While my reaction time has stayed the same since my teens (175ms~185ms), I think I discovered the replacement price I’m paying for aging instead: the sheer amount of life stuff I have to do as an adult has drastically narrowed the number of PvP games I can juggle at a time. I’ve developed an unsubstantiated gut-feeling belief that while your reaction times do get worse as you age, it’s not as strong of a factor in performance for most mid-level competitive PvP game players as the sheer loss of time bandwidth.
The period between college & up until I left my first job, I was hopping between TF2, Quake (Live & CPMA), indie/mid-scale stuff like Tribes Ascend and Blacklight Retribution, new zeitgeist stuff like Overwatch 1, CountersSrike (Global Offensive), and StarCraft (Brood War & SC2 Wings of Liberty). I was good at my major in college so the “heavy lifting” parts felt natural and intuitive to me, meaning I had less on my mental plate, and my first job out of college had a decent chunk of time where I was just learning and doing data entry so there wasn’t a lot of pressure. I already split the chores with my mom at home so I knew what I did and didn’t have to do.
I think something else that helps is that arena and team shooter skills are easily transferrable from game to game; aiming is universal and “positioning in 3D space” concepts are more 1:1, which is why modern aim trainers work so well as supplements. For RTS games, macro is a universal language between them and micro just comes from practice. Playing any of the arena/team shooters continued the developmental feedback loop and kept whatever I had learned prior sharp, and AI in games like Age of Empires have become really good versus the old days of resource cheating, so it’s more feasible (for casuals/lower-level PvP enjoyers) to do foundational practice and warmup vs bots.
These days, I take on larger and larger projects at my jobs that include research and leadership, and I have to take the reins more with chores and other household responsibilities as my mom gets older. Combined with my self-responsibilities (i.e., health, fitness, hobbies that aren’t computer related, trying to date), I have just enough bandwidth for practicing 2-ish fighting games and Age of Empires 4. If any one of them requires more focus, the other two go to the wayside just so I have enough time to distribute and still have lounge time. It’s easier to rebuild my AoE4 skill in the way I mentioned above, the new Crucible tower defense gamemode helps a ton, but fighting games demand a lot of rote memorization and “play by feel” experience in addition to whatever hard knowledge practice there is. Individual fighting games play very differently despite sharing similar control schemes and inputs, and what works in one game might not even be applicable to another, so the geenral portability of fighting games is pretty low until you get to a certain level of gamesense.
It’s an interesting feeling; I feel like I still have “it” even when I play fighting games, but that I don’t have the sheer breadth of time to keep it up across multiple PvP games anymore, which leads to a feeling of not having “it” anymore.