Am I just too old for HL2 Deathmatch?

[PorkPieHat]

Digging through the desk and find a copy of HL2 Game of the Year edition that the wife got me for Xmas like 2 years ago. Never installed it then, so I did to check it out. One player is pretty cool for a couple days then I go to check out the Deathmatch play. Not quite Team Fortress Classic, but it's pretty decent with some nice maps. Only problem is, I am getting freakin killed at about a 10:1 ratio. Literally, I will have like 2 kills and 20 deaths. I am dying before I even see the guys shooting me, and when I do see them in an open area they are getting me with the first shot almost every time. WTF?

I have a cable connection, so it doesn't appear that lag s/b an issue. Back in the TFC days I was no superstar but I was a hell of a lot better than this, and that was over 28.8 dialup.

I am like 40 now, but seriously, is everyone that good or is there a sneaky trick I need to know? Googling for HL forums hasn't found me any miracle cures yet.

[Dire]

HL2 is getting to be pretty dated, so most people you're going to find playing it online have been playing it for a rather long time. And most of the bad players will have already become frustrated/quit. No more fish in the sea.

Same thing happened for me with Halo 2 (which was released the same time as Half Life 2). When it just came out, I used to play it quite alot and did very well at it. When I decided to load it up again a couple of months ago, I was getting beat down so bad I was convinced everybody else must be cheating. Just turns out that the the majority of those left playing eat/slept/dreamed the game.

[g-bebe]

Never played Deathmatch, but was a big CS:S'er. The chaos of Deathmatch never attracted me, though when I did try it, it was frantic -- spawn, insta-kill, spawn, walk, killed, spawn, insta-kill, spawn, insta-kill, spawn, walk, walk, walk... killed. Repeat for 9 minutes and ctrl-atl-delete+registry/delete/deathmatch

[krimson]

You can't really join any multiplayer game that's been around for more then a few months and expect to do awesome right off the bat. Even if you're generally a pretty good FPS player you're probably going to get your ass handed to you for the first few weeks.

If you get frustrated easily with being at the bottom of the kill charts... don't install counter strike!

[Blarg]

This is true of RTS games, too, and really games in general, even non-video games. I play mostly RTS games, and it's amazing how tight and detailed the build orders and such can become in short order. Somebody figures something out, but then others play him enough to figure it out themselves, or see replays, and then they can do it too. So a Darwinian process goes on that takes ordinary players to high skill levels very quickly. But if you're coming in fresh, yikes. People often don't even want to talk about the discoveries you still have to make, anymore, since they're long past them and are all talked out about them.

[gusmahler]

I'm 35 and I'm not too old. I actually haven't played HL2 Deathmatch in a few months. But when I did, I was usually in the upper middle of the scores, with more kills than deaths.

At first, it's frustrating because you're playing unfamiliar maps and you're new at the game. But if you keep playing the same server and the same series of maps, you'll eventually get used to the maps, where the weapons are, and where the campers are.

[SixT4]

Whenever I was around 15 I'd try playing the original HLDM and I'd always get owned badly. I was a decent CS player too.