I've been playing Smite a lot these past few months. I never really got into DOTA-style games before, despite having tried, and Smite was the first game in that genre that really got me involved.
When I started out, after the beta opened, I didn't care too much about winning or losing. This was because I was new and I wasn't playing well at all, so I didn't care. Later on, as I got better, I started worrying more about whether I was playing well as opposed to winning. If I was losing but still playing my ass off, it wasn't really a "loss" because I was still doing my job. And all of that didn't matter so long as I was still having fun playing.
But just recently - in the last couple of months really - there's been a shift in the community, I think from migrating LoL players, that has made "losses" intolerable. Not because losing is not fun - I can still have fun losing if I'm playing well. But now, if you die once or twice in the first ten minutes of the game, you're "feeding" and your teammates will stop helping you. If anyone dies more than four or five times, there'll be a player who says "surrender at 10" (you can't surrender until ten minutes into a match) and then spams surrender votes thereafter. And if you don't surrender, because you want to play the freaking game, they just flame you for "wasting their time" and go afk, coming back every minute to twitch so they don't get booted.
Then it's basically 4v5, and a very small advantage at the start of the game quickly becomes an overwhelming advantage for the opposing team. It's a self-fulfilling goddamn prophecy. "I don't think I'm going to win, so I am going to automatically lose." I don't understand the logic behind that.
Losses like that make me incredibly fucking angry just because they didn't have to be losses. It's these supposed "pro" players spamming surrender votes because they have so little time that spending twenty minutes playing the game like you're supposed to is totally out of the question.
I would really, really love to just play Smite and have fun doing it, but there are all these assholes (pardon-my-French) who are obsessed with winning and live in abject fear of losing, and they just ruin entire games. So now I hate losing, because these assholes are only tolerable when you're winning, because that's the only condition that will make them actually play the game.