Age vs Skill

I'm 24. 1700 ladder.
I think most pro players did peak around 20 years old. But it doesn't feel like you loose a lot of skill when you get older, like in shooters where you cannot compete anymore in your late 20s. Since we don't have any professional faf players the old champions get worse because they cannot spend that much time playing anymore.

There are a couple "new" good players. Tagada and Turbo and Espeperant are around 20 if I remember correctly and they are able to compete with the best of the best now. Blackheart got really good around that age as well.

I'm 35, started playing ta in middle school when if came out. When I was 20-22 I had a lot of time to do anything including supcom as it was called then. Currently with 3 kids, a wife, working 60-70 hours a week, and trying to start a business I'm lucky to get in s hour a week.

Good players are made from those who practice, when your 20 you often have excess time.

I'm 1000, sometimes I play as a 1300, sometimes a 600

I had been playing single player since release vanilla sup com around 14 years old. I started playing multiplayer at 18 or so, back when FAF was a few months old. I peaked around 2150 or so by 19. Hovered at low 2k off and on for several years of moderate inactivity. Then took 3 years off, back now at 27, with 2180 peaked ladder rating. While I do have an ungodly amount of hours invested in this game, I take solace in the fact that the 2.5k games or so are spread over nearly 10 years. But once you 'get good', its fairly easy to maintain a good skill base. I honestly think you can make top 30 on skill and experience alone, with a healthy dose of critical thinking skills. APM is only a limiting factor at the 2K+ ladder level, and even then we don't have a high enough pool of 'pro' players to really see it take over unless you are stuck laddering on the ditch.

I know of old players in their 40's or so who could easily come back and be a top 30 player. This game is great in the sense that you can go quite far with an APM of only 50-60 or so. I also know quite a few of the top 20 players started to explode in skill around 16-19 years old.

In regards to getting older, my reaction time and APM have taken a nose-dive as I have stacked on the birthday candles. Its mostly why I play FAF and Apex Legends instead of CSGO and StarCraft 2. You can rely more on fundamentals and solid gameplay a bit more then being really really fast.

Im 30 and haven't even reached my final form yet.

Jk

I think the problem with peak faf is that it consumes energy. At least for me that is. After 2 games of intense tryharding my brain is usually fried and I cant really be productive in the time after that. And after a normal day of work I just dont have the energy to play on peak level.
Coming back to veteranshss statement: i think the people around age 20 who dont have a job and go to university have the time to wake up in the morning, take a deep breath and play peak faf for a few games, and then do something that requires less brain power. Older people usually have a career or family or friends and that kinda goes against allotting your daily energy budget to faf. If you cant relate you have never been playing good.

Yeah back when I made the mistake of going to college I used to play nwn probably 10 hours a day, had a 20-30 hr week job and 15 hr week school, should be easy to figure out why college was a mistake.

Thanks for the interesting responses, its pretty interesting to see old player derust. Even when i stopped playing for a few months i though i would not remember anything, but i kinda just did it without thinking about it.

i'm 42. so every game is some kind of a derust game

I am 5 years old and I doesnt know what i forget there.

Current 18 years - 1800 G/L peak
Started in 2016 (14-15 years) and it took me 1year+ to get into 1800 G/L ratings.

Rate of increase in skill is individual. It depends more on the experience of the games in which you played. I only play strategies, and it was very easy for me to adapt to the large-scale realtime game, but again, this is only one aspect of a successful "career" of the player, another equally important aspect is training, this game requires constant training. The maps changes, the balance changes, progress or regression, nothing stands still. And in order to somehow keep up with all this stuff, you need to devote time to this game.

i am 22,have been around for quite some time but i wouldn't way that there is a difference between ages and skill distribution.
I've seen 45 years old guys that are around 2k rating just as 1.2k guys that are 13 y.o.
It all depends on your will and the moment you want to get competitive-you will get better since supcom isn't that hard especially when the meta lasts from 1 to 3 years.

I'm 28 and 1200.
I also have older friends who play:
33y, 600
33y, 900
30y, 900
37y, 400

36 and 750 ladder, global underplayed and meaningless.
In 2013 I was 28 and 1200 global

In 2013 ladder became separate rating from global, as 1v1 players were overrated for global.

Well, i am 51 and my global rating after 14 years of plying is 0 (never played a rated game)

I play rts games since 1992 (Dune) and i have no clue how skilled i am.
At least it's enough to code an AI for SupCom

about 2100 ladder and 2000 global.
It feels like i am getting worse, but learning new hotkeys and using new UI mods compensates for that.
Also now i play alot less than i could when i was a student or at school.
I bouht supcom as soon as it came out, not sure if i can count my game amount. I was playing LAN, VPN (tunngle, garena, hamachi), GPGnet mostly on one account but i had two more with few games, then fa-ladder games.
and only after that i had (according to website) 2575 global games and 3551 ladder games and afaik it only counts ones that were rated

also started my RTS journey with Dune 2

I wonder if there's a way to compensate for increased game difficulty and higher average player skill. (Trust me, faf is tougher to play and people are better at it now versus 10 years ago)

@funkoff said in Age vs Skill:

I wonder if there's a way to compensate for increased game difficulty and higher average player skill. (Trust me, faf is tougher to play and people are better at it now versus 10 years ago)

If the average skill increases but yours stays the same, your rating will drop. There already is a system in place to compensate.

35

Peaked at 1820 ladder like 3 or 4 years ago, have been struggling to stay relevant at 1600-1800 (yeah, I go between 200 points like every month) as work gets more involved, family ,etc... I was like 2k when Supp Comm vanilla was out, but I was 20-22 then. I would say the "20-ish" age is about peak, cause at 22-23 you graduate university (unless you are cool and don't go to school like ThomasHiatt) and go to the working world, start to learn about the fun of waking up early and spending ~8-9 hours using all your brainpower; once you get home it is a bit taxing to try and play competitively.

Lesson of the thread: when you start working a real job you lose the ability to play video games well cause you don't got mommy and daddy making you food no more, there is no food court, and irl takes over a lot more.

@femtozetta That doesn't address my first point. FAF today is harder to play that Supcom was on release in 2007. It is easily 10x harder to play. And the average community member is 100x more skilled. (Most the noob trash left 10 years ago, and 99% of the rest of left since)

In regards to the conversation for skill changing over time, the other day I took a look at my POV replays from 2012. No hotkeys, no UI mods... I was either +200E or -200E for the first 10 minutes of the game. No eco skills or any sort of plan/direction visible in my gameplay. Reclaim was hardly prioritized. Efficiency wasnt discovered yet. Micro was poor. Multitasking/prioritizing was out of balance. Builds were non-existent. All I knew how to do was drag a line of factories down the map and win at t1 stage. And somehow that was good enough for 2k 1v1 ladder. Times have changed for sure. 2021 Tex could play a BO99 with 2012 Tex and do a clean sweep in 50 games. Overall average FAF skill is much higher now then it was in the old days.

I'm 19, roughly 2000 at peak. Started getting better really fast late 15 and throughout 16 as I started spamming ladder. kindof started to stagnate after that but that's because i've either just reached my personal skill ceiling or due to lack of motivation