Git Gud through data and boost your performance
Intro
I didn’t grow up playing games, it was not because I had better things to do (what kid has actually important things to do), it was just not really available to me. But I like to believe I would have loved it, because I spent a lot of time as a kid finding ways to explore other worlds. I did that through reading a lot of books, especially fantasy and Sci Fi. Watching movies, listening to music and creating my own games with friends, maybe as a way of exploring the unknown. I think playing games for me as an adult is an excellent way to escape and to relax. I still like reading books and watching movies, but games are just so much more immersive, and it’s hard to do other things while you desperately try not to die or get humiliated by other players.
The “researcher” side of me likes to break everything down, over analyse why I like certain games more than others, and dig a bit into Game Science to understand the thrill and the excitement to create great game experience. And the “quant data” part of me just wants to understand how I can boost performance through understanding what I did wrong and what I need to do to perform better.
And this time we will leave the soft research and game experience part of it and just try to git gud (get good). Or at least try to get slightly better than the useless Counter Strike player I am today.
Background
My introduction to gaming was the same as Shelby from the Youtube channel Girlfriend Reviews. Creating a gaming personality through a partner who had grown up playing games. Started out with games like Portal (because girls love puzzles) and Bioshock (because girls love Big daddy’s [insert laugh]). Moving on to cinematic games like Uncharted and the Last of us. From there it felt like I started to create my own gaming personality a bit more, I moved on to spectacular games like Ori and the blind forest to huge open world games like Red Dead Redemption and the new Zelda games. Getting knee deep into Animal Crossing, and wrapping it up on frustrating games like Sekiro and Elden Ring. Not caring about what category of game it was, just based on the fact that the aesthetics was nice, or that the gameplay was intriguing.
So the one thing I had not gotten myself into was online gaming, I tried Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rdr2) online, after 400 hours playing Rdr2 I thought I was the king of cowboy land, and oh boy was I wrong. I got hogtied immediately by bandits and dragged behind a horse for hours. Then remembering that most of my hours in Rdr2 consisted of camping, horseback riding and looking for small birds, and those skills would not make me survive the wild wild west.
The things we do for things we don’t want
So with that Rdr2 Online experience, what could actually be worse in the online community for a beginner? The answer is Counter Strike. All I have heard about Counter Strike (CS) was how toxic the community was, how everybody was cheating and shouting nasty nasty things to each other. And my thought was “Yes that sounds like something I would like”.
I think I tried CS for the first time maybe in 2021 or something like that, and as you know back then it was CSGO. I remember it to be a horrendous experience, if you have never played it before and if you have very limited experience with that kind first person online shooter games you die before you leave spawn, and people you play with are not slow to comment on your uselessness. I think they might have rude comments on short command, prepared for when noobs enter the arena. But I do like a good self punishment so I continue playing it, mostly on community servers where people were nice, and it was social and I started to like it.
I haven’t really become that much better over the years, of course I have improved but not as much as I could have if I would have been a bit more systematic around it. And here comes a bit of Game research analysis to my own learning curve in CS. It is bloody steep you guys.
Even in FromSoftware games you get a tutorial. I played Sekiro for 30h and didn’t have a clue about what was happening around me and it still felt like it had a bit of cushioning in comparison to CS.
Animal Crossing might have been the most ruthless though, getting totally ripped off by a raccoon named Tom, destroying you slowly until you owe him so much money you start gambling in turnips. But after 400h I got myself out of that addiction.
Remember this guy? who promised us a peaceful island and instead ripped us of, made us take out a mortgage and then work it of like in real life? That is not what I call Game Escape
But CS for me was just completely raw, ruthless and extremely satisfying. There is nothing as beating a really hard boss, and in CS everything is the boss for us noobs. So when you accomplish something, that feeling is pure accomplishment. And I think that is what get’s people hooked. If you don’t want to cheat it is all about practice. It doesn’t matter how much you grind, your weapons doesn’t get better, you armor doesn’t get harder, there is no short cuts to getting overpowered. It is all up to you.
In other games you build a stronger character through power ups and those are fast fixes, which doesn’t last long. And for me if you grind in CS you become better not your character, and I think that might be the difference to why the accomplishment feels greater in CS than in other games I have played. I was stoked beating Ishin in Sekiro, but it lasted like 3 minutes, and then it was all over.
Present
So with that long and personal background, what are my skill level like, 3-4 years later?Absolutely nowhere, I have played 401 hours checking by the date 2024-05-21. Those kinds of hours in a regular open world game is a huge number of hours. I have around 400 hours Animal Crossing, 400 hours Rdr2, 350 hours Zelda Totk, 350 hours of Age of Empire II. And in other games which I feel like I have played a lot, and games which I feel like i’m pretty good at I have spent like 40-100 hours. 50 hours on Hogwards legacy, 40 hours on God of War, 20 hours on Ori and the Blind forest and so on.
You get where I’m going with this, in a games like CS 400 hours is absolutely nothing. You haven’t gotten overpowered, you haven’t beaten all the bosses and you’re not even close to any kind of “status”. I’m an unranked player who often gets questions like “Have you never played before?”, and in Zelda you have 30 hearts, 40 million stamina rings, the coolest armor and nothing can kill you except your own stupidity.
The feeling after playing 400h in an open world game in comparison to CS
Over these 3 years or so I have played in total 9 Matchmaking games. Not Premier competitive mode because I’m not allowed because I’m unranked. And I need to win 10 matches before I can do so (I've lost 8 matches). I don't really understand the different modes and how it works, but I guess that comes with my 400 hours of Noobiness.
And because I have mostly played on Community servers where we mostly just try to avoid getting Team Killed and Team Flashed I have no idea how strategy in CS works. And it is a lot, I never know when to buy, not to buy, and what to buy. I just to buy things all the time. But apparently that is not how you’re supposed to do it. And believe we when I say, people who are highly incompetent to make their private finances work in the real world do know how the finances work in CS. They would be millionaires if they applied that logic into the real world.
And then there are all of the names on the maps. In real matches there are just a few maps that are considered Competitive maps. So all of these maps are built in certain ways so it becomes even and fair playing Terrorist or Counter Terrorist. The maps have certain “positions and places” and they all have different names. And oh my lord, trying to learn these names is like trying to understand the family tree in Game of Thrones. And to make CS strategy work it is quite important to learn these names, and not call them like i do “the place where the nice flowers are planted” or “Something that looks like a ramp, but it is not THE ramp” or “Close to banan, but more shaped like a pear”.
And then we have the different ranks in CS2. Silver, Gold Nova, Master Guardian, Legendary Eagle, Supreme Master First Class, and Global Elite. They sound very similar to different roles in cool tech companies. “And here we have the Supreme Master Dev and the Chief Legendary Eagle”, “You can’t talk to him he is Master Guardian of the roadmap“.
So I won’t go through more about the game, because honestly I don’t know how it works. I just go in there and it is all about Spray and Pray and shouting “No one remembers a coward”, because I have no patience.
Me at me peak performance, panicking, forgetting to hide and reload.
Experiment
So at last we have come to the experiment. I thought it would be fun to see how good or less useless I can get at Counter strike over a fixed period of time using the performance data the service Leetify can give me. Leetify is a Swedish company who provides CS statistics, and if you like data you are going to like this. I sometimes use their service and their dashboards in my data and research classes to show good examples on how to work with data. Not only to tell things about what is happening, but to help people performance better through it.
So I thought I would put Leetify to its test now. If they can make me a better CS player, they have truly accomplished something with their service. In the next article I will show you my CS performance statistics as it is now. Raw, honest and under performing. I do not carry my team so to speak. I will choose specific areas which Leetify thinks I need more practice in into becoming a better player, and set up a set amount of time actually practicing it. Some may even call Leetify the Strava of Gaming.
I like this one, the pink line is me and my performance, and the purple one is where I should aim to be, based on my hours of playing and being an unranked noob. As you can see, underperforming.
A bit of a hint of what my performance is like right now, is that my Aim, Headshot counts, Accuracy and Spray pattern is poor, but I’m performing a bit better in Counter Strafing and Time to Damage. Let’s dig a bit deeper into that in the next episode. And based in the radar chart above, I need to practice everything but positioning seems to be what I should focus on in general.
Poor - well thank you sir. Very uneven performances, let’s see if we can even that out over the time of the experiment, become more reliable as a team mate. And try to detect which things in the game play itself or things related to me can have any effect on evening out that curve as well as getting closer to where I should be in my skill group, looking at the radar chart above.
Metrics
I have set up a google sheet with certain “Soft” metrics I will monitor throughout this experiment, those are connected to me. Then we have “Metadata” which is just related to the game itself. And at last we have the “Game metrics” , the metrics related to my performance.
Soft Metrics - these are related to how I react to playing. I will track this through my Garmin watch and Garmin Connect.
Stress Level before and after I played a match and average stress throughout the day
Heart Rate - I’m going to try to monitor this and match it to the match
Body Battery at the beginning, in the end and the average
Qualitative metric - How I feel before and how I feel after the game
I might add some more here, like how I have been sleeping, my female cycle or some other random thing.
Metadata
Time and date
Map
Length of the match
Who I played with (did I play with people I know or random matchmaking)
Context
Game Metrics - These are being presented in the next episode of this series. Alongside which things I will focus on in practice. And these will be based on Leetify statistics. Looking at the current statistics it will be impossible to focus on all of them, but I will focus on the ones I think are the most important ones alongside the ones I think will have the most impact on my overall performance. I will also set up a bit more structure game plan for this. How many hours of practice and how many matches per week I need to do to be able to see a change in my performance, and also for what period of time and what feels realistic to do.
DM me if you want to play with me
