Have your friends entered their yearly Fortnite phase where they won’t play anything else? Do you refuse to reinstall that game out of fear you’ll get sucked back in and waste all of your free time? Don’t worry — you’re not alone. We’ve created this helpful step by step guide to show you exactly how to reclaim your friends and turn the gaming group chat back into a place you actually want to be.
Ask Them Really Nicely
Perhaps the ideal first course of action is to just tell your friends how you feel. If you explain that you like playing games with them and—what? They’re too busy celebrating their victory royale to pay attention to a single word you’ve been saying? Oh well. It was worth a shot.
Introduce Them To A New Game
Your next move should be to try and organically introduce them to a new game that might scratch a similar itch, but that you can stand playing for more than fifteen minutes.
Be Really Bad On Purpose
You have to be delicate with this one. Hit some shots, but never enough to actually win a fight. Give callouts that are just wrong enough to be useless, but not wrong enough that your friends know you’re throwing. Avoiding suspicion is key.
Attempt to Kick Off The Minecraft Phase Early
If you start a Minecraft server and invite the whole Discord group, you could get lucky and artificially kickstart the annual Minecraft phase a couple of months early. Be warned, though – the Minecraft server will only last two weeks at most, as usual. You’ll need to use this time to come up with a more permanent solution.
Spam Report Their Accounts to Hope They Get Banned
If you make a bunch of new accounts, manage to queue into lobbies with your friends, and report them consistently, maybe they’ll get banned. You’ll probably have to play a lot of Fortnite for this to work, but it would be a rather effective solution if you’re successful.
Send A Strongly Worded Letter to Epic Games
If that didn’t work, you’re starting to run out of options. Maybe just write Epic Games a letter asking if they can turn off Fortnite? Just for a little while, so you can at least have a break from it? Who knows, it might work – nobody has ever tried that before.
Break Into Their Houses and Steal Their Computers
Just wait until you know they’ll be asleep and silently break in through a window or something. Surely you’re capable of that. Once inside, just sneak over to their computer, unplug everything, and disappear into the night. They probably have insurance for this kind of thing, but if they don’t, this should get them to stop playing the game for a little while.
Hire A Hypnotist
This is something of a last-ditch effort, but maybe you could like, hire a hypnotist? Do those still exist? If your friends suddenly hated the game, they wouldn’t play it anymore and you’d finally be free! Nevermind the fact that hypnotists aren’t real and this will never work.
Just Play Bloodborne By Yourself
You know you want to. Who needs multiplayer games, anyway? Gehrman is just as good as a real friend, right? Right?
