I have a behavioral pattern that I've observed numerous times that seems to turn people off/against me and I don't know how to stop doing it. Not even sure if it's me, but I'm willing to entertain the idea that it is and seek to fix it. I am sensitive, so it's possible that I'm reading things in that don't exist. I need help and/or advice. TL;DR: I find myself in a situation that frustrates me and it seems to snowball into increasing frustration and (I feel) people ignoring me more and more.

So current situation is a good example, although this pattern has happened in past work situations as well. I play a MMORPG game that's very collaborative and full of friendly and helpful people. I love all the people in my guild. Never had a problem until now. They recently implemented a new feature called raids where we form teams and run the raid levels. Every 5 raids you get better XP and loot, with a very special prize at the end. The raids are designed to be really hard, so only the most experienced players succeed at them really quickly. The first week, those people soloed the raid levels and got the big prize. No problem, good for them.

Meanwhile lower level people like me have also been trying to raid but with expectedly lesser success. We've asked for the high level people to help us out, and they have a few times but not that much. After a couple weeks, they seem to have found people they prefer to play with and only help them. I'm one of the people who are rarely helped by having high level people on my teams. I politely expressed some frustration with this in our guild chat and was told that people have their own goals they want to satisfy and they have friends they want to run with and that's the way it should be. Okay, fair enough I guess. But it seems to me that the purpose of a collaborative game, and indeed a guild, is for us all to help each other. But whatever, it is what it is.

Someone organized a raid tournament with BIG prizes for the winning team. I formed a team and then quickly regretted it. As much as I loved my teammates, we were all about the same level - not high. So when we'd get together for practice runs, we'd usually fail. We would ask for help and rarely get any. I finally told my team that I wasn't in any shape to lead it, as I am severely underpowered and haven't been able to get anybody to help me "grow". (I don't feel like a good leader when I'm dying every ten seconds.) Another person stepped in and she's trying to keep the team organized and ready for the tournament. I'm glad she is, and I'm happy to stay on the team in a support role to help us all succeed. Except that the first tournament date is this week and we're still failing practice runs because we are all underpowered. I'm comfortable with saying "well, it's just not for me at this time" and not participating in the tournament but they aren't. So we persist.

This morning I got into the game and sat there in the raid "lobby" looking for teams to join in order to get my strength up. Every 30 minutes or so I would post on the game chat asking if anybody wanted to raid, got no responses. After a couple hours of this (I was reading reddit at the same time), I finally saw one of our guildies started a small 3-man raid, so I jumped in. To be polite, I asked if it was okay for me to join them. They said they wanted one of my other guildies and that I took her spot. I asked if they could make the team bigger and they said if they did it would be too hard (which isn't true - too much technical detail to write here, but trust me on this bit). So whatever, that's shitty but I bailed out to let their preferred person jump in.

Then I find out that they've been organizing their raids using game "whisper" (directly chatting with one another instead of the public chats). Here I was asking in chat if anybody wanted to team up and getting no responses while people are teaming up using private whispers. It's really hard at this point not to feel like I'm being snubbed. I feel like the more I talk about people acting like that, the more annoying I am, so I'm shutting up. But at the same time I feel like if I never say anything then people simply just don't think of me. (I'm quiet by nature, and have noticed that people overlook inviting me to things in real life because they forget I'm around, or assume I'm not interested.)

So where is the sweet spot of being sociable and working with people without being annoying? I feel like asking politely gets me nowhere, asking again gets annoying, and then expressing frustration turns everybody against me.