As my genre focus has shifted to fighting games and back to RTS from mostly FPS, I’ve noticed that the topic of ranked anxiety makes the rounds on social media platforms every so often. I’m not inherently good at fighting games so it takes me much longer than most to “catch up” but for RTS it’s much easier for me to climb the rungs despite typical ranked frustrations (it wasn’t always), so I’ve had both sides of the experience.
From the videos I’ve seen and the discussions I’ve read, I believe there’s very little out there that’s as realistic and effective as what the legendary StarCraft caster, Artosis, said about the phenomenon.
The solution? Just play
When I was playing Street Fighter 5, the StarCraft caster Artosis had a great moment on his stream that I snipped where he talked about his own experiences with ladder/ranked anxiety
He leads off with some quote misattributed to Bruce Lee that “anxiety is the fear of future change in status” and while the origin of the quote might be suspect, what else is ranked matchmaking but change in status?
His advice is summarized as “just play, it’s ok to lose”. I’ve repeated this summary when others have expressed their own struggle with ranked anxiety in fighting game Twitch chats, but other chatters have tried to “UM AKSHUALLY” me that it’s deeper than “just play”. To assuage the fears of those actually struggling and to flip the bird to the “UM AKSHUALLY”-ers, I’ll pontificate.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, anxiety is the anticipation of a future concern and is associated with avoidance behavior. Whether people like to admit it or not, in-game rank is treated as social status and is a way to enforce hierarchical division. It’s only natural to want to avoid ranked matchmaking after reaching a certain threshold because your status among your peers could change for the worse if you don’t maintain a certain rank.
You might notice that people who grind ranked tend to find some milestone that feels like a satisfying stop to them. Many people in Street Fighter 6 like to park their characters at the default MR awarded when a Diamond 5 player ranks up to Master, 1500. Artosis describes these individuals as those who “pretend to be much better than they are” because when rank comes up in discussion, “people report the highest mmr they ever got”.
These players end up hitting a peak and rarely play under competitive duress afterwards, clutching onto their accolade. Artosis cites anecdata about people who have told him that they’re 2200 MMR and his immediate thought is that these individuals are not that highly rated, that’s just the highest peak they’ve ever hit. Artosis goes on to say that people like this would sink to lower ratings if they continued to play: “if you played more you’d do worse because that’s your peak”.
Everyone tends to have different surface-level fears about the ranked experience but they all come back to losing status. In fighting games, I’ve seen people cite being worried about dropping combos as their main source of anxiety. If you read into this it’s not really about dropping combos, it’s about situations where a dropped combo is punished into a loss then seeing negative change in your rank. RTS players have a variation of this with build orders, and Overwatch-likes have a variation of this with roles and skillshots.
It’s ok to decide that you just want to play casual matchmaking, private matches with like-minded friends, or some game-specific casual mode (Battle Hub in Street Fighter 6) once you reach a rank peak. There’s nothing that says you have to play ranked because at the end of the day, it’s a video game. We play video games for fun. The issue for some, including myself, is that sometimes your friends are at higher ranks than you are and you’re actively/passively excluded both socially and gameplay-wise if you aren’t there yet.
If you really want to compete in ranked but have anxiety about the experience, I’ve found that all the self help mumbo jumbo like meditation doesn’t actually address the problem. I’ve seen League of Legends-focused videos about overcoming it that tend to lean on psychological and mentality shortcuts, but the reality of playing ranked matchmaking is that you simply have to dive into the cold water and play. It takes a lot of time and effort to become good at something, and the faster you can hit your “low” in a ranked environment, the faster you can start to climb up and out.
For individuals struggling with ranked anxiety, Artosis has formed the best solution to your issue. You and I committed time to playing any given multiplayer game because something about it was fun to us, at some point we have to struggle.
The bad news about Artosis’ solution is that your rank will likely fall the more you play until you work out whatever issues are keeping you at your threshold. The good news about Artosis’ solution is that “if you play a lot you’ll get better than anyone who doesn’t play a lot”. For example, my MR floor has gone up slightly and bit by bit over time because I’ve kept at it, even though it’s still not enough to catch up to people I want to play with.