The road to mastery is a rocky one, full of pitfalls for the unwary. So far, in my quest to become "good enough" at Blade Symphony, I'm finding my biggest obstacles to be technical. Setting up a private game between me and Faolind proved to be an exercise in futility. I've since learned that I'm missing a piece of software, but none of the in-game documentation even hinted at that necessity (the fact that I am a total ingenue when it comes to online gaming probably doesn't help).
Random matches have also been something of an uphill struggle. Most of the people I've fought have been way, way out of my league. I am currently ranked ~20,000, thanks to my wins against Faolind, but of the six or so people I've fought, four have been ranked at 2000 or less. That somewhat limits my learning opportunities.
Not to say that people have been unhelpful. Pretty much everyone has been polite and supportive. Even the guy who kept calling me "bitch" seemed to be doing so in a friendly-ish way.
My biggest obstacle, I think, is temporal. I've been finding it relatively difficult to find active servers with a reasonably low ping. It was only when I was composing this post that I realized why - I can't really play online games at work (the connection at the hotel is far too slow), so I've been waiting until after I get home and eat dinner to start Blade Symphony. This puts my optimal playing time at roughly 9am to noon, US Mountain time. Since ping is related to the physical distance between me and the server, the reason all the active servers seemed to be so slow was due to the fact that they are playing in a time zone where it is more reasonable to be sitting around playing games - ie, very far away.
I'm certain that if I played in the evenings instead of the mornings, I'd find a greater diversity of players and more opportunities for matches at a reasonable connection rate. It would, however, mean upending my schedule and waking up at least an hour earlier.
Is it worth it, merely to be the (optimistically 10,000th) best?
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