We’re both in our 30s.
There is a competitive online game I play and have played on and off for a few years. For a long time, nobody else I knew played this game so I would just play by myself or with people I met in lobbies. I would occasionally talk about the game with my friends, but not super frequently as I knew nobody else was interested.
A couple weeks ago my friend Marco mentioned he’d be playing this same game with his friends Garret and Anthony. When I asked like how long he’d been playing and about his play style, he said he’d been playing for a couple weeks just casually with his other friends. I was stoked to play together sometime and said as much. We planned a day and played together last week.
The other day I’m online and I see Marco is online, and I mention that I had installed the game on PC so we could play ranked together (I had been on console, and when we tried we were unable to do cross-platform). He says we’ll have to play anther time because he has gaming planned with a Garret and Anthony. I thought maybe they had planned to play a different game and he was about to log off, but then I see he’s still there all night just playing unranked matches.
This hurt my feelings! Why wouldn’t he invite me to play with the group? I’m not friends with Marco and Anthony, but we’ve met before a few times and got along fine. I was really disappointed because I was looking forward to having another friend who plays this game.
I don’t know whether or not to bring it up. If he doesn’t want me as part of this gaming group, I don’t want to push the issue, but Marco and I have been friends for over ten years. He has always had a thing about not introducing his friends to his other friends due to anxiety, and usually I don’t really care but this is such an easy situation to just ask sometime to join the group. It’s not like there are major skill differences, when we played together things were going fine. And as far as I know there is no beef or tension between me and his other friends.
We’ve been friends for years, were roommates before for short periods of time, have gone on trips together. It just feels really bad, but bringing it up would feel like pathetic almost. Isn’t it normal to invite friends to join in when you know people have mutual interests? Especially something that takes no real effort like online gaming?
I’ve seen him playing a few other times since then too. I feel weird asking him to play because it seems like he doesn’t really want to, and that maybe it’s something I accidentally pressured him into. He didn’t bring up the game on his own, I had asked him about his plans and he brought it up. But it feels bad to think that he wouldn’t want to, as well.
Edit: for clarity, I am NOT good at this game. I play for a few months each year and then put it down. When we played together, he was slightly better than me.
I had a friend that I never liked playing games with. He was extremely competitive and always had to win at everything. When I’m playing a game I’m very good at with someone less experienced, I take it easy and don’t try too hard so that everyone is having a fun time. This guy was just incapable of thinking about games like this. For him he would always do his very best to win no matter what, even if he had just won against his friend (me) like 20 times in a row. For example, our friend group really casually plays DOTA, we don’t know any competitive builds, we don’t keep up with the meta, we just do comp stomps occasionally for fun. This guy will sometimes jump in when he sees us playing on steam and we all sort of groan because we know he’s 1) going to destroy us all 20/0 with a high skill competitive build and 2) he’s going to spend the whole time telling us that we should be using our characters differently or it would be better to buy this item to get this combo. But we don’t want to play competitively. We have fun just dinking around trying silly builds.
Maybe it’s something like that? This is why I stopped playing games with him. If you’ve been playing this game ranked for years, your skill level may be so high above someone who plays unranked for a few weeks that it’s just not fun to play with you. Do you try really hard in every game? Do you tell them ways they could be playing better? Maybe you could try using a very uncompetitive build/character/car when you play with them, to lean into the messing around vibe instead of the serious competitive player vibe. Try to enjoy goofing around instead of being a high level competitive player.
Another possible explanation is that this is time for him to catch up with these friends. I play e every week with my friends, it’s a time to catch up as well as play games. When new people we don’t know join in it can be fun but it also disrupts our time when we’re asking about each other’s jobs and families and such. It’s kind of like planning to get a drink with your good friends, then someone only one of you knows joins in, and you can’t really talk about the good old days or how so and so’s kids are doing because this new person doesn’t know any of these details and you have to make small talk instead, which is kind of the opposite of catching up.
He’s actually better than me at the game! He games way more than I do. I’m in bronze. But I was playing support and we were having a good time.