N3O Age Of Empires and Starcraft 2 Clan

This question has been bugging me for some time. The top players and I am meant the really top players, i.e. the top 10. How do they get there? Do they actually just play 24/7? I'm not meaning this in a horrible way but to reach that level and maintain it you have to really play for a long time. Their social life must really suffer in the outside world. Say they have a job or even a part-time job. That rules out quite a bit of the day. So do they just spend their whole evenings on AOE3? They must be pretty sad. I mean there is nothing wrong spending a few evenings playing online but surely (and if I'm wrong I'm sorry) just spending there whole time online is pretty unhealthy.

I totally agree, but then again unless they play constant 1vs, which majority end up finishing <20 mins anyway so i reckon you could get about 10 games in about 2 and a half hours, including time to find a game etc. But yeah I still think AOE or computer games in general are some people's lives, and no offense to them, but my personal opinion thinks its pretty sad.

Well, I'd say they're all around 20 years of age, meaning they still have quick reflexes but their brains are now fully developed. That also means they don't have to be in high school and don't have to go to college or get a job.

I personally think it's mostly natural skill, knowledge of the game, quick hand movements, and willingness to lame.

It's not always a case of how much people play, it's a case of natural talent. I know people who play this game and have racked up over 1500 rated games in TAD and are just master sergents, and then you get the pro's who have racked up only a handfull of games in comparison. Granted, they have probably played a lot of custom and offline games for practice, but these guys just "have it".
Example: I could take singing lessons every day for 10 years, and never be anywhere near good enough even to join an amature band. Yet I know people who only sing at parties when the kareoke gets going and they are really really good.
If you have got it, you've got it.... if you don't then you don't.

I disagree that natural talent comes to play in games beside the strategy part. Which is good sometimes, but a game is something created by humans (but yes baseball, soccer, music is too but it involves your physical body) and something created by humans can always be mastered. So it is a matter of playing it and knowing what to do and getting a groove.

I'm on about the guys that always play, the guys that rack up these 1500 games and top the ladder's, that spend every waking hour playing AOE3, I dont mean the higher ranked people like NP or Grunt, they don't play the often, a lot of us play more frequent than them.

I remember most experts at Age Sanc saying they didn't nowhere play this game as much as WoW players do.

WoW is a character building game though. Two different genres.

Wow isn't a game. It's an opiate.

The depth of the game in WoW is amazing. I know people that have been playing for 2 years or so, and have not even come CLOSE to seeing the entire game.

Eh, but the thing is Rascal, even though there are plenty of places to go or whatever, that depth is largely artificial because most monsters you fight are very similar if not identical to many other monsters in the game, and the only reason it takes so long is because they purposefully make it take forever to level up your character.

Once you get to the higher levels all you can really do is join groups and do raids which take hours to complete.

I played WoW for like 6 months and stopped and I'm probably not going to play an MMO (not like WoW at least) again. Waste of time.

As for the pros, I doubt many of them spend nearly as much time playing as you think. Most of them probably have a lot of experience with other RTS and have been playing competitively for a long time. Plus, they do have a lot of natural skill.


Becoming that good is mostly about having experience, patience, and the drive to play competitively as much as possible. Many of them I'm sure do other things, like go to college or high school or whatever.

[quote=""Sluggs""]I disagree that natural talent comes to play in games beside the strategy part. Which is good sometimes, but a game is something created by humans (but yes baseball, soccer, music is too but it involves your physical body) and something created by humans can always be mastered. So it is a matter of playing it and knowing what to do and getting a groove.[/quote]

Natural talent is always a factor in everything. You can practice something until your blue in the face, there will always be others that don't have to work so hard at it but will always be better than you.

Don't kid yourself to thinking natural talent isn't a huge factor here. There is noway some people can't move anywhere near as fast as the pros. I mean, these guys are doing 250 + actions per minute and stay on top of things all the time. To be a top Age player you need to play a few hours a day, maybe 5 days a week. To be a top starcraft player, you need to play 10-12 hours a day, everyday of the week if possible.

I'm not sure about the whole natural talent too much, because i mean where do u get it from like i inherit natural footy skills from my dad, but he never played comp games as a kid as they werent out so where'd you get it from, why would it be in your genes lol!!

They all have a ton of unrated games, and know like everything about the game, and have played many other RTS games and all other aoe games

I do believe to some extent that practice in this type of game can make you better, look at like boxing, you might start slow at punching but as you box more the quicker and harder you punch, same with aoe the more u are clicking the faster you will get and better at micro....same with keyboard as time goes on ive got faster and faster at typing!!

LOL Chris, just because your dad didn't play computer games doesn't mean he doesn't necessarily have good genes to pass on for the playing of computer games.

Stuff like intelligence, coordination, multitasking, planning...etc etc.