I have been a competitive gamer since Ghost Recon launched on the PC; I played on Tagaming.com which has since been dropped and bought by another source which has ruined everything. From there I went to play Rainbow Six: 3 and Black Arrow for TeamCompete.com which since then has dropped and been bought out again by another source which ruined it as well. For the last 4-5 years I have been playing numerous games on Xbox 360 and Ps3 for GameBattles.com where I am still a member and have been ranked in top 1,000 players on GameBattles when I was an active member for COD4.
Now that you know my competitive history, and don't really care either; I begin to Reminisce of the good days of competitive gaming, back when you had a scheduled match and you couldn't plan one for 30 minutes later like you can now on GameBattles. Matches back then last for hours and when the match was over; you knew who deserved the win.
I remember one match; Rainbow Six:3 for Xbox :: season 3, round 3 of the championship tournament; My team, Darkness Falls (ranked 23rd) played Cohesion (ranked 9th). The match start at 8:30 p.m., and Cohesion was Notorious for raping clans on this map called Peaks, which was completely white with zero visability, and they were famous for pre-firing corners picking off enemies in seconds.
TeamCompete tournament rules played best of 5/ best of 5; and it was tied 2-2 going into the 5th map and it was now 1:00 a.m. Cohesion had map choice, and choose Peaks (we all knew it was comming) for their last map. The match finally ended at 3:30 a.m. with a final map score of Darkness Falls 3, Cohesion 2. We won on Peaks after a gruelling 150 minute match ending with us winning 3 rounds over Cohesion's 1.
I will now recap, now that no one really cares and is extremely bored of reading. The match last a total of 7 hours, went through countless rounds, and had over 5 subs in total with players not able to finish out the match.
After a match like that, you knew who deserved that win and who deserved to proceed on to the next round. That is when champions were made. Now days, clan matches are still instenseand fun, there are still winners and champions... but if you want to talk about a victory, tell a story like that not about something that last 45 minutes.