„You suck! Now listen to what I have to say…“
The Problem
Don’t you just hate that stinging moment when you
make your first mistake in a game of League of Legends and the announcer lets
everybody know that you died. What follows is the inevitable stream of poorly
constructed insults and insinuations about your general skill level tossed in
your general direction by teammates who feel very clever at that particular moment.
At that point you want nothing more than the ability to send 10,000 volts of electricity
to every single one of them through their keyboards and fry the mofos into fine
hate-filled dust.
You are not the only one, more often than not
this happens to everyone on a daily basis and this is no exclusive problem of
multiplayer games. Throwing harsh criticism is however much easier to get away
with across the internet and because we can’t physically do anything about it
is what grinds our gears, maybe even more than the fact that some 13 year old
wannabe solo mid just called you a less-than-skilled prepubescent man of
questionable sexual orientation.
How people cope with this actually perpetuates the problematic behavior, because the impulse at the moment is to avenge your hurt ego and strike back at him with an even more insulting remark. This, my friends, is what we call an argument, and it’s not doing you or the team any good.
1. It distracts you and your team from
the game at hand, because you are typing and looking at the chat instead of
paying attention to what is going on around you.
2. Your state of mind is more
aggressive, you are more likely to act impulsively without thinking our actions
through
3. Subconsciously you are less inclined
to help someone who insulted you, thus undermining teamwork.
Should you reason with the person? No, again it will distract you and others from the game. What you should do is ignore the whole thing. Yes, I know your pride is telling you otherwise, but your pride is the thing that is currently standing between you and victory. Just shrug the whole thing off like grit from your coat, walk it off, take the high road and do your best no matter what and be graceful about it. In the end-game chat, if you feel like it you can unburden your soul as much as you please, game is over, and you have nothing left to lose.
The Solution
Now, as you may imagine this is
a very tough trick to pull off at first, depending on your personality, so I
will share with you a trick which I use on a regular basis to be completely
unaffected by my teammates or the opposition.
Are you ready? Here goes!
At the start of the game I press
ENTER, which opens the chat input, and displays a bar on top of it to relocate
the whole window. I click on that bar and drag the window all the way under my
screen. Yep, that’s right, I hide the entire chat away from the screen.
“But Dajs,
you insufferable dolt, won’t I miss the important information? Like people
calling MIA or important strategic info?!”
A fair
point… if you play ranked. I asked myself the same question and analyzed the
game chat across 20 games and realized that I only get a line or two of useful
information every 3-4 games. As with people calling “miss”… if you aren’t
looking at the minimap and ensuring your own safety it is your own fault for
getting ganked, also pings are more effective notifications than typing in the
chat. In a non-competitive environment you generally lose nothing of importance
by ignoring the chat entirely, and if you easily get angry at people this
little tip could actually increase your in-game performance.
I hope this
has been helpful to you and I would like to know if you have any tips to share
about dealing with agitating, inflammatory teammates.
Until the next post, have a good time!
