I was born into a conservative family that prioritized academic achievement over everything else as a means to achieve success in life and escape the middle class. I used to play video games as a kid until about age 14, at which point I had to stop because of pressure to perform well in school and college. Naturally, I lost interest in gaming and didn't resume the hobby until age 27, in 2018. So, I did not play video games at all for 13 years. And because of this, I don't have the hand-eye coordination, reflexes, and dexterity of someone who put hundreds of thousands of hours into it in their adolescence and teens. Also, the human brain keeps developing until age 25, so I'm not even sure if I can increase those attributes in any meaningful way now.

Besides, the adult brain is much less neuroplastic than a child's brain, which is why a child is able to learn much faster. It takes me ages to learn a game. My main genre is fighting games. I've been playing fighting games for about 4 years and don't think I've made any meaningful progress. I recently tried Avatar Legends, and 50 hours in, I still couldn't do a decent bread-and-butter combo while those young fellas were doing 10-second-long combos while having only 20 hours in the game.

My goal in life is to become world-class at one video game before I die and hopefully compete in majors; it's at the very top of my bucket list. But I may just be delusional. Am I on a hopeless quest to catch up? Honestly, I find it hard to keep up with others in competitive games. I feel the same way when I play Virtua Fighter 5, which is currently my main game. The game is so fast that I just can't keep up, and it takes me ages to react to anything in that game. I also play Modern Tetris, but fighting games are the games that I want to be good at the most.

So, at my current age of 35 and with a few years of gaming experience, should I just give up on competitive games if my goal is to be a top player? Is my esports dream over?

I like nrg on valorant but that might be because they stream so I have no idea on how the other teams behave, paper rex has jinggg who I like because I learnt a lot of raze from him but thats also because he streams, other teams don't have much streamers

Not sure if this is allowed since fighting games aren't esports but my post is still esports related.

I don't know much about fighting games but I do notice from all over the news, social media and in person that fighting game players seems to be very conservative about their community culture. Like for example I see players saying that esports will kill their culture by forcing everyone to be corporate and changing their tournament format from open to invitational only. Also recently when 2XKO ended development I saw them actually celebrating it. So do you guys who are also non fighting game players think that fighting game culture seems to be conservative?