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
A excellent video of someone reaching radiant from silver
A video of how to aim well by Scream a team liquid professional valorant player
What I realized is that there are many ways to improve and win valorant games and climb to plat. There are somethings that will make it easier but you don’t need to do all of them.
Valorant, like life, is a game with specific rules, but how you play it is up to you.
A few different examples:
You can play only solo queue (deciding to team up with random people)
You can play only with people you know
You can play the game to gain rank
You can play the game to try out the different agents
You can play the game for the high reaction time and mechanical skill like aiming
You can play the game for the strategy required
I decided to make a list of how I want to play Valorant in the context of this challenge.
I want to play with people who are fun to hang out with
I want to make the entire game comfortable to play for me
I want to focus on the actual objective, killing all the enemies and winning each round
Step 1: Finding people to play with
The most efficient way is just to focus on playing with people I already like playing with and try to meet new people by adding new people from games I play. I should also focus on unadding people I don’t like playing with.
Step 2: Making the game comfortable for me
The areas I need to focus on being more comfortable:
Minimap
Being able to visualize where everyone is just looking at the map
Aiming
Being able to comfortably get the physical mechanics of aim and crosshair placement down
Movement
Knowing the different ways and distances to peek comfortably
Abilities
Knowing lineups and ability planning
Clearing
Knowing how to path through a site properly
Switching weapons
Knowing the physical coordination of switching knife, pistol and main weapon
Step 3: Focusing on winning rounds
Usually, I am laser-focused on two things:
Abilities
Killing people and not getting killed
I want to reframe Valorant for me.
Generally, you want to either play for a plant/defuse or try to kill every member of the enemy team.
As a result, I want to think about Valorant in the following plays:
Brute force brawl with team, if team is pushing site together
Try to get the enemy to trip up and make a mistake by confusing them and holding weird angles or lurking
Try to set myself up for an ace by having my abilites and pathing planned out
Overall I think Valorant meets the following needs for me:
Growth: Getting better over time
Significance: The chance to practice my learning techniques in a measurable area
Love and connection: Playing with people who I like hanging out with
Here is what I think my routine should generally be:
Warmup physically, and stretch, get pumped up with music
Warmup in deathmatch, get a feeling for the mouse
Warmup in the range and spike rush and defuse
Meditate
Play a game, focus on winning rounds
Vod review, focus on the minimap awareness
Practice in custom game lineup and setups to win next time or win by more
Something that I noticed when playing Valorant today, is that I tend to speed up and rush when I feel under pressure or stressed, when in actuality, I need to slow down.
Last game I trusted my instincts, and really slowed down when I felt danger and I felt it was much better.
I realized that when I feel safe, I can move fast. When I feel in danger, it is time to exercise extreme caution like in real life.
Some really interesting ideas I saw when watching this video about aim training:
My main takeaways:
Aim training is not the main practice but rather isolates specific techniques such as hitting A D targets (people strafing from left to right) or flicking.
Sens and muscle memory doesn’t matter.
Sensitivity just changes what muscle groups you use and to be a good aimer you need to be able to use all muscle groups. Low sens is using the arm and wrist, high sens is using the wrist and fingers. When you know how to use all muscles groups by changing your sens around, when you stick to one sens you will have superior mouse control to use that sens in all situations.
Muscle memory doesn’t exist since you cannot memorize a specific shot, it is always changing depending on the game you are in.
Keep warmups really short. 5-10 minutes max for strictly a warmup and 10-15 minutes for a warmup + some longterm aim group/training.
If you warmup for an hour its a training session not a warmup. It causes you to be tired out and overthink the aiming.
Higher DPI mean lower input delay. 800-1600 is desired but it isn’t that important.
Raw reaction time doesn’t matter as much as awareness. If you don’t expect something, raw reaction time matters much more. 190-180 milliseconds is normal.
Higher sens is technically better because it is faster, but it is harder to be consistent and be in control
I’ve been feeling the need to add much more intensity to my knee workouts but I don’t know what. I sought out some outside help from one of my favorite youtube channels that I discovered: Strength Side.
1. Foam Roll Lateral Leg,2-4 min. each leg 2. Single Leg HingeStretch, 20 sec. hold x 3 3. Knee Circles,20 each direction 4. Poloquin/Peterson Step Up, 15-20 (beginner) or 8-15 reps (full range) 5. Single Leg Calf Raise, 10-15 each leg 6. Sidelying Leg Lift, 8-12 reps with 6 sec pause at top 7. Split Squat, 8-12 reps, pause 5-10 sec on last rep before knee touches ground 8. Squat to Seiza, 2-6 reps *only if knees feel healthy
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.
I’ve been feeling pretty lost as of late. I am thinking about my youtube channel, about my job, about coaching, about my health and about my challenges with youtube and fitness. I’ve been stressed out about all these different things and I don’t really know how to tackle all of them at the same time. I don’t know what to focus on, which ones makes sense to put energy into, and how I will go about focusing on any of these things.
I’ve been feeling depressed, overwhelmed and depleted, constantly self medicating with youtube videos and games.
Recently, I’ve been inspired by this video:
Health is everything. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you don’t have to choose between that and health. You will be a better entrepreneur with better health.
I want to drop all of my other challenges and focus on this for a while.
I want to focus on my health.
I thought about what this meant for quite a while because health is such a nebulous topic. I feel that Brian Johnson in project Blueprint is taking a very scientific approach to health, but I want to take a more personal approach.
Here are the areas that I care about:
Mood: How positive and happy I feel overall
Passion for life: How motivated I feel about life, relationships and projects
Energy: How energetic and strong I feel
Flow: how in the moment and attuned to my body’s sensations I feel
Attractiveness: how healthy I look
Some ideas of times that I can measure these things:
When I wake up: great for seeing how well I slept
Around 10 AM: good for checking up on my morning routine
Around 3 PM: good for checking on my afternoon routine
Before I go to bed: good to seeing the cumulative effect of the day and how fulfilled I feel
I’ve tried these type of challenges before, but I feel that I sort of neglected the mental part of health, feeling healthier physically but mentally trapped and unhappy. I want to really commit to doing video journaling this entire time in order to make sure that I can express myself and work through mental challenges.
What would mean success to me is not just feeling much more happy, passionate, energetic, in flow and attractive, but also to create a lifestyle, mindset and routine that will maintain and grow that over time.