Have you ever suffered through a game for the sake of friends?

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PurpleShyGuy

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#1  Edited By PurpleShyGuy

Roughly every weekend I play with a group of friends, and it's always nice to have a chat with people who otherwise live hours of driving away. The list of games we play includes Apex Legends and recently Dead by Daylight, and I'm not having much fun with these games. To make matters worse, they show little interest in playing games I like such as Guilty Gear Strive and Titanfall 2 (when you could still get online that is), and it's beginning to get me down. I could still talk to them while playing another game, but I would miss out on shared experiences by doing that, and I still do get some enjoyment when we accomplish something as a team. But overall I find myself playing Apex Legends and Dead by Daylight as an obligation to my friends rather than something I want to.

Anyone else found themselves in this situation?

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scutteh

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Yes, quite a few MMOs (old style non-wow MMOs).

Our group was heavily into early SWG (pre NGE). Then when that changed dramatically the group were trying every game under the sun that had some element of crafting and player housing. It let to mmos promising everything (more well known ones like EQ2, to ones that basically never released or lived up to potential like Horizons, Pirates of the Burning Sea and others that only got to beta level). It took us down other paths of finding just group games where we could all just hang out with minor levelling up/ costume changes (Pangya golf/ Albatross 18 which was pretty fun!).

SWG seemed to keep us together, and EQ2 and Eve for a bit. But nothing ever seemed to replace them fully. At the same time everyone seemed to drift apart games wise.

Think it was an of the moment thing, wow certainly split a lot of the group up and I guess I never caught on to it personally (out of the Blizzard games, it didn't grab me as much as other stuff, and I ended up working there!). I did play it to stick with the group though as I'm sure many have been dragged back into to play.

That kind of 'community' gaming is the thing that brings many back to games we might not like. And it brings some really welcome surprises at times, but I guess those grind heavy things I no longer enjoy playing.

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sombre

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I played 1500 hours of DOTA2 that was awful

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Justin258

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I'm not against occasionally playing a game I don't like with friends for the sake of conversation, but I'm not going to play something I dislike on a nightly or every weekend basis or something like that.

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cikame

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I had that with Dead by Daylight and CS:GO, we all played CS together religiously back in the 1.5 days but i can't stand it now, and Dead by Daylight is just super boring, luckily they stopped inviting me after a while.
I have a friend who pretty much only plays Total War: Warhammer, i got through an entire campaign with him but it was one of the most tedious things i've ever done, i just don't have the capacity to stay awake if i'm not actively doing something anymore, so waiting for turns where nothing happens and watching long battles is a killer.

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Brendan

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I've never played a game I've actively disliked just to play with friends, but the closest would be this game that was a Diablo-like called Helldivers which none of us were that into, and I think we only played it for a little while.

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zor

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The last game i did that for was, Tell me Why. I have a friend who is into adventure games, and likes that studio. So i played through that game... and yeah... it wasn't an enjoyable time. But we have something to talk about, so there that.

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monkeyking1969

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Not really. I played Resistance: Fall of Man 2 online for a few nights to just play with my friends...but that game and its maps really sucked. lol

There is only so much sucks I can take, so games like Halo, Resistance, Uncharted Online, or Destiny never entice me enough toi play with my friends for long.

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izzy_izumi

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Way back in COD: WOW a few friends got super into the Zombies mode. It was fun, I admit, but one session lasted like 2-3 hours.

After that, I bounced.

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Ramone

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Quite a few actually, one of my best friends liked some truly awful games (Mario Party, Conflict: Desert Storm etc.) when we were young so we ended up spending a lot of time playing them together.

I can't remember who said it, but it is true that co-op with a good friend can elevate any game into being a fun experience and that was certainly the case with those games. Multiplayer against other people is a different matter entirely though.

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csl316

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#12  Edited By csl316

Nope. If I don't want to play a game I'll go do something else. I can still talk to them if I want to. It's a surefire way to lose some contact if they play it daily but eh, it's your life so don't spend that much time on something you aren't into.

Granted, I'm 35 so I don't know what social pressures there are these days. When I was younger we'd just play whatever game people had, before free to play was really a thing. I think it's kind of insane that a friendship can make or break based on if someone plays League vs. Dota, for example.

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TheRealTurk

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Back in the day, I sat through endless rounds of Mario Kart 64 battle mode. I was the only one of my group of friends who preferred Goldeneye multiplayer and we almost never played it.

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judaspete

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Wouldn't say suffer, but I only play Mario Kart because friends and family like it. Not a bad game, but I don't play it on my own.

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PurpleShyGuy

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@brendan: When you mentioned Helldivers I thought to myself "ah yes, I remember playing that game recently." Then I realised that it came out more than half a decade ago and was like "oh...wow, it's been a while."

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PurpleShyGuy

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#16  Edited By PurpleShyGuy

@sombre: I kind of had the same experience with For Honor, in which I noticed that I had clocked in over 14 days of playtime and wondered what on earth possessed me to play this game for that long.

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brian_

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I can't remember the last time I even played a game with anyone I knew personally. Over a decade probably. My sister asked me to beat a boss for her in Assassain's Creed: Valhalla... that's the name of that Viking one, right? I honestly forgot what that game was called. So I guess that counts.

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isomeri

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A few of my friends are very into Super Smash Bros. and Mario Party. I'm no fan of these games, but I sometimes try to amuse them by playing a game or two.

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MaikeruWiruson

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I played through the entire co-op campaign of Arizona Sunshine in one evening on PSVR. Truly awful game. It felt like shit, looked like shit, played like shit, but I slogged through it for the banter. I had fun to be sure, but not because the game was any good!

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Nodima

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I suppose this might be a rare moment where I come out ahead by not having any friends that play video games, at least not friends I'm close enough with to want to schedule an activity around. I had a heavy multiplayer phase in high school but that was all games I was also super into, primarily SOCOM II and NCAA Football. I had a long, weird love affair with the Final Fantasy XI beta that didn't translate over to the game proper so I never played that with people I knew (and turned me off of ever accepting World of Warcraft trial discs from friends) and I enjoyed Modern Warfare for the novelty and pace in college until I got tired of putting up 6/21 K/Ds several times a night - most of the people I knew in college were Halo heads anyway and I didn't have or want an XBox.

Recently had a phase with Apex during Seasons 1-3, I was shocked how into a competitive FPS I was, and some of the old SOCOM buddies got the band back together for a bit...but I quickly realized why the band broke up and stopped responding to messages after awhile. That actually wound up more being suffering through the old friends to play the game I enjoyed than the premise of the thread...

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vishnu_raj_c

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Me too :(

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theonewhoplays

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No

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styx971

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#23  Edited By styx971

last time was playing conan exiles about 3 years ago with my fiancee and some co-workers n a buddy. it was fine but it wasn't amazing and one of the guys liked to take all the resources we'd farm for himself so it kinda wasn't great. the idea of killing bosses together was cool n all but it was never a good process and we'd spend the better part of the night waiting some someones drunk ass to run back to us after dieing mid-travels. but we kept playing cause everyone played it. when my fiancee and i moved we had to take a break for a couple weeks and when we logged back on our nice place away from everyone that we'd made cause the other guy was gone. i refused to bother again after that it was freeing but we haven't played anything since ... and that jerk that used to take all the materials would mute my fiancee while being all nice to him at work so that was a headache gone at least too.


otherwise the no not really i don't bother with multiplayer more often than not.

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jacksmedulla

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Fucking valorant. I hate valorant.

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slax

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I mean I played more Division than I found fun. Probably Borderlands 2 as well, liked it for a while but my friends just kept playing it. But I'm sure it has gone both ways.

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sweep

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#26  Edited By sweep  Moderator

I played a lot more Call Of Duty Warzone that I was really comfortable with, but we were in lockdown so I'm not sure that even counts.

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Humanity

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At the start I had a real fun time with Destiny and some online pals doing raids and such. As time went on those guys became a lot more hardcore at it than I was and I ended up slogging my way through hard mode raids and strikes on multiple characters just to keep up with the group before finally quitting when the first expansion came out. The pace became so much for me that when I finally did stop (they all kept going) I felt actual, psychological withdrawal for a few weeks whenever I turned my PS4 on thinking “I should be out there…I should be helping the group” even though I had long since stopped enjoying the game.

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plinko

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Yes! But I had a positive experience as the game ended up getting better over time. My friends got me into Sea of Thieves waaaay back when it was barely starting out, when bananas were the only way to heal and there was no cooking or fishing. I honestly didn't have a ton of fun with it but I stuck with it because it's fun to play with friends anyways. But Rare has been updating the game a lot over all this time and I have to say it's gotten pretty solid. In the end, I appreciate that they got me into it because I got to see a game grow from an okay starting skeleton to a pretty alright pirate game. We've moved on since then and I haven't played it in like a year now, but it was fun to see a game improve update after update. It's not the most amazing game ever but it's definitely not the same as it was at launch.

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Kyary

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FF 14, WoW, Dota 2, Borderlands 2, tried all of them for the sake of socializing over the last 10 years or so. I put between 20 and 100 hours into each of them, maybe had fun for 2 hours total.

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SneedsFeedNSeed

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This is my curse. Lost most of my high school friends to mmos and ultra-popular competitive games (warzone, league, valorant)

Post-high school buddies are obsessed with Rust. Pretty much all of my friends only play games that require a huge time commitment, which drives me up the god damn wall. They don't like hopping from game to game at all, they just pick a single game, drain all of the resources they can from it, then move on. Frankly sucks the fun out of playing with friends these days.

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taylorwmartin

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All of the Halo games. I think they all suck ass. Story sucks, movement sucks, etc. That being said I’ve completed all the campaigns on legendary and spent a bunch of time on multiplayer for each game. My two closest friends love the series and have drug me through it for over a decade.

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Ozzie

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Army of Two, thought it was eh. RE6 too but that was sooo bad we enjoyed it for it's absurdity.

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SchrodngrsFalco

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I my friend was REALLY REALLY REALLY into one of those Iron Man games on xbox 360. It was so bad. I couldn't say anything he was so excited about it. Like, impossibly giddy. I've never seen someone so excited playing and talking about a game and it was that one. Was really bizarre.

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Mezmero

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Some Guatemalteca brothers I befriended in LA love to trounce me in King of Fighters. I like KoF, heck I like fighting games in general and have dabbled in many different ones over the years. However I don't practice on my own, study theory or frame counting, and I don't even care enough to main characters (variety is the spice of life with a roster like this). Meanwhile these guys have been playing KoF almost exclusively since they were kids.

To my credit I can consistently get them to their 3rd character in most matches but then 80% of the time I lose because they have all the Super Desperation Moves committed to memory and know how to time it so I can't block or dodge them. It's not that I hate playing with them, just that losing so much to people with that much more experience gets on my nerves after a while. I'm willing to indulge them because it's a series they love but it's kind of messed up that they never care to try weird games I want to play or even suggest something a little different themselves.

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BullLee

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#35  Edited By BullLee

A friend roped me into playing A.V.A.: Alliance of Valiant Arms years ago, and I hated that game with a passion. It was painfully pay-to-win, with guns purchased via lootboxes and microtransactions (if you wanna call 10 bucks "micro") being far superior to everything you could get by grinding within a reasonable amount of time, so you just got slaughtered over and over if you didn't pump money into the game.

Still stuck with that game for 3 months or so because he liked it so much, it made me detest my friend and games with MTX in general. Never touched a free-to-play game since, and probably never will.

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ono_sendai

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I don't know anyone IRL who plays video games. All of my friends who game play board games and D&D. So I am currently suffering through Carcasonne on Board Game Arena and participating in a Star Wars D&D campaign just for the sake of being social.

Meanwhile, I've just been playing Red Dead Online by myself riding around just me an my horse...

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Matt_Parker

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This is the first year I bought CoD - it's 'fine' as a game, but damn, there are a million free games that do this sort of stuff. :|

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hughj

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@scutteh said:

SWG seemed to keep us together, and EQ2 and Eve for a bit. But nothing ever seemed to replace them fully. At the same time everyone seemed to drift apart games wise.

The copy of EQ2 that I bought after leaving SWG is actually still unopened on a shelf because my group ended up backtracking on trying it.

I've never suffered through a game because of friends, but I've definitely wasted money on purchases of games because of friends where I tried it once or twice and never again. CoD4, Borderlands 2, Payday 2, L4D.

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domalain

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Warzone and Fallout 76 for me.

My Fallout 76 buddy is about 150 levels above me so he graciously 1-hits all the bad guys 'for me' while i shoot 8 shotgun shells into a beetle or something only to scratch it.

My highschool friends just take Warzone too seriously.

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sravankb

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#40  Edited By sravankb

GTA 4 - played till completion just to see why it got 10s and 9s across the board.

Holy cow, I didn't understand the hype for it back then, and still don't. My issue with it has always been the controls - at best, they were barely functional. I care about satisfying mechanics and smooth controls in games. And Rockstar has been terrible in this department, IMO. I still tried to finish it to see if the ending or the story would pay off. And it kind of does, but man - a halfway decent story in a videogame doesn't justify the price of admission for me.

An especially infuriating moment was when I realized that most of the chases in the game were scripted. No matter how well I drove, you can only start the next sequence if you reach the same cutscene-trigerring spot as the vehicle you're chasing. As you caught up to them, their cars often sped up to a clearly bullshit degree.

This just made me realize that you're simply expected to passively experience the narrative; it felt like the devs were saying "noooo, stop actually trying to play this game and follow the damn script".

I played a little bit of GTA 5, but dropped it pretty fast cause the same issues were present. I'm genuinely glad for the folks who enjoy Rockstar's games, but I'm done with them.

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ALLTheDinos

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In the 90s, I was the only one of my friends without an N64. They pretty much played hours of Smash or Mario Kart and I would spend the entire time getting hopelessly trounced. But like, what was I going to do as an alternative?

More recently I played about a year more of Overwatch than I enjoyed, but that’s what people were playing. I finally just set the game down one day and started responding to invitations with “I’d rather not play this”. We still play stuff like Gears or Deep Rock Galactic so it wasn’t a complete shutdown in our gaming, thankfully.

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sunie

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Oh for sure. I've always been more of a singleplayer game fan so whenever we had a LAN-party I had to grin and bear the latest FPS du jour: Counter Strike, UT, Serious Sam, Quake. Can't imagine it was fun for them to have a player running around with the skill of a potato but hey ho.

I will say I did enjoy UT 99 on instagib mode, that kinda leveled the playing field for me and helped me get some kills in. But it's never something I'll seek out.

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JackGollan

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#43  Edited By JackGollan

Your situation is very familiar to me(

I rarely see my friends in my free time, so it's easy to compromise with me when choosing games. It's more important to me to have a good time with company than to play.

I usually enjoy playing Guilty Gear Strive too. I note that at the moment this is one of the most fun to play fighting games. Suggest your friends to learn more about this game in the beginner's guide. I'm sure it will help raise their interest.

Do the same in the future to avoid misunderstandings among friends.

As an option, you could also hold a vote for your choice of games for the evening or have a themed game day) which sounds even cooler.

Good luck!

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FacelessVixen

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#44  Edited By FacelessVixen

I mainly play on PC where the concept of friendship is pretty foreign. I've only suffered in isolation trying to get certain games to run.

"The game wants a GTX 480 and I have a 2080 Ti. Why the fuck won't this run?!"

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Topcyclist

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@nodima: I have the other problem you'd probably hate too. Most of my friends are so casual on games except the ones that like to play them, and they, the ones who play them only wanna play 1 game and never try out others cause to them bouncing around is boring and dumb, and new games are all not entertaining enough. If you mention trying out a free ps plus game or whatnot they will never get it. The game they wanna play is usually something they beat already and wanna mindlessly kill things so we can chat...but the other problem...they don't wanna chat about anything but the game or sports. Any discussion outside of that gets met with silence. Add to that they went from trying games I can at least kinda find enjoyment in borderlands 2, even though they refuse to listen to any story so i feel like I'm mindlessly shooting and pressing x at objectives...to ONLY PLAYING League of Legends.

You have no idea how dull it is for a person to have tons of game pass games and other stuff and decide ill play LOL for 3 hours on a Saturday. They also hate that I don't play the game on my own, I just can't get it in me to waste personal time playing the game. No offense to people who like it, I get why it's good, it's amazing the work that went into it, perfect for people who enjoy that but were speaking about a person who enjoys games like god of dad, uncharted, dark souls, portal, RPGs, rocket league, doom, etc. I don't even play mouse and keyboard games. So hearing why arent you good yet after I'm still trying to remember keys and what not just annoys. Sadly the other option is to play online and hear people you don't know...can be funnier sometimes though there is less comradery. I constantly have to say I'm busy and dreading the next session lol. I hoped they'd get bored of it, but it's been years already and I heard people never get bored of that game.

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BaneFireLord

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I've played a few dozen hours each of WOW, DOTA 2 and LOL for the sake of friends, which I wouldn't call suffering per se but I would not have played them on my own volition. On the other hand, I've played some miserable games of Civilization 5 multiplayer at my friends' behest, which can be an excruciating experience even with turn timers. Eventually I put my foot down and we don't play Civ anymore.

Honestly, I'm probably the friend who's most often dragged other people through games they don't care for -- among others, less than stellar experiences by my friend group with Fallout 76, Hearts of Iron 4, and Destiny 2 can all be laid squarely at my feet. In particular, one of my friends gets very nauseated by most first person and third person games, but he's still soldiered through all of the GTA V heists I bankroll in order to provide the key fourth player despite having to lie down every 20 minutes or so to not puke. God bless him and his sacrifice.

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PeezMachine

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Just played a little Lost Ark to humor a friend. Hopefully it won't stick for him but it will give us an excuse to dust off some Monster Hunter.