7 ms·

Ugh I stopped playing league of legends because it just made me so angry and act so terribly. Screaming at my friends and just constantly feeling angry and frus

by wincy 4y ago

Ugh I stopped playing league of legends because it just made me so angry and act so terribly. Screaming at my friends and just constantly feeling angry and frustrated. With the way the ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you’ll lose half your games unless you’re a literally world class player. My wife’s ex would piss in bottles while drinking vodka and playing. If I try to play League she’ll throw the breaker because the noises are triggering to her. Now I play D&D because losing is just as much fun (or more fun!) than losing.

skulk 4y ago
> With the way the ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you’ll lose half your games unless you’re a literally world class player. This is theoretically expected of skill-based matchmaking systems.
- ianbutler 4y ago
  You are right about sbmm, but it doesn’t make for a good progression system imo. If my hidden elo says I’m diamond or w/e I should cruise through early ranks instead of being matched with other diamond elo players climbing from bronze. It should only feel like a slog/be super competitive when the external rank matches the hidden elo. Not the entire time IMO. Some games get this right, others (looking at you Apex Legends Arenas Mode) does not and it just winds up being a terrible slog.
  - bick_nyers 4y ago
    Lol so true. Why am I being matched up against top 500 players when I am quite literally making my way through bronze. Just double my queue time until we find a good match at that point.
  - cube2222 4y ago
    Actually, I think matching you against equal players would be much better in such a situation, but you should gain much more visible elo for wins than you lose for losses (thus going up even with a 50% win rate).
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    > If my hidden elo says I’m diamond or w/e I should cruise through early ranks instead of being matched with other diamond elo players climbing from bronze. Or maybe you should stop making new accounts and stop smurfing? I've been a beginner in plenty of games, and it sucks to be matched against someone far above your skill level in most games. ------ I get it. A lot of people want to be matched up against weaker players so that they have an easy win. That doesn't make it fair for the losers in this situation. Furthermore, it weakens the community and turns it more toxic. Expert players (or even advanced/intermediate players) shouldn't seek out weak players and stomp them. 50% win ratios, for everyone, should be the default goal. You climb the Elo to keep 50% win/loss, and as you lose, you fall to 50% win/loss as well, or so the ideal is. That way, everyone is on fair grounds. If you want someone to "feed you wins", maybe play a PvE game like MMOs or something? But a competitive game is zero-sum by default. Half the players lose, and half the players win each game. So community managers need to spread the wins and losses around in a fair way.
    - arthurcolle 4y ago
      > If you want someone to "feed you wins", maybe play a PvE game like MMOs or something? Yeah this is easily solved - just go ratting in high sec in a nice specced out Drekavac or something.
    - ianbutler 4y ago
      Or maybe you're new to ranked and hidden elo takes in to account quickplay? I've never smurfed in a game so shove it.
    - grog454 4y ago
      > I've been a beginner in plenty of games, and it sucks to be matched against someone far above your skill level in most games. I used to think this way until I started to understand what it takes to become competitive at high levels. The most efficient way to improve is to play with and against people better than you. If you take your ego out of the equation and pretend everyone is there to teach you, it's hard NOT to learn something. Tangential to that, a lot of people would be honored to play against a GM in chess. Yet when placed against actual GMs doing some variation of a "3000 elo speed run", they throw a fit. What? Maybe its cultural. For a while in SC2 GSL, there was a side show where a random amateur for the audience got to play against a pro. You could clearly see the reverence most of the amateurs held for their opponent.
  - ajuc 4y ago
    For you to win more than 50% of the time requires that others lose more than 50% of the time. Which sucks. But what's more important, is that if you apply the same logic to other players from 1 league higher than your real ELO - you should be the one losing over 50% of the time to make them happier :)
- ben_w 4y ago
  Back when I was in game dev, I really wanted to find a way to make them fun even when you lost. I never managed to grok that magic, but I did see it in e.g. Settlers of Catan.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    This becomes a different beast when you introduce competitive play. In non-ranked there is this feeling of freedom to try new things, have fun, etc... but in ranked it feels like things are on the line(despite those things being so trivial as a few points up or down). Settlers is so fun because you really feel like you're on a journey the whole game, and while it is nice to win, you remember the interactions and experiences in the game as the valuable thing(IMO).
    - andrepd 4y ago
      Unless the dice fuck you over extra hard x)
      - rintakumpu 4y ago
        Play with a deck of cards instead of dice! 36 cards, six sevens, five eights and sixes and so on.
        jack_pp 4y ago
        How is that supposed to help? A bad run is a bad run no matter the randomizer. Also cards need to be shuffled which wastes time if done correctly
        ben_w 4y ago
        A deck of cards behaves the way the gambler's fallacy expects everything to behave: after enough bad luck, you're sure to get a good result.
        4y ago
- mym1990 4y ago
  And I actually only truly grasped this recently(the concept makes sense). My paranoid self always thinks that in a game like League, there are artificial matchmaking things going on to keep you at 50%, apart from a stagnation of skill. In truth, I probably just need to get better(at whatever, doesn't have to be League).
  - jrockway 4y ago
    Yeah, if you win 50% of your games it means the matchmaker is working perfectly. People really have a lot of trouble understanding that. Also, to improve, you probably have to lose a bunch of games while you're unlocking that new knowledge. The toxicity of teammates kind of steers people away from that. Thus people get stuck at where they place and never go up or down significantly.
    - bick_nyers 4y ago
      Unless of course if a team full of me would have a 70% winrate, and the system is compensating (because hidden ELO) by sticking me with teammates that each have 45% winrates. It still averages out to 50% winrate. Just because you can force a point of convergence does not mean it is the correct point of convergence.
      - jrockway 4y ago
        Yeah, I definitely feel this variance in matchmaking. play games with my friends every Saturday night and 8 hours in after 5 beers, I doubt our MMR is quite as high as it was when we started the session. (The first game probably isn't great either!) But the matchmaker doesn't really know these subtleties, so sometimes the enemies get an easier than expected game. So it goes. The competitive ladder climbing meta is really about recognizing when you shouldn't be playing and not playing then. Interesting angle to optimize.
        bick_nyers 4y ago
        Yeah, if I want to climb a ladder I have to play first thing in the morning (with physical exercise as well as warmup games), and make sure I quit at the right time.
- bick_nyers 4y ago
  There can still be issues. For example, how does the ELO system view previous wins/losses when calculating ELO gain/loss from future wins? Anecdote: My friends played the first few ranked seasons on my Xbox Overwatch account, they started at Bronze and eventually got to Silver. I decided to pick it up and play ranked with a different friend, we won 9/10 of the placement matches. I got ranked Silver, he got ranked Platinum. A month later, I make a new Overwatch account on PC and rank Platinum with ease. In these systems, if you gain a lot of skill in a short amount of time, or have bad luck early on in your ranked career, you can be held back in rank gains to the point that you are essentially stuck in place. Creating a new account generally allows you to advance significantly faster through the ranks.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  The issue is that riot has designed it so the 50% has become the target rather than the metric. The result is that you'll go on win and loss streaks and if you play long enough it becomes obvious it's being manipulated that way. Winning 1 or 2 and losing 1 or 2 are just fine. winning 10-15 followed by losing 10-15 just feels bad and isn't worth it. And if you've played long enough you can start feeling when the tipping point is about to happen. The wins will start getting more and more difficult as more people on your team obviously don't belong in the game. Or vice versa, and you'll start getting people on your teams consistently such that nothing you do matters because you'll just win. Then you add in a dash of streamers and people doing "bronze to plat" challenges and it's just not fun. Either they're losing on purpose to tank their rank or they're pubstomping people far below their skill level. The end result is that it all just feels bad and the only people that end up playing a significant number of games are actively addicted to it.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    Goodhart's Law!
  - amatecha 4y ago
    Yeah, I've absolutely noticed those long win/loss streaks and it reduces the value of the game by far. It's like, by the time I get a win, it's such a total stomping, it's not even fun. I slog through like 8 losses in a row, and then suddenly get a totally uneven matchup (in my favor) and the game is like the shortest possible game, because the matchmaking finally tossed me a bone (or whatever). Great, I finally won a game, and it was basically just a free win. I don't find it fun, and the losing team definitely doesn't either. The concept of "winning"/"losing" is diluted or made irrelevant by a crappy underlying system. After this long you'd think there would be a better system devised? I'd rather wait longer than have to get these constant poorly-balanced matchups.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mym1990 4y ago
I have recently transitioned to Teamfight Tactics and a bit of Fall Guys, and have had much more enjoyment from it. But I have also realized that everything in TFT is RNG based, and is almost equivalent to playing a slot machine where every pull takes 30-40 minutes. The scary thing with a 5v5 MOBA and a ranking system is that a large part of the game falls outside of your control unless you're that player that can consistently carry. So to that point, you really have to take time to study the game and psychology if you want to climb...but then you get wherever you're going and realize you have almost nothing of value to show for it.
- sdwr 4y ago
  In theory it's a hyper-gravity trainer, spend years competing with people non-stop, then the real world is easy by comparison (or end up twitchy and out of sync, idk). Inspiration/leadership is another way to carry. Games start blurring together, even just getting people's attention can be enough of an edge to win. I had one game recently where they had the late-game edge. I've lost too many of those standing around with our dicks in our hand + farming, so I started calling targets and forcing early fights, we won pretty handily. I wasn't the best player on the team, and not all the calls worked, but I'm pretty sure it would have been an L otherwise.
znpy 4y ago
If that’s your experience with league of legends (and don’t get me wrong, i feel you) then don’t even think about even trying OpenArena and similar. The amount of cheaters/aimbotters is astonishing, and the lack of a central authority means everything stays the same or only gets worse. I had to stop playing because… let’s put it politely and say it was having a very bad influence on me.
Fatnino 4y ago
Play D&D because losing is just as much fun as losing?
- mym1990 4y ago
  When losing is all you know sob
- MengerSponge 4y ago
  They played League for so long the word "Win" and its relatives "Winning" and "Victory" left their vocabulary. I'm surprised "fun" is still there!
- wincy 4y ago
  Hah just as much fun as winning. Losing at D&D can involve all sorts of weird and creative things happening depending on your Dungeon Master. Often times you might not just die in a conflict. Recently my character found a cursed necklace that guards against all but the strongest attacks and my bard is very excited and wearing it, feeling invincible. Little does he know, there’s a very powerful evil being who can hear all his thoughts, knows where he is at all times, and can compel him to do his bidding. I’m pretty excited to see how the story develops, even if it eventually ends in my character’s horrible demise.
- spartanatreyu 4y ago
  D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) is usually fun when something unexpected happens, which is most of the time, win or lose. Playing LoL (League of Legends) and other MOBAs (Multiple online battle arenas) and winning only results in fun sometimes and almost never results in fun when losing.
chowells 4y ago
> With the way the ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you’ll lose half your games unless you’re a literally world class player. This isn't the real problem. If everyone was on the same page and playing well, and you still lost, would it be nearly as frustrating? (It would be somewhat frustrating, sure, but it would be dialed way back.) No, the problem with League is that all five players on a team can leave a lost team fight thinking "if they'd played how I wanted, we would have won that one", all five having a different plan in mind... And all five are correct. The game frustrates people the way it does because they can construct an almost-true narrative where every loss is because of their teammates, while all their teammates are doing the same.
- sdwr 4y ago
  I've never heard that explained so well. Everyone in their own fantasy ego-preserving bubble. I guess the only ways out are carry, be carried, or puncture the bubble and start communicating. Feels like the same thing can apply to life!
hnuser52395 4y ago
> "Screaming at my friends and just constantly feeling angry and frustrated." A former high school classmate was known to scream at other people during League matches, and I chalked it up to a personality issue and him lacking maturity (aka something highly abnormal). This might still be true, but it actually sounds like competitive video games and the culture around them might really normalize this behavior as acceptable. It looks like I was too quick to judge him personally, instead of accounting for the context.
jb_s 4y ago
This is it, right here. Good games are fun to lose as well. Otherwise it's just a competition where you occasionally beat people and feel amazing about yourself, or lose to people and feel terrible. The variable reward system in ranked LoL messes with our brains, gambling machines and pay-to-win games have exploited this for years. League, at least for me, didn't seem like a fun game (at least in like 2010 or whatever it was?). Most of the time was hitting hapless minions and waiting for some timer to finish so you could finally fight a human or go jungle/dragon or whatever it was. But that would be over in a few seconds and then back to grinding away at some shitty NPCs. Maybe some people enjoy the actual gameplay enough but 99% of my LoL friends played either for social purposes or were hyper competitive. I found SC2 way more fun, pretty much every game was fun unless the opponent themselves did something boring like cannon rushing. I would routinely come up with interesting builds/strategies and test them out on people (fun to figure out if it worked or not). Mass marines, weird timing attacks, anti-meta. I didn't see that flexibility in LoL. The mechanics (for me) were far more involved and enjoyable anyway but that's my shitty opinion.
- grog454 4y ago
  > pretty much every game was fun unless the opponent themselves did something boring like cannon rushing. I would routinely come up with interesting builds/strategies and test them out on people I've never understood why so many people have this value judgement for long macro oriented games and against short micro oriented games. To me, most macro games look like the same fundamental thing over and over with slight variations, and end on a small mistake that has a drastic effect. On the other hand, I'll never forget the game where Maru got canon rushed and floated his entire base and SCVs through the canons to his third (I think). And won easily. Coming up with builds is a completely valid thing to enjoy about sc2, but to me what makes the game interesting is the interactions with your opponent. It doesn't get much more interactive than a game with early, non stop aggression.
- me_me_me 4y ago
  As ex dota player, the highs you get from those outlier games are incredible. You overperform, outplay other players. Your team starts to move together and work as one. It feels amazing, you feel like a god for an hour. But this is one of maybe 100 games, the rest of those games is subconsciously chasing that next amazing game where all stars align you get a good teammates and opponents that are slightly below your skill level. But instead you get toxic team that make you loose hope in humanity. Its like slots, just each pull lasts 40 minutes :) Dota is one of most amazing and horrible games ever made. i am glad i am out of it

by wincy 4y ago

skulk 4y ago

> With the way the ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you’ll lose half your games unless you’re a literally world class player. This is theoretically expected of skill-based matchmaking systems.

ianbutler 4y ago
You are right about sbmm, but it doesn’t make for a good progression system imo. If my hidden elo says I’m diamond or w/e I should cruise through early ranks instead of being matched with other diamond elo players climbing from bronze. It should only feel like a slog/be super competitive when the external rank matches the hidden elo. Not the entire time IMO. Some games get this right, others (looking at you Apex Legends Arenas Mode) does not and it just winds up being a terrible slog.
- bick_nyers 4y ago
  Lol so true. Why am I being matched up against top 500 players when I am quite literally making my way through bronze. Just double my queue time until we find a good match at that point.
- cube2222 4y ago
  Actually, I think matching you against equal players would be much better in such a situation, but you should gain much more visible elo for wins than you lose for losses (thus going up even with a 50% win rate).
- dragontamer 4y ago
  > If my hidden elo says I’m diamond or w/e I should cruise through early ranks instead of being matched with other diamond elo players climbing from bronze. Or maybe you should stop making new accounts and stop smurfing? I've been a beginner in plenty of games, and it sucks to be matched against someone far above your skill level in most games. ------ I get it. A lot of people want to be matched up against weaker players so that they have an easy win. That doesn't make it fair for the losers in this situation. Furthermore, it weakens the community and turns it more toxic. Expert players (or even advanced/intermediate players) shouldn't seek out weak players and stomp them. 50% win ratios, for everyone, should be the default goal. You climb the Elo to keep 50% win/loss, and as you lose, you fall to 50% win/loss as well, or so the ideal is. That way, everyone is on fair grounds. If you want someone to "feed you wins", maybe play a PvE game like MMOs or something? But a competitive game is zero-sum by default. Half the players lose, and half the players win each game. So community managers need to spread the wins and losses around in a fair way.
  - arthurcolle 4y ago
    > If you want someone to "feed you wins", maybe play a PvE game like MMOs or something? Yeah this is easily solved - just go ratting in high sec in a nice specced out Drekavac or something.
  - ianbutler 4y ago
    Or maybe you're new to ranked and hidden elo takes in to account quickplay? I've never smurfed in a game so shove it.
  - grog454 4y ago
    > I've been a beginner in plenty of games, and it sucks to be matched against someone far above your skill level in most games. I used to think this way until I started to understand what it takes to become competitive at high levels. The most efficient way to improve is to play with and against people better than you. If you take your ego out of the equation and pretend everyone is there to teach you, it's hard NOT to learn something. Tangential to that, a lot of people would be honored to play against a GM in chess. Yet when placed against actual GMs doing some variation of a "3000 elo speed run", they throw a fit. What? Maybe its cultural. For a while in SC2 GSL, there was a side show where a random amateur for the audience got to play against a pro. You could clearly see the reverence most of the amateurs held for their opponent.
- ajuc 4y ago
  For you to win more than 50% of the time requires that others lose more than 50% of the time. Which sucks. But what's more important, is that if you apply the same logic to other players from 1 league higher than your real ELO - you should be the one losing over 50% of the time to make them happier :)
ben_w 4y ago
Back when I was in game dev, I really wanted to find a way to make them fun even when you lost. I never managed to grok that magic, but I did see it in e.g. Settlers of Catan.
- mym1990 4y ago
  This becomes a different beast when you introduce competitive play. In non-ranked there is this feeling of freedom to try new things, have fun, etc... but in ranked it feels like things are on the line(despite those things being so trivial as a few points up or down). Settlers is so fun because you really feel like you're on a journey the whole game, and while it is nice to win, you remember the interactions and experiences in the game as the valuable thing(IMO).
  - andrepd 4y ago
    Unless the dice fuck you over extra hard x)
    - rintakumpu 4y ago
      Play with a deck of cards instead of dice! 36 cards, six sevens, five eights and sixes and so on.
      - jack_pp 4y ago
        How is that supposed to help? A bad run is a bad run no matter the randomizer. Also cards need to be shuffled which wastes time if done correctly
        ben_w 4y ago
        A deck of cards behaves the way the gambler's fallacy expects everything to behave: after enough bad luck, you're sure to get a good result.
        4y ago
mym1990 4y ago
And I actually only truly grasped this recently(the concept makes sense). My paranoid self always thinks that in a game like League, there are artificial matchmaking things going on to keep you at 50%, apart from a stagnation of skill. In truth, I probably just need to get better(at whatever, doesn't have to be League).
- jrockway 4y ago
  Yeah, if you win 50% of your games it means the matchmaker is working perfectly. People really have a lot of trouble understanding that. Also, to improve, you probably have to lose a bunch of games while you're unlocking that new knowledge. The toxicity of teammates kind of steers people away from that. Thus people get stuck at where they place and never go up or down significantly.
  - bick_nyers 4y ago
    Unless of course if a team full of me would have a 70% winrate, and the system is compensating (because hidden ELO) by sticking me with teammates that each have 45% winrates. It still averages out to 50% winrate. Just because you can force a point of convergence does not mean it is the correct point of convergence.
    - jrockway 4y ago
      Yeah, I definitely feel this variance in matchmaking. play games with my friends every Saturday night and 8 hours in after 5 beers, I doubt our MMR is quite as high as it was when we started the session. (The first game probably isn't great either!) But the matchmaker doesn't really know these subtleties, so sometimes the enemies get an easier than expected game. So it goes. The competitive ladder climbing meta is really about recognizing when you shouldn't be playing and not playing then. Interesting angle to optimize.
      - bick_nyers 4y ago
        Yeah, if I want to climb a ladder I have to play first thing in the morning (with physical exercise as well as warmup games), and make sure I quit at the right time.
bick_nyers 4y ago
There can still be issues. For example, how does the ELO system view previous wins/losses when calculating ELO gain/loss from future wins? Anecdote: My friends played the first few ranked seasons on my Xbox Overwatch account, they started at Bronze and eventually got to Silver. I decided to pick it up and play ranked with a different friend, we won 9/10 of the placement matches. I got ranked Silver, he got ranked Platinum. A month later, I make a new Overwatch account on PC and rank Platinum with ease. In these systems, if you gain a lot of skill in a short amount of time, or have bad luck early on in your ranked career, you can be held back in rank gains to the point that you are essentially stuck in place. Creating a new account generally allows you to advance significantly faster through the ranks.
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
The issue is that riot has designed it so the 50% has become the target rather than the metric. The result is that you'll go on win and loss streaks and if you play long enough it becomes obvious it's being manipulated that way. Winning 1 or 2 and losing 1 or 2 are just fine. winning 10-15 followed by losing 10-15 just feels bad and isn't worth it. And if you've played long enough you can start feeling when the tipping point is about to happen. The wins will start getting more and more difficult as more people on your team obviously don't belong in the game. Or vice versa, and you'll start getting people on your teams consistently such that nothing you do matters because you'll just win. Then you add in a dash of streamers and people doing "bronze to plat" challenges and it's just not fun. Either they're losing on purpose to tank their rank or they're pubstomping people far below their skill level. The end result is that it all just feels bad and the only people that end up playing a significant number of games are actively addicted to it.
- mym1990 4y ago
  Goodhart's Law!
- amatecha 4y ago
  Yeah, I've absolutely noticed those long win/loss streaks and it reduces the value of the game by far. It's like, by the time I get a win, it's such a total stomping, it's not even fun. I slog through like 8 losses in a row, and then suddenly get a totally uneven matchup (in my favor) and the game is like the shortest possible game, because the matchmaking finally tossed me a bone (or whatever). Great, I finally won a game, and it was basically just a free win. I don't find it fun, and the losing team definitely doesn't either. The concept of "winning"/"losing" is diluted or made irrelevant by a crappy underlying system. After this long you'd think there would be a better system devised? I'd rather wait longer than have to get these constant poorly-balanced matchups.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mym1990 4y ago

I have recently transitioned to Teamfight Tactics and a bit of Fall Guys, and have had much more enjoyment from it. But I have also realized that everything in TFT is RNG based, and is almost equivalent to playing a slot machine where every pull takes 30-40 minutes. The scary thing with a 5v5 MOBA and a ranking system is that a large part of the game falls outside of your control unless you're that player that can consistently carry. So to that point, you really have to take time to study the game and psychology if you want to climb...but then you get wherever you're going and realize you have almost nothing of value to show for it.

sdwr 4y ago
In theory it's a hyper-gravity trainer, spend years competing with people non-stop, then the real world is easy by comparison (or end up twitchy and out of sync, idk). Inspiration/leadership is another way to carry. Games start blurring together, even just getting people's attention can be enough of an edge to win. I had one game recently where they had the late-game edge. I've lost too many of those standing around with our dicks in our hand + farming, so I started calling targets and forcing early fights, we won pretty handily. I wasn't the best player on the team, and not all the calls worked, but I'm pretty sure it would have been an L otherwise.

znpy 4y ago

If that’s your experience with league of legends (and don’t get me wrong, i feel you) then don’t even think about even trying OpenArena and similar. The amount of cheaters/aimbotters is astonishing, and the lack of a central authority means everything stays the same or only gets worse. I had to stop playing because… let’s put it politely and say it was having a very bad influence on me.

Fatnino 4y ago

Play D&D because losing is just as much fun as losing?

mym1990 4y ago
When losing is all you know sob
MengerSponge 4y ago
They played League for so long the word "Win" and its relatives "Winning" and "Victory" left their vocabulary. I'm surprised "fun" is still there!
wincy 4y ago
Hah just as much fun as winning. Losing at D&D can involve all sorts of weird and creative things happening depending on your Dungeon Master. Often times you might not just die in a conflict. Recently my character found a cursed necklace that guards against all but the strongest attacks and my bard is very excited and wearing it, feeling invincible. Little does he know, there’s a very powerful evil being who can hear all his thoughts, knows where he is at all times, and can compel him to do his bidding. I’m pretty excited to see how the story develops, even if it eventually ends in my character’s horrible demise.
spartanatreyu 4y ago
D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) is usually fun when something unexpected happens, which is most of the time, win or lose. Playing LoL (League of Legends) and other MOBAs (Multiple online battle arenas) and winning only results in fun sometimes and almost never results in fun when losing.

chowells 4y ago

> With the way the ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you’ll lose half your games unless you’re a literally world class player. This isn't the real problem. If everyone was on the same page and playing well, and you still lost, would it be nearly as frustrating? (It would be somewhat frustrating, sure, but it would be dialed way back.) No, the problem with League is that all five players on a team can leave a lost team fight thinking "if they'd played how I wanted, we would have won that one", all five having a different plan in mind... And all five are correct. The game frustrates people the way it does because they can construct an almost-true narrative where every loss is because of their teammates, while all their teammates are doing the same.

sdwr 4y ago
I've never heard that explained so well. Everyone in their own fantasy ego-preserving bubble. I guess the only ways out are carry, be carried, or puncture the bubble and start communicating. Feels like the same thing can apply to life!

hnuser52395 4y ago

> "Screaming at my friends and just constantly feeling angry and frustrated." A former high school classmate was known to scream at other people during League matches, and I chalked it up to a personality issue and him lacking maturity (aka something highly abnormal). This might still be true, but it actually sounds like competitive video games and the culture around them might really normalize this behavior as acceptable. It looks like I was too quick to judge him personally, instead of accounting for the context.

jb_s 4y ago

This is it, right here. Good games are fun to lose as well. Otherwise it's just a competition where you occasionally beat people and feel amazing about yourself, or lose to people and feel terrible. The variable reward system in ranked LoL messes with our brains, gambling machines and pay-to-win games have exploited this for years. League, at least for me, didn't seem like a fun game (at least in like 2010 or whatever it was?). Most of the time was hitting hapless minions and waiting for some timer to finish so you could finally fight a human or go jungle/dragon or whatever it was. But that would be over in a few seconds and then back to grinding away at some shitty NPCs. Maybe some people enjoy the actual gameplay enough but 99% of my LoL friends played either for social purposes or were hyper competitive. I found SC2 way more fun, pretty much every game was fun unless the opponent themselves did something boring like cannon rushing. I would routinely come up with interesting builds/strategies and test them out on people (fun to figure out if it worked or not). Mass marines, weird timing attacks, anti-meta. I didn't see that flexibility in LoL. The mechanics (for me) were far more involved and enjoyable anyway but that's my shitty opinion.

grog454 4y ago
> pretty much every game was fun unless the opponent themselves did something boring like cannon rushing. I would routinely come up with interesting builds/strategies and test them out on people I've never understood why so many people have this value judgement for long macro oriented games and against short micro oriented games. To me, most macro games look like the same fundamental thing over and over with slight variations, and end on a small mistake that has a drastic effect. On the other hand, I'll never forget the game where Maru got canon rushed and floated his entire base and SCVs through the canons to his third (I think). And won easily. Coming up with builds is a completely valid thing to enjoy about sc2, but to me what makes the game interesting is the interactions with your opponent. It doesn't get much more interactive than a game with early, non stop aggression.
me_me_me 4y ago
As ex dota player, the highs you get from those outlier games are incredible. You overperform, outplay other players. Your team starts to move together and work as one. It feels amazing, you feel like a god for an hour. But this is one of maybe 100 games, the rest of those games is subconsciously chasing that next amazing game where all stars align you get a good teammates and opponents that are slightly below your skill level. But instead you get toxic team that make you loose hope in humanity. Its like slots, just each pull lasts 40 minutes :) Dota is one of most amazing and horrible games ever made. i am glad i am out of it