot with that is the preparing your crosshair in the intuitively most comfortable way to take a fight. It’s engaging and helps me slow down and be more intentional. I won every game after using that technique.