If you want the opposition to call ‘hax’ on your aim, getting good at tracking is a surefire way to make that happen. Tracking is all about your ability to keep your crosshair on the target, regardless of their distance or their efforts to evade your fire.
Watch the Target, not the Crosshair
Keeping your eye on the target instead of your crosshair is a technique that will significantly improve your ability to aim and your tracking in particular. Staring at your crosshair means your aim is reactive due to missing out on visual cues. This puts you at the mercy of human reaction times that average 0.25 seconds or 250ms. Every time the enemy moves or changes direction you’ll be playing catch up and missing shots. Learning to focus on the target allows you to absorb visual cues that will indicate where the enemy is moving such that the impact of reaction times are largely nullified.
If you take away all of the art and effects and just think about how an enemy is really moving, it will likely look similar to one of the examples below.
Centering the Screen on the Target
It may seem like a simple concept, but if an enemy is in the center of your screen, that means you’re hitting them (assuming a hitscan weapon). As a result of focusing on the target you will notice these amazing moments where you keep the enemy centered on your screen and track them like a robot. With less of a focus on your crosshair, tracking becomes more about adjusting your aim such that the enemy is centered on your screen.
For example, if your aim is off the target you don’t need to watch your crosshair and move it onto them, instead move the enemy to the center of your screen. A good way to practice this technique is to train without a crosshair, or change the opacity of your crosshair to only be slightly visible. You will be surprised at just how well you can aim without a crosshair at all!
How to Counter A/D Strafing
A/D strafing is when a player rapidly moves left and right such that their movement is volatile and difficult to predict. This evasive technique is often the bane of tracking. Human reaction time struggles greatly with tracking this movement as every change in direction makes us play catch up again.
There is a technique you can use to counter this and when it works, your opponents will be left bewildered at how quick you were able to frag them. Instead of reactively trying to aim against someone A/D strafing, you instead predict when they are about to change direction and aim accordingly. If you wait to see them change direction you fall victim to reaction time and mess up your tracking and often by the time you get back on target they change direction again, creating a cycle of ineffective tracking.
You may not always time it right, but with practise you will gain a great deal of consistency by learning the timings of common strafing patterns.
Mimicking Enemy Movement
Moving the same direction as your target is an excellent way to improve accuracy for all aiming, but once again in particular for tracking. It all boils down to a simple principle, the more you have to aim, the more likely you are to miss. Imagine an enemy who is parallel with you moving to your right. If you move your character the same direction with your crosshair on them you don’t have to move your crosshair at all. As long as your crosshair is on target the mimicked movement is enough to keep it there. If you were to move left you would need to compensate for their movement, and for your own which simply throws extra variables into the mix making perfect aim less likely.
This technique is best used when you’re not under fire and against opponents that aren’t engaging in rapid movements like A/D strafing.
Minimising Wasteful Movement
There is a time for evasive maneuvering but if you aren’t directly under threat, or perhaps your target isn’t aware of your position you can simply copy their movement to secure some easy shots. It’s all too easy to get into the habit of moving erratically all the time which throws off aim, so it’s worthwhile to acknowledge moments where it isn’t necessary and you can fully exploit movement (or absence of movement) to guarantee amazing aim instead.
How Should I Practice?
The most fundamental skill to develop with tracking is moving your mouse at a desired, consistent speed. Perfecting this will let you track enemy movement without accidentally falling off. You can work on this by playing the following scenarios in the Sandbox of KovaaK 2.0.
Close Long Strafes Invincible
Midrange Long Strafes Invincible
Far Long Strafes
+ Those same maps with the ‘Thin’ variant in the name for more advanced practice
Don’t worry about score or predicting the bot’s movement, just try your best at sticking to the target during each strafe without falling off or being too jittery.