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People need to learn how to enjoy losing games.

Incredibly Lucid··5 votes·2,407 views

This game is high stakes, everyone is in it to win and when things feel out of your control, you become bitter and angry. People don't realize how much their mentality comes into play when they are losing. You play ranked and expect to win, yet there is no emphasis or accountability for yourself, your psychological relationship with the que up button is one of luck. You gamble away, you expect the win to be handed to you on a silver platter and if not you feel sick. You lash out at your team mates because your performance is mediocre and they are doing worse, so it must be their fault you aren't thrashing right?

What if I told you, you could enjoy the game while your losing. How? you might ask with skepticism, which is completely warranted as we have hardwired ourselves to either consider your team as liabilities or assets, depending on whether you win or lose. First I want you to completely distance yourself from the concept of winning and losing, look at it from the bigger perspective, no matter what, you are going to lose games, that's just a fact everyone has to deal with. If you can accept that, why do you still feel so gross in a losing game, you have to admit when things seemed promising at the beginning of a match, you had this fresh mentality, but as soon as something negative happened in game it's like the flip is switched and even worser things come from it.

Your performance after you were tilted becomes worse and you make plays out of anger and rashness, or you play out of fear and cowardice, there is no balance. Do not let the events in game control you, recognize your triggers and identify countermeasures, when losing people tend to rage and flame or spam ping. A useful tip is to type /muteall at the beginning of a match and if someone spam pings you just mute their ping. It can be hard to do this because we have such a habitual relationship to this rage/flame cycle. So yes no matter what you will lose games, accept this. Also do not give up in losing games, yet do not expect to win, this is a fine line and it is imperative you identify it, because your emotions must be controlled

When you are losing you must identify what things you did that led to your demise, one of the best players in solo que once stated that the perfect player has a 75 percent win rate at the highest rating. That means that there is an element of luck which you seemingly cannot control, so loss is inevitable, but this is apart of life. Now that we know we can have complete and supreme influence over 75 percent of our games, that should be relieving right? A 75 percent win rate is not something to feel bad about, its something good. But most people don't have this win rate and in this tangible bracket they have lost games where they have control, yet they do not use it correctly, and despite this fact they place their focus outside of their selves and onto their team mates.

You must look at league from a growth mindset, not a fixed one, you can improve yourself each game and make it that much more enjoyable if you identify the fact that you can be better and you can win most games if you learn how. Look at things in an order of events, what lead to what, what were my intentions and why was that a bad idea. After each mistake you make you should immediately process a solution, not resort to raging in chat. Losing should be a relief because it is an opportunity to identify the things you have done wrong. Do you really want to win when you have made mistakes the enemy just failed to exploit? That is the 45-55 win rate bracket mentality, happy if you perform slightly above average, unhappy of you perform slightly below.

Hold yourself accountable, for your mistakes only, do not hold someone else accountable for theirs, everything is done in hindsight, someone on your team makes a mistake you look back at it after 5 seconds and you flame them. Switch that energy onto your self and who you're versing, recognize only your enemy teams mistakes, and learn to understand their movements and patterns. Focus only on them like a hunter focuses on their pray. It is them you are versing not your team. Many players report the experience of being stuck, they accept they cannot win and just wait for the game to end. It is fine to know when you have lost, but control your emotions, redirect it from the bitterness or gloom and put it into a simulation of everything that happened and what to do next time. Be excited for the next game, every game is a learning experience you are not being punished, you are being gifted with the oppurtunity to learn and grow.

23 Comments

Primaquarius3 votes

How can I enjoy losing when I put in actual effort

EvilUnicornLord3 votes

Think about the successes that you had during the game, be it first blood or a good multi-kill and focus on that and not the "inferiority" of your team.

jaypiff1 votes

it becomes very difficult to do that when your team feeds at a rate of 1+ death per minute, and thats not a rare occurence

Primaquarius1 votes

It happens to me often during mid game, I give an early lead and my team gives it up

But of course my rank prevents me from having my voice heard

EvilUnicornLord1 votes

If you find yourself that miserable when playing League, maybe you should not play League.

Illabethe1 votes

Say that after you have some 6000 games of hyper carrying sabotaged by your teammates..... consistently.... always early game where it matters the most.... and there isn't a thing you can do to prevent it even if you are a good player....... Unless you play a very small subset of champions with resetting kits who can 1v5 by virtue of those resets consistently..... game after game.....

Maybe you find those champs offensive and not your play style.... and instead want to 1v5 on champs who generally are more aesthetically pleasing?

If you ever see me having a negative score, it's because someone on my team thought trading or feeding a 1 v 5 reset was a good idea.

Yesterday, for example, I had 2 explosive Zyra Jungle games where I 1v5'd,...... the second one being a 23/6/8 where I didn't miss a single skill. (but my own team didn't give me more than one honor because ZYRA JUNGLE OMFG) Team cried badly early game because they full pushed and started that game off at a "stalemate of trades" and I wasn't ganking what WERE winning lanes. Then I proceeded to slaughter the other team..... over and over again. Other team thought I was smurfing.

Then..... on my 3rd game.... My bot lane decides it's intelligent to ignore Mid roams from a Diana . My bot lane started out okay; They kind of traded kills with bot, but were on the positive side. By the time the game got to about 12 minutes, Diana had stealthfully got to 7/1. I could do NOTHING the rest of the game. Diana was Flash Qing to hit R's and 1 shotting people the rest of the game. You couldn't set up plants or move fast enough to stop her. My team's vision was garbage, because Brand wasted all his wards right on the edge of lanes where they weren't helpful at all. Even after their lane fell, the only places warded were by the outer lanes. Our mid and jungle was never warded at all. You couldn't see Diana coming.

EvilUnicornLord1 votes

My point still stands, ignore the bad games, just try to have fun. You're going to have cruddy and ignorant teammates, that's kind of inevitable, but that doesn't mean you can't appreciate the high points of the game.

If that's not working, maybe take a break from League and play something else for a while. I find that playing only one video game causes burnout and I dislike playing that specific game for quite some time.

EvilUnicornLord2 votes

Agreed.

Video games were created as entertainment, to have fun, and if you aren't having any fun by playing League, maybe you should become a streamer. They get viewers by raging.

jaypiff1 votes

thats all well and good. but the issue is when people dont communicate, they refuse to play as a team, they actually int...that happens way more often when i lose than a team just getting outplayed. or it literally is the champion choice which means the loss was decided before the match even started, like when one team has no tank because neither the sup, top, nor jg picked a tank. so now there is basically no way to win a team fight because tanks do just as much damage as assassins but have 3,4, or 5 times the health. or when you push your lane to their nexus turrets, play babysitter to every other lane, dont die at all, lose no turrets in your lane, but somehow your team feeds so hard you lose...thats not an exaggeration, that sort of thing has happened to me on more than one occasion. this is the stuff that tilts me. champions like veigar that literally just have to click on you once and their ult does 1500+ damage killing you in one shot...seems like a legitimate, skillful move huh?

i do try every match to improve my play, but when you get stuck with troll after troll after troll, how do you climb rank when you lose more LP for a loss than you gain for a win...or when you drop rank for a single loss at 0 LP. then the cycle of nonsense continues.

Incredibly Lucid1 votes

At silver you shouldn't have to worry about things like that, there are a barrage of things to improve on and until you become that 75 percent win rate player, focus only on your self in game, forget you team.

jaypiff1 votes

so teammates feeding so hard its impossible to win is something that i should just ignore, and just take the loss saying "well i should be so good that I can overcome my 0/15 bot lane at 10 minutes" thats kind of an unrealistic standard to hold yourself to

BoringLittleF1 votes

You must look at league from a growth mindset, not a fixed one, you can improve yourself each game and make it that much more enjoyable if you identify the fact that you can be better and you can win most games if you learn how.

People are angry because there are a lots of assholes willing to give them shit for not having a rank, having wrong kind of rank and make it a big deal. Also, there is the enemy being smug in the end of the game which doesn't help a lot. So the anger is not going anywhere.

VoraciousX1 votes

My problem with having fun when you're losing is that you can't do anything when you're losing. You go to farm, you can't because the minions are so strong you take a full combo to get them to half health. Every ability someone hits you with does half your health. You're nearly useless except for as a distraction. Not only that, if you're a mid laner you have everybody coming to take your farm whether you're winning or losing, then going back to their lane and taking their farm, making it even harder to farm minions when you actually do get the chance.

BrightWîngs1 votes

its more just flatout just shrugging it off losing sucks you ask anyone people are going to rather win then lose because losing isnt fun I HATE losing a game I play really well but I also hate getting mad at dumb things so I kinda just accept that im not gonna win every game even if i do well

Warlord Rhinark1 votes

That's like saying people should learn how to enjoy rubbing sandpaper against their genitalia.

Incredibly Lucid1 votes

Or i'm saying losing doesn't have to be sandpaper rubbing against genitalia.

EvilUnicornLord4 votes

If you find League to be that unpleasant (because you are going to lose games at least 50% of the time) maybe you should play something else that you'll always win at.

Or, completely absurd notion, realize that you can have fun despite losing. I used to play soccer and my team lost all the time just because they weren't better than the other team, that doesn't mean I never had a blast scoring goals or making nigh-impossible passes. Developing such an attitude really helps me enjoy competitive video games like League. Yes, losing isn't nearly as fun as winning and sometimes game are absolutely rotten with no fun parts, but you just have to be a good sport and accept defeat when it comes or you're going to be miserable.

jaypiff1 votes

again, there is a difference between losing and your team or a single troll or stupid riot logic forcing you to lose. i played a 1v1 game with a plat on my friends list, it was somewhat close then he started whooping my ass. Im ok with that and I had fun. Even put that in a ranked match and someone is showing me skills that actually surpass my own thats cool.

But when i annihilate a veigar or annie like 10/0 and they are 0/10 and they can still ONE SHOT ME with their ult...you bet im raging at riot for being so unbalanced.

When I go 10/0 on my lane and ping when my lane roams, yet my team ignores the pings and remains pushed even though my lane roaming is allowing me to destroy a turret, then they feed. then suddenly my lane comes back with 2 kills, and since it was a zed or yasuo that i worked insanely hard to shut down as an ahri you bet im pissed

Or when someone in champion select BANS MY DECLARED CHAMPION you bet i rage.

or when league autofills me to a lane that i cant play and my choice is dodge or lose essentially, but you cant dodge multiple times because then you cant play. yet its ridiculous to think you should be able to play every position AT THE SAME SKILL LEVEL. do i somewhat understand how to play other positions sure, but to the same extent that i play mid, my main? no way. so when I lose as a jungle to a person who mains jungle, you bet im pissed.

Im playing ranked to CLIMB RANK, and do so by playing the position and champions that i play best.

if i want to mess around ill play normal blind pick, then who cares if you lose. Thats where you try out new positions and champs, not ranked...

so again, there is massive difference between losing, and what happens so often while playing ranked league where your team loses.

EvilUnicornLord1 votes

Then just don't play League.

It won't kill you and you can come back later.

jaypiff1 votes

or if they just punish trolls and afks harshly in ranked, i wouldnt have to worry about it. they dont have to let everyone play ranked. if you troll or afk you should be banned, period. problem solved. and someone like me who doesnt act like a troll doesnt have to be punished for other peoples negative behavior.

EvilUnicornLord1 votes

Trolling is very subjective. Is that Darius support trolling or is he going off-meta to counter the enemy support? Hard to say and it wouldn't be fair to punish him just for not adhering perfectly to the meta. And even if he is trolling, that's a fairly minor offense (preposterous notion, but he's only being annoying and nothing more).

And AFKing more commonly has more to do with real life stuff than ragequitting. Cruddy internet, parents who won't take "no" for an answer, emergencies, etc. All of those can cause someone to reasonably go AFK (which there already is a pretty harsh punishment for, by the way.)

Also, banned? That's swatting flies with sledgehammers. You're fixing the problem by making an even bigger problem. Nobody's going to play League if they lose their account because their wifi flatlined and, even if they do, they won't spend money on their accounts because they're just going to lose the skins they buy and Riot will have to undo such an absurd change or League will collapse.

jaypiff1 votes

there are multiple game options, not just ranked solo q. there is also team ranked. im saying to ban from solo q only. and it doesnt have to be after one offense, but come on.

At the very least if there werent trolls "causing me to lose" i would be able to get a better image of my skill level. because right now it seems like if i dont have a troll or afk, i get fed and more often than not my team wins. if i have a troll or afk we lose. that is simply the pattern im seeing.

of course there are games mixed in where i just seem to have garbage luck, cant land a skill shot, or they keep getting away with 10 health and i just cant get a kill to save my life.

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