Online gaming has been the biggest growth area in the industry by far over the last decade or so. It has moved on from simply being able to play against a friend via the internet to a whole series of possible options. There is a multiplayer mode in shooters, whole tournaments in sports games, co-operative adventures in fantasy type games, not to even mention a whole load of options available in mobile and tablet gaming. There are even a million different browser games you can play at work, or anywhere else for that matter. So with all of this available, we want to be the best we can possibly be, here is a quick guide to becoming an online gaming master, follow this advice and you’ll be amongst the best before too long.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Practice makes perfect, right? Well, of course it does, everyone has heard the old statistic that if we spend 10,000 hours on anything we should become an expert, so that’s it sorted just play games all the time and you’ll become great? Well, yes and no, it’s not just the amount of practice but the quality of that practice. If you only play the games you are good at, on the easiest difficulty setting and in the areas you are good at then progress will be minimal. Like anything else in life you need to work on the skills that are weak to make the most progression, so if you are poor at using the sniper rifle in a shooter then play lots of missions or maps that require that skill to get better at it.
Use Online Guides
Gaming guides have always existed, in the good old days you would need to go down to the video game store and buy a strategy guidebook. But these days you can simply find a guide to a part of a game or a specific problem or the whole game at the click of a mouse or swipe of a finger, and for free. There are simple text walkthroughs, comprehensive guides, area and level maps and even video guides showing you exactly what to do. With most websites and video platforms, there are also comments sections available so it’s even possible to ask questions of the author of the guide and discuss strategy with other gamers as well.
Get a Coach
You can get tutoring or teaching on skills for any pursuit in life and gaming is no different at all. Getting a good video game coach can take your gaming to the next level, excuse the terrible pun there! The coach should be able to analyze your play and see where you are going wrong, what you can do to improve and even give advice on what controllers etc to use. To make this process particularly effective it is a good idea to employ the services of a coach that is specific to the game you are attempting to master, you wouldn’t hire a tennis coach to give you badminton tips for example, as there are similarities but it’s still not the same at all.
Buy a High-Level Account
In many games, there are subscriptions required and this means that you have to take it somewhat seriously if you want to be able to be good at the game. Often there is a free version available and the subscription version costs more and this can be especially limiting for online gamers as you get more options in the paid-for version. This is actually common now for all sorts of software as developers are moving away from paying upfront for a piece of software but rather charging a monthly subscription, everything from phone apps, to Photoshop and even Microsoft Office work on this model. But you need to be selective about which subscriptions you take on as you won’t want to be paying for too many. You will actually find that there is a market for buying and selling user accounts that have reached a certain level, you can buy league of legends accounts to get ahead without the pressure and bore of leveling up yourself.
Play Against Better Players
We need a challenge, there is a particular type of gamer that loves to play on the easiest settings and ‘crush it’ every time, never challenging themselves and although it’s fun on the odd occasion to ‘poon some nubz’ you really don’t want to be that guy, it’s very sad. They can be seen putting up 100 pts on Madden, set to rookie-level, of course, or deliberately seeking out lower ranked players or newbies on other games. Thankfully many games have decided to make this problem not exist as they match players according to ability to eliminate frustrating experiences where you are constantly being destroyed by competition that is way too good for you. But where this isn’t the case it’s essential that you seek out a challenge once in a while, you may be a long way off winning, however, a defeat by a good opponent can teach you so much. Think about what they did and how they beat you, and if you can’t figure it out then take that as a challenge to figure out what they did and how they achieved it.
Enter Competition
There is one way to really push yourself and push your limits. That is to go into a gaming competition, and this is different from multiplayer mode on your gaming platform. What we are talking about here is organized gaming tournaments and they are becoming more and more popular these days. These are usually referred to as E-sports and there are cash prizes available and the best players actually make a very good living from this. If we look at Fortnite, one of the most popular games around, there is a prize pool of over $100 million during 2019, so we can see this is not some small-scale hobbyist pursuit.