gibson wrote:It depends on the game. In games that have a high skill level its going to take even the best natural gamer years to be great. I remember hearing a dota 2 pro say that someone would have to play dota2 for like a year just to understand the basics. A game like aoe3 however has a relatively low skill level, making it easier to get good. With all the information of builds that top players do and recorded games of top players it would be relatively easy for someone who is naturally good at video games to be able to execute basic but strong builds better than current top players. Now there are certain subtitles to the game that take a bit longer to pick up on, but someone who is naturally talented, driven to win, and willing to put time in could easily be pr35 or higher in a few months, maybe even less.
Also, I think MOBAs are a notoriously bad example here. Mechanics are unimportant in MOBAs compared to other games, because you can't even make use of your mechanics if you don't understand the capabilities of your opponents' (and allies') characters. And since games like Dota and League of Legends have over 100+ characters, it does take a very very long time to learn all of their abilities and stuff, especially as patches make big changes every 2 - 6 weeks, sometimes even introducing new characters or completely revamping existing characters.
FPS games for example have skills that are much more transferable between games than other genres--if you can aim you will probably do fine even if you don't fully grasp the game's mechanics or meta yet. RTS is somewhere in the middle. You need a good balance of mechanics and game knowledge to be successful in a new RTS.