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I think part 1 is easiest to address so I’ll start there. I started playing because it was a new season, and it was a good thing to be busy with to avoid schoolwork. Everyone does placements at the start of the season, and waiting too long makes people disgruntled when you play
With them. So I suppose that’s why I felt pressure to play right away, besides just the novelty of a new season. But why play at all? It’s one of the only games I have that I really enjoy and understand and keep coming back to. But that history is all kinda sunk cost now yknow?
I think I have enough justification to casually play the game, and ranked is just more fun than qp, so casually playing ranked is fine too. But why tryhard on main? I don’t want to go pro or anything, and relearning the meta live while interacting with pro ppl can be daunting
And embarrassing. I think I just have a lot of emotions tied up in the game, as holdover from my younger experiences growing up with it. Like I still have some bazaar ego around my main account, and it’s really weird. Like more than just comp points, I have the desire to be
GM by the end of the season. Like last season I played much more than 25 games of tank just so I could end GM even though it was an awful meta. Maybe it’s just a proving it to myself thing? But it feels very much social. Li ke I need to continually prove through the number
That I am proficient enough. For respect? Idk, it’s really odd and I don’t think I have anything else like this, and it feels really gross. Maybe it’s bc like interacting with low elo ppl are like :O wow and I wanna keep that up? Maybe just Isaiah? I’m really not sure.
This has been a terribly formatted rant without a conclusion so I think I’m just gonna move on. Part 2 was reflecting on OW and relationships, and I think this memory lens provides a lot of insight. OW was kinda just my life for a while, and I dumped all my time into it.
Every waking moment was thinking about it, even in class. At the start of our relationship, I would invite gail over and just,,, have her watch me play? How fucking bazaar and why she put up with that idk. I would let her play sometimes but that’s like all we did.
I guess I don’t know how to think or even approach that. I guess I was just so addicted that it was just “this is the thing you do for fun” and nothing else fit the bill. That just feels like too far back in my memory to properly contextualize or understand.
Sometime in there I started grinding the game to improve really hard. Immersing myself in video tutorials, gameplay, and a whole lot of ranked games.I joined a team at one point early, and stagnated for a bit there until it broke up.For the most part though it was a very isolated
Journey. I didn’t really talk with anyone within the OW scene until Muzhoka, and even then it was still pretty solo. I tried out for a team when I hit masters, but it was really scuffed so I decided to wait until GM. Throughout this time I think it was the period of seriously
Fucked mental health, and I think gail was kinda just supportive and was mainly concerned with keeping me out of depression/anxiety/ED. Which I could talk to death about how unbalanced and screwed the dynamics of that are, but I’ll try to stay centered around OW.
When I reached GM I started team play and a lot of scrimming and hard grinding. This is when the social influence kinda started to get to me I think. The culture was very very grind focused and demands a lot of time, and I didn’t really talk this over with gail, and I think just
Acted like an asshole when she would talk about how I was never really around and never really wanted to do anything other than ow. There was a lot a lot of tension around our relationship and ow, and I remember it being a very big argued point. She was absolutely supportive of
My accomplishments and was truly happy I had found something I enjoyed, but noticed how unbalanced my life was in order to just play. And honestly it’s not even like I wanted to go pro really. The goals were the ranks themselves for a while and it was just a fun puzzle to crack