How do I stop my fear of the arena?

Question here from ms. Shy,

Question=Hey Thomas, I need a little help here...

I just started enjoying the arena
as of late and I'm trying my best for
my wings. Really excited, but it
seems, every other battle I have is
against a team (I fight with someone
instead of just myself) that is
rude, or something! And it aggravates me
so much, and I end up losing so much
rank, I'm back to private after I've
worked hard to get up to the ranking I
was at. What am I suppose to do? I'm
starting to get afraid of the arena,
but I really want to reach my goal of
Commander with my wings..
So, basically, if you didn't find the
question in there, How do I make myself
not afraid of the arena any longer? I
really like it, but dislike being
afraid..

When you're talking wings, you're talking this cool wing trophy right here, right?


That would be cool to have in your house!

So from what I'm gathering is that you're letting people's comments (rude or otherwise) get to you.

Right. I'm so with you because (gauging on what I know about you and me) we're empathetic people. So, we can get a million good comments and then that one bad comment is the one that sticks with us. In the arena you get hammered with comments. If there's ever a time I want to turn off chat, it's during pvp. Unfortunately if you're 2v2, you need chat on to communicate with your teammate.

You see, in some games they separate communication from the "bad guys" and the "good guys" when it comes to PvP. For instance, Lord of the Rings Online has a big battlefield that you run around in and "the creeps" (people playing monsters) have no way of communicating with "the freeps" (slang for "the free people" aka people playing the regular character classes). Also, in The Game Which Shall Not Be Named, you have alliance races (the good guys) that battle against horde races (the misunderstood guys). They can hear each other speaking, but the game garbles up their speech so you can't understand what it is they're saying.

In other words, communication is separated between opposing teams.

(Then the worst that happens is that you get slammed on a message board after a fight or your own teammates are rude to you.)

I like separated communication myself. KI, I think it would help a lot with the smack talk. And I don't want the other team to sit there and ask me questions or try to influence me not to heal myself or to agree to certain rules they want me to abide by during our match. That stuff always drives me crazy. I remember dueling a guy in Guild Wars and he was trying to get me to not use ranged attacks as a "Ranger" . . . GAH, I hate that.

So, now to answer your question.

The only way to decrease fear is to somehow increase confidence.

Here's my recommendation: build a team and a strategy . . . and work to refine your strategy. Only go to the arena with your team. When you have a strategy, you do two things mentally. One, you increase your odds of winning if it's a good strategy and you and your teammate execute the strategy well. Two, you decrease your fear because if people beat you or are rude, mentally, they are now defeating and being rude about "the strategy" and not you because you've taken a good chunk of "You" out of the picture and instead put "the team's strategy" at the forefront.

Look at something like football or basketball. They usually have complex patterns they run in order to win. Sure, there's usually a star in the mix, but usually the real star is the play and how the players execute that strategy.

Now, if that doesn't work . . . there's always self-hypnosis. LOL.

I do sympathize with you though. I don't like that feeling of anger or over excitement that happens with pvp sometimes.

/shrug and /hug

Any suggestions from the crowd?

Happy Dueling!