If you could offer only one piece of advice to gamers, what would it be?

My advice would be to stop researching strategies. Researching how to do something you can't figure out is great, but strategies are a big NO (unless you are just failing repeatedly). First of all, these so-called experts on YouTube and gaming sites are often incorrect on their strategies. For instance, one of the big reasons I'm successful in multiplayer in Forza is because the most popular video on Forza Horizon 5 tuning is, in fact, terrible. Same thing goes for Warframe strategies that you find out there and also Civ 5 strategies. Remember, all research and no testing means you've done nothing. For instance, there's a whole big thing about Civ 5 about where you have to build the temple first in order to win the game. Everyone who's done even a little research knows that. And yet I've never lost a game of Civ 5, and I've never built the temple first. Some games I didn't even found a religion until forced to. And I was playing on the highest difficulty. In Forza 5, anyone who follows the hive mind will not beat me. It's as simple as that.

So my advice is to quit being a researcher drone and start thinking for yourself. You'll likely do much better. Again, this applies just to strategies.
 
@ZedClampet I have a feeling most tuners on Forza Horizon 4/5 would not share their innermost secrets in tuning, because that would mean they wouldn't get as high on the rankings if everyone is using the same setup. It also seems they make tunes that might give you a better start, but then if you want to get better farther in the drag you would need some more finetuning and so on. So, it is more a general tune that will win you a lot of races against casuals, but never get you on any top-tier placing. I don't see the possibility of anyone playing winning regularly against the best using an autotune they just randomly find. It is like having an automatic rally car going against a manual rally car with the same engine in a dirt race.

I understand this advice might be a bit strange to what gaming advice is concerned, but I do think it is an important one and rarely spoken about related to gaming:

I had a friend once who was quite into World of Warcraft and the few times I visited him I would notice his children often playing alone and never with him. Whether it was like that all the time or just like that when I was visiting, I don't know, but it stuck with me. Don't let gaming take over your ability to care for your children and give them the best upbringing possible. They are only children for so long.
 
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My advice would be to remember that gaming is for fun. There's no right way to do it, the only thing that matters is that you have fun. There's no reason you should feel bad about playing a game on easy or using cheats (in singleplayer), as long as you're still having fun. There's no reason to keep playing a game if it isn't fun any more, regardless of how much money or time you've invested in it.

Also, try doing something besides gaming for fun. There's so many games it might seem they can entertain you forever, but at some point they'll all start feeling similar if you play too much.
 
PC Gaming has lots of different types of games. So try something different once in a while. You might surprise yourself and find an completely different genre of game you like that you might have dismissed before.
Through EPIC's weekly giveaways, Steam Demos, Steam Play free weekends there is a lot of choice.

This can also be applied to food :)
 
I was going to say something about video games should be fun, but @Pifanjr beat me to it, so I'll go with something else.

Play with in your means, financially. PC gaming can be an expensive hobby and it's easy to get caught up in the hardware wars to have the absolute newest and best hardware and peripherals. Set a budget and stick to it, whether you build your own PC or purchase a premade, don't get caught up in the marketing hype that makes a person feel like they have to have the newest components. Get the best parts & peripherals that you can afford (diligent research will help with this), but you can game on a PC that has older generation hardware just as well.
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
My own advice: try to enter a new game with an open mind and play it as intended, at least at first. I often see people who come into a game with all sorts of expectations about what the game should be like. If the game designers try something different, then these people will rail on them for "not doing it right."

Big case in point: City of Heroes. This was (and still is!) an MMO where many classes can do one thing very well and another pretty well. For instance, the Blaster class deals great ranged damage - but blasters also minor in crowd control. A Defender does buffs and (possibly) healing better than any other, but the class can also do some pretty serious ranged damage. Not as good as Blasters, but pretty good.

But in come MMO "experts" from Everquest and/or World of Warcraft, and they start berating anyone who doesn't stick solely to their primary role. In many MMOs, this advice is (I presume) good advice, but it sure wasn't in City of Heroes. So those people made the game harder for themselves and for others they managed to convince. The ones that couldn't break out of their assumptions soon left, and thus missed out on a great game.

Of course, if you do try it out and find the new innovations to be no fun at all, go ahead and mod the thing. Just give it a chance, huh?

Now I need to make this post too long by agreeing with people... ;)

My advice would be to stop researching strategies.
Oh jeez, I see this so much. The Last Remnant has enemies that scale up (somewhat) in difficulty which, in JRPGs, is stunning. Many JRPG players had been trained over the years that, if you started to run into difficulties playing, THE way to fix the problem was to simply go back to just before the problem started happening and defeat the same enemies over and over, until your level got so high that the problem you were having became irrelevant.

So players played LR, ran into difficulties, and tried to grind their way out of it. But the systems in this game were set so that this actually made the game somewhat harder (MUCH harder if done really early in the game). Much screaming ensued. But then somebody hit on a new idea: anti-grinding. People figured out that, by avoiding as much combat as possible, you could make the game easy.

It was all insane, though. The game doesn't need grinding or anti-grinding. You just need to play it as given without trying to exploit the systems and it works fine. Unfortunately, the anti-grind technique is now considered THE way to play, thanks to people copying other people's strategies so much.

I had a friend once who was quite into World of Warcraft and the few times I visited him I would notice his children often playing alone and never with him. Whether it was like that all the time or just like that when I was visiting, I don't know, but it stuck with me. Don't let gaming take over your ability to care for your children and give them the best upbringing possible. They are only children for so long.
I thought you were going to say that the parent encouraged the children to develop their own strategies, or maybe the children were insisting on doing it "all by my SELF!"

But yeah, it's a hobby, you can't let a hobby get in the way of necessities.
So try something different once in a while. You might surprise yourself and find an completely different genre of game you like that you might have dismissed before.
Yeah, plus genres have become about 80% irrelevant now, anyway. Just because a game is called an RPG doesn't mean it's going to be just like Baldur's Gate or Skyrim.
 
@ZedClampet I have a feeling most tuners on Forza Horizon 4/5 would not share their innermost secrets in tuning, because that would mean they wouldn't get as high on the rankings if everyone is using the same setup.
The tunes people upload, even by the really popular tuners, are often pretty bad, and I've wondered whether they actually use them themselves.

The problem with the leaderboards is that they are filled with cheaters/glitchers. You have to scroll for a solid 30 seconds to find someone who didn't miraculously finish the lap in under 5 seconds. It's very frustrating. I'm in the top percentile for every track now, but have no idea where I actually sit on any of them.

I'm ranked around 300 in Super Mega Baseball though, but their rankings are more a measure of how much you've played rather than how good you are.
 
Zed said.... The problem with the leaderboards is that they are filled with cheaters/glitchers. You have to scroll for a solid 30 seconds to find someone who didn't miraculously finish the lap in under 5 seconds. It's very frustrating. I'm in the top percentile for every track now, but have no idea where I actually sit on any of them.

i agree with you 100% i have seen several instances of this in games...

The remake of age of mythology got hacked on release day and the top players have zillions of points , that is if you can even find the tables cos the new version is a joke.

World at Arms . android ...... I have used this 7 years and the only reason i carry on using it is because some players in main chat have helped me through some difficult times. ALL the league tables have been hacked and you dont find a team or an individual player with what looks like clean points until about position 350. Mid week events get hacked as soon as they appear , the first 3 places will get some special reward stars that in real money are worth about £5 , hackers dont need the stars they just hack the events to stop clean players getting them. The game has a 3 day week end team event and i stopped doing them because if you win 1 area over the weekend and the hackers win the whole event you loose everything you spent a couple of months getting. The most annoying thing is when you work your guts off for 3 days against what you thought were clean players and then they get their hacking toys out and trash everything in the last round. The hackers are so good even the makers cant ban/stop them. One vietnam team openly said in main chat that they will keep trashing the game till the makers shut it down.

I spent 7 years of my free time on Warframe then one day i logged in and everything was gone , 7 years down the pan. The makers even told me what time i had last logged in ....... NO i was in bed.

Guildwars 1 i logged in one day and chat room indicated odd things were happening to players pc's so i reached for my mouse to log out , my pc died just as i was about to touch it , over 3,000 players hit by a dos attack i had to do a clean install of everything.
 
My advice would be to remember that gaming is for fun. There's no right way to do it, the only thing that matters is that you have fun. There's no reason you should feel bad about playing a game on easy or using cheats (in singleplayer), as long as you're still having fun. There's no reason to keep playing a game if it isn't fun any more, regardless of how much money or time you've invested in it.

Also, try doing something besides gaming for fun. There's so many games it might seem they can entertain you forever, but at some point they'll all start feeling similar if you play too much.

Wait, weren't we supposed to give 1 piece of advice? lol
 
My advice would be to remember that gaming is for fun. There's no right way to do it, the only thing that matters is that you have fun. There's no reason you should feel bad about playing a game on easy or using cheats (in singleplayer), as long as you're still having fun. There's no reason to keep playing a game if it isn't fun any more, regardless of how much money or time you've invested in it.
I can usually extend the fun by increasing my cheating the longer I play. For instance, after we finished Astroneer, I downloaded a couple of mods that make getting resources much easier. It wouldn't have been fun to play the whole game that way, but it's fun now as I just wander around working on bases.
 
I got so much advice. I got way to many hours gaming over the years. Specially when I was bed/couch ridden for years cause of my back.

If there's one bit of advice, find a good community or people to play with. Or a game with good communities to find.

They make it more enjoyable and fun. For years I played DoD like it was going out of style. I was in a group called Me109 and there were lots of us. My dad, uncle and cousin use to play there as well and we knew and played with a lot of the other clans in the game. Always loved playing with Buxom Bombshells, HBMS and many others.

It makes a huge difference when playing a multiplayer game, but even with a single player game it makes a difference. People can give ya tips or pointers, maybe point ya out to mods for a game or add ons ya might not know about.

Think of these forums as one of those communities. People are helpful, friendly, willing to share advice and knowledge or to bust your chops once they get to know ya.

And my last tip. If ya find you're not in a good community with good people then find another. There's always good ones out there.
 
Stop letting devs release games that every year have less free features and more you have to pay extra for. Eventually you won't get the full game. Its already at point you need multiple versions to get everything due to exclusives, but if you let them cut features, eventually you just buying a launcher.
 
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