I’ve had friends who’ve gotten pretty angry, haha. But absolutely. Playing with friends and liberally using the mute options can help dramatically.

I’ve noticed a lot of people who do that, or are the one’s raging especially early on tend to be the worst person on the team. Lots of positive illusions going on there.

The movie is so awful, but I have to say I love Arnold in this role!

That needs to be the #1 rule of any game (or even hobby). Lots of people stick around well after something’s stopped being fun for them.

That’s actually one of the reasons I got into Heroes - there weren’t 100 characters to select from (which can easily cause decision paralysis), and also, when you click on a hero it brings them up nice front and center. So it made it easy to find characters I liked the look of to give a shot.

That’s great with the TF2 matches! I used to play it all the time, but not so much anymore.

I was playing HoTS the other night with a few glasses of wine. It was amazing.

And god help me with all these people that rage quit or feed LITERALLY the first negative comment someone makes.

Thanks for bringing up an expanded definition here - I left it pretty simple, and Flow is such a cool concept! :)

I did that for awhile in HoTS. I was getting a little *too* stressed out for my tastes, and just took a week or so off from chat. It was a nice break from it, and the pings are really all you need (although HoTS could use a few more different ones, like if someone goes missing from a lane).

Thanks! I had a similar experience. I learned it about two years ago now, and it was life changing for me.

Which champion is he? Since I don’t play it, Yannick provided all the LoL images, so it’s his fault :P

I’ve had pretty solid luck with HoTS. There’s some bad ones that stick out, but most people in my experience have been nice or don’t talk at all. Although with HoTS, there’s an option to disable the chat, so you can avoid it entirely if you want.

Having that as a widespread practice in your game seems... like a breeding ground for rage/toxicity? It’d be really frustrating to try and get into the game with all of that going on.

Since I gave up playing it real quick, why do people play low-ranked smurfs?

Absolutely. You’ve already gone through all that, but if you’re interested I wrote a blog post about it a couple months ago: http://breakmylimits.com/how-do-i-be-my… As a society we tend to value consistentcy, but it’s really adaptability that gets us ahead. With how our brain works, both being consistent or adaptable…

In coaching terms, we call it, “Acting as if.” Some people might feel like they’re not “being themselves” if they do that, but that’s just the brain freaking out because you’re moving out of your comfort zone (unless it’s a values issue, but that’s a different matter!)

One of the reasons I go to Starbucks is to get away from my games and actually get some work done, haha. Getting up in the morning just to do that seems like a chore to me.

The matchmaker just says, “Fuck it!” at a certain point. I had a match the other day that it took forever on, and when the match started the other team had a support, but ours was MIA.

Definitely. It didn’t make it into this guide, but competing against yourself and working to do better than you have before is a great way to enjoy it more.