How to Actually Get Better at FPS Games
There's no shortage of FPS improvement advice on the internet. Most of it is either frustratingly vague ("play more, aim better") or comes from someone whose natural skill level is so high that their advice doesn't translate to average players. This guide is different — these are the seven things that actually moved the needle for me and for players I've coached over the years.
The 7 Techniques
Find and Lock In Your Sensitivity
Most players never settle on a sensitivity and subconsciously keep tweaking it, which means your muscle memory never develops. Find a sensitivity that feels natural (a good starting point: 400 DPI on your mouse, and sensitivity in-game set so a full arm swipe does a 180-degree turn), and then commit to it for at least three weeks without changing it. Your aim will get worse before it gets better — that's normal muscle memory rebuilding. Don't bail early.
Warm Up Before Ranked Play
Cold-starting into competitive games is one of the most common mistakes. Your reaction time, tracking, and mechanical accuracy are measurably worse for the first 20–30 minutes of play. Spend 10–15 minutes in Aim Lab or Kovaak's before queuing into ranked. Focus on target switching and tracking exercises. Your first ranked game of the day should feel like you've already been playing for half an hour — because you have.
Watch Your Deaths, Not Just Your Kills
After every session, spend five minutes reviewing your VOD or kill cam footage. The question to ask isn't "how did I die?" but "why was I in a position to die at all?" Most avoidable deaths come from bad positioning decisions made 5–10 seconds before the actual death. Tracking this pattern in your gameplay reveals what to actually fix.
Pre-aim Common Angles
Game sense improvement is often discussed as something vague and mysterious. In practice, a large chunk of it is simply remembering where enemies commonly are and pre-aiming those spots before you expose yourself to them. If you know enemies frequently hold a specific corner, your crosshair should be at head height on that angle before you turn to look at it — not after. This is a habit you can develop deliberately by paying attention to where you die most.
Play One Game at a Time
Each FPS has its own movement speed, TTK (time to kill), recoil patterns, and audio cues. Playing three different FPS games in a week splits your mechanical adaptation and slows improvement in all of them. If you want to rank up in Valorant, play Valorant. If it's CS2, play CS2. Diluting your practice across multiple games is a real and underappreciated cause of plateau.
Turn Off Fancy Graphics During Competitive Play
Motion blur, depth of field, film grain, and excessive ambient occlusion all reduce your ability to spot enemies clearly and track moving targets. Turn them off. This isn't about raw frame rate — it's about visual clarity. A slightly blurry, cinematic-looking game is harder to play competitively than a sharp, flat-looking one. Pro players configure their games to look "bad" on purpose for exactly this reason.
Know When You're Tilted and Stop Playing
This is the advice people resist most and need most. Tilt — the emotional frustration state that follows a bad game or a string of poor plays — is measurably bad for your performance and will cost you rating. Recognizing when you're in this state and logging off is a skill, not a weakness. The players who improve fastest are the ones who play focused, intentional sessions — not the ones who grind while frustrated for five hours.
What Not to Do
For balance: don't spend $200 on a new gaming mouse thinking it'll fix your aim. The difference between a $40 mouse and a $150 mouse in actual gameplay is negligible for anyone below the top 1% of competitive play. If you're hardstuck in gold, the problem is game sense and habits, not your peripherals.
The honest truth about improvement: most people plateau because they play the same way repeatedly and expect different results. Real improvement requires deliberate practice — playing with the intent to identify and fix specific weaknesses, not just logging hours.