Officially a boomer at 32, been playing online gaming religiously for 21-22 years. Was talking with a long term friend who's in the same boat, we are the remnant man children that refuse to give in to our 30s. The topic was, whats different between FPS 15+ years ago and now, is it nostalgia that we look back fondly on? No. Its Matchmaking, before the PC match making bug started (2010ish) it was normal to load up the game, go into your server list and join your favourite dedicated server that plays the maps and game modes you liked. On these dedicated servers you would see similar faces at certain times, and get to know people, and nobody cared about skill difference or segregating the better players elsewhere.

It was perfectly normal to play against players that were leagues above you in skill level, somebody on the top 10 leaderboard would log onto the server and you would have to up your game. As some of you may remember, we still had 'competitive' in the form of clan ladders and 3rd party websites.

Without getting too much into it, smurfing is not a thing. Some people are better than others, the only way to beat them is to accept that and learn from them by getting your ass beat. I'm new to Valorant and the few competitive games I have come into have resulted in a 'smurf' appearing in the opposite team (likely due to rank crunching). I recently won a game by simply refusing to roll over for the smurf like the rest of the team did, and focused on enjoying the game, and outplaying the so called smurf.

15 years ago, you'd scream HACKER! When you get rekt, now you scream SMURF! Just get on with the game, success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.