Count_Arioch_the_28th wrote:I hate playing online, because everyone is always better than me.
Short answer: Practice
Long answer:
You might want to try what I did when I was trying to improve my ability to play Dawn of War online.
I really didn't have a lot of opportunity to play games online from start to finish when I first had the game, and I was sure that I'd always get my ass handed to me; but what I did have a lot of time to play skirmish matches that I could save and finish later.
So what I did was play a lot on the hard difficulty mode (the 2nd hardest mode; DoW has 5 modes of difficulty, Easy, Normal, Difficult, Hard, Insane; insane isn't really that much harder, the AI just gets a lot more resources).
When I was able to not get my ass handed to me immediately by the AI, and I was able to reliabely fight and beat the AIs for the different factions and use different factions myself I played a few games online.
Since I had to be on the ball from the start to even have a chance against the AI, I was able to move quickly and effectively enough against human players that usually were a lot sloppier at the game (noobs and mediocre players for the most part) and against players that had more practice I was able to hold my own long enough to allow my ability to use 'cheap' or 'devious' tactics that would let me eventually win.
Playing other games against AI's that are as hard a difficulty as possible for you to take on will help when playing against other players. AI play is not the same as against a human, but it will help and your pride will remain relatively unbruised. Also, some people can really suck compared to AIs (that happened a lot in DoW, mostly b/c people would face easy or normal AIs and would play the game in a very sloppy and slow manner). So when you're able to compete against dangerous AIs, you might beat humans just because you've built up practice with the manner in which you have developed your typical approach to certain game maps, or how to use certain weapons or how to use a specific army type.