Last time I covered the topic of Roaming, but this week I’m going to be covering about Ranked Anxiety. In this article, I’m also going to talk about your attitude towards ranked games or gaming as a whole. This is going to be addressing more of a general concept. Expect that the format may seem a little different this time around.
Looking at this definition makes it completely justified and normal to feel anxiety. While I was researching this topic, I was looking at people who have covered the topic in the past. I noticed that those people admitted that they had never experienced Ranked Anxiety.
For me, this was something that I experienced in gaming for years. In my first 2 years of playing League of Legends, I couldn’t play ranked because of my fear of the outcome. In my case, the fear of playing ranked games came from a sense of pride. When I was younger, I always put so much pressure on myself to perform well. This is because the people around me told me that I had “so much potential” and I didn’t want to let them down.
This extended into League of Legends because everyone was playing this game. It was also a game that I was passionate about from the start. The idea of playing a ranked game, not playing well, losing, and getting called “bad” was something that I had to avoid. Back then I enjoyed playing customs 1 vs 1 or something similar. That’s because the idea of having 4 other people on my team blaming me for losing the game was too overwhelming.
I know it’s a bit difficult to understand for some people and it’s kind of hard to explain. But for me, the feeling of letting people down and having that pressure on you is something natural. Even if it is difficult to overcome. If you have felt nervous queueing up for ranked, then you may have experienced Ranked Anxiety.
Know that it is not a shame to experience that. Anxiety is a very natural thing, it is your body reacting to a stressful situation. It’s like how your body reacts to being in danger, which is why people experience this in different ways. Adrenaline gets released to your body when it’s not meant to and it makes your body and mind tense. You’ll feel scared, uncertain, and disorganized. Your breathing and heart rate increase. Oxygen to your brain and your extremities gets reduced, thus giving you cold hands.
All this happens because YOU are too invested in this game. You’re too worried about how other people will perceive you and what the outcome of the game might be. The first step to overcoming your anxiety is acceptance. Accepting the fact that you might be a bad player or you would get bad players on your team. Most of all, you should accept the fact that you need to go through those factors. you need to push through to go into this journey to becoming a better player.
Soon enough, I overcame my Ranked Anxiety. It was because finding my true skill level outweighed the fact that I could get called “bad”. I thought that if I was a bad player, then I need to know more to get better. I took a step back and realized that I can’t control my team, no one can. One team is bound to lose and someone is bound to feel bad when they play. Most of all, that team or that someone is going to be me, and I need to be okay with that.
When I played my first ever ranked game and made a minor mistake, my whole mindset changed. I got completely fixated on the outcome of the game, asking myself questions such as — “What if I lose this game?” — and I started to feel depressed. I didn’t know what I was doing anymore, wasn’t playing well, and worst — we lost that game. Even if I had gone into the game with a great mindset and positive attitude, it all went spiraling down soon enough.
I realized at that moment that I could go into the game with such a fantastic mindset. But then, my brain would completely change the moment something goes wrong. My mind gets focused on all the negative things again asking myself — “What if I lose this game?” — and so the outcome of the game was still too important for me. I realized that I need to work on how my brain works.
In Psychology, there’s this thing called the Feedback Loop. What you think, how you feel, and how you behave is all linked. For example, if you’re feeling sad, you can force yourself to smile. Doing so will allow your body to begin feeling genuine happiness. This psychological concept can either be positive or negative. As for what I was experiencing, it was a negative feedback loop. When one thing went wrong, my mind started to think about all the negative things that could happen. This then in turn made me feel more depressed, which would lead me to behave in a negative way.
My brain changed, start to feel depressed, lost all my confidence, and my play would degrade. I solved it by acknowledging that instance could happen. I knew that feeling bad about myself and worry about the outcome of the game wasn’t good. If anything, it was only going to feed into the negative feedback loop. I knew that if I made myself feel worse, I would play worse soon enough. My problem wasn’t losing the game, but rather the fear of losing the game.
So I decided to turn my League of Legends experiences into positive ones. Like thinking about my ADC that could scale anyway despite him dying 3 times in 5 minutes. Thinking that we could still come back from the game despite giving up that one dragon. Training my brain to focus on those things made me start thinking in a positive way, which made me feel much better. It allowed me to play better and enjoy League of Legends more. I got to the point where I was no longer nervous playing ranked games because I thought it was the “normal” way to play. That’s how I got to Bronze to Diamond from Season 3 to Season 5.
Even after years of playing ranked, I still get Ranked Anxiety if I took a break from playing the game. I still get nervous trying to get back into the game. It’s something that I’ve accepted which might not ever go away completely. At least I know that the problem is in my head, which is something that I can control.
RECAP
If you’re feeling Ranked Anxiety, remember the following things:
- Everybody loses games
It’s a fact that even the best players in the world can go on a huge losing streak and that’s okay.
- People will judge you
They can rage at you and be mean to you but you’re better than that and you can always mute them.
- No one can control the outcome of every game
Not you, not your team, and not anyone else. So don’t think of it that way.
- Your greatest opponent is yourself
Think positive, be positive, and stay positive. You’re the only one who can put yourself down.
That’s all for now! I hope you learned something from this article. Good luck on the Rift!
