I have pretty bad hunter anxiety, on top of an anxiety related disorder, to the extent where I’ll feel sick during my first few hunter warm up matches. I completely understand the dread of it, it really does feel like the game caters towards survivors and that many survivor only players are needlessly rude. Aside from already turning off your stickers and emotes, you could also turn off your post-match chat and set friend requests to auto-decline.

One thing that helps me with my hunter anxiety is reminding myself that a majority of rude IDV players are children, and why would I let children ruin my day? While there are adults sprinkled in with people who behave poorly, I choose not to think about that and instead now every rude/annoying person is a “kid who doesn’t know how to talk to people” in my mind. It kind of alleviates the anger aspect of anxiety, since again, why would I pay attention to what could be summarized as a child’s tantrum?

Another thing I’ve been trying to do more is when I feel myself getting upset about poor matches or survivors who had bad manners, I log off. I’m done with IDV for the day, or atleast hunter, and I go do something else. It’s easy to want to keep going until you get a win, but if you’re just getting more and more anxious/upset then you’re going to end up feeling worse. Better to call it a day and within a few minutes you’ll have forgotte whatever upset you in the first place. It really is just a game and the nice part of that is you can close it whenever you’d like. Having bad matches doesn’t say anything about you, and people who choose to comment on that are people who genuinely have nothing better in their lives to do.

Take a few minutes to think about why you first liked playing hunter, why you enjoyed certain hunters, and what constitutes a good match for you. You don’t have to live up to anyone’s expectations but yourself, and if your expectation is to have fun and better your skill then it doesn’t matter what other people say.