So the number of video games that I have really played for more than a thousand hours is very short: A few MMORPGs, with World of Warcraft being at the top of the list (Everquest second at around 2,000 hours), and then World of Tanks, the only multiplayer PvP game I played intensively. I don't actually know how many hours I played World of Warcraft, I would have to re-subscribe and use the /played command on each character to find out, but it was 5,000 hours back in 2009, and probably over 6,000 hours by the time I stopped. I don't know how many hours I played World of Tanks either, but I know that I have played 15,366 battles on my main account, and the average duration of a battle is around 6 minutes, so 1,500 hours just in battles, plus the time "in the garage".

If you play a game for tens of hours, you are probably reasonably competent with it, but you can still play that "casually" and not strive for total mastery. While most of my time in World of Warcraft I played casually (which you can do if there is enough content for that), I did for a time play in a hardcore raiding guild. I finished Molten Core, killed Onyxia repeatedly, got up to Nefarian in Blackwing Lair, so I'd say I was playing at a far more competitive level. But as raiding came with some amount of guild drama, and places like Naxxramas were more about learning a dance, I lost interest. And in WoW, because raiding was just a part time activity among many, it was easy to get back to playing casually, before I finally lost interest in 2018.

When I was last playing World of Tanks in 2019/2020, I was playing competitively, in the sense that my express purpose was to get better at the game. While I certainly didn't reach top player level, I got reasonably good at playing World of Tanks. However, in this case I find it impossible to go back to playing casually. World of Tanks is a very skill-based game, but it isn't about motor skills, but rather about a very intimate knowledge of every map, and what the best strategy for different types of tanks under different situations is on each of these maps. Having not played for a year, I simply forgot too much of that. And now playing at a lower skill level than what I had previously achieved isn't fun.

I wonder if that would be the same for people who play a lot of Fortnite, or League of Legends, or whatever other competitive multiplayer game. Once you get to a certain level of competence, can you ever go back to just playing casually?