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On January 05 2012 00:45 -Trippin- wrote:
Purchasing a second account is the best Investment you can possibly make of you are sufferIng from ladder anxiety.
THIS.
its what truly broke my ladder fear. I used to be half and half. playing to win and even losing didnt really have any effect. But winning made me want to stop playing and become satisfied. I reached Masters, and thats when ladder fear struck. I bought a second account, and i easily got into masters. Thats when i realized, that it didn't matter. No matter what, the system will place me where i belong. And it doesnt matter where i belong as long as i improve. Furthermore, i realized that there was nothing to prove to anyone but myself.
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On December 22 2011 03:47 partysnatcher wrote:
Remove unrealistic appraisals
As mentioned above, if the outcome of playing a ladder game is uncertain, appraisals can create emotions from a hypothetical, extrapolated situation and create an "appraisal of doom" that will keep generating fear in your brain. The cure here is quite simple - take some time to think realistically about what could happen after a loss.
"What's the worst that could happen?". Will I be demoted? Will my opponent mock me when I am most vulnerable? Etc. This is the time to be cold and realistic, and use statistics and facts. Pick "boring" conclusions - do not allow any feelings to affect your reappraisal, but make it solid and real. And keep in mind the fact that an SC2 ladder loss is just numbers in a Blizzard database. It does not represent a tendency. It does not have to rely on skill. Your account is not You, and You can always get a new account.
I found your article interesting for the most part, but then i got to this, which is your thought on realistically assessing situations, yet you conclude with And keep in mind the fact that an SC2 ladder loss is just numbers in a Blizzard database. It does not represent a tendency. It does not have to rely on skill. Your account is not You, and You can always get a new account.
And it's the opposite of the most important piece of advice known to mankind, which is "It's only after we lost everything that we are free to do anything.", you know, the chemical burn, accepting and embracing the pain and all that good stuff.
The account is you, numbers overall always reflect a tendency, which is you suck more or you suck less. Yes it's a tough one to swallow, but it's the foundation, you'll be building everything else on top of that - you skip it, everything gets shaky.
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I have given up long ago trying to improve. I am just not dedicated enough and will stay a Platinum forever, I kinda accepted that. Now I play when I can, if I continue winning for some time I can play for longer periods, but if I just lose 3 games in a row my mindset is completely shattered and I just continue to play terrible. I just lost 6 games in a row, due to unimaginably stupid mistakes, and knowing that I just feel desperate and hopeless. I am just never going to get good at this game.
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INterresting post!
for my self i got the solution to deal with the "anxienty", in the way, that i say ladder doesn´t matter.
I play a couple of tourneys and there i give my very best and defeat also top 25 master players while i am just high diuamond in ladder.
So: Ladder is not an indicator of skill, it´s more an indicator of how much a player want to put into laddergames
PS: sorry for my bad english^^
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That's a really interesting approach.
I'm wondering if having ladder anxiety could be just the consequences for a wider, more general problem ( ego ? self confidence ? ) and SC2 with its ladder system is just making them more noticeable.
In that case isn't it better to deal straight with those bigger problems rather than just making you sc2 experience a little less messy ?
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Gonna read all of this later on, I'm having extreme ladder anxiety to the point where it is totally ridiculous.
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I think part of the phenomena stems from the battle.net mechanics. That sound when you find an opponent followed by the pesky little countdown, I think this sequence induces nervousness. It's like you're being thrown down into a gladiator pit and are gonna fight it out until only one man stands. For me the "nervous" part was, and sometimes is, the time before specifically the first game I play. After that i'll just keep pressing that play button and don't really mind anything about it.
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Great read man! This information is fantastic and can translate to other areas of peoples lives that cause anxiety. Providing a toolset to deal with that anxiety is a great thing.
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THIS DOESN'T HELP IF I LOSE 1 MORE GAME I MIGHT GET DEMOTED TO DIAMOND YOU KNOW HOW STRESSED I AM FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
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great work, i just realized that being a psych major probably no one can ever lie to you 
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Always found the concept of ladder anxiety really interesting, I look forward to reading an in-depth analysis on it. Personally my approach to ladder anxiety has been to advise a set number of games each day as a bare minimum, and to just keep at it. I found that the anxiety diminished a lot after maybe my first 50 1v1s.
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Gotta love half the responses saying "Nice read!" and "Awesome article" yet with no addition to the discussion at all. Guess they didn't even bother to actually read it. Post count ftw!
On the subject at hand, raging whenever you lose a game is part of what you are as a person. You'll learn to deal with it if you put in the time to play and the willingness to improve. Sometimes rage is a manifestation of the inability to accept inferiority, defeat or, like in most cases, the human error.
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Wow this is an amazing write up and i thoroughly enjoyed reading it! thank you! =D
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Excellent Thread and post. and I agree.
ladder should be about fun, learning the game, relaxing.
Yes, its a RTS, its extremely competitive, it requires high precision and lets face it, losing a long drawn out game or losing a game due to a silly error or mishap in scouting can cause stress, but its best to look back on things, look at replays to learn and just relax.
A lot of players seem to suffer this. I know clan mates where they'll practice, and practice, play great during clan practice matches outside of few fundamental errors here and there and then once they hit ladder, they just lose. and I've heard from their own words "I get angry, I make stupid decisions and become irrational because of it, I lose, I get more angry..repeat" It's silly.
Really, the whole concept of BM is just silly to me altogether. It's one thing to be stressed and leave the game without a word, another to just attacking the player, call them insulting things because you dont appreciate their style of play.
It's like playing 1 on1 basketball, losing because he's a good shooter and then calling him a "***ing idiot" "imba" "you dont know how to play the game etc" it's just silly.
I can completly relate to this.
I came back not long ago (2 weeks ago after a 1 year break and started fresh new account and all and realized I was now platinum level after formerly being masters in KR/NA server), I acknowledged my drop off in skill and I took pride in accepting the losses, trying to learn the new build, analyzing, seeing what I did wrong etc. In about 1 week I started winning all my platinum games towards something like a 9 game winning streak. I was on top of the ladder and crushing my division by a lot but I wasnt getting promoted despite being put up against diamonds and beating them constantly. This fumed me but as a result, let my emotions get the best of me and I was losing, a lot silly errors, forgetting key production at x time, screwing up all-in timings and just plain losing. Basically what I had to do was take a few hours off gaming, enjoy sc2 streams and think that promo's mean absolutely nothing and what I should be concerned about is just improving my mechnics, my game play, my game sense and flat out enjoying the game again. This caused me to just break into a massive win streak and the promotion and now spiraling winning the past 18 of 22 games in diamond to get towards that goal of masters. I do not stress. I take my losses in all my practice games and in ladder gracefully and play it for entertainment no matter how much BM, how cheesy the build was that beat me.
One part I do find difficult though..is getting rid of being hard on myself. It doesnt help that I do have the asian culture mindset. I am extremely hard on myself at my losses, because after my loss and even without looking at the replay, I know exactly why I lost, whether it be forgetting about upg'rade suntil its too late, having non-flawless worker production and letting my army being caught out of position. But this very fact motivates me to become better because I know I can improve and propel me to the top.
I find another bad concept on sc2 is the abuse people have over lower ranks
I get masters players have a good knowledge of the game, but the amount of shit talk because they're a tier higher is just...endless and pukingly bad. I know it's impossible really to get rid of bm, but honeslty people should be more respectful, no matter the league, the race, the gameplay because after all we're all just users of sc2.
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Thanks alot for writing this! Had problems with ladder anxiety when i played SC2 before, and I'm currently having some (though not as big) problems with it in LoL. Will read it through again, pretty sure some of the stuff in this post could help me! tyty
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still a great writeup and article 
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On December 22 2011 08:21 partysnatcher wrote:Show nested quote +On December 22 2011 05:30 Frumsan wrote:On December 22 2011 05:10 partysnatcher wrote:On December 22 2011 04:14 Frumsan wrote:Great write-up! There are many aspects of the cognitive-behavioral theory I don't accede to though, so my question as a non-psychologist but with a lot of experience and education in the area is: How would the views you've just described (very eloquently) differ from a psycho-dynamic point of view? Thanks! CBT can, in a way, be considered psychodynamic, but I assume you mean the original philosophies like Freuds psychoanalysis. A psychoanalytic point of view would see your anxiety as a representation of inner conflicts based in childhood. It would send you into months and months of talk therapy until all your overt and covert conflicts had been resolved and you had become a more relaxed person. However, a psychodynamic direction like Kohut's Self-psychology would focus very strongly on your narcissistic ego and ambitions. The "split" in personality many feel after a loss (where you become a different person for half an hour), would be considered a symptom of Self damage. Therapy would try to make your Self as whole as possible - and mutate your narcissistic drive to a healthy, productive narcissism (not to be confused with Narcissistic Personality Disorder). But in general, cognitive-behavioral therapy is pretty much the most acknowledged method in psychology right now - it is highly acknowledged even outside of psychology - most strikingly when applied to the psychosomatic field; where it is far more effective than medicine. It is considered the most effective way to fix, for instance, sleep disturbances or irritable bowel syndrome. TL;DR: CBT is pretty good!  Thanks for you response. While I agree that CBT can in some aspects be viewed as similar to the Psychodymanic Theory I don't think that they can generally be viewed as conveying the same message in a lot of arguments. Regarding the cognitive-behavioral therapy being the most acknowledged method right now in psychology I strongly oppose this statement; I feel like the psychodynamic paradigm (if you want to call it that) is still at least as viable as the CBT-paradigm. In particular object to the statement that it's more effective in medicine in the psychosomatic field; especially since CBT isn't used without medicine and psychodynamics isn't used only with medicine. I think the psychodynamic approach is underrated in modern psychology too. I've studied Kohutian Self-psychology on my own sparetime, due to a personal interest in psychodynamics. One "problem" with most psychodynamic approaches to, say, ladder anxiety, is that it usually requires an experienced and skilled therapist, and lots of dialogue. CBT is mostly done by the patient itself, and is well suited to at-home exercises. The efficiency of CBT is measured in terms of successful outcomes per patient, and has done well here - also without medicine. This kind of success rate has proven more difficult to measure for psychodynamic approaches.
I'll weigh in as a psychoanalytically trained clinical psychologist. While there are many streams of analytic thought and each of those streams of thought could go in different directions, I think a theme throughout them could be to bring attention to the cause of the anxiety. The OP started to address this, but congruent with a CBT model there is not much attention at expanding why playing a video game could create so much anxiety that people stop playing it.
The answer to "why" can be (and is) different for everyone, but I bet a significant portion of it is related to one's sense of control or mastery in the world. Anxiety in general can often be explained as the attempt to defend one's self from a perceived uncontrollable threat. This threat could be everything from a very abusive parent (a very real threat) to feeling that you picked the "wrong" item to eat for lunch (a very minor threat) to feeling that stepping outside will lead to getting abducted by aliens (a very unlikely threat).
The hope would be that one could be firm enough in them selves (maintain ego strength) to experience a threat, feel the impact of it - both positive and negative, and be able to respond appropriately. If the threat is that your stove is on fire the appropriate response would be to attempt to put the fire out (or run outside if the fire was too big), if the threat is losing points in ladder an appropriate response would be experience the disappointment as a reflection of your skill at a video game not as a reflection of your identity (now, if you are a pro attempting to make a living off SC, then there is a whole different threat).
If one's sense of control in the world is obtained through SC there will always be a high degree of anxiety because that control is always threatened.
As sort of a silly thought experiment, I think if someone came to me as a patient with "ladder anxiety" (maybe a new diagnosis in DSM V?), my thoughts would be to explore why the patient felt so threatened by losing. My guess would be that the patient lacks other ego building activities - such as hobbies, close relationships, places for a safe expression of emotion; likely due to a lack of these things being available to them as a child.
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Very nice read, thank you I was actually looking for something similar to this and glad to have read something like this. Definitely should be lowering my expectations and play my game, thank you
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Very nice read, thank you I was actually looking for something similar to this and glad to have read something like this. Definitely should be lowering my expectations and play my game, thank you
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EPT
