Players wanting to improve at Quake Champions now have a new tool at their disposal: official heatmaps of every arena.

They're available here, and you can set them to show either kills or deaths as well as filter for individual weapons. It's fun to play around with, even for someone like me who never really got into the shooter.

It could prove useful for anybody trying to learn the game, too. Map knowledge is central to being a good Quake Champions player, and these heatmaps will tell you what spots draw the most action. You should look for discrepancies between kills and deaths: if a specific area has a high kill volume but not many deaths, it's probably a good place to position yourself if you get into a gun fight.

Filtering by individual weapons should also help—again, look for the kill-death discrepancies. For example, by looking at the Church of Azathoth map, and filtering by Rocket Launcher, you can see that lots of kills happen at the top of the stairs at one end of the map, but few deaths, which shows the advantage of taking the high ground.

By filtering by railgun on the same map, you can see there's one corner passage with a high volume of kills but not many deaths. If you grab the railgun, you should probably head there.

It has me wishing that other shooters had similar tools. It'd be great for learning maps in Rainbow Six Siege, for example. Perhaps if Quake Champions players really take to it then other developers might follow suit.

Thanks, RPS.