|

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.

Similar Posts

Vision Challenge 3: Big Improvements

Byjack

I just came back from standup paddleboarding and I feel really really good. Everything is clear and easy to see. I need to find a way to go and play on the water more.

I also was thinking about how if the eye is constantly in a state of contraction, we might need to do some sort of massage in order to help loosen and relax the ligaments and the muscles. I don’t know yet what kind of massage will work. All the current massages only target the areas around the eyes.

I wasn’t able to test my vision on my phone because it is out of battery but I tested on very small text on a book an the results are mindblowing.

12.5 cm to see clearly.

100/12.5 = -8 diopters

|

Valorant 7: Embracing Death (and Improving Movement)

Byjack

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.

|

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).

The Project Management Crash Challenge

Byjack

It is time for a crash course in project management!

Objectives:

  1. Understand and be able to apply major project management methodologies (PMP school, waterfall, agile project management)
  2. Review other methodologies that I already know (design thinking, OKRs, SRE, DevOps, UI/UX)
  3. Formulate resources and learning into distinct repositories of knowledge and simple shortcuts and worksheets that I can use as shorthand reminders and ways to kick off processes

Total time: 4 hours

PART ONE: Master project management (2 hrs)

  • Section one: Learn, research, and gather (1 hr)
    • Subsection one: Warm up via listening to videos and gathering resource lists (20 minutes)
    • Subsection two: Create own practice scenarios and find questions in them (20 minutes)
    • Subsection three: Consume and build resource repos off of resource lists and answer my own questions (20 minutes)
  • Section two: Create practice scenarios (30 min)
  • Section three: Question and answer (30 min)

PART TWO: Review other methodologies (1 hr)

  • Section one: write down everything from memory basic searching (20 minutes)
  • Section two: watch videos (20 minutes)
  • Section three: search for resources and worksheets (20 minutes)

PART THREE: Create and organize resources (1 hr)

  • Section one: create a structure for folders and docs (20 minutes)
  • Section two: create resources for project management (20 minutes)
  • Section three: create resources for other methodologies (20 minutes)

Here is a video that I started out with:

Project Life Cycle
Project Management Process

Links to the worksheets

Core Wounds 6

Byjack

Today I want to address the core wound that I am undesirable and a bad person specifically because I want to make other people happy.

He Looked Sad

He looked sad in the sharing circle

I’m having a rough time

He said

He didn’t say much more

And I don’t think

Anyone else knew

That this was a call for help

Only me

I see that you usually are very happy

I said

I feel that you must really be going through a lot

And I want to tell you

That it will be ok

He smiled

And I felt

Happy

 

I Felt Powerful

I knew

During the meeting

He was judging me

Trying far too much

To try to speak for me

I was angry

But I bided my time

When he tried to take control

And asked if I wanted to show the customer something

I said no

Then

After the meeting

Fresh from my success

I let myself be still and quiet

Let the doubt creep into his mind

Let him understand

That I knew exactly what I was doing

That I was the one

In control

|

Valorant 43: The End and More

Byjack

I decided today that I need to close out the Valorant challenge for a couple of reasons:

Firstly, most importantly, the challenge is over! I think it is important to have specific success/end criteria for every challenge because then it gives a distinct goal to focus on and allows for new challenges to take its place. My original goal for Valorant was to get to Plat in a month. It instead took maybe over a year, but there is no doubt that I completed the challenge. I have been solidly in Plat 1 for months now and just recently solo-queued up to Plat 2. Before there was a reason to keep the challenge going because I kept dropping back down to Gold, but now I think this challenge is well and truly finished.

Secondly, I noticed that I started posting shorter and less thought-out posts about Valorant. Since the challenge is essentially over and my goal has been achieved, it has completely lost focus…which is why it is important for old challenges to end and new challenges to start. Since my posts about Valorant have evolved into less focused thoughts along my journey in Valorant, I can remove the label of “challenge” and continue making posts of observations and thoughts in my overall Valorant journey. I will always challenge myself in Valorant and it will continue to be a long-term goal to learn from the game and grow as a player and as a person. I don’t need a challenge to denote that ambition because this entire blog is that ambitious. Challenges are meant to be smaller focused time and goal bound tools and structures.

Finally, I have new challenges I want to focus on. I have my art and creative challenge coming up, my jiujitsu challenge, and my sleep challenge. All of those challenges require time and effort and the less distractions and pressure I have, the easier it will be to complete those challenges. I will almost certainly start a new Valorant challenge in the future and I need to set a precedent for that now by closing out old and dead/completed challenges like cobwebs in the mental attic.

P.S. For old times sake, here are my latest strategies in Valorant that got me to Plat 2.

  1. Have a purpose/gameplan every round
  2. Look for multikills, not just killing and running – this gives you awareness even if you end up getting one kill and dipping
  3. Focus on what mindset works for you

To expand on number 3, the main mindsets I like to use:

  1. Flicking mindset (good for if you are feeling lots of energy and quite relaxed). Keep your mouse hand loose and imagine flicking on the enemies. Visualize centering all of the enemies on your screen.
  2. Cart of rails mindset (good for very careful and deliberate clean peeks). Imagine you are sitting in a cart on rails and you want to do a driveby shooting. Your railway car can move left and right but not up or down, and will stop the second your crosshair covers the head of an enemy. Anticipate to see them opposite the direction you peek (moving to the right, anticipate on the left).
  3. Adjust crosshair mindest (good if your micro adjustments are off). After seeing the enemy, focus on the space between your crosshair and their head and use intuitive movement to close that gap, whether it is strafing or moving the mouse.

So it is goodbye for now for the Valorant challenge, but we will probably be back at some point to compile data about this whole challenge and do a couple of retrospectives.