Age vs Skill
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Not only reflexes are getting slower. The capability to recognise the developing changes in a running game (and the UI) are worsening, while being focused on one activity. It's some kind of mental tunnel vision. Decisions need more time. I'm in my 50s and the most important limits to my gameplay are age related.
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I am 27. I was playing since early 20's atleast. Been playing with the same account the entire time. Over 2500+ games. I've always been stuck at the 1100-1200 rating.
My skill level takes a nose dive down to 900-100 when I stop playing for a few months. But it can go as high as 1300-1400 when I really go hard at practicing and watching replays. Sometimes I love this game, other times I yell at the screen.
I do hope FAF truly is forever because I will play this game till the day I die or another game comes out to succeed it. After this many years playing, this is the only old game that I play.
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I am 33 and I'm too slow for this game now. My best time was 2010 until 2012 when I reached a 2700 rating. Also I started with a 2300 rating when FAF launched but I'm down to around 1800 at the moment. My click per minute are just too low. Also there are so many new maps and improvements that I can't follow. So my age goes up and my skill goes down but that isn't the only reason for sure. I also had more time in the past.
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Maybe this should be renamed as experience vs skill. They are not the same but they have common elements. Skill is not only related to your training hours but also physical condition. An experienced player would be rather rusty at responding but has accumulated many automated habits some useful , some not. Point is , the experienced player would win against a more fit but still learning player. Or at least until the new player has accumulated enough training hours to overcome the handicap of a lack of years of experience.
For this reason , not all 2000, 1000 and 500 players are the same. This can have a negative effect on the mood of players , that have just begun playing and see ratings with an absolute and rather naive way.
This maybe one of the main reasons newcomers get quickly disappointed. If a young and promising player, say 700 with lightning fast responses but crude skills, got matched with an old rusty player , say 600,but with countless hours of playing could lose a game like that. Erroneously assuming about smurfs and so on. -
I'm 20 so far with the 2000 global / 1600 ladder peak.
I've been playing FAF for a little over a year. at all this, I used to play only dual gap (in the period from February to August 2020) after I started streaming and a month later the audience demanded a ladder game. six months later, I reached 1600. now I've taken a break for myself, because I don't enjoy the game as much as I used to. Every mistake brings me to the tilt.
On top of everything else, I need to finish the FAF History project, which has been frozen for the duration of my graduation. If you understand the game, you will play well regardless of whether you have a bad team or not. -
@prodromos the point of the thread was to see if there was a correlation between age and skill. But i agree what i found is that age means little. Or at least a higher age means that u have had the potential to practice more.
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Just in case anyone was curious, I plotted all the responses in this thread, plus a few other data points not in the thread, on a chart.
You can and probably should ignore the line of best fit, but to me there does seem to be a general correlation between skill and age. You can see here the top players are all in their teens or twenties. In my experience, players tend to get good in their late teens/early twenties. If they've gotten good then, they can carry it through to their late twenties, probably because this game is very slow compared to some other competitive games.
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I'm 48. My rating has hovered between 1000 and 1100 since 2014. I feel like in my 20's I had the time and the mental energy to do well at various games. In my 30's I had the mental energy but not the time. Now I have the time but not the mental energy.
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age: 47
playing since: 2007 (since SC came out, before forged alliance)
1v1 rating: 1100 - 1300 (last years, depends on rust)
global rating: 1300 - 1400 (with HEL clan mostly, I did boost my rating playing lots of custom 1v1 to 1700 in 2018 "map awareness training" )
I have less apm that 10 years ago, but use more hotkeys now to compensate
Also play less games than 10 years ago, slower to compensate for balance changes -
@archsimkat thanks for the graph, its very interesting to see. I would be interested to see how the 2 new posts would change that line of fit, I think the 50 yo might be a bit of an outlier.
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I am 23,
I play since about 7/8 years.
I have more then 5000 games if u look at everything together.
Since a longer time i am 1700 rated.
I feel like getting worse bc of very busy irl stuff.
If I get more time again I feel like I am ready to improve a lot.
