Everyone has been salty at some time or another in EVERY genre of game from kart racers to fighting games to even board games (quickest way to end friendships is a good board game) and its just generally assumed that its all from the loss. This is especially prevalent in the fighting game community, as a recent example I was sitting on fightcade in between games of TS and one of the worlds saltiest gentlemen spread his vitriolic sodium. I won’t name names because that’s rude. But to sum it up, death threats, insulting of mothers, “I hope you get raped”, ect ect. All of this attributed to a loss, there was no guise of “your character is broken” or “so and so is a cheap way to play” just he lost and it bothered him enough to keep a salt train rolling for a solid 40 minutes. At the end of it he seemed to have calmed down and actually asked if someone could apologize to the players he was targeting for him as they had blocked him.
However salt isn’t always about the loss, that’s just the trigger. A lot of the salt I see in, for example, third strike isn’t “I lost” its “I cant do this thing”. This kind of salt has the player acknowledging their own inability, however still projecting a lot of that inability onto the game, very common in beginners. I didn’t win because my ultra didn’t go off, I didn’t win because my combo dropped, I didn’t win because that didn’t parry. This is the best kind of salt for local play or playing with friends online because the target of this type of aggression is an unthinking unfeeling machine that even if you spit your salt and rage at it till the end of time would be ambivalent to your struggles. And your friends/opponents don’t have to feel like you are attacking them for winning which is always a plus.
Then we have salt caused by trash talk. This is a situation in which its not that you lost, its that you lost to that prick. This guy yelling at you over mic or in public, insulting you, calling you garbage and a scrub while he polishes off his 36 hit seth combo on your freshly salted crotch. You could lose a thousand times and pick yourself up with a bit of motivation, practice and get back out there. But when its not just the game saying “you lost” and moving on, but this obviously better player berating you and belittling you, that salt comes a flowing. Some even use this to their advantage online, purposefully trying to salt up their opponents so they make mistakes. This is personally the kind of salt I wish didn’t have to exist, I personally don’t care whether someone trash talks or not, but that sort of behavior is just unacceptable and ruins the scene for everyone. If you wanna talk trash, that’s fine, its part of the game at this point. But don’t go out of your way to make someone feel bad, that’s just unsportsmanlike behavior. Didn’tja momma raise you right?
The last form of salt that comes to my head is salt from personal loss. Things like losing a bet or money match, losing a chance to place well in a tournament or just losing at a tourny in general. Anything that causes you to not only have lost the game but to have actually lost something legitimate as well. I personally have never experienced it but oh dear have I seen it. I’m sure everyone’s seen videos of someone freaking out and smashing their stick/pd at a tourney before.
My salt falls into that second category. I don’t mind losing, I’m immune to trash talk, I’ve never been in a position where a tourny or bet was so important to me that losing caused a largely negative response. But not being able to bring anything to the table and losing for it is always a bother for me, being perfected just hurts. Games where execution is 90% of the skill curve have always been the only thing to bring out my salt. Which is ironic because my go to series is street fighter! ^^; I recently decided I’m not even going to put the littlest bit of effort towards my skills in SF4 seeing as SF5 is coming and a lot of what I’d be working will be rendered meaningless. I go back to games like third strike and alpha 3 and feel at home, comfortable in what I can do. When I lose in those games I don’t feel anything but a drive and willingness to keep playing and not make the same mistake twice. And recently that’s become my method of clearing out all the salt. I drop SF4 like a heavy brick and lay down on the fluffy pillow of third strike and alpha 3 on fightcade.
So what makes you salty? How do you deal with it? Do you think the community or developers could anything to avoid these feelings? What are some salty experiences you have had or been witness to?