Why I Never Tilt by SVB

People often ask me how I'm able to stay calm or how I avoid tilting when bad things happen while I'm playing and particularly when I'm streaming and they can see me having some really frustrating losses or annoying teammates. I'm going to tell you guys now the mentality that I adopted a while back that has really really helped me to almost never tilt.

0:18

Getting angry is a normal human emotion, and we will sometimes feel frustrated and annoyed, but letting it take over you is so incredibly harmful, and even from a playing perspective, it will stop you from playing the way you want to play. So while I can't guarantee you'll never tilt, I do think that if you internalize what I'm about to tell you, and I mean really believe it to the core, then you will find gaming to be a much less stressful experience, and you'll actually find it easier to get better and have a healthy relationship with video games as a whole.

0:46

90% of the time when people tell me about them tilting from losing an online multiplayer game, it's because of the game's rating system. It's because they're mad at having lost something they perceive to be valuable. SR, MMR, Rank, or whatever it's called in their game. Why would you care about the rating system? Well, you would care if you're using it to either define or validate yourself. This is the first mistake right here. The problem comes from that very self-definition. People always want to know, how good am I? And I get that, that's a perfectly normal desire to have. You want to know how you stack up against other people playing the game, but putting too much emphasis on the number itself is going to lead you down a very dark path.

1:23

If you value yourself and your happiness with your performance or your happiness with the game based on that number, you basically guarantee that your mental health will go up and down alongside that number too. Every time that number goes up, you think, yeah I'm great, I'm a really awesome player. And every time the number goes down, you think, Ah, this is so stupid. This number is wrong. My teammates are stupid. I played way better than what this number is telling me. Or maybe you do even think, God, am I a terrible player? Am I as bad as this number is telling me? All of this is a lie. And deep down, you know this too. You're not the sum of your best moments, and you're not the sum of your worst moments. You are what you do most of the time.

2:02

And whatever your great plays or bad days, your real level in the game is whatever you're averaging out to be. It's whatever you are when you're normally playing. If you want to improve, you're never going to get anywhere by fixating on the lows or the highs. You're going to improve when you raise that average, when you raise that base level of what you do most of the time. Rating systems are arbitrary. It doesn't matter what game you're playing. It doesn't matter how good or bad you think the system is. It's just there to provide a rough value. Chances are, it's probably fairly accurate, but the main issue that people have is that they get the order of events completely the wrong way around. The rating increase will always come after you improve. Never before. How do you expect to be rated higher if you never become a better player?

2:39

People get mad at the rating system because they think it's telling them a lie or they think that they should be higher. Why? Put it in another context. Imagine you really want to be a 200 meter sprinter. Getting mad at the rating system because you don't think that number is right is like getting mad at a stopwatch after you finished last in the race because you don't think the time was right. Sure, maybe the stopwatch is old, maybe it was started too early, and maybe the screen is a little faded, but you still lost the race, and the watch is just counting time, so how wrong could it really be? Who should you actually be upset with, the stopwatch or your performance?

3:11

Let's say you lose a game and you get really tilted. Maybe you feel the odds are stacked against you, that the matchmaking was unfair, or that your teammates were just really stupid. Next time, before you get really mad, just ask yourself a couple questions. 1. Did I actually do enough to deserve to win that game? Now, to answer this requires you to have some level of self-awareness and objectivity. But in truth, if you ever want to improve at anything, whether that's a video game or in life, you need to be able to self-reflect and ask yourself for honest answers, not always what is most comforting or what you most want to hear. So, did you do enough to win the game? In the case of Overwatch, were you playing better than your teammates? And were you playing better than the person in the other team that is playing the same role? Because really that is your competition. If you're better than that person, then you will make more of an impact than them every time the both of you get into a game, and therefore you will make it more likely your team wins.

4:00

It's the foundation of the whole ladder system. If the answer is no, then what grounds do you really have to complain? Whatever stupid things your teammates did, or whatever unlucky things happened, you flat out didn't play as well as you could have done, so you need to work on that first and foremost. Why would you focus on the things out of your control when there's something in your control that you can fix that would have changed the outcome of your game? But maybe the answer to the question is yes. You think, Yeah, I did actually do a lot, and it's unfair that I lost the game. I deserved to win. Okay, fair enough. But then you should be even less upset that you lost. Why? Because you actually achieved the goal. The actual goal when playing the game and trying to climb a ladder system is to be as good as you can be, to be challenged, to improve, and to play better than those around you so that you can reach the next rank.

4:45

If you've played better than the players in your lobby, then you're well on your way to climbing and getting to that next rank because it simply follows logic. If you continue to be one of the best players in every lobby you are put into, you will naturally have more impact and make it more likely your team wins and you will therefore win more than anyone else in your rank. You may have lost one particular game, but that's to be expected. In a team game, even the best player in the world will sometimes lose. But over the long term, over many games, your superior skill will show and you will find success more often than not. It's just not physically possible to be making more impact than any other individual in the lobby consistently and still not winning more games than them, at least not in any games I know.

5:22

If you think you're constantly better than everyone else and yet you're still losing, you're probably not as good as you think you are. It's not an easy pill to swallow, but you're likely lying to yourself and inflating your self-assessment. Alternatively, you just genuinely don't have the tools to understand your mistakes. You don't actually know enough about the game to spot all your own errors, so you think you're playing flawlessly. In which case, I recommend getting a better player or a friend or a coach of some sort to have a look at your gameplay. I guarantee you they will show you a million things you're doing wrong. Now let's say you've got a slightly different problem. Let's say you're mad because you actually played really well and you played way better than you normally would and you're upset because despite that amazing performance, you still lost.

6:02

Okay understandable that sucks you played your heart out but you couldn't claim the win but again what's there to really be mad at you may have lost that one game but ask yourself why do I not play like this more often again if you consistently played like this chances are you wouldn't be losing so much anymore multiplayer games like this are almost always about odds and percentages. One player can only ever tilt the scales in their team's favor. No matter how good you are, unless there's a severe mismatch, it's very unlikely that you alone can guarantee your team wins every time. All you can do is play well and increase the percentage that your team wins by consistently making a difference compared to what a different player in your position would do. If you're not making that consistent difference and you're only doing it occasionally, then why is that the case?

6:45

How can you justify to yourself deserving to be rated higher or be at a higher rank if you only ever play to a higher level once every few games? What about those other games? Should we just pretend they didn't happen? No, of course not. Again, you are not your best moments or your worst. You are what you do most of the time. So if you can be really good sometimes, then you need to figure out how you can reach that level most of the time. Because that's the only way you can ensure you're going to be a better player. And that's what we're all after, right? Right? Well, no, and that's another problem a lot of people have. A lot of people who really suffer from tilting and toxicity do so because they're not really striving to be a better player. They just want a higher rank. Either they think they already deserve it or they just want that rank as a symbol of achievement.

7:26

This is another really unhealthy approach to gaming. Take it from someone who knows chasing that rank symbol is completely hollow and will never make you happy. Let's say you really want to achieve platinum rank. You feel like that will really indicate that you're a good player and that you've achieved a lot in the game. I promise you, it won't help. When you get platinum, you'll be happy, of course, for a day maybe. Then you're going to realize that you actually want to be diamond now. And then when you reach diamond, you're going to want master and grandmaster, then top 500. Then you're going to want to be 4.5K or 4.6K. If all you ever do is chase these markers, you will never be happy because there is no magic ceiling.

8:03

There is no point where this greed for the next thing will ever stop. It's just human nature. As the saying goes, you will always want what you can't have. That's why you have to change your goal to a much simpler one and one that every single one of us, regardless of ability and time and talent, can achieve. Being a better player. Be a better player than you were yesterday. If your only goal is to be a better player than you were yesterday, I promise you, you will feel much healthier. Because when you play just to be a better player, you will see that you're the one in control and you have been all along. If you chase the rank symbols, you will always feel like you have no power. You will always feel like your teammates or the rank system or the game balancing is keeping you from this thing that you desperately need.

8:43

You will feel powerless. You will feel like there's nothing you can do to get what you want or what you feel you deserve, but playing to be a better player is entirely in your control. You have the autonomy. Sure, my teammate did something stupid, but what did I do? Did I make a mistake? Did I make several mistakes? How could I have impacted the game more? Why did I die there? Why did I misuse this ability here? When you look inward, you will always find something to improve on, and when you do, you'll feel much more proud when you fix those mistakes and see that progress. Definitely more so than if you just chase numbers. If you chase numbers, someone could just hack the system overnight and give you 1,000 more rating points on your screen. Would that really make you more happy? If the answer is yes, you may as well just buy an account or cheat because you're not really interested in the game anymore.

9:26

You're just looking for a status symbol. Ironically, it's only when you look to improving yourself that you will see sustained and lasting growth, and that's the only healthy and reliable way of actually gaining rating and climbing higher in multiplayer games like these. I've said it before to players who come to me for advice, now I’ll say it again: Stop chasing a number or a symbol, and chase being a better player. Because when you do, I promise you will realize how silly it is to be mad at things beyond your control, and you'll have a much healthier relationship with gaming as a whole, and hopefully, even life.

9:55

That's all I got for today guys, hope you found this video helpful and I hope it can genuinely provide guidance for those of you who do struggle with tilting. I understand how natural that impulse is, but once you realize your goals are within your reach, that being to just improve your mistakes, you won't feel that powerlessness that leads to anger. You should, I hope, just feel the satisfaction when you see improvement and the occasional frustration at yourself when you fail, which is normal and part of the process of self-improvement.

10:19

As always, I want to give a big shout out to my Twitch subs and my patrons who do the awesome job of supporting me, including my newest top tier patron, OK_Vixen. If you like what you saw or want to see more, please do like and subscribe and hit the bell icon for notifications and all that jazz. But also do please consider signing up to my Patreon. It really does help and it lets me keep making these videos. If you want to watch me play live and talk to me or ask me any questions you have, I stream on Twitch Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 8.30pm British Time and 3.30pm American Eastern Time and that same time slot on Sunday on YouTube. But that's all I got for today. I'll be back before you know it with another video. See you guys soon.