tl;dr: Was never toxic or angry, and was consciously trying to not blame others but focus on my performance, but eventually gave up on DOTA, because it’s too complex to play seriously and captain a team. Switched to Starcraft2, and realized how mentally taxing and depressing it is when you don’t have a team to blame, and that you unconsciously blame teammates because it’s a powerful mental defense mechanism. I’ve never felt worse, stressed and anxious, than after a loosing spree in 1v1 Starcraft.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing DOTA in highschool, and eventually I’ve reached the conclusion that unless you play with (and ideally are a captain) in a premade team, there’s not really a point in playing - you will never get better alone, and you will unconsciously always blame other teammates, making it harder to learn your lessons and improve. (I’m deeply flegmatic and forgiving in regards to others, a archetypal support main, so i never was getting angry or toxic, thankfully. So I was usually more focused on my own performance and didn’t care that other fuck up - or so I thought)

I’ve also quickly realised that the knowledge required to be a captain is something that even after thousands of games, and hours of research, I’ll never be able to get. There’s so many variables you need to know just to pick a team comp and get through the ban and pick phase, and then you add itemization to the mix, knowing what your team should do based on the current minute, hero picks, and items chosen by your and enemy team… I really respect any pro player due to that, because its isane how many variables they have to work with.

And so I switched to Overwatch, because there, the meta is a little bit easier to follow and there’s not that many variables in play, to be able to lead your team.

I wasn’t able to get a stable team willing to take the game seriously, and eventually I’ve also noticed that I still tend to subconsciously focus on what my team did wrong, instead of my own gameplay.

So, I switched to StarCraft 2. And oh boy, those were the worst few months of my gaming life. The meta was eaiser to grasp, I knew what to do, the issue was building the muscle memory to execute it correctly. But there are plenty of resources, from training maps to The Staircase method, so I was making a pretty good progress.

However, the Ranked. Here, I’ve realized how much blaming others in team games is a necessary defense mechanism, because in this game, you have only yourself to blame for every loss. Hitting that play button in Ranked was terrifying, I was regularly depressed and felt terrible after every loss. It was so taxing to my mental well-being, because most of the games you play, just end with: “You suck. That was a beginners mistake. You’ll never be good at this game, and you have only yourself to blame. Just give up.”.

There’s no blaming teammates, theres no " I’ve made a few mistakes, but my team also…", which as it turns out, being able to do that is a tremendous help in regards to your mental health.

I still had fun, it was a great challenge and I enjoyed learning the game and slowly getting better, but the losses, and especially loss streaks, were so stessfull and taxing, to the point where I was literally anxious to the point of almost having panic attacks every time I wanted to hit that fucking Find Ranked Match button.

But the wins, oh boy I’ve never felt better in my life. But, you know - as an average player playing at your rank, you should hover around 50% win rate. And that’s a lot of losses.

I’d recommend this experience to everyone who keeps playing competitive games with random players. It was eye opening in regards to how you handle losses, and a great introspection into how I subconsciously handle losses in team games, even though I never got angry.)