A guide on dealing with Frustration, Toxicity and Ranked Anxiety

Overview

Team-based games establish psychological challenges for players. Most of the players eventually face frustration; an urge to blame others; and a fear of pressing the play button.In this guide I clear up the reasons for these situations and give several advices on how to deal with them.

Intro

When I started to think about this guide I thought that there isn’t much to talk about. I was wrong, there are a lot things, which need to be said. Sorry if you don’t like long texts 😀

Before we start, I need to say that I’m not psychologist, and everything below is just my experience and humble opinion.
And sorry for my English, it is far from perfect, but I hope you can understand what I wrote. If you don’t – please tell me, so I can reformulate.
Now – let’s start.

All team-based games require not only gameplay skill but also establish psychological challenges for players. Most of the players eventually face frustration and feel of lost control; some of them experience an urge to blame others and to be toxic; and many develop a fear of pressing the play button. Awesomenauts, unfortunately, is no exception.
In this guide I would like to clear up the reasons for these situations and give several advices on how to deal with them.

Three sides of the problem

It is important to understand that toxicity and frustration are two sides of the same coin, and the ranked anxiety is the third side.

The thing is – people don’t get toxic for no reason, they get toxic when they are frustrated. Blaming others and saying bad things in the chat are probably the simplest ways to ease your frustration. But it spoils the match for you and others completely, is a bannable behaviour, and there are other ways to deal with frustration.

Similarly, frustration doesn’t appears from nowhere, it comes when you face ruthless reality, while having specific and unrealistic expectations. Your plans and methods doesn’t work and you feel helpless, i.e. frustrated. Anxiety appears when you are afraid in advance that this will happen and that you will have no control over it.

The less you are anxious, the less you get frustrated. The less you get frustrated, the less you feel a need for a toxic behaviour.

Ranked anxiety

Ranked anxiety may look like the smallest problem in Awesomenauts (further – AN), since it is mostly casual fast-paced game. Additionally, AN doesn’t have unranked mode, so many people treat ranked as unraked and don’t feel ranked anxiety at all, they just don’t care. But even they may feel other types of anxiety, which stop them from playing. For example, it can be a fear of meeting toxic people or “stupid” teammates, or simply fear of losing for 5th time in a row and feeling bad about themselves.

In-game anxiety comes from unrealistic expectations and perfectionism. It is a feeling that something important may go wrong. And that feeling is partially right, something will go wrong, if you perceive reality not like it is, but we will talk about this in next chapters. In this chapter let’s ask – if something goes wrong, is it as important as you think?

In case of gaming the most suitable solution to anxiety would be to lower importance of the game in your life. If you don’t care about rank, you don’t feel anxious about losing your progress. If you don’t care about performing well, you don’t feel anxious about losing strikes. If you don’t care about what random players say, you don’t worry about toxicity. And let’s be honest, when it comes to a game, while you love it, and value it, you don’t need to predict and control everything what is happening in the game, losing control here won’t get you killed and won’t lead to any troubles in real life.

And don’t get me wrong, it is good to care about having fun in the game, it’s just that oftentimes people care so much that it doesn’t even allow them to have fun. It’s good to care in moderation. Do you care in moderation? If you are reading this guide, I would say you care about those things too much. (So do I, but shhh…)

Ok. So. We need to lower importance of the events in the game. Easy to say – hard to do. Still, there are specific things, which you can do:

• Play with a friend in a voice chat. If you tried it you know what I mean. It will give you a courage in front of all small problems 🙂 by shifting the focus from them to communication and having fun together. A friend also can support you. And the very possibility to express your emotions and thoughts to another human being can ease your frustration.
  If you don’t have friends who like the game, try to find new in the discord community[discordapp.com].

• Play more. More matches you’ve played – less important each separate match feels.
• Watch other players and guides in moderation. Just in case if you do it a lot, like I do – I watch the game more than I play it… When you watch very good players you can develop very high expectations for your own performance, then you start to play, perform much worse and feel bad about yourself. Just be aware and pay attention to your feelings here.
• Develop a good mindset and believes, which fit your needs and fit reality. For example, you can value fun more than rank, or ignore rank completely. You can see other players like people, who are not perfect (just like you), so you won’t expect much from them. And … many other things. Let’s talk about this in a separate chapter.
• Have a life. As trollish as it sounds, it is true. More good (and bad) things you have in your life outside of AN – less worried you will be, and more fun and relaxation you can get in AN. If you feel like you’ve got too involved and worried about what is happening in AN – have a break.
  Also keep in mind the big picture – the game and the current match is not everything you have in your life, you have family, friends, school/work, other hobbies and other games. If something bad will happen here it won’t affect most of your life.

Believe me, all the advices above will help A Lot, and not only with anxiety, but with frustration and anger management too. I believe, if you can do all these things in perfection you won’t meet frustration again and don’t need to read the rest of the guide :). But they are not that easy to do and require time. Meanwhile, you may need to face frustration in your games, therefore – let’s talk about it.

Frustration

There are many situations in AN, which can make you frustrated: matchmaking failure, bad teammates, lags, bugs, etc. But there is one thing all they have in common: you want to control what you can’t control.

And again – solution is simple, but hard to follow 🙂
a) Detect what you can control and what you can’t;
b) Accept things, which you can’t control;
c) Improve in the things, which you can control;
d) Never be frustrated again.
Simple, right? 😀

Not really. There is very nice concept by S. Covey called “Circle of influence”, which is described in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. It says that there are limited amount of things, which you can influence, but if you focus on them this amount will increase. And vice versa – if you focus on things, which you can’t change, amount of things which you can change will decrease. Find the book and read more about it if you are interested.

Meanwhile, lets go to more details and specific AN examples.

• The most common example of frustrating situation is an overaggressive teammate, who keeps dying. Can you control it? No. Can you do something about it? May be. You can say in the chat “Please play safer”. The teammate has changed his(her) behaviour – excellent. He(she) did not – ok, you can’t change it. He(she) either don’t care, or just have a bad habit, which he(she) can’t change quickly. But there are still things, which you can do. You can use teammate as a bait and kill enemies. You can fight with him(her). Or you can stay safe yourself and be ready to defend turrets when enemies have 3v2 advantage. All these are things you can control for sure and there are a lot of space for your personal improvement here, both in skill and decision making. If you focus on that space for improvement – you won’t feel frustrated.
• Same goes for an angry teammate, who feels like staying “afk” and chatting all the time, while your turrets die. You can try to calm him(her) down quickly (see below), but if it doesn’t work you need to stop. If everyone ignores him(her) – he(she) will stop to chat as well. Instead you can wait for him(her) to come back, play defensively meanwhile and, after the game is finished, report for greifing or verbal abuse to prevent spoiled other matches from being.
• Much less obvious, but important example, is your own mood. We can’t control our mood, but we can control our actions and we can develop a habits which helps our mood to stay the way we want it to be.
  If you are easy to get angry – it is ok, don’t try to magically stay calm all the time. You can’t do it, and even if you “succeed” this will make it even worse later, when you reach boiling point. Stay angry if you feel like that, just keep it to yourself. You can yell at your PC, tell everything what you think about the match to your roommates, or even set up a punching bag nearby :). (Btw, there is even a special topic on ronimo forum[www.awesomenauts.com], which allows you to express your frustration and find out that there are other people like you). Unless you don’t s*** in the chat – your anger won’t affect your team.
  When you are done you can think about the cause and what you can do to feel different at the same circumstances next time? May be you can be more proactive? May be you can change mindset? May be you need to have a break from the game? May be the problem was outside of the game and next time in this mood you better go do something else instead, like physical exercises? All these are the things, which you can improve.

• Another tip would be – develop specific process-oriented goals for yourself before you start a match.
  In multiplayer game you just can’t win all the matches. If you’ll try to – you will get frustrated.
  To avoid this you should have other goals for yourself, goals which depends only on you. Goal examples: to try a new build; to learn to predict enemy cool-downs; to learn to kill solar boss quickly; or to simply have fun and laugh at stupid mistake and prise good plays of yours and others.
  I mean, it is fine to want to win, in fact it is important to want to win when you play competitively, it’s just shouldn’t be the only thing you want when you start a match.

• Loosing strikes can feel awful. When you have one you need to identify the reason:
  a) You have a bad day and play worse than usual. Playing more will make you even more tired and tilted, and likely to lose. You just need to have a break. May be a long one (overnight), may be just a short one (to take a shower) – but you need it.
  b) Matchmaking can fail. For example, in the late night very small amount of players playing, that makes impossible to match you with a players of you skill and ping. Then you just need to find another time to play or stop to care about wins and focus on things, which doesn’t depend on good matchmaking.
  c) You are just unlucky. There are always a chance that you’ve lost several games in a row even though the players were perfectly matched and you had 50% chance to win each time. Just be aware of that and be ready.

• Lags can be frustrating. You dodged that ability, but it still hits you and it feels like you can’t do anything about it. But you can. You can check players pings, you can dodge in advance. Furthermore, lags are mutual, so your abilities will hit that enemy, before he(she) can dodge. Pay attention and you will learn to use lags for your advantage.
• Nauts or other aspects of the game, which feel unbalanced may frustrate, but mostly they frustrate people who know a little about the game and just refuse to believe that they can lack full knowledge. If you are in this situation – try to ask yourself why those things are in the game? Why I have so hard time playing against this naut? May be it has a weak spot, which I don’t see? No? May be it is my counter and I need to let allies to take care about it? No? Then you can and should go to the forum[www.awesomenauts.com] and give feedback, so developers know it and take this into account when many of other players feel the same.
• Bugs and cheats should be very rare to happen, but they can. Just remember that they are rare, report them (see below how) and go on, there will be other fair matches.
• There can be person-specific things, which frustrate you personally. For example, some people can play normally at the start of a match and in the middle, but to the end, when win is close an anxiety appears from nowhere and “paralyses” them, making them slower, which can lead to a loss.

  These personal issues can be very different and it’s hard to give an advice here, but if you have one in AN, most probably you have it in your everyday life as well. It won’t have a quick solution, but if you work on it in the life it can help you in the game, and vice versa – you can use in-game frustration to learn about yourself and become better in other aspects of your life. If you have a psychotherapist, for example, don’t be shy to talk about what you experience in the game, it can be very fruitful subject to work on.

Are you toxic?

I’m sure every regular player felt frustration and urge to be toxic, at least occasionally. If you are sure that you’ve never experienced that – this can be true. But… there is a good reason to doubt that – we all are people – most probably you’ve just chosen to believe that you are “perfect”, while you are not.
If you understand that and let yourself to be what you are, then you can see the problem and only then you can change it.

In fact, the very awareness of what you feel can change a lot. This is how mood works – your mood is a way for your subconsciousness to speak with you. When there is something good happening, your subconsciousness will want you to notice it and make it happen again; something bad – to take actions to prevent it. If you keep ignoring your mood and don’t want to do anything, then subconscious part of yours needs to “yell” louder (i.e. make your mood even worse) to attract your attention. When you notice it, and just say to yourself, for example, “I’m angry, I’m angry because my teammate has made a mistake” – it becomes much easier to calm down; there is no need for subconscious hints anymore – you already know that there is a problem and you need to do something about it.

Inability to deal with your emotions will make you perform worse just like bad aim or bad minimap awareness. Additionally it will make your teammates play worse if you bring it on them. A player who has great mechanical skills, but poor emotional skills (i.e. blames teammates, gives up easily) will have much lower rank than the other player with the same mechanical skills, who stays constructive in the chat. Furthermore – that first player will have lower rank than other players with lower mechanical skills, but better self-awareness, self-control and communication skills.

So, as a matter of fact, your ability to deal with your emotions is a game skill. Don’t move it aside like something unrelated, which prevents you to progress with your rating and to have fun. If you want to improve, then face it in the same way you face your issues with other skills (aim, ability management, minimap awareness and game knowledge).

How to develop that skill? In general you will develop it in your fight with frustration, by learning how to be proactive and focus on your circle of influence. But at the same time try to look at things from different point of view, from the point of view of the guy/thing, which makes you angry. Let’s look at the above examples of frustration from the toxicity side:

• Your teammates are stupid and stubborn and make you super angry?
  You need to remember that they are people, just like you are. Everyone makes mistakes, everyone can have a bad day. Not to mention, that oftentimes people see things differently, what looks like stupid play for you may look optimal for your teammate and vice versa – your good plays may look super stupid for others.
  Just try to remember these things. You should feel calmer and should be able to focus on your own actions then, may be you even to win the match despite everything.

  A good practice for people, who get angry over teammates – is to disable an in game chat for a while (go to “Settings”->”General”->”Enable in-game chat”). Flaming in the chat quickly develop into a bad habit and you suddenly become one of the toxic players, who stay afk and dump their emotions into chat, blaming and harassing teammates. You need to break that habit. If you don’t have the chat, it becomes more clear for you that you can’t control teammates and helps you to concentrate on what you can control: your own actions and decisions. While doing so, you will develop the good habit of proactivity, and once you have it, you can turn the chat back on.
  Chat is very important in a team game, it can give your team a big advantage, just use it consciously, or it will do the opposite.

• Your enemies have an unplayable ping?
  You need to remember that the ping is a mutual thing, you have the same huge ping from their point of view.
  Also, that guy didn’t ask to be matched with you, it’s the game who put him(her) there, he(she) probably as unhappy about that as you are. Will additional toxicity problem make you both happier? I doubt so.

• Your enemy cheats?
  Well, first of all, you need to report it (see below how). Then think – will it help you if you will start to say toxic things about him in the chat? Most probably he(she) just have chat disabled and you will just waste your time, which you can use to win the game. And yes, you can win, most of the cheaters have super low skills! And those who don’t – they would be top-1 rank, you can hardly meet them in the match. Remember that and focus on winning, win and be proud of yourself!

• An enemy doesn’t cheat, but plays unfair? Backdoors or uses stupidly overpowered naut?
  What looks unfair or unbalanced for you make look perfectly fair for other people. Usually developers put something into the game for a reason, when the majority of players love this thing and the game will gain from it.
  When something is in the game, that means that everybody can use it. If you chose to not use it – it’s your decision, noone forces you to do it, so why do you think that others need to force and limit themselves?

Meeting toxic players

Toxicity from other players, which you face, is another very important problem. To don’t get frustrated about misbehaviour of others you need to know what your emotional reaction can be and what you can do. It’s good to plan in advance here, otherwise you can get very emotional and make wrong choices.

First, the easy part – what you can do for the game. There are number of options:

• You can try to calm down toxic guys in the chat. Act situationally. For example, remind them that everyone makes mistakes. Tell that you understand their frustration, but there is no reason to spoil the game, which we still can win if we focus on the gameplay. Or ask them whether they feel alright, may be something happened in their life? Just chose the words carefully and don’t say “calm down” directly 😀 – this won’t help.
• You can ignore them, just don’t engage. Hopefully they will calm down naturally, since talking to themselves is not much fun and makes you feel stupid.
• You can mute them (see below how), so they don’t distract you.
• You can report them for verbal abuse. This both, helps you to direct your anger and calm down, and helps community to rid of toxicity – even if those players won’t get banned they can get a warning, which will change their behaviour.

Many people forget about mute option and engage into aggressive communication, which makes the problem only worse, since it distracts the team and feeds toxic player need to be aggressive.

Second, the hard part – what you can do for yourself. Don’t forget about your emotions, you are the one who needs to grasp them and deal with them. Some people just don’t care about toxicity in the chat, if you are one of them – this is super good, just stay calm and continue playing. But many people, when there is toxicity towards them, feel either angry or sad and kind of bad about themselves.

• If you are angry – this is actually not the worst, you feel like you can defend yourself and then, once conversation is over – go on. So, be angry when you need it. Try to express your anger. You can speak to yourself and say whatever you think about toxic guys out loud, or even play a bit more aggressively, or something else. Just try to avoid too much flame in the chat, it can make you to join the group of toxic players…
• If you feel sad and unsure about yourself – this is harder to bear and can hurt for a while. What helps a lot is to remember that toxic players are people too, they have their own reasons to say what they say and you don’t have to take it personally. If someone calls you an idiot ask yourself Why HE Needs to do it? May be he(she) is frustrated? May be his(her) dog died and he(she) is angry these days? Or may be he(she) is an idiot with lack of self awareness, and can see only mistakes of others, not his(her) own? In any case, this is their emotions and they need to deal with it, not you, unless you are happened to be their psychotherapist (: I hope you are not (:

By the way, improving at the game itself can be your personal workaround for this problem. There are exceptions, but generally higher you climb in ranks – less toxicity you see. You meet more mature people game-wise, those who played a lot of matches, experienced and used to most of good and bad things in the game. Also, top players feel good about their own gameplay and thereby don’t need such psychological defence mechanisms as blaming others. Not to mention, that they have passed natural selection: it is hard to win and to improve when you have negative mindset. And talking about mindsets…

Mindsets and Facts

When you educate yourself about how the game (and life) works your expectations become more realistic, which prevents unexpected frustrating situations, fixes anxiousness and urge to be toxic.
Development of good mindset and believes also helps a lot.

Here is list of things, which help me to keep calm in the game. Many of them I’ve already mentioned before.

• There is a report system in AN:

  You can mute and report players by pressing “Esc” (Menu) -> “Mute/Report” -> Left-Click on player -> “Block” or “Report”. If the game ended, switch to Stats, Left Click on the player icon, Report. This may change later, but those options will always be available somewhere, if you can’t find them go to the forum[www.awesomenauts.com] or https://www.reddit.com/r/Awesomenauts/ and ask how to do it.
  Alternatively, you can do it via e-mail, according to the instructions on forum[www.awesomenauts.com] (you can report cheaters with this link too).

  You can report bugs the main menu, press the icon at the left top corner and chose “Report issues”. Or you can do it directly to forum[www.awesomenauts.com].

• Other players are people too. They are not perfect. They can and will make mistakes. They can and will get frustrated and angry. If you need moral support – think about of others in the same way, try to support others too when they need it.
• You can make a lot of mistakes and still win, you just need to make less mistakes than your enemies do.
• Whatever is happening – there is always a chance to win or have fun and learn something useful in the process of losing.
• The only way to improve is to experiment and learn. It’s ok when others try new things, which they are bad at and fail. If you feel bad about it, probably you must try it yourself;)
• Team-communication skill is a part of the game skill. Improving it will improve your rating.
• People perform worse when you call them bad, people perform better when you make them a compliment.
• Being positive allows you to have more fun. Compliment others (including enemies) on good plays and may be he(she) will compliment you back.
  Friendliness breeds friendliness, toxicity breeds toxicity.

• Loses are unavoidable. Matchmaking is there to make probability of win 50%, that also means that it tries to make probability of your loss 50%, so others can win too.

  Losing strikes are also ok. Think about it as a toss of a coin. If you toss a coin a lot, you will get many tails in a row from time to time. For example, probability to get tail 6 times in a row is 1/64 – something very probable, when you play hundreds of matches.

  But your losing strikes also depend on yourself. Be aware of your mood and state if you wanna win.

  Another thing to know – matchmaking depends on time of the day. You have less players[steamdb.info] at night or at morning, when everyone in school and at work – that means it is harder to find good matches. So if you have ping or skill matching problems – try to play at another time of the day.

• If you are truly better than your rank you will win matches rather than lose and you will slowly progress further. If you are not, if you have 50% win rate or even lower, but feel like it is fault of your teammates, who are constantly doing worse than you – that probably means that you can’t see your own mistakes. Indeed, if people at your current rank do many mistakes and you don’t, then you have 2 people on your team who do many mistakes, but the enemy has whole 3 people who do many mistakes – your chances of winning are higher.
• Bugs are unpredictable negative aspects of a program. It is impossible to develop a big program without bugs. The process of finding bugs and fixing them luck predictability as well – it is a creative process. Even a big company with smartest programmers can’t give any guaranties and timelines when it comes to fixing a bug. Ronimo is a small indie company and don’t have enough resources to work at everything at the same time. One needs to be patient about that.
• Character balance is a subjective thing. You never can do a game, which will feel perfectly balanced for every player. The goal of developers is to make a game, which is balanced for “average” player. So when you feel like the game is not balanced personally for you it is not good enough reason to call the game unbalanced. You feel like that naut is overpowered? There are people, who think that it is ok, or even underpowered. You feel like that naut is underpowered? There are players who won’t agree. Learn why and use it for your advantage. May be they use another build? You can use it too and crash everyone! Or may be the naut is just hard to play and you need to practice more?

  For example, many new players feel like Gnaw is overpowered. But as a matter of fact,

  Results from the naut rank poll from Awesomenauts

  showed that for an “average” player he is in a

  View post on imgur.com

  [imgur.com] power-wise and when you look at what nauts are used by top players[www.nautsrankings.com] – you can’t find a gnaw main at all.

• Same can be said about in-game features. What looks like a feature to you, may look like a flaw to someone else. Even if it’s not the case – there may be others, more important features to implement first.

  If something looks like a flaw to you, you may be in a minority. If it is a big thing – developers keep it there for a reason. Biggest example is “XP system” (team levels, which you gain by killing stuff during the match). There is number of people, who say that it ruins the game for them. But in fact, polls show that vast majority of players think that it does improve the game, and I don’t remember even one experienced top player, who would say that “XP system” made the game worse.

• There is such thing in life as “Negativity bias[en.wikipedia.org]“. Negative things get very much more attention than positive things. Imagine yourself being given 100$ and then 100$ has been taken from you. You’ve gained and lost nothing, but how would you feel? I bet you would feel bad, like you’ve lost something right now.
  This is because our ancestors were required to pay attention to all bad and dangerous events to survive, while good events were not that crucial, or at least not that urgent to react to.
  Same is applied to gaming, but it has nothing to do with survival, so you need to be aware of it and fix subconscious negative bias with a conscious thought.

• Useful links:
  – https://www.reddit.com/r/Awesomenauts/, forum[www.awesomenauts.com], discord[discordapp.com], wiki[awesomenauts.gamepedia.com];
  – nautsbuilder[orikaru.net] – to try different build order online, and share a good one with friends;
  – nautsrankings[www.nautsrankings.com] – to check ladder-board online;
  – steam guides, awesomeguides[theawesomeguides.com] – builds/strategies used by players;
  –

  Naut Streams – Who To watch from Awesomenauts

  , who streams atm[www.twitch.tv];
  –

  Awesomenauts youtube channels – who to watch from Awesomenauts

  channels list;
  – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKUhjV0q2jUOG9Ooji0D-1w, patch notes[www.awesomenauts.com].

Conclusion

To enjoy a team-based game you need to develop a set of psychological skills, just like you develop a set of mechanical skills. You do that by learning about how the game works and how the people work and matching your expectations with reality. It is hard process, which takes time. Meanwhile – good luck and have fun in Awesomenauts!