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My Counterstrike rank was always inversely correlated with my general happiness.

I remember being a young teenager (25 years ago now, yikes) playing counter strike and StarCraft all the time and being pretty good at both. I started playing with others who were in really good leagues (back then it was called cal-i for cs, not sure what exists now), and I realized the level of dedication and time necessary to compete at that level and I basically gave it up. Once you start thinking, “becoming better at this is going to take 6-10 hours of my life everyday” I checked out. In hindsight, I wish I had known it sooner.

“The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." - Paul Morphy

I had the exact same experience, when I went to a chess club for the first time. I realised that to keep pace with those guys I’d have to spend more time than I was willing to on getting better.

Especially with MMR based systems. No matter how good you get your win/loss ratio will end up around 50%.

So you have to ask yourself why you need to keep getting better. To me It’s really about finding a level of “good” that you can maintain comfortably, while maintaining interest.

And also realise that games aren’t vocations. It’s fine to play a game until you stop having fun, then stop playing the game.

I play chess at a nearby place and they just split people into self selected newbie/intermediate/advanced groups. There is just no limit to how much time you can spend training in chess is the thing, applied to most games really. I used to be more into it during the pandemic but now I just play casually without practicing everyday, which is fun enough for me.

I played against hardcore gamers and didn't bother. They may have cold head, but I have fun. I once though about playing games with cold head, but the idea is so ridiculous it didn't fly at all.

Those sorts of guys have ruined all the games I grew up with. I can’t just casually play anymore. It doesn’t exist. Every lobby left is a sweatfest from people who have been playing the game nonstop since it came out 10-20 years ago sometimes. You have to swing vine from vine to whatever crap game is currently popular to get a chance at pwning noobs again.

Chess is super old but reason it's fun is because of the rating system that matches equal-ish players against each other. I'm guessing these games don't have that, I thought Starcraft had something like that but it's been a while since I played it.

Not much to be done about that with community ran servers for a lot of games. Its a thing when the game developer runs a ton of servers but usually that only lasts a few years after release before these are shut down by the game developer.

There's an easy fix for this one!

AI literally made game hacks undetectable. It's never been easier to cheat on videogames in a way that poses literally zero risk of getting banned.

Here's an example of a tool that has made my "The Finals" experience about 10000% better: https://github.com/Babyhamsta/Aimmy

I'm having fun with my buddies, leasiurly talking on discord while yet another diamond sweat-lord who tries to gank me gets destroyed.

Also related, but botting on games like runescape has made my desire to play MMORPG's go way up too. Now I too can play the fun end game content without wasting my damn life on it.

Botting honestly put people out of work. I met someone from brazil who as a kid used to sell runescape gp to americans. He made some money in a world where there wasn’t much else opportunity to do so at that age.

The third worlders doing this themselves often bot or run bot farms.

you shouldn't be proud of this. people like you ruin games.

The most fun I had playing video games in the past 10 years was when the PokémonGo api wasn’t locked down.

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