Woes of competetive gaming

    The inherent problem with competetive gaming  is that one side inevitably loses. No matter the time spent on training , preparation and planning  one side will win and the other does not.  And losses are depressing, especially if you were preparing

    There was a recent tournament in World of Tanks game , 96 teams applied. Only one won. First there is barrier of finding 20 people who would commit to playing together in tourney. 2nd there was actually those who honored their commitment. 3d there were those who were preparing and 4th there were those who were good. At the end there was only one team which won! 

My clan had 5 teams.  All were organized. All were training. But just 2 made to rewarde  stage  and only one won. In my team in particular we had daily trainings and drills for over a week . We made to semi finals, I could not play the game due to work emergency, my team lost in semis. I was supposed to be one of the key players on the flank which was overrun , so blame could be partially placed on me. It could be we would been overrun anyways , but fact is because I could not play  they had to put replacement player who was  not used  to play on that flank in this role ,which potentially tipped the scales in favor of opposite team

At the end of the day it worked fine for us -after all we still got some prize. It was not so good for many others. One of the top teams lost before getting to semis,  it had some elite players (in game  top 10), the loss before prize  stage was clearly not satisfactory, as a result of this  loss some players broke up from their main clan. I think some might have even quit the game.

Of course this is not really a problem. Tournament teams are self selected. People  know what they are aiming for and know that not everyone will be on top.

       Bigger problem is how you make broader base of non competitive   gamers accept that you don't win all the time. In fact for large numbers player base their loss might be more than 50% of the time .Do you reward them anyways? Do you   isolate  this aspect of gaming from main game  completely? Do you try to make everyone play vs same skill levels so they w:l 50% of time?