In my tournament days, I spent a lot of time labbing on games like Melee, Marvel (to a lesser extent), Brawl, Soul Calibur, and a variety of other games I had attempted to become a tournament-level player.

Initially, I was not interested in being a tournament level player, but as I found a clan, crew, and other gaming-based groups, I found during the Nintendo DS era that I had access to tools and groups that allowed me in 2006 to maximize my potential at competitive gaming. What this meant is that instead of believing that I was amazing at the game, I actually had tournament level players playing against me on a continuous basis that meant that I had a distinct advantage in a variety of games.

While it seems unfair, it did prove that players who did the groundwork back then could easily find groups to become better. Over time, I was one of the most dominant figures in the clan because I had easily routed time to myself plus having the historical experience with gaming, I easily won a significant number of tournaments with little to no effort. Back then, however, it was hard to get many extremely skilled players as we see today because many of them did not know the avenues that were available. Even for myself, the tournaments that I won had problems when the people who could be me were unable to enter, or the game I played they didn't have.

This topic is difficult as it's become apparent that as more people have access to the games, people who have gotten older have found it difficult to keep up with the same games they were godlike at, and my own group of friends have vanished from the gaming scene due to being too old and hard to keep up with the skill level demonstrated in the early 20ies. It's one of those topic that I have different group of friend dispute due to think that the 26-year-old age limiter was fallible, but I found after 27, my skillset couldn't keep up with the way I originally had played. Though I played Melee mainly, I find that when I play online, it's something I have already talked about and is just too hard to keep up with.

The fateful test of being too slow. (Kirby Super Star)

As a kid, I had learned about Samurai Kirby, a minigame featured in Kirby Super Star, but one of the particular usefulness of the minigame is it can register how quick your reactionary skills are. Essentially, it serves as an old-school metagame function of how quickly you can react to the exclamation mark that appears on the screen. However, to skill all the nostalgia, I found that over time, I got slower in my teens, and now am dramatically slow. My reaction speed used to be in the single digits, and now it's gotten to the point where I am +16, which is way too slow in practically in every single game that could be competitive. It's useful to run this analysis, but the truth is that you have to be -10 to stay competitive.

I had practically mastered everything in Melee; all tech possibly achieved, AMSA teching was easy, getting combos with Marth comes as naturally as waters, and mulitshines with fox isn't hard anymore. Yet, with the reactionary test, it doesn't necessarily matter how good you are at execution if the opponent can react faster and get a grab combo from you because you didn't push the button fast enough. The inherent problem with it is that the individual who know how to get around certain objections cannot get around that a physical limitation actually effects the flow of the match so much that it changes the game to being unplayable. I've had many matches where high-skilled opponents are simply off the platform, but then the exhaustion comes through, and you're limited to watching them get quick hits in because the idea cannot register anymore.

Thus relies on the inherent problem of high-skilled gaming, which is that it's becomes a problem because you become unable to be as high skilled as when you need to be, which is young. It's not that one should rely on casual games because competitive games are amazing for a reason. However, the more you notice older player starting to retire is because like me, the result actually do mean something if a reactionary test shows a significant decline in the ability to perform the reaction. If you are playing a competitive shooter, you will get shot first most of the time.

While I never managed to catch super tournament ranked players like Armada, Hungrybox, or Mango, I have found myself playing against people like PewPeuU, Sfat, Shroomed, and other players who were worlds better than me, but the difference at my current skill level is that their precision and reactionary skillset was so high performing that personally, it just got in the way that their brains functioned so optimally that allowed them to see, achieve, and react quickly to their objectives in the moment to the point where I felt too slow to get out objectives against players of their calibur. It got annoying because in many tournaments, I would find myself against many ranked players but was not able to react fast enough to handle myself. Though I don't really mind losing to these kinds of players, the problems star to stem from the fact when you have to look back and know that you're hitting a skillgap and exhaustion gap that prevents you on operating on the same capacity as yesteryear.

The main thing is that when it's over, it's not like I wasn't trying to get better as I was running tournaments as often as I could, was recognized in my region, and was performing pretty well for every tournament that that I entered. After some point however, it was donning on me that the region shut down on ever operational capacity, meaning tournaments had stopped, but even for myself, I just was not the same level of player I used to be. It's bad because you start having to avoid playing seriously because you can't that same level of player anymore. What this also meant is that high-skill gaming gets in the way when you get knock out of brackets early and find yourself with having to play a different game or having to find something else to do; the game itself eventually becomes a liability when you cannot go play the game anymore.

Ultimately, games like Street Fighter: Third Strike, and Marvel vs. Capcom were falling under the same problem where players who used to be dominant in the games would suddenly stop playing, and I would ask these players why they stopped. Their answer ranged from many reasons, but the main one was that they felt like they couldn't play the game anymore and just didn't have the time for it. It's not that you should discount many of the players, but it does get to the point where if the game does not show up because the players are not playing it anymore, then no one is coming to the venue because there is simply nothing to do.

Even for players like Mango who can draw up a crowd of Melee players, it gets to the point where he's was significantly younger than my own crowd, so expect people my age to show up was nonexistent. At some point, it's not really high-skilled if each player worth playing is finding out that they are not going show up anymore, and they are going to leave. Essentially, they are not there, they moved, and you're left with a remnant of a game that used to be cool.