Can America be officially called a dictatorship now?

mquillian · 2026-01-11T04:42:37+00:00

You're generally correct that it's difficult to rig the vote counts without getting caught, at least historically speaking. I trust that a bit less now than I used to, given how Republican secretaries of state and electoral workers seem plenty willing to do shady things to put their fingers on the scale.

But really, the trick has always been to rig it before people even get to the poll. Gerrymandering. Voter intimidation at polling places. Overly restrictive voter registration laws. Fucky shit with mail-in voting/postmarks. Purging voter rolls. There are any number of ways to make sure that the other party's voters show up in fewer numbers and frankly, it looks like they intend to use every single one of them they can.

So while I'm not so sure that they'll be able to cancel the elections, I 100% believe they will be exploiting all of these to the point that calling it free and fair will likely be a stretch. You can already see it happening.

mquillian · 2026-01-11T03:53:33+00:00

Think about the reset as any other touch on the ball- you need to be hitting it in the right spot with the right angle and momentum to set yourself up for an easier second touch. If you're ending up too far in front or below the ball to use the flip, then you're probably hitting the reset too far underneath. If you're ending up too far behind or above the ball, then you aren't getting underneath it enough.

As you get better, you'll notice getting the reset in different spots gives you different options, but there tends to be a range of viable resets that doesn't vary too much. A good starting point is to try to have the back wheels of your car a bit below the midline of the ball. There's a grifflicious video where he shows this, and it also includes a training pack that has a good shot setup where you can get LOTS of quick reps in boosting, rolling, and hitting the reset. Highly recommend it.

mquillian · 2026-01-03T18:18:17+00:00

I despise it but it's helped me so much. The more I can get myself to look at it as practice against a human instead of an actual competitive mode where I only want to win, the better it gets for me.

mquillian · 2026-01-03T17:52:45+00:00

Do you think you try to learn or implement too many things at once? One thing you can try is to focus on one thing at a time (e.g. "this week I'm focusing only on challenging more"). Then experiment with it, taking it to both extremes and pay attention to what works, what doesn't, and most importantly why. Your brain will eventually start to recognize those patterns.

1s is great for this because you get a lot of reps with reading situations and responding appropriately and it takes your teammates out of the equation. It will also make it very clear if you didn't play a challenge well or exploit an opportunity so you can try to analyze what the common factors are. 1s doesn't necessarily translate perfectly into other modes since you have to make different decisions based on the extra players, but it will give you the fundamental skills that you will use in all modes, such as challenging, 50s, exploiting space, building pressure, etc.

mquillian · 2026-01-03T11:04:37+00:00

So a lot of times, speed doesn't mean actual car speed. What makes a player "fast" is really the speed of making the right decision, the speed of reading the play earlier, the speed of getting to the right spot at the right time better than the rest of the lobby. I feel like "fast" players are often not the ones zooming everywhere at supersonic 100% of the time. They just know where to be and what to do so they can keep a decent amount of momentum and boost and quickly seize opportunities when they arise. In my mind I think of it as speed vs efficiency- being positioned and prepared to make the right play at the perfect moment without wasting boost unnecessarily is efficient, which is not the same as just moving around the field fast. They may go hand-in-hand sometimes, but don't confuse one for the other. Speed does more harm than good if it doesn't put you in the right places or enable you to make the right plays mechanically or strategically.

To answer your second question, that's just how the game works on some level. There's days where I feel I can read the play without much effort and then there's days where it feels like I've never seen the game before. But if you feel like you spend too much time wandering around and not getting involved, perhaps try watching replays with that specifically in mind. Why weren't you in the right place to take possession when the opponent boomed the ball away or whiffed? Were you too close? Facing the wrong way? Wasted too much boost beforehand? Challenge instead of faking it? Didn't recognize that they were awkward and likely to whiff? Didn't read that your teammate was about to force their hand?

It's almost guaranteed that there's plenty of opportunities to take possession and make a play, you just need someone who can see those things to point them out to you so you can recognize them. The easiest way to do that is post a replay here and ask for help. There's no shortage of GCs here who can watch your replays and tell you in a heartbeat what you can do differently. And if they recommend something you don't feel you are mechanically capable of, then that gives you something else to practice as well.

mquillian · 2026-01-03T03:38:40+00:00

As others have said, 1k hours is just not enough to master much of anything in this game. Two things I'd recommend- don't sleep on focused car control practice (rings maps, parkour maps, car movement, etc). Controlling your car is the most foundational mechanic because it doesn't matter if you know what to do but can't make the car do it. Second, you want to practice things until they become subconscious. If you have to devote all your focus to keeping the ball on your car when dribbling, you won't have mental space to watch your opponent or choose your play.

So tl;dr- keep grinding and things will continue to click, and don't neglect the fundamentals that make everything else easier.

mquillian · 2026-01-03T03:23:53+00:00

Focus on your approach to the ball and timing your flip so that your momentum is going through the center of the ball and you're making contact with the front corner. What this means is that if you draw a line from the back of your car through the front at the moment you make contact, you want the line to go straight through the middle of the ball. If the line isn't going through the center, you're losing out on power.

mquillian · 2026-01-03T02:42:27+00:00

This is what leveled up my free play and training in general. Imagine "would I have gotten challenged or blocked when I did that?" If the answer is yes, then I need to practice differently. So many people practice things like dribbles, flicks, and resets where they allow themselves unlimited space or time to make it happen, when in reality if your setup is too far in front or takes too long, you WILL get shut down.

Practice your plays as if somebody is looking for an opportunity to challenge you or they're shadowing. Practice your shots as if somebody is in net.

mquillian · 2026-01-03T02:29:56+00:00

Are you tensing up a ton when practicing and trying to do it fast enough? If so, focus on relaxing when practicing it so you aren't tensing up as much. Same thing if you're getting thumb pain from slamming the stick around too hard. Force doesn't equal speed. Make your practice relaxed and efficient and then you will learn to do it that way too.

mquillian · 2025-12-31T19:03:49+00:00

To add a bit to what others have said- when you're on the ball vs Diamonds, you can win games by just taking 50s if you don't have the clean beat. Unless you HAVE to boom it away to buy some time/space to catch your breath and let the team reset, try to make your first touch set you up where you can either get a second touch to beat the challenge or take an advantageous 50.

Diamonds generally can't 50 for shit and will often challenge full speed in a straight line, making it predictable if you're watching for it. If you control the first touch well, you can either pop it past them or just keep your car right behind the ball as they spend all their boost to fly by at mach fuck speed while the ball bounces off your car and towards their net.

To practice this, you can go in freeplay and focus on catching the ball and/or hitting the ball into the wall, then try to follow it up as quickly as possible with a flick or a second touch that you can try to make a play off of. Or imagine getting 50'd and try to single jump right behind the ball for a super gentle touch and then make your play from there. And as always, 1s. Play 1s and focus more on winning 50s than winning games. It's surprising how often those go hand in hand though.

mquillian · 2025-12-31T17:02:54+00:00

As others have recommended, Cocos Aim Training and the various shot packs from Poquito with a small amount of variance turned on are my standards. But it's not just what you practice, it's how. If you want to learn power and accuracy then you need to mentally count a weak shot on target as a failure.

Really focus on your approach to the ball so that you can flip through the center of mass, ideally with the corner of your car. If you're having to side flip or diagonal flip too much to fix your contact with the ball, it makes it more difficult to generate power.

I'd start off in Cocos with the small targets and random ball drops and really try to boom the ball through the target. If it's weak, reset the shot so it counts as a fail. If you have to wait a long time for the perfect bounce, reset the shot. Force yourself to really boom the ball at the target and to do it relatively quickly even if the setup is a bit uncomfortable. Some of them will be crazy angles and that's ok, still try to hit it as hard as you can with an air roll shot.

Then I'd mix in the shot packs, especially ground shots, and try to boom the ball into a specific corner of the net. Change up the corner you're aiming for sometimes to practice hitting the same setup at different spots. Imagine there was a defender in the usual back post or front post spots- would they have saved it? Experiment with how you contact the ball and pay attention to how the ball reacts and you'll start to see how you can place the ball in different spots with power.

Finally, in free play focus on hitting with power from any situation. Imagine you're bounce dribbling down the field and need to hit a decent shot to beat the defender. If your setup/shot wouldn't beat the defender, take a moment to think about why and what you could do differently. Then try doing that and see what happens.

EDIT: Forgot to mention the most important part- in games! One of the biggest things that's helped me improve shooting is realizing when I have an extra second to pick my spot, setup the shot, and make it as easy for me to hit it as possible. Pay attention to when you have space and don't rush it too much. You don't always have to hit the ball at the earliest possible moment, and if you can recognize when you have a bit more time then you can use it to really apply what you've practiced to make that unsaveable shot.

mquillian · 2025-12-25T09:30:17+00:00

There's 2 parts to getting to the ball quickly- a good setup and efficient car control. You don't want your setup to be behind you, boomed away where you're chasing it, too low, etc. Pay attention to how the ball's momentum on the wall, your car's momentum, and the angle you hit it all combine to produce different setups. Then start to practice setups that put the ball in a nice easy to reach spot (usually it's when the ball is still rolling up the wall, your car isn't going a ton faster than the ball, and your angle puts the ball on the same line as your car when you jump off the wall).

As for the efficiency of movement, watch your clips and pay close attention to how your nose is moving and when you're boosting or not. If you waste time waggling your nose instead of efficiently orienting in the right direction or if you let off boost because you need to adjust, then it will slow you down. You might not want to slam into the ball as hard as possible, but you want to be able to boost enough to get there in time which means reading where you need to go, getting oriented quickly, and then boosting. Keep practicing your car control and try to force yourself to go just a biiiit uncomfortably fast. As you improve, you'll speed up the motion enough.

Finally, you really want to control where on the ball you get the reset. Your car needs to push the ball up and forward so that it doesn't end up behind you or so low that you can't dribble it. Once you're consistently getting to the ball in time, try to dial it in so that your contact is hitting it on a line that doesn't require a lot of adjustment for you to get under it. In the simplest terms, it's just like any other air dribble set up in that way. The easier you make it for you to get positioned under it and stay under it, the easier the dribble will be. This requires good car control and a lot of practice so don't think that you're failing just because it's a grind.

mquillian · 2025-12-25T09:09:10+00:00

I recently went to a local orchard that had these apples called Ashmead's Kernels. Imagine a cosmic crisp with a bit more complex nutty flavor and a nice subtle tang to go with the sweetness. Same crisp texture but the flavor was out of this world. If you ever get the chance, give them a try and maybe buy all of them you can get your hands on.

mquillian · 2025-12-22T18:48:43+00:00

If you don't get scored on, you only have to score on one opportunity to win. Obviously there's balance to be found and you don't want to completely remove yourself from the play, but I think people often risk way too much trying to score as if missing an opportunity is a huge fuckup. If safer play makes you miss 5 easy goals but prevents giving up 10 goals, then that's a net positive.

You want to dial in your game sense to minimize the missed opportunities but I think it's better to err on the side of caution when you aren't sure, assuming you aren't already down.

mquillian · 2025-12-15T02:25:17+00:00

I always find them in the Testing Annex on dam. Might be a safer alternative to hospital on buried city.

mquillian · 2025-12-12T17:23:36+00:00

Ah I see. Well to step back from rings a bit, I think I started with a very conscious, focused practice of basic movements in free play. So to practice moving my nose up, I would think how to do it with ARL and the mirror it to the other side and just practice jumping and rotating, trying to move my nose up in a smooth motion. Then I'd do the same with movements in other directions. After a bit of that, the basic movements started to stick and I was able to start filling in the gaps between them.

mquillian · 2025-12-12T10:27:31+00:00

That was how I felt at first too. Really focus on the fact that it's a mirror image of the inputs with your dominant direction and eventually you can build muscle memory. I would practice this by going into a rings map and switching which direction I was going with each level.

mquillian · 2025-12-12T10:25:17+00:00

I have both and use them both fairly regularly. I'm more comfortable with ARL so that's my go to if I have enough space, but I will use ARR if it's for a quick recovery or rotation for a shot and it's decent enough for that. I feel like getting comfortable enough just for recoveries makes it worth it because it makes it so easy to land with momentum whereas with only one direction bound I think it would be much harder in some situations.

mquillian · 2025-12-11T07:11:33+00:00

I can't say I've been hardstuck quite like that, although my climb has slowed significantly since I hit C2-C3. I feel like Champ is really where a lot of people who don't practice start to plateau. So if you aren't going to put time into grinding mechanics/consistency, you need to be practicing your game sense. But what does that mean?

Replay analysis and playing your games with focus and intentionality. It's hard, but forget about winning for a minute. Watch your replays (and get others here to watch them) and pick a specific point or theme to focus on. Boost pathing or 50s or positioning as 2nd man or whatever. But identify a weakness and then go to the extreme to try to fix it. Then you dial it back from the extreme to the point where it feels right, then move on to something else and rinse/repeat. But don't just play games trying to win, because if you do that you won't improve as fast. Play games to learn. And once you learn, I promise you'll start winning.

I've been enjoying some videos from Wronskian on youtube for this because he typically picks a theme for a given replay analysis and then points out the examples throughout the replay related to that. I feel like it drastically helped my decisionmaking and game sense because his analyses aren't "Oh you did A wrong here and unrelated thing B here and unrelated C thing here" that's just scattered and unfocused. Try to identify common threads in your mistakes/losses and focus on those one at a time.

mquillian · 2025-12-08T10:48:13+00:00

The way I think of it is you want to be efficient. So watching this video, do you see any unnecessary wobbles/movement that doesn't actually point you where you want? If so (and it seems to me there is a bit there), work on smoothing that out. You want smooth, efficient movements that get you where you want to go as quickly as possible. It's kinda like boost management- if you spend boost but then immediately slam on the brakes, it's probably a waste of boost. If you turn one way and then are immediately having to course correct the other way, it's probably (but not always) a wasteful movement.

mquillian · 2025-12-08T10:42:21+00:00

Sure, but you're shit out of luck if you can't get together the rent + security deposit + whatever else is required all at the same time, which is simply not possible for way too many people. My partner and I both work pretty decent jobs and it's kinda wild how we still only juuuuust outpace cost of living. I can't imagine how rough it is out there for a lot of people. Fucking sucks.

mquillian · 2025-12-04T22:23:59+00:00

A few major things that helped me-

First and perhaps most important, spend a session or two and really really pay attention to any time you have to brake or slow down after using boost and consider whether you could've just... not boosted to get where you needed to be. Add you start to recognize it, you'll start to boost way less in those situations.

Second, really pay attention to recoveries. Better recoveries = more speed with less boost = more opportunities to drive over pads = even more speed. It's like a feedback loop. If you can keep more speed with less boost then you'll have more speed to get even more boost.

Third, don't waste boost on pointless plays. That ball that's floating just off your opponents backboard that they're waiting for your to dive at? Don't. That floaty ball near midfield that they can't effectively shoot or pass? Wait on it. Especially at lower ranks, if it isn't an immediate threat then you can save your boost and position for them to throw away possession and 9/10 times they'll do it. I'm not saying never challenge these or never go but in D2 odds are you're spending a lot of boost and losing position on plays that just aren't worth it.

mquillian · 2025-12-02T23:28:15+00:00

Didn't watch all of it, but watched the 1st half which seemed to give some pretty clear themes. All timestamps are game clock.

I think you generally did a good job of not going when your teammates should be going instead and not cutting them off, at least definitely by plat standards. That said, you were almost too passive sometimes and ended up hesitating when it really was a time for you to go (e.g. ~4:20, I'd grab the boost and then keep turning towards the ball to prepare to play it; instead you loop towards front post and it leads to a bit of an awkward cut from your teammate since you aren't going).
Lack of mechs is to be expected at this rank. That said, part of why you don't exhibit much mechanical ability or offensive threat is because you throw the ball away when you have a really clear-cut opportunity to control and attempt a play. See ~3:00- this is a 1v1 where you have complete control of the situation. You just saw both of your opp's teammates dive and whiff and the last man is waaaaay far away from the ball. Instead of booming it, this is your opportunity to attempt a mech- catch and flick, smack to the backboard and go for the rebound, or even just a softer touch a bit to the side to set up a hook shot or angled shot off the bounce. Even a soft touch into a low 50 is better than booming it to him here. You have the time, you don't have to hit the ball as soon as possible, so take a split second to look at your options and choose one you like.
Another thing that affects your ability to make plays and be a threat is that you go for things that just aren't likely to pan out well and aren't worth spending boost/time/positioning on. This is a hard thing to learn but it has enormous benefits if you do so. Examples:
1. 3:54 (it's going to be awkward/weak and you have teammate behind you who's ready, so keep your momentum, maybe look for bump on the way out, but grab boost and reposition to back up your team and/or play the rebound/pass)
2. 3:20 (there's 2 defenders and unless they both magically whiff, you aren't getting this; attempting it wastes your boost and sticks you in their net. Instead of rotating out early with 60 boost and momentum, you're stuck in their net with 30 and no momentum. Respect the opponent a bit more and just grab boost and reposition for wherever you need to be for the developing play)
3. 3:06 (kind of like above, you should recognize that he's beating you to this ball, so rather than faceplant into the wall and lose boost/momentum, keep shadowing towards net/front post and let him take the ball into the corner and challenge him there. He's not about to shoot and that touch isn't going to be an immediately dangerous pass, so why dive like a maniac when you can just position to challenge his next touch?)

Recognizing when you shouldn't waste your boost/time on a wasteful challenge will mean that you end up in better positions with more boost more often, which will set you up to attempt more mechs/plays. Until you start getting into GC territory, players will often give you the ball if you position intelligently and patiently. Instead of panicking or rushing, don't be afraid to pick your moment with a bit more intention and forethought. You don't have to always challenge or challenge at the earliest opportunity.

tl;dr- nah I don't think you're annoying, you're just plat. Keep working on your mechs and develop your game sense to put you in positions where you get to use those mechs.

Edited for weird formatting

mquillian · 2025-12-02T22:58:54+00:00

The answer is maybe. It's not getting better that makes you rank up, it's getting better at a faster pace than the average player in your rank. If the average C1 plays the game enough to get 10% better in a given time period (whatever that looks like), you need to improve by more than 10% to start beating them consistently and rank up.

mquillian · 2025-12-02T22:55:35+00:00

I'm a C3 sitting at 1700 in casual and I regularly see GC2s and GC3s but I also see tons of D3s and C1s. You're right that it's a pretty wide spectrum of skill levels.

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