I've been playing online FPSs for years now, but I've always been absolutely terrible at them. I can maybe get a 1:1 K:D ratio on a good round, but my average is probably closer to 1:3 or 1:4. This has been pretty consistent in every FPS I've played over the years. I'm not sure what I'm really doing wrong. I use cover. I try to flank with my teammates. I throw grenades to flush enemies out of cover. But somehow it always seems like they're faster, more accurate, better able to get the drop on me.
Is it just because I only play them for a few weeks or months before moving on? Is this something that gets better with practice, or do I have some kind of undiagnosed motor deficiency?
Thanks for the advice. Never even occurred to me that I might have my mouse sensitivity too high, but I have noticed I tend to overshoot when adjusting my aim.
Connection is a pretty big deal and a lot of modern games manage to hide a terrible connection pretty well. Chances are that's your issue.
Map knowledge is what makes a good player though, especially on PC where aiming and shooting is pretty easy. I use to be pretty good at COD and it was just because I figured out how the spawns flipped. In Battlefield I just learned the routes people took and where to check for campers. I admittedly wasn't great at CS, but I got a lot better when I learned how and where to peek. You do kind of have to get to the point where map knowledge is intuitive though so it does require a lot of playtime and it's not worth it.
Also most FPS games aren't designed to be cooperative. It helps in some of them, but for the most part it's bad for you.
Is it just because I only play them for a few weeks or months before moving on? Is this something that gets better with practice, or do I have some kind of undiagnosed motor deficiency?
the people you are playing against are sinking a lot more time in this probably. I'm in the same situation, every now and then I'll check out a multiplayer game. But for some people they are always in at least one FPS
Your problem is playing FPSes with cover/flanking/grenades instead of the raw S P E E D of an arena shooter
Basic things to help you get better are your mouse settings. A good starting point for your mouse sensitivity should be doing a 180 in game by moving your mouse from starting position to right (or left for left handed) edge of your mousepad, assuming you don’t have one of those giant ones. Then you fine tune it from there to wherever feels comfortable. Also watching pro players on YouTube/twitch helps somewhat.
Also posture plays a role in your aim. Sit up in your chair so you aren’t adding extra force to your forearm by dragging it across the table.
Also one thing that I noticed that helped my aim is actively thinking. I have adhd pretty bad and it’ll be impossible to focus sometimes, and in those times I usually try to actively think through what I’m doing, like “oh my crosshair should be pre aimed over here” or “oh I’m in a pretty bad spot and should move” like I’m actively saying this in my head.
The mouse sens thing was 100% my problem for the longest time.
A friend of mine used to be a semi-pro CS player, he was spectating me play Apex and asked "You've never considered your DPI or sensitivity have you?" He walked me though this process mentioned. Before I could do a 360 by moving my mouse a tiny tiny bit, and through the process it became a whole arm movement. The difference was night and day, my aim was significantly better immediately.
I turned my mouse tuning waaaaaaay down when I started playing Hunt Showdown and it's mde a big difference.
Honestly the TLDR version of this advice is basically "keep turning down your sensitivity until you can't enjoy the game anymore."
Sit up in your chair so you aren’t adding extra force to your forearm by dragging it across the table.
Alas, I pretty much entirely play from my wrist out of necessity. As soon as my arm gets involved, my precision goes waaay way down. It's a life long pathological thing that affects many areas of my life. :( In FPSes I usually rely on positioning and tactics to get ok scores. Weirdly, the one game in which I was unreasonably good at shooting was Battlefield 1. Absolutely no idea, did nothing particularly different. Just me and my open sights SMLE III routinely getting long ranged headshots or quick aim close ranged kills. It just clicked with me.
I remember in TF2 I played pyro and had a mouse sensitivity of 12, compared to my sniper friend's 0.7 (who used his whole arm and mousepad area).
Whatever is comfortable and works for you is also really all that matters in terms of aim. That being said, being a pyro on 12 sens is such a pyro thing
Quite a hit of nostalgia. I download TF2 maybe once every couple of years to faff about for a bit.
Ok so there's several factors here.
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Framerate and your hardware. A 144hz monitor with 144frames per second WILL result in better gameplay. This is a well understood data-driven fact. More frames correlates with better gameplay. The smoother the gameplay and the higher the framerate of the picture that you're looking at the more precise your aim is going to be.
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Aim training. Conscious intentional practice is valuable. Your muscle and motor memory is a tool that can be practiced for improvement, 20 minutes a day actively trying to improve your technique with drills will have a real outcome. A lot of people use Kovaaks for this which not only provides you with every possible drill that could be imagined but also tracks progress over time.
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Use the same sensitivity in every game you play. Use an online tool for this to work out what your settings in one game are and what settings in another game would achieve the same outcome.
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Crosshair placement. Big one but crosshair placement is major particularly in games where 1 click is all that's needed to kill.
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Gamesense and pre-firing. Sometimes you can know that there is an opponent around a corner beforehand, start shooting before you can see them.
It's pretty decent for drills. Being able to do different types of drills is important too, for example in Overwatch the majority of characters require you to have tracking skills rather than twitch-aim skills, Quake on the other hand is about snapping to very fast moving targets, and Valorant/CSGO are about crosshair placement and understanding how corners are cut and where people hold corners on each map. Different types of fps games have pretty different skills that require fairly different techniques. Crosshair placement is a universal one that you'll find valuable across all of them though.
Gamesense is the hardest of all of them to learn, it's one you only get with in-game practice over and over and over and builds up over several hundred hours in a game really. You learn to feel the flow of maps, and know the general distances that enemies can cover from their spawn to possible locations that you'll encounter them so you learn to know when you're going to see the enemy before you've even seen them.
Another one here is headphones audio too, use headphones, positional audio information is a significant advantage you can not get from speakers.
For reference I use a 1200 dpi mouse with 5.55 sens in Overwatch which is 8.190008 inches/360 according to this. I don't know what you use, but this works for me, probably a little higher than some others are suggesting here. I would probably go lower if I had more space but my desktop space is limited. Anyway I'm not amazing or anything but can definitely confidently be above average at most.
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Is it just because I only play them for a few weeks or months before moving on?
Yes. Sweats are called sweats for a reason. They’re may not be playing 24/7, but they’re playing enough to make it their second life. Also, hacks and Smurf scrounge are lucrative businesses. The latter because high skilled players get upset when they get matched with others with the same or higher skill, so they rather go stomp on some noob instead of getting good
Oh god yeah, this. You're not going to get good until you've got like 500+ hours in a game.
It happens a lot that a game pops up that's similar to a previous game, and then you have a section of the playerbase that came from the other game and they'll be more skilled than new players. For example, Splitgate is very similar to Halo. I played it a ton in beta and was surprised at how good some players were when the game had only been available for a couple of weeks, but the answer to how they were so good is that they had played hundreds of hours of a very similar game. I think that the amount of time it takes to get good varies from person to person but it will always be pretty high, it's just that some people get a head start from their previous experience.
Obligatory "Touch grass & practice with a real firearm instead"
You need combination of more practice, a better connection, or a different control setup. Get some friends and a headset. A group of co-ordinated dumbasses is more powerful than any gamer™️.
I think people have probably mentioned all these already but to add my two cents: a monitor with a 120+ hz refresh rate helps a lot, lowering your sensitivity (I'm at 1600 dpi and 0.65 in game sensitivity on apex legends, you can convert this on various websites. Compared to a lot of pros mine is slightly low) , and practicing a playlist on kovaaks, are the three real big secrets.
Tracking and flicking are the two broad modes of shooting which boil down to two modes of mouse control. Don't be scared to practice at different sensitivities: there is a general neighborhood that you should be starting out in as a human with human parts, but practicing at especially high and low sensitivites can be great exercise. The idea of "muscle memory" doesn't matter that much when you realize that shooting at different ranges requires mastery at corresponding sensitivities. The farther someone is the smaller the target and the finer your movement needs to be, the closer they are the bigger the target and the more accurate your broad movements need to be.
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Mouse sensitivity! Turn it down as low as you can go. Buy a large mousepad and use your arm. If your mouse has a sniper button, make it actually SPEED UP your sensitivity instead of slowing it down. You can use that for close quarters.
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Framerate! Make sure your settings are low enough to give you at least 60fps, preferably 120
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Monitor lag! Make sure your shit isn't in like HDR movie mode.
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NEVER use wifi
What games do you play? There are some broad types of FPS games that have different playstyles.
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