The world of competitive gaming spans countless games and genres, ranging from multiplayer online battle arenas such as League Of Legends to the side-scrolling platformer Super Mario Maker. Even the competition itself can take on a variety of different forms, whether it's PvP combat, speedrunning, or anything in-between.
Competitive gaming is unlike anything a casual player might experience. Requiring time, devotion, and plenty of passion, competitive gamers seek to be the best of the best, mastering whichever game they choose. While it's certainly an impressive feat to be at the top, it can bring a lot of downsides.
10 Solo Practice Doesn't Translate To Team Games
In team games such as Overwatch, Valorant, and Dota 2, players practice both in their teams and solo. When they play solo, they typically play to climb to a higher elo, with some players being able to boast about being the highest-ranked player on their server. However, the main issue is that climbing higher as a solo player doesn't necessarily translate to team play.
Playing solo is an entirely different experience from playing within a team and dealing with all the communications and shot-calling that comes with it. Although they're still playing in a team during solo practice, it's suddenly a much more individual game. While this type of practice is much easier, it can sometimes be less effective.
9 Disparity Between Regions
Practically all games with online capability have servers for different regions, often vaguely categorized into large areas of the world such as North America, Europe, etcetera. However, a lot of games also contain more specific servers for countries like South Korea and Japan, which put more stock into competitive gaming early on and have cultivated much larger player bases.
The variety of servers can affect a variety of things, but the most important thing tends to be how much quicker certain servers are than others and the minor but key performance improvements this allows. Frame-perfect attacks or dodges can be executed more easily if the server has less lag, meaning more optimized servers can elevate the moves practiced.
8 Someone Is Always Out To Beat Your Record
Players in competitive areas such as speedrunning can spend weeks, if not months, planning and practicing a record-breaking run. Practicing lone areas, putting the pieces together, and then performing a flawless run takes both immense knowledge of the game at hand and even more skill.
The issue with trying to break a record is that there is a multitude of other players doing the same thing. Even if a player is successful in finally beating a record after months of hard work, someone is waiting in line to beat it again, sometimes mere minutes later.
7 Shorter Career Span Than Most
Competitive careers, especially eSports careers, are much shorter than other high-performance careers, mainly due to very human things such as reaction times and better eyesight. Players begin at increasingly young ages to take advantage of their better reflexes, which can mean retirement as early as the mid-20s.
There are a wide variety of competitive players that play well past their 20s and into their 30s and play incredibly well, too, but the average age is certainly much younger than other jobs. This can be an advantage as it allows space for players to move into coaching and management roles, but can be a detriment for a guaranteed long career.
6 Technology Mishaps Affecting Performance
Videogames are intrinsically linked with technology which opens the door to many more things going wrong that are out of the realms of human control. Controllers going haywire, loadouts not being saved properly, wi-fi going down, or experiencing a stutter without any warning — all of these are situations that have happened, and will happen again, in competitive gaming.
No matter how often the kit is checked, some things are simply out of the moderator's control. There is no way to predict how technology will react. While there are some great programs out there that help fix any of these mistakes, they're still annoying.
5 The Range Of Health Issues
Spending extended amounts of time using controllers, keyboards, and handheld consoles is known to lead to a variety of health issues. These don't stop at simply one part of the body; gaming can cause a whole range of physical ailments.
Injuries such as carpal tunnel, repetitive strain, and eye strain are all exacerbated by gaming's very nature. While all of these are completely manageable, they're injuries that'll only get worse with time. When players begin to show signs of hitting their peak, they are often forced to take breaks or even possibly retire to help their bodies recover.
4 Practice Can Feel Like A Chore
Even in one of the most exciting jobs in the world, doing the same task day in, day out can get repetitive and exhausting. Not only that, but practice sessions typically take up entire days, especially considering for a lot of competitive gamers it's a full-time job.
With a large amount of practice needed for competitive gaming, it quickly becomes chore-like and harder to get through. Much like physical sports, it can be easy to forget to stretch and rest to avoid strain.
3 The Amount Of Time It Takes To Reach The Highest Level
There are only a handful of players in the world who can say they're at the highest level of competitive gameplay, and it's taken all of them a huge amount of time and devotion to get where they are. Competitive gaming isn't as recognized as other sports, which means its elite must battle to not only sit at the top, but leave a legacy also.
Most competitive players will see a degree of success as long as they put some work in, but it's only those who devote an extended period to their chosen game who will reach the top and find their name remembered in history books. That, or those who happen to innovate the game in some way after years of trying new techniques.
2 The Sometimes Ruthless Fans
The world of competitive gaming is fast. With the constant changes to games at every level and new possible competitive games coming out every year, it's no surprise that the fans can get as wrapped up as the players. While some communities are large and attract the same issues as most other non-gaming fan bases, the niche communities can be just as ruthless.
With many professionals streaming attempts and practices on sites like Twitch, fans can overstep boundaries after interacting in the more casual settings. In reality, even though they're brilliant at the rapport, competitive gamers are professionals and still real people behind the screens and that should be remembered.
1 Being At The Mercy Of Updates
Any game, online or not, is now subject to updates in the internet age. Games like League Of Legends have updates that affect things ranging from damage certain items do, to revamping entire characters, and other games like Hollow Knight receive updates that will patch out bugs.
Updates can massively mess with a competitive player's edge. Speedrunners will use bugs to skip certain areas in Any% runs, while a competitive team could learn an entire team composition based on a previous patch, only for a minor shift to one character's damage to undo the whole play. It's a fascinating balancing act that requires constant vigilance on patch notes and updates.