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Memfis

Older players, how did your skills change with time?

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34 and have been playing since the beginning. I mainly only play SP or Coop but always on UV even for slaughter-maps. I don't notice any skill reduction yet. For online competitive games, I still play Arma and people call me cheater. I take that as a compliment, since I have never cheated in online games. About 8 years ago I was still playing a lot of Tactical Ops MP and was also considered one of the better skilled players, since many voted me out as cheater :) So far skills have increased.

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35 and playing doom since 1994.

It is not my skills that chnaged, but the gameplay required to beat the levels.

I always preferred things like "random combats", "exploration" and so on but now gameplay is focusing on "perfectly orchestrated battles".

Maybe it is only me getting old.

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Doomkid said:

What country do you hail from? I live in Australia but would love to have a Choco Doom DM with -extratics and -dup 2 so I can up that loss count to 3 ;)


That sucks. You guys are unlucky in Australia. I'm in Canada and I have 300 pings on American servers. My ADSL2+ is garbage. The fiber that goes out of my town is saturated.

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I have definitely gotten better at the game compared to when I was a kid. In my very earliest Doom playing, I used a Gravis joystick, which to this day I can't comprehend why I used. Soon after that, I used the keyboard only without strafing, which of course doesn't really help in dodging. It wasn't until I accepted keyboard and mouse as a viable control method thanks to UT that I started getting better. ZDoom was the first engine I used this method in, and that helped me get a lot better. Since then, it's just been a matter of playing through various different wads over the years to hone the skills. I'm still not particularly great at difficult encounters, but anything on the more lax side I can deal with without too much trouble.

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Bashe said:


I have one too with a trigger (an another one with fewer buttons) and Doom95 worked great with joysticks. It supported analog movement.

Did your joystick used a connector like in your picture or a midi port like this?

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axdoom1 said:

That sucks. You guys are unlucky in Australia. I'm in Canada and I have 300 pings on American servers. My ADSL2+ is garbage. The fiber that goes out of my town is saturated.

Damn, that blows. I'm just taking the piss with my shit talking, if our internets were better I genuinely would love a true OS DM!

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One method of increasing skill that I was really into for awhile (and might revive soon, as it's a lot of fun) is seeing how far I can get on a single life in Final Doom PSX. Without an in-level save system, and the pre-thumbstick controls, it's quite the challenge. I eventually got good enough on UV to make it to about the 12th or 13th map without dying once.

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I remember when I was a kid , I hit ENTER every time when playing Doom, so I'm pretty sure I was playing in HMP. I did die at the 1st try itself though..

Right now as a teenager, I am exceling in UV and Nightmare. I had never touched Too Young to Die in days. But anyway, it's Doom, no matter which difficulty you play it in.

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axdoom1 said:

I have one too with a trigger (an another one with fewer buttons) and Doom95 worked great with joysticks. It supported analog movement.

Did your joystick used a connector like in your picture or a midi port like this?

I'm pretty sure they used a midi port. I just now realized that the one I posted a picture of looks like it has a Sega Genesis/Atari 2600 end to it, but the two that I had, which were the pictured one and the one with the trigger like you're talking about, had serial-like ends.

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I'm struggling more with UV than I used to, but that's more likely to be a reflection of how wads have gotten harder over the years (enter slaughtermaps, for instance).

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Not sure if being 28 counts as older, but my skills have improved dramatically over the last two years: I used to barely be able to survive Thy Flesh Consumed on UV with saves, but now I can easily beat any of its levels from pistol start with no saves, or do a no-death-no-save UV episode run.

While I'm not very good at not dying (I'm more of a trial and error guy), I would never go below UV for any WAD, and I only reload in case of actual death, even if I have 1% of health left.

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For people struggling with Doom wads today, best piece of advice I can give is to treat every situation like you have 1% health. In dangerous situations you are much more likely to stay alive if you put all your focus into not touching those fireballs and rounding up all your monsters into one big mass so you have one target to shoot.

A lot of players ive watched that struggle with harder wads seem to put too much emphasis in getting as many shots in and killing all the monsters as fast as possible. The direction you are facing while aiming at your target dictates what direction you strafe in so try less to focus on shooting and more on not getting hurt.

The best practice you can do for yourself for slaughtermaps is to play wads and try to hangout in a room with monsters as long as you can without killing them. The longer you can cope with monsters without getting hurt, the better you will be at staying alive in tough situations

Also don't ever underestimate the power of infighting. Getting monsters to fight saves ammo, kills monsters faster, and buys you some time to escape from a nasty situation while they are distracted. Get as many monsters to do your work for you so you can stay alive. This is also important for same species monsters. Big group of hell knights? Get their fireballs to hit each other and now there is less fireballs for you to dodge.

The new Doom game promoted always running, standing still will kill you. This is not entirely true for regular doom. Many times, small calculated movements are much more efficient than running full speed all the time.

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axdoom1 said:

I don't want everyone to quit playing online only because they all get their asses kicked by a single person.

axdoom1 said:

BTW, to impress you even more, I kicked the ass of people playing with a mouse and I was playing keyboard only. I kicked ass so much, nobody wanted to play with me because they always lost. Getting you ass kicked by someone who plays keyboard only is hard on the moral.


The only thing impressing me is how arrogant you sound.

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My skill at doom is improved with the time. For demanding difficulty modern wads I imagine you are referring to Sunlust/Stardate20x6 etc. I have not played them yet so I do not know.

@Soundblock I think your todeath.wad is one of your most difficult maps higher than many of the wads that we see today.

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Dragonfly said:

The only thing impressing me is how arrogant you sound.

I am not an arrogant person.

The first thing you quoted is obviously a joke, but the second thing you quoted is true.

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It's rather natural that skills improve over the time. It's hard to determine as I haven't "benchmarked" my skills in particular. But having beaten UD, D2 and D64 in UV with pistol start and no saves throughout is something I'm proud of ;) After all, we play games to have fun, don't we?

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Many pwads becomes easier. And I predicted many traps, because most authors place them in obvious places. Also know how to retreat to another safe place when monsters starts surround me.

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I have no idea because i always use TAS tools... Probably my skills were improved because i can beat some hard maps.

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DoomGater said:

I truely believe only this part of your post.


There is a reason why, you know... ;-)

axdoom1 said:

I always win.

axdoom1 said:

I always win.


Now they only want to play cooperative.

I win so much, I am sick and tired of winning.

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Define 'older'.

I have pretty much hit my limit when it comes to skill. Sure I'm better than 10 years ago but despite playing DOOM all my life I'm nowhere near as good as demo recorders for instance.

I used to be proud that I could finish Deus Vult 1/2 maps on UV without dying, or going through Unloved with no deaths but nowadays that stuff apparently is childs play to many people. When you look at something like Stardate 20X7, I could only finish the first level on UV without dying, despite hours of practice on the second one. I just can't do it.

Subsequently I'm only playing on HMP now (unless I know a WAD is not super hard) because I can't be bothered to waste hours restarting each fight.

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Well, I am especially curious about players that are 40+ or so, but I guess not many users would respond if I specified that. I'll have to bump this thread in around 20 years and see what the same people say.

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I'm 74 -- been playing Doom stuff since '94. Always play UV, don't care much for the slaughter maps. My favorite mapper is Lainos. I guess my reflexes have slowed a tad over the years but I still keep on truckin'!

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I'm 39 and I've been playing Doom regularly since 1994. If anything, my skills are currently as good as they've ever been. I haven't noticed any difference for a number of years. I always play in UV and very rarely think the fight isn't fair. A few months ago I clocked both Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 with greater ease than when I played them both a few years ago. Levels that I struggled on before were not so hard this time around.

When I started playing Doom I was a keyboard-only player, like most other people. That was a bit of a handicap. Years later when I was Dooming with a WASD and freelook mouse configuration, my skills naturally improved. I think that's also why the original levels aren't as hard as we remembered.

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I actually have gotten considerably better as I have gotten older, I think. I would be the butt of everyone's deathmatch in say 1997 playing original doom, but now I consistently steamroll just about everyone I run into in multiplayer online games like bonk.io or just getting my scores on the top scores in games like you'll find on newgrounds or armorgames. I can go back and play the old video games I grew up with, like for the atari 2600, and they're a joke. Like Berserk and Asteroids or Space Invaders, I'll just never lose a life and I'll just keep going and going until I feel like quitting and it's just boring. Then when I revisit games in the era after that, like recently with Ghostbusters for the sega master system, and I just rammed through the whole game easily, and was left wondering why it ever gave me any difficulty at all. I recently visited my 1st cousin who has 2 kids, both roughly 30 years younger than me, one I think is about 12 and the other about 15, they have an xbox one and one of the more recent mortal kombat games, and it was just cruel for me to play them even though I had never played that particular game and didn't know any of their special moves (though I have a long history with mk starting from the original from 1993), they just couldn't do a thing against me.

As for doom itself, that has a special place in my heart and I sometimes revisit it as well, but I have to say that the way to win the levels and fight the monsters is just a little more clear to me. I remember when I played doom originally, I would save and load an awful lot, but I can clear through any of them in doom 1 except that 4th one in ultra violence mode easily, and at very least I can get through half the levels of doom 2 before I am likely to fail but then I never really took the time to familiarize myself with all the later levels on that, and that is about the point where I lose interest, it's just too long to play in one sitting. I played all the way through doom 3 (for the original xbox) on skill level 2 in one sitting once.

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