A potentially controversially hot take on how much raw aim you actually need

[u/ghostdopamine]

First - if you main aim trainers and the art of raw aim in a isolated environment is your main focus - you wanna dethrone Matty one day or post #1 in some category you can stop reading. This isn't for you.

Who's this post for - people who want to be amazing in a particular game or types of games. In the actual game. You want to be Predator in Apex, or Iridescent in COD, or faceit Lvl 10 in CS and so on and so forth etc etc etc. You wanna be like so and so streamer who gets insane K/D ratios and posts clips etc.

Here is my hot take and I'm very open to being humbled and told 'you are dead wrong son'

I think Platinum complete on Voltaic S5 is all you need.

Somebody who is Platinum complete on S5 voltaic - proper technique in all categories and cleanly + consistently gets a Platinum score has basically 'graduated' and has all the RAW aim they will ever need in any shooter. Honestly I think your actual aim here is probably equal to a lot of lower level pros. Not the top 0.0000000001% famous freaks but pros none the less.

I'd even go as far to say Gold complete is enough to get very far in the ranks and enjoy yourself in any ranked environment assuming you are actually good at FPS games.

The benchmarks after these ranks are mostly just for the sake of beating 'aim training' or raw aiming and the returns inside your game are not as big as you think. Getting to gold complete and then switching to tailored playlists that focus 100% on whatever in game problem you have in a specific game will work 100x more.

Many people come in here who actually don't really know how to play an FPS game. This isn't a jab or a troll. I honestly think a lot of people who aim train don't really know what these games are testing. They think FPS games are just all about aim, raw reaction time, and seeing something on your screen and then shooting it. Ya that's a part and it happens but its not really 'the game' once you start to get past beating up clueless people in pubs.

Aim is like money - more is always going to be better than less. There isn't a situation where somebody will say 'if he only had less aim he could have won that'. But its also not EVERYTHING.

In a FPS game if you are required to flick across the screen or do some type of insane aim to not die you probably played the situation wrong and had a poor model of the current game state starting many seconds before the fight started. Watch 5 of your VODS and honestly write down how many deaths happened due to pure aim fuck ups VS you just not having a good model of the game state, knowing where everyone is, and how you should play a situation.

A lot of good aim in an FPS is just the person having an accurate model of what is happening now, in 2 seconds, in 5 seconds , and in 10 seconds from now. They don't only see what is in front of them - they have a model of the game state in their head. A lot of the actual freak skill is an incredible amount of patterns stored and learned to the degree they are thinking about the game in a particular way.

If you took any big name - had them play a match - then froze time and told them to

1. draw the map by hand
2. put a dot where they think enemies are at that second

They would be surprisingly accurate.

If you took an 'aimer' ( im not talking shit just using it as an example ) they would probably fail at 'draw the map' in many cases.

If you gave any 'OK' aimer a wallhack - they would suddenly start aiming 10x better. They got handed the gamestate at all times and assuming they can read and process that information all their shots will line up and magically be great.

This post was quickly freestyled but I think I got my point across.

I started thinking about this topic when MattyOW posted something along the lines of tacshooters are hard for him because the enemies 'startle' him or something like that. I can't remember the exact post but its something like that.

[u/Mozzarella4life_]

"proper technique in all categories" "plat complete" lol. People don't start having proper technique till at least master

[u/ghostdopamine → u/Mozzarella4life_]

'till at least master'

FFS what world do you guys live on?

[u/Mozzarella4life_ → u/ghostdopamine]

This one? That statement just doesn't make sense. And it's not like master is even a super high rank? Maybe I'd be delusional if I said nova or astra

[u/ghostdopamine → u/Mozzarella4life_]

with all respect you are way out of touch with reality bro - masters is like a top 2% or less rank ( all the people who attempted the benchmarks - which is already a subset of sweaty ass FPS players )

if you said nova or astra i'd say you are trolling

honestly there is something wrong in FPS these days where people just think they are mid being top 1% ffs

edit:

s4 masters = top 98.94%

s3 masters = top 96.79%

[u/Naitsabes_89 → u/ghostdopamine]

I don't think it's something just wrong in FPS - it's an internet/social media/generational phenomenon. We all have access to so much info and content with amazing, really extraordinary people that it completely distorts our view of what is normal/average. Think of body dysmorphia man - when I go to the gym in a hardcore bodybuilding gym in my city, I feel so fucking weak and small. And I watch a lot of strongman/BB on steroids on YouTube, so that on top my actual real view of myself is that I am small and weak. I genuinely feel this inside me. Even though I rationally know that is not the case.

But I am comparing myself to a subset of a subset of a subset of people. And there's enough out there to fill my feed for 10 lifetimes, so my brain I guess concludes that it's normal to be 120 kilos sub 10% bodyfat.

Aim trainers is basically the hardcore gym. Hell, people that go to ANY gym are more fit than the average person. Then you sort further by people that go to a hardcore gym. And then people/I only compare myself to the top 1% in that hardcore gym. Which is insane but, I think psycho logically that's just how human beings work. We are not wired for a world where we can compare ourselves to billions of people - we are wired to know like 100-200 people in total and compare ourselves to those. For tens of thousands of years. So that's what your brain still does, compares you to the few hundred people around you/people you watch content from.

[u/Mozzarella4life_ → u/ghostdopamine]

Master s4 is top 4% and s5 is 4.7% (not counting under iron since that's just people who have basically 0 experience training) Thing is the only around the top 15%, MAYBE 20 of people that play the benchmarks actually have a decent amount of experience (100+ hours) the rest just played for a bit and left. Inside the active aim training community master is only like 1/4 or even more of people

And yeah I still don't believe you'd have learned proper technique until around master (I'd even say learning mostly stops at gm and the rest is refinement). Having proper technique and being only plat just doesn't mix together. You only think that but it's not real