Games

Yes, they made me a bit too angry. While i still play some online now and then, never the competitive games.

lmao i never managed to get into these kinds of games. too anxiety-inducing and stressful.

i tried in the past because i was so fucking lonely and thought it would've been a good way to make friends. oh well.

i've always been a singleplayer/co-op girl and that's not going to change anytime soon.

Yeah, I have stopped really caring for competitive games for 3 or 4 years, if not more, now. Playing with friends can be a blast tho, and that's what I do when it's a competitive game. Usually it's league of legends for me, but I play very little of it now, which is to be expected when you play the same game for a decade lol.

Gaming in general for the past years have been tough for me because despite genuinely loving it, my mental health have steadily declined to the point I have trouble even starting anything, let alone continuing to play something I have started, but right now I'm playing Breath of the Wild and Baldur's Gate 3, both for the first time and let me tell you, I'm having a blast and don't feel like stopping anytime soon. Single-player games are fucking great.

Now, I don't think the issue with competitive games is the fact that someone will get the short end of the stick and not have fun. If that was the case, fighting games would be dead by now. You can absolutely have fun while losing. The issue I have always seen, in league at least, is that you're alone, there's no collective sentiment when playing, no team mentality, most people are hostile and everyone is trying to win in a selfish way and because of that you get frustrated, which eventually turns to anger, and all of that most likely ties to the hyper-individualization of the self under capitalism. Every now and then you find a team that clicks, where everyone communicates and play for each other, instead of in spite of each other, and when it happens it's fucking great, even when you end up losing.

Yes.

A long time ago, actually and it was very good for my mental health.

By the time video games got to where being destroyed over the internet was possible, I couldn't afford the time investment required to git gud.

Yes, I avoid them. The only time I make exceptions are during LAN parties, when we all squad up together, to get demolished by sweat lords. But at that point, it's all about the hang session, really.

In my free time I prefer leisurely games, like thoughtful indy platformers and puzzle games, with the occasional RPG or survival game sprinkled in.

I'm travelling currently and taking a bit of a gaming sabbatical, but I look forward to replaying Sunless Sea when I get back. I also am looking forward to the STALKER 2 release sometime this Q1.

The only multiplayer games I've played in the past 10-ish years are Dark Souls and like Payday 2. This year I'm trying to get into fighting games, though, lol.

For the past ten years… I don’t think I ever ended a session of a player vs player match - “happy.”

Yeah I had this same realization a while ago when I used to almost exclusively play competitive games. When I lost a match, at best I just felt bad, and at worst I was pissed because I got my ass kicked by some little shit taunting me over voice chat or something. When I won I just felt okay or maybe relieved, but not really good or happy. Either way when I stopped playing I was usually in a worse mood than when I started.

Now I mostly play single player games and have a lot more fun. After I close out of the game I feel satisfied and like I genuinely enjoyed the time I spent playing it. No more getting needlessly stressed out or having my day ruined because of a game. Also it helps that when I need to answer my phone, get a package at the door, etc. I can (usually) just pause the game and come back no problem.

I just stopped finding pvp fun at some point years ago and stopped playing competitive games.

I went back to some old school games and found that I can play them 20 times longer than anything new rn.

I've been enjoying OG Star Wars battlefront 2, and I can't stop. I never stopped loving that game apparently

I left ranked league of legends for single player pirated offline nintendo switch stuff, and old steam games in my library.

No regrets!

I have only played coop styled PVE multiplayer video games for years. Monster Hunter games are my favorite. Just dudes and dudettes slaying dragons. Most of the time vocal communication isn't necessary. Emojis and some signals at most. Most of the time when you are with people that know what they are doing you don't need anything. It makes playing with random online so much better. And there's not much animosity against other people. Like ok, sure, you can get a bad player here or there, and sometimes you might have to boot someone for being a little shit but generally speaking it's pretty smooth sailing.

When I play against people there's just so much extra stress. I just don't like that kind of fight. I like to work with people not fight against them. Even if it's team based pvp I don't like it. You are still fighting against other people and in the end that leave some people feeling shitty or angry at other people. I don't like that. Maybe it's part of why I took to communism so quickly and readily. It's not about competing against each other like shitty capitalism but working with each other to make things better. That just resonates with me in all things.

Getting back into EU4

just wait until you experience the adrenaline of being declared on in multiplayer. shit would get my heart racing so fast i thought i was going to pass out

i tried playing eu4 again recently but the feature bloat made it super inaccessible, victoria 2 with dlcs seems like the perfect level of features but i guess game dev doesn't work like that anymore

Once I enjoyed playing MMORPGs. But also this is kind of stressful to me. So I rather enjoy playing single-player games or Genshin Impact on my mobile phone, at least the interactions with other players are mostly friendly there and you can help someone

I wasted some good teenage years playing League of Legends. I quit it because of how not only it made me feel awful but also made me into a rager.

Nowadays I only do pve if playing multiplayer and honestly? I feel much better. MMOs kind of feel the niche of social interaction when I want to play with others.

And yes, the MiG-19 is the BEST plane in DCS (until we get the MiG-23).

If you ever return - Play jazz in the background. Something chill that you would hear at a lounge. Your mood changes completely and you go from tense and raging to feeling at your most laid back mood. For me it turned multi player FPS games into a relaxing activity.

I've always preferred co op for that very reason. Like I get it back in the day when you needed another person to have a good challenge, but bots are pretty good these days and I'd rather frag em alongside you.

I've been enjoying my time in Darktide because despite it being a fucking Warhammer game, the co-op only concept means that the most insufferable, toxic That Guys go elsewhere. I've had maybe one bad interaction, and it was so relatively minor I can't remember what it was about.

I quit League of Legends (checks notes) ten years ago and it was a great decision. Since then I've tried other competitive online games - Titanfall was my jam for a while, then Overwatch of course, tried to get back into Starcraft/SC2, really like Dragon Ball Fighter Z but I haven't been able to play for a while - but I always quit as soon as I cross the threshold of getting pissed more than I'm having fun.

My favorite online experiences now are all cooperative with relatively small player bases. I dug the hell out of Final Fantasy XI playing it through last year (though I still have a lot of content left if I ever go back to it again), on DCS I play on a "casual milsim" server that's mostly frequented by Australian dads where we play against a pretty hardcore computer opponent, and now that I think of it Dungeons and Dragons (and most other TTRPGs) totally has the same vibe of "coop gameplay with a small playerbase".

I still play Call of Duty: Mobile to this day. The problem I see now is SBMM, P2W bastards, and cash shops ruining the experience.

I used to play a lot of Street Fighter and found my fingers thanking me after I decided to stop playing it as competitively.

I'm currently on break from them, I can enjoy them (if they never made me really happy, I wouldn't play them), but they can also be bad for my mental health so for now I've been avoiding playing online, I still play some of the games but just against bots

I'd like to return to them eventually though, I really enjoy the process of learning and improving and adapting that doesn't exist the same way in singleplayer games

Feeling bad because of losing is certainly a big part of it, but I think another big problem often comes down to the mechanics these games have been putting in to cause addiction, like battle passes which are everywhere these days (even Splatoon, which is one of the biggest reasons I've grown to really dislike 3 even though I love this series)

Edit: Though, can't forget that another reason I fell off of Splatoon 3 in particular is because they ruined the rank system in this game, designing it to be grindy and require far more games to make actual progress regardless of skill, and distancing it so far from the skill ratings which are the actual good ranking system, there's a reason so many people switch to X Battles (the mode that directly uses those skill ratings) the moment they hit S+ instead of continuing to waste time grinding

Especially since they now have everyone rank down each season, forcing everyone to grind all over again for no good reason even if their skill hasn't actually changed

Splatoon 2's system was a lot more directly related to the SBMM than one might assume, and it was significantly better for it, you wouldn't be forced to stick around in a rank you couldn't handle and if you were truly too good for your current rank then you could move out of it pretty quickly, the whole "skipping ranks" thing happened if your matchmaking rating was higher than normal for that rank

I'm a big Dota2 addict and luckily I learnt to approach it more casually. I know not everyone has the material conditions required to do such impossible thing as to play a competitive game in a healthier way, but I'm here to say that it is eventually possible

I was done with competitive online gaming after ten minutes of Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal twenty years ago.

Hey if you’re looking for other single layer games to play I know a few hidden gems

Yes, though I think I made the same realisation like 5 years ago. Decent number of people tried to bully me back into comp games. Real nice community you (the sort of person that would do this) got there

Pretty much, I occasionally play Halo but that's about it. Even then I can only stand it in short bursts before I have to stop. When I played on a console back in highschool it was really bad for my mental health but most of the time now I just end up realizing there's something better I want to spend my time on.

To go from competitive gaming to quitting cold turkey won’t work in my experience. Try playing a solo mode of whatever you play most often. Ex: I played lots of NBA2k online and it just made me pissed that people can buy better stats and attributes, so I just started playing MyCareer mode (single player) and never looked back. I might play one or 2 full length NBA games with my player, play a good game and then I quit before the game pisses me off. I play a whole hell of a lot less of it now, maybe once every day or 2, and I have more fun in the process.

I have never really been into online gaming and much prefer single-player experiences. I played COD for a time years ago, and I quickly got very, very annoyed by kids constantly telling me they were going to have intercourse with my mother.

Now I view gaming differently than I did then. It is escapism for me. I don't like my escapism tainted by the sheer competitiveness of it all. I have enough competitiveness in my daily life. If I want to slog slowly through a game -- sometimes just playing on easy because I find it more enjoyable -- then I do that.