About a month ago, only about two months since my last time on SC2, Ian invited me over to watch some SC2. The local e-sports society also held another BarCraft. This was really great because it got me back into SC2 and the social aspect started to keep me motivated. For MLG Anaheim two weeks ago Ian invited me over once again. These regular e-sports events with real life friends really started pushing me to play the game.
I started playing again and I continued on with zerg. I actually managed to play (and win) a placement match but stopped after that because of the ladder anxiety. At Ian's house for MLG Anaheim we played a ladder game each, so that got a second placement done (won that too). I continued to play custom games as zerg but after playing (and losing) to a few of Ian's bronze league friends, I realised that I just played better as terran. I switched back to terran just the other day and boy did it feel good. Even though I hadn't played terran in a long time it immediately felt familiar. There were a few skills that I'd lost since I last played, such as remembering to shift-click workers back to the minerals or build supply depots, but I've almost fixed those completely.
Being an extremely lazy university student who spends all his time either at uni, at his computer or sleeping (but mostly sleeping lol), I have many spare hours a day to play StarCraft. I'd always liked the idea of putting all those spare hours to use to see how far up the ladder I could get, but my damn ladder anxiety had always stopped me from achieving it. I decided that for the next year I want to try and spend at least five hours a day playing SC2 to see just how far I can get.
Realising that the major problem was this ladder anxiety, I started thinking of ways to fix it. I'd tried taking people's advice of 'just hit the damn find match button', but that didn't work at all. The anxiety was still there after all. I eventually came across the first edition of GLHF magazine and was reading through it when I found a really great article on beating ladder anxiety. It suggested having little goals to try and achieve each game (like staying below X amount of minerals) and if you could achieve these goals, you could count that game as a win, even if you did infact lose. I thought that was a good idea, although I felt it wouldn't fix my problem completely and it would make me focus on those goals rather than the specific things I wanted to work on in my play.
Shortly after, I came across a short youtube video about how to fix ladder anxiety. The guy suggested making a daily goal of playing the ladder until you lose three games and then stopping for the day. I thought this was a great idea. My problem with the ladder was just the fear of losing. I don't really care about my league or rank at all, it's just that losing games feels 'scary' and the adrenaline builds up to a point where my hands are shaking. I started to think about this daily goal of losing games. I decided that my daily goal would be to play until I lose eight games (if I play at about a 50% winrate that would be 16 games a day on average, about what I can handle at the moment). I focused not on the fear of losing like I used to, but instead the thought that these losses would be my daily goal and if I achieved that goal of just laddering till I hit that eight loss mark, then I would infact 'win'. Essentially, I turned losing into winning and in the process, completely eliminated my fear of losing. I also knew that just by fixing this problem that had plagued me for over a year, I would finally be able to mass ladder games and progress rapidly through the leagues.
Thanks for reading, in my next blog post I'll talk about how this method has worked for me and where I am now.
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