The idea
Most of these start as a chat room. This one did not.
At some point the people you played with stopped logging on. Not because they went off it, but because a job landed, then a mortgage, then a kid, and the evening that used to be free got spoken for. The game stayed installed. The time moved to 23:00.
The usual answer to that is a chat room for people in the same boat, and then a long wait for something to happen in it. Over30 works the other way round. It starts with people who already go live and teams who already play fixtures, because those give anyone arriving a reason to be there on the first day rather than the fiftieth.
The competitive side is not a graduation from the casual one. Over30 Esports runs real rosters on a fixed evening, and it is one of the two things the whole thing stands on. What grows around the streams and the fixtures is the community, and it assumes you have forty minutes at an unpredictable hour, because that is true of everyone here.
Being clear
What Over30 is not.
Not a clan with a rota
Nobody is tracking your attendance on the casual side. Miss a month and come back, and the conversation carries on where it stopped.
Not allergic to being good at it
Communities for older players tend to make a virtue of not caring how good anyone is. That is a fine thing to offer and it is not this. Some of us want to be genuinely good, and there is a roster for that.
Not a numbers game
We are not counting members in public, and we are not going to pretend to be bigger than we are. It starts small because it starts honest.
Not a local club
It runs online, and the people in it are spread across Europe. Competitive play started with one title because that is where the people were, and neither the game nor the map is meant to be the ceiling.
Where it goes
We are early, and we would rather say so.
Now
Streamers and teams
The two things that have to exist first: people going live worth watching, and rosters playing fixtures worth following. Everything else is downstream of them.
Next
Somewhere to stay afterwards
A proper space for the people who turn up for a stream or a match and then want to play, rather than watching and scattering back to their own group chats.
Later
Rooms with people in them
LANs and nights out, wherever there are enough of us to fill a room. The point at which a list of usernames turns into people you have actually met.
Getting involved
The early people get to shape it.
There is no committee and no roadmap set in stone. If you turn up now, what you want out of it is largely what it becomes.