guest section from Ceiba
The Spectrum of Reactive Tracking
By now, everyone knows reactive tracking. It is one of the six primary categories on every aim training benchmark. But did you know that this one category is actually its own spectrum?
Standard Reactive
On one end of the range, we have standard reactive tracking. This includes well-known scenarios like Air and Ground Plaza. These are foundational scenarios that have been around for almost as long as Kovaak’s and have provided immense value since their creation. Yet, on the other end of the spectrum, as the difficulty and evasiveness of the bots in each scenario increase, reactive tracking turns into pure reactivity.
Pure Reactivity
Pure reactivity as a category includes the more difficult reactive scenarios, most notably, LDDH. My followers definitely know that I recommend LDDH variants frequently. This is because of how different it is in nature compared to other ground tracking variants. Not only is the scenario much harder than Ground Plaza, but it requires a much different approach, one that we’ve already seen.
Now, to clear up confusion, I must admit that calling these scenarios “Pure Reactivity” is somewhat misleading because pure reactivity is not really a category. It is an approach- a specific technique used to play these specific reactive tracking scenarios. Everything we’re discussing within this video falls under the one category title of reactive tracking, but we just need different labels for whether a scenario can be played in the “standard” way or if it can be played “purely reactively.”
Let’s begin by talking about the path a new player might take to understanding this category. Through this, we can better understand the development of specific techniques along the way.
The New Player Pipeline
Let’s assume that a new player to aim training will gravitate towards the Voltaic benchmarks. They will play reactive tracking in the form of relatively easy air and ground variants. What makes these easier is that they feature bots that are much larger and slower. This makes it easier for newer players to get used to movement reading.
At this stage, players who struggle with reactive tracking may also struggle with smoothness. If they cannot match the target’s speed well enough or react sluggishly, or if they react too quickly such that they overflick, it will hurt their score.
If you are at this stage and trying to improve at these early variants, you must simply focus on training stability and getting your movement reading skills up to par. This means grinding tracking scenarios on evasive bots.
You could try playing invincible versions that acclimate you to singular bot patterns for longer periods of time. At this point, you just need to grind and learn.
Focused thought and practice will bring some players to a much higher playing field. The advanced section of reactive tracking will usually feature the standard bot patterns for high level aim training. It is at this point that previously simple concepts of stability, speed matching, and smoothly recovering become integral to the process and automatic. However, movement reading at this level becomes much harder. Because of quicker bot movements, you need to find opportunities to make space for recoveries.
This is where you must employ edge tracking.
Edge Tracking
Edge tracking, sometimes referred to as underaiming, means to place your crosshair intentionally off of center mass while tracking a reactive target, specifically on the following edge of the bot.
This means that if the bot is strafing right, you will follow the bot on its left edge, and if it is strafing left, then you follow its right edge.
What this does is create more space for a good recovery by maximizing your time on target during a strafe direction change. This is because, since you are on the following edge of the bot, when the bot changes its direction, it will pass through your crosshair. You will stay on target during the time it takes for you to react to the direction change and recover the track.
For most players’ aim training careers, this is as far as one will go. However, as standards for aim training increase, and as players continue to press themselves toward a higher difficulty, you will inevitably run into scenarios like LDDH.
What is Pure Reactivity?
What makes LDDH so different? Well, for one thing, it is a mix of many complex, fast movements. It is almost impossible to hold a steady track on the bot for a long period of time. Also, most importantly, LDDH bots do not have movement acceleration and deceleration, which means there is no indication of the next bot direction change. I personally found this scenario almost unplayable the first time I tried it, but after learning what I needed to do to play it correctly, I can confidently say that LDDH gave me the keys to understanding pure reactivity.
Perhaps a better way I should have transitioned myself into these scenario types is through rA reactivity, specifically Strafetrack, Reactivesphere, and Leaptrack. Strafetrack specifically is a much easier version of LDDH. Once again, viewing the category of reactive tracking as a spectrum, these scenarios, along with Fuglaa track variants and blinktrack, fall into the middle of the range. It is common thought that, well, since these scenarios are simply more difficult and evasive, wouldn’t it be viable to emphasize more on the concepts reinforced by advanced tracking? Ie. edge tracking and pattern reading? Well, no.
Because of how fast these bots move, with no acceleration, random blinks, and in seemingly random patterns, trying to apply common advice and these well-known techniques falls apart. Edge tracking will prove useless. Instead, you simply need to try for any long period of time on target you can possibly get. The reason why most players fail to do this is because of predicting.
Prediction
Predicting is a bad habit that forms out of too much trust in predictable bot patterns. This manifests in a few ways:
- Most of the time, it looks like the player is reacting to a bot strafe that never occurs.
- Other times, it manifests when a bot is in a very long strafe, and the player begins to shake off of the current strafe in the opposite direction, expecting some kind of nonexistent direction change.
- Other times, it just looks like poor speed matching and preemptive motion changes.
The reason why this fails in scenarios like Strafetrack is because these bots are so evasive, so seemingly random, and often much smaller, so not only is there much more room for failure in a prediction, but failures also hurt your score so much more.
But predicting, at least mentally, is a part of movement reading. So does this mean that movement reading goes out the window with these scenarios? Well, if you look at it through the perspective of certain reactive players, say Madbadman, that would be a reasonable conclusion.
The MBM Method
Madbadman does not believe in reading bot movements, which makes sense for these types of scenarios. His approach to them is pure reactivity. It is the very brute force, rigid, snappy-looking kind of aim that minimizes time off target by simply reacting to and syncing your motions with bot strafes. Pure reactivity is exactly what it sounds like. No fancy techniques, no abusing a pattern- just good old-fashioned reaction in any direction.
Now obviously, this isn’t realistic because EVERY scenario always has a pattern that can be exploited to some degree. It’s the same thing with real games- any player will have tendencies in movement that can be exploited. There is no pure randomness with these kinds of things, and if there were, it wouldn’t really make for a good scenario.
Nonetheless, pure reactivity scenarios have been coined as MBM reactive, due to his connection with Aimbeast, the only place where scenarios at this far end of the spectrum can be found. This includes crazy scenarios like Godball, Close FS, and Pasu Track Evo. They take the concepts reinforced by LDDH and run with it. They are the hardest form of reactive tracking that can be possibly found in any aim training environment, at least currently, and realistically, they should be at the end of any path that a new player would take through aim training.
Pure reactivity and reactive tracking have different applications when you go to make the in-game aim translation. It is critical that you consider these applications and mappings when you decide which to prioritize. This next segment will discuss that in detail.
EDITOR’S NOTE: dumb noob montage watcher here, i feel like as MBM has transitioned from playing mainly aim trainers to maining Overwatch, his directional changes have smoothed out tremendously. even in a game like that in which there is no accel/decel, there is still value in maximizing damage on the directional changes, controlling your adjustments, and maintaining visual clarity.
there is value in playing pure reactivity if approached correctly, but being able to dynamically alter your adjustment speed is a significantly more applicable ingame skill that should not be sacrificed in the pursuit of “pure reactivity”
Ceiba’s In-game Translation Advice (Instant Accel)
Hi, I’m Ceiba, For those of you don’t know me, I’m an aim trainer player. And I’m mostly known for my reactive tracking scores. Outside of aim trainers, my main game is Overwatch. For reference, over my 7 years of playing it, I have around 3000 hours in OW, and earlier this season, I was rank 61 on DPS. I mainly played Soldier to get there.
OW arguably has the highest pure reactivity requirement out of any popular FPS game. And this is due to the fundamental nature of the game engine used by Overwatch. Movement in the OW engine is completely different from almost every other popular FPS game in one incredibly crucial way: unlike games like Apex or CS:GO, Overwatch has instant acceleration.
This means instead of taking a small amount of time ramping up to your max velocity when moving ingame, you instantly start moving at your max velocity whenever you press a movement key in Overwatch.
Instant accel might seem like a minuscule thing, but in reality, it has pretty massive implications when it comes to aiming. In a game with gradual acceleration like Apex Legends, you have a small window of opportunity to read a target’s movement whenever they change directions. This moment of opporutinity occurs whenever the target’s velocity differs from their max speed. If somebody decelerates from their max velocity in Apex Legends, that means they started strafing in the opposite direction. If you’re able to consistently notice this ingame, it makes it relatively easy to read movement. As Matty has previously discussed, a game like Apex Legends focuses more on general reactive tracking than Pure Reactivity for this simple reason.
In a game like OW, it’s completely different. Instant accel eliminates the opportunity for reading strafes. This turns situations that would involve general reactive tracking that situations that exclusively rely on pure reactivity. Another additional layer of complexity is added by the plethora of movement abilities in OW, like Tracer’s Blink, or Soldier sprint, or Monkey’s jump, etc.
With all this being said, there are a actually a small handful of abilities that have gradual acceleration. Like Ball’s ball form, and there are some individual heroes that have gradual acceleration as part of their base movement. Either they don’t touch the ground or they have a weird form of movement like Lucio or Echo.
Now, over my thousands of hours of playtime I’ve learned a couple of neat tricks that make the high pure reactivity requirement of Overwatch, as well as instant acceleration in aim training scenarios much easier to manage. The first and arguably the most important is based around how your eyes focus on targets. Aim as a whole is an extension of hand eye coordination. The physical adjustments you make with your mouse are the “hand” part of the equation, so what is the “eye” part of the equation?
Well, in normal reactive tracking scenarios, reading the movement of the target is the “eye” component. In pure reactivity scenarios, it’s similar but slightly different.
Instead of hard focusing on the velocity of a target when reading acceleration, you soft focus your eyes around the target with a bias towards where the target is likely to move.
For instance, if a target is standing on high ground with only cover to the left and they’re strafing right, it’s very likely that the target will change directions and attempt to strafe towards cover, so you should soft focus your eyes to the left of the target despite the target’s current direction of movement.
Thank you for reading this episode of Unraveling the Secrets of Aim!