I started playing Valorant mid-August as my first FPS game. Needless to say, I was absolute trash and placed iron 1 when I unlocked comp. I even remember my first comp game where my teammates (all iron 1) were flaming me so hard because I was playing poorly--almost made me quit the game, but I'm glad I didn't. This week I got my first wins in Platinum and I'm so happy!

This post is going to be about my journey and the things I learned along the way.

August 15th: My Valorant journey begins and I spend the next 3.5 weeks learning fundamentals of aiming , movement, and ability usage in iron.

September 10: Had an amazing series of games (8 game winstreak) where I finally climbed out of iron and made it to all the way to bronze 3. By this time, I had been playing Valorant for hours everyday and developed some game sense. From what I remember, bronze players are rather predictable and overrotate a lot, making them easy to exploit. Also teammates are more receptive to making plays and using comms than in iron.

October 1: Won my first game as silver 3. I guess the biggest contribution for me getting from bronze to silver was improving crosshair placement and aim practice.

November 15: After being hardstuck in silver 3 for a month and a half, I finally reached gold! I'll talk about big takeaways in the section below.

December 20: I finally reached platinum this week! Currently Plat 2.

Big takeaways:

Honestly, my aim is still terrible (average 55-60k in gridshot). So how did I solo queue out of gold with subpar aim?

-Game sense and positioning are probably the most important factors for me in gold+. Knowing where to be at the right time, how to isolate fights or position for unfair fights, how/when to create space, and when to bait utility and rotate goes a long way. Also, as a sage/omen main, I can get into a lot of cheeky spots that catch enemies off guard.

- Comms and positive attitude/tone. Definitely give call outs, but don't backseat game (we can all agree that's hella annoying). Just as important as to always stay positive, even when you're losing badly. There's been several posts about this, but keeping a positive attitude, praising your teammates, or saying "nice try" helps with mentality a lot. I've won more comebacks from 9-0 leads than it seems reasonable by keeping morale up. Also, don't flame your teammate even if they're not playing that well (being tilted and tilting others don't help). As an example, I recently played a game on split where my killjoy went 2-11 on defense. He was apologizing for playing poorly and I was like "don't worry about it, I bet you'll pop off on attack". He actually did pop off on attack and even got a round-saving ace, and we won with me being match MVP and him being second on my team with 21 kills.

- Be a team player, play your role, and play smart. This is also really important for me. I'm usually not top fragging, but I've maintained around a 60% win rate for the past month by being smart with my utility and supporting the team. I also never hunt for kills and always play the objective like guarding the spike.

-Crosshair settings and lowering sensitivity. I played with default crosshair and sensitivity all the way to silver 3. Super dumb I know, but I was new to FPS. Finally customized it (I even had firing errors on originally oof) and lowered sensitivity and changes were practically immediate, so definitely do this earlier rather than later lol.

Thank you all for reading and hope you have a safe and happy holiday season!