Getting older, reflexes coming to a hault, but still love online competitive multiplayer

[Quilty]

I used to be able to play for hours, and although I was never very good, I could hold my own in games like the Battlefield franchise.

Nowadays I still love playing a few rounds of Battlefield 1 with my buddies, usually once a week, but just yesterday I had to stop after two hours due to back pain, headache, and an increasing feeling of nausea. So I lay down, closed my eyes, and listened to an audio book about WW1 to console myself. I felt incredibly old and broken.

 

[Doktor Best]

Just play Go or Chess instead. Video games suck for competitive multiplayer.

Online Chess (and probably even Go nowadays) you play against engines in most cases.

Chess.com and Lichess have pretty good anti cheat engines that analyze your moves and ban you pretty consistently if you use engines.

How does that even work? Most openings and variations are pretty much solved deep into the midgame. So does this engine ban GMs? If not, it's useless for low-level play, because on low level you can use the third-best recommended engine move and still roflstomp newbs who don't use an engine. In a difficult situation using a single engine recommendation can win you the game etc. When do these anti cheat engines start banning exactly? Chess is fucked. Huge skill-differences, which makes offline play with friends unsatisfying most of the time, and online everyone and his mother uses an engine.

Not exactly an expert on this but they usually look at a players movement pattern and see if they can reconstruct them back to the algorythms used by engines. Using lower graded engines doesn't make a difference since those algorythms are still the same, its just another algorythm for errors is used on top and anti cheat detection systems do have access to those algorythms aswell. Using engines for single moves can maybe lead to a slight advantage in crucial plays, but usually you do not decide outcomes of trade offs with a single move, but with a sequence of moves. Especially engines are often proposing seemingly self weakening moves in order to pull of some crazy line of play 5 turns in advance. If you blindly follow one of those moves you most likely will not be able to reap the benefit.

I'm not saying those anti cheat systems work flawlessly, but they do appear to be working well enough to catch cheaters over the course of a few dozen games. There was a pretty famous case of a female GM just recently who let one of her staff members have access to her account, who used it for one evening to troll people by playing with an engine and her account was banned straight away after basically one evening of cheating.

 

[Johannes]

Modern Warfare 2019 is pretty campy, sorry, "tactical" for a CoD. It's by no means "realistic" though, as it's a CoD after all. It's pretty fun though, and the mechanics and general feel are solid for a modern, fast paced shooter.

Most importantly for you, it also has skill-based match making which means you'll never be severely outclassed by other players. It also means you'll never get to roflstomp noobier players yourself, because they'll just not show up in your matches. It's a weird situation where the majority of the playerbase is kept on a ~1.0 k/d ratio because of this. There's no way to opt out either. Overall though, it's probably good for what you're looking for.

I'm kind of vain in that i want to play a game where I can be in the most competitive leagues/ladders and not be stuck in the wood league with other 1-mmr players.

Unrealistic goal that you'd learn a new game to that level. Since clearly you're not hugely talented, you wouldn't need to ask such questions if you were. Or how much time would you be willing to put in?

 

[Lyric Suite]

I used to be able to play for hours, and although I was never very good, I could hold my own in games like the Battlefield franchise.

Nowadays I still love playing a few rounds of Battlefield 1 with my buddies, usually once a week, but just yesterday I had to stop after two hours due to back pain, headache, and an increasing feeling of nausea. So I lay down, closed my eyes, and listened to an audio book about WW1 to console myself. I felt incredibly old and broken.

Don't worry, it's only going to go downhill from here on!

 

[Lyric Suite]

Yes I am very old (early 30s) but in online competitive multiplayer years, I might as well be a dinosaur.

Bitch please :D
Rapha 31, coller 34, killsen 34, toxjq 36. 2 walking aimbots, 2 outhinkers so neither you nor lyric have a real excuse.

I have no idea what you are saying here.

I didn't say i would have been a "pro" if it wasn't for old age, if this is what you are getting at. I didn't make it as a pro when i was young so that's the extends of what i can do (and the extend of 99% of players out there). I thought this tread was just about losing talent relative to what any of us had when we were young, not whether we can "excuse" ourselves for not making it on the top charts on account of our decrepit bodies.

Obviously a pro can still be a pro even at old age, not the least because the physical degradation of old age isn't as crippling for games as it is for real sports, all though logically speaking even a pro might probably experience some degradation over time.

 

[Johannes]

Definitely your reflexes slow down as you age and also the time you devote to practice decreases as other things come to demand your attention more as you age. But you can offset this with the experience you've accrued over all these years, at least if you're a smart type of player at all who can outmaneuver less well rounded opponents, who might be better at the raw execution of the newest strategies.

You can see this in combat sports as well, it's super physical obviously but there's some guys nearing or at 40 who are still among the best in the world.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

The only competitive online MP game I have ever played was chess. Via e-mail.

 

[Konjad]

Arma 3 King of the Hill

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

I'll second MechWarrior Online.

People say you need to have lots of mechbays and what not to have fun, that's just not true. Admittedly, it's fun to have more, but you start with 3 slots and the game gives you a shitload of in game money your first 40 games or what have you, so you can play those in one of the various demo chassis (I think they change every month or something), try some stuff out, see what you like, and buy a couple mechs with your tutorial money. Years ago you needed 3 mechs of a given model to be able to master it, so I think that's where people are coming from when they say you need more mechbays.

If you like it and have fun, you can play it like I did and just grind out all the challenges for the little bits of real money currency they give out.

It plays like a somewhat slowed down FPS. It's all about tactical play, super fast reflexes don't help all that much.

If you decide to try it, I'd recommend a locust as your first mech. Cheap, fast, and you can put a decent longish range loadout on them, and learn the game while lasering bigger robots in the ass and running away before they turn around and kill you.

Then save up for a kodiak 3, to try the oppose side of the spectrum. Huge, slow, DPS monster.

 

[blessed king of longing]

What are some quality multiplayer competitive games, where it's less about twitch skills, or even super-fast thought processing, and more about methodical/big picture strategy?

I'm tired of playing games with teenagers who are clearly faster than I am.

Back in early teenage years when counterstrike, quake 3, and starcraft were at the height of their popularity i was pretty good, and could hang with the best players.

I still love online competitive multiplayer games, but it's hard to find options where I'm not immediately handicapped due to being an old man.

Any game suggestions?

being good at fast paced games is a muscle, use it or lose it. just because you've played for thousands of hours doesn't mean you don't need to practice.
you also need proper hardware - whats your rig? a mouse with a good sensor is just as important as a monitor with low response time and high refresh rate.