A Changed Perspective on Aiming

by uGRAVEL - 12/25/20 : 11:59pm

People currently equate time with getting better. There are hundreds of videos on YouTube about experts giving you their opinion on what’s the BEST or FASTEST way to get better at aiming. And while the mechanical journey feels progressive, like you’re moving forward, the end result will leave a bitter taste in your mouth. How do I know? Well, I’ve spent 25 years playing games competitively, and you don’t know who I am.

The purpose of this article is to make sure you don’t spend a lot of time mindlessly shooting things and think some time years down the road you’re going to be some pro. It’s not going to happen that way. Once again, how do I know? I continually convinced myself that was the path for 25 years.

When you’re done with this article you’re going to have a new way of thinking when it comes to aim and practice. Hopefully I will show you the absurdity of our current methods and how simplifying the mechanics leads to an easier skill to practice in a quicker amount of time. If you can tap your finger to a beat, you can use my method to improve.

Close your eyes. Imagine you’re on your very first date with your future significant other. You decide to take them to a carnival. When you arrive you walk up to the ticket booth and buy some tickets, they’re overpriced. Looking around at the dazzling lights, a game catches your eye. It looks something like this:

You put down some tickets, pick up a gun and take a shot. It doesn’t go well. You sit, ignoring your future significant other and get to business. You really want that goldfish. You want to be the hero.

$20.00 in...

You’re getting a little better. You start to mess around with some analytical thinking about what you’re doing.

The ducks are on a fixed belt. They seem to be going at the same speed.

$40.00 in...

There seems to be two speeds. The ducks are not actually equally distanced apart. But you start to notice something. If you can determine the speed of the duck, really you just need to get the timing right. And maybe I should take the wind into consideration?

$60.00 in...

Turns out the wind didn’t matter. You did it. You are the proud new owner of a $60.00 goldfish. You walk away feeling accomplished. A kid out of the corner of your eye is staring at your prize. You give him a smirk, tell him “Good Luck!” and fade into the darkness with a slight chuckle echoing as you are swallowed up.

What was the point of that?

The carnival analogy speaks to a number of issues with the current state of aiming mechanics in esports. I also believe aiming in a tactical FPS should be similar to the carnival game involving the ducks. If this sounds ridiculous, I invite you to take a quick peek and maybe I can convince you.

Time & Money in, Information Out

Let’s start with sitting down to the game. In all games that we play, we transmute time into knowledge. You sit down to a game, you spend 45-minutes to an hour in game and you probably get some sort of knowledge at the other end of that. I think this information is valuable to beginners but tends to fall out around the intermediate level.

This is all conjecture but I think that in the beginning information is easily available and easily actionable. You try a new gun. You try a new character. You try a new level. You learn a little bit about it. If there’s something interesting about it that you like, you might stick with it or you might move on. But I think all the information you gather at this stage is not difficult to obtain.This is the $20.00 dollar level in our carnival analogy.

Overtime, sometimes a lot of time depending on the game, you reach a level where you are comfortable with the mechanics of the game. In our carnival analogy, you know there are ducks, you know they move and you pull the trigger. Sometimes this is enough for people. I mean it’s just a carnival game.

Graduating out of Beginner

In our carnival game, we identified speed and distance between targets.These seemed to matter to our player when he was trying to get better. If we focus on these elements, our hypothesis is that we improve.

Well what if our carnival player came up with a crazy idea. What if he thought he needed to account for the wind? He takes a couple of shots and what the heck... we got it. Well now our player believes they have to account for wind when really it barely affects his game at all. But who is going to tell him?

Thought Leaders Matter

Why is this a problem? Well what if our thought leader turns out to be that kid that was just watching? The kid can tell us all about what you did, he can talk about all the various ways you held your arm. But that kid lacks the actual insight and knowledge that only the player knows. I know that this creates a huge issue with our modern day coaching. The argument that you have to play to coach is highly debatable. So I’m not going to touch it.

But I think it’s very straightforward that the person who played the game probably has more pertinent information about the game than the person who just observes it. The player (at the $60.00 level) can make difficult connections of concepts in the game that a person at the $40.00 carnival level just can’t make. The time and dedication to the game is valuable. So I guess in a way I did touch the coach argument. A coach can be a valuable coach if they have put in the time and dedication to the game. While their information isn’t complete, when combined with the knowledge of the player playing... a little magic... and bam, a good reason we have coaches.

So what's the current aiming landscape look like?

I believe that we have a lot of kids explaining how the player did it. I think that most of the players at the $60.00 level have moved on and the $60.00 level of knowledge is very rare.

Now I’m not trying to be a gatekeeper or include myself in this group. But there needs to be a recognition that this resource is valuable.

And since this resource is already rare, it only makes sense that our landscape of education reflects that. Go google “How to get better at aiming” and some random person will recite you the same stuff. Get a practice routine. Aim at these targets. Do 45 minutes of practice before you game. A million eyes just glossed over by reading that. You’ve seen it. And it doesn’t make you better.

Detour... it matters don’t worry.

A little info about myself, I picked up competitive games when I was 10. I’m 35 now. I was a person who spent thousands upon thousands of hours practicing. That’s not even close to an exaggeration. It started in Counter-Strike 1.6. I jumped into a de_inferno custom game. I found some bots. I set it to headshot only and I would practice 1000 kills per session using a deagle only. The idea behind it was that I could always use a deagle, whether it was a buy round or a save round, it was formidable and cheap. Coincidentally, this practice routined killed my desire to play any game for fun. Fun was replaced with the dopamine hit of landing a headshot and essentially ending my opponent instantly. It became an addiction.

This routine didn’t stop in CS 1.6. I took it to every other game after. Looking for ways that I could get in more reps than my opponents. It was my obsession.

But you don’t know who I am. If I spent all that time practicing, what did it get me? Am I upset? A little. And it didn’t get me much. Mechanically I am up there. But I’m never going to hit $60. Why?

Re-examine and Simplify

Have you ever driven in a really dense fog? The kind that you can’t see past your bumper? Well that’s what it felt like to try and improve in those 25 years of gaming. One thing would seem super important and then something else would  come up that seemed equally important. I would play against bots and thousands of hours of deathmatch but it didn’t translate. I struggled to figure out why. I couldn’t see a path in front of me.

In retrospect, it couldn’t have happened any other way. We are still in the infancy of esports. People have to stand up, develop and re-examine what they develop and soon we will have the same aspects that exist in traditional sports. And once again, people have but they are handing out the same information that I used when I started playing. It has always bugged me.  

Let me introduce you to my re-examination on aiming and how I believe it should be taught going forward.

NOT APPLICABLE

You need to take a look at the game you’re playing and apply the correct foundation when it comes to mechanics. What I’m trying to say is if you played Apex Legends and then turned around and tried to apply the same mechanics to Valorant, you’re going to have a bad time.

What that tells us is that these games are different and thus you shouldn’t practice the same for each.Hopefully at this point it's clear that advice is not universal. So what do we do? Since we’re going into aiming, I will use that as an example.

One of the cool things you can do with modern mouse technology is track your mouse’s movement over time. If you haven’t seen it, I suggest you give it a try. I believe Razer Synapse has this feature.

So which one of these do you think applies to Apex and which one applies to Valorant (by the way this is paint, just trying to show an example, not actual data)

A:

B:

Valorant is more horizontal aiming. You hold a spot and then there’s usually a quick burst of movement. It is also more methodical in how you play. There are less erratic movements.

Not so much in an arena style battle royale games like Apex Legends. There are constantly changes in elevation, targets can appear above you just as much as they can appear below you. So do you think the aim mechanics are the same? Do you think if I gave you one practice routine that it could apply to both games? I can tell you definitively the answer is no from my own personal journey in gaming.

Remember how I told you I would practice 1000 hs a session in Counter-Strike 1.6, well that ballooned. Wanna see my rock bottom?

This gets you nowhere.

What we waited 6 pages for...

I promised you a new way of aiming in tactical shooters. This took me 25 years of aiming to figure out just how dumb I was and how simple aiming can be. It doesn’t require 21,000 mouse clicks to get better.

The reason we had to go through the explanation is because you need to realize this isn’t just some whim. This is 25 years of doing it wrong and waking up one day to a new idea that is so simplistic it is very easily rejected. At best it will make you reconsider the time you spend aiming. At worst, it’s another tool in your kit in tactical shooters.

BRING BACK THE CARNIVAL GAME!

Something that a lot of newer players get told is that you should always have your crosshair at head level. You see in tactical shooters, head levels do not move. It probably has something to do with the technology of the time but has become a constant in the genre. Well if the head level never changes, theoretically if you were able to maintain head level at all times, the enemies heads should arrive like these little ducks.

You might be saying to yourself, “But it’s different because we’re moving.” Well... maybe you’re moving too much. Sounds childish but if the problem is the movement, maybe moving less is the solution. At least that’s where my brain went.

From my perspective, being on defense, you hide. It forces the enemy team to play slower. They have to check corners. So what’s this? Did we create the duck game? I think we did.

If you hide and hold an angle, you’ve essentially created the game above. However, there’s one more subtle difference, it’s actually more like this:

What does this do to the game? Well we’re essentially faced with the realities of the modern tactical shooter. You don’t have all the information. The game feeds you clues through sounds and your teammates call for enemy positions.

Remember when we were talking about the $40.00 carnival level knowledge. Well here it is again:

There seems to be two speeds. The ducks are not actually equally distanced apart. But you start to notice something. If you can determine the speed of the duck, really you just need to get the timing right. And maybe I should take the wind into consideration?

The first two sentences were put there on purpose. In tactical shooters, there are two speeds, walking and running. Thus like the ducks example, if you focus on the timing (since the ducks are on a fixed plane) all you need to know is whether the person is running or walking.

All information is valuable and movement is constant. So players tend to walk everywhere. This means your default positioning should account for this default behavior. Hold your cross-hair at a head-shot level but one which you can react to when the head walks into your cross-hair.

We’re going to start simple and only take on cases that are straight on. When you start taking long angles into consideration it gets a bit more muddy.So imagine you’re looking at this angle:

This angle could probably be pulled a bit down but this is about the distance you want for walk ups.

This would be an angle expecting a run out.

The skill involved in this aiming is not based on your ability to make micro adjustments that are hard to replicate. Instead you’re playing the duck game. Keeping your cross-hair at head level and waiting for the ducks to walk into your cross-hair. You’re working on your ability to accurately predict how long it takes for your brain to register a player is on the screen and then to have your cross-hair placed in a spot that allows you to recognize it for that instant-tap.

From there it is mastering timing on your recoil so you can tap the next person and so on and so forth.

Now Why does this work?

This is your average player-model in a tactical shooter:

They tend to put the camera in the middle of the face. What this does is cause the following things to be true:


One, your camera starts at the front of your face and looks outwards in a cone shape. This is important later.

Two, because the camera starts at the center of your face, your shoulders become a problem. They are always exposed first in any situation (except maybe if you ran in an angle that was parallel with the exposure angle)

Since you can’t align your camera with your shoulders, your shoulders will always be first seen before the player can have vision of the other player. It’s just the anatomy of the game, since you can’t align with your gun your shoulders always stick out. Here’s a fun video explaining how it’s an advantage in the real world when you can slice angles because you can control where you see from:

https://youtu.be/QSzTqh8ZsEE?t=358

Since I will always have a warning (their shoulder) before I see them, I have to train myself to react based on that information. Find the spot where I can leave my cross-hair at head level and based on running or walking, adjust my cross-hair placement while still maintaining it at head level. Finding my sweet spots by practicing and holding angles. After that... no one should get by you or you should take at least one with you since you’re on defense.

IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER!

Remember this line: “One, your camera starts at the front of your face and looks outwards in a cone shape.”

There’s a golden rule when it comes to understanding your fixed-camera. The golden rule is that you want to always be the furthest from the angle you are holding. This should make sense to you at this point. It’s your player’s shoulders. No matter how you approach this problem, your shoulders will always lead your exposure. Thus you can never expect to have the jump on your opponent because they will always see your shoulders first. All that changes is the level of the exposure.

You can replicate this issue by walking up to a box on any map with a friend. Run directly at the wall so all you see is the wall. Now slowly expose your player model by tapping left(A) or right(D). Tell your friend to let you know when they see you. You’ll be surprised.