In your honest opinion, what is a high level/top tier player, and how do people get to this status? I've seen these two terms a lot, but never really got the grasp of what it means. So I made a thread about it. Detailed answers are definitely helpful.
First you have to be of royal blood to get to such a high tier of status. But being royal isnt the only thing you need, money is the second thing. Money to buy skill and to buy over people to call you skillfull/high level. And if money fails i hope you dont mind to do some dirty work to win over the people.
Very subjective. There's two things that come to mind when I see this question
A. Someone who focuses on one particular game that is popular (SM64, oot, SMS etc.) and sticks with that one and is dedicated to getting the best times possible. eg. Siglemic, Calebhart
B. Someone who has done a multitude of different games (I'm talking 100s) and has great times in those games. eg. Cyberdemon531, Jumpyluff
[quote] In your honest opinion, what is a high level/top tier player, and how do people get to this status? [/quote]
For specific games, a top tier player is generally someone who has spent countless hours on a game and has a very high position on said game's leaderboard. The more popular a game is, the more competitive it (usually) is, so the top players tends to be the ones who have grinded the game for a very long time.
Popularity plays a minor role, but it's just for recognition.
Effort (Talent does not imply that some players can and others cannot. It implies that people who don't have it will work harder to reach the same level)
Dedication
Lot of time
Training
Schedules
Regularity
Humility (from casual play to speedrun, from fail to win, whatever how good you are, you will face countless bad times, and have to accept that time is needed to overcome obstacles, or that sometimes today's not the day).
If we are talking about popular players on Stream, add some skill to entertain and interact with viewers, cool attitude...
I think basically, people are just missing the point that before reaching the top of any game, players needed to fail more than anyone else to produce any decent result, through researchs and tests, through training.
"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
- Michael Jordan
I don't see "high level" and "top tier" being a different thing if you define both of them as being "extremely good" at video games....
There's no such thing as the "criteria" of top player because people have different ideas / notions about that, but as the general ideas I'm just gonna put following things by which I'd think someone being a "skilled" one.
1, Excellence (Skill) 2, Dedication to be better (Time, making efforts) 3, Industriousness (Be active to do practices) 4, Well-informed about everything ("Knowledgeability" in that game, if you put that in short)
I myself am still a budding speedrunner but I had been a huge fan of The Mercenaries of Resident Evil games for quite a long time and have watched the gameplay of a number of different players. In my view, it seemed like the truly skilled players are those who have got not only actual skills but also can give the others proper advices as to how you are supposed to do in a certain part of gameplay - anyone can be better at that game through the practices by mimicking the gameplay of some others who are generally considered "handy" by those familiar with that game to some extent, but there are few who can really get the hand of it inside out and can be knowledgeable enough to guide the others to their goals they shoot for. :)
I'm not quite familiar with speedrunning in general and the standards of the good players yet, but I reckon the same can be applied to that as well when it comes to "what (factors) generally define someone as being a truly distinguished player". ;)