>>57400428>>57400541I'm almost 30 at this point. I've never liked Smogon, but I played it anyway due to lack of any alternatives.
Now that I met goals I had and reached the heights of many different metagames, including the one that was most important to me, I feel satisfied with myself on the one hand and tired of the game on the other.
Playing so much Pokemon has made me realize how poorly designed the game is on a fundamental level, to the point that every match I go into I'm expecting any skill displayed on either side to be overridden and the outcome to be decided by RNG. No matter how good you get, you are always completely at the mercy of luck. This realization and seeing it play out again and again has caused many an aging player to mentally check out, to see loading up a battle as a chore and a bad habit to kick.
I get annoyed whenever I think of playing this game now. I used to spend hours upon hours queueing and building and discussing in chatrooms, but now I don't; I play one match a week if that, I don't open the chatrooms anymore, I don't build new teams at all.
I proved what I had to prove myself. I realized nothing else I did ultimately mattered to anyone else, and everyone who's chasing some objective measure of success never gets attention for it unless they demand it, only to be old news and forgotten the next week---and god forbid your favorite metagames die completely, like being a lower tier tied to a spinoff.
You realize it was all for nothing, and that the game sucks not just the rules. That's why so many older players quit and the scene is carried by guys in their mid 20s and younger. You don't realize these things until you've been doing it long enough and are forced to square your investment with your fleeting youth.
