Martin Black · @TypicaINerd
2nd Mar 2018 from TwitLonger
Quitting competitive COD
I get so many messages every day of people asking me how to become a pro or how to make it in the scene. Which first of all I definitely didn't see myself as a pro or that I had "made it". But what I can say is there's literally 0 chance unless you are the biggest ass lick in the entire world and can deal with top players/pros constantly talking shit to you and getting personal over a game because you might've beat them or come close. I could sit here and give names and call people out, but it would do nothing they know who they are. They are in their little circle collecting there salaries and me saying something will change nothing.
This scene is so toxic and noone wants to see anyone do well apart from themselves. I should've realised how bad the scene is when in my very first GB tournament I got booted in the final by certain "pros" for using "nades and stuns". I Literally had no idea who they even were at the time, I had never spoke to them before and yet they do that. That pretty much sums up the majority of the scene.
During the start of BO3 when competitive COD moved over to PS4 I had so much motivation to compete, I was winning Gfins/GB tourneys etc against top pro teams. I had a team I enjoyed playing with and I consistently played extremely well. If only Addiction was 18 at the time then me Ryan him and Momentus would've 100% qualified for the EU Pro League but because he wasn't we never signed up to the very first qualifier for the League. Fast forward a few months and I lose last map to LDLC for a spot in stage 2 of the Pro League. This made me lose all my motivation to compete/play and win. I stopped playing for over 3 months and was sure I was going to quit but for some reason I let people convince me otherwise.
During those 3 months that I quit, and even the long breaks at the end of the Call Of Duty season I felt so much better and my life wasn't a big mess focused around COD. My main problem is that I can never balance anything, if I'm to do something I put my 100% in, all my time and energy and I don't have any left for anything else such as uni etc. Hopefully now that I'm not putting all my time into COD I'll be able to have a bit more of a 'normal life', I'll still be playing games of course but not to the point that I was with COD.
It really does hurt though that I have to quit something, throwing away all the time I spent for reasons out of my control. All I wanted to do was to make it into the pro league in BO3 and see what happened, I never wanted to make a job out of competing. I just enjoyed winning - winning with people I considered friends. But when you go on Twitter and constantly day in and day out see tweets about you and how much of a cunt you are, or how bad you are it's extremely demotivating and got to the point where it genuinely affected me. I just wanted to compete and enjoy my time playing which is impossible when it feels like everyone hates you. I really have no idea why people in their circles would just hate on me. Maybe it's because using my name in their Tweets would guarantee them some attention and a bunch of likes. The people that would do this, when they've talked to me in person at events would tell me how wrong they were about me and that I just come across differently and 'wrong' on Twitter.
What happened today was just another sign that I should call it quits, no team stays together longer than 2 weeks anymore unless their under contract. How can you have the motivation to scrim and win with a team that you know probably won't be together within a few days regardless if you're playing extremely well. No matter what people would say about me and how bad I am, you can't deny that every team I've been on has placed well. My worst placing at an EU only event is 9-12th and at ESWC I placed 25th-28th which had a large amount of top NA teams at the time in open bracket. We beat Killa, Mirx, Holler and Wheats then proceeded to lose to Panda who at the time were an amazing team so I wouldn't consider my ESWC placing particularly bad. There's a large amount of top EU teams who are salaried who are placing worse than that at NA events this year. People can sit and call me out for one off maps they'd see on streams which were the first map of the series, but they never saw anything to do with the games that weren't on stream. I do not play anywhere near the same when I haven't warmed up properly and not in the correct mindset, and when you get 5 minutes to shoot some bots or sometimes you don't even get to warmup it's hard. Which is why sometimes I would have a tough first map when you play a team that was allowed to warmup and you weren't. I literally had 3 bad first maps which were all at Gfinity were they'd rush you to get on and play because of their time schedule.
Regardless of how many negatives there were, I also had a lot positives during competing. My very first time being on a plane and going abroad was because of Call Of Duty which was pretty cool. I met a good amount of people who I considered friends and also made a bit of money which I used to buy myself pizza a lot of nights haha. So yeah I don't really want anything to do with COD at this time, and if I unfollowed you by mistake and you genuinely like me and want followed back just DM me. I might've missed out a few things or wasn't very clear in this post but to summarise I'm basically stopping competing because of the scene and the people at the top of it. Slowly running out of people you could potentially team with just because of something someone else said even though you're far better than them gives me no motivation to continue to play, I'm not going to sit and act fake and ass lick people who have sat there and got extremely personal because I've beat them before.
Thanks to the people who did support me and would tweet/DM me it helped a lot :) <3