[edit at bottom]

I don’t expect anything from telling anybody this, I just needed to say it somewhere. Feel free to make fun of me if you want to.

I’ve been playing Valorant very casually with my boyfriend for the past week. We’re both new to the game, but he has more experience in this type of game as he has played csgo for years. I’m completely new and I don’t even play shooters often either, I’m playing to play with him. So yeah, I’m awful.

When we could finally play rank after playing unranked for awhile, he was excited as he likes to be with more serious players (people who don’t afk, team kill, knife rounds etc.) First 2 games went ok, just regular games. But our 3rd game, it was a horrible experience. As usual I was playing terribly, I don’t do it on purpose though, and I always do my best to follow the advice given to me by my boyfriend and youtube videos. The other team started making fun of me and one other person on their team, because we were doing the worst. I remember a lot of what they said:

“Omen you are so bad”

“this game is a 4v4”

“Omen how much damage do you think you did last round?”

“Who will get a kill first? Omen or Sova?” “No one”

“WOW OMEN YOU GOT A KILL!”

“Can you guys take our Sova?”

“Ooh wow nice job omen lol”

“Omen you need to be doing something”

I felt awful and even though I’m already bad, I felt like I was doing even worse because of all of this. I felt sorry for the Sova too as I feel like they got it even worse for being on their team. My bf told me that I shouldn’t care as they were just dumbasses anyway. I tried to ignore it, and I never said anything back. I still felt terrible. In the end we lost 12 - 13. I didn’t want to play anymore, and tried to sleep. I had a nightmare related to this incident and couldn’t sleep well.

I’m not sure why it bothered me so much as I heard similar things before in call of duty. Maybe it’s because ranked meant it’s for people who are more serious about the game, and it made me more nervous about it all. I should have muted everyone, but I didn’t think about it at the time. I just wanted to cry honestly.

Bf wants to play with me, but I don’t want him to get annoyed when playing unrated(because of what i mentioned earlier). It usually ruins his mood, but I’m also just a little traumatized by that game in ranked. I don’t know.

Edit 8hrs later: I fell asleep when I got done typing this post, so just now I woke up. Thank you everyone for the advice and for being kind. I’ll do my best to immediately mute and try to not let things get to me. I do have a lot of fun playing this game, so I will continue to play, but I don’t think I’ll go back into rank any time soon. I’ll probably try it again one day when I get a lot better and not always be at the bottom. Thank you all again 💙