He was more known for his aim. Pretty much used the railgun as a melee weapon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csRyEUmbVP4

These config settings really suck monkey balls. Jeez...

Try and find videos of him playing team dm when he played with cK, he would literally get half the teams kills the majority of the time. His dueling skills were insane in his prime. His aim (rail!), his item control, etc. He is a Princeton math wizz so he's definitely one of the smartest players ever, inside and outside of quake.

You forgot to mention his attempt at making a real railgun, which is pretty awesome if you ask me. You can check out footage of that in his part of this video:

http://www.own3d.tv/video/18140/The_failed_djWHEAT_interview

haha the part where carmac interviews socrates is awesome :) at 10:00 something.

Cooller's parts are better.

"How do you think you'll do?"
"I zink I vill loose."
"To whom?"
"To anybady."

The other night I spec'd him on one of the public duel servers he was messing around on and did find myself laughing a few times when he bundled head-first into a room where a guy was playing +back defensive rockets, would kill the guy and then the other person would whine saying "what a stupid move" etc as if czm was a noobie

The funny part is, for the most part it was stuff you'd do in Q3 without much thought, but if you do in QuakeLive you get punished for. I think he just needs to get used to QL, because he would often look for spawn frags which may happen in Q3 but just wouldn't happen in QL.

It still impressed me that even though they were practice games and he mentioned on a few occasions he was trying out stuff like certain rocket jumps or moves (which I hadn't actually seen from other experienced QL players in most cases) and that at the end of duels when he was talking to his opponent about a certain situation like the "stupid moves" he would say something like "you had 180/0 with only LG low ammo right?" and was bang on the money with his hp/armor predictions on like every case. That's probably not very impressive usually, but this was like exactly bang on. The guy would have had like 178/4 or something in stack and an LG with 20 ammo. Maybe I'm just too much of a naab :p

what's surprising you?


czm built a fucking railgun...

wheres that dm7 ffa match of some quakecon duel qualifiers :O

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rx4zY8sFHc

This one?

cheers, mate!

czm had ridiculous overall aim, but was especially known for things like vedic pointed out (only having rail, using it at point blank like it was instagib).
He also had fantastic timing, but this seemed to vary from map to map, imo.
Like klout pointed out, he was a TDM god back in the cK days, and now he's a irl math god.

Oh, and he was also known for raping everyone on hub...like badly (40-0, for example).

well, with only his rail (as you and Vedic said) he has still placed 2nd at ESWC 2005, 1st at CPL 2006 (was it 2006), etc etc... So i guess that you can't really say that what Vedic said is right because no matter your style of play, no matter if you abuse something, only the victory matters.

imo had the best raw aim quake ever saw. stx-kash too but kash seemed to disappear from q3 pretty quickly

Well, taking away CPMA players probably czm is the best raw aim.

You can't compare old quake3 aim with ql aim. Current well known aimers would shit on those players back then.

not entirely true (well depends on how far back you mean), osp aiming is in many ways different compared to cpma/ql aiming

not really, you still aim the same way (except maybe with rockets, cuz they are faster etc) but overall your accuracy drops, in ql.

while at the end of the osp era you could manage to hit 40-45% shaft (on LAN, or with low/very low ping), nowadays in ql especially with the new hitboxes, you'll "only" hit 35-40%. But some people still manage to hit like around 45% in ql only cuz they are playing quake for like at least 6 years now, so basically they had time to practice their aim A LOT.

overall best aimers of today get more consistent and solid aim than best aimers of ~2004.

no.

shit changed when octagonal hitboxes where introduced and you couldn't abuse the 45° hitbox 'bug' anymore.

apart from that osp's netcode was so much worse than what cpma/ql have leading tosome weapons like lg needing a different kind of aiming altogether.

"shit changed when octagonal hitboxes where introduced and you couldn't abuse the 45° hitbox 'bug' anymore."

cylindrical hitboxes. octogonal are for q4.

you can still aim at the side of the opponent and then make a bit more dmgs, cuz his dodges become less effective this way.

you still aim the same way in all version of q3, no matter the netcode/hitboxes etc. but you just won't hit the same accuracies.

45 lg in OSP? wtf lol

hitting 35-38 was really high and considered godly in osp. hitting 40-42% in cpma with xerp was good too.

In quakelive if you hit 40% in duel + spamming then you are aiming really nice.


Quake 3 lg had cripple + easy knockback, so that made it easy to hit in cpma and xerp made it overkill +888 damage.

OSP had built in 50ms lag so shaft wasnt so gay.

Quakelive hitboxes / 777 / no cripple or knockback make lg harder than q3 but i think its fine.

i'm talking about LAN, mainly, or low ping games.

ofc you won't get 45% lg on average, but that still doesn't mean that you can't hit 45% for 5mn (in a 15mn duel game). well, i mean, sometimes you will hit 45%, and others times you'll hit 35.

"In quakelive if you hit 40% in duel + spamming then you are aiming really nice."

Yes that's true. especially at duel ofc. but anyway lg acc is overrated, depends on a lot of factors.

and i agree about the rest.

I've watched a few Q3 games (didn't get into Q3 until after QL came out) and they all struck me as having extremely poor aim. No one could ever track LG continually, rockets were very spammy and few actually connected, and what I would consider a simple rail was often missed.

I can't say it as truth, but it looks like most Q3 players aim was far far far worse than the 40% shafts and 60% rails that are commonplace in quake live nowadays.

obviously the skill has increased quite a bit since then, but aiming in osp was still different, especially online.

lg for example didn't stick to the crosshair but was wobbling behind which made it tons harder to aim with :)

I mean, i was comparing ppl like hal9000 and voo with czm

voo doesnt have the best aim, he'd say so himself, rat had the best predictive aim ever and lugia prob the best lg'er

i'd say neither hal nor vo0 are known for aim.

tho you see hal flicking alot, i'd argue that you gotta hit those flick shots if you try enough. and alot of them are standard shots that he decides to flick anyway.

Toxic without a doubt has better raw aim than czm overall

As does cypher probably

here we again about kash................

If he had raw anything, it was reaction-time, not aim.. ?

reaction-time is part of aim.

It's very related yes, but it's an easy and useful distinction to make.

Given the way you aim, there's almost no difference. But look at toxic for instance, he relies more on mental prediction and smoothness when he shafts than on raw reaction time. Fox does the same with rail. To me, these are the most impressive aimers.

czm has the roboty quirkiness of aiming that goes with reactively repositioning crosshair constantly, as well as a lot of broad flicking.

I tend to have the same kind of style as you or czm, the kind of aimbotty-style; perhaps that is why I admire the toxic way of shafting for instance.

(not to mention the intricacies russian style with acc; the fly-aim, - which is impressive, but not because of their aim, but because of unpredictability when you're on the dodging side, and general speed/freedom of movement.)

I mean. It's easy to see the distinction if you think a bit about it.

For instance you can visualize a top down process that is all about prediction and ways to transition between points of actual information, and then there's a bottom up side that concerns the frequency of sampling these points of actual information.

The point then is simply that it seems very likely to me that toxic concerns himself with fewer actual points than for instance i do when i'm aiming. The reason he nevertheless outaims me is that his prediction in each point better corresponds to what will happen.

Not to mention the physical side of execution, which is most strictly perhaps what would be called aiming.. Which I think appears to the eye as smoothness.

Odd I never thought of his aim being that strong back in the days, but he did seem to be able to use his railgun as melee grinding.

It was the key to most of his success, as fighting position against him was iffy, since there was no point where he was really "out of position" using the railgun. Due to this, games against him were fantastically entertaining.

what do you mean "back in the day"?

for me people having great aim started in 2003.
if you watch lexer, fat or unkind play, in that year. you can already see really good aim.

Lakerman in 2000/2001?

for me people having great aim started in 2003.
if you watch lexer, fat or unkind play, in that year. you can already see really good aim.

out of those 3, only 1 played seriously in 2003 (lexer), and quit after a year. maybe 2002.

don't see your point exactly.. maybe you're just trying to be right.

in any case, lexer played quakecon, unkind played asus (here you'll argue that that wasn't seriously).

fatal1ty yeah, he had his comback in 2002, but whatever.

wasn't trying to be accurate with the dates, just asking what he meant by "back in the day", because i somehow assumed he was reffering to the czm vid from 2006, that is also posted in this thread.

czm was a solid dueler before 2004, top4 on quakecon2k3, that's it. nothing special. from what i remember he started being REALLY good on eswc2004 when hub was first introduced to vq3. whatever he did, he did it from 2004-2006, that's 2 wins, 1 final

lexer and unkind sure had their moments of unbelievable frags and aim but you cant say they were very stable aimers particularly lexer with sens 2 accel 2 and unkind on the same but later 4/.5.

lexer had the worst fucking shaft ever, lol.

I'd blame his 2/2 sens for that after having played with similar for a while :) worst lg ever though is prob right amongst all the players that won major lans.

theres a nice very old demo of him playing 2v2 against stickmen on dm7. worth looking for, i would find it but on limited internet at the mo

he also had the nicest tdm binds.

he made his own little game. ultrono arena.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/ultrono-arena

My folder says "ultrono arena - worst fps game ever"

have you tried militia?

dynamix hear loads guys, he hear loads

is not funny for one else ?

czm is a typical highsens player which means his aim seems beastly against weaker players that can't dodge (like in that ffa demo) and he can also make some crazy shots against stronger players which makes his aim seem better than it is. His lg aim against dodging opponents for example is mostly weak in the demos I've watched.

Check out the CPL final against jibo for example. The demo from czm pov makes you want to kill yourself when you see how badly he gets outaimed but cheer in the end when he still manages to win.

He used a rather low sensitivity (this was before 40cm/360 on huge mats became standard) on a high-friction 3M pad in the days of that FFA demo.