Additional advice on these topics exists elsewhere. Remember this book was not written by a team of people.
If you top frag consistently, unbind Tab. The scoreboard gets into your head and you stop fragging.
Play without tilting. It is a game. One match against the hundreds you will play this season — and you are going to let it wreck your aim, your comms, and your ability to win the next one?
Nobody wants to play with someone who is constantly angry, yelling and tilted. It drags down the team’s morale and their willingness to keep enjoying their time. Do not ruin it for other people, especially the people you call your friends.
It is all fun in casual, ranked or customs — right up until someone gets angry and shuts down over something minor.
Stat-checking your opponents gets in your head as a developing player. Seeing higher ranks makes you feel beaten before the round starts. Seeing lower ranks makes you overconfident and frustrated when things go wrong. Either way it distracts you from playing well. Focus on your own game. Play the game, not the stats.
Your teammates, especially new ones, often do not know much yet. That is not a reason to be cruel about it.
Toxic players and people accusing you of cheating do not determine who you are or whether you get banned. Toxicity is unavoidable in competitive games, but you do not have to absorb it. If a teammate is being abusive, mute them — better to lose a few callouts than your focus. Engaging only shifts your mindset away from winning. Stay focused, mute early, and stay out of pointless arguments.
Tilt is an unnecessary mental state that gets in the way of improving. It is anger built up from playing too long, and at the end of the day it is stress accumulated over a video game.
Blaming teammates is easy, and it stops you growing. Instead of criticising other people, look at your own actions and how you could have played it differently — especially if you often die early and spend the round
spectating. Learn from your own mistakes rather than backseat driving.
Some rounds are genuinely unwinnable. Developing the ability to analyse your own play anyway is what separates people who climb from people who do not, and it matters most in solo queue, where your progress depends entirely on you.
Under the current system, rank is a glorified battle pass. It looks good, but if someone is in your lobby then one of three things is true: they have the same skill as you, they got boosted, or they are a single Champion being carried by four Coppers.
You will lose. You know you will lose. Take it on the chin. There is no way someone like you is going to fall apart over a player who shot you in the back of a room you never checked. Drone it. Listen for it. Get better and queue the next one.
If you are one game away from ranking up and you cannot close it, play next season. It is just like that sometimes.
During a round, run the scenario in your head. Imagine you were on the other side. Imagine you were the person you are fighting. Anticipate where they went, where they will push from, and — if you did not kill them and they ran — where you would have gone from there in their position.
Prefiring is shooting preemptively for a possible kill. Make sure it does not compromise your position.
You can use it in many ways, wherever you deduce an enemy is likely to be from the information available.
People can only be in a limited number of places. As an attacker, the bomb chassis, head glitches and head holes are the spots you want your crosshair on while you wait for a defender to peek into your line for a free pick.
Scan the room. Keep your crosshair on the openings that have the potential to produce an enemy.
Related: the hardstuck breakdown.
This chapter is from The Principles of Competitive Siege, a free guide by Szhutsen K. Liang. SiegeIQ puts the same thinking on your own clips: upload a round and get a breakdown of what actually went wrong. Try it free.