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If someone is an esports player, it would be hard to stay a professional (in most action games at least) at age 30 simply due to natural wear on your hands and

If someone is an esports player, it would be hard to stay a professional (in most action games at least) at age 30 simply due to natural wear on your hands and reaction times getting slower.

tester756 5y ago
In CS:GO there were players around their 30s and were successful https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/Virtus.pro https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/Virtus.pro e.g >2016-07-30 1st S-Tier Offline ELEAGUE ELEAGUE Season 1 2 : 0 Fnatic $400,000
mym1990 5y ago
This doesn't really make sense. Athletes in many sports are playing way past their 'prime' these days and they are wearing out much more than just their hands. Consistently good reaction times are a result of consistent training. Plenty of older baseball/tennis players have superhuman reaction times. I would see mental fatigue and boredom as being the major hurdle to playing esports on a professional level at an older age. No matter how fun it started as, 10+ years of looking at the same thing over and over has got to be soul sucking.
- KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  In physical sports the barrier to entry is very high. Even if you have good reaction time, high strength, etc. you will still need 1000s of hours of practice from a very young age to excel. In e-sports there's millions of people practicing every day and the built in ranking system can filter that down to the current top 0.1%. At this point branching out into actual competitions is not nearly as difficult as getting noticed by a NBA, NFL, etc. recruiter. It does depend on the Game. CSGO players play a very limited number of maps so pure reaction time and hand-eye coordination is often the deciding factor. Strategy games like LoL and softer FPS games like Fortnite are less dependent on physical talent.
  - mym1990 5y ago
    The ranking system in physical and mental sports is essentially the same, it comes down to: 'can you beat or compete with X person consistently', and just for context...there were over a million high school football players participating in 2019, and this is mostly in organized play. If I want to get noticed in League, I have to grind a queue for ungodly amount of hours to get to a respectable ranking and then solicit myself to teams for proper team based competition...good luck with all that.
- blahblah123456 5y ago
  It's counterintuitive, but if you look at eSports players, the prime years are much lower (both the start and the end). You do see 16 year olds at the top but you never see 30 year olds. It feels like the prime is really 16-25. Reaction times in traditional sports are not as important, and hands are one of the worst things to wear out. More parts != more wear out. There's a reason why there are (general) physical therapists and physical therapists who specialize in hands. Hands are incredibly complex and soft tissue injuries heal very poorly due to lack of blood supply. I doubt the boredom thing is that different for sports vs eSports. At least with eSports the game is changing due to patches. With sports, the game itself hardly changes. For citation: see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0094215 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... you can see reaction time starts to drop off rapidly starting at age 25
  - tester756 5y ago
    > You do see 16 year olds at the top but you never see 30 year olds. In CS:GO there were players around their 30s and were successful https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/Virtus.pro https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/Virtus.pro e.g >2016-07-30 1st S-Tier Offline ELEAGUE ELEAGUE Season 1 2 : 0 Fnatic $400,000
  - jackothy 5y ago
    Re: Boredom eSports players spend a lot more time playing than normal athletes. You can only be physically active for a few hours per day. eSports players can do a lot more, like tyler1 who consistently streams for 10+ hours 5 days a week. Normal athletes arguably also get more variation. Football players don't play back to back football matches all day every day, they practice and improve in a lot of other ways. They also get more variation due to traveling around to play away games.
  - mym1990 5y ago
    Its not really counterintuitive, the prime years are lower because true physical development in physical sports starts at a later age, everything up to that point is related to building a physical foundation for movement, building an interest in the sport, and laying groundwork for proper mechanics. There is also societal stigma from playing video games seriously past early 20s(well atleast 5-10+ years ago, but with Twitch and things it is now way more accceptable). "Reaction times in traditional sports are not as important" is laughable.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  1. Most professional athletes have very short careers. 2. The athletes who do play "past their prime" are usually making up for reduced physical acuity with other skills (e.g. you don't see very many baseball players hit triples after 30). 3. Players with long careers invest a huge amount of time in conditioning, and to a hard-to-measure degree, PEDs. 4. I don't really follow eSports; If someone played Starcraft competitively 20 years ago, are they still playing SC, or do they switch to something else like LoL? What's the typical competitive "lifetime" of a game? If you picked up game-specific skills, it might be harder to apply #2 when the game du-jour changes. 5. As a slight nitpick to the whole conversation, my understanding is that "reaction time" is perhaps a misnomer; the drop in reaction time with age for performing a simple activity appears to be relatively minor, but more complex activities (including habitual ones like driving), which suggests that the performance decline is in selecting and/or executing the proper response to a stimuli rather than what we think of as pure "reaction time"
Drew_ 5y ago
I haven't seen any evidence to suggest 30 years is a number of much importance for this. Most Esports scenes also aren't old enough to have older players as well. The only ones that I know of are Quake and Street Fighter. In Quake currently only 1 or 2 of the best mechanically gifted players in the world are under 30. In Street Fighter, there's a wide range of ages including younger players as well as players as old as 40+. The "god of execution" Sakonoko is 42 years old and is still winning major tournaments every once in a while. In Formula 1, Lewis Hamilton is likely on his way to yet another world championship at 36, edging it out over his 10 years younger contender.

If someone is an esports player, it would be hard to stay a professional (in most action games at least) at age 30 simply due to natural wear on your hands and reaction times getting slower.

tester756 5y ago

In CS:GO there were players around their 30s and were successful https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/Virtus.pro https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/Virtus.pro e.g >2016-07-30 1st S-Tier Offline ELEAGUE ELEAGUE Season 1 2 : 0 Fnatic $400,000

mym1990 5y ago

This doesn't really make sense. Athletes in many sports are playing way past their 'prime' these days and they are wearing out much more than just their hands. Consistently good reaction times are a result of consistent training. Plenty of older baseball/tennis players have superhuman reaction times. I would see mental fatigue and boredom as being the major hurdle to playing esports on a professional level at an older age. No matter how fun it started as, 10+ years of looking at the same thing over and over has got to be soul sucking.

KingMachiavelli 5y ago
In physical sports the barrier to entry is very high. Even if you have good reaction time, high strength, etc. you will still need 1000s of hours of practice from a very young age to excel. In e-sports there's millions of people practicing every day and the built in ranking system can filter that down to the current top 0.1%. At this point branching out into actual competitions is not nearly as difficult as getting noticed by a NBA, NFL, etc. recruiter. It does depend on the Game. CSGO players play a very limited number of maps so pure reaction time and hand-eye coordination is often the deciding factor. Strategy games like LoL and softer FPS games like Fortnite are less dependent on physical talent.
- mym1990 5y ago
  The ranking system in physical and mental sports is essentially the same, it comes down to: 'can you beat or compete with X person consistently', and just for context...there were over a million high school football players participating in 2019, and this is mostly in organized play. If I want to get noticed in League, I have to grind a queue for ungodly amount of hours to get to a respectable ranking and then solicit myself to teams for proper team based competition...good luck with all that.
blahblah123456 5y ago
It's counterintuitive, but if you look at eSports players, the prime years are much lower (both the start and the end). You do see 16 year olds at the top but you never see 30 year olds. It feels like the prime is really 16-25. Reaction times in traditional sports are not as important, and hands are one of the worst things to wear out. More parts != more wear out. There's a reason why there are (general) physical therapists and physical therapists who specialize in hands. Hands are incredibly complex and soft tissue injuries heal very poorly due to lack of blood supply. I doubt the boredom thing is that different for sports vs eSports. At least with eSports the game is changing due to patches. With sports, the game itself hardly changes. For citation: see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0094215 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... you can see reaction time starts to drop off rapidly starting at age 25
- tester756 5y ago
  > You do see 16 year olds at the top but you never see 30 year olds. In CS:GO there were players around their 30s and were successful https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/Virtus.pro https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/Virtus.pro e.g >2016-07-30 1st S-Tier Offline ELEAGUE ELEAGUE Season 1 2 : 0 Fnatic $400,000
- jackothy 5y ago
  Re: Boredom eSports players spend a lot more time playing than normal athletes. You can only be physically active for a few hours per day. eSports players can do a lot more, like tyler1 who consistently streams for 10+ hours 5 days a week. Normal athletes arguably also get more variation. Football players don't play back to back football matches all day every day, they practice and improve in a lot of other ways. They also get more variation due to traveling around to play away games.
- mym1990 5y ago
  Its not really counterintuitive, the prime years are lower because true physical development in physical sports starts at a later age, everything up to that point is related to building a physical foundation for movement, building an interest in the sport, and laying groundwork for proper mechanics. There is also societal stigma from playing video games seriously past early 20s(well atleast 5-10+ years ago, but with Twitch and things it is now way more accceptable). "Reaction times in traditional sports are not as important" is laughable.
aidenn0 5y ago
1. Most professional athletes have very short careers. 2. The athletes who do play "past their prime" are usually making up for reduced physical acuity with other skills (e.g. you don't see very many baseball players hit triples after 30). 3. Players with long careers invest a huge amount of time in conditioning, and to a hard-to-measure degree, PEDs. 4. I don't really follow eSports; If someone played Starcraft competitively 20 years ago, are they still playing SC, or do they switch to something else like LoL? What's the typical competitive "lifetime" of a game? If you picked up game-specific skills, it might be harder to apply #2 when the game du-jour changes. 5. As a slight nitpick to the whole conversation, my understanding is that "reaction time" is perhaps a misnomer; the drop in reaction time with age for performing a simple activity appears to be relatively minor, but more complex activities (including habitual ones like driving), which suggests that the performance decline is in selecting and/or executing the proper response to a stimuli rather than what we think of as pure "reaction time"

Drew_ 5y ago

I haven't seen any evidence to suggest 30 years is a number of much importance for this. Most Esports scenes also aren't old enough to have older players as well. The only ones that I know of are Quake and Street Fighter. In Quake currently only 1 or 2 of the best mechanically gifted players in the world are under 30. In Street Fighter, there's a wide range of ages including younger players as well as players as old as 40+. The "god of execution" Sakonoko is 42 years old and is still winning major tournaments every once in a while. In Formula 1, Lewis Hamilton is likely on his way to yet another world championship at 36, edging it out over his 10 years younger contender.