Super Quick Update: “eSports and Competitive Play”

Short and sweet update on my decisions to try and go back to older games, as well as entries to other options.

• Black Ops 2: Everyone’s on Ghosts
• Alliance of Valiant Arms: Everything is fucking OP, and the shop system has been butchered.
• Blacklight Retribution: HRV a.k.a. legal wallhacking slows the game down to a crawl.
• Quake Live: Time issues, and it’s hardly popular in North America.
• Counter-Strike: Very very tempting, but the community is still split between three games, unlike StarCraft where the entire scene had pretty much transitioned into SC2 HotS. As an example, CEVO still hosts 1.6, Source, AND GO events.
• COD4 Promod: NOBODY is playing this on leagues anymore. Hell, I don’t think it’s on ANY league.
• KOFXIII: If I have the time, sure, as well as a regular sparring partner/s, but like I said in the main post, it’s fragmented as a community.
• America’s Army Proving Grounds: I was pretty good at AA3, but I never saw any competition potential on it. Highly considering this route.
• Tribes Ascend: I’m complete shit at this game
• League of Legends: LOL FUCK MOBA SOLO Q IS HELL
• Ghost Recon Online: Another good candidate that would actually be fun to play. My only issues with this game is my frame rates when playing it. Gotta upgrade my rig first.
• Day of Defeat: WAIT, SERIOUSLY? This shit is still listed on NationalESL. Tempting but no.
• TF2: Really, it’s more of the same “I have to find a team” deal.

That’s about it, really. While I have options, I’m just too reluctant to start again, considering my rig isn’t up to spec anymore.

eSports/Competitive Play and Why I Can’t Do It Right Now

I used to be a Promod player like you, then I took a shitty PC in the face.

tl;dr money

I used to be big on playing competitive FPS. I had experience playing PAM2 Rifles-Only CTF on Call of Duty 2, Promod and PAM4 on Call of Duty 4, Black Ops 2, and Alliance of Valiant Arms. I used to love playing to win, playing to help my team rise up the ranks, playing and actually having fun.

Now, that’s all changed. With the decline on eSports-friendly games and denial of private rentable servers, I just can’t take it seriously anymore, at least on the FPS side. So I looked for another way.

My search led me to fighting games. Sure, I was a big super-casual-nub whose only combos involved a jump-in kick to crouching kick to some special move, but I was willing to learn. In fact, I had bought a stick, and I had modded a few of its parts. Hell, I even put custom art on it. What’s my problem now? Time. While I could easily squeeze in an hour practice a day, five days a week, one online game per day, I just don’t feel motivated. My issue with the FGC is the general fragility of its games, and how splintered and fractured the communities are, because let’s face it, there are MULTIPLE FGs out there. Comparing it to RTS where StarCraft has a hold, or FPS where Counter-Strike is still here, or something bigger like the MOBA scene where LoL and Dota2 are both popular.

On a smaller scale, the only reason I can’t really play at these levels anymore is that I’m running on an aging system (well, let’s face it, it was aging 4 years ago). My frames per second are suboptimal, and anyone can tell you that frames is life in a shooter. On the other side, I just don’t have access to an online console. I have an Xbox but that requires a subscription that I can’t sustain. I don’t have a PS3, either.

They’re really just lame excuses, but at its core, being “hella poverty” is actually a predicament when you’re trying to be good at this. I doubt any skilled player can keep their consistency when they move from a 250FPS average rig to a 20FPS average. Still, I’m not giving up. I’m probably going to start going back to the games I had played competitively in, and maybe find new prospects. As of right now, AVA and Blacklight Retribution come to mind easily.