EG Chance's Quake Bible

Originally posted by zGreatCornholio

   WARNING, HUGE WALL OF TEXT!
CAN BE APPLIED TO ANY FPS >_<

Introduction

Practice, Practice, Practice. The famous words of Champion Johnathan "Fatal1ty"
Wendel. We've all heard it before, and we all know how important it is to reaching
the highest levels of play, but what about those guys who practice all day every
day and seem to never improve? I'm sure you know who I'm talking about. That
guy who's been playing for the last 4 years and in the 240 hours of game time
he's logged, since the Quake Live beta opened, has barely managed to etch out a
positive record. Well, this article intends to help those players - and any player
ready to patch up holes in their game that prevent them from reaching higher
levels of play. Unlike other articles, you won't find play by play instructions here.
Quake is about choices. From the second you spawn in, every single thing you do
matters. As we'll see more into this guide, even every single thing you think
about doing matters.

This article is structured around insight. Insights are the foundation for your
improvement; the building blocks of your game. They enable you to make the
right choices at the right times. Without them, you can't build a structure strong
enough to carry you into the next level. Remember that in every step forward
there is an often hidden insight holding it in place that you must find in order to
further establish it as your strength. Meaning, if you're playing great - there's a
reason why. You have to find that reason to retain that level of play. If you're
playing miserably, there's a reason why. You have find that reason and stamp it
out.

The following sections primarily contain insights to help you improve your game
on your own, this is the most important thing you can learn. You won't always
have someone to tell you how to play. Irregardless I cover a few key subjects that
should be your primary focus every time you play. Those two subjects are enemy
status and timing. We'll get to them a little later. For now, we need to understand
some principles to keep your head together.

Discipline. (Willing forward the strongest formula)

Create no waste. Discipline is probably the most difficult and synonymously
important strength of a competitor. Discipline is often what separates the
aforementioned soft practice junkies from the hardened veteran masters. The
practice junkie plays, and plays, and plays, but while he does so he'll be thinking
about doing his laundry. Or what about that new episode of Lost? A thousand
superfluous thoughts are floating through his head while he's drunkenly dropping
into the void like a bewildered klutz or missing the easy jump pad rail. Players like
Fatal1ty will tell you, even when you practice you need to focus 100 percent on
every game, the entire game. If you can keep this up for 8 hours a day you're
going to come out with some serious results. If you can do that, by the way, you
may have some kind of gift ;p. There are few people I know that can play more
than a couple hours without reaching "burn out." Don't concern yourself too much
with the quantity however, because the quality is what counts.

So discipline is largely about staying focused, and staying focused has a lot to do
with your emotional state. You can't be getting too angry, excited, or relaxed
when you need to be completing a crucial task like timing red armor or dodging
behind a pillar. An example of the kind of excitement that creates problems is
when that energetic excited feeling takes your mind out of the game. i.e. "I'm
doing so good! That shot was amazing! Wait.. what was the armor time again?"
Herein lies the difference between an amateur and an expert. The expert player
will simply move onto the next frag, perhaps increasing or maintaining the same
level of energy and readiness whenever necessary.

All that matters is that at the very least you're ready to accept and deal with the
current situation, rather than acting on your emotions regarding the current
situation. On the whole, emotional features like excitement will, by nature, lead
to what are called "leaks." Unintentional holes in your game that, despite knowing
what you should have done in a situation, you went ahead and did something
else. Leaks commonly arise from emotion, but they may also come in a more
dangerously subtle package; thoughts. Anytime you have thoughts floating
around that don't pertain to the game at hand you generate leaks. Disciplined
athletes have little to no leaks.

In order to prevent leaks you have to be aware of your current state of mind.
Keeping your mind clear of fog will allow you to take on any and all information
presented to you, and process it in an unbiased, no-nonsense fashion. With a
clear mind, you stay out of your own way and focus on the critical information
you need to make your next move. That is what strong discipline is about and
that is the core purpose of discipline.

Don't think of discipline as a strenuous exercise. A large part of it is making
yourself comfortable with giving it your all and ensuring you're ready to play
irregardless of what might have or could happen inside and outside of the game.
There is an "easy way" to attain a leak-free strong discipline without breaking
your routine down into thousands of meticulous details and then making yourself
remember them all when you need them. This leads us to our next insight.

Presence. (Remaining in the moment to maximize mental efficiency)

Presence is the state of mind (or no-mind) that has no past or future. Without
past and future, you are not wasting your brain cells/neurons on things that do
not currently exist and therefore hold no bearing on you as a player. You are
focused entirely on what is happening, and since what is happening is all there is,
it is therefore all that matters. This is an easy way "cut down" or lean up your
thoughts and become all killer, no filler. In my experience, you are may only
compete at your peak performance when you are committed fully to the present
moment. The ideal way to look at this is; there is no seperation between you and
what is. This "oneness" is commonly referred to by sports analysts as, "the zone."
Disciplined presence means we should be playing the entire game in the moment
as it emerges unto itself.

You don't need to "think" to strafe jump. You just do it, and the more you can
clear up the mental noise in your head while you play - the more your mind will
wrap around the task you're trying to accomplish. The task of discipline is greatly
simplified by just maintaining continual conscious presence. How is this achieved?
Focus on the task at hand, nothing more, nothing less - and not so much on the
task, but the totality of the moment.

Your mind should be like water, ready to adapt perfectly to fit any container.
Concentrate on what is happening, what the situation needs from you, don't think
it out in long-drawn inner dialogue - just be aware of it and allow it to come
through you. Give your mind the space and freedom to gather all the information
you need. Allow yourself to respond to the situation with relentless indifference,
clarity. Through this comes power. This is natural for a lot of athletes but will take
some practice in itself if you're not used to it. It seems like focusing on the "Now"
is common sense, but that all depends on how aware you are of your straying
thoughts and emotions. There's not much more that I can say about this, you
either get it or you don't. If you don't, just keep playing with a clear head and
always focus. Eventually you'll figure out how to find your "zone." When you do,
recognize the Presence and understand that it is an enormously beneficial ability
which can become absolutely pivitol to your success as a player.

Alright, so. Now we know we need discipline to continually bring our best forward
so we can call on our abilities at will, and we know how to stay in the moment so
we can be efficient with our mental resources. The line between beast and newbie
doesn't stop at staying focused and cognatively present the entire time, you have
to be focused on the right things. Now, what exactly are these "right things" I
keep mentioning, the "important stuff"? What should I concentrate on while I
play?

Opponent Awareness/Enemy Status. (Mastering the raw data.)

Whether you're playing Duel, Team Deathmatch, Clan Arena, Free for All, or even
Counter-Strike for that matter - your awareness of the enemies status is huge.
This is the part of the game that provides you with the information to make
almost all of your decisions useful. I come from a Duel background, so for the
most part I will explain this from a singular, one-player perspective rather than
the plural, team-oriented perspective, but the same nonetheless applies to either
mode.

Your opponent has XXX health and armor (at maximum totalling up to 400), he is
standing X,Y,Z on the map, with X weapons, and X ammo. The opponent is also
moving at XXX units per second. These variables are life and death in the arena.
The ability to contain this information accurately within your consciousness is the
apex of your game. I can't stress this enough because when it comes down to
winning or losing a frag - the most common thing a player does is --misread the
situation and--- mistake some other feature for the reason it happened.

For example: Player B goes through a doorway expecting Player A to have 25
health, when really Player A has 125 because he just got the mega health. When
Player B gets killed after landing a few beads of shaft he gets mad and blames his
aim for not doing enough damage. The anger itself is an issue, but we'll get to
that later. The misjudgment of enemy status is by a landslide the most common
mistake players make, and if not immediately corrected here it has the potential
to just domino.

Any time a gap occurs in our intellect we immediately fill it with the most easily
accessibly and most seemingly obvious reason, and if there is no obvious
reason... we invent one! Creating a solution to fill the gap works well on a short
term scale to alleviate a problem with the best solution we can come up with off
hand, but eventually if the player leaves it unchecked his game's foundation is
liable to become almost superstitious. Many times rather than filling the gaps with
a logical guess to what may have happened players fill it with any answer that
most conveniently protects their ego. Anger is likely indicative of the player trying
to defend his sense of strength that he feels he is losing by being punished.
Players that get stuck in ego will perpetually blame some inauspicious aspect of
the game, continue letting problems chain together by answering them
baselessly, and thus continue to be on the receiving end of the next fragger.

The only way out of this is being honest with yourself and accepting the reality of
the situation, which, I will tell you on the bright side is that you simply did not
accurately read the information you were given. Why is that on the bright side?
Because you no longer have your superstitions like "I just suck" to blame, you
have real, tangible reasoning to tell you what went wrong, and how exactly to
deal with it. We are all human, we all make mistakes. We need to remind
ourselves that these mistakes can either bear fruit, or drag us to hell, depending
on whether we accept our equality and subsequent mortality, or cling to ego and
think somehow we deserve better or worse without first understanding more. It's
the questions we can not answer that cause our suffering should we find
ourselves in a situation where we are struggling.

Once you have accurate awareness of the enemy's status, this is where the Art of
War comes in. (<3 Sun Tzu) Now you can constantly balance your status against
the enemy status, and move accordingly. If you have the advantage, you attack.
At the disadvantage, you wait for your opponent to make a mistake or you retreat
in order to gain more resources than your opponent.

What about when your back is against the wall and you can't retreat? You're out
of luck. The best way out of any sticky situation is to not get stuck there in the
first place. If you're already in this situation you're forced rely on a miracle shot,
opponent choke, luck, or some insight into your opponents fallibility to survive.
This is the last thing you want to do. Good players will attempt to force you into
this situation all game long. There's never a time when they want you to be
prepared.

You always hear about successful athletes and gamers "visualizing" their success.
I promise you they aren't visualizing having 2 health and hitting 5 consecutive
grenades for the win. They're seeing kills unfold realistically and effortlessly in
their minds eye. Studies have shown visualization helps immensely in improving
task completion. In fact, it's been shown that you can actually gain muscle by
merely thinking about lifting weights. Try and keep your opponent contained in
your minds eye throughout the game. And you don't just want to think about
where they are, you want to literally contain them by limiting how they can
expand around the map.

The majority of the learning curve in any game comes from getting yourself into
the right situations. The more experienced you are, the easier it becomes to
make useful choices using the discrepency between your enemies status and your
own, and the more meaningful every move you make becomes. I said it earlier
and I'll say it again. Quake is a game about choices. From the second you spawn
in, every single thing you do or even think about doing matters. Misinformed
decisions lead to death. If you can't figure out immediately why you just lost or
got fragged, go back and examine the replay afterwards. You need to understand
what happened. (Hopefully one day we'll have easy-access demos that display
enemy health, enemies through walls, and item times.)
Enemy status is key, but make sure you're always paying attention to your own
status (and your team if you're in a team mode). You might think you can take on
125 health joe newbie with his spawn shotty - but if you're not healthy enough
and he's in close ducking behind pillars he's gonna drop you like a brick. I'm
always suprising myself how often I go in to attack and look down and realize I've
got 150 armor but only 12 health. It's a given that any time enemy status is
considered, it should be weighed against your and your teammates statuses as
well.

The most difficult thing is gathering this information, and retaining it while
playing. Saying that it's difficult is misleading, however, because this again isn't a
stressful or demanding skill. It can be achieved with ease given time, discipline,
and continual conscious presence. The idea of difficulty is purely psychological
and arises when you resist your current situation or the "time" it takes to
accomplish your desired result.

Other insights reguarding enemy status can include player tendencies. If you've
played a person enough times, or even in your first time playing a guy you can
sometimes pick these up a few minutes in. You can use them to "get inside" your
opponents head, putting damage on them when they're not expecting it - or
taking the RA they always leave up when Mega spawns. Psychology can also play
a role here. If you know your opponent is fatigued, you may be at an advantage.
This isn't something you will want to learn to rely on, but it helps to be aware of it
so when they're feeling peppy next time - you can expect they won't be cutting
you the same slack.

So I know where he is, I know how much health he's got and I'm totally with it.
What else do I need to focus on? We'll discuss just that in the next part.

Resource Timing (Expanding and controlling your advantages)

Resources include items placed around the map that are designed to give you or
your opponent an advantage. In most modes these include weapons, armor,
health, quad, and other powerups. In Quake, it is essential that you time items to
the second. First and foremost you'll be weighing enemy status with your status,
but the ultimate goal of resource management is to effectively eliminate your
opponents ability to gain any significant advantage.

This means timing the most important items while simultaneously preventing
your opponent from getting them. This also means what items you can not time
you need to be mindful of as well. If you know they don't have the Lightning Gun
(LG) but you do, not only will you try to force mid-range fights where you have
the damage advantage, you will also want to prevent them from getting the LG so
you can continue control area's of the map that are best suited for its use. The
same goes for rockets (close range) and rail (long range). As you can see, enemy
status falls in to effect resource status, and vice versa.

In duel, the advantage of the Megahealth and Red Armor are so great that you
want to have each of them timed all game, every game. This is an area where a
lot of players faulter. You can play mindlessly all day long and garner enough
experience to eventually have a pretty solid lock on enemy status, but item
timing is a whole other beast. It takes planning, forethought, careful execution
and extreme intelligence. Experts say you need an IQ somewhere in the 140's at
least. Wait... really? No. Again - this isn't something that requires a lot of stress
or effort. Like everything else it just requires conscious present awareness.
Forethought itself only happens in the present moment. The future holds no
significance. Just because you're timing something does not mean you are
focusing on the future. All timing requires is presence and the ability to add. The
important thing to remember here is to time to the second.

What I often do is simply repeat ":16, :16, :16" in my head and if I have Mega
and RA timed I repeat the RA time too, ":16, :23, :16, :23..." Keep in mind that
its not necessary to time like this if you are good at remembering when it spawns
without it. I generally have trouble timing without repeating the numbers if I
haven't been playing in awhile or I'm distracted (either by physical external things
or just mental noise).

It may also help you to time them out loud. I recall sitting behind Paul "CZM"
Nelson and hearing him chant the spawn times for RA and MH like a quake item
conjurer after he said in the game prior he was having trouble timing. Sometimes
I'll get confused and mix up which items are spawning in which order, especially
when mega is spawning before RA (because mega usually spawns after RA). For
example I'll be repeating ":26, :30, :26, :30" in my head but the item I think is
going to spawn at :26 is actually spawning at :30 and vice versa, so it may be
helpful to remember to emphasise the next coming item in your head first and
foremost.
As we said before, in order to maximize any advantage you gain from picking up
a resource you must time it. Of course this will not be possible with every item,
not only because some items spawn in less than 5 seconds effectively rendering
timing them meaningless, but also because there are often 20+ items per map
and the average human being can only remember around 8 digits at a time.
So why is timing a weakness for so many? Well for starters, many players
experience heavy mental resistance to it, most often labeling it as a "less fun"
aspect of the game. Other people are trapped in the illusion that its too effortful,
and requires too much of their concentration or is beyond their intelligence.
General lack of discipline is, however, the biggest problem. Mental wandering
anyone? Too frustrated or impatient to remember the time? There's your lacking
discipline.

Item status, enemy status, and team status are an interconnected power struggle
where the exact respawn times play a critical role. Megahealth respawns at :XX,
red armor at :XX. You have XXX health+armor... You get the picture. Accuracy
within these categories takes time and determination to master. Along the way,
its a lot of fun. Brilliant plays start to emerge when both players become fully
aware of the enemy status and item times. It's a game with RTS style resource
management and Fighting game reflexes. The overlay of deception and
punctuality unfolds a dynamic and eternally interesting genre of E-Sport. Every
map has a unique architecture, powerup layout and weapon scheme. This sets
the stage for a vast set of gameplay meta-memes and personal meme's just
waiting to be uncovered.

Perhaps in the future I'll write an article laying out the specific meta-strategies
encountered on individual maps, but for now this marks the conclusion of the
"what to do/think about in-game" section. From here, there's a few other things
to consider pre-game and post-game.

Aim (The most overthought skill in Quake.)

If you were to ask the best aimer in the world how he aims so good he would
probably explain the process in a way that would leave you just as well off as if
he told you to tap your heals together and wish for good aim. Indeed, the concept
of "aiming well" is one place where things get a little foggy for us humans to
describe =]. We tend to try to quantify things in order to understand them and
aim is such a dynamic category we are stuck with a lack of general insight here.
But there are a few things that I think play a crucial role in aim.

1. Comfortablility. Firstly, you need to be comfortable with your environment. If
you're not used the height of your chair, size of the monitor, shape of your mouse
etc. you may have trouble aiming just because you'll be encumbered with
discomfort the whole game. Simple ^_^. Next you need a sensitivity you can
stand behind 100 percent. To do this, you need it to meet the demands of the
arena with absolute ease and comfort. This means setting it high enough for
those quick yet important placement shots, and having it low enough to maintain
a steady track.

Warmup is there purely to get a good comfortable feel for your setup and make
your mind comfortable with your sensitivity and the general handling of your
mouse again.

2. Concentration. I've said enough on this already. Presence directly equates to
amazing aim =]

3. Movement. Great movement kills two birds with one stone. You stand where
you need to be to simplify the shot(s) while synonymously avoiding enemy
attacks.

These are really the only three factors of any relevance that I can offer you when
it comes to aiming. A lot of people get borderline superstitious with their aim.
Some will nervously tweak mouse settings, sensitivities, visual configs like they
have obsessive compulsive disorder. Don't be that guy ;p.

Here's a few more tips to make sure you're on the right track.

Stop trying to predict the future. There's a lot of hype in being able to "read" your
opponent. Thats fine, but don't mistake "reading" them for predicting them. You
can not predict what a person will do. Trying to predict player movement in battle
will only lead to poor accuracy and frustration. What you can do is merely read
their movements and this'll be all you need to match them perfectly. So stop
spamming that corner for 10 seconds cause he's already behind you :p. In a
straight up shaft fight you want your crosshair to track the opponent with the
immediacy of a shadow (<3 Bruce Lee), and you can only achieve this through
total presence.

Just like we discussed earlier with enemy status, putting yourself in the right
situation with aim also has an enormous value. You're not going to miss that
jump pad shot when you're 200/200 and have every item in the map on lock. The
reason? Comfortability and simplicity. You're comfortable because you're in the
exact situation you need to be, add that to the fact that the shot is the simplest
shot in the game and probably doesn't even require you to move - and you have
yourself a winner :)

Motivation, Attitude (Pushing the limits)

It's important to keep a healthy morale when you go to play a game. Sometimes
you just aren't motivated. If you're not feeling up to a game, don't play. It takes
discipline just to take a break sometimes. A lot of players think, "Man, I keep
losing because I'm playing bad... I'm playing badly because I don't feel like
playing... but I need to get better so I have to keep playing." This is a vicious
cycle that traps almost every aspiring pro*** at some point. If you find yourself
in that situation you just need to remind yourself that it's the quality that counts.
Taking into account the stress of tournaments, it may all be a bit overwhelming at
times. If you're new to the scene, you might be freaking out months before the
tournament even starts. If you take my previous advice, you know its not smart
to practice when you're stressed because you'll be too emotional to concentrate
or play your best. So how will you get practice if you're purposely not playing
because the pressure is too high? The answer is simple. Do what you can with
what you have, and, you receive what you give.

"Do what you can with what you have." What I mean by this is, you do as much
as you can with what you're given. Whatever that means, whatever situation you
are in. If you're stressed out and you can't seem to calm down, you have may
have no choice but to play through it. You gotta accept that you're just going to
suck while you play. If you can't practice for a solid week before an event, what
can you do about it? Do everything you can but don't resist it psychologically. You
have to bring peace into the game in order to maintain functionality because....
"You receive what you give." Give it nothing, you can expect to receive nothing.
Give it your all, every, single, time-- you're going to get something back. If it's
not enough for you, too bad - give it some more. How is there a choice in the
matter? And don't just give it more- give it better, brighter. Give it lightness,
freedom, joy, enthusiasm. See what you get back. Life is the journey, a beautiful
means through uncertainty. So you start with what you have, and you do what
you can with it. Give it your all, Good luck.

Resolve. (Conscious adaptation)

Alright, so I'm practicing really hard and I'm paying acute attention to everything
thats happening - but I still having troubles with such-and-such problem(s). This
is where resolve comes in. Resolve is my favorite word, it just means so much
(seriously, it has 18 definitions on dictionary.com.) I said at the beginning of this
article that discipline may be the most important aspect of an individuals ability,
to me resolve plays a key just above that. Resolve gives you the ability to take a
step back, and tackle the problem again from a different angle. Or maybe just
tackle it harder this time. Or maybe lets try diving in on it from above. What if we
dug a hole and trapped the problem in a pit of spikes? No, I've got it... we'll use
magnets!... haha

A brilliant player (you know who you are) once told me repeatedly to think
outside the box. I kept thinking to myself, "What does that even mean?" I think
the answer to that question, or any question, is the fruit of resolve. With your
resolve you have ability to adapt, rework, recreate, restore, regenerate, renew.
Resolve is the forge by which the blade of your will is tempered. And like any
great sword, it must be shaped, heated, cooled, and folded thousands of times
before it is perfect - but who is ever perfect?
The end.

I want to remind you that while all these insights are important, and though its
important to gather new knowledge - the core of your concentration while playing
should be on enemy status, and timing. These two components are the basis for
all in-game decision making.

Hopefully this article has given you some knew knowledge or at least a fresh
perspective on things. If you still find yourself getting stuck, try writing stuff
down, you can build a journal or progress report of sorts this way.
It's been fun sharing with you all! Keep at it and together we will improve the
meta game! See you on the interwebs =]


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