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Comment by ZephyrBlu | Hacker News Reader

> Eventually I decided that I no longer wished to prioritize the game over other things

This is what I unfortunately found as well. I reached Legend in Hearthstone (The top rank, no clue what percentile it was) a while back and top 3-5% in StarCraft II a couple of years ago.

In both games I stopped playing shortly after reaching that level because the time investment just didn't seem worth it to me. I love games, but playing at a very high level requires a lot of practice and focus.

I don't really think it's possible to play competitively and do much else because of the time investment required just to stay at your current level, let alone improve. I love games, but it's hard to justify when I could be doing something more productive with my time.

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I think there's something to be argued that reaching a high level in any competitive game or sport has merit.

I've learned more valuable lessons from competing in Starcraft than I can count. Without knowing the exact opportunity cost, I think trading my highschool grades for the competitive experience was worth it.

The biggest mistake I think I made was not cutting games out completely after having learned those lessons.

I definitely agree and also feel like I've learned valuable lessons from SC2. It sucks to give a game up though :/.

I play Starcraft for the story only, and I loved it. Still play the campaign from time to time. I feel like a savage amongst civilized men on this thread.

Please don't feel like "a savage among civilized men". Video games are made to have fun with.

I experienced both sides. First trying to become a professional CS:GO player, and after just having fun playing the Starcraft 2 story.

Some of my friends still deeply enjoy the competitive aspect. Sometimes I just want to see big stonking robots blow up aliens :)

This was how I played AoE and StarCraft as a kid! I think the vast majority of players play them this way, actually. If you're in the competitive multiplayer scene, it's easy to forget there are millions or tens of millions of single player / campaign-only players.

Campaigns seem to have a bad rep among most gamers online, but honestly they are the most satisfying aspect of strategy games. One of my favourite games growing up was Rise of Nations and its Conquer the World maps - remove that and you get a worthless husk.

I absolutely loved rise of nations. I didn't play the campaigns though, I played random map 1v1 matches versus the AI. Had a great time!

The majority of players come for the campaign and the space fantasy narrative.

The competitive scene has been stable and has kept sc going forever.

I wouldn't frame it as 'giving up' when you stop playing, rather you achieved what you set out to do.

I sacrificed around 1 year during university to Age of Empires. Wasn't my most productive year at uni.

Anyone remembers DBD_Jinx? For very long the only western dude to compete with the Koreans in 1vs1. However he also confessed, that he had partly sacrificed his private life for it.

I trained a lot. I trained hours a day on 2X speed hunting, build order. I played under many smurf accounts, to then foster my primary account(s). MrFixIt forums as well.

I played 1vs1, team games, I played DM as well.

After intense 2 years (time zone shifts as well, many sleepless nights) I decided to never ever play online in a community again in order to prevent my lazy/fun loving side to be sucked in again in clans, games etc.

No Warcraft nothing. To this day I keep the vow. Only game I play still from time to time is AoE II: DE.

In 2000, I came out of my first retirement to play a couple tournaments. The first time I heard of DBD_Jinx was when he beat me in the second round of the BattleTop NYC Challenge. He went on to win the tournament and became widely recognized as a top player.

It's the nature of competition and it's the same with physical sports. Lots of effort to gain minor benefits over the others.

Browser games tend to respect your time more by making you login every day but limit how much you can do. You won't see players who play the game 24/7 because the game tells you to stop after you ran out of action points or scheduled your base, etc.

Actually no, most physical sports are not like that because the human body has limits and exceeding them is counter-productive because it leads to injuries.

Most professional soccer players spend about 1-2 hours per day on training. Off-season they will spend slightly more but that's only for about 3-4 weeks.

Doing anything more leads to injuries.

1-2 hours of training per day is incredibly low for a professional athlete. Professional cyclists are on the bike for over half the day, and there is even more work to be done on active recovery and strength training. Even runners, who are more limited by their body than nearly any other sport, spend 15+ hours a week just on running. It's a full time job.

I agree, there's no way professional soccer players only practice 1-2 hours a day. I'd guess 1-2 in the gym plus another few hours at least actually practicing soccer. Even something that's fairly brutal like American football involves an hour or two per day in the gym, plus practice. Professional athletes figure out how to practice as much as possible in a way that doesn't lead to long-term injury and "as much as possible" is almost always way more than a couple hours per day.

I also agree. There's a common tendency to overtrain to injury in sports, and it's mostly self-driven, even at amateur level. You look at people training something strenuous every single day, and you'll see a bunch of people who are constantly working around minor injuries, looking for a way to keep getting in the practice. The proliferation of PEDs in sports is not just about enhancing the on-field outcomes but also a quest to recover from this intense, high-volume training faster.

Also a Hearthstone player here- I used to regularly hit top 200 legend on ladder. I think one of the biggest lessons that I got out of starting to get more into the competitive scene is that there's more to games than trying to be the absolute best and that I need to set my limits and figure out where I can have fun without letting something take over my life.

I've since cut back significantly on my Hearthstone playing and been able to apply similar thinking to other games I've picked up (for example Magic The Gathering: Arena). Games are for having fun not for endlessly trying to get better. That was probably a mentality that I picked up from years of MMORPG (Runescape) addiction.

I stopped playing RTS entirely some years ago because of that.

I used to love RTS but...

1. Rushing is stupid, all RTS seemly suffer from allowing it even when devs attempt to curb that down, I remember in AOE for example people training on how to build towers on the enemy base in 2 minutes or how to win with villager rush. (also knew a guy that relentlessy tested ways to rise to the second age faster)

2. Singleplayer often the AI is super cheaty, after a while I got bored with that, because I couldn't use actual strategy to win, for example the match that made me realize that was when the last AI was on an island, I conquered the rest of the map, was careful in my usage of the market to stockpile all resources for myself and deny the AI... then whenever I attacked with the 200 unit limit, the AI defended itself successfully, after I got bored of hours stuck on this stalemate, I used cheats and found out the AI stripped the whole island bare but was still pumping units non-stop AND knew where I was going to attack, so they always had perfect defense.

3. Multiplayer is a matter of how fast you click and how good you are with pattern matching and some other training-related things, intelligence for example isn't that important, rote learning, time to practice, etc... that is.

So I concluded that basically multiplayer RTS is a huge timesink, and to me, unfun. And singleplayer RTS after the campaign is done is or too easy (because the AI is utterly dumb) or too hard (because the AI cheats), I never found out a difficulty I enjoyed playing against the AI.

> 1. Rushing is stupid, all RTS seemly suffer from allowing it even when devs attempt to curb that down, I remember in AOE for example people training on how to build towers on the enemy base in 2 minutes or how to win with villager rush. (also knew a guy that relentlessly tested ways to rise to the second age faster)

I have to politely refute this. "Rushing" is the word inexperienced players use for "playing in a more optimal way that prepares you to attack sooner." If you call it "rushing," what you're really saying is that you need other players to deliberately play worse to give you extra time to prepare. All of these strategies have counterplay and usually lead into long games. Using a vil rush or tower rush is not a way to end the game, it's a way to begin it.

> 3. Multiplayer is a matter of how fast you click and how good you are with pattern matching and some other training-related things, intelligence for example isn't that important, rote learning, time to practice, etc... that is.

Again, you could only say this if you had not made it to a competitive level. Intelligence is pattern-matching. And of course playing anything at a competitive level involves "training-related things," that's a kind of meaningless statement if I'm being honest. And I can't speak for StarCraft, but in AoE2 APM is not essential. To prove the point, the top-rated player has beaten other top 200 players without using his keyboard. It's about decision-making. Even at my level, I can beat other players rated a couple hundred points beneath me without using keyboard shortcuts just because my decision-making is better.

> I have to politely refute this. "Rushing" is the word inexperienced players use for "playing in a more optimal way that prepares you to attack sooner." If you call it "rushing," what you're really saying is that you need other players to deliberately play worse to give you extra time to prepare. All of these strategies have counterplay and usually lead into long games. Using a vil rush or tower rush is not a way to end the game, it's a way to begin it.

For less experienced players, rushes like these tend to end the game early rather than begin it in an interesting way. Either the defender knows how to hold the strategy and shuts it down, or hasn't seen it before and gets destroyed. While these strategies are certainly part of the game and make high level competitive games far more interesting, it is often a frustrating experience for low/mid level players. Many of those players are looking for an experience where they build their army for a while and attack once they're satisfied with what they've built. Certainly not strategically optimal, but that's often what they find fun.

I totally understand that. It's how I played from 1999-2015.

I'm just saying that rushing isn't a flaw or a problem, rather it's a matter of perspective. Players who want to build up for a while nearly always want to do that because they haven't learned any other way to play. And they're not under any obligation to do so, either-- but it's not fair to say the game is flawed on that basis.

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