This is my valorant journey and a documentation of what i've learned over the last year.

I was introduced to Valorant by a friend during quarantine. It was closed beta and I grew up playing CS 1.6 so I gave it a try. Our first five games together were rough. There was five of us. My crosshair placement was phenomenal but my reaction time was shit. We had no idea how agents worked. Raze had two grenades by default. Everyone fought over who would play Omen just because he looked cool. Ton of run and gun and gigantic ego peaking. We got placed in Iron 3. I remember grinding shooting range for hours. One time I got 29 out of 30 bots on Medium and thought I was hot shit. Then I entered a game and bottom fragged. It didn't make sense to me then, and still to this day. Unfortunately, we weren't improving as a unit so I decided to go solo queue and my rank gradually shot up.

I first learned about jiggle peaking in Silver. Awpers were running rampant so a technique had to be mastered. I remember seeing some Plat player in my lobby, and everyone went into praise mode like they just saw God. I remember wondering myself how good That plat player actually was. He ended up dodging. Then the "big bang" happened (valorant was officially launching). I remember being so vexed about not making it to Gold.

There was no ranked games for the month of May. Everyone was playing unrated and I took the time to watch the mainstream pros at the time - Hiko, shroud, tenz, aceu, ska, etc and tried to implement my game. During this time I learned some cheeky plays, how to hold angles, and how to use agents properly. I grinded all month and thanks to the influx of new players, I finally got placed in Gold.

Gold was hell. Every game was a new surprise. Aim gods, afkers, throwers, and lots of toxicity. I stuck to one agent and mastered it. I finally got promoted to Plat after three months, and I decided to make a new account to "preserve" this precious hard earned rank. Then act rank came out a week later...

My new account got placed in Gold so I had to work my way up to plat again. Plat was an interesting place. It seemed like nobody knew what they were doing, but they did. Players here had great mechanical skill, but it seemed like they were playing for themselves. Rarely did people IGL. I was stuck here a couple months until I learned about something called team work. I started filling roles rather than playing like a one man wrecking crew and I started winning more games. I also found out about aim labs which helped tremendously. Eventually I got promoted to Diamond.

In diamond, you have to be READY to shoot at every angle you peak in a fraction of a second, otherwise you die. Kill or be killed. Reaction time is MONEY. All those easy kills you got from picking people off from iron to plat ends here. People in diamond RARELY ego peak unless they are awping because the players here are just that godly. They will hold a tight angle at a site forever until you peak them and boom. They know how to use their abilities to the best of their advantage. They are experts at exposing you to five different angles, and the moment you see them you dead. If you are confident here, then you are probably a smurf, on a fast track to immortal, or just having a good f'in day. I rarely go duelist in this rank because I assume everyone is on a 27" 244hz monitor and that fraction of a Hz difference is all it takes to win or lose a duel. At 144hz, 15" laptop screen, playing five games a day, immortal is looking real slow for me.

Of course, not everyone in Diamond is cracked. I don't know what it's like in Immortal or Radiant, although some of them have washed into a few of my games. It seems like they are diamond but just much more consistent, team oriented and bigger brained (better game sense).

In conclusion, a game is meant to be played recreationally, for fun. Playing in silver with friends is fun. Playing in high diamond is a grind.

Thanks for reading.