The real question you want do ask yourself, why is it that some people become good, and some people get stuck behind?
My answer would be the attitude towards the game. You see lots of people, in any game, that would just play that game for hours and then complain
about imbalances, cheese, luck and whatnot when they lose. But still you have to see that in top level play, there are still the same people or teams
who come out on top, why is that? If you want to be good at something, my belief is that you need a will to improve. Whenever you lose or make mistakes, just don’t let it get over your head. Instead you have to look at the situation and think to yourself: How can I learn from this? There are always ways to improve, and you should never complain at the game.

Other than that, I strongly believe that anyone with an interest for a game can become very good at it. You can say something in the lines of “How can I ever beat these guys whos got such talent?”. I think that talent is only something you have to become good at something in a short period of time, and that even if you don’t have this supposed talent, you can still become really good, only that you have to put in more hours. So if you are struggling in that regard, don’t give up hope.

Exactly how do you become pro?

I mentioned before on my general thoughts about the difference between a good and a bad player. But let’s talk about TF2 here. Remember that this is the individual part, so I aint gonna mention anything about teamplay here.

First thing you want to do is to learn the maps. Not just where CP 1-5 are located, but how they look. As a scout, you want to know where all the small ledges are, learn the corners and practise all kind of different jumps you can make. You should never feel like you are lost at any point, and when you get trapped by your opponents you have to know every single exit point. Your movement has to be fluent. Just join your server 5 minutes before any match to practise this.

I’m going to talk more about movement later, but first I’m going to speak abit about aim. The easy part about scout aim, is that you only have one weapon to practise, which is the scattergun. There are multiple ways to practise your aim, but first you have to figure out HOW you want to aim. Basically there are two ways that most scouts aim, you can either track your opponent, or use flickshots. When tracking your enemy you pretty much try to keep your crosshair at him all the time, and then (in my preference) just hold your fire-button. When you flick, you just flick your aim towards the enemy and time your fire-button. For me who use a low sensitivity I tend to use both of these methods when aiming. When I’m on long-range to mid-range I usually track my enemy, but when I’m close Ill start flicking. One tip that works for me when I track, is that I usually keep my eyes abit behind my enemy, and therefor it makes it easier to follow his movement. It’s about the same as when you drive a car, if you keep your eyes right in front of your car, it’s harder to drive straight, instead you focus abit further down the road. It might sound like just a gimmick, but try it out and see if it works.

When you start to get better at aiming, and you feel like you can kill anything with 2-3 scatterhots, you have to start practising predictions and enemy dodges. Let’s break it down for each class you face.

Scouts: There are two general ways that an enemy scout will dodge against you. First one is either a circualar movement, which will force you to aim up and down since the distance between you two will change all the time, and also sideways since he’s strafing. The other one is fast strafes back and forth. If you see him use the first way, I would suggest you aim with flicks, since his movements are going to feel slower. If he is strafing fast, you will want to use predictions along with tracking. With that I mean you should pretty much ignore his side-movements and keep your crosshair at the center of his strafes and track according to your fire-rate timings.

Along with these to dodging patterns, you will see alot of scouts who double-jump. Then you have to rely on flicks to hit him. You should time your shots and hit him with a flick just after he use his second jump mid-air to changes his movement direction.

Soldiers: These guys have a low movement speed, so the tricky part aint to hit them, but to not get hit by rockets. This is done by using the proper distance and also the map to your advantage. Try to find higher ground so that he cannot aim his rocket at your feet, and instead force him to aim for your body, which is alot harder for him. Also keep in mind that soldiers will want to jump when shooting their rockets to minimize self-damage, so be ready for that when you aim for him.

Demoman: Same with soldiers, the hard part aint to aim at them, but to avoid taking damage. If you want to become really good at taking down demos, you have to learn the firing-rate of his two weapons. What you want to do is make a fast, unpredictable side-step just when he is about to fire a pipe towards you. I promise you that it will make you live alot longer if you time it right. The same thing goes for stickys. If you time it right, you will see his stickys being fired at the complete opposite direction as where you are going. But keep in mind, they won’t trigger their stickys until you are standing on one of them, so you have to remember where he is putting all of his stickys so you don’t accidently move back on one of them. Demos will also jump alot, so aim accordingly.

Medic: This is actually one of the hardest targets to kill in my opinion. Although he doesn’t have very much health, and isn’t too fast. You have to ignore that he is the important class to kill, and just aim as it were any other class. Remember also that it’s popular for medics to take very small sidesteps in order to mess with your predictions. You will think that he is going to strafe back and forth like any other class, and you will flick accordingly and miss. Try my tracking method that i mentioned earlier and might be easier for you.

Okay so let’s get back to movement again. I’ve pretty much mentioned everything you need to know when I spoke about aiming, but I’m going to sum it up for you. You must learn how to move unpredictable. You can either just random spam your movement keys, or think in the terms of long-strafe and short/fast strafe and mix those up. This is what you want to do against scouts. Against soldiers and demos you need to use the map to your advantage. Find spots that will make the enemy soldier aim for your body instead of the ground you stand on, and time the enemy stickys to
dance around them.

Ignoring enemy classes, you have to feel 100% comfortable with scout movements at all times. Learn the aircontrol in TF2 (practise with soldier and demo, jump as high and far as you can and just strafe around
mid-air). You also need to be able to air-strafe backwards in case you get knocked up in the air by pipes or rockets. As I mentioned before you should learn all the corners of each map, so in the case where you get shot back you can strafe backwards in the air to safety. Also try to learn how to backpedal through every map that you play, it will make you know it inside-out.

ability to move smoothly on the maps, jumping, balancing, etc.

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