Just another one of those questions that have been on my mind. I want to know what its like to be in a competitive game competition and if its worth it. Theres no way ill even be in 1 because they look hard and im a casual gamer.

  • Rhynoplaz
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    12 days ago

    A friend and I entered a local Magic the Gathering tournament. I had just taught him how to play, and he had picked up a few cards of his own and talked me into giving it a shot.

    I sat down across from my opponent and watched him peel the plastic off of a deck that he just bought, and pummeled me with a pre built elf synergy deck.

    My friend got stuck in a neverending healing token deck. He couldn’t do enough damage to break all the healers, and the healer didn’t have anything strong enough to get past his defenses, they just sat there dealing and healing infinite damage for what felt like forever.

    I was pretty much over the game by the end of the day.

  • JohnWorks
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    1912 days ago

    Went to a local smash tournament with my friends a while ago now and it became apparent to me that I was really good among my friends, but the worst at a tournament lmao.

    • @[email protected]
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      1112 days ago

      That’s definitely how it goes. So many of the people that show up start that way - “I can beat all my friends, I bet I’ll do pretty good in tournaments.” then “Oh no”.

      But everybody’s gotta start somewhere.

  • aramis87
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    1112 days ago

    You don’t have to do massive or big tournaments - go small instead! More fun and way less pressure. I’ve done a few ttrpg tournaments at GenCon and another few at my LFGS. My sister sometimes did small local puzzle tournaments like for KenKen and Sudoku.

  • @[email protected]
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    812 days ago

    For a while I was part of the number one raiding guild on the server with the worst progression in WoW.

    Wyrmrest Accord, you were great.

    So I got that going for me, I was among the best of the worst for a couple months!

  • @[email protected]
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    12 days ago

    I participated in a local Unreal Tournament competition and won $3k. Was $75 buy in and I think I got somewhat lucky in my match placement. Was allowed to do this solo at 14 🤣.

    Lots of terrible players in my bracket while I watched the best pick each other off on the other half. Took second honestly by sitting back and picking off kills from others engagements 🤷‍♂️.

    I did CAL P on in the CS1.6 era with middling success.

    I barely can get high in the mid tier leagues today. Too much specialization, meta, guns, characters, and the playing field is literally thousands of times bigger.

    • @[email protected]
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      10 days ago

      You’ve probably also aged out of it. I never thought it’d happen, but I can feel my hand/eye coordination getting worse over the decades.

      It’s well document in Korean pro leagues that APM decreases with age as well.

      • @[email protected]
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        110 days ago

        It’s mostly meta and effort. Your reflexes don’t decline THAT until your 60s. Sure you might not be able to be a top 1% but beyond that it’s mostly just practice and giving fucks lol.

        I’m not reading patch notes, I’m playing builds I want and ignoring meta, and I’d rather pop 2 off in the noggin than seek out and practice with better players.

        OTOH I’m turning the fastest laps of my life with my auto racing and am chasing a win!

  • @[email protected]
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    810 days ago

    I been competing in fighting game tournaments for over a decade. Its a blast, even if you suck. The fighting game community is one of the most welcoming competitive environments I’ve ever been apart of. 10/10, highly recommend.

    • @[email protected]
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      310 days ago

      This. The great thing about fighting games is that today is one of the best times to join: there’s lots of online activity, long past the days in which you needed a local tournament to actually play. You will find a passionate player about literally any fighting game on earth, no matter if it’s an indie title (I suggest Punch Planet!) or an old KOF classic. Hell, good rollback implementation even makes playing on (decent) wi-fi actually acceptable.

  • missingno
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    1612 days ago

    I travel to Combo Breaker every year and enter a whole bunch of games. This year I was able to up my travel budget for both CB and Frosty Faustings. Some of them are games I consider myself decent at, some of them are games I just hop in casually for fun. And then there’s the Mystery Bracket, where every round is something you’ve probably never heard of and the goal is to figure out what’s happening before your opponent does - it’s the highlight every year. Back in 2022, I even TO’d and commentated the side tournament for Puyo Puyo Champions, and I got roped into filling in on commentary for Panel de Pon.

    In a double elimination bracket, 25% of players will go 0-2. If this is your first time entering, you should expect to be one of them. And you shouldn’t let that stop you from going to have a good time! Majors are basically conventions that happen to have brackets at them, and that bracket will only be a small fraction of your time all weekend. Get as many casual sets in as you can before/after bracket, check out the arcade room, buy some trinkets with your favorite characters on them from the artist alley, watch finals, go out to dinner with rivals you’d only ever spoken to online before and finally get to meet in person. Oh, and come to the mahjong tables where you’ll find me promoting this strangely unexpected venn diagram intersection.

    And that’s just what majors are like. If you have any kind of local FGC, go to your locals! Don’t just sit at home playing ranked, get out of the house and meet people!

    • @[email protected]
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      212 days ago

      100% agree! I used to go to Smash locals on the regular, and it’s so much more welcoming than I thought it would be at first.

      There’s no expectation for any skill level, just show up ready to learn and people will mostly encourage you and help.

  • @[email protected]
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    12 days ago

    I’ve traveled the world playing tournaments for a little bit. Won a few. Crashed out in some others…

    The big conventions feel insanely cool. It’s like you’re in the game but irl. You are walking down the elevator of your hotel and it feels like just being in the game when you are surrounded by people that you with. It’s super cool having people come up and hug you and you go “oh who’s this?” And it often turns out it’s people that you have shared hundreds of hours with.

    The actual competition I’ve always felt it’s all about who can play the least bad. As far as I could tell. Everyone plays worse on stage. For a multitude of reasons. At the end I was playing extremely chill and care free and it showed in the results.

    Also something less obvious. Tournaments always developed their own meta. Which I always heard comments from people from home “why didn’t you follow this meta thing. Why did you play such weird strategies?”. It’s because truly if there’s a big competition going on. Everyone good is there. And it’s not even worth getting practice on the normal servers. You have to scrim over and over the people there and that develops its own meta.

    Is it worth it? Uhhh. I’ll always cherish those memories. They were truly great years. But I would say for me nah. Not worth it. I’ve always wanted my career and life to be about some other things. And as much fun and surprisingly how well it all paid. I don’t think it was worth the many years I spent doing that and nothing else.

    Amazing memories though.

  • @[email protected]
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    812 days ago

    I used to play WoW 5v5 arena competitively in 2007. This was way before they went hard on e-sports so it’s not really comparable to today. Just to give you some perspective, the winning team at blizzcon got $25k which meant $5k each which (again, only in case of winning the world championship) would’ve just so covered my travel costs.

    Honestly it was terrible. At first I used to play for fun and only accidentally ended up in a top team. Then my team got way too ambitious and it became more of a chore. I told them early on that I had no interest in playing like that but they couldn’t find a replacement so I kept playing with them until I was fully burned out. It was nice being good at something but it ruined the fun of it.

  • @[email protected]
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    612 days ago

    I joined a rocket league tournament at a comic-con! But the servers went down just as we were about to play, lol, so I never got to try

  • @[email protected]
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    310 days ago

    I’ve competed on stage in a rural village in F-29 Retaliatory head2head tournament (over serial cable) around 1993. I’ve gotten to grab first place in a Bo3 single elimination format, defeating my nemesis, Lil’ Cloud, in the finals. I took home a mobo for a 286 (but no cpu, PC case, peripherals or anything else). For a bonus prize, they’ve pitted me against the final final boss, the IT admin from the neighbouring town. I’ve beaten him 4:1 in a Bo7, and my reward was an AdLib card. I did end up using this one in a 386 SX build that my dad bought me a couple months later.
    Despite being on stage, I do not remember having any stage fright at all. I remember the crowd around us, but everything got drowned out by the sound blasters screeching the noise into my ears through some cheapo cans. I just remember being baffled that after having my toughest final against Lil’ Cloud, I suddenly have another challenger I have to sit down against.

    Around '97 I got sucked in by Quake II in PC cafes, mostly playing FFAs on LAN. However the Q2 scene gradually moved on to QuakeWorld, Quake 3 Arena and Counter Strike. Since my PC was always lagging behind in performance, I chose to stick with QuakeWorld, and mostly played in 320x200 software rendering so I could aim for 120Hz + 120 fps vsync as time passed.

    Around this time, between 98-2003 there were a couple LANs in and around Budapest that were CPL feeder events, however QuakeWorld has long been dropped from the biggest international events, and was relegated to mostly online tournaments and smaller local LANs only. Despite this, they always allowed QuakeWorld players in and even offered prices for first three places within categories. However the participants gradually declined from 50:50 Q3/QW to 50:40:10 CS/Q3/QW to 75:20:5 CS/Q3/QW by the end.

    In the last LAN where they still allowed QW players in, must have been around 2003, I think we had no more than 50 players out of 600+.
    I’ve competed, but not on stage, in the 1v1 category, choking due to nervousness around the quarterfinals, dropping to Loser’s Bracker. I did lose my LB match as well, the nerves never recovered. I remember one of my buddies talking over my shoulder, asking me wtf was wrong with me that I’m making all these mistakes. I came out as a sweaty mess from both matches, feeling totally defeated and unable to process why things were going the way they did. It haunts me to this day and gave me flashbacks to it in online competitive play, like WoW’s Arena 2v2/3v3.

    I also competed in 2v2 at the tournament with my best bud as my partner later that day. The nerves were still pretty bad, but I was relying on my partner’s skill to carry us, along with some clever map selections. It was a Bo5, and we knew that with my nerves shot we had to focus on just one map that had mixed shaft (lightning gun)/rocket launcher (RL) play in order to take the series, as otherwise we could dominate maps that relied on RL only, as predictive spawn lockdowns was our forte, in contrast with raw skill/aim. Basically the moment we won first draw for map selection, we knew we could make it a 3:1 or 3:2 at worst if we selected our least favoured map and won it. I’ve still made a lot of mistakes in heated moments, and we did have to draw out one map by deliberately avoiding respawns near the end of the match in order to deny our opponents a win, but in the end my partner carried us to victory.
    While the 2v2 finals were not exactly on stage, they did put a cam on a big screen and we also had a bit of a crowd forming around us. Smoking a light joint an hour before the match did help though. I forgot what we won. I just remember receiving a trophy at the finals ceremony and feeling completely undeserving of it. And then moving out of my parent’s basement and in with my buddy, getting high 24/7 for the next 6 months.

    As for the question is it even worth it: yes, yes it is. Not when you are older though. At 20+ you are already aged out, and the commitment required is tremendous just to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Better stick to turn based strategy.

  • Nico198X
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    311 days ago

    yes! the old Nintendo World Championships! various pokemon and smash bros tournaments, and will be going to my first EVO this year!

    it’s fun as long as you’re passionate about it and don’t fret too much about winning or losing. just have fun with other ppl who also enjoy this hobby and try to learn and keep growing!

  • Jerkface (any/all)
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    312 days ago

    In the 80s I went to a public event featuring the California Joy Stick; “Joy” referring to the brand of dish soap. There’s probably a more common name for it. It’s a device made of a large fabric loop on a stick with a nut for holding the loop open. You dip it in a solution of water, dish soap, and glycerine, and then open the loop to the breeze or walk with it. You can create bubbles tens of metres long, and wide and tall enough for a person to stand inside. I’m surprised it isn’t still a thing people do, you could easily make one.

    There was a bubble making competition. Most of the competitors seemed to be quite casual, but most of them found it fairly easy to be competitive.

  • @[email protected]
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    12 days ago

    Never did like pro level (and never had aspirations to do so), but way back in the day, the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) had an amateur league fittingly called the Cyberathelete Amateur League (CAL), we had a small team for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars that we competed in, didn’t do stellar but it was a blast, met people from other teams we’d often practice with or just do pub games.

    It was total beer league type stuff, if you can find a group like that imo it’s worth it, would love to have that type of experience again, end the day stakes were low and we played for fun, people took it serious but not too serious if that makes sense, it’s really easy to kill the enjoyment if someone takes it too far though.

    • @[email protected]
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      512 days ago

      CAL got somewhat serious at the very top and was basically the precursor to MLG. CAL open was very hit or miss, but at least in CS it got quite serious pretty quickly. Those top players were some of the first ever to get paid semi consistent and were the best in the world at the time.

      • @[email protected]
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        110 days ago

        I played some tourneys through CAL in counterstrike a long time ago and there was some tough competition on the amateur side. The pros were on another level from most amateur teams but a few of the amateur teams could still give them some competition.