I love competitive games but they don't seem to love me.
Thing is, I'm not very good. I wouldn't even call myself average. If an eSports professional is at about an A+ and a newborn infant is at F, I'd give myself a C-, and that's being generous.
As a gamer, it's really hard to admit what your rank is in most games. Your rank is like your gamer card, your merit badge; some people practically treasure it like their honor depended on it. In most gaming communities, casuals and lower ranked players are looked down upon as if they had the pox. It's like hanging out with your successful highschool buddies who all have their own companies and private planes while the topic of conversation is how much money they managed to make in the last hour and you're still paying off your college loans. It makes you feel small - less significant - sometimes even worthless.
In Overwatch, I am merely a low Gold player. If a typical Overwatch player is to be believed, then I might as well quit the game because people at my skill level aren't worth playing with. Some would even go so far as to say my life isn't worth living, which sadly is typical toxic Overwatch community trash talk. That feels pretty terrible. So much so that some people would even fling your rank at you as an insult. Find an Overwatch player and call him a "gold rank Hanzo main" and watch them froth at the mouth, burst a blood vesel, and lose their minds with blinding rage.
In Tekken, I'm at green Mentor level, which is only the 5th rank from the bottom. It's a pretty low rank and I do believe I belong there. But you know, surprisingly, the Tekken community doesn't look down on people like me too much. In fact, they go out of their way to tell us low level scrubs how to improve. At least, for the most part, they do; there are always going to be assholes here and there. It's a vastly different experience from Overwatch or other team-based competitive gaming community.
And that may be due to the nature of fighting games. With fighting games, it's 1v1. There's no one else to blame but yourself. There are no throwers. There are no feeders. There are no healers or DPS's not doing their job. You're either good enough or you're not, and there's very rarely an in-between. And throughout the course of a fighting game player's "career," regardless of whether it's a top tier god or a low ranked scrub like me, everyone goes through a phase where they just get bodied. No one starts at the top. The difference is that good players learn and adapt faster and more efficiently. On the other hand, I just keep running into the same stone wall over and over like a blind dog. But despite that, I keep coming back to Tekken 7 for punishment.
Just tonight, I went 4 wins - 20 losses. I still get salty and I still feel like a worthless piece of crap every time I go on a 20 game losing streak. But I never wanna give up. Instead I treat each loss as an opportunity to identify things I did wrong or memorize abused strings from other characters. It doesn't make me better right away but there's some noticeable improvement there, albeit marginal. And that little bit of improvement is enough to draw me back in to get my ass handed to me another 20 or so straight times, which again makes me feel like scum. But then I analyze my losses and come back to get bodied once again. It's a terrible drug.
This is the natural way fighting games go. Get bodied > Learn > Get bodied > Learn >Get bodied less > Learn > Get bodied less > Learn > Get bodied > and if you do it enough, maybe you'll sneak in a win every now and then until you start losing less. At least, that's the plan.
Until then, I'm just gonna keep going back into the Tekken arena and leaving bloodied and bruised.