This was intended as a quick reply to CooloutAC in the q2 thread, but I ended up ranting. Woops.
inb4 cool story bro.
INCOMING RANTOriginally Posted by CooloutAC
I started playing Quake with QL. Came here from CS with a lot of friends, and I'm just about the only one left standing from that original surge. Hell, last year about two weeks before QuakeCon one of my close rl cs friends and I introduced this game to a friend of ours who had never played a shooter on the pc before. t3/4 CA and Duelers may know him as Weeblesucks.
We sat there for about three hours watching him cuss, punch his table, make up words to call people who were completely destroying him because he didn't have any idea how to play other than run at people and try to hit shots. He eventually said after losing 10-11 games in a row with a total of maybe 15 frags "This game is such ********. I don't see how anyone can play this kind of game. You just get destroyed constantly."
Came over to his apartment after work the next day, and he was on playing CA. He'd been playing for a straight six hours already that day. Completely addicted. He'd gotten a little better. A little strafing here and there, had a bit of an idea on what guns would work better in situations than others. He'd get upset, saying "I don't get it. I keep getting ***** but I can't stop playing." He'd go out with me for a smoke, then immediately come back in and get back on to keep trying to better himself.
Two weeks later, he came to QuakeCon with us. Just dropped everything he had going on and went, because he was in love with Quake, and wanted to go play with us and other quakers, and see what all the LAN fuss was all about. It was some of the best times we've had as friends since we met, and just further engulfed us into this game.
Forward to today. He's taught himself how to strafe correctly, c-jump, time items / fight decently for items in duels, and overall become a pretty solid tier 3 / low t4 player in a matter of 8/9 months. Yes I and some others have shown him some things and helped him along the way, but the fact is that he persevered through one of the hardest games to come into with zero previous pc fps experience and flourished into someone who can actually contend at the mid levels of play in a game with people who've been playing the series for years. And he did it from the ground up.
Point being, very rarely in games these days does one deal with a situation like that. A lot of games today try to implement the everyone wins idea in order to please both casual and hardcore. In a lot of ways it's ended up screwing how games in the States go in the way of keeping player counts high and complaints low. I can sit on this forum and look around, and it seems like if someone isn't winning 90% of the time, then the tiers are broken, or someone cheats, or too many bugs prohibit them from being able to win.
No one wants to actually try to improve their playstyle, gamesense, ability to time, move, aim, offense, defense, situational issues... nothing. It's just expected that everything is even and fair and everyone gets to experience the fruits of victory and accomplishment game in and game out. I look at Europe, and how plentiful their community is (growing in fact, it seems) and I can only come to the conclusion that the majority of the NA player base can't fathom taking the time to get better at a game, they just want the immediate glorification and wins under their stats.
Maybe it's because I grew up under counter-strike 1.3, and came into that game from playing SOCOM II online for ps2 where you had skillmatching, to a game where you had to learn from your mistakes, bad pushes, triple peaking awps, getting quad naded for running around loud as an elephant, getting out played due to lack of map knowledge, spammed through stuff because I didn't know the spam spots or were standing in obvious areas, etc etc. Cs was unforgiving, and I only got better from dying a lot, learning how to use recoil correctly, learning how to actually play the game instead of making sure the game put me with people that were around my level so ultimately my personal skill cap would be a lot lower in the long run. It was a pain in the ass for a good 2-3 years, but I eventually got to a point where I could compete against the best in the game, and could go to tournaments with my teams and actually perform well (though I never ended up winning anything big).
It just makes me look about the NA fps scene as a soft bunch, because no one feels they should have to learn through trial and error anymore. That can be faulted on the idea of fps games the last decade; Everyone wins yet everyone loses in the long term. It's a bad habit to expect that every game every time will be completely even and fair. Instead of fussing about someone who outplayed you, why not look at how you were outplayed and work on what you're lacking in to better yourself as a player, then come back and even the score? It's not impossible, just requires actual effort. I was hardly any good at QL when I first came to this game, but now I've come to a really competitive point where I can hold my own and sometimes pull a game in my team's favor.
Suck it up and play. If you're happy with where you're at and how you play the game, then that's fine. If you want to get better, and rise to the top to play against some of the best in Quake today, you have all the tools at your disposal to make it happen. Like I said before, it may be because I came from a time where there were no tiers and balancing, and had to learn how to play from losing a ****load, but I feel a lot of you have it made / easy compared to those of us from the earlier days, and sometimes I just can't believe how spoiled some people come off as. Actually try to get better, and you'll get better. It's simple. There are plenty of nice people in the community willing to help others learn, and plenty of videos / tutorials / even videos with pro commentary explaining exactly why they do what they do in situations. It's all there to use and learn from, why not utilize them?
Don't think I'm trying to be elitist / an ass or anything. This is just something I've wanted to say for quite a while. Take it as you will.
Other than that, see you all at QC. :]
EDIT : This has since been posted on TastySpleen. Thanks for all the nice comments guys! http://tastyspleen.tv/?p=1434
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