How much do FRIENDS make a difference with you?

[Fhaerron]

Everything.

This isn’t a single player game.

That said my experience in this game is bad/sad to say the least. In 2014 I bought the game for myself and my GF at the time so we could play together which we did, however something happened and we broke up, this was about a month after we started and I didn’t continue anymore after that.
On 3th March 2016 I decided to play again with a new character & on Moogle server but I’ve only played for around a month as well because I was pretty busy in life and didn’t had any time to play any games.
And then basically I started ‘for real’ in March 2017 and have been playing until recently. With SB I got free transfer to Omega, one of the reasons I left was that Moogle was 90% French (I don’t speak French) and that I was playing alone all the time anyway.

Omega didn’t really brought any difference. I had a pretty good friend at the start (or so I thought) but once I finished leveling my last tank job to 70 he just left me, was a guy I did the roulettes with.
I tried a handful of FC’s but they’ve always been horrible, either people that can’t play or just FC’s going inactive, dramafests, etc.

Same with premade raid groups, And I rather shoot myself in the head then pug raids so no finding people there either.
I spend a lot of time in the housing (Shirogane) but it’s 99% of the times empty there, when I did find somebody it was the occasional guy looking for Au ra or neko girl (must be girl in real life) to ERP with.
Some other ‘friends’ or rather people I met, on this very forum actually were also quite ok but they also stop talking after a while and/or remove you out the blue so there goes that.
I do have 1 friend though who I’m still friends with. She’s probably the reason I kept playing for so long but I just couldn’t play any longer. I was bored out of my mind and pugging stuff gets you nowhere.

In ESO and in GW2 I am much more social. Even just chatting with random people. The playerbase of other games are quite different overall.

I would even dare to say that the playerbase of other games are quite 'better'?

So much this. I’ve only played ESO for about 4 months when it launched but I had 3 different guilds and quite a lot of people to talk / play with.
I’ve also played Destiny 1 a lot back in the day (around +3K hours), always having fun in voice chat (there is no in game text chat) and doing raids just about any day even when I already had the loot that week I kept doing it because it was fun and to help people. Apart from that every day people were always asking me if we could run things together. Fun times!

And now I’m back in WoW (have been playing since 2007 until 2016). I didn’t really played Legion (the current expansion) much because I don’t like the story in it, but I’m back now because XIV failed for me and I’m preparing for the expansion but the social difference is so huge. I’ve only been back for a month (not having played it for 2 years) and I’ve already had so much chats, In this one month I’ve talked more than I ever did in XIV in the course of one year and a half. Made new friends, did the latest raid already, etc. It’s just amazing.

Same story in Guild Wars 2 which I play casually but still have social stuff in it.
Weird thing is people always say how toxic wow is and that XIV has the best community and is very social but for me it’s just the other way around.
I guess that I’m just not ‘compatible’ with the people in this game and their ‘mindsets’? I don’t really see any other explanation.

Anyway this is the main reason I quit XIV about 2 months ago because no friends and the content drought is real.

Note for the people that take the exact words in the context:
I did quit XIV, I’m just subbed for my house. I do not consider renewing my sub the last day before my house gets demolished and logging back in the last day remaining of my sub to lengthen the demolish time in between my ‘freeze’ periods ‘actively playing the game’.
Though I really should stop this, I don’t want to support a full price sub MMO with a cash shop like a F2P MMO.

Extra note: sorry for the crappy format, I used my text editor to write this but I forgot that this forum board doesn't support that. (No surprise).