Albert Ong · @H4xDefender
24th Nov 2019 from TwitLonger
Mental health and 2019 retrospective
2019's been an interesting year. This was my first full year at Riot, my first full year living on my own, and it'll be my first year away from competing in video games since 2009. (won't be playing TCS this year, too washed up now)
I can't lie, I miss the hell out of competing, but I don't miss a lot of the baggage it came with. I don't miss playing scrims and solo queue for 12 hours a day until my wrists flared up in pain, I don't miss having to constantly manage the egos of the more fragile players on teams so we could get through scrim blocks, and I certainly I don't miss doing all the bitch work of shotcalling, tracking timers, and getting sacked in draft only to get passed up by teams anyway since all of NA's scouting and tryouts are done through networking and solo queue.
But despite all those drawbacks, it gave me a purpose to care about solo queue, and for someone like me, that was enough.
Friends, co-workers, and randoms I run into in solo queue often ask me if I have to play solo queue to do my job. The answer? No. Not really at least. I could not play solo queue for a full calendar year, and still be completely fine at my job. Would I be less effective? In some ways yes, in others, no. It'd probably be a slight negative to my production in the long run, but that could be mitigated with 100-150 timely games in the season, as opposed to the nearly 1k games I put in over the course of S9. (which does not count any of the internal playtests I've played either)
For a while, I got by and kept playing with the motivation of wanting to be the first person to ever end Challenger with a Riot tag in their name. Accomplished that in S8, and even knocked out my side goals of 500 LP and finishing top 100. (Ended 515 LP, Rank 63) After a while though, I couldn't really force myself to keep playing by artificially manufacturing goals to pretend to care about. There weren't any physical rewards, the ladder was a mess, and honestly, I just wasn't having fun with the game anymore, because it all felt so meaningless to me for the amount of effort I was putting in. Surrounded by pro players, full-time streamers, and people aspiring to go pro, I just felt out of place. Playing solo queue "4fun" didn't cut it for me.
In the off-season leading up to S9, I had some pretty solid team offers, and thought real hard about taking one of them. I've been playing League since S2, been D1+ since S3, and played in Challenger Series as early as S4. Spent S5 mixing my time between HSL and Challenger teams, spent S6 mixing my time between uLoL/CSL and Challenger teams, and S7/S8 in amateur hoping to make it back to NACS/Academy. Getting any offer shocked me, (I'd made it clear that I was already working at Riot when these came) and with the context provided, you can infer how difficult it was for me to decide to turn it down.
There were a myriad of reasons I didn't take the offers (pay, team roster, having to leave Riot only months after taking the job, schedule disagreements, etc.) but one of the biggest ones was actually something I haven't told anyone until now.
I didn't think I'd be able to handle the social media comments.
While I was playing League throughout S2-S8, I wasn't just playing on teams. I did a bit of content creation on Youtube, streamed for a while on Twitch, wrote up several MOBAFire guides as well as a tier list, did both individual and team-based coaching, and even did a bit of boosting at one point. I'd worn a lot of hats in League of Legends.
I wasn't super huge on a lot of these things. I had about 3k subs on YT, 1500 followers on Twitch, about 200-250 clients I coached, and only made a couple grand boosting. (hated it with a passion and got out quick) I did have over 8 million views on my MOBAFire content though, and that's where I got my first real taste of something resembling e-fame. At first, it was great! Every now and then people would tell comment or DM me about how much success they had after reading my content and thank me for the help, and things were great. Once I started to get more popular though, I'd get more and more negative comments, and I couldn't tear my eyes or thoughts away from them.
If you asked people close to me how I felt about the "haters" some would probably be surprised to hear I care. I've learned to be much better at pretending to tune them out. I play with chat off in ranked, I regularly deactivate my twitter for days at a time when I'm in a bad place, and I have an extension on my browser to block twitch and reddit web addresses that I use regularly.
But it still doesn't go away. Not for me.
I can still quote angry youtube comments on my Combat Arms videos from 2011 when I was a stupid 13/14 y/o squeaker with a Wal-Mart mic that definitely shouldn't have been making videos with commentary on them. I can still remember WOGL forum comments about how inconsistent I was with the AK in Crossfire. I can still remember twitch chat flaming me when I inted on Lee Sin vs LolPro in 2014 NACS against HeavenTime's Evelynn. I can still remember the comments of people who thought my MOBAFire guides were too blunt, too cocky, too ugly, you name it.
A large part of me wanted to take the offer despite knowing all of this. I wanted to do the selfish thing and give it a try, even despite knowing it was likely going to go horribly, but in the end, I was just too much of a coward. I thought staying at Riot would be the safer choice for my well-being, and it likely was the correct choice in hindsight, but it wasn't the sunshines and rainbows I thought it'd be.
The year before I joined Riot, I was more active on social media than I had been since I still wrote MOBAFire guides (I'd stopped around early 2015 without citing a real reason since I didn't want to admit what it actually was) since I'd been seeing how far I could go with YT/Twitch. People gave me a lot of great advice about how to grow my channels since I had solid content, but in all honesty, I realized pretty quickly I didn't want to get bigger. I was naively hoping I could subsist with a small following so I wouldn't have to read as much negativity, since by this point (2017ish) I'd already known I didn't have the mental fortitude to just avoid reading it, and I knew just what effect it had on me, but obviously that wasn't a real strategy. Getting the Riot job offer when I did was an absolute godsend. I finally thought I'd found an avenue where I could do what I loved (playing League) while avoiding negativity, but of course, that was horribly incorrect.
Instead of seeing a small subset of personally targeted negative comments, I started attributing almost everything even tangentially related to Riot as something directed at me. Even things I KNEW were absolutely no fault of mine started triggering me to end. The obvious answer is to just not go looking for it in the first place, but it showed up everywhere and I just didn't have the self-control to stop, especially since my desire to read everything under the sun related to what I've done originally stemmed for an ever-burning desire to please as many people as possible, as well as self-improve. Reading Reddit and looking for H4xDefender turned into reading Slack and looking for @aong. Reading my own Twitch chat turned into reading the Twitch chat of streamers that I played with and against. People telling me that I was shit and to kys in solo queue turned into people telling me that I was dogshit at balancing the game, that all rioters are trash, and of course, the ever hysterical jokes referencing the Kotaku article. (the article that had come out less than a month after I'd started at Riot, but who cares l0l) Impostor syndrome and negativity bias is a hell of a combo.
My mental headspace got so bad this last month with all of the things I've been working for most of the year (preseason, and Aphelios SOON) starting to finally reach public feedback, that I just stopped playing solo queue on my Riot account altogether to avoid as much of the vitriol as I could. (I definitely didn't stop as early as I should have though, so to the few people I flamed/essentially inted in the last month before I stopped completely, I apologize). The competitive side of me definitely wanted to grind back to Challenger again, but in the end I just didn't think it was worth it.
Despite all of this, 2019 really wasn't too terrible of a year. (negativity bias btw) I'm still alive, I'm excited as hell for Aphelios, (been working on him for over a year now) and I've got an insane group of guys around me that I have the pleasure of being able to work with. 2019 was likely the last year you'll see a lot of me in solo queue (so ending GM hits doubly hard) unless something drastic changes, so to all of the people I've been seeing on the rift for all of these years, GL, and pce.
I'll likely do a decent amount of streaming in December/January to show off my insane Aphelios mechanics I've built up over the last year of working on him before I do my best disappearing act, so you can look out for that. Don't think of this as a retirement but instead as an indefinite hiatus. I'll likely come back in bursts once I'm in a better place mentally, but this post is both a public announcement of my intentions as well as a reminder to myself that I should never let my headspace get this bad again.
Writing this monstrosity of a twitlonger on a whim in the dead hours of the night has honestly been more therapeutic than any of the sessions I've had with psychiatrists over the past month even though I've paid hundreds of dollars for them, and 15.73 for this delivery Wendy's that I've been eating while watching streams on Twitch and writing this on the side. Life is funny like that sometimes.
To anyone who actually ends up reading all of this, you a real one. It is now 5:44 AM at the time of me writing this, and it's definitely time for me to sleep. Looking forward to a better 2020!
-Albert "H4xDefender" Ong