www.fnatic.com - Fnatic 'bsl' released his opinions publicly via their forums. All Credit is due to the Fnatic organization & bsl. The first thing I'm going to discuss in this article series is probably the most important, in terms of getting really good. I'mean, everybody can probably learn how to use the AWP and do so quite successfully. However, if you want to get to the absolute cream of the crop among snipers, you have to understand certain principles that will allow you to get in very favorable positions and thus be that edge that a lot of teams today really need. According to Gotfrag this is from my memory, so it might not be correct, but I think it's quite accurate the team that gets the first frag will win around 75% of the rounds. On all maps, depending a bit on the side you're playing and who you're playing, you will be able to get that first frag a lot easier being an AWP:er, using long distances to your advantage.
you really need to have a very self-confident and cocky mentality in-game when playing as an AWP:er on a top level. When you're up in the game you attack. When you're down in the game you attack. You always need to put pressure on your opponent and not let them control the game. As a team, you should always try to force the other team to play your game, in a pace you decide. Using your sniper early in rounds, you will be able to get that entry frag that every team wants. it's my job to do it now and it will your job to do it after you ve read this article series. If you want to, that is.
Trevor Schmidt (Midway from Gotfrag) once said, when broadcasting a game at the CPL last winter, that Fnatic were a team that played with a very assured mentality, while teams like JMC had a scream when you win a round -approach to the game. I really believe that the approach we have is the best one and it makes it much easier for us to stay confident, as opposed to the very climatic/anti-climatic approach that JMC use. We play very calm, exactly as we do when we practice and we rarely get emotionally upset or nervous, too happy or excited.
To sum up my thoughts about the mentality I feel you need, I would say that the most important thing is to have confidence in yourself. If you don't, you will start to miss shots and not really capitalize on the very favorable positions you can get in. Watch demos of players like cogu, hpx and fRoD, just to mention a few. You will pick up a lot of good things from them. And the things you pick up will be very important for your development as a sniper.
The next part of this series will be more about positioning and the last part will probably be more about handling an AWP, when to zoom and double zoom etc.
"Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." -Sun Tzu So You Want To Be A Sniper? Final part – positioning and AWP handling.
I know I´ve been kind of lazy writing this. My initial idea was to release this short after the first part, so you would not be stuck with a bit of the “course”. Oh well, I guess things does not always come out as planned.
When writing this I am on an airplane on my way to Korea and Seoul to compete in the e-stars tournament, alongside X7-Hacker, mibr and eStro. With the pre-tournament adrenaline pumping, I hope that I will be able to give you guys valuable insight on positioning and aiming with an AWP.
Where you position yourself do really matter!
My first and most basic advice for a fresh sniper would be to (a) always think about if the position you are in will allow you to hit an easy shot; and (b) if the position you are in will allow you to fall back if you miss a shot. The mentality when figuring out where to position yourself should be the same as with USP vs Glock -- you generally want to be positioned for long distance combats, due to the fact that the USP is much more accurate and does a lot more damage than Glock at long distances. When you get into close combats -- no matter if you are playing with an AWP facing rifles or with an USP facing Glocks -- you will be in a very unfavorable position. I´m not saying that you will never be in situations like these, because you will. When having to rotate towards a planted bomb is one thing that comes to mind. All I´m saying is that if you try to put a lot of effort in trying to avoid them, you will do a lot better.
When you get to the level when you start to play against very good teams, you have to mix up your play a lot more, and thus you cannot just take defensive positions because your game will get too predictable. But if you are not feeling that the opponents pick up on such things, do not try to make offensive plays that are a little more risky just to make your opponents keep guessing.
When discussing CS with my fellow AWP:er and friend, Brian “hpx” Christiensen from NoA, he made some really interesting points about how he plays his game. He said that while he might not be the best at hitting every shot, he played a very smart game and really stressed the importance of team play. Team play is the key to successful Counter-Strike and there cannot really be any argument made about it. Make sure that you really put time in figuring out how to make your AWP:er as efficient as possible. Make sure that the rifle players can back him up properly and vice versa. Every player is like a dancer on a theater -- everybody needs to know their moves in order to make the show as good as it can be. I hope this makes some sense at least.
At the highest level you have to think carefully about positioning all the time. Before the final at GameGune 2007 cArn and I decided to adjust our AWP tower (boost) down in the middle as CT on dust2 a bit, because we knew that cogu knew about our tower, having played them only weeks before at ESWC and we also knew that he was very good at, pixel by pixel, get himself in a position where he could kill me easier than I could kill him. By adjusting our tower by very little, I managed to kill him a couple of times in the final from our “new tower” , being a lot less likely to get killed myself, and we got the extra rounds we needed to come out on top in a very tight game.
Old tower:
New tower:
Personal development versus motivational issues.
I get tons of questions about how you improve yourself technically in Counter-Strike. Most of the questions I get are about aiming and there´s nothing wrong with asking such questions. I don´t think good aim is the most important feature of a good CS-player, but at the same time I can´t really deny the importance of being able to hit your shots, so I´m going to give it my best try.
I think one of the most important things is to have a steady plan. One of the things I recommend doing is setting up a goal for how good you want to get. A strong mind can usually overcome most obstacles. When I started to play CS back in the days (god, I feel like I belong in a museum or something having played for so long) I didn´t really care about getting good. It was all about having fun. I was one of the best, if not the best, player at the café I started to play at, but that didn´t really mean much. When I started to play in clans and moved from LAN to Internet I started to feel that I was quite good at the game and during a period of time, when I was around 14-15-16, I played a lot and felt that my game started to improve rapidly. The rest is, as the cliché says, history.
Nowadays I almost exclusively play CSDM, outside of the ordinary practice with the team. I feel that CSDM fits me perfectly, as it´s a very fast paced way of training and also a lot more intense than ordinary public, which tends to bore me pretty quick. One other thing that I find quite useful is to just try to imagine different scenarios in your head and play them out, imagining clicking at your mouse as fast as you can. If you play the same scenario in your head for a couple of times, you will notice that when you do actually get in a situation like that, you will be faster than usual, because your brain has repeated it happening when you thought about it.
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