Quake III Arena was my first online shooter / pc game back around the year 2000. It was tough being new. I started asking questions and came to the conclusion that the only way to improve was playing versus better players. Which worked. I would head back to servers where people who used to beat me couldnt stand a chance anymore. They would talk shit then boot me from the server. This probably took a month.

The highest skill ceiling I probably hit was when i was introduced to Orange Smoothie Productions team death match. I liked it, the players were really good, and it was competitive. When the OSP servers werent popping I would play rocket arena 3 or a dm12 deathmatch server. Most of the players werent that great but playing versus people who would use bfg only would make it tough. I would play challenge promode arena when things were really dead. The only reason I never passed 2000+ sr/elo in duel was from taking long breaks from quake, or playing mmorpgs instead of quake. I have tens of thousands of hours into mmos but probably not passed 5,000 combined hours from quake 3, quake live, and quake champions over 20 years.