How do you guys rate yourself skill wise in your various games? Do you actually think you are skilled, or is it a combination of time/interest in your game vs pure skill?

As I am getting older, (still relatively young, but working/life commitments minimize my game time) I am noticing a lot of trends that I did not notice before. Say WoW for instance, I literally do not have the time to spend on gearing and leveling characters, learning the classes (this is a major point) , so forth etc etc for raids/pvp. Nothing weird right? I have a life outside of games. But five, ten years ago I would of been grinding every week (not consciously), wrecking nubs in RBGs, thinking I was top shit. But was I really? Were you really? Or was it just the fact that you had the time to play your game, so you learnt the game, and had more experience than the average gamer, hence you were better than the average gamer.

You skilled gamer you.

All those times I thought I was a god, was I really just young? Was it just a fact that I had spare time on my hands? Did I shit on people back than in the same situation I am in now? Watching people out level you, learn a lot more than you, nothing based on skill but just the fact they have the time to invest in it?

What has me thinking about this is that I'm still playing Overwatch (don't flame me), and I have always considered myself quite skilled to the average gamer. The only thing I feel I have been lacking compared to a pro is aim and a little experience, and I have felt the main reason for that is my lack of time to invest in the game. No, king aim does not make you a pro, but you do need good aim to be be a pro. Beyond aim, I can shit on people with better aim than me because I have been playing games for a very long time and can move, have better decision making than the average person. Lately though I had about a month off from work, Christmas holidays, annual leave, etc etc. So by circumstance I invested time into Overwatch consistently and my aim skyrocketed massively because of consistent game time.

I'm in my 30s, I'm not miraculously gaining reaction time, accuracy etc. The only thing I have gained is some spare time. I am now consistently getting ranked against GMs and even top 500s. They are without a doubt way better than me, but I am getting matched against them. Where as before I would be playing against 3.5k-4k players.

But what changed? For me it's really a simple answer and that is time to invest in the game. Is that what separates us from the pros? Time to invest in the game to actually master it? Are we all Rekkles except we don't have the time/dedication to invest in the game? With the odd Faker among us that has some pure skill? Or do you believe that no, skill is skill and time has nothing to do with it?

Personally I think its a combination of both. I think OWL is the perfection example. There are players in OWL, Striker, Pine, so forth that I could never touch in a million years skill wise. Seriously, watch striker play OSU, fucking insane. But than there are other players who are pros, Custa, Rawkus, etc etc where I watch them playing and I am like, 'You know what, I have just as good aim as you, if not better', but I don't have the time to learn the game, the youth to take those risks that you do.

Not sure where I am going with this, just typing shit. But I guess:

TL;DR, does time=skill or skill=skill?

 

I think skill is something you attain over time. The only natural talent that could help someone in games is a good reaction speed and a strategic mind, although playing lots of games apparently trains that up. Obviously you have to know the rules of the game too, and whatever meta exists for optimal play. So yes, time spent playing and how dedicated you are to improving, versus just doing whatever and sometimes getting lucky is how you attain skill, no one is born good at games.

The younger people who literally grew up playing high-FPS FPS's and the like obviously have an advantage in those kinds of games over someone who grew up playing DOS platformers or the original Doom, so that's why you're getting shit on by younger players (and they have way more time to dedicate to it, because it's a very viable career path to do nothing but play games these days, and therefore easier to justify as a hobby to parents).

 

I mean, skill is a combination of time, effort and talent, so playing more tends to make you better at the game... I don't think you can be truly skilled at any game without putting in the hours, unless you're a lifelong fps pro just playing the next game.

I rate myself by comparing myself against others. Competitive online? If I win a good amount more than I lose, I'm good. If I'm crushing, I'm really good. Single player? How easy of a time I have playing the game, killing bosses, tackling harder difficulties. MMOs? Topping the dps meters and not wiping.

I was really good when I took WoW heroic raiding seriously, and when I took Dark Souls pvp seriously. I considered myself very skilled and "elite", in those games. But both were a result of a lot of experience and taking it seriously, not because I was innately better at it than others.

While I think talent is a real thing at the very very top (professional gaming), for regular gameplay, it's mostly experience. If you want to take it to the next level, effort becomes relevant. Talent and familiarity definitely gives you a leg-up, and can be an upper ceiling.

Like, take a look at League of Legends. There are a ton of players stuck in Bronze, despite having played hundreds of games. They play for fun, and don't really care ot improve. But if they took it seriously and sought to improve, I guarantee they could climb a few tiers. While some new players climb to Diamond in a month or two, because they're just that talented.

 

Skill is something experience gets you. Talent can be instant. I've seen people just starting out but with an innate understanding or great hand-eye coordination or both achieve in minutes what takes others months. It sucks, but its human nature.

 

Experience goes a long way. I can pick up any shooter and be pretty good at it, despite not being a competitive player, simply because I've been playing shooters for 25 years. I'm 31, so it's quite a long time, and my first games were doom, wolfenstein and duke nukem. All these different games over the years (cs, halo, quake, tf2, hl, etc), all these different scenarios to draw forth from. For me though, I can't just stick to one game for years on end. I played OW for the first two months it was out, had tons of fun, but I honestly don't know how people are still playing it 4 years later. Despite having the freetime, I just don't have the desire to grind a game like that. As a consequence, my skill always has a sort of bottom threshold, but I'm never going to get to the next level, and I'll always just be a competent casual. There's always a point where a game no longer becomes fun to me (and it's not win/loss related), and I won't hesitate to move on.

Some games are just beyond me though. I love rts games, might be my favorite genre, but it's a dead genre. Figuring out build orders, developing micro skills, that's the natural development of playing these games over time. I've got hundreds, if not thousands of hours in aoe2 and various c&c games. The one game I could never really figure out was WC3, but custom games I could do. If I were to get the WC3 remake today (which I'm not), I bet I would struggle to get through the campaign on easy. There was just something about it, perhaps past rts experience just getting in the way

 

I've always been better in rts games than pretty much anything else. When I was still a teenager I played Dawn of War I for years in various leagues and was constantly somewhere among the top 10 of the ladder. In SC2 I was somewhere around mid- to high master level. That's pretty much it I suppose in terms of notable rts skills.

Then there's league of legends. That game is so hilarious, fun and frustrating at the same time it beggars belief. I'm solidly gold 1 to 2 but strangely enough I feel like a worse player mechanically than I ever was before. I feel so old sometimes when I play and my reaction times have become horrible. Currently I'm adapting by taking an old man champ like Galio where I can fuck shit up without having to do fancy micro moves. It's a little painful but I guess still better than losing all the time.

I know there's not that much carry over between rts and lol, but back during my rts times I always prided myself on my mechanics and micro which could salvage my admittedly far worse macro. It's kind of amazing. When I was in TS with older people I never understood how they could be surprised at my doing so many things at the same time on the map. I was just cycling through my groups, sending them here and there and it felt effortless. These days I'm happy if a skillshot goes in the right direction.

As for shooters, don't ask. I had a lot of fun playing various iterations of battlefield with my friends but that was always because of the social aspect and nothing else. I'm terrible at them.

Shit I sound like an old man with all this "back in the olden days!"

 

For most people, it comes down to a combination of experience, and experience is the sum of your knowledge of the game and time invested. I used to consider myself certainly in the upper echelons when I played ME3 multiplayer. I could carry pretty much any team to victory on Gold difficulty, and with halfway decent teammates I could run Platinum without much trouble. It took time to master the movement, ability sets, enemy behavior, map layouts, target placements and useful tricks like pizza running or getting rid of the of the rocket launcher. Today I'm sure I would wipe on Silver difficulty because I'm years out of practice.

 

My reaction time has gone downhill quite a bit as I've gotten older and stopped investing huge amounts of time in console games. Thus I find shooters and uber difficult souls-esque action games to not be quite as enjoyable as they once were.

I'm investing more time in rpgs/adventure/strategy/puzzle games nowadays that cater to a casual playstyle.

 

I've been gaming for 24 years now, and have played on a variety of platforms and genres. That's given me a wealth of experience to draw on which gives me a base level of competence where I will very rarely not be at least good at a game. As I get closer to 30, I've found that my reaction times are slower and I can't compete on things like shooters/twitch aiming, at least on a strictly mechanical level. I've always had fantastic macro though, an inverse of @Eilyfe 's situation. I use my macro to create scenarios where lesser micro isn't as crippling.

I've been world class at several games in my life, but I do think that the sheer time investment needed to master mechanics is something I'll see fall by the wayside as time goes on. My current game is Vermintide 2, and while I'm comfortably in the top 5% of players or so after 2 weeks, the thought of trying to become amazing at it is daunting.

 

In an overall sense, I wouldn't rate myself very highly. Been gaming since I was a kid, with 20+ years invested now. But I've always been mostly into RPG's, and those don't require much (if any) reflex or coordination to excel at.

 

I'd say decently talented. Top .5% in North America is pretty good for LoL. I've recently become a five digit in osu after six months. To be fair, there's definitely a time commitment here, I doubt I'd be that good without spending a good amount if time on games, but theres also innate talent there that I don't think everyone has.

 

I'm a washed up, has-been, reluctant adult.

 

One of the big issues with getting older is that you remember how good you used to be at this stuff.

I won a fair amount of money playing CounterStrike back in the day. I was consistently banned from private servers for accusations of hacking in the early CoD games. There wasn't a mainstream shooter I couldn't get into the top 1% skill-wise within a few months for a decade. I was an officer in a few of the iconic guilds in the Everquest/early WoW days even.

I was really, really good at videogames for a long, long time.

Well, I'm 47 now. The last shooter I played was BF1, and I was pretty shit at it really. I hate the vehicles in all the games these days. MMOs are dead to me. I love Path of Exile, but I can't help but cringe watching streamers play it and think I should have those guys/girls' reflexes still.

I just don't anymore.

 

Lul.

All memes aside, that's pretty rad. So you're Challenger or GM in NA? Which means you're playing with/against guys like DL and other pros in regular soloq games -- that's great. How does it feel going up against them? Are you nervous about it? Is it just business as usual? Have you thought about going pro or trying for more?

 

I've been gaming since I was a kid, when my dad bought me a N64 in the late 90s, with a heavy preference for shooters and third-person action games, with a side order of RPGs (though I'll gladly play anything with a good story). Skillwise, I'd rate myself as above average. I've certainly never been world-class at anything, especially not competitive multiplayer games (largely due to avoiding them out of a lack of a competitive streak and not enjoying losing), but I'm able to do fairly well in the games I play. I've successfully done top-tier content with 70+ percentile parses in pretty much every MMO since WoW came out, I don't find Bloodborne and the other From games particularly challenging, etc.

And all without any significant, dedicated time invested. I flit between games as strikes my fancy, play em for a while, and then move on to something else. I completely lack the focus and dedication to actually train myself in any game, and I still generally end up performing well above average.

All that to say that natural talent is 100% absolutely a thing in gaming, as it is in everything else, and it can be an extreme influence on one's ability to play the game.

But it's also not the be-all, end-all. I am regularly shown up at games by people in my friend circle who do focus and dedicate themselves to playing a specific game and training their ability at it. Learning the game and its mechanics and foibles, training the muscle memory for responses, etc is almost universally as, if not more, important than raw talent, and putting the time and effort in to do that can easily overcome almost any disparity in natural talent. Unless, of course, the guy who's more talented also puts in the time and effort, then you're fucked.

 

I think it really depends on the game whether talent really has much going for it.

For shooters and the like? Talent really goes a long way. I’ve always loved those games, but I’m terrible at them and no amount of playing ever really changed that.

Things like MMOs, though? That’s all learning and practice. I did some really cool stuff when I played EVE and I was really good at whatever I put my mind to there, because it was all practice. When I played WOW I was damn good at leading my raids, because I’d practiced and obsessed over it. Really, the amount of time I invested into those games baffles me. The things I could have gotten done instead. But either way, that’s just time invested that I just don’t have anymore. Though if you’re leading raids you do have to have a decent talent for multitasking.

RTSs are also mostly just practice and some decent ability to multitask. The strategy, even the on the fly stuff can be learned.

 

I only play one video game anymore, and that's fifa. Now I can go into why fifa is a shit video game that is unbelievably pay to win and has a poor skill gap at the highest level, but nobody here would care realistically.

There are about 300 people in the world that I dont think I can beat in any one off game. Expanding to 2 legs (because EA would rather mimic real life football than have a best of 3 format to reduce rng further), I'd say there are no more than 500 people worldwide who will consistently beat me. Most of that is down to practice and time spent on the game, I can easily admit that, but skill gained through time is still skill.

 

Not quite. Top .5% is ~D2. Top .01% is GM, for reference.

That being said, I've played against quite a few streamers. Notably, TF Blade, Revenge, Tobias (but he's like really bad), Emiru, etc.

After the initial "Wow I know that guy!" it really is business as usual. And if I'm being honest here, everyone ints, even the best.

 

The few times I've dipped my toe into online gaming, it hasn't gone especially well for me; Injustice 2 I don't think I've ever won a match, Battlefront 2 varied depending on the mode, but I spent a lot of it getting killed by people I hadn't even seen, and the few matches I played in Mass Effect Andromeda actually went OK, but I could tell I was going to hit a wall with it very quickly unless I put more time/effort into it, which I wasn't interested in.
If I'm playing against friends, I'm usually slightly better, although it can vary depending on individual familiarity with the games we're playing.

 

I think the competitive nature of a person also plays into how high you go and how hard you commit, even excluding your innate talent (which is absolutely a thing).

While almost everyone in this thread seems to be competitive to one degree or another, I'm personally Non-competitive wrt gaming as a whole. (I see competition as a necessary evil in most aspects of life but thats a philosophical debate for another topic. And I only try to be competitive only when absolutely necessary.)

So I've been playing games for more than 20 years and I'm well into my 30's right now. But I've never felt the need to be the absolute best or even good at any game. It also helps me that I can't play FPS because of a depth perception problem with one of my eyes.
So, never been into FPS; never felt competitive, even in games like DotA or Lol, which I regularly play.

So I've actually never noticed if I'm above or below the curve wtr skill. Couldn't tell you if I'm getting better or worse even if I tried.
I think you would call me the experience hog/Hoarder.
I play LoL or DotA only when events are on, so that I can collect the skins, lol. Heck My DotA profile is filled with only legendaries, all earned during passes.

I regularly play Wow, where I enjoy the experience/open World/leveling far more than gearing or being the best in server. (I mean, with a 250 ms ping, it would be nearly impossible, but I don't even find the idea of trying it appealing. XD). I religiously farm all the mounts though.

Tremendously enjoy games that have a decent story-line, like the witcher series or LoTR spin offs or the Darksiders. Anything that gives me a good experience I value a lot more than competitive play.

Just wanted to put in a different perspective in here. Even if it goes on a tangent wrt the OP.