First, again, sorry about the missed update. I went to long into the night (morning) and couldn't muster the energy to put anything up. I also have a pounding headache to show for it, so I guess that's my punishment.
Anyway, here's tonight's topic: setup. It's different for everyone, and comes from both the monetary limitations and the actual gaming preferences, so mine and yours and the pros' are going to be drastically different. I'll start with my own setup and expand onto my thoughts on what a prime setup should be for various people. I'll stick to the PC for today, and I might go into consoles tomorrow.
First, my rig. Don't shoot me, but it's nothing spectacular. At all. I run a two year old MacBook Pro with an NVidia 8600 GT graphics card and 2 gigs of ram. I don't just play with the stock keyboard and screen and mouse. I'm not a masochist. For a screen I use a 19 inch, 720p Insignia through the attached HDMI port, and for my purposes, it's more than I could ever need, right now. I have a Logitech Pro 2000 wireless keyboard and mouse, which serve me rather well unless the connection isn't great, as it can be with all the stuff on my desk. I now have Turtle Beach PX21 headphones, which I'll be reviewing once I get a few weeks of gameplay with them. A couple early dings on them, however, are that they are not circumaural, but instead sit within the lobe of the ear. Granted, the padding is very good, so no real pain yet, but we'll see. Also, there is an annoying feedback from the microphone which I think is there for gaming, since this is a gaming headset, not a casual listening headset. I use a Staples mousepad with puppies on it, which make me smile and serves my current purposes. For internet I have Comcast cable at 2 Mbs through an Airport Extreme Router and ethernet cable. I have the capability, therefore, to run any PC game on the market, albeit the newer ones run at low settings. I'm not choosey, so I don't really mind. I want to upgrade, but funds aren't there. I'm working on that.
For the casual gamer, or the guy who plays RPGs for a couple hours a week, maybe a little more, the setup I described above is probably more than enough. In fact, even less would probably do. Go to Best Buy and pick up a stock PC and you'd probably do just fine for the RPGs and casual games out there.
For the enthusiast, which I myself quickly crawl towards, more oomph is in order. A newer NVidia or ATi graphics card, say in the 280 GT or 5500 series, respectively, is probably sufficient. The prices on those cards is at all time lows, so getting your hands on a card to last a few years is easy. 720p screens are the way to go, since the human eye has trouble discerning between it and 1080p resolution except at very large screen sizes. The keyboard/mouse I use is probably not really a good choice, since it's exceedingly cheap and the signal likes to flake at the end of long sessions. Wired keyboards and mice are the way to go, if you can find a way to keep them untangled from all the other cords that go with the various tech devices for a gaming setup.
For the pro, I can only imaging that everything is at the very top of the line, from $100 dollar mice and keyboards to mousepads, graphics cards and screens and headsets. Without the skill-set, time or wish to go into competitive gaming, there's not much I can say. That isn't mentioning that these guys get a lot of their stuff for free from their sponsors, so money isn't that big an issue. What I can be assured of though, is that setups like these are upwards of $10,000 dollars or more, and that doesn't count the countless hours spent using the equipment, the constant upgrades and cost of transportation, food and living.
Whew. I'm going to bed now.
Thanks for reading,
Xiant
Showing posts with label Professional. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Professional. Show all posts
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Sunday, July 18, 2010
The Pros are Human
This is something I myself have never experienced, having no YouTube name, but I've heard quite a bit about. When we(the masses) watch high level video gameplay on the internet, our first instinct is, wrongly, that the results we see are the norm. A high K/D in a few games of CoD, BC2, MoH, TF2, anything where that kind of data makes an appearance, means, at first glance, that these are games that happen all the time. These YouTube commentators always, always, go 75/2 in MW2, 30/3 in BC2, 43/1 in MoH. It's routine for them and there is no frustration involved in getting these games. They are just naturally good and everyone who thinks they do anything less than 10.0 K/D is just a noob with no skills.
It isn't true, no matter what your thoughts on K/D, no one goes for any period of time without something to grow frustrated about. No one has a K/D of 30 all the time. If you look at the stats these very commentators post on their pages, the answers are right there, it's just that no one looks. Would SeaNanners have a measely 5.0 K/D if he always went 30/2? Would Sandy Ravage, who I'll talk about shortly, have a 3.20 CoD4 /3.50 MW2 (XBox 360) or 4.10 (PS3) K/D if those 78/4 gameplays he posts happened every night in almost all the games he played? No, it would be much higher.
On the topic of Sandy Ravage, I watched his live stream today, and I can say that he is just like the rest of us. Not every game is a complete domination (regardless of gametype). He died, he used Painkiller, he had trouble and he quit when he became frustrated with the game or someone in it. Granted, he did win quite a bit of the games he joined, but not all of them. Some you simply can't win, having joined too late. Quite a few of the games too were close calls, with only a point or two between victory and defeat, and Mr. Ravage spent a fair amount of time either looking for players or dying. It wasn't the AC130 fest or the Spas-12 fest that he puts up on YouTube. The reason is simple, and the real point of tonight's blog.
These players are human. They make mistakes, they have bad days, bad rounds and bad weeks. SeaNanners stated in one of his videos that he simply became to angry to continue, which for many of his viewers is all but inconceivable. But the emotions are there, the mistakes are there. No man is a god at anything. These people are good at what they do, sometimes even great or exceptional, but they are not perfect. Ask any of them about going negative. They will have stories for you. Oh, the stories they will tell.
And that leads to the title of the post: the Pros. Yes, what they can do is amazing, and what they show off at tournaments is beyond the ken of 99.9% of regular players. The reason? These guys practice, and they do it a lot. They don't go into public matches, generally, keeping to the competitive circuit as much as possible, keeping their skills sharp by playing against equal or better players and learning, yes learning, from them. Even the best players always learn as they continue playing. A new tactic on how to approach an old enemy, a new technique to surprise an unexacting foe, a new way to use the environment, itself known to a pixel, to the betterment of the game.
This does, of course, lead the the question of frag videos and top ten/five videos. Why aren't there more of them put out? The answer to this is simple as well: those moments are rare at best. Sure kills like those you see on PLDX might be somewhat regular, but the chains of kills, the exterminations, the total destruction is something that happens once in a while, not every day for any single player. The events must line up in just the right order at just the right time and that player must have just the right setting for his epic action.
All this, of course, comes with experience. In established games like Halo 3 or CoD4 or MW2 or TF2, where most maps played competitively are well known and well explored with known troop routes and objective locations and weapon drops times (down to the second), you'll get some really good stuff. That's because the players know what to expect and they play, both sides, knowing exactly what will happen. They've done it before. Many, many times.
One last thing to remember is that every single gamer that has ever lived has been a noob at some point. No human who ever lived jumped into a competitive game with no prior experience with any sort of gaming apparatus and completely owned, that I know of. Any stories I hear I will not believe, simply because of the way humans are. We must learn before we can grow. No human looked at a book at could read at a college level. No musician never heard music and could simply play. Not even Mozart. He copied his sister after listening and watching, not completely cold. The same goes for competitive gamers. They don't just head into Counter Strike or whatever and start dominating. There is always a learning curve that, once surmounted, allows for great feats.
And still, no one does perfect or even excellent at every game. It simply isn't possible.
Thanks for reading,
Xiant
It isn't true, no matter what your thoughts on K/D, no one goes for any period of time without something to grow frustrated about. No one has a K/D of 30 all the time. If you look at the stats these very commentators post on their pages, the answers are right there, it's just that no one looks. Would SeaNanners have a measely 5.0 K/D if he always went 30/2? Would Sandy Ravage, who I'll talk about shortly, have a 3.20 CoD4 /3.50 MW2 (XBox 360) or 4.10 (PS3) K/D if those 78/4 gameplays he posts happened every night in almost all the games he played? No, it would be much higher.
On the topic of Sandy Ravage, I watched his live stream today, and I can say that he is just like the rest of us. Not every game is a complete domination (regardless of gametype). He died, he used Painkiller, he had trouble and he quit when he became frustrated with the game or someone in it. Granted, he did win quite a bit of the games he joined, but not all of them. Some you simply can't win, having joined too late. Quite a few of the games too were close calls, with only a point or two between victory and defeat, and Mr. Ravage spent a fair amount of time either looking for players or dying. It wasn't the AC130 fest or the Spas-12 fest that he puts up on YouTube. The reason is simple, and the real point of tonight's blog.
These players are human. They make mistakes, they have bad days, bad rounds and bad weeks. SeaNanners stated in one of his videos that he simply became to angry to continue, which for many of his viewers is all but inconceivable. But the emotions are there, the mistakes are there. No man is a god at anything. These people are good at what they do, sometimes even great or exceptional, but they are not perfect. Ask any of them about going negative. They will have stories for you. Oh, the stories they will tell.
And that leads to the title of the post: the Pros. Yes, what they can do is amazing, and what they show off at tournaments is beyond the ken of 99.9% of regular players. The reason? These guys practice, and they do it a lot. They don't go into public matches, generally, keeping to the competitive circuit as much as possible, keeping their skills sharp by playing against equal or better players and learning, yes learning, from them. Even the best players always learn as they continue playing. A new tactic on how to approach an old enemy, a new technique to surprise an unexacting foe, a new way to use the environment, itself known to a pixel, to the betterment of the game.
This does, of course, lead the the question of frag videos and top ten/five videos. Why aren't there more of them put out? The answer to this is simple as well: those moments are rare at best. Sure kills like those you see on PLDX might be somewhat regular, but the chains of kills, the exterminations, the total destruction is something that happens once in a while, not every day for any single player. The events must line up in just the right order at just the right time and that player must have just the right setting for his epic action.
All this, of course, comes with experience. In established games like Halo 3 or CoD4 or MW2 or TF2, where most maps played competitively are well known and well explored with known troop routes and objective locations and weapon drops times (down to the second), you'll get some really good stuff. That's because the players know what to expect and they play, both sides, knowing exactly what will happen. They've done it before. Many, many times.
One last thing to remember is that every single gamer that has ever lived has been a noob at some point. No human who ever lived jumped into a competitive game with no prior experience with any sort of gaming apparatus and completely owned, that I know of. Any stories I hear I will not believe, simply because of the way humans are. We must learn before we can grow. No human looked at a book at could read at a college level. No musician never heard music and could simply play. Not even Mozart. He copied his sister after listening and watching, not completely cold. The same goes for competitive gamers. They don't just head into Counter Strike or whatever and start dominating. There is always a learning curve that, once surmounted, allows for great feats.
And still, no one does perfect or even excellent at every game. It simply isn't possible.
Thanks for reading,
Xiant
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