What is ladder anxiety?

Everyone who has played a competitive mode in a video game, whether it be in a solo or a team environment, has probably come to the point where (s)he didn’t want to queue for ranked play anymore, in fear of playing the next game.

This is what we usually refer to as ladder anxiety.

Ladder Anxiety is ultimately a fear of failure.

This is something that I have a lot of experience with. Didn't matter if I was playing Starcraft, Poker, World of Warcraft, Chess, or even talking to women in a social setting. Even trying to go to the gym can lead to this exact kind of anxiety.

It got worse and worse, up to the point where I quit the game, without really wanting to actually quit.

This anxiety can be so crippling that it creates the ultimate paradox of wanting to do something, but wanting to do the thing makes one ironically not want to do it anymore. The fear is real. The psychology devastating and even maddening.

Don't hate the player,
hate the game.

Why am I bringing up this issue now? Because it's something that I've never even come close to defeating. The anxiety and fear of potential failure puts me and many others in a perpetual state of deer-in-headlights inaction. Get out of the road, deer! It's not safe for you here!

With Ragnarok right around the corner I will have to apologize in advance, as many of my posts may devolve into pure Ragnarok nonsense. This even happened with that shitty Drugwars game (remember Drugwars?) So many of my posts were about a game that had zero strategy and zero sustainability. How embarrassing. Ragnarok will be infinitely better so... I assume my posts will be infinitely more aggressive.

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@edicted for the love of God stop blogging about Drugwars.

Is what you'll be saying about Ragnarok soon™ enough.

As Ragnarok is going to be a combination of CCG, chess, poker, and crypto all at the same time, things are going to get very intense. Money is going to be on the line. Players are going to full on rage when they get unlucky. The tilt is real.

Performance Anxiety by itself is bad enough, but when there is actual money on the line? That brings it to a whole other level. I remember back in the day when I was a "professional" poker player; terrified of losing. Even scared of winning too much. Days that I was up $1000 or $2000 I knew I'd be in for a world of pain soon enough.

In terms of my poker playing, I mitigated the damage of anxiety and tilt by playing extremely tight and by the book poker at lower stakes ($1 NL and $2 NL or $30-$60 tournaments). Anything more than that was just too big a risk and I could not handle it. This style of play was very boring, as I folded 85% of the time and got bluffed a lot, but the volatility of my bankroll was greatly reduced and my hourly rate was pretty great as well, in addition to going on tilt far less often.

With games like Chess or Starcraft, there was always a certain plateau of skill I'd reach before realizing that I wasn't going to get much better than that unless I took it a lot more seriously.

Yep, I'm a master(3) StarCraft player.

I've got a blackbelt in StarCraft, which sounds impressive until you realize that blackbelt is just the first level of mastery (Dan1) and there are like nine or ten levels of mastery total. A blackbelt is like being the least skilled master. A very pessimistic way of looking at the situation. This is essentially the opposite of how we should be thinking if we want to improve further.

Think of games as opportunities to improve.

As long as you learn something from each game you play it doesn't matter if you win or lose.

This is the correct way of thinking about it.

Do you want to win, or do you actually want to get better? It's quite funny because I was planning on writing this post today no matter what, but I actually fell into a trap today involving this very incorrect mindset.

@samostically approached me today asking me if I wanted to play a chess game, and I agreed. I haven't played chess in over a year, lets do this. I made the mistake of asking what his ELO ranking was, and he said 1992.

Yikes.

There's no way I can win against a player of this skill level. My ELO is like 1600 (1500 is average on most scales). There's really no way I can win a game against that. I even found out later that he's ranked much higher than that in fast games (like 2300 blitz) which is a pretty legendary ranking.

So instead of just playing the regular game and losing and perhaps learning something, we played a variant instead.

https://lichess.org/Yj4PQ0xp5KJK

This is the game we played. It's called Horde and I actually won, which I was very surprised. Pulled out a clutch victory right at the end. I'm not even sure if I've won a horde game as white, as I've only played this variant a few times, but I find it amusing regardless.

Then after that victory I invited @samostically to play Go which is a game he's never even played before. Even giving him a +9 handicap I crushed him two games in a row because weirdly enough I'm really good at Go compared to chess even though I've played way more hours of chess.

The funny thing about being ranked 1600 ELO in chess is that I could pretty much beat anyone that I meet on the street. Chess is obviously not a super popular game these days. People are bad at it. But there are so many skill levels higher than where I am today, and I passed up an opportunity to learn in exchange for an opportunity to get a few free wins under my belt. I feel dirty! Shouldn't have done that! I should have chose to learn something instead!

Some people might actually have physical symptoms, like shaking, sweating, cold hands, quick breathing, or heart racing. Others might have psychological symptoms, like the feeling that you want to play your favorite game, but when you are about to start, you question if you actually want to play.

Hm, yeah, I have had some of these things happen to me. You ever get cold-sweats caused by nervousness? I do not smell pretty when that happens! Also the quick breathing is not helpful either. Breathing exercises can help quite a bit for almost any activity in life, from going to the gym to yoga to stress reduction to actual blood pressure reduction. Deep controlled breaths are surprisingly key to mastering life itself, it seems.

Team play

Luckily Ragnarok will not be a team game, because team games create even more opportunities to get stressed out. Not only must one worry about themselves and their own ego, but one must also worry about the perceptions and egos of their teammates. I know from experience bro, I've played League of Legends.

Christ Almighty.

In a 5v5 game like League of Legends (or even a physical sport like basketball) there can be so much toxicity involved. Especially if your teammates are toxic little shit 14 year olds who's entire job at that stage in life is to annoy everyone around them. Engaging with trolls in team games will ALWAYS make you lose more games.

Escalating the situation will always put everyone on tilt. It doesn't matter if you're right and they are an idiot. If you escalate, you lose. In fact many times if you escalate they will lose on purpose just so you lose. The psychology involved in team games is amazing, and it's something I've never gotten used to, which is why the highest ranked I ever was in LOL was platinum, which is high for most people but low for my standards.

Bronze league heroes baby.

As with Poker, Chess, LOL, Starcraft, or Ragnarok, even professionals will only win 55% to 60% of the time. If you can consistently win 60% of your games in chess against the best players in the world, that makes you the best player in the world. If you can get a 10% edge in gambling, that makes you a master gambler. The same can also be said for cryptocurrency trading. You can lose 40% of the time and still be absolutely killing it on average. This is very important to keep in mind, as it makes the psychology of losing sting quite a bit less.

So what are some things we can do to avoid this fate?

Like any fear we may have, sometimes exposure therapy can be quite helpful. This means failing on purpose or simply putting ourselves in positions where failure is the likely outcome.

When I was playing Starcraft 1 in high school there was no automated matchmaking. You had to find your own opponents, and those opponents might have an ELO from 900 to 2000. I often chose opponents that had a lower ELO because I would rather win a lot of games for a small amount of ELO gain, and lose one or two games here or there at a huge penalty. It was fun winning so many games in a row.

Unfortunately, I never learned anything from playing this way, because my opponents were always worse than me and never had any insight to offer me. The only reasons I would lose once and a while was simply getting unlucky, therefore there was no lesson to learn even when I did lose.

As surprising as it sounds, working out at the gym can be a great way to constantly achieve failure. The interesting thing about going to the gym is that building muscle is largely dependent on our ability to push ourselves to failure over and over again.

Back in olden days I thought that I could simply build muscle and gets the results I wanted just by putting in a certain number of reps over time. Surely, if I did 50 curls a day over the course of hours this is the same as doing 50 curls in a matter of minutes. Turns out, no... this logic is 100% false.

If you want more muscle mass, you have to prove to your own body that this mass is required. After all, muscles cost precious resources, and your body is an efficient machine that refuses to needlessly give you muscles that you don't need. Doing so could literally kill you, and your body is programmed to live. If your body gave you muscles when it should have given you fat, and then you run out of food that winter: that can make the difference between living and dying. We have not evolved past this scarcity programming on a genetic level.

This means pushing your muscles to failure, proving to yourself that you NEED the muscle. The micro-tears that get created from pushing to failure heal, and during that healing process more muscle appears. This is why diet is so important in the healing process. Make sure to eat enough protein and all that jazz, or it will take you a week to heal instead of a day or two and you'll lose everything you worked for.

By engaging in an activity who's success is ironically based on failure, we can further increase our psychological health by bringing it into sync with the physical. Meditation and things like Yoga can also be extremely heathy in this regard. Yoga and related activities heavily rely on controlled breathing and muscle movement. A holistic approach is required here if we are really going to take this seriously.

Usually, the fear of playing ranked rises the more games you lose, and especially the more you lose in a short period of time. But it’s not exclusive to the amount of games you played and lost – it can also easily appear when you find yourself in a situation where your next games might be really important. Often, games have something like a promotion/demotion system for their ranks, or they show you direct numbers that indicate how many games you need to win or lose to get promoted or demoted.

It's funny because I'm kind of the opposite of this.

I'm actually more afraid of ranking up because then my opponents will be that much stronger and I'll have a much better chance of going on a massive losing streak. Everyone experiences these fears in their own way. The problem must be identified properly.

People tend to remember negative things more easily than positive ones, which can be directly related to winning or losing in video games.

Power of Positivity

This is definitely accurate, especially within crypto circles. How many times have we seen people complain about losing 30% after a token spiking x2 or more? We tend to lock in the gains mentally with infinite entitlement, and then act like the losses are completely undeserved.

In games of skill/luck like poker and Hearthstone players will attribute their wins to superior gameplay while convincing themselves the losses are just bad luck. Players will constantly assume they are the only ones getting this unlucky as they play the victim and engage in delusions of persecution and grandeur. I know this from personal experience, but these days I notice it far more often in my opponents and other peers.

Drop the ego, it won't do us any favors. We should Never assume we are somehow less lucky than other players. That is quite simply not how it works. This is something that can be seen ALL THE TIME in toxic LoL games. I can't tell you how many times I've seen players parrot this exact sentiment:

If I could just rank up and stop getting paired with these bad teammates I'd be able to rank up even more!

Forever Bronze.

The logical mental gymnastics employed here are ASTOUNDING, and we can find this exact sentiment across any and all team strategy games in existence. The vast majority of players, especially bad players, refuse to admit that THEY are the problem and they are the one's who need to modify their own actions in order to get better. Apparently it's psychologically much easier to blame others rather than take responsibly while expending effort to improve. Many would rather resign themselves to mediocrity and blame others for this fate than confront the fact that indeed they are the problem.

The first piece of “advice” I’ve heard a dozen times is, “don’t care that much about it, it’s just a video game” … which might be the worst advice for someone with ladder anxiety.

The reason you actually fear to play again is that you do care – and there is nothing wrong about this.

Again, the key in this case is to play to gain experience and improve your own game, rather than to blame teammates or bad luck. Simply maintaining a positive attitude during early gave adversity can mean the difference between a win and a loss. I've seen this happen so many times: games that are lost simply because the losing team becomes psychologically demoralized and they turn on themselves like rabid wolves. It's a fascinating and quite counterproductive response. I wonder then how this is so common among people even though it is so ineffective. Somewhere along the lines the evolution of human psychology fails itself within these cases of abundant example.

Conclusion

How do we avoid tilt and curb ladder anxiety?

• Stay positive
  • Stay cool in the face of adversity.
  • Do not belittle teammates or deflect blame to them.
  • Use positive language/emoji, especially when behind.
  • Don't give up, even if you only have a 1% chance to win.
    • You'd be surprised how many players will give up instantly right when the slightest thing goes wrong.
    • You'd also be surprised how many more games you can win simply because your opponent gets lazy or overconfident.
  • Always deescalate toxic social dynamics.
    • This is a mastered skill that is ignored by most.
    • Many will opt to escalate the situation and wrongfully justify this toxic action that will only help the team lose.
    • If de-escalation is not possible, mute the toxic player and instruct all teammates to mute to kill the conversation.
• Practice being okay with failure.
  • Play for experience rather than playing to win.
  • You don't have to win to have fun or for it to be a good game.
  • Review lost games and see if there is anything more to be learned. Reviewing winning games fun and painless, but also less insightful.
• Identify key problem areas
  • What are you afraid of?
  • What ways do you specifically go on tilt?
  • Do you have reasonable expectations?
• Try to improve incrementally rather than all at once.
  • Understand that trying to imitate a professional can backfire.
  • Understand that ignoring professionals and the accepted meta strategy can also backfire.
  • Less is more. Simplify and adapt.
• Sync your physical and digital reality.
  • Practice slow controlled breathing and movement.
  • Sit up straight. No slouching or rolled shoulders.
  • Go to the gym.
    • Push to failure. Pushing one set to failure (as in you can't do a single extra rep) is better than half-assing five sets.
    • Core, back, and shoulder muscles control sitting posture.
      • These areas are often ignored for legs/chest/arms.
  • Diet: Eat your vegetables trope.
  • Even seeing certain colors can alter your emotional state. Red increases aggressiveness and risk taking. Blue fosters calm analysis. Bepto Bismol (dull pink) will render one apathetic, muted, and disarmed. This is scientifically undeniable to the point that professional sports locker rooms must be painted the same colors for home and away teams. More on this another time.

Employing these tactics can increase confidence and skill levels for any given task by exponential margins. Why did I take the time to write all this out? Mostly for myself, but if my dear readers think they can benefit as well then so be it. I'll see you on the battlefield!

One last reminder of great note. I'd like for all of you to think back to the last blockchain game that was paid for out of pocket by a prominent community member and then just given away for free to the network without so much as even a small premine. Yeah, that's not a thing that exists. That's not a thing that's happened yet.

The launch of Ragnarok is one of those things that may be looked at back through the lens of history like:

There it is. That's the first one that did it right. The first one that not only brought a game to life that would have been impossible within the legacy economy, but also was given away fairly to the community for free with zero strings attached.

Look at the way this game works. A complex CCG poker chess game? No corporation would EVER greenlight such a thing. The target audience demographic is too small. Anyone who knows anything about Norse mythology knows that the storyline and environment of this game are going to be some of the darkest and fucked up shit you've ever seen; another big no-no that would have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day.

But guess what? The blockchain don't care! These things can no longer be shot don't. Innovation is spreading like wildfire, and the central banks are fresh out of firemen. Better luck next time, regulators.

How lucky are we to have this all going down on Hive? I'm feeling pretty lucky. The price is irrelevant. Freedom is priceless.

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