I know few posters on Vgchartz are revelant in their favorite but I will not spill it out? As for me I'm very very Acknowledged and very Prominent in many games I play here's the list

- 2D Sonic(many World Records helped the fanbase on so many strats)

- Fast and Furious Arcade 2004 (The owner of Twin Galaxies sent Johnny Nitro after me on my 3rd youtube channel)

-Project Justice "fighting game from Sega Dreamcast" Made the best Momo Combo every Momo elite gamer commerorates my work in maximizing her combo

- Sega Fighting Vipers (I trained and Fought Kori maru his the Best Sega Fighting Vipers player ever)

- Sega Scud Race Super GT Plus (I'm the top 3 players world Wide on this game arcade racer by SegaIt's in my 3rd channel I get merits for my Beginner Stage run)

- Dirty Drivin ( many World Records for this racing arcade game)

- Nintendo Cruis'n Series (the best players acknowledge my runs They know of my World Record for Cruis'n  on WII aka Fast and Furious arcade but console version Met legendary Cruis'n players Petedorr, L - Roy , Raptorr, and Adamo I ended up 2nd place in Carnival Joyride Adamo and Nintendo speedrunner Cruis'n fanbase aknowledges my skill hope the next game I come back)

- Bullet Soul Infinite Burst Community "They love my strat on the Shmup I'm top 3 on consolewish the Switch version had leaderboards so I can be Crowned #1 king in that version with my Maishen"

- Virtual On series from Sega back in the day in 2010 Was a wild Fei Yen RVR - 14 KN

I feel like I can always be somewhere close to the top level players on any game I play, but never get quite good enough to be notable or actually be able to compete with the best. I've tried to get into many competitive games over my life and it's frustrating how I can never really get past that barrier.

First was Guitar Hero when I was a teenager. I was possibly the 2nd best in my city, but nowhere near the best player and nowhere near the best in the country. Trying to play against them was humbling and I could never get anywhere near their high scores. I got over 700k points on Through the Fire and Flames, and FC'd many difficult songs, most notably Cliffs of Dover, Master of Puppets, Free Bird and The Spirit of Radio, but for the top players these seemed like easy feats.

Then came Smash. I played it for thousands of hours, there was nothing else I'd do with my time, I was wholly dedicated to being the best in Brazil, and dreamed of the world even. I had pretty solid results from 2015-2019 but never got close to the best players in the country, rarely ever won against them and only once made it into the top 8 of a national, in which I lost straight away. It's especially sad that I could never be among the 10 or so best players in the country, because even the best players in Brazil are nowhere near the best players in the world.

During the pandemic I got into speedrunning Ori. I had tried speedrunning before, with Super Metroid, but never took it seriously, now with Will of the Wisps I went all in, learned a lot of tech and difficult skips, wanted to make it big in the Main Quest Order category. Which, I suppose I have, given I'm currently 3rd place in the world. But in all truth, I'm only there because the game has a small speedrun community, I'm significantly behind the top 2 and it's obvious that if this was a popular speedrunning game (which I can't understand why it isn't), my 3rd place run would probably be closer to 30th.

And now it's Splatoon. Again I tried it before with the first two games, but they were always overshadowed by Smash, now I'm dedicated to it and even got into a team, I'm a good player and maybe have some room for improvement, but it's already obvious where there's a barrier I won't be able to get past.

tl;dr trying to get far in a competitive game is a fruitless effort, don't do it

You're amazing in those games I also tried all the games you listed, In Splatoon I get destroyed most of the time I'm very bad at shooting games being top 3 world wide in Ori is a great feat. And Smash bros you beat everybody in VGchartz very easily. I'm Very bad in Smash Bros all the versions including Melee :(

Thanks. I know I'm better than most people at them, I think that's natural given how much time and effort I put into them. It's just that last barrier I can't seem to break through, from being a good player, to actually being a top player. At my age now it feels like a barrier I won't ever really get past, I don't have as much patience to improve enough at these games and get frustrated more easily. Though I suppose Ori was the closest I made it to the top and the only one where I maybe feel like I could potentially get to the top if I really gave it my best. But then again, maybe not.

edit: anyway for further context on Ori, while that 3rd place looks better than it should due to the small community as I said before, it's also helped by Main Quest Order not being the main speedrunning category. When looking through all the categories and seeing what all the best players can do, it's pretty clear there's at least 10 who are better than me, and would be above me if they ran Main Quest Order. I guess it's still decent that only 10 players in the world would be better than me, but again, it's a really small community. Less than 200 people have submitted a speedrun in any category, and most of these people only tried once or twice for the heck of it.

You can make it just keep grinding, Trust me I know the feeling of being so close to the very top. When I speedrun Sonic and ended up top 10 I said I'll look into the rest of players I took some routes from top 9 and top 3 then added their routes to mine and copied number 1 then I ended up getting WR (grinding + studying the rest of the speedrunners including top 20 will have a certain glitch or route that's how to make it top Watch other speedrunners check the top 15 you'll get there.

My best game back in the day was probably Gears 1. I could 1v4 pretty capably at my peak and developed a bit of a reputation at one point, though I never really played competitively. I also lead one of the top clans of the early days of Metal Gear Online (PS3). Won a small tournament featuring the developers and had a shot to compete in Japan before personal issues forced me to leave it behind. These days I don't have time to really git gud at competitive games and am not sure what I would if I could - maybe Factions 2 soon but we'll see.

That's a beautiful story 1 vs 4 in gears and you entering a tourny featuring developers in Metal Gear online. Love it.

In side-scrollers, I would probably rank among the best in the world. Outside of that... I'm all right lol. I think this is mostly because of when I grew up (2D era). It was a different time, for sure.

It's Mario right! I knew it !

In Elite Dangerous I was one of the first to map the outer arms of the Galaxy, all detailed here
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/exploration-quest-for-the-loneliest-planet.132053/
I set many records (which have all been broken by now) and mapped out propulsion of different space craft to figure out a formula for max efficiency landing on high G planets. Get it wrong and ship perma death, buy a new one. Nerve wrecking to trust your high school algebra scribbles :)

It was a great community (likely still is) and we had lots of fun on the first Distant worlds expedition, setting more records along the way. Yet eventually jumping around a procedurally generated milky way got boring and my ship is still somewhere lost in space.



My next big journey was in FS2020 all detailed here
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/exploring-the-world-in-the-beechcraft-bonanza/266981
I visited every country on Earth during the pandemic, exploring the entire world. Also there I became part of the community, hunting down bugs, mapping engine performance, pushing planes to the limits and beyond. 

Yet also there, content is finite and bugs apparently last forever. FS2020 also heated my gaming laptop up so much that I'm now using an external keyboard and one USB port broke. Many keys don't work anymore, membrane probably melted. Sometimes I would burn my fingers on the numeric keys :/ I was planning on upgrading to explore Canada in more detail after that got an update. However the bugs are still there, the update was one of the worst not even improving much of the terrain at all. So not any time soon.



In the meantime I have and still am playing GT Sport daily. I can hang with the fast aliens but mostly popularized 'racing from the back'. Not qualifying and seeing how far you can get, which has led to many last to first victories. Basically the way GT treats single player.
I spend tons of time on mapping out cars fuel efficiency and the mysterious workings of the penalty system. As well as making compilations of races, especially of my favorite track, Nurburgring 24H circuit and the Nordschleife.

My insane stats for GT Sport with over 15 thousand online races
https://www.kudosprime.com/gts/stats.php?profile=1495257
My GT7 stats are not that impressive yet, same as the game. I'm still far more invested in GT Sport and just drive one race a day in GT7 to keep my credits going up. One day PD will settle on physics handling and fix the bugs :/

Oh and I was quite a known figure on GT Planet until I had a falling out with the mods and left. I don't agree with their ToS. So I joined our crew (TPC) on Discord where we can chat and exchange lists of trouble makers without mods interfering.