💾 Archived View for drunkpigeon.cities.yesterweb.org › Writings › Gaming › 2022 › being-a-scrub.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 09:27:08. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The Scrub Experience: playing when you just ain't that good

I feel like the major turning point in my gaming experience started when I booted up a Quake FFA match for the first time. I had just gotten used to even being considered competent at a game(I can thank TF2 for that ego-boost), and thought I would do poorly, but that this was a temporary phase. In my two years of playing, I have yet to win even a single Team Deathmatch of QuakeWorld. I was fortunate enough to find a player even greener than me once in a duel, but this was a fleeting luxury.

I have grinded so many skills in this game, improved my strafe jumping, my aim, my item control, learning a new trick every day but never enough to emerge victorious. I considered it a victory just to have a KD above -1. You only survive being that bad with the cope of redefining victory. Every new technique you learn is one they've seen before, or that you don't do well enough to outsmart them. It's a frustrating experience for sure, a true test of determination. Improvement in this manner is obviously possible, but only the most hardheaded of people will gain any benefit from it.

I started to see many of the same issues when I dusted off my childhood game, Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 2 and started playing a couple Netplay matches with it with a few experienced players. There was a general objective of resource control(i.e maintaining enough Ki advantage so that you can combo the enemy into a Blast 2), but even if I did get those resources, my attempts at combos simply could not penetrate their defense. It was like I was playing with a sticky controller, crying at the screen like I would have playing against the hardest CPU back when I played it for the first time. Again, the same training just to notice that this time, I managed to get a whole life bar off my opponent before taking damage, even if the end result is still the same.

I have come to believe that it is this feeling that is the true difference between certain gamers, whether you are gaming to numb your mind or gaming as an act of determination, gaming in vain in order to see whether what you once thought unachievable is truly so or whether you simply cannot see the path. I think everyone except the very few has a mix of both of these in them, even if the forms they take are very different, but at least for me, it took competitive experiences like these to truly click from one to the other as my main driving force in my head. I'm a scrub, and if I'm lucky, I won't stay that way.