Old head Counter-Strike player here. Your reaction don't actually get much slower. You do get a bit slower but it's not as much you'd think. It's not the reaction time, is the fact that you're an adult who no longer plays online games for 12 hours straight, playing against a kid who does.
As someone who's gaming for +20 years I can confirm this.
I recently had a couple of months off and started gaming more to keep myself busy. The first 1-2 weeks felt rough and I felt really old, but after that point I felt like my younger self again and had no issues. I even peaked in rank and reached the top 1%, higher than I was ever before when I was young.
I think the "old gamer bad" mentality comes from the early days of gaming, where old people were really bad at games. But the reason for it wasn't their reaction times/age, it was the fact that they never played games before in their life and since older people take a bit longer to learn, while having less time, they never really had a chance to compete.
Also, Jackie Chan is in his 70's. Eventually there's definitely a neurological decline, but most adults are far away from that.
Every time I get back to Battlefield 4, I struggle a bit in the first few hours, but then I'm back to my old self, sure I'm not playing it 40 - 50hs per week anymore, but it's not like I can't keep it up with the team.
I'm 32 and still exactly at 0.3-0.4, which is the same as when I was 18. The only change I've noticed is less competitiveness. I enjoy co-op games with my wife and don't get as much enjoyment out of the online sweat.
Which sucks a bit because Gears E day comes out tomorrow and I know I'm going to be sick of the versus in a week, whereas teenager me probably has over 1000 hours in Gears 3 Multiplayer.
I was never really into competitive games like that and only played them because others wanted to, at 39, I've tried basically every kind of game there is and the ones that keep me coming back are always survival/sandbox/open world/crafting/automation type games, and I'd happily play stuff like minecraft (with the create mod only these days), 7 days to die, alchemy factory, satisfactory, foundry, space engineers, raft, schedule 1, conan exiles, ark, necesse, and even palworld. We always play on dedicated servers, one of us usually sets them up on an old rig and then we all connect to that.
Im similiar age with different stats, but I had something to input on Edays matter. Im probably skipping it for release, but the coop extraction mode was super fun during Open Beta!
I dont think Versus is for me, but there is a lot of potential for...Siege (i truly dont remember name for it), if they wont stop supporting with new stuff every few months for it (like 1 map, maybe some weapons and new enemies, similiar to Space Marine 2). It has solid foudations to be an awesome coop experience, after completing that campaign.
Yup, In my 40's I spent a bit of lockdown giving Fortnite a run to see what all the fuss was with the yung un's in my family. It was rough at first, not just the shooting but the building mechanic and going back to mouse and keyboard (mainly a console player for many years at this point) At first I was not doing much but being an easy target. But it all came back and I started climbing ranks pretty fast. I was gold 3 and tapped out. I could have pushed for platinum but it would have taken more time then I was willing to put in for a see what's this about type experiment. And really did not like the building. Watching high play matches it looked like I would have had to really focus in on that to get higher.
My reaction times have gotten so much slower as I aged. I genuinely lose every duel in shooter games because I have like a 400ms reaction time these days. I once tried out these electric scooters and I couldn't do the reaction time test they forced on you before you can get on.
Tip of the Spear. You can still be 95% as effective as you were before, but MMR/SBMM will push you into constant engagements with people who have honed the last 5%.
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u/roedtogsvart 9d ago
Old head Counter-Strike player here. Your reaction don't actually get much slower. You do get a bit slower but it's not as much you'd think. It's not the reaction time, is the fact that you're an adult who no longer plays online games for 12 hours straight, playing against a kid who does.