29 years old and still able to make top 500 in a lot of competitive games. Hopefully it isn’t ONLY downhill from here.
The last time I tried to play CS, somebody politely (I thought) told me that perhaps I should play with bots.
I’m 42. I suck at FPS. I downloaded battlefield 6 and hated it.
It wasn’t always this way. I still have a screenshot from COD World at War where I got over 100 kills and only died once during a game.
I miss being good at games… But somehow I’m still better than like 50% of my teammates, it’s paradoxical
Depending on genre the avg age of players has literally just kept going up.
Gaming as we knew it is kinda dying. There’s no new blood into a lot of genres.
MMOs, strategy, mobas etc as some great examples. The avg age of players is like 30+ cause the genres either arnt popular anymore or they went to mobile.
Mobile gaming has basically gutted the pipeline for new PC and console gamers.
As a kid there use to be plenty of folk from 10 to 40 playing wow or what ever hot new mmo was just released
Nowadays you would be hard pressed to find someone under 25.
better than 50% of my teammates 25% of the time!
They’re all 50 years old
Aging sucks. When is the anti-aging research starting?
Not gonna be for us poors, Bubba
And I want none of this healthy diet and exercise BS from the nutritionists either. I want to peel or an injection not salad.
once the last boomer is cold l.
It’s honestly maybe more flattering than you realize.
Motor Reaction time starts to decline around age 30.
Comparing a 20 year old and a 30 year old. About a 200ms decline. That’s not huge in real life activities. But it can make a difference in games.
So essentially if you are over 30, playing against 20 year olds, you are literally playing with a handicap.
If you still beat them, that’s something.
It could mean your prediction skills are superior, that they circumvent motor response delays.
It’s likely something like that is occuring.
Some humans are really really good at compensation in the brain.
When something starts to slow down or not work as efficiently as it used to, people with higher cognitive intelligence, often find alternatives approaches to compensate for this loss. To the point where the end product is even superior to a young healthy brain.
This is actually the real reason why people who are higher educated and more intelligent show less severe dementia symptoms and get the disorder later in life. (Or so it seems. But actually they don’t get it latter. Just have noticeable symptoms later)
They actually have it just as bad (biologically) but are masters of brain compensation.
A famous study on nuns is how we first learned about this. If you are interested.
I’m happy I’m still pull a avg 140-160ms reaction time at 35.
I mean, you say that, but I’m mid 30s >:D
Imo, this test is flawed and doesn’t take display refresh rate into account. Well, at least flawed in the sense that you can’t compare it to other people because they may have measured it differently on different hardware. Its not universal.
I’m at work right now and using this shitty screen at 60hz, I got 230ms. I upped the refresh rate as fast as it can go, to 75hz and improved my reaction time to 200ms.
To get accurate results, you’d need to do this test at different stages of your life on the same hardware with the same software version of the test. So take it with some salt.Honestly, all you actually would need to do is just go to the steam survey, check what the most common hardware is.
Cuz all you got to do is test against that. As if your response time for example is in the top 10% of people. When your baseline is the most common hardware available then you’re in at worst the top 10% of people. Reaction speed changes depending on task just as much as it does on hardware.
Like personally, I take a reaction test using the most common steam hardware and I’m looking at about 150 milliseconds response time by doing it on my normal hardware which is many times faster. In refresh rate it only shaves like two milliseconds off average and it fluctuates just as much. Like two milliseconds off average and it fluctuates just as much.
I even have a little like toy thing that I picked up one day years ago that tests reaction time using a mechanical device. Testing it. It’s within about 5 to 10 milliseconds of variation off of what most digital online tests that I can find.
And it within margin of error shows exactly the same amount of reaction speed that the online tests show.
So they’re accurate enough at least within a handful of milliseconds.
The toys basically just a taser and two people grip a thing. Whoever grips and clicks the thing faster doesn’t get tased its rather fun.
I almost always win even against my younger cousins and step Brothers who are as young as 12. So my 35 year old ass still has it!
Just don’t ask me to have any amount of reaction speed with my legs. Probably try and kick something. I will miss it. By a mile. 3 hours after you threw it.
So I said there is a difference of about 200ms. But humans cannot typically react faster than 200-300 ms. Even young people. Because it takes ~ 200ms for a signal to be sent. So I’m suspicious of this result.
I used to do research on reaction time. We throw out any number under 150 because it’s considered not humanly possible and it’s an error measurement.
I rarely saw 200.
Usually people hovered around 300 to 400.
Also I was doing research on 18-20 year olds
Keep mine. It really does depend on tests. A lot of the online tests start with a negative offset to account for ping. So a 160 you would typically add anywhere from 30 to 60 on average. The better online tests will actually run a short ping test in jitter test to set the offset more accurately. Most though don’t and just use a fixed value. The annoying part is it’s usually in the fine print somewhere that you have to manually f****** re-add it. They don’t tell you that it has a offset. So that way the numbers look lower. It’s stupid but it’s the trend.
My rule of thumb is most of the time the devs just slap a 50 in there surround number and it kind of covers most bases. So a 160 would be a 210. Which for a test where you can do it repeatedly and be hyper fixated on knowing what you’re doing. You can get pretty damn close to 200, not reliably but that’s going to be like you’re 1% best result which is what people f****** posting.
Like for example, my best results in these sort of tests accounting for offsetter between 190 and 210. But that’s like one in 50 tries. Where my normals closer to like like 230.
And usually I have like a 10 millisecond variance on my average tries.
oh that’s because you started at -40ms
I was literally Stadia incarnate in my heyday
It’s all super interesting, thanks for all the info!
He concluded that Alzheimer’s disease is likely caused by early childhood experiences or trauma instead of something from adulthood
Woah
Yeah but that was not supported.
It’s biological.
He really is a vampire though
Ohhhh yeah getting called a cheat is fun and sexy but I’m still high from when I googled my gamer tag years ago and I had made a list of “gamers to look out for”.
mmmmmmm
You should frame that
It was on crazypeople.online
Like crazy gamers to look out for.
/jk
Nobody on rocket league would ever believe someone in their mid 50s could play at champ 1 level.
And when I was having a bad game and the inevitable toxic bullshit was typed up the reply of “I’m probably over 20 years older than your dad and I’m at the same rank as you are” usually got them to stfu. It felt great.
Bathe in their anger
I got accused of using scripts in a street fighter 6 lobby, I was so flattered ! And I didn’t even know scripts existed or what they do!
I am near 50 and I am not even good.
I could never remember all the button combos for fighting games like that, it’s impressive!
I don’t use them and some people frown on them but there are modern control scheme now with some auto combo and easy special moves. So it’s better than before on that front but still not for everyone I guess.
Virtua Fighter is my favorite. Simple 3 button layout and all reflex. It’s intuitive and you don’t have to remember a shit ton of moves.
When I was a kid, I had this fantasy that gaming 10s of years later would be fantastic… Schooling all the kids with my 20+ years of experience they lack, running circles around them.
Turns out dulled reflexes are a bitch and it’s exactly the opposite.
Competitive multiplayer games are nowhere near as much fun as they used to be. I do still feel good about being able to complete (non-dexterity-based) puzzles and make complex deductions a lot faster than them, though.
The trick is too just play the 20 year old game online still instead of moving on to the newer shooters. Everyone still playing is 30+ and have diminished reaction time as well so you still have a shot lol.
CS 1.6 is still going for a reason 😂
I ended up getting glaucoma in my late 30s, so my eyes have really sucked in my middle age. Occasionally though, life throws me a bone and it all seems to click. I agree though, I prefer co-op these days. Not much use in multiplayer aside from maybe sim racing
Oooof when it clicks
I was ranked in the top 10 for pistol kills in modern warfare 3 for over a year and a half.
Then I lost interest in fps games for a few months. Tried to come back and play with some friends, and completely sucked ass.
This is my main problem as well. I can still get to the same skill level I had, but if I stop playing for 2 weeks, I’m basically back to square one.
Honestly I can go 3 days without playing Rimworld and I’ve completely forgotten what was happening, and half of my mods are unfamiliar again so I have to start over.
My kids who are teens/20 year olds.
“Dad why are you always playing in a tank or a plane on BF?”
Me “Because I am old.”
I used to have reaction times like that made other people weep. I was constantly on watchlists for cheating and even banned by a few poor losers in private servers. Those days are well in the past now.
It’s why I switched to the boardgames for the competitively itch
Last time I was really good at competitive shooters was in my 20s playing MW2, Left 4 Dead, and Battlefield 3. Battlefield 4 and Black Ops 1 were when I felt it shifting, and now I just don’t play online shooters anymore.
I feel like multiplayer games need a special chill lobby for verified players over 30. One where you can step aside and deal with the kids without causing issues. A space where you can call it a night without spoiling the fun because it’s 8:15 and you really need to get ready for bed.
That’s funny - MW2, BF: Bad Company 2 and BF3 were the last competitive shooters I really enjoyed, too. I had a good time playing Apex Legends for a while, but not because I was good at it… more because I could have fun playing my own version of The Running Man until someone inevitably found me. I was that wimp that would drop in some remote corner of the map and spend as much time as possible avoiding combat.
I’m 53… and that was how I started playing.
It took me two years and a bit of fiddling with the controller setting to “git gud”. My K/D ratio for the first couple of years was 0.11 (prolly lower but that was the lowest it would show.) and I eventually got it up to 0.71 (approx 1.1 for the last few seasons).
Im amazed at how many people play these games without a headset. I can usually hear them before I see them.
It’s not necessarily just your reflexes, the console players with their built-in aim hacks are fucking ridiculous these days
e: OR SO I WILL KEEP TELLING MYSELF
Every gamer ever: no scope headshots an opponent…“man I’m so good at this game!”
Also every gamer: dies from a no scope headshot…“this guy has to use an aimbot to beat me, so lame!”
You might have fun checking out Hunt Showdown.
While twitch reflexes help, you can also get a big advantage by game knowledge, tactical thinking, creative plays and/or patience. Not too many kids playing though…
Arc Raiders has been pretty fun imo. There’s a ton of room for outsmarting your opponents, or even just diplomacy in some cases.
Just last night, I was paying in a group of three, my two teammates were up ahead with me lagging behind. Another group suprise attacked us from on top of a huge concrete wall with massive high ground advantage, firing on my teammates whom had little more cover than sparse trees. This group hadn’t seen me yet, so I told my friends to keep them occupied while I flank. I found a strong position to their side where they had no cover from me, but I had cover from them, lobbed a couple grenades and opened fire. It caused them to scatter in a panic, trying to find cover from both me and my teammates, and we absolutely slaughtered them. Felt incredible. Damned shoot on sight bastards lol.
Also, runs can be an absolute maximum of 30 minutes, but usually shorter, so good for people with actual lives to live.
This is me with Overwatch. My game sense helped me so much more than click head skills. I would support main and shot call and it was a huge game changer. I eventually went to dps role and was amazed and how effective I actually was just from literal years playing backline and knowing how most games would flow and who to target. I eventually outranked my support and tank roles in dps despite being mediocre from a skill standpoint.
That’s why I’m an RTS enjoyer. Less twitch reflexes and more know-how, control, and good habits.
Every now and then my quake 3 reflexes kick in and for a few minutes I become a God.
I loved Quake 3: Arena as a kid. That and Unreal Tournament, I can still see that Facing Worlds map in my head.
Unreal Tournament was a drug. So many times, that game caused the, “IT’S MORNING ALREADY!?” effect.
it was unReal! just like Quake II rocket arena
Crossplay get mad when I tell them im playing with a controller and im beating their keyboard and mouse ass. Son I’ve been gaming on a controller since 1984, your keyboard is no match
“I can shoot the dot in a yellow subpixel on a dpad that moves 100 pixels at a time”
There’s just something about fps with keyboard and mouse that my brain doesn’t grasp, a controller is muscle memory and second nature so I’ll always prefer them.
Same to be honest. I can click my way around a screen, but I can barely aim with any precision.
I find it easier to roughly aim where someone is, and then fine tune with character body movement, which is something accomplished way easier on dual sticks
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I can basically play like I was younger but I can’t stay hyper focused for as long 🤷♀️
You can also see a lot of multiplayer ranking systems basically make sure only the turbo grinders make real progress past a point
You might be just as good but they make sure it takes hundreds+ hours per season to get to the top.
How I used to play Counter-Strike for 3-4 hours as a kid amazes me. Last time I think I bailed after 30 minutes.
Yep. There’s definitely a shorter performance arc when firing up a fast-paced game. Couple short rounds to warm up, then several good rounds, then frustration at why your hits don’t land as hard. Time to take a break. Used to last a lot longer at top level a decade ago.
No, im still young. Nevet mind i saw that movie, face off,in the theater
Pretty sure that’s con air
I loved that movie as a kid. I wonder how it’s aged
I actually rewatched it not long ago. It holds up well.
Any other day, that would seem strange to me.
It was to me too. Lol
You’ve never seen a fancy car flying behind a plane before?
