[Jotaku]

In my case I play multiple different anime games competitively, I lack in time to practice. So using smaller amount of time to make my performance better is the most important to me.

Following is usually what I do when I want to increase my gaming skills
1. Do read guides by others
2. Practice as directed in guide, see any small increase in performance
3. Write my own guide to identify what I actually did which made that small increase.
4. Repeat the process, review the videos.
5. Once become pretty good by following others' guides, try something new and organize about it by writing about it in my own guide.

Step 1 is important to me because it prevents me to spend time uselessly for practicing some unnecessary things.

Step 3 is also important to me. Because unless I try to logically identify and define what I did for that small increase, it usually takes much more time in practicing for my body to realize such a performance boost. That said, if I don't try to define those things using brain part, then usually more practice and effort will be required for getting the same amount of performance improvement.

Well, this is my pattern. 
How do you improve your gaming skills?

[EggrollDB]

My number 1 rule is ask questions and take advice from anyone. 

Being competitive requires growth and a lot of time poured into the game you're focusing on. There's certain interactions that "worse" players or players with "less experience" can see that you may not be able to notice, so I definitely think asking questions and focusing on improvement over winning is a great place to start.

[Jotaku]

My number 1 rule is ask questions and take advice from anyone. 

Being competitive requires growth and a lot of time poured into the game you're focusing on. There's certain interactions that "worse" players or players with "less experience" can see that you may not be able to notice, so I definitely think asking questions and focusing on improvement over winning is a great place to start.

Ah yes, that's also the one way for improvement. Guide is something simlar to taking advice i guess.

In these days most people do that through reddit, discord, youtube though, not forum haha (although the difference is that they do that frequently over and over again because of their platform structure auch as chat or uncategorized board, while we just put all the stuffs in related forum, like guide forum, so no need to repetitive)

Anyways i am sure taking advice, watching guide, etc can reduce spending huge amount of time into just playing game because without knowing knowledge, one might go into false direction that can turn into huge waste of time (especially for games that have tech, skill tree, builds stuffs)