tips on memorizing callouts?

[neonscreenlight]

there's just. so many of them. and i hardly even remember the layouts for the stages on their own

 

[sevenleaf]

so i very briefly knew callouts for most of the junior’s draft chill ‘23 maplist (because i was convinced that everyone else would already know them and so i needed to catch up reallyreallyreally fast before teams were assigned) and to copy-paste what i said months ago in the UP server about how i was approaching it:

my process has basically been like
1) go into recon and pull up the callout map
2) walk around the map & locate the areas marked on the callout map, saying the callouts out loud
3) just kinda keep doing that for a while, take different paths, find locations on the enemy side of the map, look at the callouts when you need to but try and name them without looking when you can
4) before you leave recon, close/minimize/otherwise hide the callout map and try to name locations yourself on the overhead map
5) come back to a blank map later (like, hours or even a day later, do smth else basically) and see how much you’ve retained

not mentioned: i only did like, one or two maps a day. having a set maplist to learn helped a bit, too - the biggest thing that's always stopped me from just trying to learn callouts myself has been that there's so many maps and i didn't know where to start

i found it very helpful to actually walk around the map in recon rather than just study off of the overhead maps because, like... you do look at the overhead map, but you also want to be able to recognize where plat/snipe/[insert hyper-specific map callout like 'breakfast'] is from the perspective you get as you're playing on the map. i found myself talking through how different areas connected to each other, too - like on scorch i'd be going "okay so if i drop from spawn i'm on summit, then if i walk through street that takes me to court..."

...i've since forgotten basically all of the callouts i learned. lol. i ended up being the only one on my team who'd learned callouts, so we didn't use them during practice/the actual tourney, and i haven't gotten a chance to play with a team again until pretty recently. so i think it's something you've got to reinforce every now and then. i feel like practicing with others and being intentional about using callouts during matches would be more effective than just learning them on your own. my (current) team has yet to practice callouts together, but i imagine the strategies i was using alone might still generally work in a group? i'm definitely not an expert on this, so i'm curious what's worked for other people (alone or in a team)

 

[reelrollsweat]

im not comp but ive picked up callout locations by playing w/ friends in open, you could deliberately recon maps and go over them but it also just kinda comes with experience. if someone calls "liter on their bunker" and you can see the liter then take a mental note that that's where bunker is. also a lot of the locations on those community callout maps (i assume youre using those as reference) are pretty specific/unnecessary and you wont use them often in practice. imo its most important to know general stuff like mid, plat, bunker, snipe, bats, alley and you can also just call left/right/behind if you need to. you dont really need to memorize map by map either, ex. most maps' plats are similar kinda geographic locations so you can basically guess where plat is once you have a good enough idea

 

[DChachouke]

The way I do it is I first try to learn them through recon with the callout image next to me. Going through each callout area, saying their name and such. Then I stop looking at the image then do it again from memory. from there, I try to repeat that without the image regularly, and I skip whatever I forget and continue with what I remember. Once the exercise is done, I go back to look what I'd forgotten and do it another time.
I also try to practice them when I'm playing regular games, with the images of the maps in rotation next to me to check what I miss.
Doing sendouq and scrims is also good to practice since you can actually make use of callouts.
Last thing, but there's also patterns for areas such as plat, mid (duh), pits, court, etc. So it's good if you can notice those

 

[Babab]

there's just. so many of them. and i hardly even remember the layouts for the stages on their own

Watch vods from top players- I recommend Omega, madness, Leafi. That’s if you’re feeling lazy about it. You can pick up quite a decent amount from just watching their scrims.
If youre a bit more invested, or want to learn quicker, just hop into solo and literally speak to the screen as if your teammates can hear you. This helps with practicing actually saying the callouts.
You could also do a spin the wheel kinda thing. Essentially, you look at the callouts list, write each of the names onto a free online randomiser type thing, (at this point make sure to have sendou.ink open with whatever map you are memorising) and whatever call comes up, draw a dot on the map on sendou. Idk if that makes sense, but the first two are my go-tos anyway-I only did the last method when I wanted to play a certain couple rotations with a few friends

 

[Alphine_Agnitio]

there's just. so many of them. and i hardly even remember the layouts for the stages on their own

practice saying them outloud even in soloq, play pickups with other players regurally, you pick pretty much all the universal ones up eventually and the rest come with basic studying techniques

 

[joe???]

I swear I am not trying to be dismissive but don't worry about them too much. Just know left and right, ours and theirs, and then most maps generally have a "plat" and a "drop" lmao. People move wayyy too fast in this game to callout itsy bitsy spots and unless legit everyone on your team knows every spot then its going to cause a lot of confusion.

 

[mizuta_ahato]

sorry to intrude, but i'm quite interested in comp... what exactly IS a call-out?

 

[Aiko.Octo]

Everyone's advice here is pretty solid (especially 'walk around the map in recon and look at the callouts map at the same time' it's seriously the only way my brain could begin to make the connections) so I'll mention one off-beat method if you have access to the resources; It's a combination of the free software Anki and its plugin Image Occlusion Enhanced. Essentially it allows you to set up virtual 'flashcards' in which you're shown the callout map with the location name blanked out and you have to guess what it is. It's 'smart' in the sense that it will show you cards that you know well less often and those that you struggle with more often. It does take some time to set up though and you have to use the PC version of the software to do that, but once you do that you can sync it to the web interface and use it from your phone/etc.

It's by no means a full learning solution and one can argue the time to set it up isn't worth it especially if you've never used Anki before/struggle with learning new software, but if you know your own learning style well enough to know flashcards work well for you, it might be worth the extra effort. For me it's nice to have the extra out-of-game option of taking a few quick minutes to practice while you're bored standing in line or can't fall asleep or slacking off at work (which I am Totally Not Doing right now).

Another thing that I don't think was mentioned-- you can sort of ease the burden of "so many maps" overwhelm by prioritizing learning callouts for maps that are actually used frequently in competitive play. For example you see Inkblot, Museum, and MakoMart in pretty much every tournament maplist, but not a whole lot of Hammerhead or Mincemeat. A lot of maps have similar landmarks that share a callout name anyway, so once you get a few maps down the rest feel less overwhelming.

And like others have said but I want to reiterate anyway; don't worry about it too much beyond matching the usage of the people that you play with (unless maybe you're in charge of/have taken it upon yourself to get your team to use specific callouts more and are leading by example). You'll learn and reinforce naturally much better in play anyway, and you're very likely to just forget anything that you take the time to learn if you're not regularly using it in play. Of course everyone's learning rate/style is different, so maybe that's not the case for everyone, but.... that's my general impression anyway.

 

[Grushi]

sorry to intrude, but i'm quite interested in comp... what exactly IS a call-out?

in comp callouts are essentially just what you say on voice chat during the game. To give generic examples: "I'm taking tower!", "close to cooler" or even simple stuff like "back up!" is a callout.
Neon's referring to map callouts here, which are map-specific locations you use to call out positions. For example, on Manta maria, the two blocks that are linked by the grates in mid are called bunker, and not "the snipe area next to the grate bridge on the mast" or something