Ladder Anxiety and Escaping its Trappings

We’ve all been there: you’re playing your favorite game and you’re climbing its leaderboard, you’ve hit a stride, and you finally got a rank you’re ecstatic about! The rush gets to you, you’re excited and you rightfully celebrate your achievement. It’s time to queue up for another match and go even higher — however, you find yourself frozen, there’s an unshakable hesitation, are you ready to lose what you just achieved?

It’s a common feeling for anyone who has tried to compete: Ladder Anxiety.

Being afraid to climb because you’re afraid of losing what you worked for isn’t a feeling to be ashamed of, nor is it a phenomenon that can’t be beaten. Everyone suffers this paralyzing anxiety to some degree, so conquering it will require different solutions.

Identifying your Level of Ladder Anxiety

The first step to defeating any Ladder Anxiety is to first understand what you want out of the game and why you compete in it. Some people want to reach the minimum ranks required to get rewards (usually a gold equivalent) and don’t care about aiming any higher. Others play to improve their mastery over the game and don’t mind what results form afterwards.

Neither goal is strictly better than the other, but it helps to be honest with yourself since it will help you better identify when you get nervous playing the game. If you find yourself anxious to queue up when you’re close to reaching a ranked goal you have in mind, then it probably means you’re more worried and focused on the result of your matches. Alternatively, if you find yourself struggling to make certain decisions while playing ranked games, then you might be more anxious about events going wrong in the game and your playstyle may suffer as a result.

While understanding these different types of problems is helpful, that alone won’t matter if you can’t ultimately solve it.

Quelling your Ladder Anxiety — Fear of Defeat

As there are two major sources of ladder anxiety (fearing any potentially bad results occurring and being afraid of a game going wrong), there are also easy ways to help fight back against these feelings. The anxiety towards defeat on ladder is one of the most common sources, and also easily solvable.

I’ve mentioned this in my last article, but the main game I focus competitively on right now is Legends of Runeterra, where I always aim to hit the highest ranks (usually aiming for Top 700 for tournament qualification purposes). I discussed there how after aiming to keep that streak of high ranking finishes alive, I’ve gone through a little bit of a burnout in recent seasons as a result. Due to that burnout sometimes Ladder Anxiety would spawn from those doubts when it came to securing a Top 700 finish.

In another card game I used to enjoy competing in, Hearthstone, I’ve had less of an emphasis on trying to seriously climb on that ladder. Despite this lack of a focus, I still was able to reach the Legend Rank (which is equivalent to Master’s Rank on LoR) in recent seasons and was able to achieve respectable finishes on the Americas server.

Granted both games’ ladders are fairly different in their climb and ranked systems, it still shows that having less attachment to your efforts in climbing can make it easier to reach greater heights on the ladder.

Now this isn’t to say “never care or do your best when you play and you will simply win all the time” but it’s an example of how loosening expectations can help you avoid any future anxious thoughts of ranking up and just going for it.

If you know you can reach a high rank (especially if you’ve reached those ranks in previous seasons or in different games), then there’s a healthy chance you can achieve great results again. Some players that fear a loss on ladder sometimes tunnel too much on future games and forget about previous successes. Despite it being common to forget past victories, remembering them can allow you to have a clear path to accepting any game results as they come.

Ending Ladder Anxiety — Fear of Losing Control

While fear of losing a game and falling down the ladder is the more common source of anxiety, another part of anxiety can spawn from getting dismayed during the game itself. There are multiple ways a game can spiral out of your favor (getting a bad draw in card games, bad shops in auto battlers, having non-ideal teammates in a team game), there can be ways to bring back some sense of control.

While it’s easy to take note of things that are random going horrible, there are still constants to be aware of. For non-1v1 games (like League of Legends or VALORANT) matchmaking can bring teammates that are unwilling to communicate or be a detriment to the team. Even with all of these non-controllable factors, there are still constants (like the fact that you’re the only non-random person on your team each game).

This also extends to other genres with larger variance like card games and auto battlers (like Legends of Runeterra, Hearthstone, and Teamfight Tactics). While a bad hand or shop could be dealt to you, figuring out how to find the lines and cut any potential losses are what separates good players from great players.

While there are unwinnable situations that can easily happen (a teammate trolling you or an atrociously bad hand is drawn after mulligans), taking a step back and looking at the larger scope that fringe games don’t have to define you can help fight back anxiety.

If the grand picture is tough to comprehend, then another way to rid the anxiety that occurs during the game is to just practice more. Once you’ve played a game enough (and analyze more in depth concepts while doing so), you become more experienced and can better identify what you’re doing right and wrong with what you’re able to control.