Yeah, I'm not looking for friends, just civil players.

When I've played I've turned off comms, but kind of hard to ignore the aim bots and chat if you're at least trying to work with your team.

Maybe I'm being overly sensitive but knowing that people are yelling at me but I just cant hear them feels weird.

The only game I play with any expectation of improving is League of Legends. In that community there's the concept of "mental," e.g. your ability to stay calm and think. Players will talk about "improving my mental" like they talk about practicing combos or learning more about game sense. As if they were Buddhist monks and not teenagers playing video games. I think this is because League is a uniquely frustrating game for the same reasons it can be uniquely rewarding: teamwork matters a lot. It is easy to get frustrated. It is very obvious that people who don't get frustrated easily perform better.

If you're upset at the idea of people yelling at you then you just have weak mental and need to improve. Alternatively, you just might not enjoy that kind of ultra-competitive game and should find another game to play. Either one is absolutely fine.

I'm sure the kids and the military thinks yelling at people improves outcomes, but I'm pretty sure we all learn that actually doesn't help anything.

I've watched competitive games and the teammates are in no way distracting and yelling at their teams. They are doing their most to work cooperatively and even minimize distractions by only speaking up when it contributes.

Absolutely correct, people are just thinking about themselves and not about winning. You have no idea how many times I see people with the attitude "You did something I don't like, now we both have to lose."

I definitely get the tilting aspect for League, I found it generally un-fun to play competitively without the right team. ARAMs however were generally more enjoyable for me as while people are still playing to win there's usually a more reasonable set of expectations. I suppose it does make the highs higher, but spending 30 minutes in a game with frustrated people isn't a very good time. Maybe that's part of the reason some people will /ff so early.

For me at least it stops being fun if people are legitimately upset about what's happening versus people enjoying playing the game together. In general esports seems to have really turned this dial for games in general towards competitive, with a shift in focus from moment to moment gameplay being fun to climbing ELO and completing battlepass tiers.

For what it's worth if this sounds like scrub salt I was GM in Overwatch for the first few seasons (back then people actually talked too) so I get the appeal, but long term it just feels like a second job after a while.

Now I feel silly, lecturing you about mental when you've obviously played the game. 100% agreed esp about it feeling like a second job.

No worries, I do think it's an interesting point that people talk about mental like it's reaching zen enlightenment. Though for what it's worth with roughly balanced teams, keeping your and your teams morale up and not getting mad seemed to be the biggest X factor a individual could bring, both in impact and because it seemed to be a fairly uncommon ability, which maybe ads a bit to the mystique.

I do this too and am 32. The only way I like to play games is auto muting everyone and pinging everything. I often used to have people get in chat just to yell or curse you out to vent frustration. Like, I couldn’t even mute these guys, almost always males, fast enough for them to not get in a quick little shitty jab if we were losing. No thanks. We may have run past each other and respectfully pinged some badguys. It would be different if people had anything interesting to say outside of they typical hey what’s up talk.