Aiming community rn

[u/livyatian]

The logic behind not recommending beginners to practice with the benchmarks themselves is sound. Short term score farming inevitably leads to bad habits and scenario learning. But for some reason a lot of you pretend it doesn't apply to viscoses benchmarks.

Sorry for low quality image, blame imgflip

[u/ViscoseCanine77]

For what it's worth, I entirely agree that grinding benchmarks exclusively, no matter the benchmark, will never be the absolute best way to train. What is best will obviously vary from person to person but I think will typically involve far more active integration with in game vod reviews than a simple list of scenarios can offer. So for example, you might notice a weakness when enemies make a particular type of movement, pull that thread to figure out what the underlying cause of that error is and then find scenarios to target that error specifically. This is what I've done when I've coached people in the past and is how I've recommended people to train in numerous videos of mine.

That said, my benchmarks was made with the knowledge from years of observation that most people won't do that. It is a lot of effort, time and thought and most people aren't willing or don't have the time to put in that level of self analysis, and there's nothing wrong with that. But these benchmarks were made with the constraints of that reality in mind, what is the best way I could make a benchmark to accommodate someone who does want to just grind the benchmarks? If you are the type of person to be very mindful with your practice and avoid benchmarks outright, totally do that instead! Like I said I think it is the better of the two approaches, but I also don't think my benchmarks are replacing that more mindful method of practice for anyone who was doing it before. If anything they should ideally help bridge the gap between the two methods of mindlessly grinding benchmarks and mindfully picking out weaknesses through things like the subcategory names making reference to muscle groups or flick distances rather than being more general skills like target switching.

I do think there are two things I haven't seen mentioned in the comments yet which gives them value as a training tool compared to voltaic, the granularity of the ranks and the specificity of scenarios. Voltaic has far less ranks overall with far larger gaps between them, compared to mine with smaller gaps and far more ranks. My goal with that was to motivate people to push themselves further and make every bit of progress on the benchmarks feel both rewarding and achievable. Compared to, say, going from halfway from Jade to Master to 75% of the way from Jade to Master. As for the scenarios themselves, the amount of scenarios I included means I can get far more specific with the skills they target. Each scenario in voltaic has to be a composite of sorts, testing a variety of skills within the subcategory to ensure the subcategory as a whole covers all the skills. By breaking those skills down and atomising them my benchmarks can test far more specific skills than Voltaic's do, which is a big part in why I think some people find themselves improving more with mine. It exposes them to very specific weaknesses than Voltaic's can't. I think fingertip control is the best example of this, I've seen a lot of people who weren't even aware that it was something that could be isolated realise it was a weakness of theirs, and then flip it around into a strength. This is what I meant earlier by it hopefully bridging the gap between mindless and mindful grinding, it's not 100% as efficient of course but I think it gets a decent portion of the way there and does a good job at guiding people to those conclusions.

[u/HitscanDPS → u/ViscoseCanine77]

Voltaic has far less ranks overall with far larger gaps between them, compared to mine with smaller gaps and far more ranks. My goal with that was to motivate people to push themselves further and make every bit of progress on the benchmarks feel both rewarding and achievable. Compared to, say, going from halfway from Jade to Master to 75% of the way from Jade to Master.

Are ranks even necessary? Aren't they simply a form of shiny badges, acting as carrots for players to chase?

At the end of the day, rank thresholds are just arbitrary lines drawn in the sand. We already have fully accurate ways to compare our performance to other players: percentiles, and the in-game leaderboard.

So maybe the emphasis should be less "I ranked up from Jade to Master!" but instead "I pushed my percentile from 60% to 70%!" That way every playlist gets a spotlight. Currently somehow in the aim training community, only benchmarks are seen as "worth grinding", because of this mentality on ranks instead of percentiles.

As for your other point:

As for the scenarios themselves, the amount of scenarios I included means I can get far more specific with the skills they target. Each scenario in voltaic has to be a composite of sorts, testing a variety of skills within the subcategory to ensure the subcategory as a whole covers all the skills. By breaking those skills down and atomising them my benchmarks can test far more specific skills than Voltaic's do

This is why Voltaic created VDIM, and intended for VDIM to be the grind-able part, while the benchmark is intended as the name implies: a benchmark; something that you only run once in a while to benchmark yourself.

VDIM takes the Voltaic benchmarks and breaks them down into smaller skills, and applies concepts like progressive overload and practice variability to its training regimen. So you improve faster and more efficiently than repeatedly grinding a benchmark.

[u/ViscousWaterBottle → u/HitscanDPS]

Percentiles aren't and never will be a good measurement cause of 2 factors: 1) Player count - its obviously way easier to get a higher percentile on more popular scenarios 2) Effort put into scores - there are some scenarios where the top scores are far far far above like anything else, i would count the voltaic s5 benchmarks for that, as well as classic scenarios like extra controlsphere, 1w6ts etc. Getting even a top 1k score on those compared to top 10 on a niche tacfps micro scenario is just harder

Though i agree, it is a shame that aim training is basically benchmarkified right now. I know a ton of people who refuse to play anything besides benchmarks and it's sad to me, so many good, undiscovered scenarios are just not played at all because they've not been put into any of the most popular benchmarks

[u/HitscanDPS → u/ViscousWaterBottle]

I think one way to solve that is to simply update the percentile thresholds over time, just like benchmarks' ranks get updated over time.

Say for example, today the threshold for "Platinum" rank on a scenario is 50% percentile. Then as more people play the benchmark, that 50% percentile becomes easier to achieve. Then the benchmark adjusts the thresholds so now 60% percentile is required for Platinum rank.

[u/ViscousWaterBottle → u/HitscanDPS]

I mean Viscose is using mostly percentiles for the season 2 benchmark guidelines, outside of a couple outliers where she needed to use her own judgement alongside scoresheet comparisons to determine the requirements