Do you have a gaming crew? (and how did you get them?)

Yeah I'd love to know how to meet people online and get a crew together, which might actually lead me to playing online multiplayer which I never do otherwise. I know that people use Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and other online places to meet like-minded people and build friendships. But I have autism and a laundry list of social hang-ups and anxieties that has always prevented me from building relationships, and at this point I don't even try to seek them out because I'm too paralysed by doubt and afraid of rejection to try and put myself out there.

I hesitate to call my IRL friends my gaming crew because I game with them pretty rarely due to a combination of them getting online late at night and having different gaming interests.

That being said, my crew's friend circles have started overlapping during the pandemic which has been cool to see since I'm meeting new people through friends I already have and vice versa. It takes a lot of pressure off of meeting people online when you're with a trusted friend.

I'm also extremely hesitant to jump into meeting people online because I worry about running across unfriendly people. The internet can be a rough place.

@theoriginalatlas: Hey, I'm liquiddragon#7838 on discord. Let me know if you're interested in playing anything.

I play zero online games, not that I'm against it. I usually prefer in-person gaming with friends, but obviously that hasn't been as prevalent now.

Not until recently. Even then, it's for a weekly jackbox session.

Yeah, couple of work colleagues

Hanging out in #giantbomb and #lljk in the Dota2 client for pickup games. Generally nice people.

@liquiddragon: I don’t have one for similar reasons to yours. The very few times that we manage to meet up with the two old friends that I used to play games with and sit on a couch to play I have a blast so I do love the idea of playing regularly with a crew of good buddies but as you mention, time is so limited for everyone.

It is interesting that for most of the content that GB produces, a gaming crew is at the core of it which I think is part of the attraction for me, because I miss this aspect of gaming from my life. Especially now that multiplayer has come a long way from LAN parties and setting up PCs all day to get them connected, the experiences you can have with other people are so varied and the whole thing is so effortless (although playing with people in person cannot be beat in my opinion).

I do wonder sometimes if the gaming experience that GB presents through its content (playing with friends all the time, trying new games, intelligently discussing the industry) is the rule or the exception for people that play games in general so I am curious what other people have to say.

I do game occasionally with my brother and some old college roommates, but I sort of hesitate to call it a "crew," because we don't always end up on the same wavelength. We'll "pitch" games to one another to co-op, for which it sometimes turns out that some or all of the others have no real interest. And sometimes some of us will drift away from interest in a game and the others won't. And sometimes our schedules are just very different.

E.g., I'll still play Overwatch occasionally with two old roommates, but my brother isn't interested in that at all. But only one of those roommates is interested in Monster Hunter, which my brother also enjoys... although lately I'd fallen off MHW myself, so the two of them have been playing it without me. And at one point one of those old roommates tried to get us into Anthem (pre-release), but I tried the demo and didn't like it at all, so I took a hard pass and ended up getting into Warframe instead.

Which is all a long, rambly way of saying, "Yes, kind of," and they're all friends/relatives who I've known IRL. I've never really been comfortable with the idea of cultivating online-only gaming friends.

The closest thing I have is playing Destiny with people. A friend of mine was in a clan first (not sure how they found them) and I joined sometime later. As a result, I've been doing raids or exotic quests with people. When the latest raid came out in November, I started to have a regular crew of people, where we try to do something once a week.

Over the pandemic, some friends IRL and some from different countries wound up frequenting a discord I started about a year ago. We play loads of Siege and Tarkov and it has been a genuine godsend having something like that while locked up for about a year now.

No, and I never really have. Growing up, most of my friends were more into sports, so I mainly gamed by myself, and with one other friend I made when I was a bit older.

During the pandemic, I've made a few friends that I play with from time to time, but not regularly enough to call a crew.

I'd like to change that, but between finding a time and a game that works for everyone (like others have said), it's difficult.

I have a group of friends that I made in a Call of Duty clan some 16+ years ago that I still play games with from time to time. We're all in our 30s now so it's not as much as in the past, but we have discord so when we have the time we play something.

If you'd asked me a week ago, I would say no and think of a bygone era where my siblings had time for games. But as of a week ago, we all got way into Valheim. Even my niece plays it (pre-teen) and she loves it. Haven't been this hooked on a game and co-op buds working together since Destiny 2 raids or Halo 2 multiplayer.

I lost all of that some years ago, partially because my brother and I spent less time hanging out playing couch co-op like we did on the 360 and finding a game we both want to play together online is not always a great fit. Most of my old IRL friends stopped gaming with the exception of the occassional single player thing. Also, me and my brother are both fairly introverted so at times us playing online co-op becomes almost like playing with an AI that sometimes talks, we need that in-room thing to really start joking around while playing I think. I had a brief group that I played CoD and Battlefield with from work but they also exclusively played that and I found myself less eager to join them partially because I found myself playing worse with them than by myself but also there was never a meet up time scheduled so it was self-invitation to groups and I find myself being somewhat too anxious to jump in, it reminds me of cold calling someone on the phone, I have this weird anxiety that I'm bothering people.

It's all very unfortunate because I do really dig cooperative games and I probably secretly really want a group to play those games with.