anxiety

Issues with Quick Join

by

wow-64-2016-10-26-06-19-16-56

The last several days I have spent a good chunk of my time idling on this riverbank out in the Western Plaguelands…  while often roaming around a completely different Plaguelands over in Destiny.  However that is not what I am going to talk about this morning, I simply needed a screenshot to post and grabbed this one.  What I am going to talk about is the 7.1 patch in World of Warcraft, or at least a small part of it.  I acknowledge ahead of time that this post is probably not going to make a lot of sense to many of you, because you have to really suffer with anxiety brain to get it.  Yesterday as part of 7.1 a new feature called “Quick Join” was patched into the game.  To quote the page announcing this feature on the World of Warcraft site…

So whether it’s your guildmate, your Battle.net friend, or your Real ID friend, you’ll be able to find each other and take part in a variety of game aspects without the need to ask the age old questions of– “What are you doing?” “Any room in your group?” “Can my other friend join?”  You’ll just be able to see all of your friends, see what they’re up to, and ask to join with just a couple of clicks. It’s so easy, a drogbar can do it!

It is hard for me to adequately explain how much anxiety this causes me.  In Diablo 3 there is a similar Quick Join feature that is designed to let you easily get into games with your friends.  How it works in practice is that folks randomly join into your game usually without actually talking to you first.  After the generally jarring experience this causes, I wound up going into the settings and flipping myself to private so that I would not show up in the Quick Join list.  My fear with the World of Warcraft feature is that it would work like this, but I guess fortunately that is not the case.  What it does instead is whenever you are queued for content, you show up in the Quick Join list allowing folks to request to join your queue.  From there you have to accept or deny that request, so no ninja joining.  Unfortunately it still makes me deal with the guilt of turning down friends, and the possible social ramifications.  What I really wanted to see was a sort of “opt out” private mode built into the system, or maybe this would have been the perfect time to roll in the much requested “Appear Offline” or “Invisible” mode to Battle.net.

Anxiety Brain

I am generally a fairly gregarious person, and I try and go out of my way to welcome folks when playing the guild cruise director role.  I am also known for driving a van full of candy… that gathers people up and convinces them to join whatever guild I happen to be a part of.  This is absolutely one side of me and I love being that person whenever I can.  That said there is another part of me that comes out when I am overly stressed or just simply worn out from having to “act normal” at work or day to day societal constraints.  This part of me just needs to duck my head into my turtle shell and hide from the world… and these are the moments when Battle.net scares the shit out of me.  I love having easy access to my friends, but sometimes I cannot handle appearing to follow basic social norms.  There are times I need to fade into the background and pretend that the rest of the world exists.  Essentially I need my alone time, and it is important for me to recharge my batteries so I have the strength to confront those times when I need to be around others.  The thought that at any moment someone could ask to join me in whatever I happen to be doing… and that there is now a system to make that easier…  is completely terrifying.

Yesterday a friend who I know was not getting this equated this to “you’d rather group with strangers?” and that is not entirely it either.  There are times that I queue to be an anonymous blip in someone else’s radar so I don’t have to think… or be concerned about anyone other than myself.  There are times where I simply need to complete an activity, and I am not necessarily up for the burden that comes from grouping with people I know.  When I group with people I care about… I feel responsible for their safety, happiness and enjoyment.  Maybe this is just the gut reaction from playing tanks all of these years, but I feel like when I am in group mode I need to be fully there for the folks who are with me.  Essentially I have to psyche myself up to be able to take on this mantle of responsibility and do the things I need to do to make a group happen.  Having that whole thing thrust upon me, is just jarring and abrupt…  and how exactly do I explain to someone who I legitimately care for… why I am going to click that deny button?

Ultimately I am going to deny a lot of group invites that happen through this system, and I apologize ahead of time.  Sometimes when you say “It’s not you, It’s me” it really means “nope it is absolutely you”.  However this is not one of those cases because in all seriousness there are just times when I cannot handle being a responsible adult.  In theory I could start deleting people from my Battle.net friends list until I only had the people who understood exactly what this means, but that is also a bad solution.  I use that thing for grouping, and especially lately I have been pinging folks to try and find a fifth for mythics or keystones.  My Battle.net list is largely there for cross realm grouping options, and I shouldn’t have to give that up just because I cannot handle the thought of getting randomly grouped with people when I am not prepared for it.  Of note…  this isn’t even an issue yet because all last night I didn’t see a single item show up on my quick join list.  That unfortunately is not the way runaway anxiety works… instead I am stuck thinking through all of the possible things that COULD go wrong… before they actually have.  There are so many times I get mired in the feedback loops of “what is the worst possible thing that could happen” and I am certain this is one of them.  I just find it frustrating that after all these years of asking for an invisible mode we still don’t have it.  I know all of this is “all in my head” but that doesn’t necessarily make it any less valid either.

 

Pushing Away

by

Lamentation

I posted the above statement, but I didn’t really have the strength to go into more detail last night.  Essentially I have been sifting through my blog in an attempt to summarize the year… which is one of those things that you feel like you SHOULD do at the end of a given year.  There are so many end of year traditions going on in the blogosphere, and I guess in some what I felt like I needed to do something.  The problem with this notion is it seems like the person that existed in the first half of the year, was one hell of a lot happier than the person for the last half of the year.  In January I had just attended my first gaming convention, and was super excited about Final Fantasy XIV and the raid…  and still pretty damned excited about the progress being made in World of Warcraft.  I was somehow juggling as many as four nights of raiding a week, streaming pretty regularly, along with a new column on MMOGames and a second podcast in the form of Bel Folks Stuff.  Now zooming back to today, both the FFXIV and WoW raids are dead in the water…  and I have backed almost completely out of MMOGames and essentially killed off the Bel Folks Stuff podcast… and it has been several months since I have even vaguely attempted to stream anything.

I know at some point I just got overwhelmed and started locking up… and I guess I never quite unlocked.  I am still in trauma mode where I am moving from day to day on mostly muscle memory.  There are a lot of things that I just don’t do anymore, not the least of which is read blogs on a regular basis.  During the “Bonanza” column I was reading roughly 450 blogs and every post on them all in preparation for my weekly column highlighting the posts contained within.  Once I handed that column off to another blogger… I quite literally stopped reading blogs all together for awhile.  I had turned this thing that I got a lot of enjoyment out of into a job, and that is the sure fire way to make me stop wanting to do something.  I now read blogs… but do so extremely infrequently…  and feel like a complete failure for allowing myself to get to that state.  I think as a result my own blog has suffered, because so often there would be a topic going around the blogosphere…  and reading the thoughts of another friend would end up sparking me to write my own take on it.  Now I sit down each morning and struggle to come up with anything to write about at all.

Cessation

There have been several points this year where I have contemplated just stopping all of it.  I’ve considered backing out of the podcast, and stopping with the daily posting.  It feels like I have been pushing away from all of the things I have cared about, one by one…  and each time I do it I just feel more of a failure for doing so.  I have been struggling greatly with just existing, let alone being happy and excited and engaging.  What makes this even harder is looking back and seeing that apparently I had whatever magical sauce there is at the beginning of the year, but it is almost completely gone now.  The frustrating part about it is…  I am not sure how to get it back.  I realize I have to start putting myself out there, a little bit at a time…  but even the thought of logging into voice chat on a nightly basis feels like the biggest possible hill to climb.  It has been at least three months since I have regularly logged into voice chat on a nightly basis, and maybe that is a good first step.  The problem being that the games that I am playing right now and not the games that the rest of the AggroChat and Stalwart crews are playing.  I really am enjoying World of Warcraft again, but even when I am logged in it feels like I am completely disconnected from everyone in it.

There were moments last night where I was asked to help out a few friends, and it felt like it took all of the effort in the world to accept.  I spent time with Giulietta doing the Pit daily quest, and I need to do this more often since I too need a bunch of them to complete the flying requirement.  I had fun while doing it, but it always requires so much effort to get over that hurdle to put myself out there… and actually do something with another human being.  Similarly I forced myself to go do stuff with Finni/Qav when I was hordeside because I knew once I got started I would enjoy myself, but it is entirely too easy to stay mired in my own oblivious world.  I realize what I am describing is depression, and I have battled it my entire life.  I am going through what I would term as a “down cycle” but this one seems to have been going on longer than most.  Generally I go through a few weeks of retreat and then that energizes me to the point of being able to engage again.  This time… it just seems to keep dragging on and no amount of “fake it until you make it” is working this time.  There just seems to always bee some external stress force bearing down on me, and I am hoping that being off for the Christmas break will help some of this.

Ashenvale

Wow-64 2015-12-22 06-45-14-71

As far as gaming goes…  I feel like I had a night without a lot of progress.  The focus of my evening was largely  the holiday event, where I complete all of the daily quests on the four characters that can do them…  mail all of the tokens to Belgrace… and then become crushed when I realize that yet again I have no mounts.  Lodur and I decided that we are going to create #Team360NoMount and the only requirement is that RNG and Blizzard hates you too.  I have this lengthy history of not getting holiday mounts to drop.  I have the two from Brew Fest, but other than that I have a perfect record of always participating… but never getting the mount.  The sorest point for me is always going to be the Headless Horseman mount, because it is probably the one I want the most…  but will never actually see.  I do admit though that this years Yeti mount is going to be a close second in the amount of pining I will do if I don’t get it to drop.  There are few cooler things than riding around on the back of a big damned Yeti.

As far as actual game progress I managed to push my Warlock to 21 and am now sitting in Ashenvale.  I took the start quest from the adventure guide, and happily cancelled all of the quests from the Northern Barrens.  I am wondering just how long I will actually be questing in Ashenvale before I do the same and move on to whatever zone comes after it.  The biggest positive of this of course is the fact that I can actually summon my Vendor Mammoth and sell things whenever I feel like it.  This is the toughest part of the sub 20 game in World of Warcraft, is being so insanely used to summoning a vendor whenever you want… but suddenly not having that ability.  I swear that mount is the single best item I have ever purchased in this game.  If I can ever get the cash to purchase the Yak from Pandaria, I am sure I will say the same about it….  since being able to Transmog my gear is just about of equal importance to me.  If I could summon a transmog vendor at any time I would never look fugly again!  Other than that I managed to knock out a few parts of the Hellfire LFR on the Cow, but didn’t really get anything worth writing home about other than a few more runes and some gold thanks to queuing as a partial group.

Performance Anxiety

by

Cash Shop Fodder

WildStar64 2015-08-26 06-09-41-33

With the impending launch of the Wildstar free to play model, I thought I would talk this morning about one of my problems with cash shops in general.  One of the most popular items in any MMO cash shop is the “experience potion” for lack of a better generic term.  These are items that grant a limited duration buff and increase the aquisition of something.  These sometimes apply to experience but also pvp systems and token currencies.  They seem to be fairly ubiquitous when it comes to MMOs and they often times hand them out like candy in your introductory packs.  My theory is that they want to get players hooked on these early so they keep coming back to the cash shop anytime they run out.  Now if you had boomboxes in Wildstar you already have a few of these more than likely.  My problem is…  I never spend them.  I just logged into my Rift account to take a quick census and I am currently sitting on somewhere between 150 and 200 of these in various forms.  They are generally locked from you selling them on the auction house…  and since I am not using them they just take up inventory space.

The problem I have with them is that I feel like there is a value associated with them.  They cost money, and I want to make sure I get my most out of them.  So when a game gives me one.. I hold onto it forever never quite finding the right time to spend it.  If the potion is an hour long, it feels like I need to find the perfect time to use it when I will have an hour of uninterrupted time at the keyboard.  Even more so it feels like I have to figure out the optimal way to spend my bonus experience time.  I do a lot of running around aimlessly in video games, and when I have used an experience potion it feels like I am “on the clock”.  I have to get the most out of my time and need to do whatever I am doing with minimal downtime.  As a result I just end up crushed with indecision and so they sit in my inventory unspent collecting dust.  I end up resenting them being there, because they are taking up space that I could be using for other things.  I didn’t want them in the first place, and the game keeps handing them to me like they are important and special… and something that SHOULD be desired.

Performance Anxiety

ffxiv_dx11 2015-08-03 21-06-33-32

This just highlights a bigger problem I have in games, that I will  call performance anxiety for lack of a better term.  It is like there are times when I have to be super focused on the game and take it more seriously than I really want to.  When I sign up to raid I accept the fact that once the raid starts it is “go time”.  The rest of my game time however I want to be able to stop and smell the roses.  The problem is when I group with another living person… I feel like I am also “on the clock” and responsible for making the most of that time grouped together.  So instead other than dungeons and raids I actively avoid grouping with anyone.  That way I am only responsible for my own enjoyment and won’t feel guilty when I need to step away from the screen because my wife needs me, or the animals have knocked something over and I have to go investigate what they just broke.  The worst is when I am in an MMO and there are quest objectives to be done.  I feel like I not only have to be aware of my own needs… but the needs of everyone in my party and assure that they also accomplish whatever they need to get done before moving on myself.

I realize all of this is irrational, but this is the sort of mental struggle I go through each time I accept someone else’s group invite.  Most of the time I can steel myself against the anxiety and just push forward, but there are other times…  when I just cannot risk taking responsibility for others.  I talked some yesterday about my current desire to “hide out” and as such I thought I would talk a bit this morning about the other side of the coin.  Grouping with other people is often times a draining experience for me.  I shift into responsible adult mode, and step up to the plate like I know what I am doing.  I am willing to take on this mantle for my friends and my guild…  but I am rarely willing to take on this mantle for strangers. I realize most other people don’t quite have the hang up I do with grouping with strangers.  So when someone asks me to tank something, or dps something…  I always feel strange asking if it is a guild only group.  The worst of these experiences so far has been when it comes to partially queuing for raid content.  The anxiety that comes with tanking for strangers in a dungeon… is nothing compared to the anxiety of tanking for a raid group full of strangers.  For me at least it ranks among the least comfortable experiences, and I would rather simply do nothing… than queue with a bunch of people I don’t know.

Opening The Curtain

I get the impression sometimes that folks seem to think I have my act together.  The truth is I am just as strange and vulnerable as the next person.  I put on a really good front sometimes, and I do a fairly good job of pushing down my own insecurities.  You might ask yourself… why in the world would I be opening up like this?  Well the truth is that I know there are lots of people out there with their own quirks, that think they are somehow lesser for them.  My theory is that by showing the weak points in my own armor, that others might be more comfortable with themselves as a result.  Once this down cycle finishes I will be back to my normal self again, and the armor will go back up.  In the mean time I am talking about the things I am struggling with, in hopes that it might help someone out there.  We all have our own hang-ups and we learn to deal with them however we can.  My coping mechanism tends to be disappearing for a bit while my shields recharge.  Tonight I will be submitting myself to a raid group where I assume that we are ultimately going to have to PUG people…  even though every fiber of my being tells me to run screaming into the night.  There is a certain power in knowing your own limitations and forcing yourself to face them.  I’ve learned over the years that everyone is broken inside…  just most are better at hiding it than others.