When I was about 15 I first started playing Team Fortress 2 somewhat "seriously." Of course, I was a total casual player, but I was enamored with the idea of improving at playing the Scout specifically. I had heard.. through the grapevine.. that the best way to improve at Scout aim was (nonsensically) improving at the Quake Lightning Gun. I have always been willing to undertake strange methods of improving at the things I liked, and so I set off, to play this so-called Quake, and the eminent version of Quake at the time was Quake Live.
My fixation was more or less singlemindedly set on tracking aim. How much can a person learn from a single activity? It has been said that all the glory and majesty of God is latent in the tiniest blade of grass.. expressing the necessary interconnection of all events. From a determinist materialist's point of view, such is a trivial consequence, depending on your notion of necessity. Tangents aside, for two or three years I sat for a very long time in my room dedicated more or less entirely to the pursuit of tracking aim. To my mind, there was nothing more beautiful in this world than the high art of smooth, accurate tracking. It was an expression of a perfected kind.
I would've done anything to attain my goal and it was a delirious phase of my life where in which no one could help me or interject in my rather bizarre and stilted obsession. I did not go to school, I did not work, I could not drive, I dreamt of nothing but achieving my dream and I didn't care about real life. My father was intermittently alcoholic, recovering for a month or a few weeks before relapsing and I lived with my grandparents fresh out of my parents' divorce. I can't say that any of it particularly left a mark. All that mattered was tracking aim. It was more beautiful than anything else in life. Waffling about my personal life aside, I suppose a small digression into the actual focus of my obsession, tracking aim, is worth the bytes. After all, eventually I was decently successful. I was able to hit quite good LG (that's lightning-gun, for the uninformed) reliably against anyone I played with.
Tracking Well
Avoid practice versus bots. Focus on even ground tracking at first, the case is considerably simpler. Practice movements, there are only two movements on even ground elementary tracking to learn. Lower your sensitivity. Use your arm, not your wrist. Develop independence from your movement. Learn to utilize contrary wrist movements against your arm movement.
If anyone is curious, I may be contacted through one means or another for elaboration on any of these points, though I doubt anyone is particularly interested. It's been years since I met someone who gave a damn about something as specific as tracking aim and even longer since anyone cared about my opinion specifically on the topic. You can't expect everyone to keep up with the personal life and history of a no-name dinosaur like myself. That being said, I devoted my mind fully to the study, practice, and cultivation of this art(?) for a great portion of my adolescence, and my commitment was to a monastic degree, so I may have something to offer.
I have much more to write about this game. Its aesthetic properties are quite deep and fascinating to me in ways that unfurled more and more the deeper down this rabbithole of neurotic fixation I went. The darkness and grime, abyssal qualities of the original Quake were deeply comforting to me. I would close my eyes and shut the blinds, black out the room, and just play the soundtrack of the game, written by Trent Reznor. It was deeply comforting. It is said that the dip on the area above a person's lip, the.. philtrum, if I recall, is caused by an angel kissing a newborn's lips in the womb before it is born, so that it cannot speak the unknowable glories of God it has comprehension of prior to life. I wondered if this darkness and enveloping presence was akin to a womb for me as well.