My parkour experience - tips, advices and more

[SwiftSmoky 8,445]

I played this game for almost six years, and always been into parkour. I am leaving in less than a month so it's time for me to share with everyone some of what I've learned about parkour, give you some advices and motivate you  :)

What I will say here is not only my own experience, but also things I saw when looking at other players or talking to them. My knowledge is based on my own parkour experience along with the experience of many other players.

 

I'm not going to talk here about why I leave, I'll only say that it's most likely that I'll never come back. And I won't give anyone my account, I don't want anyone to use my name. I might look at the forum sometimes, but I won't play anymore.

 

That's a lot of text, so if it's too long for you to read it all I suggest looking at the titles and read only what interests you.

 

 

Getting started with parkour and advancing

 

Players who decide to learn parkour because they get impressed by parkour videos with cool looking tricks are those who usually get frustrated and feel like they are noobs, for two reasons:

 

They try to learn parkour in the wrong way

The thing they do wrong is actually has nothing to do with parkour itself, but with finding a good team. The first thing players think they need to learn parkour is a good team that can do the tricks they want to learn. Teams that are good enough for it are usually closed and don't accept new players or accept only experienced parkourists. If you manage to find a team of advanced parkourists that are willing to teach you, it will be a great way of learning parkour (if they know how to each of course), but chances are that you will not be able to find such a team.
The main mistake here is trying to go right to the advanced stuff when you just start, it's just like trying to join a group of professional parkourists in real life and try to start learning advanced parkour tricks before learning the basics like simple vaults, rolling and some safety rules.
So the right thing to do in this case is to meet some of the other players that want to start learning parkour (and there are hundreds of them out there) and start with them from the basics. This way you will have a team that is at your level of skill, which is the perfect team for practicing parkour tricks and learning new ones.
There are many people who create parkour clubs for this purpose, or join parkour clubs. But the problem with parkour clubs is that they just don't work they way they're supposed to work. Players end up having a bunch of inactive members and problems with timing parkour session, time zone problems and so on and so forth. The best way I know is just inviting friends to do parkour whenever you feel like it, just see who's online from your friend parkourists and invite them to do parkour with you. It works even better if you have a Skype group of friends that like doing parkour and are at about your level of skill, this way you can chat with them without inviting so you can see who's online and who wants to do parkour now, or plan a parkour session some time soon, even if the other players aren't in tanki right now or are in a battle that they don't want to leave.

 

They try to do things that they don't have the right equipment for them

Many of the players that start learning parkour are low ranked or just don't have a very good parkour equipment. Players might do the trick perfectly right but it will still not work because of their bad equipment, yet many players think they do something wrong or they lack the skills required for this trick. For example, many players asked me to teach them the Leap trick, they saw in my video that I was doing it with Wasp M0 and Thunder M4 (and with my upgraded Wasp M1 and Thunder M2, but only when less power was needed) and still they try to do this trick with Thunder M1 and think I can just teach them to do it right.
So for those who just started learning parkour and are low ranked, focus on learning the tricks that work with the equipment you have. You will not be able to make many cool looking tricks at the beginning, but don't get frustrated, as you will rank up and buy better parkour equipment you will be able to do more and more tricks.
I also recommend you watching M0 parkour tutorial videos by TFP if you want to see some basic tricks that can be done with equipment that everyone can get easily.

 

Coming up with new tricks

 

There is another way to learn parkour, one that allows becoming very good at parkour without learning from anyone else. This way is a "easy to say, hard to do" kinda thing. It is about learning the game mechanics, if you know how the game works, how parkour works, you can use this knowledge to come up with your own tricks relatively easily. All you need is to understand the physics of the game, what affects the tank's motion and how exactly it affects it. Then it's up to your imagination to come up with new ways to use these mechanics.

This is how I got to where I am now, I have very technical thinking and good imagination. This way helped me to come up with new tricks and this is how i got to where I am now. I am known mainly for my OMP skills, and everything I did in my OMP montage videos is tricks that I thought about them this way. Also many players tell me about how surprising it is that I keep adding tricks to the Parkour Dictionary every time they thing there's nothing left, it seems like there's nothing more to do, like everything possible was already invented and done... But nope. There are many more things that are possible but no one did them yet. I can tell you for sure, I didn't experiment even with half of the game mechanics that can be used for parkour, and I'm sure I didn't even notice everything, so you can come up with lots of new tricks for sure. Imagination is infinite.  ;)

 

 

What makes someone a good parkourist

 

Everyone will agree that players who can make a lot of parkour tricks are good parkourists, for example, if someone knows how to make all the tricks in the Parkour Dictionary, he's a good parkourist, right? I'd say he is good, but far from the best. The parkour tricks in the Parkour Dictionary are "base tricks", they are only the base of more complicated and much cooler tricks. You can take any base trick and combine it with one or more of these tricks to create a complicated parkour trick. For example, you can combine the Mine Jump trick with the Bump trick to get a further and higher jump, and you can add more shooters on the top of the ramp and under the jumper, add support snipers, add thunders for the Thunder Jump effect and basically just go crazy with it... There are countless ways to combine different base tricks to make very cool stuff. So players who can combine base tricks to create a lot of cool and advanced trick are way better than those who only know the base tricks. Being able to combine base tricks together requires creativity and technical thinking, but not as much as needed to come up with new base tricks.

Also there are players who know many parkour tricks but don't always know what trick can work in every case, so they have to try a whole bunch of tricks before finding a trick that is actually good for what they're trying to do. So, of course, knowing when to use each of the tricks you know, and being able to combing base tricks to advanced tricks based on what you need to accomplish (land on some spot, go over something, go far/high enough, stay for long enough in the air...) is very important too.

 

So in my opinion, a really good parkourist is one that is capable of mastering all the existing base tricks, combining them into advanced tricks and coming up with new base tricks, and knows how and where to use any of these. And he also should have a good control over his tank, general movement skills. (such as controlling his motion in the air by shooting to move to the right direction and landing on the wheels, or on something else if this is what he wants...)

 

oh and I'm not saying that I'm the best parkourist, so plz no comments about it. (I'm also not saying that I'm not the best haha, there's no reliable way to see who's really the best, and I don't care about it anyway, I'm not a competitive person)

 

 

Ways to improve your parkour skills

 

There are many different skills you can enhance to get better at parkour, in addition to learning tricks. Improving these skills will help you implementing in a better way the tricks you already know, learn new tricks more easily, speed up experiments with new parkour tricks, control your tank and others' motion better, have less fails, and so on. But there's no such thing as improving all skills together, you will have to work on each skill separately, or just a few skills together, but not too many.

 

Minigames

There are some minigames that help improving skills that are used in parkour, for example, to improve your ability to stay on the wheels and never flip you can play the "flip fight" minigame. It improves the player's ability to stay on his wheels when he's getting shot by other players, among with a few other skills.

To see a list of minigames that can improve your parkour skills, view the Parkour Minigames topic. Of course you can also come up with your own minigame to train yourself and improve the skills you feel like you need to work on them more.

 

Simple repetition

One of the best ways to practice something is to do something over and over again. This is what you do in minigames too, these minigames are fun games that involve parkour skills, but simple repetition might be boring. So it is better to use simple repetition only when you need to enhance a skill that you can't come up with a fun minigame for it. For example, if you want to practice your ability to land on very narrow platforms (such as signs, gates, fences, palm trees, antennas...) you will have to simply find a few different places where you can jump on something narrow (for example the cliff with the fence next to it in Highland, or the top of Esplanade to jump on the sign down there) and just jump over and over again until you have more successful jumps than fails. It is very important to practice it in a few different places so you will actually improve your precision jump skill instead of learning how to land a jump in only one specific place. You can also change the difficulty gradually, in the case of precision jump skill, you can switch to weapons that are less helpful in balancing (for example: rico -> smoky -> thunder -> rail -> twins -> isida), you don't have to start from the easiest weapon, you can even do it without shooting right away, it all depends on how skilled you are when you start training. You can then challenge yourself to perfect this skill, for example for precision jumps you can try landing on a sign perfectly sideways.

 

Doing parkour

When you do parkour you use quite a few parkour related skills together, but it's a relatively bad way to improve most of the skills simply because the repetition is not efficient enough. You can spend an hour or more doing parkour and face the need to shoot in the air to prevent flipping less than 5 times, while using a minigame or a simple repetition you'd use the same skill 30 times more. There are things that you can improve only through parkour, like improving your jumper skills for mine jumps. There is no better way to practice it than actually doing mine jumps. So doing parkour is a good training for the very basic parkour skills that you use a lot, and the other methods are for the less common parkour skills, ones that you don't use too much when doing parkour normally.

 

 

How to improve your parkour YouTube channel

 

I didn't do some of these things myself for my own reasons, but these are some of the main things that make a parkour video better.

 

Video length

It is better to spend more time on making a really good video rather than making a few worse videos in less time. For example, if you make series of videos where you show a specific parkour trick in each video, it is better to spend more time on every video and record yourself doing the same trick in different places, and show it from different angles, a 2-3 minute video can be good if you only show the trick without commentating and explaining it, but the length can vary from trick to trick. The important thing is that you show how you use the same trick in enough different places and from different views so the viewers will be able to see it clearly and learn it easily. And too short videos are not very fun to watch.

Viewers feedback can sometimes be confusing, because when you will make good videos but upload them more rarely, they will tell you that you should upload new videos more often. The good part is that it means your videos are really good because they want more, but if will be bad if you'll listen to them and it will result in lowering the quality of each of your videos.

Many people think that uploading more videos will help them get more subscribers, but it's not true. The first thing that makes people subscribe to your channel is the quality of your video. So take your time and do your best!

 

Series

Divide your videos into series, choose a topic for each series and don't mix or split the content between videos within a given series. For example, if you make conquering videos it will be the best to upload a different video for each map you conquer, and not more than one video per map. It is obvious here but in some other types of series it's not so clear for some reason. For example, players like making "fast parkour" series, which is basically a series of videos with random parkour tricks. The idea is perfectly fine, and it's fun to watch. But some players make it wrong, they don't randomize the tricks correctly. Instead of showing new random things every episode, they end up repeating the same tricks in every single video. Youtubers that do it usually don't get many views on their fast parkour videos. It is ok to repeat the same tricks in many videos, but you should keep some variety in your videos.

 

Commentating and background music

Commentating the video to explain the trick clearly is a great idea if the purpose of your video is to teach players. If you make the video just for entertainment or for show off or something like that, background music will be great. When commentating, it is still nice to have some background music at the silent moments when you don't talk for a while. I recommend making the background music less loud than your speech.

 

In-game view

In most cases using spectator is the best choice, but it depends the content of the video. If you want to teach something, it can be good to include a bit of footage from player view, trust me, it helps a lot to those who try to learn something. If using spectator isn't an option for you, you should learn how to get a good view for the video. For example, if you make tall jumps and you are not the jumper, the jumper will get out of your view fairly quickly unless you get far enough or get on a house near by. If you are the jumper, you should learn how how to turn your turret to prevent the camera from twisting at high speed and making it very hard to see anything. Sometimes simply moving your turret to the side (~90º) will do, but in some jumps you'll have to keep moving your turret constantly and even change direction in mid air a few times in rare cases. It all depends on how your tank is twisting.

 

Graphics and FPS

Many youtubers suffer from low FPS, and many of them play with all graphics turned on or with the "automatic graphics" on. The automatic graphics option helps you to get decent FPS when just playing, but when you record your screen you'll end up having lower FPS in the video, it will look worse than it does on your screen while playing. To solve this problem try experimenting with different combinations of graphics settings to find out what graphics you should choose to make your game look nice without lowering your FPS too much. If you get very low FPS when all effects are turned off, you are not likely to become a good youtuber, go get a better computer.

 

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That's pretty much it, I definitely forgot to write about a lot of things, but oh well... I don't want to write a whole book about parkour. If I didn't cover a very important topic I'll edit this post later. I hope this is helpful for you guys, I did my best to help the parkour community and I wish you good luck in the future!

 

 

 

 

 

            ~SwiftSmoky-                                                                    A past leader of the parkour community

[r_4oM0 23]

What kind of a "Computer" ? :P ( Anyways it helps me! )

 

*Upvote*

 

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[Gunslinger300 45]

aww too bad about u havin too leave

[delnina2 1,570]

Good luck ! 

 

and Bye you will be missing :(

Edited June 26, 2015 by delnina2

[Lord-of-the-Snipers 1,620]

Leaving, but still spending time to make a very solid guide! +++

Your OMP vids... B)

 

Good luck and wish you the best!

[dilsharox 2,395]

nice guide

[God_is_good_to_me 0]

im sorry you have to leave :(

[sahl_super 157]

Dude I one time saw you in battle but now Leaving the game and your parkour  , Anyways your guide and Videoa anr not good it's super good :P .....

 

Good luck , your playing six years bur also not :( 

[SwiftSmoky 8,445]

your playing six years bur also not :(

Cause I was always making new accs to stay in the middle ranks :P also I do more parkour than fighting so I don't rank up a lot heheh

[Areeb321 151]

Good Top[ic , but i see many using Reload Hack in Parkour Battle's !

[T.O.R.N.A.D.O.XXX 184]

See you tomorow

Edited August 11, 2015 by T.O.R.N.A.D.O.XXX

[buddersword 26]

I just skipped the whole article , Only to ask you, why are LEAVING tanki?

[SwiftSmoky 8,445]

I just skipped the whole article , Only to ask you, why are LEAVING tanki?

Read the description of my last video, and if u want a bit more info look at the comments as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIqhFF8EWl0

[yoshi-1 1,096]

Very nice topic, but about the FPS:

 

Swift, if I'm you, I would turn some graphics off. F.ex. "dynamic shadows". Your videos are very nice, the tricks are nice, the music is nice, its detailed and its fun to watch your vid's, but its very laggy..

[Fruit 6,570]

Closed due to inactivity of the topic.