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I've gotten a number of private requests to expand on the below thread with additional means of calming and collecting one's thoughts before a game. Since Starcraft 2 is as much a game of nerves as it is of skill then every edge you can get where your ability to think is concerned is a vital advantage.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=181719
Every player has a time when frustration has taken it's toll. They start to miss probe production. Their micro slowly devolves in a goopy mess of derp.
A big part of fighting Tilt is knowing when it's hit you. Endorphines and adrenaline do NOT help your game and strong emotions cause your brain to produce them. They will slow your play and your decision making will suffer.
Signs of Tilt:
1.Tension in your shoulders-Watch for your upper back to tense. Particularly pain between the shoulder blades and in the neck. A light pressure in the temples could also indicate stress developing.
2.Fingers staying more attached to specific keys-When you're under stress you are less likely to build certain units which require your fingers to move to unusual parts of the keyboard.
3.Missed opportunities-Reviewing your replay you begin to see you've completely failed to tap a particular resource. Maybe you could have gotten away with building an Archon when you were out of energy. Maybe you dropped probe production altogether.
4.Adrenaline rush- You begin feeling anxiety about your next action and make riskier and riskier decisions, hoping to end things quickly. The best players play patiently.
5.Fighting yourself rather than fighting your opponent-You're finding your units won't respond to your commands as cleanly or effectively. You're mis-clicking constantly.
6.Fear of the next match-You are afraid to face the situations that caused you to lose. You feel anxiety at the thought of facing those situations.
If you're feeling any or all of these things, you're on Tilt. Recognizing it will save you a bigger fall down the ladder. You can remain on Tilt for days or weeks if you don't take steps to mitigate it.
You DO NOT want to 'Amp yourself up' before a game of Starcraft 2. Lay off the energy drinks. Don't play angry music with the game (No Slipknot, no Seether).
Methods for removing Tilt and letting you get on with the game.
1.Write out your worries.-I realize this sounds goofy but a recent study proved that writing about your fears and anxieties can massively improve performance. If you want to read the story, here is a link.
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/648822.html
Surprisingly enough, this really does work. Writing out your fears about the game as well as a plan to improve can work wonders for your play.
In particular it's good to focus on the particular moments in as great an emotional detail as possible where you felt the worst worry. The deeper you detail your feelings the more effectively you will control them.
2.Take a cold shower- For calming the mind, cold works wonderfully. Also, eating soft ice will create feelings of general calm.
3.Study The Game- Stop playing the game for a bit and log into the Team Liquid streams section. Watch other players play. Watch old Day9's. Go spend an hour on Husky Starcraft's Youtube Channel. Head over to BattleVet
Feeling like you have new knowledge of the game will keep you from sliding into permanent tilt. Tilt, in large part, is a feeling that you're not going to improve. Having new information and something to grow you as a player outside of the game itself can help keep you from those thoughts. It isn't just the knowledge itself that will improve your play but the emotional boost you get from feeling that you have absorbed something important which will make you a better player.
4.Self Hypnosis-The one section I had a request for expansion on.
Self Hypnosis is a powerful method of pulling yourself off of Tilt. It requires a modicum of self control to achieve but you can begin to feel very strong and to allow losses to slide off your back while wins make you feel like a shark in a Sherman tank.
Begin with a quiet space in your home and something that you can focus on. This can be as simple as a candle light. Begin to look at it closely and examine it more and more, attempting to find new details in the light. This will, given a bit of time, calm your mind. Your muscles will unkink, your adrenaline will work itself out of your system, and you will begin to feel a modicum of peace. Once you are in this place, begin to examine your fears and worries about the game at a distance. Look for underlying reasons for this fear.
All too often you'll find fears of failure, public shame, and other such things underlying your worries about pressing on to the next match.
A second method involves visualization which works better for people who are more emotional thinkers. Begin inside your mind with a blank space. Empty. When you think of the very idea of emptiness, go to that place. Force yourself there however long it takes until it settles in. You may have to do this over the course of a few days. If you do it for 5 minutes a day, you will find it steadily easier to go to that place.
From that alone your game will improve, however if you use it for self introspection it will be even greater. Pick an object in your home. A marble or other small thing you can hold in your hands is good. Imagine your emotions as an orange liquid filling your body right down to the tips of your toes.
Now, take that liquid and within yourself make it flow into the object. Let the object become an endless black hole, draining away the intensity and fear and anger. Empty yourself completely until there is just you, a glass vessel in the shape of a person, ready to be filled with whatever thoughts you deem proper. If those are positive thoughts, your game will be much stronger.
Each time you hold that object from then on, imagine that orange liquid draining away and sit there quiet and still until it is completely gone.
5.Make a plan- Get together a set of ideas for your next game and execute those until you have them down pat. You may have to do a build order 15 times before you work out the proper timings and have a complete idea of what to do. That's FINE. Do it anyway. This is essential to getting off of Tilt. You have to feel like 'YOU' are in control. Not the match-making system and not your opponent.
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If you are still having issues with Tilt at this point after trying these things, you will probably need to walk away from the game for a while. Not a solution I like because I ascribe to Day9's belief that a person must keep walking over dead bodies if you're going to grow as a player, but it is a solution.
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Interesting concepts.... Self-Reflection is basically the only way to fully calm yourself down after being on your nerves from playing Starcraft 2. It does have profound effects on your inner self and I can see where your coming from. However, I'm going to point out that your average player rarely does all of this. Probably because no other game gets you on the nerves as much as Starcraft,competively at least.
Why does Starcraft 2 require so much more concentration than most other games? There's many answers to this. Maybe it's because the game doesn't reward you if you lose, or maybe it's because of there are no breaks in during the game. Or that there is more than one way to lose or win and this makes it that much harder. Anything goes.
However, should we be taking it this seriously? Spend as much time studying the game as playing it? Get worked up over the game? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on the individual. I for one try to be self-aware of myself on my emotions on this game and then give a constant reminder that I might just need to chill out for awhile.
What I'm trying to say is, sometimes you just have to relax, take it easy, don't over think it. Except make sure you get to play after, do some team games, play against your own friends, just don't stress over yourself being on tilt. 
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From "The Right Way To Lose," by Zac Hill:
When we lose, many of us think, consciously or not, that we’re somehow worse people for it. We have to justify the great expenditure of time we’ve poured into this game we love, and the easiest measure of that is success. See, we say, it’s worth it. But the game doesn’t always work like that, and when it doesn’t it’s easy to become furious at some undefined and indefinable thing that bars us from the jaws of victory like a granite wall.
Doing this will make us miserable.
I’ve concentrated these last few weeks, like I always have, on ways of becoming better at the game. The difference is that I realized you can’t always measure “better” in terms of skill, of wins and losses, of your position at the cutting edge of tournament Magic. If you’re the greatest player on earth but you’re not having fun, you’re just a maestro at tactics. We play Magic for the same reason that we (ostensibly) do everything else: because it makes our lives better than they would be without it. If that’s not where you’re at right now - if the crippling sting that comes with every loss is all that you can think about - no masterfully-timed combat trick, no lucky string of topdecks, no perfectly-engineered technological Weapon X of a decklist will help you truly and genuinely “win.”
You are not your DCI rating.
The article was written for people who play Magic: the Gathering competitively, but it applies to just about everything in life.
Other, highly recommended reading: http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/2005_Stuck_In_The_Middle_With_Bruce.html - Why people need to lose, and how you can get over that psychological handicap.
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orange liquid filling my body :o
Good stuff man.
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Excellent, excellent posts. I can't tell you how many games I've lost because I'm on tilt. I'm gonna try and read snippets from this every time before I play!
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Further suggestions are excellent. I tend to analyze heavily and I imagine there's likely to be other future guides made related to how to think about the game to improve yourself.
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Wouldn't a warm shower be better than a cold one?
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Warm showers tend to promote blood flow and endorphin production (the bodies natural pain-killers). Your problem when you're on tilt isn't a lack of blood-flow or a lack of endorphin's. You have adrenaline (epinephrine) chugging through your body and your serotonin levels are low. Cold showers give a bit of a shock to the system but also cause your body to make more serotonin. You need serotonin to regulate your moods.
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6. Have fun and remember it's a game.
That's my priority, and why I rarely, if ever go on tilt. Just have fun, don't obsess over your rank/points, they don't matter. Play to get better, and to enjoy yourself. When I stop having fun, I'll know it's time to stop playing, because even when I lose to cheesy builds and retarded mistakes of my own, I remember it's just a game, take a mental note not to do that again, and start up the next game. Just enjoy playing, and take everything in stride, that's my advice.
-Mr. Wiggles
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Disregard Slipknot and Seether, acquire Megadeth.
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One of the things I've noticed in my play is the game music. It makes me more anxious as the game goes on and as the music builds up during battles. I disabled it and my thoughts were much clearer.
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For people like me, it's often hard to tell the difference between "tilt" and my natural baselevel Badness.
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Huh, I had no idea Liquipedia 2 had an actual article on this subject even if it misses a few things.
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2.Take a cold shower- For calming the mind, cold works wonderfully. Also, eating soft ice will create feelings of general calm.
Taking a cold shower does the complete opposite of calming you down. Think about it, exposing yourself to an extreme cold that your body isn't used to sends your brain into survival mode as your heart rate rises to compensate for the low temperatures. It increases adrenaline flow, not decrease.
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Its funny to read this now. I was silver league two days ago. Was around 150 W 150 L...
then I had a 14 game losing streak!!! Got demoted to bronze.
Went to sleep woke up and I've won 23 of my last 29 games.
Two things helped me:
1) A good night's rest
2) Fast blink stalkers...
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Should I post this over to the main Starcraft 2 forums on Battle.net? Seems to me people there might benefit at least a little. It might take the shrieking down a notch. I notice the positive posts tend to get a lot of attention.
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Nice thread. I'm affected by the fear of losing quite a bit (to the point where I don't want to ladder due to the ridiculous fear of losing pixelpoints) so I'm going to have to try some of this out.
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On January 15 2011 09:33 Captain Soban wrote:Show nested quote +2.Take a cold shower- For calming the mind, cold works wonderfully. Also, eating soft ice will create feelings of general calm. Taking a cold shower does the complete opposite of calming you down. Think about it, exposing yourself to an extreme cold that your body isn't used to sends your brain into survival mode as your heart rate rises to compensate for the low temperatures. It increases adrenaline flow, not decrease.
It doesn't have to be ice cold. Infact, you will probably find a cool shower very relaxing. Some morning I like to take one when I get up because it makes me feel pretty good. Infact, I actually do better on days when I take a cool shower to start. Cause I just feel more relaxed overall.
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Throwing your mouse in the wall fix it.
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I can say that liquidpedia's advice to do push ups if you have an adrenaline rush is not that great.
Did about 30 in a very small window of time and had sore back and shoulders for about 3 days afterwards
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On February 01 2011 18:49 AussieBBQ wrote:
I can say that liquidpedia's advice to do push ups if you have an adrenaline rush is not that great.
Did about 30 in a very small window of time and had sore back and shoulders for about 3 days afterwards
Well, that just shows how powerful adrenaline can be, as it pushed you beyond your normal limits for push ups. But acknowledging that the body wants to either fight or run away is good. Do some exercise, but do not overdo it.
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On February 01 2011 18:49 AussieBBQ wrote:
I can say that liquidpedia's advice to do push ups if you have an adrenaline rush is not that great.
Did about 30 in a very small window of time and had sore back and shoulders for about 3 days afterwards
No offense but that just sounds like you're out of shape...
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While doing push-ups will make you feel better physically, it won't take you off of tilt or improve your ability to play. If anything you may find your mouse harder to control.
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On January 15 2011 07:02 woowoo wrote:
6. Sleep
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I find my biggest issue is if I lose game in a frustrating way and then que another right after, I find myself thinking about the last game instead of focusing on the current one, then I lose that one to.
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We also normaly relate a big part of our assimilation memory or gestures to peoples we know,
is a very powerfull technique to memorise and remember very detailed how everyperson influents our behaviour so you can "call his hand" upon the necessary time, it is also known as using the right hand of the person.
if you pay attention closely you always remember a person before doing something , or remember a person to use the behaviour you assimilated with him.
in a very organized mind maybe we can have a person who categorized every person he met to achieve the maximum performance of every task necessary,that could explain why we give names or qualities even withouth having conciousness of why we should do it , this unconciouss behavior may acts back when we are on the rythim mind and can give to the person who does it a unconciouss fear to give the proper names and qualities to everyone who he mets becouse of the indexing of memory.
peoples remembering is probably the only way to use their behaviour our mind assimilate and mimic almost unconciously and impressively detailed , is almost impossible to describe how the human mind can see someone doing something and imediately become the other person by assimilation in steps , that is the left side brain part that make many step-by-step actions,the right side brain is very works another way and can be very complex specially for mens.
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Quite the guide. The fact it openly contradicts itself at the end is interesting, because it presents a solution it doubts, and one that certainly isn't a solution. You won't callous your mind if you don't push through difficult situations.
I'm going to play my appeal to authority here with a degree in psychology and deep understanding of sports psychology, but there is only two things you need to do:
#1 - Mute your opponent - Nothing they say is going help you stay focused.
#2 - Win or learn, never lose - Losses are lessons. You didn't lose because you were better at that moment, you lost because they were better at that moment, by definition of the word better. Respect the definition of better and learn from it. Embrace "More GG More Skill."
If you're not failing in life, your not trying. Failure is an excellent thing, but most people can't stomach it, which is why most are mediocre.
When you embrace failure and ignore the naysayers, you won't get tilted, you'll get energized and will have calloused your mind.
If you're struggling beyond that, read Mind Gym by Gary Mack. The toughest fight you'll ever have in life is with yourself. Win that fight, not just because it will help you Starcraft, but because it helps you with life.
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On June 22 2021 20:51 BronzeKnee wrote:
Quite the guide. The fact it openly contradicts itself at the end is interesting, because it presents a solution it doubts, and one that certainly isn't solution. You won't callous your mind if you don't push through difficult situations.
I'm going to play my appeal to authority here with a degree in psychology and deep understanding of sports psychology, but there is only two things you need to do:
#1 - Mute your opponent - Nothing they say is going help you stay focused.
#2 - Win or learn, never lose - Losses are lessons. You didn't lose because you were better at that moment, you lost because they were better at that moment, but definition of the word better. Respect the definition of better and learn from it. Embrace "More GG More Skill."
If you're not failing in life, your not trying. Failure is an excellent thing, but most people can't stomach it, which is why most are mediocre.
When you embrace failure and ignore the naysayers, you won't get tilted, you'll get energized and will have calloused your mind.
If you're struggling beyond that, read Mind Gym by Gary Mack. The toughest fight you'll ever have in life is with yourself. Win that fight, not just because it will help you Starcraft, but because it helps you with life.
I like that philosophy. Every game - win or lose - can be used as a data point for reflection and analysis. Even if you get embarrassingly steamrolled, there's often at least something useful that can be learned from watching the replay.
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I am a casual diamond player - and I disagree with the premise that one should avoid "tilt". The most fun games I have are when I am emotionally involved; nailbiting basetrades or chaotic games. If I was to experience those games like a lot of pro players without any visible emotion - why should I care for the game; it's not like I am playing for money.
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My post is for those who want to reduce their tilt episodes and who have the time and will to play and analyze the game. Otherwise go meet a friend. Or continue reading if you're curious anyway.
Imagine a hypothetical (wishful and unattainable) scenario in which you have a perfect understanding of the game theory (not clairvoyance) and you have the necessary muscle memory and the right tools to optimally execute it at all times. You'd know all that is knowable and you'd know how much is possible to know. Then you'd be in a situation where you could have certainty in your true long-term winrate. Given that no factors outside of your control impact your performance in any capacity, you could quite well be in a state of complete confidence.
In such a state there would be no rational reason to experience tilt (except out of boredom, but I won't address that), as you'd always know why you're winning or losing, and you'd know that there's nothing more you can do about it.
What this means is that one of the main reasons why we tilt is that we experience uncertainty. Uncertainty in our knowledge, in our abilities and perhaps in our tools. We can't control our future results and we can't fully explain past results, therefore we're in an anxious state. The more uncontrollable and unexplainable our results are, the more anxious we get, and the more likely it gets that we tilt.
Therefore one of the most important things to do in order to overcome tilt is to enhance our theoretical knowledge, another is to improve our execution, and we also want to make sure that our tools are optimized. We don't want to be guessing the right play a lot, and we don't want to miss important keyboard inputs.
This means we need to play, study and visualize. We need to cover basic, advanced and expert knowledge and mechanics. We also need good hardware, optimized for our needs, and a good internet connection of course.
If, despite following this, we still happen to tilt, then there's a good chance that we need to correct something in one of those areas. Realistically we'll never be complete, but there's probably always room for more.
Another thing that can cause tilt is when we believe we're facing an inevitable and unwanted conclusion. This belief can either be true or false, but it's not always something that can be addressed with knowledge or execution, because not everything is knowable or doable. In such a case we may tilt and possibly ruin our last realistic chance at overcoming the perceived finality of our fate.
A famous example would be Idra prematurely quitting a televised game that wasn't yet lost. Doing pretty much anything other than quit the game would've been a better choice. That doesn't mean we should never surrender, but it means we should stick around until we've completely exhausted our realistic options - because it's possible that our perception is off.
A few last words: frustration and anger are not the same thing as tilt. You may experience frustration and anger while you're tilting, but also while you're not tilting, so they can sometimes be unrelated.
I do believe that in certain situations frustration and anger can drive certain people to perform better. But everyone's different, so what works for one person may not work for all. You gotta know yourself.
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EPT
