I think for me, the main frustration is the way those games are structured. You run around for a few minutes and when you finally have decent equipment, someone shoots you out of nowhere and you get kicked out, have to requeue and start over again.

On the other hand, when I die in Overwatch, Valorant, Counter Strike, Quake, Unreal Tournament (yes, I'm old...) I know that I'll be back in the action in a few seconds, I didn't lose much progress and I can still win this.

Not hating on people who like and enjoy PvP games, but to me it feels like it's a good way for a developer to make a game that doesn't actually have that much substance. Lacking content? Nothing to actually do in the game? NPCs are difficult to make interesting to fight? Just have players shoot each other. It's basically content that creates itself, not to mention (if you have good matchmaking) the difficulty ramps up naturally without you having to write better enemy AI.

I just want to fight stuff alongside other people, rather than potentially making another person's day just a little worse because I shot them before they shot me, you know? Is that too much to ask?

You need cozy game time. It’s not good to add a lot of stress in the pursuit of entertainment! If it doesn’t bring you joy it’s not worth your time. I’m looking at you, League of Legends.

Yeah, online competitive games just feel like I'm sitting an exam nowadays. I can do without the stress.

Also it feels like you spend ages running around in an empty field with nothing happening interspersed with seconds of not that great shooting gameplay

I stopped playing any game that makes me rage, because my dogs react as if I'm angry with them - since it's just me and them in the room, obviously I must be mad with them.

I feel the same about PvP in games in general. I just wanna vibe, maybe hang out with friends, and the sweat that comes from going against other people actively detracts from that.

I play pretty much everything. Some of my friends rage quit stuff when Im still 100% calm.

When it comes to BRs specifically, they can be very frustrating. Your winrate is inevitably low, due to there only being “one” winner per match, still me and my friends enjoy both Apex and Hunt: Showdown.

In both cases we started having a lot more fun when we started taking the games much less seriously, and not caring about whether the game told us we won.

In Apex, instead of wins, we’d count squad wipes. We began playing much more aggressively, not caring as much about our gear, and going TOWARDS action instead of away from it. This led to less time “wasted” meaning if we died, we did so fast and early, and so we'd get to the next game faster. If we won, we’d score gear off the players we just defeated.

Similarly, in Hunt we’d head towards the first firefight we could hear, and either get kills or get killed. Pretty much always playing free hunters with cheap loadouts we wouldn’t care about losing.

And we never, ever, even considered caring about or grinding rank.

I play to maximize fun, not progress. I min/max for enjoyment, not stats. It’s one of the reasons I have chat entirely disabled in Overwatch, voice and text, because I don’t wanna hear it if someone is screaming at me over my pick. I don’t care. I here to have a good time.

I can honestly go one step further and say I'm just tired of shooters. Unfortunately that seems to be all my friends want to play, so I typically just hang out in voice and chat instead of game with them nowadays.

For me it's more the fact that if you don't play almost everyday, you get absolutely destroyed by people who do.

I don't understand why br games always focus on being fast, that's exactly the opposite of what I would want out of that experience. If I want a fast action game I can play any team death match, a br game is something that I want to get invested into my run to raise the stakes for the end.

Most competitive games stresses me out. I have probably 1k hours in WoT and WoWS. I know I should be enjoying the small moments and not worry about winning as much, but I just can't do it.

I think BRs are fine, I'm just glad that the market has moved away from the BR mania that it was once in. BRs intrinsically need a large player base to succeed and it was exhausting hearing about this "sick new BR" only for it to shut down 6-8 months later

I feel like as I get older, I prefer action games that reward strategic placement and high level decisions, rather than the precise millisecond actions.

Things like bunny hopping/sliding in Apex, lean spamming in R6S, etc, tend to make most shooters unappealing to me. Even a game like Deceive Inc has the general idea of stealthy strategy, but in the end all that matters is landing headshots.

Theoretically, this would mean I’d like “realistic” squad warfare FPSes, but those aren’t really aimed for fun. Mostly I’d like an arcadey shooter with movement abilities, but one that has you make decisions between offense, movement, defense; not spam multiple at once.

I've also never liked BR games. Too often it felt like you run around for minutes, looting stuff and nothing happens.

Then you see somebody and kill them without them noticing you. Or.. you get killed the exact same way.

Or when playing with friends. Like Apex, you get into fights with other teams, which is cool, but then third party comes in and owns you from behind.

Then it's over and you've to do everything all over again, running around looting etc.

Or you decide to drop in places where many players drop too. Then you have stupid fist fights or pistole fights. If unlucky, queue again and do it all over again.

This is more annoying than anything else. I prefer joining a fair 5v5 fight on a map where I respawn and keep going. Or real TDM/DM.

I think BR games have too much of a luck factor attached to it compared to oldschool real FPS games like CS, UT, Quake and all that. And I think that exactly is rage inducing.

I like games that indulge my poor impulse control and reward risk-taking and recklessness. Battle Royale games seem to be the exact opposite of this, which I think is why they rub me the wrong way. I don't want twenty minutes if waiting only to die in ten seconds, I wanna die over and over for twenty minutes and maybe still win the match.

I've never played multiplayer games in my childhood (long story), and the first multiplayer I've really tried was PUBG Mobile. I've been hooked on it for about three years and made some online friends over it. when EA made Apex Legends available on Linux last year I've switched to it and clocked about 600 hours since then. I really enjoy the BR format, and even though I've never tried a competitive shooter like Counter Strike or Valorant (fuck their intrusive anticheat by the way), running exactly the same lines on the same map and constantly holding the same angles and hoping to just outreact the opponent by a milisecond doesn't appeal to me.

BRs are a game type that sounds awesome to me on paper but I never end up actually enjoying. Too much time with nothing happening with it all to just abruptly end. It's a cool idea I think. Just not for me

Yeah, that's why prefer to avoid PvP games. I'm not good, tbf, and the stress I'm feeling is just too much to handle - my real life is stressful enough, thank you very much...
For example, I would love to experience Sea of Thieves on my own, finding some treasures, fighting skeletons or the Kraken. But the PvP aspect is killing it for me. I'm not entitled to anything, of course. Plenty of people wouldn't enjoy a pure PvE Sea of Thieves, but as far as I'm concerned, that kind of game would bring me back for sure...

That's just kind of how I ended up being with anything competitive honestly, especially if it's a huge time sink, which battle royale games tend to be. Even CSGO's "Danger Zone" mode can take like half an hour with just 18 people.

I've found myself missing some of the older shooters I played as a teen like Black Ops II, MW2, Battlefield 3, etc. They're still "competitive" in a sense, but you're not playing for nearly as much as you are in Apex Legends or Fortnite. Plus the matches aren't overly long and you can rejoin the action in seconds depending on the mode. And if you leave a deathmatch, you aren't really losing a whole lot of progress. Pretty much 5 - 10 minutes worth as opposed to 30 minutes to an hour sometimes.

Nah I don't play anything anymore that forces me to do PvP and that includes all Battle Royale games. I rather play shooters where I either can play alone or, even better, my friends and me against zombies, monsters or whatever have you. Those are the greatest shooters!

I haven't played any game with PvP in like a decade. I think WoW turned me off from them.

I played Tarkov for a solid 3 or 4 months. The game itself is beautiful and raw. It's got the best weapon modification system I've ever seen. The sounds are top tier, especially when you consider the realistic differences the headsets to muffle or amplify sounds.

The downfall is the other players. The net code sucks so bad and the cheaters are rampant. The game suffers a lot for this. The reason most battle royals have high TTK is because losing instantly to someone is a terrible feeling, so to prevent this you have a ton of health and shields to at least give you a fighting chance.

Tarkov doesn't give a shit about that. You can spend 15 mins putting your kit together and loading into a raid just to be one tapped by a rat with a mosin shooting SNB. All that work into putting your kit together is wasted and now you've just donated your kit to wherever loots your body.

The SPTarkov mod is the greatest thing to ever happen to Tarkov because it got rid of the worst part of it: the other players.

I think the problem is in your head, apex is a relaxing game for me. Not that I wouldn’t take it seriously but I don’t invest anything into it mentaly.

Never "got" battle royale. Except. EXCEEPT. CS:GO dangerzone and (lmao) the BR mode of Fallout 76. Those are fun. Apex did not feel anywhere near as fun as those.

This is why I don't rank in League. It's ARAMs so long as I can tolerate bad teammates and then Co-op vs AI when I just want to weed & chill

Those games seem like they're for the hyper competitive types, and that's just not me. Back when I was in high school in the late 90s we would play the original team fortress over the lan in the computer lab. The best part about it for me was trying to come up with funny things to say in the chat.

If you enjoyed apex except for the high stakes format, check out titanfall 2. There's a community made client called northstar which fixes EAstrash servers and offers mods/silly game modes and customization

I've been unwillingly playing Fortnite for the last two years. I like competitive gaming with friends but big map BR games are just so boring for about 90% of the time you play them. Just soooo much running around. I consider time spent looking for opponents to be pretending to play a game.

Come to the bayou and play Hunt Showdown you’ll never leave

I feel like I should like battle royales in general, I like the idea of having to scavenge for gear and survive and work together and all that, but I find in reality I'm just always stressed out all the time. I've tried a few different battle royales and the idea that someone will shoot me and minute and I'll lose all my progress and have to load into another match just makes me so anxious that it takes away a lot of the fun of it.

Steep learning curve, having to wait to join a match in order to play, and not having time to just enjoy the world are my big turnoffs. I would love to run around a PUBG map with just like AI bandits and some animals

FFXIV is the only online game I will tolerate playing with strangers

Sounds to me like you just need to relax your own expectations and examine why you play those games. I started playing PUBG with friends this year and had a lot of fun. But i'm not really playing for the win. Of course we are trying to win, but the enjoyment of the game and the time we spend is just as important. A game where we try something stupid and die laughing is just as much fun as getting a win. One of my mates sometimes rages when he dies to what he considers to be bullshit but for me, I just shrug, and queue for the next game and start over. I enjoy the act of playing the game so why should i care if i have to start over?

Battle Royale sucks, story games with multiplayer elements are where it's at :D

Honestly, it's mostly a mindset change. I very recently picked up fortnite with some friends. Running quads is more of a "let's see if we can bully people with weird strats" instead of "I need to win or I'm not having fun." Its more about dicking around with friends and having fun than winning everything. Chances are you are not making money by playing, so why be concerned about it?

Don't like them. Deathmatch is more fun, and is even better with some Quad Damage

Personally I can't stand the gearing up phase of BR. So boring to have to find weapons every time only to get taken out by some guy more skilled than you