How to play FPS games if you’re over 30

I play Unreal Tournament 2004, Unreal Tournament 4, Quake Champions, and Fortnite. I&#x27;m 47 years old.<p>I&#x27;m by no means the greatest aim, but I can hold my own against semi-pro players, players that typically compete for money in tournaments. I&#x27;m often accused of being a bot.<p>some tips:<p>1. Good equipment. I have 240fps monitor and wired gaming mouse. I thought I had it good with 60fps monitor but it makes a world of difference to have more.<p>2. Good settings. Your mouse sensitivity should be very low. I move my arm about 14 inches left&#x2F;right to perform 180 rotation. It&#x27;s a lot of movement and a bit of a workout, but it&#x27;s the only way to make those flick headshots consistently. My mouse dps is set at 350, but really depends on your resolution also. My X resolution &#x2F; mouse DPS = 4.8 (1680&#x2F;350).<p>3. Good technique. Use your elbow and shoulder only for aiming. Do not use your wrist. Your wrist should always be straight.<p>4. Practice, of course! I play for about 20 minutes vs bots before I even go online.

Is this intended for people <i>new</i> to FPS? I&#x27;ve been playing since early teens, coming up on 32 now... still consistently in the top while playing the handful of shooters I play. Perhaps it&#x27;s because I&#x27;m not playing the twitch shooters though? I mostly play Battlefield.

I feel like this was conceived of and written by people who don&#x27;t play games.<p>There is a huge gap between progamers who practice against progamers with coaches pointing out where they are falling short vs playing against any random teen.<p>Having played games from childhood into adulthood I can confidently say I am a much better player now than at any point in my life whilst still playing less than I used to. If you were playing for the first time ever in your 30s then maybe the muscle memory and neural pathways aren&#x27;t there, but that&#x27;s just practice.

FPS games require skills along two primary axis. One is your physical skill. Can you click on heads very quickly and accurately? This skill has an age related peak. If you&#x27;re good at this alone, you can be successful playing these games.<p>Another axis is &quot;game sense&quot; which is a combination of map, player and meta knowledge. What are the most common routes taken by the enemy on this map? If we secure this site, what are the most likely avenues of approach the enemy will take? What weapons are my opponents most likely to buy based on the current phase of the match, and how can we respond? A player with better game sense can be competitive with people who are better at those twitch reactions by setting up scenarios which favor tactical advantage over raw shooting skill. Communication is key here as well. You have to be able to get your team onboard with setting up these scenarios. These skill do not decrease with age except at the extreme end.<p>Obviously the best players are great at both of these. That&#x27;s why many pro players have videos out there of them destroying people who are cheating with an aim bot. Their knowledge of the game and maps give them such an advantage they can overcome literally impossible reaction times from opponents. But being competent at either one will enable to you enjoy and be competitive in these games, especially if they use rank based match making to ensure you&#x27;re not getting matched against those super players. At the lower to mid rank of these games, you can see examples all over the place where individuals are competent at one of these dimensions, but there is almost always a glaring gap in the other. Whether it&#x27;s the person who can consistently get head shots but also runs themselves into unfavorable positions so they keep dying, to the people who are trying to coordinate and plan but lose almost every one on one engagement. As you get older you&#x27;ve got to rely more on that game sense than you can rely on your raw reactions and that puts a real upper age limit on pro level competition, but shouldn&#x27;t in any way prevent people from being able to compete in the pleb arenas.

All I want to know is where are the servers with the adults on them? I have enjoyed the more realistic FPS, but the kids running around everywhere just cussing at everyone or using aimbots kind of kills the fun.

One thing as an old gamer (who played many tournaments 30 years ago), tactics is really the key for good players. Map awareness, spawn points, lines of sight, travel directions, common congestion points. Learning weapon recoil of the game, learn what weapons have advantages. I probably won&#x27;t beat the younger reaction times, but I can still make the leaderboards, and still have fun.<p>The only thing that sucks, is most games are pay to win. I dont mind paying for simple xp boost and skins, but buying pay to win objects ruins the fun.

The article misses probably the easiest way to level up: Join a team. A four-stack is almost always gonna have a leg up on a team of randoms. Playing a game consistently, with the same squad, form group dynamics and strategies that are much more difficult to execute with a first time squad.

I playing lots of FPS, started with Wolfenstein 3d, today mostly TF2, I&#x27;m 50+, mostly no problem.

This article seems like pandering.<p>&gt; Medical studies suggest that reaction times peak at 24 and go downhill from there<p>But if this peak is by a few percent, then why would a 35 year old be bad at video games? Also, if reaction times peak at 24, why would we be playing &quot;superhuman teenagers&quot;, and not... superhuman early 20s?<p>Side note - I think in NHL hockey they see early 20s is the most athletic &#x2F; fast &#x2F; skilled time you&#x27;ll ever have, not surprised to see this here

I play hardcore FPS like From Hell or Insurgency because you die from a realistic amount of bullets, like one or two. You die more but you kill more too. I use a console because I think a controller is a great equalizer.

The thing I&#x27;ve noticed is that many games seem to depend on connection&#x2F;host, even more than in the past.<p>Halo Infinite is pretty much the poster child for being shot through walls and otherwise being a several frames out of sync or behind. No amount of reaction will fix that.<p>Am I wrong for expecting games to get better instead of worse over time? Seems like its all about loot boxes, subscriptions, add-ons these days. Actual game play, content, and consistency seems lacking.<p>Caveat: I&#x27;m mostly talking about the big popular ones.

I don&#x27;t need strategies, I&#x27;ve made my peace with the fact that I&#x27;ll never be good at FPS games. I just play to socialize with friends and press buttons.

I enjoy more slower paced FPS&#x27; these days that don&#x27;t require to maintain skill. Fini the Call of Duty and Battlefield days, these licenses have been milked long enough anyways. Even the newer licenses like PUBG or Overwatch require a regular time commitment to be any good at it (which make them enjoyable).<p>I find myself having a great time on Rising Storm 2: Vietnam[0], Insurgency: Sandstorm[1] or Hell Let Loose[2]. They tend to have more mature audiences and less skill grind, easier to just jump in a casual game once in a while without getting obliterated for a consecutive hour.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;418460&#x2F;Rising_Storm_2_Vietnam&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;418460&#x2F;Rising_Storm_2_Vie...</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;581320&#x2F;Insurgency_Sandstorm&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;581320&#x2F;Insurgency_Sandsto...</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;686810&#x2F;Hell_Let_Loose&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;686810&#x2F;Hell_Let_Loose&#x2F;</a>

I was born over 30 in terms of shooter skill, and my winning strategy has always been:<p>1. Play games where there are options that don&#x27;t lean heavily on precision&#x2F;twitch shooting. E.g. class-based&#x2F;hero shooters, or battle royales where positioning is more important and enemies are usually spotted at a distance.<p>2. Play with friends.

I play a lot of Rust and I&#x27;m 51. I do ok! One of the interesting things I found when playing FPS games on Roblox with my 11 year old is that a lot of players don&#x27;t know how to do the &quot;Dance&quot; so are always looking the wrong way in close encounters. Which just comes down to practice.

36 year old here, I&#x27;ve gotten Diamond in both Overwatch and Apex Legends and was an LEM CSGO player.<p>- I don&#x27;t think reaction times matter as much as people think it does, positioning, movement, and general crosshair placement matter a lot more as does map knowledge and situational awareness.<p>- Having good equipment is pretty standard these days, a good GPU and gaming mouse + keyboard is almost a must have as well as a 144hz or higher refresh rate monitor.<p>- The biggest constraint on my ability to beat the best at an older age actually just comes down to how much time I can dedicate to the games. With a full time job, a wife, and 2 kids, gaming will always just be a side hobby and something I do with the little free time I have so I basically just don&#x27;t practice as much as younger kids with more time. That&#x27;s what 99% of it boils down to.

Hiya, 40s COD player here, you&#x27;ll notice a lot of groupthink in shooters where players get very predictable. That is where your old head pattern recognition comes into play and you can exploit that play style. With proxy voice chat now, mind games get even crazier. I would use this very often in Rust to trick players into doing things, or faking them out with other tactics.<p>If you don&#x27;t want to play with those kinds of players there are tons of other shooters, Hell Let Loose and Squad come to mind as slower more team oriented games.

Yeah, people using all kinds of fancy hardware is kind of bad for me, since I generally play with a gamepad, cheap LCD tv as a monitor, and the sound turned off since everyone else is in bed (which means I can&#x27;t tell if someone is walking behind me). It&#x27;s hard to win super often when it&#x27;s just a test of who can aim quicker, I usually have a K&#x2F;D of 1&#x2F;3 or something like that. Which, I don&#x27;t care too much, but sometimes you get people swearing at you which is so juvenile.

To see many real life examples of gaming after 30 check out qhlan(.org), a QuakeWorld lan party going on right now in Stockholm. People under 30 are a rarity here!

I don&#x27;t trust any articles about how to play first-person shooters if they don&#x27;t say &quot;gibbed&quot;, &quot;fragged&quot;, or &quot;suck it down&quot;

I just play DayZ where everyone is from across the world with high latency and winning is more about planning and ambushing than quick twitch.

I believe the old quote was... &quot;Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance...&quot;

Why would you even bother to compete with teenagers in multiplayer FPS games in your 30&#x27;s?

Easy, play Doom eternal, get good, and then every other FPS feels slow as molasses.

tbh just play more reactive games like quake or csgo. Modern shooters don&#x27;t sharpen your neural patterns the way classic gameplay does. More time trigger time less wandering around a map.

Who&#x27;s in denial they&#x27;re nearing 60?

I miss Planetside original

But can you out-cheat them?

your reflexes stay mostly the same for your whole life

tl;dr: Use good equipment and proper thoughtful strategy.