Competitive Online Gaming’s Ladder Anxiety: Explained
Any competitive online multiplayer game or in fact any competitive sport has a ranked system. The ranked system is what motivates the players to keep on playing the game, they want to get better at it or ‘rank up’ as in a ladder. It takes time to rank up through the various ranks. League of Legends has different categories of ranks, CS:GO has an entirely different system for competitive gameplay (ESEA) which uses the Elo rating system, and Valorant has a tier-based ranking system.
Gamers often don't play competitive games for ‘fun’. They play because they want to win and try their best at it. But matchmaking can clutter performance by matching you with low-elo players or someone might go AFK in mid-round or someone is basically just bad at the game. This frustrates the person who seriously plays the game. Even if he or she isn’t heavily affected by it, sometimes they do not want to play anymore. They experience a thing called ladder anxiety.
After you've lost several matches your ratings get decreased and you also might get de-ranked. Ladder anxiety is having a stressful time after losing a game and thinking about the loss which tends to frustrate you. Moreover, it is the fear of losing more games in competitive matchmaking. It leads to getting annoyed by anything and constantly regretting queueing up for the match which you lost.
From personal experience, ladder anxiety is terrible, especially when you want to play the game all day and night. A lot of times it doesn't make you quit the game and begs you to play more hence losing more matches. I overcame this by just stopping to play for 2–3 days and then resuming which wasn't in a continuous manner. Taking breaks of 48 hours or more can help you focus your mind on something else, which in turn will help relax yourself from the screentime of playing the game.
Riot Games, the publisher of Valorant and League of Legends often tries to update its ranking system by making changes how the rating is applied. One of the recent patches for Valorant gave new players 10 unrated matches to win as ‘smurfs’ (high tier players playing in low ranks) are taking over the bronze-silver tiers which cause unfair gameplay.
Overall, video games are meant to be fun, and even the competitive aspect of video games can and should be fun for everyone playing. If you find yourself in a situation in which you keep playing only for the rank and not because you are enjoying it, it becomes a problem which can easily lead to you not wanting to play the game anymore. Try your best to prevent this from happening, and keep enjoying the game as long as possible. — Mario Trappein (Content Creator)
There is always going to be ladder anxiety. A lot of new players want to play the game, many who aren't aware of the mechanics and just want to play for fun. Their experience is ruined because of toxicity, mainly age and region-based harassment. Toxic gaming culture is an entire topic itself to be talked about, maybe for another time.
[ Edit: As of January 2021, Riot has implemented a numerical ranking system and a leaderboard for Valorant rank tiers.]
