Hire a Game Coach Online

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Expert videogame players, many of them teens, are forging professional careers as coaches, finding clients — many of them in their 20s or 30s — online, the Wall Street Journal reports. Some gigs pay $65 an hour. From the article: 'Gaming-lessons.com says its youngest "Halo 2" instructor is 8-year-old New Yorker Victor De Leon III — better known by his online gamer name, Lil Poison — who has given several lessons a month since late last year, fitting the classes in after he has done his homework. His father, also named Victor, says his son has used some of the money he earns from lessons (hourly rate: $25) to buy a hamster, named Cortana after a character in the game.'"

This was happening way back in Starcraft days

[Astarica]

Top Starcraft players would offer lessons either on a hourly level or a per game level at some ludricous rate too. Of course, given the free flow of information of the Net, you'll find that none of these experts actually had any secret worth paying for because if they did, everyone would've known about it already. Although the secret to being good at games and almost anything else in general is just talent + practice, people are quite willing to pretend this isn't the case and if you just get 'the secret from the experts', you too can be a world class Starcraft or Halo 2 player even if you possess neither the talent nor the endurance to learn the game.

Re:Why?

[Reapy]

Seriously. I used this technique when I first jumpped into jedi outcast online (1.2 patch). I was losing left and right and had no clue. I speced the guy who was number one for a long while. He was running up to people and kicking them, then doing a heavy overhead swing on their prone bodies. It was working pretty well.

I started doing it. I noticed immediate results. I kept doing it until I got proficient at the technique. I later learned a whole bunch of varients on it through expriemntation, but always had that same trick there to use in a pinch.

That's how you get good at games, find a way to "win" (in my case kill), get good at it, then learn another way to win. Then another. Until you have a huge bag of winning tricks to pull out against someone else.

Pretty soon the game will come down to who runs out of tricks first, and who can execute them better, or more creativly. That is about when most online games are the most fun to play.

Very simple concept, just takes a little bit of time to get there.