gold. (8/15/2022)
As of today, I've hit Gold 1 in Valorant, which has been my goal for the past two years or so (it's off by just a few months). It's an amazing high, and I just feel great, but on some level I wonder if it was all worth it.
I think it's similar to wearing braces. In the moment, you hate them, and you hate the sores in your mouth and all the other inconveniences that they bring, but you sort of forget about them and as time passes on, you are glad that you did it, because on some level you've forgotten all of the suffering that you had to go through to get to the end result.
And playing Valorant these past two years hasn't exactly been all good. There have been countless nights where I've just stayed up, saying "can't end on a loss," only to end up in some of the worst mental states I've ever been in. And those were some truly terrible mental states. But, with these extreme lows, there have also been extreme highs, which just make Valorant all that more addicting a drug.
And a drug it is. I can definitely see how some people can get addicted to video games, and through this experience I am for sure staying away from other common drugs, because I can tell how those will affect me potentially. There are days when I just play Valorant from when I wake up to when I go to sleep, totaling like at least ten hours in just one day.
I'm competitive by nature, and that has had a huge effect on how addicted I've been to this game. At first, I wanted to get gold simply because that was around the point where you were better than 50% of people in the game. However, rank resets happened, and silver (which is where I was) ended up being just around where you are better than 50% of people who play the game. Theoretically, I could've just stopped there, but something about that shiny little gold medal just eluded me and I chased after it like a moth drawn to a flamy hell.
As time went on, the more depressed I got, because if I'm not even able to rank up after all this time and effort spent in the game, then how the hell will I ever rank up? I even started to think that there must be something in my genetic code that just makes me shit at video games, and that Valorant might just be something I'll never even be remotely decent at.
And I'll admit that I did get a lucky when finally ranking up to gold. There was a rank reset that added a new rank recently, Ascendant, and with that achieving higher ranks became even higher. According to this website (https://www.esportstales.com/valorant/rank-distribution-and-percentage-of-players-by-tier), Gold 1 was around the top 36% of players in May 2022, but it has now since dropped to the top 46% of players, as of July 2022. Realistically, I've probably stayed at around the same level relative to the population for some time.
I talk about how I'll never start playing League of Legends because I don't want my life to be consumed by it for a good two years at least. Somewhere in heaven God must be laughing because even though I've never laid a finger on League (sort of, I finished a tutorial), Riot games managed to still steal my soul through another game called Valorant.
It wasn't like I truly deserved to get better while I was playing the game, however. Having fun and getting better are not the same thing, and I definitely neglected doing some things that would have made me better. Watching videos, practicing instead of playing, and doing VOD reviews are all things that help, but I did not spend nearly as much time as I could've/should've done. It's the same thing here as with any other game (or even sport), but it wasn't really fun or exciting so I just didn't do it. Perhaps if I actually did do those things, and trusted the process, I could've gotten better faster and ranked up faster also.
It's stupid to measure your own self worth by a shiny medal in a stupid little video game, but getting Gold in Valorant has consumed my life for some time, and it feels amazing to reach that goal. Now that I've finished with this, however, I think I might change things up a little and go back to some games that are actually more fun, like Smash Ultimate or Melee or maybe even Rivals or Fortnite. There's a lot of options. Or, I might just keep playing Valorant, cuz it is fun, at least sometimes.
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