I’ll give you the kinda granular version to completely understand their mindset. This is gonna be a long one.

Gabe Newell (from Valve) once described a concept in Half-Life called an ego injury. Basically, if the game world doesn’t react the way you expect (bullet holes on walls after you shoot them), it feels like a personal slight, as if it’s ignoring you, even though it’s literally just a fake wall on your computer screen.

Now apply that to an FPS match. You get home from work, feel like you’ve “earned” your fun time, queue up, and assume that should be enough. You haven’t practiced aim, movement, or strategy, but you still expect your inputs to magically serve you the outcome you want. When they don’t, you experience an ego injury, because you felt entitled to fun, but \*somehow\* you’re not getting it.

This is where cognitive dissonance kicks in to save your Ego from collapsing. You frame the player who outplays you as “the bad guy.” They’re secretly insulting your life choices and your self-worth (even though they literally didn’t register you). You could sit down and improve, but you don’t have the time, and you were never that good at FPS growing up, so you have no mechanical base to fall back on. 

So now that turns into bitterness toward the people who did put in the work. As an ego-defense, you call yourself more “honorable” because you’re bad but casual, and label those who invest effort as somehow morally inferior and “tryhards, sweats, cheaters.”

You want a reaction from the people who embarrassed you in-game, but they ignore you when you message them. \*\*Reddit doesn’t.\*\* Reddit gives you thousands of upvotes from people who feel the same, and that hits your aroused validation receptors. Now you feel like you’re getting back at the “TTV YY noob” who rolled you, \*without actually putting in the work to improve,\* because that feels beneath you (not honorable).

When you post on Reddit, you’re not actually looking for things to change. If they do, that’s certainly a bonus. What you’re actually looking for is for \*your side to win the upvote war on Reddit,\* because now you’re, again, getting back at them. It’s the gamer version of trauma bonding.

Anyway, whoever read this fully is a legend. I tried to explain it as best I could. This is prevalent in Team Fortress 2 (my main game), and dealing with “filthy casuals” is amusing once you learn their mindset. I personally call them shitters, because they shit on everything.

I know why the Veterans want sliding to be removed (TRIGGER warning).