An Introduction to Competitive Gaming: MIRC

If you're an avid gamer and you wish to get into the world of competitive gaming, this is the first step essential to getting involved with the online gaming community. This may be useful for people interested in playing Counter-strike 1.6, Counter-strike: Source, Day of Defeat, Day of Defeat: Source, Call of Duty, Team Fortress 2 and really any other game competitively. What do I mean when I say competitively? Essentially, I mean playing against people who take the game more seriously than your average Joe, who are willing to put some money down on the line for a chance at winning a local area network (LAN) tournament.

Competitive gaming has its ups and downs. The first being that there is obviously a high level of competition because let's be honest, who doesn't want to sit on their ass all day playing video games while earning a little bit of cash to boot? There are millions of competitive gamers in the United States alone, and they come in a variety of size and shape. By this I mean that not everybody plays computers games, and not everyone plays Xbox Live. This guide will be most useful for the former, the computer gamers.

First of all, what is mIRC and why should you use it? Well, mIRC simply stands for Internet relay chat. It is a free piece of software that allows users to chat with each other. What makes this program unique is the integrated scripting language, which allows users to write their own scripts, and simply do more things than your typical chat utility. As far as why you should use it, this is the number one form of communication between gamers and programmers alike. This means that at any given time you can find thousands of people on one network alone, and please take into consideration there are a lot of different networks hosted by different servers around the country and, more extensively, around the world. Therefore, as you may have guessed already, team based games such as Counter-strike or any of the previously mentioned games require you to find not only a team to play with, but a team to play against. Now, you may be thinking "Yeah, but I can find a bunch of people to play with in public servers." While this may be true, those people are typically what we consider casual players, and do not take the game nearly as serious as competitive gamers do.

To get started with mIRC you'll need to visit their site or any free download site to obtain a copy. Next, you will need to specify what network you want to connect to, which can be found in the server option in the option menu. For gamers in the United States, I recommend using Gamesurge, as that is the most saturated network around at the moment. Here you can find tons of different channels where you can search for clans, teams, tournaments, league information, and competitive teams to play against.

You are now probably wondering what to do after you've chosen the network you wish to use. Once you've logged on you'll be prompted to join the website of the specific network and create an account in order to verify yourself. Once you've done this, the next step is to decide what channels you wish to join. The basic command to do this is '/join #channelnamehere' and the channel you want to join depends on the specific game you play. For example, if I play Counter-strike 1.6 competitively, I would log in to Gamesurge, and type /join #findscrim (this is the channel to find 5v5 scrimmages).

The next thing that you need to know is idling. Every team has their own respective channel. Let's say my team is named "Toxic Monkey Avengers" I might have a channel registered under the name #tma. Many people will ask you to idle their channel or add their channel to perform, and this means simply join their channel whenever you are on mIRC in order to make them appear more popular. Teams that ask you to do this generally are not good enough to get idlers by skill alone, so you can ignore these types of people unless you are friends with them and wish to show your support for their team.

This introductory guide was designed to give you a basic understanding the mIRC aspect of competitive gaming, and hopefully it will assist you in getting your foot in the door to finding some skilled competitive gamers to play with so you can improve your own skills, and maybe get a good team going and win some money.