When you first started playing quake improving your quake game would have taken leeps and bounds as your experience grew. But as you gained experience there is only so much you can learn from experience and basic skills. Above this level is what seperates the great players from the average, but you may ask how all of them get there, well I cannot give you an answer for them all but some have done something and what they have done is what I would like to go into in this article. What I will go into is how you can look at your game and how to go over it and improve it. Because there is only so much someone else can teach you and after that you can only learn yourself...
Demos
One of the most important things you can do is watch demos of your own games and watch mistakes you make and list them on paper and take time to concider them. Knowing your game faults is the first step to improving them. Also I would recommend when watching demos that you only watch demos of the best players to help put the best habbits into your game because I have seen from watching the not so good players bad habbits have arisen.
One more thing when it comes to watching some of the best players playing is also noting and writing down some of the things you notice that set that player about the rest and how they handle certain situations and aim with various weapons. This way you can yourself pick on some of the techniques of the best players and adapt them to your game.
Other Gamers
When you are developing your own ability to analyse your game a good way to analyse other gamers and see what common mistakes some players make and try think of a solution to that. In many ways you can think up various training things you could undertake or do. An example of this would be failing various jumps and an obvious way to look close at what they do before, during and after the jump and see what they are doing wrong and in your own mind ok they are doing this wrong so they need to do this to correct it. In the long run this will develop your own eye for looking for things to improve on and as your game lifts so will your technical side of getting into various things.
Practicing
Once you have been able to figure out your mistakes you need to practice game situations as much as you can and make sure you do it right. One thing I must stress when trying to correct your game is to never practice alot when you are tired because you will make mistakes and therefore inforce bad habbits so getting your skills to another level so to speak requires alot of concerntration and effort. And when it comes to quake and all the various skills required at the top level you need to be at your best to be able to improve on a game that is already highly skilled.
When you are practicing one of the best ways to check if you have learned something is to practice your skill for say 10 minutes, at this point many players would say ahh I have got it now. BUT the true test is to see if you can take a break for 10 minutes come back and do it, and if you can do this then you have developed your skills. One more note using that idea of the break is very important and if you can do this I really believe you will see alot more results than just slugging it out for an hour constantly , believe me it works.
Conclusion
Being able to train yourself is probably one of the hardest things to do correctly. I still personally still have not got it right, it takes time. This is one thing that is very hard to explain and alot easier to show, I hope this article has given you some idea how you can train yourself. This is more of a journey your techniques in training will "evolve" as you expand from what I have hopefully taught you in this article, Good Luck!
