Is it just me or is making friends on PC gaming getting hard? I’m a little new to PC gaming, by little I mean I’ve played World of Warcraft for over six years (172 days) and have yet to make a single friend relation on there. Recently (4-5 months) I’ve broke through to PC gaming (going 15+ titles strong on Steam!) from my old console days.
On console I had tons of friends the only problem is they don’t want to convert to PC and the ones that do only play Minecraft, even after I bought them Stonehearth. I told myself that it was time to move on and find new friends, so far I have been very unsuccessful. I don’t know if joining a guild/clan would be good or if I should just be a loner.
From my experience the best way to make pc friends, (Or really just online friends) is to join a forum of some sort, like this one. Once you settle in and talk to people you make connections, those connections grow and you meet more people that are into different things.
I’ve been a member of only 3-4 online forums, 2 of which were for specific games, and my skype and steam contacts list is 200+. It’s full of people that play different things so I’m never bored when I play my steam library.
I don’t think there’s a magic formula beyond being a decent person really. I’ve played WoW for almost a decade now and have a sizeable friends list of people I’ve known all that time. May not talk very much, but they’re there if I need them (or vice versa).
Anyway, most of my WoW friends I’ve made in guilds I’ve joined. If the guild fails or you leave or w/e, send a few messages to particular people giving them your contact details, or ask for them, etc. I’m in a top-100 EU guild ATM, but I’ve got friends from the first year or two of WoW still, way back when I was a complete newbie .
Also of course… just ask them for their BattleTag or whatever . It sounds silly, but if you’ve enjoyed playing alongside someone from outside your guild or clan or w/e, ask for their contact details so you can stay in touch.
Beyond that… just talk to people. Give the new guy a crash course on a particular boss fight, share some jokes in the melee channel, be a good shoulder for people to cry on when they’re feeling down - you know, all the things you’d do for someone in real life.
Wow, now that you brought it up and i reflect on my PC gaming history i realize i have come a long way sins playing Stronghold.
My first online friends come from back in the days when Empire Total war came out and i started playing that online. You just started to talk to people on your team and most of the time you added one another on steam, had a couple of good rounds and then went separate way.
Years later i played planetside 2 and after playing in a platoon the leader announced that it was lead by The Elisian drop troopers or something like that and encouraged us to join, so i did. after a few months of having a blast running around as a medic and healing my guys i slowly lost interest again.
Now, before the planetside time i found a friend, i don’t remember how but we played some total war, hearts of iron 3 and minecraft and all sort of games. Sins i liked planetside more then him we lost contact for a bit but when i tired of it we started playing mount and blades, napolionic wars and joined a regiment called The 47th run by a guy called Spy.
A few weeks after me joining the regiment me and my friend had a falling out whilst playing minecraft. We still don’t speak to this day. The regiment went through loads of reforms but i still played with Spy. After some time when i started to get a bit bored i heard from a fellow regiment member about this small community that played Crusader Kings 2 on a regular basis. This was about 1½ years ago. I am still a member of that community.
Today, we play space engineers, EU4, Anno 2070 and many other games but i know that if i send a message to Spy he would love me to join his regiment to once again hold the banner of the 47th Regiment of Foot whilst we march on the field of glory.
**Edit:**Oh yeah. Forgot about the point. The point is that you just need to start talking to people. Sooner or later it might lead you to finding some awesome friends. In my current community we even buy gifts for birthdays and such. Well the 5 of us in the inner circle do anyway
To be honest, I don’t really have any friends I made while gaming, I assume I am just to young and don’t go online too much but hey, tomorrow is a new day.
Joining groups like this one is a great start, if you are looking for people to play with make a post here with the games name, you will find people in no time.
There is no secret to making friends in gaming, though they’re are a few ways that can help.
Just be yourself, as long as you are not a jerk. Just hang out with a few people you meet in a chatroom or forum and take it from there. If you want, I can play games with you and maybe a few others over Steam.
Off the topic of making friends and into a still on-topic-ish one. I’ve found that it’s not hard to make friends, it’s hard to keep up with them. I have a fair amount of skype contacts, most of witch know each other from certain circles of friend groups I keep based on personality and favored games. This doesn’t always work out perfect, as I’ve tried to mix these circles and met with mostly failure. (What’s the word, something about not staying together or not sticking, Consistency?) My friends also often go inactive, for months, these are people that i’d known for months and had a blast playing with, but over time, it just fell apart and I lost them. Much like what i did to this forum, at first I loved messing about, but as stonehearth’s kickstarter and early dev hype died down others lost tons of interest. I found i mostly ended up showing up late and necro posting old threads, with little to no response. and all i had left was the scribes thing. Then i had to do school stuff and other friends distracted me, and by the time i got back, it was dead.
So, Basically, It’s well and dandy you have friends, just make sure you keep them around and make sure that months don’t go by without talking, as you’ll forget who they are, Don’t let friend groups keep your from spending time with everyone, and, most importantly: LOVE EVERYTHING!
(I remember most of you guys though, I think)
Also, I used your thread as a sob story. Sorry, my psychiatrist gave up on me last month.
That is brilliant, I’ll have to remember that. I also liked an earlier quote of yours, “I can see that you’re trying to make good points.” (Which can be followed, of course, by “but” or an equivalent word.)
On topic, then… personally, I tend not to make a lot of friends playing games, nor do I try to. I tend to go about it the other way around: I make friends in other ways, and then I play games with them. Just how it tends to go, for me. I guess that’s not really helpful… but there you go, anyway.
Whar do you guys think is a great social game? Not based on social media or any form factor of social media (Twitter,Facebook,etc) but one that has a great social aspect to it? While at it’s core it’s still a game.
well I guess it comes down to what your definition of friend is. Are these people you want to know outside of gaming or not? If no then Steam is definitely the place to find people who share similar interests. Iv gathered up the maximum amount of friends on steam over the past 5 years from various games. Most of the time these friendships form from guilds/clans and other times Its because we just so happened to play together in a multiplayer game. Some of the friendships Iv made over steam were really great and its always sad to see some go offline to never return but you get over it Still if stonehearth goes the way I think it will with coop/multiplayer where each towns economies can work together, strong bonds will form
I’ve noticed over the last few years that I’ve been acquiring less and less gamer friends. I think this is due to idea of clans and gaming groups are becoming more and more obsolete (at least in my experience). My glory days of social gaming were with clans I met many good friends worldwide some of which I’ve met up with in person and I generally had a great time. Most of these friends were made on the cube engine and it was a highly social atmosphere, when we weren’t playing we were talking to one another on skype, IRC, teamspeak, or forums. It wasn’t uncommon for clans to invite people from other clans over to participate in the social culture we had created. This particular group was quite nice to have, we played other games together, but over time the popularity of our main game, life, and many other factors came up and now when I visit the IRC the social interaction is almost nonexistent. I have has similar experiences in clans for other games.
Over the last few years though almost every game I play seems to have a pretty hostile environment, a lack of maturity, and an abundance of absurdity. Other than playing with select persons from time to time I find general public games for ARPGs, FPS, Survival, and RTS games (my favorite genres) have degraded into a rather poor atmosphere. Due to my main social games being quite old and newer games not giving me that social element I either venture out solo in these games, or play singleplayer.
I would suggest if you’re looking to capture any sort of friendly and fun social group for gaming that you look for clans which pertain to the games you play not just steam based groups, but ones which have been around for a while with a strict code of conduct which makes it harder for membership. These types typically have their own website, forum, rules/guidelines, and boast a mature atmosphere. Just remember just because it sounds stuffy and boring on the surface it seldom is.
As for social games. I am having a hard time to finding one of these myself - GW2 was pretty social but overall I didn’t care for it. You’ll probably have to stay in the realm of MMOs if you want a very pure social experience… you just don’t find that in many other games these days. Shooters and survival games being some of the worst… but some ARPGs are pretty social, but they are typically old school and have clans and the like.
I don’t believe that cleans are becoming more and more obsolete, I believe that there are too many clans. I never really liked the thoughts of clans til three years ago. I was in the ‘hardcore’ scene of Halo Reach, and decided the only way to get into the scene is through a game group, that’s where I joined my first clan and made some best friends.
I’m actually looking to start my own gaming clan, I just don’t know how to start it. Like what genre is clan heavy? I imagine shooters are #1 and MOBAS fall under #2.
My question now is how do you go about making a clan? What do you think attracts a person to join a clan? Is it social interaction based, is it that your clan is great at a game?
Quite frankly I see people make friends in games all the time.
The MOBA community for example. Most of the top teams consist of players who had never even heard of each other until they saw the other in-game, and although there isn’t coverage of the lower leagues so I can’t be sure, I feel fairly certain that there are plenty of teams made up of players who met on the MOBA. Heck I know a girl who’s very good friends with a Norwegian guy she met on it I believe.
Another example would be a Civ group. Yeah, people actually made friends whilst playing Civ, which is quite a feat. I recently found a YouTube channel called FilthyRobot and have been spending my past two weeks watching his livestreams on Twitch and he seems to have made several friends playing Civ in a joinable Steam group.
I think the potential’s out there for any game and when you asked “What games should I play to find friends?” I feel like that’s not really a relevant question. Personally I would expect you’re more likely to make a bunch of friends playing MMOs, but my advice would be to just play games you enjoy, find online groups and join them and if you find people who you seem to mutually enjoy playing with, don’t be afraid to ask if they own any other games. The worst thing that happens is they say “I only really want to be friends on this” which they’re probably not going to even say, but even if they do it’s not the end of the world.
I know i’ve been hanging out with some cool people on PS2 in the 382nd in TR. I’m sure i could even play other games with a number of them. Try Planet Side 2.
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. It sounds silly, but if you’ve enjoyed playing alongside someone from outside your guild or clan or w/e, ask for their contact details so you can stay in touch.