Why Bother Aim Training
Aim training is a way for people to improve their raw mechanical skill in first-person and third-person shooter games. While you can improve your aim by playing games, and there are also maps in games for aim-training (CS:GO and Overwatch), most games don’t have the customizability to address specific aspects of your aim. The benefits of third party aim trainers can be distilled into four key parts:
Isolation: the ability to practice a specific skill without distractions
Repetition: practicing the same skills over and over quickly
Customization: Tailor your training to what’s most comfortable or beneficial to you.
Feedback: Instantly get information about your progress.
As an analogy, aim training is extremely similar to going to the gym. It allows you to build up the fundamental skills and mechanics that are required to perform in your main game, similar to how weightlifting helps you build more strength to become a better athlete. However, you should also be aware that aim training won’t immediately make you a better player. Aim Training will not function as effective practice for ‘game-sense’ oriented facets like:
Positioning
Decision-making
Ability/Utility Usage
Communication
All of these skills and more must be honed in your respective shooter in order to give yourself the opportunity to leverage your aiming ability on your opponents. Because of this, you may not see benefits from aim training if something other than aim is significantly impacting your performance.
Setting Up Your Environment
When most people begin aim training, they tend to be overwhelmed by the settings they should be using. We can quickly cover bases and give general guidelines to settings.
Mouse SensitivityStandardized MeasurementsAlmost all games use different sensitivity scales, for example, this means that the numerical value of your CSGO sensitivity will not transfer over to VALORANT as it will feel drastically different due to being calculated by a completely separate set of rules. For this reason, Aim Lab offers multiple scales for setting your sensitivity. While you can think of your sensitivity in terms of your game’s scale, you’re better off using distance measurements instead of arbitrary values such as edpi (in-game sensitivity * mouse dpi). The most popular and the value we will recommend to measure sensitivity is cm/360, or how many centimeters you need to move your mouse to perform a full rotation. There are tons of tools out there for converting your cm/360 into different game sensitivities.
What Sensitivity Should I Use?For the most part, sensitivity is entirely subjective and preference. However, if you need a point of reference, sensitivities somewhere between 20cm/360° to 50cm/360° are among the most commonly used by top FPS players across a variety of titles. Typically, you should prefer slower sensitivities for games that are heavily reliant on crosshair placement, such as CS:GO or VALORANT, and higher sensitivities for games that require more tracking or frequent mouse movements, such as Overwatch or Fortnite. If you are unsure where to start, any sensitivity around ~30cm is an excellent, well-rounded sensitivity for many games. Feel free to try various sensitivities, but don’t spend too much time worrying about your sensitivity. Test out what works for you.
Muscle MemoryUnderstandably, there are many beliefs and concerns about sensitivity among different gaming communities that can worry novices. One of the most common myths about sensitivity is that you must consistently use the same sensitivity across all settings to ensure that you preserve “muscle memory” when aiming. This is a very simplified and inaccurate understanding of motor memory, an important idea in neuroscience. Because aiming has little to no formal research, it is best not to worry about muscle/motor memory, even when discussed as a proper neuroscience concept, as its role in aiming is not well understood. Enough skilled players have shown over time and through experience that it is okay to change your sensitivity, and it is okay to use different sensitivities for different games.
Understanding Field of ViewOne misconception people new to aim training have is training on the “wrong” field of view (FOV) will hinder their improvement, especially when the FOV is different than that of their main game. FOV is not directly linked to improvement in aiming, however it does affect how you aim train.
As you increase your FOV you have more vision, this allows you to get more information at once, this is especially useful on wide angle scenarios where you may have no information available on your screen at a particular moment. This tends to lend itself to target-switching scenarios like VT Dodgeswitch or VT Sphereswitch. This is not to say there aren’t downsides to using higher FOV, as it makes targets appear smaller, and thus slightly harder to acquire for some. Higher FOV also creates distortion around the edges of your screen, similar to that of a fisheye effect. The number one thing that catches most people off guard is that higher FOV causes sensitivities to feel slower.
For lower FOVs the opposite for everything, you have less information, targets appear larger, there is less distortion, and your sensitivity feels faster. There aren’t that many benefits to using a lower FOV, but you may see two benefits to using a lower FOV.
See your own mouse movements more clearly, which can help exaggerate the imperfections of your proficiency in smoothness.
May be beneficial for targets to appear larger especially when it applies to precision.
The first benefit is a very good reason to lower your FOV, however the second benefit is often discouraged. Lowering your FOV for a scenario to make a scenario easier is known as cheesing. Cheesing is simply when you are doing something for the sake of the score, instead of playing for improvement.
Other SettingsAim Lab offers other settings to tweak your environment. These settings are mostly preference and do not affect the quality of your practice in most circumstances. However here are some settings you may want to tweak to your liking:
Wall and floor colors/textures
Bot colors
Crosshairs
Hit/kill/spawn sounds
UI elements
All of these settings are personal preference, but if you are unsure you can take a look at some top aimers and try to replicate their settings. You can take your time to experiment with what you like and dislike, or what works and what doesn’t. Just like FOV and sensitivity there is no harm in changing your settings regularly, so long as you don’t overly attribute them to whatever difficulties you may suffer as a player.
How To Aim Train
Now that we have touched bases on why you should aim train, and you’ve gotten your environment setup, you might be wondering where to begin. One of the best ways to get started is to figure out your skill level and train from there.
Figure Out Your Skill LevelWe recommend figuring out your skill level by playing our Novice Benchmarks[go.aimlab.gg] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2790274927 first. First, you want to grab and make a copy of our Aim Lab Progression Sheet[docs.google.com] . Play each scenario for about 5 runs, as you finish each scenario input your high scores into the progression sheet. You will then see your rank near the top of the progression sheet. If you manage to place gold, you can go ahead and move on to the intermediate benchmarks and proceed as before. Once completed you should have a complete sheet that shows your strengths and weaknesses.
If you want a guide in video form, you can check out our video that explains the benchmarking process
How to PracticeOnce you get a general idea of your abilities, you might not know where to train those skills. It can be very overwhelming for new players to train when there are thousands of scenarios out there to play. Lucky for you, we’ve curated some of the best scenarios and created routines catered towards your skill level with our Fundamental Routines[docs.google.com] . Just play the routine according to your rank, for example if you placed silver you would play the Voltaic Silver Fundamental Routine[go.aimlab.gg] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2692621130, alternatively you can play any Game-Specific Aim Lab Routine[docs.google.com] , or if there is a particular issue you are having you can try looking at our Issue-Specific Routines[docs.google.com] to correct those habits. As you improve and get a grasp on how to improve and you outgrow the routines, you may want to curate your own playlist, which we recommend doing utilizing our Recommended Scenarios list[docs.google.com] .
Other Recommended RoutinesIf you're looking for other good routines for your main game here's a few to get you started. Click on the hyperlink to play the routine, or subscribe on the workshop.
Voltaic x Cartoon Valorant Warmup[go.aimlab.gg] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2657298840
Voltaic Valorant Routine[go.aimlab.gg]
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2657298283
Voltaic CSGO Warmup[go.aimlab.gg] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2662385487
Hollow x Voltaic Apex Routine[go.aimlab.gg] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2678702156
Having The Right Mindset
Growth MindsetHaving the right attitude towards training is arguably the most important thing you can have to set yourself up for success, and can contribute to success even in real life. It’s easy to feel inadequate compared to others, or having the idea that you’ll never improve. It’s important to realize that it’s not always mechanics or game-sense that is holding you back from improving. Sometimes, the biggest obstacle you face is yourself.
Having a growth mindset means a person does not shy away from adversity, and instead actively seeks ways to overcome it. A lot of growth-minded players will seek out challenges for the sake of improving. However a fixed mindset is a mindset where you’re not seeking out ways to improve. One common thing people with this mindset do is only play to win without understanding their shortcomings.
One more important aspect of a growth mindset is building confidence by believing you can perform well. If you believe you can’t do something, you’ll likely perform worse or even quit altogether. This comes from a fear of failure, which can be detrimental to your improvement. Being open to your own mistakes and flaws can allow you to improve by allowing you to address it. On the contrary, being overconfident is just as dangerous, having an inflated ego gives you an exaggerated perception of your strengths while not being aware of your weaknesses. You need to be able to accurately reflect on yourself so you can see what you’re doing right and wrong.
Reviewing and ReflectingAs we covered before, having a growth mindset includes being aware of your strengths and weaknesses. To improve as efficiently as possible, you should make it a habit to analyze your own gameplay, as you may not fully recognize your flaws in the middle of your own gameplay.
While watching your own VoDs (Video On Demand) that you have recorded, your mistakes may not always seem clear, especially if you’re new to aim training. However, you can ask experienced players in our discord to have them review your runs, as they may be able to better understand your weaknesses and strengths. Some things to keep an eye out for while reviewing
Shakiness
Slow Reactivity
Lack of speed
Inaccurate
Overpredicting
Doubt
Slow micro-corrections
Poor timing and/or reading skills
Poor target prioritization/pathing
Poor crosshair placement
It’s vital that you remain objective when you analyze your VoDs. With aim training it’s much easier to review because there are less variables that can impact your performance compared to an actual game. It’s still extremely important to recognize issues that exist within your mechanics, instead of mindlessly playing scenarios hoping for improvement.
Thanks For Reading
Hopefully this guide helped give you a sense of direction for aim training and general improvement. If you enjoyed the content, have more questions, or want to access our high quality aim training resources feel free to join our FPS improvement discord Voltaic[discord.gg] .
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2850950506
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