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Penny Arcade - Comic - Half-Life
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Half-Life
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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They already said Adderall right there in the strip!
I mean, if you've got people you like who you play them with, even if you're all terrible, it's probably still a good time.
Doubly frustrating when you did used to top leaderboards and the like when you were in your early 20s. I can almost feel the increased lag time in my synapses sometimes and it's hard to get into competitive modes in a lot of games now as a result. The palpable decline in reaction time brings forth existential despair.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
At 41, when I see high level Pharah players, my brain wants to scream "hax!!!" even though I know they're just damn good (and probably half my age like the comic the says).
Hax will always be easier for my brain to accept, though.
XBL: InvaderJims
Bnet: Pudgestomp#11153
1) How much "chemical talent" will e-gaming allow?
1a) Who will determine at what point Adderall goes from "therapeutic levels" to "performance-enhancing levels"?
2) Will e-gaming go for an impossible dream: "clean gaming"?
3) Who will do the testing?
3a) Which type of testing will be used? A Gas-Chromatography Mass Spectrometer is considered the best mass-produced substance-detection method, but there are always going to be players willing to try anything to get an edge--something that a GCMS test will find, but not for months or years until lab researcher can reverse the residue to figure out what it was, originally. Do we want e-gaming heroes to testify before Congress 20 years after the fact that they were all "coked to their eyeballs" (to use an old racing phrase)?
4) Will Out-Of-Competition testing be required of all players? Elite players?
5) What will the penalties be for medication violations? Who will be empowered to enforce these rules?
Hmm, I think I may have a research project proposal forming...
I couldn't blame my poor gameplay on jumpjets and wallrunning anymore with CoD WW2. I had to accept the fact that I just can't hang.
But at the same time, I agree, I've been slipping and there is a difference. My brothers and I made it to the finals of the Overwatch tournament at PAX West and while we hung with the teenagers who ended up winning (we took the first map and lost the next 2) it was definitely difficult. Our team was 25, 30, and 32.
Wait, wouldnt a time machine just bring you back in time in your current age?
Yes, and if it's made by Razer, it's going to break almost immediately.
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
One of the weird things about esports to date is how damn early pros retire from competition. They're frequently dropping out of stuff around age 25 to move to coaching instead, an age where a lot of athletes are hitting their prime. This has mostly been a Starcraft thing though given how other games haven't had as much time to really entrench themselves so I'm curious to see if this changes in something like Overwatch where maybe the veterancy to coordinate with other players will end up trumping pure reflex alone.
Hearthstone is an exception but that's nowhere near as reflex intensive but also nowhere near as lucrative.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
I think there are a couple of things doing this to StarCraft pros especially: Korea has mandatory military service that you can only postpone for so long, and that lasts something like 4 years, which basically makes you a fossil by the time you get back into the scene. StarCraft is also famously rough on your arms and eyes. Some of the biggest names from Brood War like JaeDong have done irreperable damage to their wrists, hands, and forearms, even though they're only in their late 20s or early 30s.
It's not just the Korean pros that drop out early. Happens to the Americans too for various reasons. The physical aspect of it is definitely a factor for some here too. Applying sports medicine to esports is still fairly new but thankfully being done now.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Thank god I can always go to XCOM for validation.*
(* As long as I ignore the existence of Impossible.)
(We'll ignore the fact that I probably couldn't beat those games anymore.)
-Tycho Brahe
Agreed, while I think age does seem to be a hindrance, I think time-investment is the real culprit here. And since the ability to do the latter tends to negatively correlate to the former, it exaggerates the effects of aging. Ditto for wear and tear incurred by playing professionally; that's a product of the time being put in, but because the effects kick in as you get older, it makes it look like more of a consequence of age. People look at what pro-gamers can do and ascribe almost magical qualities to it, but that's overlooking the incredible amount of effort they put into training to be able to play at that level.
Speaking from my own experiences, I've always been bad at games, but that's because I've never been able to diligently focus on practicing a specific game for a large amount of hours within a relatively short time necessary to "git gud". Partly because I'm always getting distracted by some other game, and partly because when a game starts to feel like work I develop an almost pathological aversion to sticking with it.
But I don't buy it as an excuse either. I'm 44 and still play piano and cello, which both require dexterity and speed. If anything I'm better at it now than when I was 20.
Either way, I embraced this and now I'm the Top 10 Junkrat NA. (Ok, not really, but I've got like 170+ hours logged into the ADHD maniac and on a lot of maps I can deal with a Pharah better than any Soldier, Widow, or McCree.)
Sadly it is only Win95 compatible, so you won't be traveling farther back than that
Yea exactly.
I do think part of it is sort of culture related. E-sports culture is coming together more though so we'll see how that changes as time goes on. But I feel like in general sports culture was already built more around doing that sport over and over for years and practicing it to stay on the level. That same idea isn't quite built up for the a lot of the e-sports guys. And a lot of them are kids who are having a good time playing video games and then moving into a professional scene and eventually just sort of burn out. Plenty of guys will say they get burnt out. It's not always fully in their mind as a career so to speak as many of them haven't really planned on it being a career or even worked jobs in general yet so the mind-set is very different.
Just some thoughts I've had on the matter.
it wasn't pure reflex and twitch at that point either. It was getting to the point that I could damn near predict where people would show up around corners and I had quite a few kills that as I did them I screamed haxx on myself because I knew how sketch that would look on the killcam.
then I had to start working so... yea... didn't need that stress in my life anymore and glad for it.
now i can barely keep up with just *watching* the youtubers showing off rainbow 6 and battlefield ww1
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
We don't exactly have a separation between the equivalent of collegiate level competitors and full on professionals either the way we do a lot of other competitive activities too. The one exception I can think of off the top of my head is Blizzard's college team competition for Heroes of the Storm where university affiliated teams duke it out. So we don't have a real way of splitting out the people that were just never really going to try to do this full time after a certain age. Right now everyone has to make it at the highest level to really make a splash in the competitive scene.
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My best CoD years, by far, were well after I learned not to engage revoltingly young tweakers in pitched battle, and instead use every dirty but perfectly legitimate trick in the book to gain the upper hand. Cover, concealment, corners, decoys, reverse ambushes. Use their faith in their own indestructability, their reliable overreaction to being bested through strategy and planning, their deeply ingrained need to avenge themselves, and the decisiveness with which they make poor decisions against them.
Probably a very different story in games where characters come in a variety of cartoonish colors, could be spotted from orbit, and cannot simply be dispatched with one tenth the contents of a typical rifle magazine.
Reason: kedinik
Obsolete technology serves no purpose here.
Bobart Robsky