many people try to improve by doing the same shit they already were doing... but then 'better'.
That doesn't work.

You have to find out why the things that you're doing don't work.

i keep dying @ items... does it mean i shouldnt pick up them? :0

Probably. ;)

if you would be serious about the question... your problem is probably that it is too predictable how and when you will pick up items which lead to you taking too much dmg...
but because you're a troll... you shouldn't play.

hah :D

recently i've noticed half of the advices given my more skilled player are actually rubbish... its: ur timing is bad, ur positioning is bad, ur too aggresive etc etc... never direct ways of improving :D

e: not talking about you in this case, didnt have the pleasure of allmighty weird school :-)

the weird school pwnz... but it requires you to think.

But to give true advice.... you need to play games upon the opponents weakness... so that you really figure out where the other guy is 'wrong'.
And even that is hard.... because there can be multiple explanations as to why he does something 'wrong' in a certain situation. And even in some cases... what he does might be the right thing to do... but it's just not consistent with your own views.

For instance many people think that timing items means being at items when they spawn and picking them up as they spawn... these are also (often) the people who tell you that your timing is bad.
But you can beat them by just dealing damage at all items he picks up... and picking up what is left around.

Quake is about seeing where the opponent differs from yourself... and how can make those differences work in your favor.

im cryin right now

rule nr one of flaming weird:

flame him only when he says bullshit... hes pretty right atm

i cried because it was beautiful

I never expected this from you.

dont you think exploiting your enemy weakness is kinda against playing your own game?

im really aggresive, not to say retarded... i always try to exploit even to slightest mistake in positioning, to the point im more damaged than enemy... now, games with other aggresive players usually go into total ffa, with constant rushing...

obviously i could play more defensive, but i wouldnt be as confident as playing my own game, leading to the point i could be losing because i dont have the guts to attack :-)



just asking, considering i flames you so much, you dont have to anwser :-)

you seem to confuse exploiting weaknesses with playing defensive. (lot of people do)

That however is not the case... you can play extremely agressive while exploiting weaknesses. Especially if you have some decent kind of aim (something I lack).

Sometimes it is even a necessity to play agressive to exploit weaknesses.

What it does mean though is that you analyse his skills, compare them to your own and then create a 'best way of attacking'.
Many people actually do this... but they don't realise it. One of the steps that pro's have made is that they can reason about it before the game starts. (For example take rapha's analysis at dreamhack on how you counter Evil which he gave well before the final...)

no, i dont confuse these two, at least i think i dont :D it was example, maybe over simplified...

my question is the samo tho: adapting to your enemy weakness may need some major changes to your own game... could cause drop of confidence...

wouldnt it be better to just play your best, not giving a fuck about your enemy?:>

that seems to work for strenx and evil.... so perhaps ;)

But a more serious answer.... I do not believe that even if you come up with a way to "play your best" that it cannot be completely obliderated by someone who knows which actions you will do ('because they are best').

When I want to explain my own way of playing to others... it's always something like this: "If I know what you are going to do... it will always affect you negatively" and tbh I have never seen any guy out there who has proven me wrong.
There are so insanely many ways to punish people for their choices that as soon as you are sure which option they will take in a certain situation... you can then hit a facerocket + nade + rail on him before he even knows where you are. (bit extreme example but it sort of works that way)

hah, thats one of reasons i rarely go thru lower ya tele @ ztn, when im in control :D


you are right[weird feeling, agreeing with you] knowing what your enemy will do is lethal... just knowing what route he will take is enough to make a good trap

Well then how would you view the above "wouldnt it be better to just play your best, not giving a fuck about your enemy?:> " ?

Playing your best has to include reacting to what your opponent does... does it not?

not giving a fuck and just aggressing works for strenx or evil cuz: strenx has massive aim, and evil has solid lg+great game knowledge and experience, which enable him to use lg more effectively than strenx, even if his aim is obviously not as good as the frenchie's. but it can backfire, this style. vs guys, like cooller said, with solid game knowledge, who know how to counter aggressive styles. 2 examples i can think of is strenx-rapha on tox, where rapha hit 80 rail or smth, and evil-rapha in the dh final on hektik, where the same rapha went to town on the russian, who was, otherwise, on form and, ofc, won the whole thing in the next map/s

Well, man it's not that easy to answer this question...
For instance avek is still wondering, after all these years, how to play against rapha if you remember

yeah...


imo, his giving rapha too much respect, leading to moments when he could totally obliterate him with his +fwd rockets...


but on the other hand, im not even decent at duel :-)

ehmmm... in my defense... I've already answered the question (even before he asked it).

The question of how to counter each opponent is impossible to answer because you need to make a plan for each opponent.


Your question 'how to counter rapha? (given that you are av3k)' should be easier to answer though... but the fact that rapha thinks the same way makes it hard.

The reason why it is hard for av3k to find any answer is because rapha is very allround and he pwnz at getting into the situations that av3k doesn't like.
Av3k doesn't seem to be able to find any way where he can abuse his (slightly) superior aim/movement while not being caught out at a few rediculous situations ;)

I could go into more details but then you would almost have to discuss individual demos etc... which I don't really want to do.

(edit:)
p.s. Being able to play that game is what makes quake great btw (these mindgames are what I refer to as quake)... and because rapha is the best at getting into situations that his opponents dislike... even at such a high level. Is what makes rapha the best quake player.

also another small thing... it's impossible to make major changes to your own game... But tbh I wouldn't even know how to describe my "own game" without talking about the opponent.
You have to compare the skills and see which situations should go into your favor and why.

how much money do u have

Enough to make you go down on all four and ask me to call you lucy.

ooh kinky, lindo <3

Eu te amo <3

Jag alskar dig <3

bwrtlzsxxsrr sgrlz bwrxrxstrpqltr <3

potat <)))))

In the (_x_)

you need to loosen up moar (_o_)

what's this? i'll join O_O

Could be an option, send me a sample of your training techniques.

When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child. Then you will improve, and not before.

If I look back I am lost?

In b4 a book nerd raging because the tv show made such quotes too easy.

I am currently reading the books :@

After you saw some episodes, admit it!

Yeh, I've actually seen season one and two before starting the read :P

i read them all except for the 5th before i watched the tv show.

as always, the books > tv. by alot!

Watch tutorials. 2gd did some (twitch.tv) and there's always youtube, for example avek, strenx, stermy, commented matches, etc. For example a good parallel is the classic cooller-rapha dm6 commentary and then watch the live casted match (both on youtube).

There are written tutorials too (again google can help), memento mori's spawn system thing and so on. Literally spending 2 seconds on google, youtube and twitch gives you access to dozens of hours of tutorials, plus the thousands of casted matches.

Then re-watch them all until you begin to understand them better, especially matches you remember watching years ago, and then it is practice, practice, practice.

weapon 5;+back

/bind MOUSE2 say "you fucking cunt"

You'd do anything for plusses, wouldn't you?

totally

Works!

<3 haha

play +back all the time, and dont take fights when u dont have at least equal stack

"dont take fights when u dont have at least equal stack"

Unless you have (far) superior position.

And hit those rails.

aaaa imo it depends...

i myself never take long range fights, because my rail is pure lottery... i will however take rl/lg fight when im outstacked/outpositioned just because i belive i will hit better...


problem arises when my enemy is better with it :D

1v1 in which mode? Duel? There are plenty dueling guides and videos available. If you are new try to practice timing one item. When you feel confident add another item to time. The best duelers can time 4+ items to the second. This isn't necessarily the reason why they are successful, but it helps a lot. If you mean something like Clan Arena then you should work on your dodging first and foremost. Become better with the most damage inflicting weapons. It's too silly at its core to be more serious than that.

He obviously meant 1v1 TDM.

1v1 CTF is the best.

In SA it's going to be very difficult for you to improve, in fact I would say pointless in this day and age. It would be different if it was 2001, but now we have like 20 duelers in SA, you just won't be able to get enough game time in.

The only true way you would improve is if you moved to Europe and focused on improving. I don't think you will improve at a very fast rate even if you focused in SA.

There have been a bunch of guys that have been playing QL every day in SA, and even a lot of duel, although they are improving, their rate of improvement has been very slow.

Anyway, just play for fun. If the game is fun for you, you will play it a lot, and improve.

Don't kill his motivation, man.

tB - the scene has changed drastically.. DGL league has 67 players signed up for the 1v1.. the scene is well and alive and players are improving daily. We have loads of players in the 1700+ ELO level, looking at QLRanks, other countries are averaging the same ratio of players as SA in this bracket.. we are not far off. On my level, I find the level extremely challenging and always want to improve, I just dont know what I'm doing wrong.. which is why I'm asking for assistance

Number of sign ups doesn't really mean anything until the tournament happens, and out of those people I've only seen like 20 of those people duel regularly or in the past, and less than that are actually really good.

When I was looking to improve the only thing to really do it was playing a lot, there was no magic bullet and progression was slow. I'm not saying that you can't improve, but the amount of time you will need to put into it will not be worth it.

Why so pessimistic? You have fun playing and learning so you can have more fun when you improve. How is it not worth it?

I started playing in 2000, basically 4 hours a day for 2 years, in South Africa. It was great, really fun, however I still regret that I played that much.

Don't get me wrong, I love playing quake, but the only reason to play that much was to be the best, and I never got to be the best, and I never went to any overseas tournaments. I would have had just as much fun without endless demo watching and bot sessions.

I was trying to say that he will improve slowly by just playing the game and having fun, but he shouldn't stress over it. By actively trying to improve, he is not going to improve much more than just playing by fun.

Yikes I'm turning 30 in 4 months.

I can understand you. Right now I feel like playing for competition is what makes quake (live) fun, however it is pointless to "try-hard" as it's not even certain that that there will be a competitive scene when new players to this date is good enough.

I nowdays play very rarely, but when I play I still aim to get better. However, getting accepted for low-seed to DH was one of my goals, so my motivation is pretty much gone :/

your advice to move to Europe kind of reminded me of of a thread on ESR some time ago.

Someone had a ridiculously insignificant problem and he stated that he had already tried formatting, reinstalling windows etc. I was pissing myself laughing reading all the ironic comments and I've just spent half an hour trying to find it. Anybody remember that? It was a huge thing, tons of jokes, pls help me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

c'mon guys, someone's got to remember that. I've checked all the forum threads in hardware section and all journals from last two years but its nowhere to be seen....

Or am I just delusional there was no such a thing? :(

hehe, yeah it wasn't really a serious comment. Well unless one was serious about quake?

For me, watching my own (LAN before QL) demos was always a great source of improvement as you can notice errors easily.

QL duel, the 13 circles:

- HNNGNNNG PTOTATOE.
QL Duel is a game mode where you spawn with 125 (too if you died), you gather score by bringing the other guy to 0 HP.
- Who cares about that fucking machine gun?
Picking up weapons will improve your chances!
- Why does I die so quickly and he cheats to is unkillable???! xD
Picking up health + armor will do the same thing.
- CoD > quake. I want my autoaim back.
You need to be efficient with the weapons, which means aim + situational awareness.
- This fucking labyrinth shit fucks you and your whole family, why should I play this fucking halo mod?
Learn the maps, paths, items, and everything we talked about before in context to the map.
- I shoot him so much but he just +backs and kills me later with rocket spam shit.
Look at bullet point # 3, not only can you pick up items, but you could also start denying them to the opponent. The mystical theory of "control" is born.
- LUCKY SHIT DEAD BOTTER FUCK HIM /ragequit
As your opponent is still beating you, he probably knows the things mentioned before as well. Try to become better in the previous categories. How? Learn to lg properly, learn to aim rockets properly, learn to +back properly, learn to time better.
- Quake live sucks, I'll play CA now, fuck all y'all.
Your opponent is not a machine, it's a human who does things better than you, try to learn and counter that. Although you won't be better than him in 3 weeks if you haven't ever beaten him before, why so? You are not more talented than him or else I wouldn't need to write this down.

If you got those basics down, then you're probably in the 1600-1900 elo range, depending how much you only play worse or better players or good or worse maps for you.
Can't help you for the next steps, but it just seems to be being even more precise with timing, +backing more efficiently, using every way to trap your opponent etc.

knowing the basics isnt enough to get you 1900 elo. u need to add to that at least few solid months of experience and it also requires you to mostly play guys with lower real elo. to actually get to 1900 elo and deserve it you need imo: q3 experience and/or solid quakelive experience, medium aim at least (lets say 29-30 lg in profile stats), some timing and some duel skills (as opposed to heartless skills for example)

Watch "Improving at Quake" and the two Game Analysis commentary from Twister here; http://www.youtube.com/user/rtcwtwister?feature=watch

This is insanely AWESOME! This is EXACTLY the kind of thing I am looking for. A quick review of position on different maps, a view-through-walls view of the opponent to see what they did to combat your positioning.. wow, I am amazed, thanks so much for the link!

that's not what it's about really

You're just mad because he didn't plus you for your wall of text

twister made this to make you learn to learn, not just learn

PS: I'd rather have some flame than pluses

its fantastic how twister teaches how to learn, while he learned the rail so awesomely

No problem, and thank twister aswell :)

I really struggle on Aerowalk when I get spawned at the grenade launcher.. I find that side of the map to be so one-sided, like the map is OFF BALANCE, how can they put such a crappy weapon there and expect you to get up and recover... looking at this vid shows such a amazing recovery techniques.. really helpful!

bad place to ask how to improve. esr is a place where trolls that suck at quake talk all day about quake

And occasionally, some lowlife cheaters talking craptastic on a bully pulpit. Truly a sad place.

Watching your own demos isn't enough you gotta preview them and do that succesfully so that you actually find what you're doing wrong. You can get tips from pro VODs too but you can't copycat them totally because your combat skills aren't good enough.

There is no easy way.


For me, I found watching back my own demos with a notebook infront of me, writing down all the item times that I collected/observed to see what items I was missing out on the most; how I was positioning myself relative to the order of the impending items, and how well I positioned myself to pick up/fight for/deal damage on each item.

Remember, using wolfcam you can view your enemy pov when they are close by/in your vis leaf; this is really useful in seeing how well you dodge and how easy it looks from your opponents pov on how hard you are to hit.

Also, when watching really good players demos, try and analyse why the player made certain decisions; why did he attack here and not there? It mostly depends on how much damage they can output in their current situation or the next predictable situation, or the order of the next big items.

If you are unsure about what to do in a certain situation (just spawned, opponent has full control, how do I get weapons let alone armor etc), every top player gets put in these situations and they work out how to get out of them. If they just walk to a weapon, it's because they know that their opponent will be picking up an item elsewhere, or that they can escape if he attacks you there etc etc.

These days, you don't even have to watch demos. Just go to the youtube channel quakelivedemos, there are so many vods (made from demos) that pretty much every situation has been played out on the main maps, it's more intuitive to skip forward to key moments in the game without knowing the cvars as well.

Remember, imitation will get you nowhere. You have to analyse and understand what you are doing wrong, what you are doing right, and what mechanics of your game (movement, timing, aim/damage output, dodging) that you are most lacking and need to improve as a priority.

Good luck, and most importantly, have fun!

"practice practice practice"

fatality should know it ;)

Watch ddk's duel guide.
Watch twister's analysis videos (then watch them again in 6 months when you'll understand).

Watch every IEM tournament game on youtube and listen to 2gd/joe's commentary.

Watch the IEM classics videos where rapha and cooller analyze games.

Then play a lot. Whenever you want another injection of smart stuff, watch some of the above and then go back to playing again.

At the end of the day, it does come down to "practice practice practice" but it helps to have good ideas floating around your head at the same time.

Well i won't go into detail because then it will be a huge wall of text. But the 4 basics of dueling are positioning,aim,dodging and timing. The top 3 ql players are unique regarding this in that they edge each other out in certain areas. Such as cooller for his dodging, rapha for his positioning and timing, cypher for his aim. The best way you will learn is to watch demos from them.

Positioning is such a stupid term. It's used to cover all the game awareness, predicting, planning and decision making. It's rather confusing.
Yes, in the end it comes down to where you go or "position yourself" but the term isn't descriptive enough.

said it better than myself

it's also another word for moving around the map and doing something specifically intelligent to avoid confrontation

overused word, it's become meaningless. Positioning in itself means nothing - position more to a beginner. What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

Eh the only way to get better is to find someone on similar skilllevel and practice with him. Watch demos afterwards from his and your own pov to notice mistakes you dont already know. For instance everyone realizes his huge mistake in min 9 which gave the opponent the win but usually you did so much more but you dont remember anymore. Just do this and think about your game. No need to play hours and hours. If you cant find someone tean look for someone who will watch with you your demos and point out major mistakes.
Work on small parts of your game and fix them rather than trying to suddenly time 2 items instead of none ;).

Dont waste time on watching pro demos. Wont help you until you reach a certain elo. I dont even like all these help videos because afterall you still need to play yourself.

Think, play and spec own demos. That is it.

have a plus...

enemy demo is so usefull, it shows every single mistake you made... thx to ischju i realised it :-)

Give up.

/rant after losing a duel 10 secs ago

I'm not an advocate of playing people under you, you gain bad habits by playing shitters and scrubs.

shitters/scrubs don't time properly, they just rush you to fight even if they will lose the battle etc, it just becomes a waste of fucking time. It isn't duel.

Playing people of your own skill? I don't think it helps much. It may be enjoyable but you'll still get crushed by a real pro eventually. You may possibly level up, but only after years of slowly climbing the ladder.


Just play pros and only pros.
What you get from this:
NERVES. You are playing a pro, if you manage to get 1 frag and be up on him, you get that 'OH SHIT IM BEATING XXXXX PLAYER' nerves.
Spectators joining and watching you get raped vs a pro. Also a nervous feeling but you will get over it.

You get pissed, but you absorb the moves a pro does. I've done shit to random scrubs that has been done to me in game, watching it on demo is alright, but to know how devastating it is, you need to experience it against you in game.

Getting owned hard toughens you up. Playing 3 months vs pros in duel gets you 3+ year vs scrubs in duel or 1+ year of playing someone your own skill.

Everyone says they don't get anything out of it, but with quake you need a long time to get good at anything. So if they quit too soon after the repeated ass rapings, they won't know they were learning.

The only reason playing pros does not work for some, is that they fucking give up and stop or they revert to playing scrubs and it messes up their flow.

C'mon, if a pro is shafting you 40 and railing you 60 every game, you will fucking learn what moves to do and what not to do. If you are worth anything in duel, you will learn to counter it.

Play 10,000 duels.

http://www.esreality.com/wiki/Commentaries

and if you haven't yet, it's important to remember every timing by heart (learning RA language and MH language as rapha puts it)

learn the pairs trick (XX:X4 = XX:X9, XX:X9 = XX:X4) here by doing vertical rows http://deadmen.us/quake-time-test.html

after that you can practice more on http://visualhud.pk69.com/timer.html

uuuuuh that link :D
Fraze is under the "amateurs" haha... what a noob
and even the video where memento_mori invited me is up there :D

to be fair when those were made id not played any comps in eu etc, and also when u see the other list of players in pro, its fair to say i should stick to amatuer haha