If you’ve tried to improve but stopped somewhere along the way, why?
US West timezone does terrible things for my participation. At one point I did try really hard to git gud, but there was a more-than-mild case of technique gatekeeping, and my actual progress slowed to a halt.
Plus, once my progress did halt, I got about a year and a half of flaming and shaming from a whole lot of people, and balance took the piss in the meantime, so now I either cheese, fight when I know I'm winning, or fight for some meme I find funny. I fought with arbies and hellfires last meta and a full 2.0 rabisu this meta, I 1vHowever-Many the people I think I can win against, and I 1v1 shotgun starfliers, or bigger caps in my hatchet, or in freighters. There's an ongoing meme in KNF discord about the number of times I killed Werdi due to some cheap trick, where Werdi regularly slams people who beat me with relative ease.
If I'm heavily outskilled, I might still fight it for the funnies. Comically insurmountable odds are comical and insurmountable. Every time I saw Wesker online I beelined in his general direction. If I'm simply reasonably outskilled, I won't fight. I just leave and log a functionally neutral character. Bunters have no reason to attack a Planetform, Loyola Group has no reason to attack a Zoner, and none of you guys fly nomads so I'm simply home free.
I can say I'm reasonably bad at PvP. I pick up a few cheap win tricks for each patch and that's about it. If I actually outskill you, I will assume you are either somewhere between new and inexperienced at the game, geriatric (in snub combat), or possessing an IQ akin to a lightly microwaved cherry tomato (in capship combat). Messing around with memes or hitting a terrible matchup (Heavy Bomber vs LF) don't count. And as much as I meme at Nyx an'em about "Nah, I'd win" and every other cocky and overconfident meme I can pull up, I usually approach fights expecting to lose. Winning in PvP tends to be a pleasant surprise and is usually just a lucky shot, or having a cheap trick or a tiny bit of knowledge over my opponent that would transform the fight into a relatively pathetic beatdown of me if they knew.
I don't think I'll ever improve again. Sometimes I feel the drive, but then I remember that actually getting better would mean squeezing technical information out of people who don't want to share it, and investing time and effort into perfecting it when I could just as easily figure out the next cheap and easy strategy and maintain roughly the same level I have for roughly 2 years now. Plus, I get to watch people I like get their skill level up and surpass me. It's like raising kids, but without the crippling monetary investment.
If I lose/quit this job I have, though, I did make a deal with the devil (@Antonio) to take the game super serious and invest myself in it, so we'll see. Maybe I will get back on the PvP grind and try to improve again.
I'll do something about my superiority complex when I cease to be superior.
"Whatever happened to catchin' a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whoopin and gettin' your shoes, coat, and your hat tooken?"
