Before getting my beta key on jan 19th this year, I played around 3 months of rocket arena back in 2007, and a little bit more back in 2006. I was really bad at Q3 back then though, most time I would find myself between bottom fragging and middle of the pack on the scoreboard in the CROM RA 3 server.

I have played 23.6 hours of QL so far, and I found myself rising steadily from bottom of the scoreboard to the very top (most times) in FFA, and usually top 3 in the CA if there aren't some good clanners on.

Then I tried to play duel. I have a bunch of eswc2008 and masters demos to learn from. Although my all time record for duel is at 17-7, most of them are played against my friends who got into quake for the very first time from CS/NS two weeks ago, and right now they already gave up quake for the most part.

Because I never dueled in Quake 3, those 24 duels are the only ones I've ever played so far. To give a reference to where my skills are at, the last 2 games I played "q2 slasher", who confirmed to me that he was the guy who wrote column on gotfrag. I lost both duels on dm6 (first one 3-21, second one 7-19), and dm6 is the only duel map where I know every weapon, power-up and health bubbles are.

I was told all the good players can time 4 by the seconds. Right now I can only time 2 items with consistency. If I picked up mega at 3:47 and RA at 3:58, I would keep 2 numbers in my head: 20 and 25, mega first. When I pick up mega around 4:20, it becomes: 25 and 55, RA first. Afterwards: 50 and 55, RA first. And I take a peek at YA from time to time to check if it's there. I tried including a number for YA once but I lost track of it really fast because I couldn't update or estimate 3 numbers frequently enough.

I have also seen the genesis defrag intro video and downloaded the strafing map and defrag mod. I can circle jump up to the 4th of the 8 rooms ranked by difficulty (yellow is the 4th one). But I never once made it out of the 1st strafing jump room (blue), I never progressed beyond the 4th step. So needless to say my strafejumping is terrible, with each jump I only gain 40ups or so, and never making the dm6 rail jump once. And it's been that way with no improvement for quite some time now.

Currently my mouse sensitivity is at 35cm per 360 degree turn. I have tried setting it to everywhere between 20 cm and 40 cm. My rocket is probably the worst, I panic a lot when my opponent is hitting me and I rarely get good hits when they are not on the same floor as me. Sometimes my rail can be decent, I have hit 75% RG against an opponent who i'm 1-3 against (and 5 frags were obtained with RG that game). With LG I find it very hard to produce a constant stream of hit-confirming beep sounds when he is strafing, and if he rocket juggles me I usually lose.

So I would greatly appreciate it if someone can share just what exactly do I need to do to time all 4 of the power-ups by the second. What tips can you give me to progress beyond the yellow room in circle strafing and blue room in strafe jumping? What kind of mouse sensitivity do the top pros use? Is playing CA the best way to improve my aim? (I spend most of the time in CA trying to aim better, and I really dislike the quake live "Trinity" and another map (crossfire?) where you can get hit from 3 directions at the same time no matter where you stand)