[General] First Time Poster Tip

Hello all! I'm a lurker on this sub (first post woo!), and I wanted to share some gaming tips that helped my depression.

I'm a long time gamer (about 11 years now) and in my earlier years I was all about competitive online games. I would PvP in WoW or try and improve my ranking in League, or even be obsessive over my k/D ratio in many Fps games. Since I've came to terms with my depression, I've strayed away from multiplayer games, specifically competitive ones.

Some people are just simply not nice online where no one knows them. They could be flaming you for one wrong move you did, and for me, that would put me into a depressive state. I wanted to be a valuable team player and any criticism I did not take lightly. This started to compound itself with outer influences and make my depression worse.

So I simply started to move away from PvP games. It also helped that many of my online friends, and me included, were starting to grow up and our schedules were conflicting. But now, I'm soley a single player gamer. I still play online games like WoW but I mostly level by myself or do PvE things (sometimes RP!). And in doing so it has helped me deal with my depression better because I get the same sense of value and importance that I strived for earlier in my gaming years, and it has decreased the amount of toxic people I've came across.

So if anyone does read this wall o' text, then my tip for you (if any of this aligns with your situations) is to start focusing on the single player aspects of games!

Tl;dr: people can suck in multiplayer, so stop playing multiplayer games :)