I've been stuck into this game for a month now, and I don't know why I'm still playing. It's making me a little crazy. So I was tired of the usual Steam games that I buy, play for a few hours.
This is fun. And then literally never touch again for the rest of my life. So I wanted to find another game, something that would actually capture my attention for several months. So I decided I'd try something with a competitive scene. Youu see, I used to be really into Overwatch competitive before it, you know, became a dumpster fire.
Then I stumbled upon a new game that looked familiar. It was called Valorant. They both have abilities and teamwork, so they're basically the same.
Right? Wrong. First day, I opened the game. Open season on the enemy. To my dismay, I realized the bullets did nothing.
Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh, that was bad. Oh my god.
Random abilities filled up my screen. What the heck? What am I watching?
The heck is all this sh**? And I died repeatedly. What?
AHHHHH MOTHERF- I didn't look inwardly at my mistakes, like a rational person. No, I swore at the universe and blamed the game. Maybe Valorant wasn't for me.
It was so unlike any other game I had played in the past. Everything down to the movement and shooting felt so foreign and restricted. I could simply go back to farming and dig up. But then I remembered the reason I looked at Valorant in the first place.
I needed something that could fill this emptiness I felt. I wouldn't give up. No, I decided I would give the game an honest try this time around.
The only difference is, I would do research. I enrolled myself in the game. I found myself in some good old YouuTube university and watched all the guides I could find on the game. I learned about stuff like movement error, where bullets go everywhere if you move while shooting. And recoil control, where the bullets don't actually go where the crosshair is located.
As someone who's maybe played an hour of CSGO, I just didn't understand why people would play a game where the bullets don't go where you shoot. But then, something interesting happened. The complexity of the mechanics, while overwhelming at first, started to lure me in. If I could just master recoil control, I could get kills.
If I could master movement error, I would shoot before the enemies. At this point, I committed myself to 30 days of intense gameplay, with the goal to rank up as much as possible. But first, I had to get to level 20 and unlock rank play. On day one, I did my three placement matches.
They were chaotic, and I had no idea what was happening, but instantly, I was hooked. There was so much to learn. It was like an endless well of knowledge. I ended up losing two and winning one.
I expected to be placed in iron, and maybe even bronze, if I was to be placed in iron. I was lucky, but to my surprise, I ended up being placed in silver 1. I was excited to be placed so high, and that I could skip over all the lower ranks, and the evil hell that accompanies me. That is, until my first real silver match. That's when reality set in.
Everyone I played with knew all the callouts, how to properly use all their abilities, and I just felt... lost. I barely knew my way around the maps and how to use my abilities. Imposter syndrome sets in. Surely I had been placed in the wrong rank.
I've only played this game a couple days now, and I was targeted by people with hundreds of games under their belts. I was an iron player, misplaced in the realm of silver. After a few matches, I got extremely close to falling into realms 3, which honestly seemed more fitting for my skill level.
But you see, I had set a goal to get to gold by the end of the 30 days. An ambitious goal, for certain, because at this point, I still had no idea what I was doing. The only thing I knew was, see enemy, shoot enemy. And even then, I lost most of my gunfights.
Game after game, I was bottom fragger. But I couldn't let myself just keep losing. No, I needed to climb.
I thought back to the times when I was struggling in life and how I got by, usually through pure effort and slamming my head against the wall until it cracked. But that strategy wouldn't work this time. It's way too slow, and I only have 30 days.
I needed a way to compress the experience people get from thousands of hours of gameplay into a fraction of the time. That's when I stumbled onto a perfect solution. I could just hire a coach for weekly sessions, and maybe he could help me build the confidence and skill I so badly needed.
I found a service called Gamer Sensei and hired one of their top tier coaches. I found it. coach named Lucas. He trains the best players in teams.
He has thousands of hours in game over 10K CSGO, and he is very serious. And he was going to help my silver ass. The first week, we didn't even talk about the game.
No, all we talked about was mastering the mechanics like shooting and movement. Similar to Karate Kid, I was given a simple routine of Wex on, Wex off. Wex on, play deathmatch.
Wex off, shoot bots. Wex on, play deathmatch. Wex off, shoot bots.
Youu get the idea. I was skeptical at first. The routine was too simple and I desperately wanted to learn more so I could rank up. I needed to drink from the firehose of knowledge, not shoot the same bots over and over.
Regardless of my doubts, I followed the training program to a T. Every. Single.
Day. It's my surprise over the course of a week, things slowly started to change. What once required great focus became automatic and ingrained in me. Instead of constantly thinking about recoil control, I would automatically pull down my gun during gunfights. Movement error became a thing of the past, and after the first 7 days, my mechanical skill had blossomed.
And on day 7, I got my first ever ace. It wasn't pretty, and I'll admit, a little sloppy, but I was proud. But more importantly, I learned to trust my coach.
I now had the confidence I needed and I was ready to start pouring hours into rank play. It was time to enter rank games and climb straight up the ladder. I started consistently getting kills and would end up in the top half of the leaderboard.
If I kept this up, I was sure to be gold in no time. But the truth is, even with my level up mechanics, I still wasn't ranking up. In fact, I kept losing. I thought about blaming it on Elo Hell, the smurfs, or poor teammates, but the truth is, I simply lacked impact.
I met with my coach again to figure out what I was doing wrong, and it turns out, just about everything. Without even knowing it, I had fallen for the classic dumbass. The Dunning-Kruger Effect, or as it's commonly known, The Idiot's Fallacy. Youu see, when you start a new skill, your confidence is at an all-time high, even though you still suck. Youu don't know what you don't know, and I...
didn't know nothin'. I was still at the peak of Mount Stupid, and it was time to begin my journey into the Valley... of Despair. There were aspects to the game I never even considered.
My coach taught me about the biggest mistake I was making. The economy. And I'm not talking about stocks or bitcoin. The economy is the lifeblood of your team.
It's a constant pipeline of top-tier weapons and heavy shields. If you play the economy game right, Youu'll always win the rounds with the best possible chance to win. In the early rounds, you can snowball into victory. Youu see, you start out a round with just a pistol and $800 to your name, and with that, you can get a deagle or use a cheaper gun to buy some utility. If you win rounds, you get to buy the best weapons and destroy the other team.
If you lose, you need to save for a round and devise a clever strategy to win against a team with a superior firepower. My biggest mistake is I was always buying and never saving, so I'd always end up with middle-tier weapons, such as an SMG with white shields, instead of getting a rifle with full shields. And in those rounds, unless you get lucky, you're just doomed to lose from the start. But after getting my economy, game dialed in. I noticed my team was consistently winning more rounds.
I would push our team to save when we were broke and buy when we were rich. With the new knowledge I'd acquired from my coach, I was able to climb to the upper ends of Silver 1. I was ecstatic by the slightest bit of progress, especially because for the first time I felt that I'd earned my rank. After playing several more games, the progress came to a grinding halt.
I couldn't crack Silver 2. After all this time and effort and learning, I still hadn't moved up a single rank. Did my contributions even matter? Was all the learning for nothing?
Youu might say, but... It's pretty. It's only been a few weeks.
Just give it time and they'll rank up. And while that's true, I was impatient. I needed to rank up more than ever, so I decided to double down on the learning. I wouldn't fall for the idiot's fallacy again. My coaching sessions helped a ton, but they were only once a week.
I needed a daily outlet for constant feedback and improvement. That's when I figured out I had everything I already needed. Hours upon hours of gameplay that I had already recorded.
With these vlogs, I could figure out what I was doing wrong and fix issues with my gameplay faster than ever. I dove in and went through my games looking for areas of improvement. And after carefully analyzing one of my games, something clicked for me. The concept of Intel let me tell you gathering Intel is crucial if you want to win Youu see the team that gathers more info and acts on it faster will almost always win the round if you think about it Valorant's like a game of chess with a small twist Youu can't see where the enemy pieces are and the act of uncovering where the enemy pieces are is the act of getting intel If you know where the enemy is at and they don't know where you are It gives you a massive advantage Youu can crack through their defense easier predict where they're gonna find the spike and use your utility in a devastating way Like chess there are different pieces Agents and they all have their own rules in chess pawns are the front line and used to create space and make favor ...for trades for your team.
Similar to duels, their job is to bust through the enemy's defenses and create space for your team to enter the bombsite. A good duel is can't be afraid to die if it's in the name of victory. Similar to sacrificing a pawn if that means you'll get the queen.
I realized I could weigh the scales in my team's favor if I simply gathered crucial intel on the enemy's movements. On this match, Pearl, we were behind. 6-12.
Somehow we managed to claw our way back. Yes! It was 12-12, the game pushed into overtime. We had no idea where they were.
So I decided to peek a hallway with my knife out. To my surprise, all four of them were there. My team was able to react.
Placing swarm grenade. Placing swarm grenade. And we were able to secure the round and the game.
You, lowkey, can't believe that happens. Woo! Crazy!
I learned it's not always about getting kills, but putting your team in the best situation to win. And thus began my slow climb along the slope of enlightenment. It started to have more and more impact every game.
I managed to climb from Silver 1 to Silver 2, my first inkling of forward progress. But I soon stalled out on my new rank. Each game was still a coin toss, and there was so much I couldn't control. All it takes is for one Smurf on the other team to throw your entire match off balance. And in Valorant, Smurfs are everywhere.
They're high-level players that make new accounts and purposefully tank the placement matches so they can play against less experienced players such as myself. My initial reaction was to blame Riot. Why do they make it so easy for people to Smurf? All they do is ruin other people's gaming experience and make ranking up even harder.
I could keep complaining. and putting the blame where it was so rightly belong or I could get over and take action. I decide on the latter. I need to figure out how to deal with them or I was destined to be stuck forever. I consulted my coach, YouuTube, Reddit, and they all said the same thing.
Smurfing is outside of your control. Just take the loss and move on. But that wasn't good enough for me. Out of dire frustration, I came up with my own strategy to deal with the onslaught of smurfs.
Or as I like to call it, strategy to the smurf. I developed this two-pronged stratagem where if you execute it just right, it greatly increases your chance of winning. The first prong is the easiest to execute.
If the smurf is on your team, you do everything you can to make them play better. Youu can stroke their egos, pump them full of heals, bait for them, and it's almost always a guaranteed win. But if you get the short end of the stick, then you're up against the smurf.
This is where prong number two comes in, and prong number two does not mess around. If you see the smurf, call him out to your team and dump all of your utility on him. Youu want your teammates to drop what they're doing and focus all firepower on the smurf and overwhelm him.
They fail. Stupid amount of force. If someone can trade with, uh, Omen, we win.
If you see him, just start screaming and then we'll all dump utility on him. Yeah, if he's- Omen right there, Omen right there! Omen, back site, he's back site.
One's-uh, Reyna's there too. Garage, garage, garage. All right, she's dead.
If I'm playing smokes, I'll smoke him. If I'm playing duelist, I'll flash the ever-living crap out of him. Youur goal is to make the smurf's life a living hell. Every round becomes a battle to figure out where the smurf is and make them play worse and worse through a combination of cheap tactics and tilting them. As a brimstone, I'll put down a smoke, wait for him to enter, and then blast him with the shorty.
And if they die, I don't hesitate to make fun of them and all chat. And don't feel bad. Valorant is a game of war, and they have already violated the Geneva Convention. Tilt the smurf is a path to victory. powerful tool to turn a losing game into a winning one.
There are times when the smurf would simply rage quit and we would end winning a 5v4. Remember, they are smurfing because they have extremely delicate egos and can't handle any form of losing, so it's your job to take advantage of that. With this stratagem, I was able to take back control and the matchmaking system failed me. Instead of hopeless rounds, we would enter them with a plan for winning. With this, I was able to claw back a rank up game from the clutches of defeat and move past the threshold of silver 2 to silver 3. It felt good to rank up, and while I was feeling good, now was not the time to run.
rest on my laurels. No, it was time to keep pushing for my goal of reaching the infamous gold rank. The end of the 30 days was closing in and now I needed to level up my skill faster than ever. I learned from my coach about a website called tracker.gg that tracks all of your games and win rates.
With all this new data in my fingertips, I decided to drink in the information. That's when I made a shocking discovery that changed the very way I played the game. My biggest mistake was I was ignoring one of the most important aspects of rank play, the meta. The meta is like a cheat code that boosts your win rate before the game even starts.
Love it or hate it, the meta is the best. The meta is always there. It's a cruel mistress that if you don't seduce, she'll gouge your eyes out and tank your win rate, but treat her nicely, and the rewards are endless. My first reaction to this was pure disgust.
Are you telling me the meta has more of an impact on my win rates than my gameplay itself? It shouldn't matter what agent I play as long as I play well, right? The truth is, the data doesn't lie.
Some agents are borderline broken on certain maps. If you're on Breeze and you don't have a Viper, guess what? Youur chance of winning just dropped 10%. Playing Fracture and you have a Breach?
Youu now have a 60% chance of winning. Congratulations. If you're queuing for a match and you have three kids on your team that insta-lock the duels with colored hair, guess what, that might be a good match to dodge.
I realized what an empowering discovery this was. Instead of waiting for the universe to tell me when I could win, I could align the stars myself. I could try to paddle my boat against the wind or open my sails and use that very same breeze to push me toward victory. Before I knew it, my win rate started to skyrocket and I was on the precipice of gold.
And I even got my first 1v5 clutch. Woo! Wanted a villain?
I gave you a villain! The only problem is, the act was about to end, and when the act ends, the competitive ladder closes for a few days and you need to redo your placing matches. Was it even possible to hit gold in such a short amount of time?
But I remembered a quote that I found written on the bathroom stall back in high school next to a series of phallic shaped objects. Three things never came from comfort zones. And I knew what to do.
In a mad dash to get gold before the act ended, I decided to cram in as many games as possible. Every day I played longer and with more intensity than at any other point in the 30 days. And then I went to bed. In my free time, I watched videos of pro players.
I had momentum. It's like everything I had learned over the past 30 days had come together and given me a new elevated perspective of the game. I could recognize patterns that I had never been able to see before. And on the last night before the act ended, I queued up for a final game.
The one that pushed me over the edge into the land of gold. The match was Breeze. Someone took smoke, so I ended up filling on a new agent. The game was extremely close and we hit overtime.
The first round of overtime, we tied it up, so it pushed to double OT. And it was at that moment, everything fell apart and we lost the match. It was just a Place in silver 3 for the act. This loss stung more than the rest.
I had made several mistakes, crucial errors, where if I had simply not messed up, we would have won. And now I'd have to wait for the next act, and upon doing so risk my entire status on the whims of the ranking system, and I would have to redo the placement matches. I had no idea if a new agent or new map would throw off my gameplay, but there was no reason to soak in defeat. No. I had to look to the future.
Then, the update hit. No new agents or maps, but guess what? Custom crosshair colors! These are the kind of updates I would lose. And you know, new skins.
With the new act here, my rank hanging in the balance, and only one day left out of my 30 days, it seemed like fate was on my side. It was my last Hail Mary to hit gold. I had no idea what the new act would do to my MMR, but I remembered a quote from the great man Michael Scott. Youu miss all the shots you don't take. So even though the new act could potentially place me in the lower depths of silver, I decided I would play my heart out for the remaining day left in the challenge.
I first came back in the act. We started off a game down 0-6. We were up against a formidable team, Breach on Fracture. We had a good game.
If we come up with a counter player we would lose for sure. What the breach does is he lines up his shit. So I think what we do is we go through Arcade. Over here, over here.
Remaining. That's three. One left standing.
There we go. Good shit. Shit.
In a state of desperation, we came up with the last ditch strategy that let us take back around and snowballed. But by this point, we had tilted them, and they had a lever. We ended up winning 13-8, and this was the moment I had waited for.
Where would I be placed, I wondered. So much was outside my control. Couldn't take the anticipation, and closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, channeled whatever sort of desperate energy I could into the game, and waited for my rank to be announced. And when I opened my eyes, reality set in. It happened.
I was in the place into gold one in my sheer excitement i forgot to record the moment but it went a little like this after 30 days of grueling ring play i had achieved my goal the universe went still for a moment and i was happy i did it i actually did it but over the next few hours the excitement wore off and i simply felt nothing it didn't make sense i'm supposed to be happy now but instead i just feel empty inside was hitting gold not enough i put in hours upon hours effort yet here i was feeling the exact same as the very start of the challenge Did I need to hit plat, diamond, or even ascendant to feel the same sense of accomplishment? Or was it the excitement of learning that brought a sense of fulfillment? Nah, that's a load of BS. At the start, I could play with my wife and we could play together.
But now, I was in gold and it ran too hard to play with her. The success had brought nothing but loneliness. And just like that, as the 30 days came to a close, I finished at gold 1. The weird part is, regardless of how empty I felt, I was still itching to play more. I just don't know why.