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by emerongi 1630 days ago
For me, it was about ranking up. I'm harsh on myself when ranking up, these are the possible scenarios:

1. You play well, but your teammates play poorly. You lose the game, you feel bad.

2. You play poorly, but your teammates play well. Whether you win or lose, you feel bad.

3. You play poorly, your teammates play poorly. You feel bad.

4. You play well, your teammates play well. You win - the only happy scenario -, but even then there's going to be complaining and whining by everyone in the game.

If your win rate is something like 55%, you're going to experience a lot of the bad scenarios, even though you're ranking up in the long term. Once it's an addiction, you start the game already in a bad state of mind, as you hate that you're wasting your time on a pointless game anyway.

ARAMs were fun though, I actually enjoyed ARAM.

1 comments

I've wished for years that mobas and other competitive-ranked games simply let you completely hide your rank from yourself. I'm sure the psychological addiction aspect has something to do with why this is never an option, but playing unranked games isn't really a replacement because those players have a different mindset. Just let me play competitive modes and be blind to my ranking :(
In my experience, Dota unranked games are basically taken just as seriously as ranked games. But most games either don't have proper unranked matchmaking or it goes as you say - people take it more casually.