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Valorant 14: Insane Warmup

Byjack

My insane warmup strategy:

  • No sound (focus on clearing every single angle)
  • Good crosshair placement
  • Movement-based aiming

Results: 1st place deathmatch sheriff only, breeze

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Valorant 42: Chaining Kills

Byjack

A new mentality that I’ve been working with is the idea of chaining kills.

  1. Come up with a play that I want to go for (util, direction, etc.)
  2. Go for not a single kill, but a multikill
    1. Expect more than one
    2. Have a gameplan for getting not one, but 5 kills

It is interesting that taking the offensive makes you much better at being confident. Also, expecting multiple attackers and working on killing as many as possible makes it a lot harder for people to catch you with a trade.

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Valorant 23: Hitting Plat

Byjack

It has finally happened. I’ve hit plat in Valorant. A journey that was supposed to take 2-3 months, but instead took a year and two months (14 months).

Blood sweat and tears went into this challenge, and I learned something interesting at each rank.

IRON

Iron was an interesting rank because it was the rank when I was first learning how to use my mouse and keyboard in a game. I had never played a shooter game on the pc, and haven’t played many serious games at all on the PC. 

Getting out of iron was simply learning how not to make extremely basic mistakes such as reloading out in the open, not getting stuck on walls, planting and defusing the bomb.

BRONZE

Bronze was also an interesting rank. I started actually enjoying the game more here since I had a better idea of what was going on. Bronze rank was still stressful because I would get killed out of nowhere all the time.

I don’t really remember what I did to get out of bronze rank, but I think it had something to do with playing off of my util and learning how to check corners where people hide.

SILVER

I was stuck in silver for a long time. Silver was where I learned a lot about aiming and movement and got quite good at it.

What eventually got me out of silver was learning how to preaim angles.

GOLD

Gold is not a very interesting rank, everyone is pretty much like silver but with slightly better util and aim.

However, perhaps the most interesting thing in the whole challenge is how I got out of gold. I got out of gold primarily by getting more confident.

I did this in two ways:

  1. I focused on a few agents and learned how to get reliable value out of their util (Chamber tp locations, Brim lineups, Sova lineups).
  2. I dealt with some of my underlying negative self talk

I hear lots of things that people say about confidence:

“Stay positive”

“Imagine you are the best”

I always thought these ideas were bogus since I always thought confidence was about one thing: Feeling comfortable in your own skin.

But I started to doubt myself when I say professional Valorant coaching advocating (SEN Zellsis) for the “cocky confidence” mentality and I was stuck in silver.

But I think in the end, I was right. In order to be confident, you need to feel safe and at peace. The real question, is HOW?

Here are the main ideas:

  1. In order to be confident, you need to be ok with not being great (not being smart, successful, attractive, etc.)
  2. In order to be ok with those things, you need to process your traumas and limiting beliefs.
  3. In order to process, you must welcome in your limiting beliefs and incorporate it into yourself.

My limiting beliefs were:

  • “If I don’t succeed, I don’t think I’m worth anything”
  • “I need to beat myself up for every mistake and always think I’m worse in order to not mess up”

Simply by saying those things in my head, made me feel clarity every time I started to stress out and I suddenly felt calm. I gave myself permission to continue to berate myself (or not) but simply welcoming these parts in instead of avoiding them (and having them show up as unresolved stress), made me have a clear mentality that made my rise to plat.

I learned I have a huge amount of power, intelligence and creativity that are locked up by stress and fear. Slowing down, focusing on a few things at a time, and embracing my fears allows me to operate at my fullest potential.

What I thought confidence was:

  • Fake it until you make it
  • Cocky
  • Don’t care
  • Aggressive

What confidence actually is:

  • Ok with failing
  • Calm and clear-headed
  • Balanced
  • Trust yourself
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Valorant – Inner Game

Byjack

The most interesting part of these videos is the last part of the second video, where they talk about inner game.

What I find interesting about inner game is the idea that mentally telling yourself to do something won’t work, but noticing will make your mind automatically make the change. This is the essence of connection theory and it is so interesting that psychologists have studied it.

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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 21: Aim Mechanics

Byjack

I’ve narrowed down core aiming principals to a couple of things:

  • General Aim: Pointing your body toward your target
  • Survivability: strafe peeking (strafe out, prediction of enemy location, hit strafe and shoot at the same time as seeing enemy)
  • Preaiming: crosshair placement
  • Flicking: loose mouse hand + some general aim mechanics

Overall, I think the most important technique is just having the mindset of pointing to your body toward your target (what I’m starting to call general aim since it gets you in the general vicinity of your target). This helps massively with confidence, with holding angles, and with tracking and flicking.

Second most important is probably a combination of a loose mousehand and good crosshair placement as this allows you to hit most targets while also being ready for a flick. This pairs with a strong understanding of how to slice a pie and clear a site.

Finally, some sort of strafing is important as it increases survivability by a lot.

There are a couple more aiming techniques that I feel are significantly less important as they are more niche. These will help you in deathmatch and higher elos but are not part of core aim:

  • Strafe shooting: general ability to track and strafe a moving target, paying attention to crosshair
  • Spray control: the ability to crouch spray and spray adjust
  • Angle holding: predicting how close or wide a peek will be

Strafe shooting is probably the most important as it is good for long range fights as movement based aiming is a lot more effective on those fights.

Spray control is pretty niche to close range gun fights and fighting multiple enemies.

Angle holding is very important but general aim and strafe clearing are more key to holding angles.