EPT
.Psych approach to ladder anxiety - Page 4
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Uliking
Turkey15 Posts
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kirdie
Germany221 Posts
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Tobberoth
Sweden6375 Posts
On December 22 2011 07:06 Uliking wrote: People generally say that they get frustrated when they lose and stop playing. It makes the complete effect on me when I'm on a lose streak I want to play more and more because i know losing is part of learning and when I'm on a win streak it is harder to play for me since I don't want to ruin the streak. I think to beat ladder anxiety you just should learn stop caring about ladder since it is meaningless. You can even like enter a game and just surrender to remind yourself that points you get in ladder have no meaning. I'm a high master zerg and when I'm bored i just enter with random and lose 10 games with four gates and 2 raxes because since I'm not a progamer why should i care? that should be the mindset i think don't be hard on yourselves people .This is definitely a good way of thinking about it, I'm the same. This season (today) I haven't lost a single game since placement and I'm thus top 8 plat. Because of this, I don't really dare to play more games today since I know I might very well lose my streak and this happy feeling I have coming back to laddering and having success might go away. So streaking can indeed be bad. I don't think one should enter games and surrender immediately, but I definitely encourage people to do crazy builds/play random just to force themselves not to care. On my second account, I played my worst offrace for all my placement matches using dumb builds such as CC first and macro style marine only terran, and I still won my games which is hilarious, but it felt really good to go into laddering with the intention of trying something fun instead of just winning. | ||
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MetalLobster
Canada532 Posts
I'm guilty of most of the points made in this post, such as overestimating my skill and accepting my "appraisals of doom". I will definitely get back SC2 as soon as I finish Uncharted 3 and go though the shit-ton of games I recently bought on Steam xD. | ||
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partysnatcher
156 Posts
On December 22 2011 05:30 Frumsan wrote: 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. | ||
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partysnatcher
156 Posts
On December 22 2011 06:53 straycat wrote: Really great thread! I especially liked the part about the Current Skill Level vs Future Skill Leve and how overestimating ones skill will/could lead to less enjoyable ladder sessions. It really struck home with me, since I always considered myself as part of the high plat/low diamond region, even though I was just recently placed into platinum. I used to go with a rather abusive "14g14p - first zerglings to banelings asap" zvz, and roach/ling allin every zvp with ffe. In combination with almost no zvt matchups on ladder (for some reason) my MMR was on steroids for a while (it simply is much easier to win with an early allin on these levels, it's just the way it is). Going to more traditional (yet new for me)/macro builds though, my winrate plummeted and I found myself matched against high golds again - sometimes even losing to them! Needless to say (?) I was a wreck and raged against the injustice of the world. But then I started thinking like "maybe I was never good to begin with??" and I have now downgraded my goal of getting into diamond to getting to a comfortable somewhat high plat rank - trying to perfect my play enough to never lose against gold players. It feels... great! Also, from Mr. Black's post: On December 22 2011 06:23 Mr. Black wrote:[..] 3. Always be good mannered, and ignore bm. I don't know why, but it helps me to chat at the beginning of every game. I like to ask people who their favorite players are, did they see mlg, etc.[..] This is smart. Establishing a relaxed interpersonal context and using good manners will really help reduce the "social tension" part, when being face to face with someone who is also pumped full of adrenaline. I'll try to find a way to add that to my OP. | ||
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RunAwayCactuar
United Kingdom54 Posts
Best advice = Login and instantly play a game, don't even think about it | ||
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docvoc
United States5491 Posts
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Merany
France890 Posts
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SkimGuy
Canada709 Posts
I still have ladder fear though  | ||
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p1cKLes
United States342 Posts
If I haven't played in a while sometimes I find myself getting a little bit of anxiety about playing 1vs1. This explains a lot. | ||
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Gridline
United States41 Posts
I personally had it fairly bad during the first season after I hit my skill plateau and began losing more. Eventually I rationalized it and got it under control. No more adrenaline spikes at the start of games and it helps immensely, your not so exhausted after games and pretty much eliminates that flash of rage that happens once you realize you've lost. I very much endorse the advice in this thread, just rationalize it in your mind and realize that whether you win or lose it's just a game. With the right mindset a nice long day of laddering can be quite a relaxing experience. | ||
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Proof.
535 Posts
On December 22 2011 04:19 kenkou wrote: One thing about the adrenaline that bothers me ALOT is my hands and feet getting ridiculously cold. I know its a bodily instinct to the rush, but will it ever go away if you can control adrenaline? I've been researching on ways to keep those parts of my body warm during/after games, but i'm still stumped. I really hope that whenever I can get my adrenaline under control, that it will fix itself. This happens to me so often. In Dota it would happen to me after a good game but there I got so used to it that it didn't bother me. Now in SC2...after a good game (win or loss, doesn't matter), I get jittery as hell and my hands feel like they've been in the freezer for the last 30 minutes it's ridiculous. Same symptoms I got in Dota, but I can't handle it as easily in this game. | ||
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Luftmensch
277 Posts
This is where I completely accidentally noticed SC2. I watched pro matches and day9 dailies for two months before I bought the game. I just had to get it even though I already knew deep down what was coming. At first it was fun, interesting and difficult. I haven't picked Zerg, the Swarm picked me. After playing Dota1 for so long I noticed that you could ask a Dota player 3 questions about the game by which you could determine his whole personality without really having to know him. It's similar with races in SC2. When I look back now I see that there was a major subconsious decision that led me towards Zerg: it's the most free-form race in the game. While with Toss or Terran you have fixed crisp timings you must oblige to, with Zerg you're free to mold it anyway you want (mainly due to it's reactionary nature). Now why did that appeal to me? Because I never liked being confined in any way. I'm a 26 year old kid, a dreamer, after all you could wiki my name and understand what I'm saying. In every sports there comes a time where you must give yourself in to dry practice if you want to improve. Doing the same thing over and over again. That time has come for me to do and it's not that I don't want to, it's that I can't, my mind won't let me. In various games I understand what I should be doing, but my fingers aren't fast enough, my multitasking is non-existent, I overfocus. Throughout my whole life whenever I was interested in something I focused a 100% on it and the world could collapse around me and I wouldn't notice. I always thought that it was a good thing but it's very bad for SC2. I'm not 15, my personality is formed and it's damn hard to change it now. After the initial brainless, automatic clicking through game openings, when I reach 40+ supply my mind starts overfocusing on everything: battles, production, positioning, scouting, I get so focused on any of them that it takes me a while to unfocus and move to another thing on the list and it's a lot of time wasted and the inevitable losses happen even though I know what I should be doing and that is such a devastating feeling. That is what bugs me the most. I know what I should do it's just that it takes a lot of time to refocus from such a deep focus and I'm not just gonna learn the game by heart since there is no fun in that. Before every "find match" button pressing I tell myself "you know what you should do, don't focus to deep, relax and try to remember stuff" and that creates enough pressure as it is, let alone after I lose. When I lose I don't even have to watch the replay, I know exactly why I lost and the inability to put that knowledge to use due to my lifelong practice of focusing instead of multitasking leaves me completely disenhearted. I have decided to stop playing SC2 althogether. I will still watch and enjoy the pros do it, just like I watch and enjoy football games without playing it. I deliberatly left this for the end, OP will find this data useful being a psych major: I'm a very anxious person (with irritable bowel syndrome as a physical manifestation of my anxiety) with delayed phase sleep disorder (extreme night owl) and severe chronic procrastinator with serious problems regarding finding motivation to do anything. I'm an idealist, also a "realistic" pessimist (it's a side-effect of using lots of statistics and probability for determining outcome), some would say I'm depressed even though I just make informed observations and it doesn't take much to see that the global picture of it all just doesn't look good (weltschmerz). I'm also an atheist and Mensa member. I've never been to a shrink and would never take any brain medication. CBT sounds interesting but I will probably never get myself into actually going, besides, where would I get the money for those expensive visits to the shrink. Peace out, hombres! | ||
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stokes17
United States1411 Posts
Ladder anxiety=fear of failure The reason that the Jonah complex shows up so acutely on the star craft ladder, imo, has to do with the immediacy and potency of the reinforcement following a win or loss . For whatever reason, the fact that its public record-ladder points/position-etc, players really fear losing a starcraft game, and they get re enforced very strongly from a loss not to let that happen again ie. they get very upset, rage if you will. These same people probably are extremely satisfied and happy when they win because the reinforcement is just as strong in the positive direction. the players with the least ladder fear are the ones who aren't really effected by the reinforcement after a win or loss. Or I guess a better way to put it in the form of advice; if you want to get rid of ladder fear, then one should try and not tie their internal gauge of their skill level and competency in SC2 to the results of their ladder games. | ||
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Synwave
United States2803 Posts
This isn't science. Common sense perhaps and certainly observationally biased, but science? | ||
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TheFear
United States55 Posts
One poster mentioned an idea about decaying MMR, and I think that would be a nice idea. A few days ago I went 0-1 and retained my masters league position from before this season, and I got crushed in that game. I actually had a nice timing window for about 2-3 minutes to attack but my push came way too late as he had already fortified his expansion. Anyways, all in all, I think it might be helpful for people like me who want to ladder again - but definitely need to get our skills totally reassessed because of so much inactivity. I know that I could just play it out until I get demoted or get the hang of that level of play again, but somehow this isn't very attractive for me to do. It feels like I have a huge mountain to climb, and I rather just start from the bottom up again, lol. Anyways, there was another article that brought up some good points related to Psychology and sc2 play posted here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=142131. I also chimed in with a response in that thread as well. I figure if you guys found this article useful, you may want to also check out this older article too. For now I will probably just continue sneaking a game every now and then, and remaining a fan of esports. I could always spring into more games in the future, but right now it seems unlikely with D3 on the horizon and my prime RTS era having come and gone (at least as far as I can tell.)  | ||
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Tobberoth
Sweden6375 Posts
On December 22 2011 13:15 Synwave wrote: Are people really replying to this with "great science" and "really good to see a scientific approach" to this? This isn't science. Common sense perhaps and certainly observationally biased, but science? You fail hardcore since you're not giving any arguments. Is this science? I don't know, you don't seem to think so, but without supplying even a single argument, how is anyone supposed to answer your post? Psychology is most definitely science, no doubt about that, so you probably have some better arguments. Write them down. | ||
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imyzhang
Canada809 Posts
On December 22 2011 04:22 Gyro_SC2 wrote: The way I deal with ladder fear is to try to play a strategy, and if i lose its mean my strategy suck not me. i lol'ed. very nice read =] | ||
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TelecoM
United States10675 Posts
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