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I've seen countless threads recently and in the past dealing with the issue of "Ladder Anxiety". For whatever reason, people find laddering absolutely daunting and terrifying. I'll be honest, I used to have this issue like many of my fellow players; but now I find the whole thing absolutely silly.
For me, the issue was always a combination of two things. First, I ascribed too much worth to my ladder ranking. I was terrified of losing a bunch of games and getting demoted a league (Being in Silver, I was always scared to go back to Bronze). I wanted to get to a higher ranking; I always do, really. But on it's own, that is absolutely absurd:
I want to get promoted to a higher league.
I do not want to get demoted to lower league.
The only way to get to a higher league is to play ladder games.
If I play ladder games I might get demoted.
What happens if I get demoted? Well, back when I was in Silver, that meant I would get sent down to Bronze. What does that mean?
Well, it means I am going to get some hella easy games; Bronze kids are easy for me to beat. So even if I get demoted, all that will happen is I'll get a series of really easy games and likely get promoted again.
The second issue was that I constantly told myself "No, I'm not ready. I haven't practiced enough. I don't have a strong enough response to X build yet. I can't ladder until I can beat X"
That's fair enough, but it shouldn't be enough of a deterrant from laddering that it causes an issue. If I'm considering signing up for a tournament? Sure. I'll make the decision based on how confident I am in my abilities. But laddering? If I run against X build that I suck against, I'll either hold it/beat it or I won't. If I do, great. If I don't, well, who cares? That just means I'm closer to the series of easy games I described above. Every loss brings me closer to easy matches, and every win is an indicator of my progress as a player.
I got over my ladder anxiety by just framing everything positively; it's a lot easier to not give a shit how you perform on the ladder if you realize that regardless of whether or not you beat your opponent, you still win.
But this realization lead me to another epiphany; the ladder is how you play the game. Starcraft isn't a story-centric game; it's multiplayer centric. That's where the fun comes from; going head to head with another guy and battling it out.
Try playing a custom game against a friend; just a simple 1v1. No pressure, right? Maybe a bit of pride is on the line, but really, it's just a fun game between the two of you.
Uh oh, all my friends are offline, or they're busy playing 2's or 4's or something stupid. Who can I play against now? I guess I could go into one of the race specific channels and ask if someone wants to play. Play a custom match with a stranger; I literally have nothing to lose here. Does it feel stressful? Hell no, nothing is on the line!
That is what the ladder should feel like.
Going on those channels and asking if someone wants to play has a problem though; I might end up matching myself against someone way better than me...and getting absolutely demolished is a bit rough. It's hard for a Gold league kid(or a bronze league kid, for an easier example) like me to take something from getting smashed by a Master's kid that feels like playing some custom 1's.
Shit, I wish there was some way to match me up against strangers that should be at about my skill level so we can play some fun games...Maybe a simple button that just finds someone around my skill level. And those matches we play should be used to determine our skill level for later matches!
Shit guys, I just defined the ladder.
 
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The fear comes from the demotion idea. You ask "What happens if I get demoted?" and the answer is: You get demoted. If I'm in Masters, start losing a ton and fall to Plat, and then start winning again to get promoted to Diamond and then level out... I'm not in Masters any more. The ladder is full of people who get pleasure from pissing other people off, so they do proxies and rushes and all in's and shit, and it makes other people fear the ladder.
You might ask what's the difference between Diamond and Masters and the thing is, there's no other way to gauge how good you are. All you can do to say your skill level is to say where you are on the ladder, and no one wants to say they're worse than they were. The ladder can change your rank so fast, by putting it in leagues and groups (or whatever they call you 100 person part of your league) Blizzard made it so you see results faster, good or bad. If they just made one huge ladder with everyone on it, I think people would care less, because the difference between 1,000,000 and 999,980 and 1,000,030 could all be one game, so movement doesn't really mean anything until it's a pretty big shift.
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Ladder anxiety comes from the fear of realizing that you may not be as good as you think you are. Lot of people got in say Masters a while back and play just enough to stay in that league every season while they really should be diamond but dont play enough games to let their MMR stabilize at that level.
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honestly i don't get it either. once you play enough ladder games you realize how quickly your MMR changes and even if you do something drastic like switch races and get demoted, you can get back to where you were in a day or two. I have a lot of friends who are very competitive with their ladder rank but when it comes to gauging my skill at a certain matchup I would much rather go by my games vs a player I respect and know is good than by the number of points I have.
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I agree with what you're trying to say, I was right with you... and then I got demoted. It fucking sucks, it's a soul-draining, life-crushing, dream-destroying thing. I haven't been able to get my promotion again, and it's been months now. It killed my drive to play and made the game MUCH less fun.
Maybe I shouldn't have played those ladder matches "just for fun" when I wasn't in the right head-space to play well...
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I think you sort of miss the idea of what people are worried about.
I want more ladder points.
If I lose, I will have less ladder points. That's the opposite of what I want!
So if it's late at night, I'm having a loss streak and I feel like I will only meet up with neckbeard cheesers, I just call it quits. I call that ladder anxiety - I just go play other shit instead because I don't want my nerd points to get gobbled up.
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Estonia4644 Posts
i got rid of my ladder fear and finally embarked on placements and a ladder spree at 4-7am, when drunk, with a plat friend, who was equally as drunk, kind of coaching me right besides me, just pointing out obvious macro flaws.
Now i gotta keep laddering drunk though, first game of the day with shaky hands is just terrifying
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I agree with your definition of ladder, but I don't think it really argues against why people should feel anxiety.
The previous two cases you used (playing with a friend or stranger on a custom map) showed the main reason why there was no fear - because there was no ranking system that constantly told you how good (or bad) you were.
You're right in that it would be convenient to adjust those custom game searches by having something that could match you up against equally skilled players. But the introduction of that convenient feature is exactly what makes people so scared...so effectively you're just defining the problem again but not realizing it. Again its not just a minor step up from custom games with random strangers with widely varying skill levels; that convenient skill-matching/ranking system you wish you could add is the whole psychological problem (at least to me).
What I would like is if there was a custom game lobby where platinum players, or gold or whatever could play with each other without any fear of being demoted or promoted (can't have one without the other!). And I think that that's ultimately what you should've been aiming for - a way to play a custom game (without the ranking fear) that targets a certain range of players, so it can still be a meaningful, constructive experience.
And if people feel like they're not good enough for their level they can join the gold lobby or something. Incidentally I hope Blizzard is taking it seriously, its pretty much the main reason (from what I read on these forums and others) as to why people stop playing. Although the game is generally pretty stressful and hyper-competitive. I haven't played any other game that made my hands shake so badly that I couldn't press any hotkeys lol
*grammar edit
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it's not silly at all.
When you leave SC2 for a month or so and you come back, if you were some high leagues like diamond, the game suddenly feels like it has advanced/evolved and you are left behind. Not only the matchup has new timings/metagames, but also you will start to question your decisions and get familiar with the new maps.
Whenever you analysis your own replay, you would see how much uncertainty you have in your play.
I remember a few days ago I went against a Diamond Terran who was off racing as zerg in a custom game, I lost with over 1000 minerals at 15 mins. I made tonnes of weird decisions like lots of lings and didn't do anything with them.
What's worst is that it took me so long to actually produce any unit, I remember the upgrades, the buildings but production was off. It just shows how much hesitation I had in my play.
Basically I have just lost what I called "game sense". If you are confident and experienced, you could feel how the game is going relatively, you respond everything with your style, having a solid plan and goals to achieve throughout the match.
It's quite scary how much you need to committee just to stay in the zone
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On February 14 2012 04:24 ETisME wrote:
it's not silly at all.
When you leave SC2 for a month or so and you come back, if you were some high leagues like diamond, the game suddenly feels like it has advanced/evolved and you are left behind.
It has advanced/evolved, and you are far behind; you don't play at a Diamond level anymore, so why keep lying to yourself and say that you're really at a level you consciously know you aren't?
If you're avoiding laddering because you don't want to lose your rank, you need to realize that you are more or less admitting to yourself that you can't play at your rank. Who exactly are you trying to impress with this fake rank?
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I can absolutely relate to you on this. When I first started to play SC2 seriously, about 9 months ago, I was in Silver league and desperate to play a lot. The game was just so fun and rewarding at the time. Therefore I'd constantly play games in order to rack up my rank. It was easy then.
Soon, after the new season, I was promoted to Gold league. All of a sudden I was in a whole different playing field. I could see how more competitive the guys in this league was, as my rank was always dropping if I did not play often enough. I think in part this caused my case of ladder anxiety. Because then I realized that I had to continue winning if I wanted to maintain a high rank. Therefore every game became a chore, and my arms would feel like jelly at the start of each game. It was truly a horrible feeling. But luckily I pushed through, and not a long time after pushing myself I was rewarded for all my efforts: I was promoted to Platinum league. Soon after the promotion though, that season's ladders became locked and I felt secure at the time. No worries about dropping out or anything, and no need to rank higher because I've already attained quite a higher rank than with which I started. That whole ordeal sort of ended my anxiety for me.
Today I am still in Plat league, and quite content I shall tell you. Now I just play 1 or 2 games a day, and never become nervous when playing a game. For now the ladder thing has stabilized for me, and I do not care much for my rank anymore. I guess after a while one realizes that ladder rank is not that important. One thing that actually bothers me now though, is that the game of StarCraft 2 has now become so familiar that matches aren't that interesting any longer. Sure, I never get bored of playing, but the matchups themselves do kind of. I reminisce for the days when I played with utter ignorance of all the strategies, build orders, timings etc.
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On February 14 2012 04:47 Kasha_Not_Kesha wrote:Show nested quote +On February 14 2012 04:24 ETisME wrote:
it's not silly at all.
When you leave SC2 for a month or so and you come back, if you were some high leagues like diamond, the game suddenly feels like it has advanced/evolved and you are left behind. It has advanced/evolved, and you are far behind; you don't play at a Diamond level anymore, so why keep lying to yourself and say that you're really at a level you consciously know you aren't? If you're avoiding laddering because you don't want to lose your rank, you need to realize that you are more or less admitting to yourself that you can't play at your rank. Who exactly are you trying to impress with this fake rank?
That was how I kind of felt during the previous season of SC2 ladder (Season 4 I think). With my position in Platinum, and with tougher opponents, I thought that by playing often (and possibly losing often then) I would easily fall out of the league and be demoted. Therefore I did not play really during that season. Of course, with the start of Season 5, I knew that my level of skill was not on par to compete again. Because at the time I felt like laddering again. In so doing, I started to play a shit ton of 1v1 custom games, most of which were against players of Gold+ rank, thus improving my skill at least marginally. Now a few weeks ago I then decided that I was ready to ladder again. And lo and behold, I certainly was. I have not lost too many games this season, and my rank is decent. Laddering is fun once again. 
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EPT
