Where do the best FPS players reside?

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erf

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Where do the best FPS players reside?

I've been playing a ton of Quake Live and it seems that the toughest servers are in Texas and Cali. I'm not saying there aren't skilled players in all regions of the United States, but that perhaps because of regional culture, interest in the genre, etc, that certain areas may be more prone to house skilled players.

Anyone else noticed this trend?
 
The best teams worldwide tend to come from Scandinavia, Brazil, and S.Korea. Comparative skill wise american players take a back seat with some minor exceptions.
 
Pings will come into play with some of this. European/Asian players wouldn't do so well on US servers, because of the latency gained. So players will tend to do much better in their local areas (as I find at late night with some games where all the servers active are empty or with 200+ pings :(). I long for the day where the whole internet has 1ms pings.

IDs headquaters are in Texas however. :D
 
piscian18 said:
The best teams worldwide tend to come from Scandinavia, Brazil, and S.Korea. Comparative skill wise american players take a back seat with some minor exceptions.
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Yeah, I "liked" Quake Live on FB and it seemed a lot of the players that were winning tournaments and such were European. I was more referring to public servers in the US. I know once you start talking international it changes. :D
 
In my old clan, we had players from all over the US and even one guy from Australia. To keep it fair we always had our servers in Dallas. Although, one of our best players lived in Texas, so that gave him a slight advantage. Now, I'm playing Homefront with a new clan from the UK. I ping about 200 on average to their server and let me tell you I dont even want to look at my KD anymore. But, I'd have to say, there are amazing players all over the world. Personally, I think Cali players are the best. LOL
 
In terms of video games I would say Counterstrike and Quake have been the two most influential fps games in producing very good fps players and helping esports.

In terms of regions there are a lot. I think just about everywhere in America you can find a lot of good fps players, but specifically I always here a lot of cool things happening, or good players coming from Dallas (I have never been there before). If you look at the best players from counterstrike and Quake most of them come from either America or Europe. You dont see very many asians - I suppose they like to stick to their RTS games.
 
Cannot say I have ever noticed this. I have gamed with plenty of Texans, and I would not say they were omg best gamer ever.
 
Texas is around the middle of the USA, roughtly speaking.

They get better latency/host advantage, especially since CoD (just pulling an example - it doesn't apply here) autoselects those in the geographic center of a lobby most often... just what I have noticed so far.
 
Due to things like population size and relative locations, you will probably play with more people from California and Texas. So even if their per capita skill level were the same, they'd have more skilled players.
 
jeremyshaw said:
Texas is around the middle of the USA, roughtly speaking.

They get better latency/host advantage, especially since CoD (just pulling an example - it doesn't apply here) autoselects those in the geographic center of a lobby most often... just what I have noticed so far.
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Yeah, ping > skill any day.
 
Tekara said:
Where's the highest unemployment? I know I played online games *a lot* when I was between jobs; easiest way to not spend money and still stay somewhat social, and anything you do for long hours daily, you tend to get good at.
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what about talent and proper know how of using your setup ? I've seen many players gone way past the 1000hrs mark in l4d2 and they still suck HARD, plus they usually play with speakers (hence terrible situational awareness and bad reaction to game sounds or even voice chat ) and don't even know what FPS/lerp means.

I have a full time job + lots of weights and clean eating every frickin 3 hours ( currently at 196lbs 16% BF ) and i usually play much betten than other players in my country who are students / unemployed and often have TWICE the playtime i do, i even got called "cheater" yesterday because i joined a public CSS to test the cl_crosshairspreadscale cvar, it was a stupid guy who has played about 40hrs of CSS last week and 450hrs total, he said "yea right, cheater !!" because he got headshotted 3 times in a row and then he left the server :S

Trust me playtime doesn't always equate to skill, nor experience, not in this genre atleast, i've seen ppl with only 60hrs of playtime dominate others who have played more than 1.000.

Same thing happens to the pro scene once in a while, look @ fail-tality , he got his ass so many times handed to him by Vo0 in painkiller, Vo0 was mostly wasting his time playing WoW while fatality was practing 8 hours a day hardcore, only to get dominated by him in almost every single tourney.

There was a time i used to play a LOT because I had nothing else to do, i was mediocre at best due to pure ignorance and stubborn mindset, i forced my self to move the mouse with my left hand and keep my dominant hand in the arrow keys, used 50hz wireless mice, sometimes trying to play at 20fps because i thought it was cool to enable 4x AA on my GF3 while playing RTCW and to top if off i had stereo speakers next to the monitor because i had no idea that sound gets you kills until i bought my first x-fi in 2006.

PS : greece has unemployment rate of around 20%, and we have some of the worst fps players I ever seen, calling cheater everybody who's adjusting his netcode settings and "nerd/nolife" everybody who plays better than them, even if they have played a lot less than them. man am i proud of my country :p

Maybe there are fpss where the most experienced players clearly has the upper hand, like TFC / quake3 veterans who strafejump and rocket jump like second nature, but in recent, popular games like cod TF2 BC2 etc the skill gap isn't as huge, if it was they just wouldn't sell, ppl get frustrated these days way too easily imo, it's the new age of instant gratification, if a total noob can't get a single along his first 10 minutes of playtime, it's pretty much guaranteed that he will uninstall his game the very next day and call it crap/unbalanced/mindless etc.

Arena shooters please come back !!!
 
Why.. on this char I'm sitting on. J/k :p

It really boils down to who can put down hours and have some talent to push them over the top.
 
The FPS game players? Counterstrike likely. Quake Live is producing some impressive players , but geographically probably South Korea.

I hope that with the big FPS games coming out this winter we'll get some more competitive choices.
 
With your mom...

Seriously how the f is anyone suppossed to answer this? Actually, I bet some Finnish University actually made a study on it :rolleyes:
 
Europe and in recent years Eastern europeans have really shown to be top class fps players, sweden seems to produce consistently top fps players.

Why are people mentioning korea in this thread? Sure they dominate RTS, but seem lacking when it comes to fps.
 
Carl said:
Europe and in recent years Eastern europeans have really shown to be top class fps players, sweden seems to produce consistently top fps players.

Why are people mentioning korea in this thread? Sure they dominate RTS, but seem lacking when it comes to fps.
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It's hard to judge Korea when it comes to FPS, because they mostly play their own games. The Korean CS community is relatively small, meanwhile the free alternative Sudden Attack has a much bigger player base, but it's only of Koreans (you need a Korean SSN to get an account.) Given the things that make Koreans successful at RTS games, they would probably be extremely successful at FPS games if they were actually playing the same games as us.

As for the OP's question, in the US it's Texas and California. Texas in particular, largely because Quake and CS grew out of there, and they had the most/best LAN centers and tournaments to grow a community/infrastructure.
 
You might as well of asked, "What part of the US has the bigger penis size?"
 
Don't even mention Koreans in fps its pretty laughable. RTS sure, FPS Europeans take the cake.
 
Alchemic said:
No, it doesn't. Ping is absolute. The best players in the world only play single player.
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No, ping is relative. A 50 or 100 ping difference is easily be overcome by skill provided the absolute ping is still within the playable range. If my ping is 100 and yours is 200, I do have an advantage, but if you are more skilled than me by enough of a margin, you can still win. If the ping margin gets too wide, then yes, no amount of skill can overcome it.

If the best only play SP, then how do we know they are the best?
 
There is no places that have more than others. its pretty even and random.

Carl said:
Europe and in recent years Eastern europeans have really shown to be top class fps players, sweden seems to produce consistently top fps players.

Why are people mentioning korea in this thread? Sure they dominate RTS, but seem lacking when it comes to fps.
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The only reason other countries have better players than we do is because they arent doing it for the popularity and money.
 
German Muscle said:
There is no places that have more than others. its pretty even and random.



The only reason other countries have better players than we do is because they arent doing it for the popularity and money.
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That's not entirely true. I played a ton of competitive Quake and Unreal Tournament through the series, was part of some teams and even went to some major LANS. I played against people that WCG and ESWC invites.

The problem is that playing online, is nothing like playing on LAN. The internet in the US sucks a dick since it's all about corporations raping the crap out of consumers, go go free markets. This sucks when picking a place for the server. At the time you had Chicago or Texas as your choices for a server where most people could ping OK to, but it was still nothing like playing on LAN. You were pretty much royally f'd.

In Europe the internet isn't just about profit mongering capitalists. So it is very easy to play there among the best players and have connections that while not as good as LAN, roughly mimic it.

When it comes down to it, our internet just blows gigantic donkey ass when it comes to being suitable for anything.

Also gaming from a LAN cafe vs gaming from your home is different in Europe and even Korea or parts of Asia. This also helps since people are constantly playing in similar scenes to actual competition, many people simply spend hours at LAN cafes.

The US used to have really good and even top Quake players. But as Europe has kicked our ass silly in internet backbone, we've been left in the dust. It's no shocker that top European players tend to hail from places where the internet is subsidized by the government and a fucking ton better than how it is here.
 
sd11 said:
That's not entirely true. I played a ton of competitive Quake and Unreal Tournament through the series, was part of some teams and even went to some major LANS. I played against people that WCG and ESWC invites.

The problem is that playing online, is nothing like playing on LAN. The internet in the US sucks a dick since it's all about corporations raping the crap out of consumers, go go free markets. This sucks when picking a place for the server. At the time you had Chicago or Texas as your choices for a server where most people could ping OK to, but it was still nothing like playing on LAN. You were pretty much royally f'd.

In Europe the internet isn't just about profit mongering capitalists. So it is very easy to play there among the best players and have connections that while not as good as LAN, roughly mimic it.

When it comes down to it, our internet just blows gigantic donkey ass when it comes to being suitable for anything.

Also gaming from a LAN cafe vs gaming from your home is different in Europe and even Korea or parts of Asia. This also helps since people are constantly playing in similar scenes to actual competition, many people simply spend hours at LAN cafes.

The US used to have really good and even top Quake players. But as Europe has kicked our ass silly in internet backbone, we've been left in the dust. It's no shocker that top European players tend to hail from places where the internet is subsidized by the government and a fucking ton better than how it is here.
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So its not that other countries take it way more seriously but that USAs internet isnt as good? Are you high?

Are you that same person who blames your issues on the server?
 
German Muscle said:
So its not that other countries take it way more seriously but that USAs internet isnt as good? Are you high?

Are you that same person who blames your issues on the server?
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Other countries take it more seriously as well, but that's only part of the issue.

When I was playing Quake and UT we had to get a server in Chicago, or Texas. The entire competitive community did. It still sucked though, you'd have pings in the teens 20s if you were lucky but they could go as high as 40 or 50. 20 already plays no where near close to LAN settings, its mush.

Compared to teams in Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany... those guys had single digit pings to their clan servers which is really close to LAN settings and a plethora of Cyber Cafes that people could go to and play at.

And while there were a slew of US players that took the games seriously, at the end of the day the Euros from the nations that win were used to playing on LAN and the game properly and the Americans ended up shelling out for LAN housing and trying to catch up at the end of the day, and that never works.

Don't kid yourself that our internet issues are inherently a problem when it comes to high level FPS play.

We simply lack the sort of infrastructure for this work properly.
 
sd11 said:
Other countries take it more seriously as well, but that's only part of the issue.

When I was playing Quake and UT we had to get a server in Chicago, or Texas. The entire competitive community did. It still sucked though, you'd have pings in the teens 20s if you were lucky but they could go as high as 40 or 50. 20 already plays no where near close to LAN settings, its mush.

Compared to teams in Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany... those guys had single digit pings to their clan servers which is really close to LAN settings and a plethora of Cyber Cafes that people could go to and play at.

And while there were a slew of US players that took the games seriously, at the end of the day the Euros from the nations that win were used to playing on LAN and the game properly and the Americans ended up shelling out for LAN housing and trying to catch up at the end of the day, and that never works.

Don't kid yourself that our internet issues are inherently a problem when it comes to high level FPS play.

We simply lack the sort of infrastructure for this work properly.
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Just watched a german team playing in the quals most of them had 50 pings with the highest was 70. I ping 18 to Chicago and 40 to Dallas and im in Kentucky.
 
German Muscle said:
Just watched a german team playing in the quals most of them had 50 pings with the highest was 70. I ping 18 to Chicago and 40 to Dallas and im in Kentucky.
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Qualis for what? Nordic FPS players have always held a huge advantage in environment for gaming, not only because it's more culturally accepted and there's more/better LAN centers and communities, but also because home internet is vastly superior in all of those countries. They really do play with a LAN ping most of the time for CS.

There's simply too much stigma around gaming in the US and the communities/players aren't centralized enough. We're spread too far apart.
 
Jaerb4 said:
Qualis for what? Nordic FPS players have always held a huge advantage in environment for gaming, not only because it's more culturally accepted and there's more/better LAN centers and communities, but also because home internet is vastly superior in all of those countries. They really do play with a LAN ping most of the time for CS.

There's simply too much stigma around gaming in the US and the communities/players aren't centralized enough. We're spread too far apart.
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ESWC
 
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