To Rank Or Not To Rank?

I think online gaming is one of the greatest things to happen to gaming.  In saying that it changed the way games are played. It gave the option to have fun, or take it to the next level.

I always feel like when I play a game no matter how much I have played the game or how many hours I have invested in the game I still want to accomplish something. I become addicted to this when I started playing Burnout:Revenge. I played so much I became ranked 51st in the world. Tim Speedle was ranked 20th at one time. We played ranked racing all the time and that's all we done. I took a break from online gaming for quite sometime. In that time The idea of 'rank' completely left my mind. I played several games and enjoyed them in that time. The September 25th, 2007 came. The release of Halo 3. I suddenly regained my urge for ranked events.

I played Halo online for around 6 months. The whole time I was playing ranked matches and it was paying off. Me and the group I was playing with quickly gained and moved up in rank. Then I started to notice something. People were becoming very serious about their rank and how they got it. I include myself in that, if the game glitched or someone cheated I was as angry as I had ever been. Then it hit me one night. At the end of a round we had lost and myself and another team mate had lost a rank. Even though I had racked up almost 20 kills, I was told that I needed to “step it up a notch!” What? I had more kills than anyone on the team and I was being told to get better. In the next couple of weeks I took the game and traded it. I have not touched it since. Then January 21st, 2008 came. The release of Burnout:Paradise.

Even though I had played ranked so much on Revenge, I had no urge to play on Paradise. I just wanted to have fun. Halo had done it for me. I did not want the hassle or the ranked problem again. So I just played. Sometimes running races for fun and sometimes just driving around with friends. By not racing ranked I have met some of the nicest people that I have ever met online. They have became some of my best friends. So now I look at it as if the Halo fiasco had never happened I would not have met these people. Even after Burnout came out I still would not play ranked on other games that where released. I don't know if it was because I did not want to or because my friends did not want to. Either way I did not miss it, until now.

I recently started racing ranked rooms again on Burnout:Paradise, I forgot how much I missed that feeling of having something to loose. To say that rank does not matter and you are doing it for fun is crazy. If you are doing it for fun then why do ranked? Ranking on Burnout or any other game is the same as leveling in WoW or ranking in Halo. It's just a different interface, same concept. So the point I am trying to make is if you want to play any game and try to get a rank that's fine, your working for something and that's good. No matter how bad the situation may be. How good or how bad you may be. How low or how high you may be in rank. There is always something good to come out of playing games online for rank or not.