| |

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

Similar Posts

| |

Valorant 38: Day 1 – Apas – 6/3/23

Byjack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHsBpSit-kc&t=382s&ab_channel=valorantpromatches

I didn’t really know how to copy the apas style, but I noticed that he wide peeked a lot.

I also used the ideas earlier about hyping myself up and it seemed to work.

We didn’t win this game but I was incredibly aggressive and confident in my peeks. I entried with the classic and was not afraid to push very aggressively, buying my team space.

In this game I started feeling frustrated with my team and that I was starting to overheat and not aim as properly.

After running a deathmatch and focusing on taking a second to aim, and to fully face the enemy, looking for the kill, I had this game.

I felt this was by far the most successful, with aggressive peeking but also utilizing util and gamesense to the fullest.

My sense is that hyping myself up is probably the biggest strategy for me, with some additional adjustments afterwards for aim technique.

| |

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

Sova Fanart 1: Class Unit 1 Day 1

Byjack

UNIT ONE: Sova Model Studies | Day 1 – Portrait

Since this unit was all about model studies, I went into a custom game and used the model as a reference for drawing sova portraits.

I started with this side view of Sova.

Then I did colors:

I really didn’t like the colors. So I tried looking at tutorials.

New rough sketch of Sova:

Followed by a more refined outline:

Then by a painting attempt:

Something wasn’t clicking. I still didn’t like the painting job. I decided to try again and learn from another tutorial on shading.

I tried to color again.

This time I felt something clicked with using large soft brushes and the lasso tool. I used the soft brushes to create nice gradients and the lasso tool for the clean edges. Looking closely at the painter I see that he also uses the smudge tool a lot.

|

Valorant 20: The Combination of Crosshair Placement and Strafing

Byjack

I learned a couple of things when it comes to Valorant. Firstly, I need to either warm up less, or find a different way to warm up, because I notice that both my overall body and my hands get tired after 3-4 deathmatches.

I also learned that it isn’t always good to position for the strafe kill since usually you want good first shot accuracy and even though you are hard to hit when you are strafe shooting, I realized strafing is more of a niche skill rather than how you want to take most gun fights.

However, the best way to use strafe shooting is using cover to shoot.

Here is a step by step breakdown:

 

We strafe to the right to clear left.
As we move to the right, we expect the enemy somewhere on our left.
As we peek out, we try to predict/micro adjust to the head. We are already thinking about moving left now.
As the shot fires off, we are already back behind cover.

Here is a short clip of me demonstrating this concept in a deathmatch.

The point is to always look for cover, if you notice, I get overexposed a couple of times in this clip and I recorrect behind cover quickly. These are a lot of long shots, but it gets even cooler for tight close angles and you can use it hold angles after peeking as well (you don’t need to overpeak everything).

Sova Fanart 3: Class Unit 1 Day 3

Byjack

It’s been a full week since I last drew for this drawing competition. I’ve been feeling a lot of dread because there are so many details in drawing Sova and I don’t feel any closer to getting better at him because it takes so long to draw a full figure.

I drew for a full hour but didn’t get very far.

Here was the reference:

Here is my rough sketch:

And here is my lineart:

The lines don’t feel that confident and don’t seem to be creating forms, more just tracing lines.

I feel that I need to slow down. I like the idea of the exercises but I feel that they need to be broken down further into smaller syllabi. Since I don’t have much time to draw every day and each task every day feels a bit daunting and overwhelming, I need to break them down further to learn at a fast rate.

I also wish I could draw from the live model, but the issue is that you can’t hold an active shot (like shooting or doing the ultimate).

At the same time, I said I would embrace failure and I did. I still believe in my overall plan and I believe when I look back, this will actually be helpful even though its painful right now.