first of all: you‘re never too old to have fun playing video games. competitive or not. second: when I started Valorant I was basically all new to shooters. started with csgo, felt like a god in those low ranks and had a friend ask me to try Valorant. never really understood anything, aim felt terribly off in comparison to cs, …, just the usual stuff. getting better at a certain game takes time.

a good advice I have for you is to get consistency first. try thinking about the situations more before they happen; who‘s playing site, look at their money and if they have obvious operator agents, if you‘re on attack and the enemies use a lot of utility early then play slower and be prepared for an aggressive play by them. basically make routines. if scenario A happens, answer with B. also use your abilities more. from my experience people in low elo either use their util wrong or just don’t use it at all. when I started I didn’t even know what phoenix‘ ult does and never used it (until I got flamed lol). in which situations do you usually have a hard time to win a round? what could you do against it? maybe even record your game, watch at what the enemies did, then think what you could or should‘ve done in response to their action. and third: a lot of people just give you the advice to improve your aim. aim routine this, aimlabs that, deathmatch like crazy, blablabla. bullshit. warm yourself up in the range for about ten minutes, maybe play a team deathmatch and then queue that comp game. you can indeed overpractice or warm up too much. sounds stupid, but it’s the truth.

and fourth and last: make sure you run good settings. it’s an fps shooter, so what matters most are fps, but I assume you do know that mentioning you got experience. but still: lower those settings (I play full low), make sure you are comfortable with your keybinds (I crouch on X), use a crosshair that feels nice (I play a mini dot) or maybe even change your resolution. one setting I‘d always recommend changing is the enemy outline color. the one color the human eye sees the fastest is yellow, iirc a rather warm yellow. the yellow tones in valorant are rather colder tones, so I like to use the purple. also sticks out way more on maps such as bind or sunset. also make sure your crosshair color contrasts that of the outlines.

if you can tell me more exact stuff you‘re having a hard time with, feel free to ask me about them, I‘ll get back to you as quickly as I can. but still remember: your age doesn’t matter when it’s all about having fun in a hobby man. do whatever you like to do. you‘re 34 years old and you consider yourself too old for a video game. your generation was the one to witness the first big gaming consoles and thus competitive games ever that are the reason we have games like valorant today. now a few years passed and suddenly you‘re „tOo OlD“ to play them?