I don't claim to be great by any means, but I'll pass along some things I've heard and try to practice:
1) Play with players of greater skill then you (the greater the skill, the better). I spent my first 3-4 months of UT hosting my own server and joining random pubs. I thought I was pretty good because I generally owned everyone, and since I wasn't getting much better, assumed I had pretty much peaked in skill level. What I hadn't realized was that there was an entirely different tier of players that I had never run into (until finding PuF). I got my ass handed to me so many times after that (and still do) that I was pretty humbled. But I learned inifitely more in that month (and every game after that) of playing great players then I did in the entire 4 months of playing newbies prior to that (to my credit, I didn't know they were newbies
).
2) Even though it's time consuming and you'd rather be playing, download demos of great players playing and study them. Some of the moves and tactics I've seen some guys use make me sit back and think, "Jesus, I'd be 87 years old before I thought of doing that".
3) Getting good at UT is just like any other sport, learn your weaknesses and address them, no matter how frustrating. If you suck with the shock rifle...use nothing but it for a week. You can't just say to yourself, "Well screw it, I'm just never going to allow myself to be without any weapon but the Shock Rifle"...because it isn't that easy
. Once you address the real problem spots in your game, you can start fine tuning everything else until you've got your game tweaked.
4) Master every aspect of the xloc...from quicly navigating maps, to reaching special areas, to telefragging (*especially* telefragging). Have you ever noticed that it's highly underused by lesser skilled players and almost overused by great players (so much so that Epic had to fix it in a patch to make it more fair)?
5) If you play team games...learn to communicate with your teammates. Make speech/text binds so you can let others on your team know what's going on. Even if no one else is using them but you, it will still be a benefit to your team.
There's a slew of other tips, but I've got to get to work, and I have no doubt that all the other helpful PuF's will jump in and fill in the blanks...cya...
Jeff
