FPS's - Why Am I So Rubbish

Short sad story: there once was a kid who used UT's bots at "godlike" difficulty to train for instagib matches. Life got a chore, and that kid is no more. 😅

Seriously though, back in the golden years of competitive UT-UT24K I used godlike bots as part of the daily training, it wasn't a question of winning or losing matches, just of by what margin it should have been a win. Tried the same for fun about a year ago, I didn't actually end last on every match, but still I was owned in ways I didn't even think were possible by an AI. Damn I felt slow. Damn I am slow.

Story of my life.
I used to be able to do the shock rifle combos from running, jumping or strafing and i made lots of opponents curse and quit on me.
I found my old UT instalation like 6 months ago i could barely do a combo from a static position and not very far away :cry:
 
I've currently been playing the Borderlands games like crazy for a couple of months (since the free upgrade for the Original), completed 1 twice with same character, then I completed BL TPS with a couple of different characters, now I'm back to BL2 and just had the Bloodwing scene again.....nooooooooooo :(sniff . Awesome games.

I think it's a natural process of getting older. It's probably why there are few F1 drivers past their mid 30s.

Then you get Valentino Rossi at 40 hooning around on 220+mph motorbikes (hence why he's known as the GOAT).
 
Story of my life.
I used to be able to do the shock rifle combos from running, jumping or strafing and i made lots of opponents curse and quit on me.
I found my old UT instalation like 6 months ago i could barely do a combo from a static position and not very far away :cry:

I feel you, so painful. Not that I was awesomely great at that back at the time either (during serious matches my role was usually the heavy support/machinegun guy, I had an unnatural ability to keep the lock on one's head once I had it in the crosshair :D), but I can say I was at least fairly competent in shock combo operations. Last time I tried it it was a shamble, not even worthy of handling a flak gun. :LOL:

Out of curiosity, I just started a new Doom (2016) campaign at Ultra-Violence after finishing it at Hurt Me Plenty about a year ago. I'm finding it quite the challenge, Nightmare would probably be out of my league at this point.
 
It does sometimes feel as if video games have forgotten that they're supposed to be fun. Not just for a few people, but for everyone. With a lot of multiplayer titles you end up with 1 or 2 people playing extremely well (for whatever reason - naturally talented, lucky, ages sunk into the game, better purchases... hacking..) and everyone else basically just being their "content". This is especially true when you get the "level up" thing - when the better players get the best characters and so become more-or-less totally immune from low-level players. So they level up further and.... well, you know how it goes. It's especially stupid them there is one item that - once you have it - everyone else who doesn't is basically just cannon fodder. Where's the entertainment in that?

It's easy to say "Git gud", but the fact is that - for reasons already discussed - not everyone will. And therein lies the rub. The function of a video game is to entertain - and the game fails at that if people aren't enjoying it. Period. Blaming the people who aren't enjoying it for the game's failure to deliver an enjoyable experience is failing to grasp the problem at hand. The game needs to be engineered to be enjoyable, not to find out who's best at playing it. But gameplay in modern games seems to be something given fleeting consideration after graphics and sound are done....

For me. An idea multiplayer match should be fairly well balanced and should just go one way or the other with both teams feeling it was a tight-fought battle and one team just squeaked it. But. That's rare. My proposal would be to try to skill match people based on win/lose or kill/death metric. You can even try to make it part of the game with people being "promoted" to another league as their K/D ratio exceeds 1/1 and demoting them when it drops. Do NOT lock content behind this, though. Not everyone will be able to play in the premiership but having paid for the game they ought to be able to play it all. One of the things I like about E/D is that you can do practically anything in a sidewinder or a Cobra. You can do more of it in a Corvette or Konda, true. But there isn't much you can't actually do in the smaller ships if you want to. I respect that.
 
Speaking for myself as a 45 year old who's been gaming since mid 20s. I used to also be very good at the classics, Quake, CS, CSS, various battlefields etc..

My twitchiness isnt there so much anymore but I've gotten a lot more clever. I'll use the tools I have much more now, look for flanks rather than head on fights, support the team much more. All that good stuff.

For instance I play Battlefield V which is a merciless game if you play it head on. However I'm rarely out of the top 5 by score on my team and I've won over 70% of the games ive played. I'm delighted if I maintain a positive KD but it doesn't matter, the everything else I do for the team is what matters.

Play the objective and play it smart
 
Speaking for myself as a 45 year old who's been gaming since mid 20s. I used to also be very good at the classics, Quake, CS, CSS, various battlefields etc..

My twitchiness isnt there so much anymore but I've gotten a lot more clever. I'll use the tools I have much more now, look for flanks rather than head on fights, support the team much more. All that good stuff.

For instance I play Battlefield V which is a merciless game if you play it head on. However I'm rarely out of the top 5 by score on my team and I've won over 70% of the games ive played. I'm delighted if I maintain a positive KD but it doesn't matter, the everything else I do for the team is what matters.

Play the objective and play it smart
As my dad always said: youth and vigor are no match for old age and treachery.
 
I used to be King of the Hill back in the early day's of Rainbow Six (late 90's). But now in my mid 50's I'm completely rubbish.
Put few hundred hours into PUBG and every time it's the same: Jump out of plane > Find gun > Die.

Anyone else think age is directly proportional to being rubbish at FPS's :)
Those of us a decade older, agree. :(

The arthritis doesn't help, either.
 
Anyway, is me firm belief that you just go rusty quicker with age, but the mind is a marvelous piece. Training (i.e. playing) a thing can make what zips past you in the beginning appear like ample amount of time to react when you have muscle-memoried properly thus freeing process time for decision making in shooters.
And, like me, when there wasn't much mind to start off with-and it's going... :(
 
Talking of age and being well past the sell-by date.... to think I used to jump out of moving aeroplanes and get shot at for a living. Nowadays I struggle going down the steps of a commercial aircraft...it's the landing thing that scares the crap out of me, much preferred jumping out...landing is way too dangerous :rolleyes:
"Never jump out of a perfectly good airplane"- Dad, 101st ABN.

I had this little yellow and black lever to pull, in my time. Forty+ years ago.

We're all going back to D&D In The Nursing Home. Pray you're not stuck with the KDM... :)
 
A big part of getting older is acceptance I think. I remember how much more capable I was physically in younger years and how incredible youth was, something I was taking for granted at the time. My parents and older friends were trying to tell me what I experience right now but I always laughed it off....only now when I experience it for myself can I really comprehend what they tried to do. And I m staying before the same problem when trying to transport my understanding to younger people.

Theres advantages in getting older too. For one I m more empathic and able to see things through other peoples eyes. My relationship really has blossomed in the last 15 years once I got calmer and lost my "drive" for competition and my natural agression decreased.

In hindsight its very unnerving when I remember how often I was risking my life or health in unnesseray demonstrations of courage or because I was triggered so my life has gotten more stability.

Its a balancing act between giving up and refusal to accept limits. For example I have had a healthy phase about 12 years ago when I started to eat better, train and generally become more powerful with my decisions. I have since lost a lot of my buff and muscle mass but refuse to accept that I m "old" and instead try to reach whats possible. And doing so only outlines how "good" the young have it without realizing it :)

At 37 you can and will compensate any lost reaction time with strategic thinking and preperation. You ll also be more patient then somebody 17 years younger then you. You ll eventually lose that too. My final shift to less twitchy games happened around 42 or 44 I think when playing competitive games simply was stressful and not enjoyable anymore. I have my memories, that has to be enough :)
Wait until your bosses are half your age, you have forgotten more than they will ever learn, and they know it.
 
I think it's a natural process of getting older. It's probably why there are few F1 drivers past their mid 30s. You get old gradually and don't realise your reactions are going, until something throws that into sharp relief. I occasionally think "Heck, I used to be able to do this a few years ago - what's wrong with me today?" "a few years ago" being 1996....oh.....

The other part of it is the amount of time you get to play as you get older. I used to spend ages - literally hours at a time - several days a week playing games. Now I'm lucky if I get to spend 2 hours a week on a weekend. How is a person who plays 2-3 hours a week supposed to keep up with someone who plays 5-10 hours a day? These days I work more hours, have responsibilities around the house, other social commitments, other hobbies. etc. I can't spend hours memorising the exactly location of pick-ups and practising with weapons - let alone sink hours in to "earn" power-ups and upgrades.

Then there is the sheer number of cheats out there. Not just unsporting behaviour but outright hacking and so on.

Anyhoo. I tried PUBG. To be honest I found it to be pretty rubbish for the reasons stated. You log in, there 2-3 minutes of sodding around loading the level, jumping and parachuting, searching for guns and then - pop - you're dead and you need to restart. As there is no respawn. So it's 10 seconds of gameplay every 5 minutes. It's - frankly - boring. And it doesn't help that the game makes no attempt to level-match players or even work out if they're in the same EU state (so massive language barriers). It doesn't even look nice and if I hadn't got it through CD-Keys, I'd have refunded it. Maybe I missed something, but I couldn't see what was so magical about it. I thought it was cr*p. The most fun thing was the training mode, oddly enough. Because the gameplay was continual and flowing in a way that PUBG just isn't.

If you want a FPS where the action is nearly continuous and dying just puts you back to a spawn point, try Star Wars Battlefront or Battlefront 2. You'll still have a lousy K/D ratio but you'll have more fun with that than PUBG. Especially in the blast and strike modes, where they've just cut the number of players needed to start a match in half (and botted the other players until they join). Honestly, this game is pretty good fun in a casual kind of throwaway fashion. It's very, very accessible and when you get killed you respawn in seconds and plough back into the fight.

I think I'm right in saying you can refund any game in steam in 2 hours. So my plan is to pick a one to download. Try it and set a time for 90 minutes. If at 90 minutes I'm bored or uninterested, I quit out and refund it. Then buy something else, until I get something I like for longer than 90 minutes.
A few years ago was 1986... :(

This happens in all physically competitive things.
 
It does sometimes feel as if video games have forgotten that they're supposed to be fun. Not just for a few people, but for everyone. With a lot of multiplayer titles you end up with 1 or 2 people playing extremely well (for whatever reason - naturally talented, lucky, ages sunk into the game, better purchases... hacking..) and everyone else basically just being their "content". This is especially true when you get the "level up" thing - when the better players get the best characters and so become more-or-less totally immune from low-level players. So they level up further and.... well, you know how it goes. It's especially stupid them there is one item that - once you have it - everyone else who doesn't is basically just cannon fodder. Where's the entertainment in that?

It's easy to say "Git gud", but the fact is that - for reasons already discussed - not everyone will. And therein lies the rub. The function of a video game is to entertain - and the game fails at that if people aren't enjoying it. Period. Blaming the people who aren't enjoying it for the game's failure to deliver an enjoyable experience is failing to grasp the problem at hand. The game needs to be engineered to be enjoyable, not to find out who's best at playing it. But gameplay in modern games seems to be something given fleeting consideration after graphics and sound are done....

For me. An idea multiplayer match should be fairly well balanced and should just go one way or the other with both teams feeling it was a tight-fought battle and one team just squeaked it. But. That's rare. My proposal would be to try to skill match people based on win/lose or kill/death metric. You can even try to make it part of the game with people being "promoted" to another league as their K/D ratio exceeds 1/1 and demoting them when it drops. Do NOT lock content behind this, though. Not everyone will be able to play in the premiership but having paid for the game they ought to be able to play it all. One of the things I like about E/D is that you can do practically anything in a sidewinder or a Cobra. You can do more of it in a Corvette or Konda, true. But there isn't much you can't actually do in the smaller ships if you want to. I respect that.
Tell this to Frontier.

Or, worse, this board. :(
 
I used to be King of the Hill back in the early day's of Rainbow Six (late 90's). But now in my mid 50's I'm completely rubbish.
Put few hundred hours into PUBG and every time it's the same: Jump out of plane > Find gun > Die.

Anyone else think age is directly proportional to being rubbish at FPS's :)
As soon as you loose interest in these type of games, your skills wander elsewhere.
 
Yes, I noticed this years ago and the effect only got worse. The less time you have on this world the faster it goes by.
I've seen it explained in a way that as you get older, one year becomes a smaller fraction of your life (for a 10y/o, year is a 1/10th of their life long, for a 50y/o it's 1/50th) so that kind of makes sense.
But when Y2K came, I said "damn it's already ten years since 80s, and I still kind of have this feeling when I see year 20xx, although it's now twenty. :LOL:
 
Tell this to Frontier.

Or, worse, this board. :(

Well, maybe.

E:D did go through an odd "Counterstrike, but it's spaceships" phase a couple of years ago. Dev priorities suddenly seemed to focus on combat very heavily and introduced things like engineered weapons, special effects (still think that's awful) and CQC/Arena mode. The weird thing is that the near total uninterest in CQC (launched shortly before all this) apparently didn't tip anyone off that the player base didn't want too combat-focussed gameplay.

Recent developments in mining and exploration seem to suggest this phase is over, so apparently someone twigged or been moved on or something. But the game still has some one-shot-death weirdness in it as a result of this dubious flirtation with FPS mechanisms in a game that is actually a simulator...
 
I can remember most of the 80's...the 90's?...Not so much. Perhaps because the music was crap ;)

Oh, I thought it was just me. Very little good music came out of the 90s in the charts. It was all either repetitive Eurobeat or depressing, bland rock. There was some good stuff just outside the charts, but if the P2P era did anything for humanity it democratised music by allowing people to hear what they liked, not just whatever the record companies decided to sell this month. Music became demand-driven, not supply-driven. A lot of the charts is still very superficial, but it's better than it was.
 
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