Recently for my mental health I decided to stop playing competitive games. You know, your Battlefields, your Call of Duty’s, your War Thunders, etc. I found myself angry more than I was having fun. For the past ten years… I don’t think I ever ended a session of a player vs player match - “happy.” Now I’m playing mostly singleplayer games with some MMORPGs. I am much happier. I actually look forward to gaming when I can. There is enough to get mad at in the world, I don’t want my entertainment medium of choice to be anger inducing as well. I feel like the worst part about the vast majority of player vs player games is that someone basically has to not be having fun for the other person to have fun. Not universal, and probably more a matter of personal mindset but it’s how I feel. I was just wondering how many if any comrades here have done the same and how it has effected you? I can confidentally say my life is better for it.
I’ve been playing House Flipper 2 a lot, which is a good detox from high stress games. Getting back into EU4 as well, beating up Europe at every chance I can get. Trying to learn Kremlingames games, mostly China: Mao’s Legacy. Flying the MiG-19 in DCS, my favorite plane. It’s been fun, and better. I do not miss War Thunder too much.
I’m not knocking people who like high action player vs player enviroments, it’s just something I have grown to not enjoy anymore personally.
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.
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.
Yeah I somewhat regret saying that aloud because it just makes me look like a sore loser, but hey, at least I’m avoiding situations where I’m a sore loser. 😅
Nah, it didn’t came accross like you’re a sore loser. What you said is not wrong, it can’t always be fun, and for some people losing is always not fun.
Yes, they made me a bit too angry. While i still play some online now and then, never the competitive games.
I used to RAGE at Destiny when it first dropped like a decade ago almost. I was really good at the game for a short period but then everyone else got way better too and I eventually quit. Now I only play online games if I’m with a friend and that’s rare
For me they often provoke self-anger. I kept experiencing intrusive thoughts like “That’s the third time I died that way and I KNEW it was coming so what the hell’s wrong with me?” and “I can’t believe I choked AGAIN. I dragged my whole team down and now I’m 100 MMR deeper in the hole to show for it…”
I wasn’t having fun anymore and decided to hang up my hat for good – these days I stick to TF2 when I want to scratch that multiplayer FPS itch. It’s so much nicer to play on my own terms in a setting where whether you win or lose everyone has fun and wants to stick around for another round or three.
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.
This is like me. I would like to play them but they are way too stressful, especially if there’s voice/text. I sometimes do coop stuff - Remant 2, World War Z, Destiny 2 but if I pick up that someone’s getting annoyed with me I get stressed and start playing badly. I wish games were better at putting you with similarly ranked people but I think they just want short queues so they chuck everyone in together - newbs and the not-so-good get slaughtered and either get good quickly or leave (mostly leave I think). For me, at least, the best thing is to try to find a small, friendly Discord community and just play the games when you know you are going to be with friendly, supportive people. I’d love to play games like Rust, CoD, but toxic players keep me away. Then there’s the homophobia and ageism… but that’s a whole other post or two. 😅
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.
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 left ranked league of legends for single player pirated offline nintendo switch stuff, and old steam games in my library.
No regrets!
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.
One of my breaking points was having an incredible loss streak in War Thunder and when I finally won a match I noticed the only thing I felt was relief. Nothing else. Like goddamn that is not something I should have to work towards in a hobby.
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
Old Battlefront 2 is an amazing game. I tried getting my friends to play it recently at a LAN, and no one could appreciate it as much as I do.
Please join me comrade
I’m travelling until the end of the month. I’ll DM you when I’m back home, so we can connect on Steam and Discord, or wherever. 👍
Absolutely I play with another close comrade of mine as well, please join us it’s so much fun
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.
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Yeah. That’s why I am pretty muchbonly grinding for camos and ranks.
That ine downvote:how tf is SBMM good?
Not the downvoter but SBMM is a necessary evil if you have a matchmaking system instead of purely community servers.
In community servers, there’s an equal emphasis in the community as well as the gameplay, so you don’t mind getting dunked on as long as you have some fun with your teammates and dick around in chat.
When there’s matchmaking, however, everyone aims to win the match and move on. If you don’t have some type of SBMM, the new guys just get dunked on over and over with little chance to learn.
The example I have for this is TF2. In Valve servers the players with thousands of hours completely dominate everyone else, and without a sense of community this got tiring for me pretty fast, even on TF2 where there are some impromptu fun moments (conga chains etc). I tried to play circa 2015, I think they added some sort of sbmm afterwards with the competitive updtae.
Note that I say this as an argument in favor of community servers, not in favor of SBMMs, but as long as corpos make the games that’s not gonna happen sadly.
You asked how SBMM is good, so I’m gonna write way too much to answer why I think that
SBMM is important for games with matchmaking because competitive games are generally both more fun and more fair when players are matched with other players around their current skill level, people generally don’t like when a game is just rigged from the start and they can’t contribute anything because of it
It’s pretty bad for people learning and improving too to not have it, because it’s a lot harder to learn from a loss if you just get blown out immediately by someone so far above your level, as opposed to someone closer to your skill level where it’s easier to tell what they’re doing differently compared to you
It’s also a weird complaint to say that the game “punishes” you for sub-optimal behavior and playing casually, because what really happens is that you maybe lose a few matches before the game realizes you’re playing worse and puts you around that level, meanwhile if you don’t have SBMM you will always have a pretty good chance of being matched against someone trying as hard as they can to win and optimizing their gameplay and equipment (this has been a common complaint about Destiny when they have removed SBMM in PvP in multiple instances, because it lead to it being basically impossible to play casually because basically every game is full of pubstompers)
If CoD’s implementation doesn’t work like I described, then that’s a CoD problem, not an SBMM problem, there are loads of games with SBMM where people are generally happy with it (like Splatoon, or most fighting games)
It’s also worth pointing out that despite a lot of people thinking SBMM in CoD is some recent thing, it’s actually been a thing for most of its existence, same with early Halo
And as far as being casual and “chilling out and having fun” goes, you also have to keep in mind that you don’t actually know how seriously your opponents are playing at any given moment, it could very well be the case that they’re also not taking it too seriously and just seem like they’re “tryhards” because they happen to be a lot better, a problem that’s improved by SBMM rather than made worse because you’re ideally (as in, in games that do it well, not as sure about CoD) less likely to go against people like that if you’re not actually on their level
Counter point: the real reason players suck is that they barely have time to improve due to long work hours. Most of us casuals are low income folks and have to make ends meet by working long ass hours.
This is one of the key reasons I support raising the minimum wage and reducing work hours.
This isn’t a counterpoint though?? That doesn’t really have anything to do with SBMM, and if anything seems like it supports its existence because this way you get matched with other players in that kind of situation, instead of being thrown into unbalanced matches against the people who have loads of time to spend practicing
Like, I’m not really sure what this has to do with my comment at all and I’m just really confused
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
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).
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 think dota has a lot of avenues for better understanding communism and dialectics.
As one example, the way the five roles fit together in the balancing of their power spikes and the harnessing of their skill sets towards a common goal, it makes me think of this Che quote:
One acquires in the face of work the old joy: the joy of fulfilling a duty; of feeling important within the social mechanism; of feeling oneself a cog that has its own unique characteristics, that is necessary — although not indispensable — to the production process. And, moreover, a conscious cog. A cog that has its own engine, driven further and further every time, in order to bring about to happy conclusion one of the key premises of socialist construction: the availability of a sufficient quantity of consumer goods for the entire population.
That’s crazy because I actually thought a lot about how Dota2 was ‘dialectical’ compared to LoL’s more ‘ontological’ approach. In League, the roles and lanes are written in stone, the items all serve the purpose of scaling the numbers on your fixed champion gameplay. On the contrary, there is fluidity in the Dota2 roles, ambiguity built in every hero, and items are here to mutate your gameplay more than simply scaling up your stats. Dota2 ends up with both more cooperation and actually more individual courses of action, to the cost of being harder to learn.
And coincidentally, Dota2 is very popular in Russia, China, and other periphery countries, when League is overwhelming in the West and its puppets
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
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.
Hey if you’re looking for other single layer games to play I know a few hidden gems