As anyone who has played 5 seconds of League of Legends knows, competitive multiplayer games have a tilt problem.
I say this with love -- I owe almost all of my close friendships to either competitive Starcraft or competitive World of Warcraft. Esports and gaming have taught me how to succeed and how to improve myself more than any other pursuit. But there’s also no denying that they are a pit of rage and frustration from which many do not escape. Raging at videogames is such a ubiquitous experience that the guy whose entire identity is getting mad at League of Legends became a legendary folk hero that Sherriff Riot Games themselves had to eventually unban.
I think part of this rage is just a natural side effect of doing something competitive. When tensions and emotions are high, it’s not surprising that they spill over into anger and frustration. None of us are immune to getting upset when we fail -- that part of failure is a feature, not a bug. But many people, 20-something me included, let losses go far beyond anger and frustration and deep into rage or day-ruining grief.
I’ll be honest, Q-UP wasn’t built as a commentary on the state of the world. First and foremost, the game is designed to be funny, engaging and addictive. But, like all decent games, Q-UP is about something. To me, Q-UP is grappling with this deep pit of rage and perceived unfairness at the center of multiplayer games, which are otherwise one of my favorite things in the world.
I think there are three parts to this rage trap: basic psychology, gaming culture and evolving trends in game design. Psychology and gaming culture are above my paygrade and have been discussed ad nauseam. I don’t have anything to say about those that somebody else hasn’t already said better. But I would like to lay some of the blame at the feet of two modern game design techniques.
Fake RNG
The first culprit is something I and every other game designer use all the time: fake RNG. Sometimes called “Bad Luck Protection” among other names, fake RNG is a technique that designers use to smooth out real randomness into something that goes down easy. You see, real randomness has an odd texture. It’s lumpy, spiky and unpleasant. Q-UP demonstrates the bad taste of real randomness (and some of the central characters incessantly apologize for and cope about it) but Unfair Flips is the real master here.
Unfair Flips is literally unfair, in the sense that the coin starts out weighted at 20% heads / 80% tails, but it’s also figuratively unfair in the sense that true randomness *feels* unfair. If you’ve ever played or watched someone play the game, you immediately realize that a 20% chance of something doesn’t feel like a 20% chance. A 50% chance doesn’t feel like a 50% chance. For many people, getting 7 tails in a row at 50% is a sign that something fishy is going on. But that’s just true randomness -- we want it to be nice and even but in reality it’s full of lumps. Unfair Flips is about those lumps.
But lumps of randomness feel terrible, so what many games do is take these lumps and smooth them out. Let’s say you’re playing DOTA 2 and you have a critical strike chance of 10%. DOTA 2 uses fake RNG for crits, so while the game is telling you that you have a 10% chance to crit on any attack, in reality the chance is going up every single time you fail to crit, until eventually it’s almost 100%. This smooths out the distribution of crits, but it’s also lying to the player. It’s telling them that they’re eating real randomness and then it’s actually feeding them Randomness++.
Taken on its own, a game using fake RNG isn’t a big deal, and for lots of games it’s actually an improvement. Like I said before, I (and every other designer) use this technique all the time. But the problem is that we don’t really interact much with direct randomness prediction in our day-to-day lives. Randomness and chaos are all around us, but how many times do you really sit down and think “I predict this thing has exactly a 15% chance of happening” and then wait to see if it happens? Almost never, right? Instead we’re constantly dealing with fuzzy randomness with nonspecific predictions. Will thing X happen today? Probably, maybe, I bet, I think, It could happen, potentially, likely, unlikely...
For many of us videogames are the only thing in our entire lives that have the opportunity to actually calibrate our intuitions about randomness. They are the only thing in our lives that show an exact number, say 15%, and then go onto demonstrate what something happening 15% of the time should actually feel like. If a game fudges a number here or there it’s not a huge deal, but when almost every videogame across the board is fudging every percentage all the time we start to see not only a missed opportunity to help people intuitively understand randomness but a direct miscalibration of our collective intuitions.
I don’t think any game is evil or even mistaken for doing this. But taken as a whole, I do think we are failing to capitalize on a unique calibration opportunity that games present to us. It should be no surprise then that a huge percentage of people who play Q-UP or Unfair Flips immediately suspect the coin is rigged. Human intuition about randomness is bad and filled with frustration and superstition by default, and constant exposure to fake RNG only confirms these wrong intuitions. But in reality, the thing that has been rigged is every other coin that has ever been hidden from you.
Ranked Ladder
The other design pattern I’m going to blame is like 5-10% actually evil, and that’s the Modern Ranked Ladder. Ten thousand years ago, in 2006, I used to play a lot of competitive games. Most games back then had 1v1 ladders, and most ladders used either a very simple ranking system or were based off of Elo, the ranking system Chess uses.
The thing about 1v1 games with Elo is they’re very good at placing you at your appropriate skill level relatively quickly. If you get a fresh Chess account then within a day or two you are going to be hovering around your appropriate Elo until you genuinely improve at Chess. In that sense, your rating becomes a valid stand-in for your actual skill.
Smash cut to 2025, and we designers have discovered a lot about these ranked systems. One of the main things we’ve discovered is that thanks to TrueSkill and other innovations we are now even better at quickly detecting players’ actual skill levels, even in messy 5v5 games like League of Legends. One of the other things we’ve discovered is we can take a player’s actual skill level and stop showing it to them and instead show them a weird fake number we made up. The problem is we can find their real skill level super quickly and then it doesn’t change unless they genuinely get better at League of Legends. But how is that a problem?
Well, you know what feels bad? Actually needing to get better at a competitive game! Who’s got time for genuine self improvement? Not me! Instead we’re still going to use their real skill level to matchmake them and vaguely push them in the right direction (+9 for a win / -23 for a loss anyone?) but for no good reason we’re going to invent a completely fake different number that takes 100 games to catch up to their secret real skill level (called hidden MMR) that we’ve known since game 10.
Sorry, I lied. There is one really good reason for doing this. Now they have to play 110 games of League of Legends! Hey, you finished your 110 games? Oops, the season reset! Time to do another 110 games of slowly gaining points.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why this design pattern might make people start to feel like climbing up the ranked ladder is the natural state of things, to feel like they DESERVE to earn ranked points, like if they are not earning ranked points ALL THE TIME then something is VERY BROKEN and it’s probably THEIR IDIOT TEAMMATES and maybe it will help if they CALL THEM A BUNCH OF SLURS.
Listen, I’m not saying anyone is personally evil or that game design is entirely or even mostly to blame for the esports rage trap. But I do think that these two design patterns contribute significantly. I also don’t think Q-UP is a shining beacon that will lead every competitive multiplayer gamer like myself to a promised land of serenity. But I hope that for some people, pulling open the curtain and staring directly into the naked, unadorned abyss of random laddering for roughly 7 to 55 hours might help them start to recognize that same abyss behind the gilded curtains in all of its many guises. It certainly helped me.