AVA Competitive Player Guide

AVA Competitive Player Guide by DrPecker

Many people strive to become a top notch competitive player, but many do not have the skill nor the knowhow. In this guide, I will teach and show you how to gain skill and game sense. This guide comes from experience of years of cs 1.6, css, and cod4 tournaments and lans.

I will be continuously writing into this guide on my daily whims of boredom, I will write as much into this guide as I can until I get bored. So without further ado (is that how you spell that? Weird) we will start this guide.

So you’ve played in a couple of “clans” and “cwed” a bit and are thinking you can take on the top teams, right? If you answered yes to any of those, your not ready to take on a semi decent team. First, were going to learn the correct terms for things, competitive players use teams, not “clans” and they scrim, not “cw”, got it? Good, moving on.

So the first thing in becoming a competitive player is being able to aim, chances are, I can run circles around your aiming skills with my eyes closed, while using my opposite hand. So lets begin

The first thing you want to learn about, is fixing your mouse problems. You don’t have any you say? Your wrong.

So head on over to leaguedownloads.com and click on the counterstrike source tab, now move down to where it says mouse fix pack, and download it. This is completely safe and harmless to your pc.
Now I’m not doing a tutorial here for extracting and running this, it edits your registry, plain and simple, there’s instructions in the file for every OS, follow them unless you want to be butt raped by windows.

So now that you have this done I’ll tell you what it does. This will fix your mouse acceleration issues that comes with every operating system. Once you finish it, you will notice your mouse to behave a bit differently, this is good, it makes your mouse more precise in its aim.

Next, go move onto your control panel, go to mouse, select pointer options, where it says select pointer speed. Make sure that slider is directly in the middle dot, having it further to one side or the other will mess up your aim with the mouse, now make sure “enhance pointer precision” is left unchecked. This button lies, it does the opposite. So if your on windows xp, it should look like this.

Now your windows settings are fine.

Now the first part of this section refers mostly to gaming mice, however there may be usefull information for other types of mice.

So the first thing you need to do is download all your drivers for your mouse, this is essential. Most gaming mice come with a cd, don’t use this, look up the newest driver on their site.

So now that you have your mouse drivers, go into its driver panel and explore it. Most gaming mice have polling rates and dpis. The polling rate is how many times the mouse will track your movements a second. most options are 125hz, 500hz, and 1000hz, set your polling rate to the highest setting possible on your mouse.

Next up is the DPI, many companys advertise that there mouse can go to 3000 dpi, or 15000 dpi, you get the picture. Don’t ever use a high dpi, your precision on the mouse will falter. Use the lowest two settings possible, Ie on a mouse that has 400,800,1600,3000. Use either the 400 or 800 option. Never buy a mouse that does not have a lower setting then at least 900. The lower the dpi, the more precise it will be. I personally use 900 dpi on my death adder lefty, due to using it at a lan the first time I had it without changing the drivers.
Heres what your setting should look like

Now moving on to selecting your sensitivity, This is really a personal choice and many people use a wide range of sens. I have a 900 dpi mouse with a 9 ingame sens. Some guidelines to follow are, know the limits of your mousepad size, use a sensitivity that will fit it. Do not go over around 30, anything over is to fast. (note I do not know exactly the limits of ava sens) Do not continuously switch the sensitivity, try it out for a full game or two to get used to it.

Now I can do around a 280 degree swing with the full range of my mousepad. If you would like to directly use my sensitivity, use the following equation to find out what your settings should be in relation to mine. (Assuming windows sens is in the middle) DPI X INGAMESensitivity= TrueSens. So mine would be 900 X 9=8100, so for someone to mimic my sens with a 400 dpi, they would have a 20.25 ingame sens.

In most peoples minds, the only way to get better is to play demolition pubs. This cannot be further from the truth, you can gain gamesense and tactics from playing in a demolition, but your aim will not improve anywhere near what it would in a deathmatch. Think about this for an iota of a second, in a Demolition game, you can be sitting around dead for over 2 minutes endlessly watching in a 3rd pov of a campfest, while in a deathmatch it is endless continuous action. Much better for improving your shot then in a demo map.

There are two types of death-matches I do, the first being a normal straight-up death-match in where I go to improve my gunning skills and getting to know my gun on an even more personal level. The other type of death-match is actually more important, I myself call it a 2 shot dm as I run around bursting 2 shots, you may not get nearly as many kills or learn your gun as much, but your True aim (non recoil, luck, or spread dependent) improves tremendously, very fast.

The amount of time I put into death matching you ask? Usually I would give you a number of kills to achieve around 100-200, but for myself I give a timelimit, due to the fact that I can get around 50-100 kills in a 10 minute death-match (no im not trolling.) I usually dm from 30 minutes to an hour.

Map selection is critical and AVA only really has two suitable maps for improving aim. Cold Case (the best) and for a bit of variety castle rock. Why are these the best selections? Because they are straight forward, without random rooms or many twists and turns, and they are flat and open. So no, running around snake eye will not improve your aim, sorry.

Along with death-matching I do a routine warmup. I have posted a quick youtube video showing a part of the warmup I do. Note that I do not go through each routine fully, I use an entire magazine on each plane I shoot at when I truely warmup. The first part of the video will help get your sensitivity down, and your hand warmed. The 2nd part trains your flick shot.
Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRC2Hj7zYtQ Sorry guys, didn’t look at the video before I uploaded, You can not see my crosshair, and it is pixelated, will have a better version out later, for now you can watch that to get the jest of it.

Oh crosshair placement, one of the simplest things to master, and one of the most effective things you can have in your arsenal. Yet many people, even at the top level of competitive play struggle to use it.

The simple putting your crosshair level at head level is known by most and is used widely when staying still and camping by a flat surface, however this art is lost to most people while moving, rounding corners, and navigating through slopped surfaces.

Being able to effectively place your crosshair is a critical part of becoming a great player. When you correctly place the crosshair your reaction time will become faster as well as your aim more precise and you will have a huge jump on the opponent player.

I will first talk about navigating around corners, I see to many people either put there crosshair onto the wall such as this
This is possibly the worst way to round a corner, it leaves you exposed, your timing is slow, and it makes you look stupid.

The second wrong way is by leaving your crosshair to far outside, allowing huge space for your opponent to cap you before you have time to move.

The one below is the best way to navigate the corners. Leaving just enough space to be able to react to an enemy who may be sitting on the other side of the wall and or an enemy who is charging at you.

The next thing I will talk about is navigating up and down elevated parts of a map.

These next two pictures show you what not to do. Both of these players have there crosshairs aimed at the floor of the level they are going up to, this is very very bad.

In these pictures below me is the correct way to navigate an elevated sloop, they both have the crosshair placed at where an enemy’s head would be if they were on the level you are trying to get to.

*Note I am not in the best spots in either of these pictures.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvwGv2XCbqw
For the closing of the crosshair placement topic, I’ll leave you with a bit of advice. I have seen many people throughout my time who when moving will not adjust their crosshair, leaving it at the headshot level of where they used to be, make sure to always be dynamic and continue to change the placement as you move.

So you’ve taken the first steps into becoming a competitive player by learning to aim. That’s good and will put you leagues above some, however there is still much more to learn. The next step into becoming a competitive player is, obviously finding a team and in more depth, learning to play as a team.

Obviously your not going to go anywhere if your playing with a bunch of kids who have never heard of a strat. So you need to be aware of exactly what your getting into. The first thing we will talk about are “Pub/Pubstar clans”. These are teams that are made up of a bunch of people who really don’t know much about competitive play, usually don’t have a voip, accept people who don’t have mics, ect…

The warning signs of a pubstar clan are being asked what your rank/Kdr is (Get used to this phrase, your rank and kdr means nothing to a real team) being asked into a 1v1, not having a communication system, or having people on the team that either, refuse to get on your voip or do not have mics. These teams should be avoided playing on at all costs, you will only get worse by playing with them.

Now that we have that out of the way, we can start to look at exactly what to look for in a team. The first thing that you will want to look for is if the team has a voip (voice communications) if they do, the next thing you will want to know is the type of voip. If they have things like using xfire voice chat, or skype walk away, this shows they are in no way dedicated. Good voips include ventrilo and mumble, and to a lesser extent mohawk and teamspeak (

The next thing to look for is how they run there tryouts, if they first ask you for a 1v1, be wary, most competitive teams realize that 1v1’s are almost utterly useless. If they ask to tryout in a pub, just straightup leave, any real competitive team knows that pubs will prove nothing as to how you are as a teamplayer. Other warning signs are being asked for your rank and kdr, though some decent teams do do this. A good sign for a tryout is a 5v5 in either a channel 4 scrim or the clan channel as there a team can rate your aim, teamwork, gamesense, clutch, and calling.

So if all checks out with the team you want to tryout for, go give it a shot. Don’t be scared to tryout for the team, if you don’t make it you may have to go to a worse team and continue to prove yourself in leagues and scrims for a while (think of that as minor league baseball, or D-league basketball) When your trying out, remember to talk, call out anything you see, work with the other players, follow the strats and try not to bait people much. If you see other players on the team not making calls or arguing with each other after rounds, this possibly isn’t a very good team and may not stay around for long. I myself have walked away from a few teams that were considered decent that seemed to rage at each other and behold, the teams are not around anymore.

Done with the tryout? Do decent? Make the team? Your not done with looking though, you still have alot to do. Do you like everyone on the team? Or are there a few people who seem to push your buttons? If so this may not be the best fit for you, keep looking. Like the people? still not done, stay for a few days, see how dedicated and how active they are. See if they like to scrim and like to play the game, or all they do is complain about it. Remember, you can only build chemistry with other players if they are on and willing to scrim, if they want to pub or refuse to leave a pub to scrim, leave the team, they are not dedicated to competitive play. Another phrase to remember, “Scrims > Pubs, always”.