[hr] Part 3 [hr] The purpose of this section is to talk about what overall leads to the farthest jumpstats based on what we can not necessarily see in stats. [hr] Circle, diagonal, horizontal strafes - Does it matter? Many players who are new worry a lot about their direction of strafing with the mouse. There is absolutely no penalty for vertical movement in jumpstats or strafing. You can go just as far. What is true, however, is that circular strafes are much harder to sync generally speaking. Although some players may prefer them, I have not seen any truly skilled player who specialized in using circle strafing. There is always going to be some form of diagonal mouse movement in strafing, as nobody can hold a mouse perfectly straight while rapidly moving it. As you practice and become more skilled, it will become less difficult to strafe in a mostly horizontal fashion. Do not worry too much about this as it is something that simply comes with practice. [hr] Two types of strafing This is something that I have never discussed with another player in the past, and I do not know if other players consciously change how they strafe for different circumstances. However, what I can say for sure, is that there are two types of strafing that are visually nearly identical and difficult to distinguish between that work better in different circumstances. It is all in how the mouse is moved. Even more than that, it is about how you think about strafing as a concept. The first way to think about strafing is as snapping a mouse between two fixed points in virtual space in-game. The second way you can think about it is gliding the mouse across the mouse pad smoothly in alternating directions. The first style of strafing is a more rigid way to strafe and the second style appears much more smooth visually. There are different circumstances in which these two methods of strafing work better, but I first must discuss potential speed and actual speed, and how gaining speed actually works as far as we as players can understand it. [hr] Potential speed vs Actual speed - How gains work Speed gain is impacted by several factors. First it’s important to understand the difference between potential speed and actual speed. Potential Speed is how much speed you could have had if you executed everything perfectly. Actual speed is the amount of speed you actually got based on how you perform. For example, if a strafe has 80% sync, 10 airtime, and 13 gain, you actually gained 13. However, just looking at the sync, you can already tell you could have potentially gained more. This means that without changing your flight path in any way, just by increasing your manual input accuracy, you could have gained more speed. Gaining more speed on the same flight path means that without a doubt you would have gone farther, because every other variable is the same. Potential gain naturally exists through the faults in your jump. Nobody is ever going to gain the absolute maximum they could have because nobody is ever going to have a jump without flaws. Actual gain is controlled by a few things. First and foremost, sync. Higher sync will always mean higher gain. Secondly, the speed and width of your strafe. A wide strafe has the potential to gain more speed than a strafe that is narrow. The speed at which you execute the wider strafe will determine what you get out of it in terms of both distance and speed, though. All servers using the KZTimer plugin have the server setting, SV_Airaccelerate, set to 100. Airaccelerate is what determines the rate at which speed can be gained. If the speed of your mouse movements is too high for the amount that you have moved based on the AA value, you will not gain additional speed for strafing that wide. This means that to strafe wider, you have to strafe at the ideal rate of speed. The ideal rate of speed is the maximum speed at which you can move your mouse without exceeding the limits of the AA setting. Even if you can figure out how fast you approximately need to move, it becomes harder to execute that rate of movement over longer distances of mouse travel. Therefore, the wider you strafe, the harder it becomes to benefit from it. Furthermore, the wider you strafe, the more time you will spend away from the ideal flight path. Because of this, the question arises, how wide is too wide, and how fast is too fast? The opposite question also has to be pondered, how narrow is too narrow, and how slow is too slow? Unfortunately, I have no system of measurement by which I can tell you what these rates are. Through trial and error, you will quickly be able to tell what works best. Another contributing factor to potential speed gain relates to what I previously talked about above, strafing smoothly. While I can not support it with any evidence that is not purely anecdotal, I have always felt that a smooth mouse movement generally could generate more speed. The reason I feel this way is due to the concept of dead airtime, where you are neither gaining nor losing speed. Earlier I talked about this in the case of overlapping key presses, but there is another area in which dead airtime can exist. [hr] Dead airtime To reiterate, dead airtime is time in the air where you are not changing your speed in any way. I discussed earlier how this can exist as a result of actions taken with the keyboard hand, but this can also exist as a result of mouse movement. At the point in which a strafe reaches full extension, as in, a left strafe reaches its left-most point, or a right strafe reaches its right-most point, there is an extremely small and immeasurable point of dead airtime. As the mouse hand transitions from strafing in one direction to strafing in the other, there is a very small period when there is no actual movement occurring. This is where dead airtime exists as a result of mouse movement. It is for this reason that I feel like a smoothly executed strafe could gain more speed It appears that a strafe that focuses on a smooth movement of the mouse will spend less time at full extension and therefore have lower dead airtime. While I have always strafed using purely movement from my forearm, I hypothesize that the smoothest movement and most ideal strafing would be from a combination of using wrist and forearm motion. As an example, if a player is strafing towards the left, as they approach the full extension of their strafe, they can continue to move left with their forearm while starting to move towards the right by pivoting at the wrist. However, this would take an intense amount of focus and practice to perfectly execute and would likely only provide minimal benefits. [hr] When to use snapping strafes vs Smooth strafes While I do not hold longjumping world records, I do hold multi bunnyhop and weirdjumping world records. If you read this guide to its entirety, you will understand how the strafing mechanics of weirdjumps are not that different from longjumping, but multi bunnyhops are a totally different thing, for one small reason. What I have discovered is that for some reason, multi bunnyhops tend to go much farther if you strafe in a snapping motion. Weirdjumps, longjumps, and countjumps go much farther if you use a smooth mouse movement. In addition to that, multi bunnyhops go farthest on smaller strafes, where longjumps, weirdjumps, and countjumps tend to go farthest on medium to wide strafes where more speed is collected. The most logical explanation I can come up with for this falls back to the principal I introduced earlier about speed gain in the CSGO version of the Source game engine. The more speed you have, the slower you can gain speed. Even beyond that, it appears that when you have a very high amount of speed, such as in multi bunnyhops, the optimal angle formed between left and right strafing should be smaller to gain more speed. Try strafing very wide on a multi bunnyhop and you will gain about the same amount of speed as if you strafed very narrow. Although, you should be going farther if you are strafing much smaller,because you will have less deviation from the straightest flight path. [hr] Strafing evenly It is imperative to strafe as evenly as possible, excluding the last strafe (I address the last strafe in its own section). To strafe evenly means making airtimes even and consistent, making mouse movement width even, and making mouse movement speed even. If you do not strafe evenly, you will not get as far as somebody else who does that is otherwise of equal skill. [hr] The first strafe As I have explained, speed gained early in the jump is the most valuable, because you will have that speed for the longest period of time. For this reason, it is commonly advised to have a large first strafe. Unfortunately, people are confused by what exactly this means. Many players are only looking at their gain on the first strafe, and not how it relates to the airtime they have. It is important to make a distinction between size of a strafe, and duration. The size of a strafe is what is controlled by your mouse hand, and the duration of the strafe is controlled by your keyboard hand. It is beneficial to have a large strafe, but not a long one. Having both a large first strafe, and a first strafe with high duration, is seriously harmful to the distance of a jump. The reason for this is that you are collecting speed while strafing away from an ideal flight path. The more speed you can gain, the better. However, when you are gaining a lot of speed and strafing away from the ideal flight path, you are travelling farther off course. The farther off course you go in one strafe, means the longer your next one has to be to get you back on course. Even if you do make it long enough to get back on course, the damage is already done, because you spent so much time going the wrong way. Try to gain as much as you can in relation to your airtime on a strafe, not as much as you can overall. While I feel like players who read this guide will already understand this, since it is such a common question, I will address it anyways. Many people struggle to get high sync on their first strafe. Aside from travelling in the wrong direction, which is highly unlikely because your prestrafe goes in the same direction as your first strafe, the sole contributor to low sync is a late W release. Your first strafe can not technically start in the eyes of the plugin and game until you let go of W. The low sync on your first strafe lowers actual gain, and therefore is the most detrimental occurrence that is possibly seen in jumpstats. This is a big part of the reason I earlier called the W release the most critical part of a jump. [hr] The last strafe The last strafe is a commonly misunderstood strafe. Many people have asked me about how to improve the gain on their last strafe, or how to improve the sync. While you want to be in control of the last strafe, those two aspects are completely unimportant past a point. What most people fail to consider is that there are two ways to think about the last strafe. You could continue to strafe, and collect a little bit more speed, although you are already at the end of the jump so extra speed gained is negligible. Alternatively, you could stop strafing and continue to fly through the air in a straight line without strafing. It is better if you just stop the strafe early, executing more of a half strafe than a full one. The benefit of the slight speed gain in the end of the jump is almost never worth it. You can test this for yourself by trying three-strafe jumps. Obviously the first and second strafe must be much faster than the last one for reasons described earlier in this guide. For the last one, try to have mouse movement throughout the entirety of the strafe and see how far you get. Then, try a few times where your third strafe is more like half of a strafe. The reason this works better has to do with how the takeoff point relates to the ending point. Remember, we are trying to strafe along a straight line. This concept is not something you will have to worry a lot about once you become more advanced and can land nine or ten strafes, because when doing so many strafes, you will never have a long last strafe. [hr] Take-off direction when jumping from a longjump block When jumping off of a longjump block or any straight-edged block, you must take into consideration where you are facing when you jump off of the block. The correct way to be facing is nearly straight off the block, at a slight angle away from facing directly off. It is hard to give an exact figure as to how far you should be looking away from a straight line off the block because this changes depending on how wide you intend on strafing. Focusing on this is only important to make sure you cross the gap in an ideal fashion. There is no benefit to this for pure distance so long as your strafing follows the principles described in this guide. You can visualize the straight path that a jump should be executed across as the midpoint of your first strafe if you correctly jump off the block. You can think of the direction you are facing as you step off the block as an indicator as to approximately where your second, fourth, sixth, eighth, tenth, etc strafe should be.
