apex and valorant
competitive gaming
the cleanest feedback loop I have found outside a gym.
the games
Apex Legends is the main one. I peaked platinum, main Wattson and Alter, and yes, I have the Karambit. Valorant is the other, diamond across somewhere around 3,000 hours, which is an alarming number to write down and also the reason I understand hit registration better than I have any right to.
I built the PC I play on. That started as a practical decision and turned into its own interest; knowing what every part does changes how you think about the software sitting on top of it.
why ranked
You cannot argue with elo. It does not care how you felt about the game. It takes your input and returns a number, and the only way that number moves is if you actually got better. That is rarer than it sounds. Most feedback in life is delayed, noisy, or polite. Ranked is none of those things.
The failure mode is obvious and I have lived it: you can grind for hours and improve nothing, because volume is not practice. The players who climb are the ones reviewing why a round was lost, not the ones queueing again immediately. That lesson generalizes uncomfortably well.
where it fed the code
Both games ended up producing projects. valo_scout came from wanting stats the client would not give me, and from wanting an excuse to write a sorting algorithm by hand instead of calling one.
radiant_slice came from a longer-running itch: I had spent years complaining about netcode without understanding it. Building a shooter with hitscan weapons and a lag compensation component was the fastest way to find out that the problem is genuinely hard and most of my complaints were uninformed.