Hypothetical Question

[Ath192]

You're absolutely right! You have identified why I play an MMORPG. For the impersonal natural of communication.

Maintaining a personal friendship with someone is effort. Scheduling around them, doing everything you can to be their "best friend" only for them to consider someone else their best friend that they don't talk to as much.

You can grow too attached to these friends and become dependent on them. And if something happens to them, it could affect you in a big way.

So eventually I felt it would just be a whole lot easier to allow my interactions to be fleeting. I have conversations with people as if they are my friends. In some cases, I will have another conversation with them weeks, months or years later. Sometimes they will just "see me around" (sort of like on these forums).

But none of them will truly know me so I won't have to deal with the emotions that come with that too much, nor will I carry the burden of being available for them always.

That is the strength of an MMORPG. You are exposed to people and conversations and community constantly. It can remove your loneliness to the maximum extent, without the need to deal with actual friendships.

Whether it removes your loneliness depends on your mindset. You can be surrounded by people constantly (like a celebrity) and be lonely, or you can have a small group of friends with rare interactions with others and feel like everyone you've ever met is your friend and feel socially fulfilled. It's all about mindset and who you consider a friend, really.

Discovering that made me happy and content. I literally rely on no single person to make me happy. Like an investor, my eggs are not all in one basket.

I think some of them would because I ponder that sometimes when people vanish.

Fair take. I would have to say I'm a lot more discerning about who I consider a friend vs acquaintance.

[Gemina]

The social aspect of FFXIV isn't much different from what I experience in RL in the sense that I interact with strangers far more than I do my actual friends. The impact from them leaving the game is very minimal. Especially considering that we also talk to each other outside of the game on our discord.

FFXIV is part of my life. Leaving the game is akin to relocating, changing jobs, or getting into or out of a relationship. It would have that level of impact.

[Donze]

Yes.
Though this is less hypothetical, as all of the players I knew back in 2.35 are gone. I have not joined a new FC or LS out of preference (i think im too old to watch screeching all caps abbreviated/acronym speech).
Ive gone through MSQ on 2 characters, leveled FC and Subs and Airships solo, and generally have a good time with the bite sized social interactions I do have in duties and world.

So I can say with confidence that in the absence of my previous community, I do still enjoy playing daily =D

[LilimoLimomo]

You're absolutely right! You have identified why I play an MMORPG. For the impersonal natural of communication.

Maintaining a personal friendship with someone is effort. Scheduling around them, doing everything you can to be their "best friend" only for them to consider someone else their best friend that they don't talk to as much.

You can grow too attached to these friends and become dependent on them. And if something happens to them, it could affect you in a big way.

So eventually I felt it would just be a whole lot easier to allow my interactions to be fleeting. I have conversations with people as if they are my friends. In some cases, I will have another conversation with them weeks, months or years later. Sometimes they will just "see me around" (sort of like on these forums).

But none of them will truly know me so I won't have to deal with the emotions that come with that too much, nor will I carry the burden of being available for them always.

That is the strength of an MMORPG. You are exposed to people and conversations and community constantly. It can remove your loneliness to the maximum extent, without the need to deal with actual friendships.

Whether it removes your loneliness depends on your mindset. You can be surrounded by people constantly (like a celebrity) and be lonely, or you can have a small group of friends with rare interactions with others and feel like everyone you've ever met is your friend and feel socially fulfilled. It's all about mindset and who you consider a friend, really.

Discovering that made me happy and content. I literally rely on no single person to make me happy. Like an investor, my eggs are not all in one basket.

Wow, reading that took the rest of the emotional energy I had for today. It sounds rough, but I guess you also feel like it's working for you and makes you happy? If so that's probably all that matters.

Personally, I need to have more in-depth friendships in my life, but I do agree that the sort of ad-hoc interactions with strangers that MMO's provide is satisfying to another facet of my social needs.

[Limecat]

Technically they have, most of them don't play at all anymore outside of the start of a new expansion, or have filtered off into statics for raid stuff and only show up Saturday night/etc to meet with those people. I'm just kinda here by myself most of the time, with one other guy that talks, and a few others that are like me that do still log in but tend to not be conversation starters unless addressed.

[Jeeqbit]

Wow, reading that took the rest of the emotional energy I had for today. It sounds rough, but I guess you also feel like it's working for you and makes you happy? If so that's probably all that matters.

It is and it does make me happy, so I agree.

I don't think it's necessarily uncommon for this to happen to people, because they often have a lot of people they interact with occasionally, but don't know in an extremely deep way, such as at a school or university or other place with a lot of "regular" people. I just stopped particularly chasing the close friends thing, and adjusted my mindset.

There is a drawback to it when health problems occur because that can be hard to handle alone, but outside of that it just works for me.

[Vyrerus]

Not all of my friends have quit, but my friends list has been a ghost town outside of major patches for years now. And even on those major patches, there are maybe 12~13 people who get on that I know will want to play with me at some point (almost never immediately, because they have usually already started playing and progressed a couple of hours beyond where the MSQ patch starts or are neck deep in an instance already etc.)

I don't login all that much anymore, unless it's to challenge run alts or for RP. Even those aren't quite so appealing, as there are bigger, better challenge runs being done that I don't have time to do, due to the nature of their restrictions. RP wise, genuine RP is hard to find as it has always been due to the insular nature of the community, but even ERP is hard to find now because of 3rd party programs like MARE that break the ToS and are also mildly dangerous to your PC. Yet, go to Balmung or any other hotspot, and you will see, "MARE required." in so many seacoms that it'll make your head spin.

Gameplay wise I can still have fun with XIV solo, but it doesn't feel as good as it used too. Partially due to just how long I've been playing, but also partially because almost all rotations are stale and homogenous.

I mainly continue to login, usually reminded by the forum 2 week login restriction, to make sure my FC house doesn't get demolished (only one or two other people check on it occasionally, and within the last year or so, only my best friend Dameion stopped an auto-demo beyond myself). This will be the first expansion where I don't have final raid tier savage gear for my main jobs BIS nor the final extreme of the tiers weapons for my other jobs. I haven't been excited to login to play since I had to leave my raid static after we got our final member's main job weapon from P8s. And even though they kept raiding, they stopped raiding a few months ago without actually even finishing the tier. Real life just got too demanding for most of them, and they weren't progressing. Raid lead didn't even respond to me wishing him a happy birthday on Discord, on his birthday, and we've been friends for ages.

I'm really hoping Dawntrail will surprise me. Haven't got a lot of hope about that, though. The inclusion of an FFXI 24 man should make me grin ear to ear, but I don't trust this dev team about that.

TL; DR - Yes, I could keep playing for the game, but not happily.

[Windfire]

Considering I don't personally know anyone playing the game, the closest I could get would be would I still play if my whole fc quit. Answer: Yes, because I do very little group content outside of roulettes.

[Reinha]

My irl friends haven't played since like... ARR? Players who don't know my name and who aren't friends with me in real life are not what I consider friends, and they are not what's keeping me here. I've stayed because the game is fun to play. I still like to chat with other players sometimes the same way I enjoy chatting with coworkers or customers.

[Iscah]

My game experience isn't dependent on a friends group beyond the game. I'm in an FC and I enjoy their company but it's almost a separate thing to the game itself, and if they all abandoned the game then it wouldn't affect my experience of the game much.

Most of my actual gameplay (outside of the "basically a single-player RPG" story aspect) is spent either in roulettes, hopping into party finder groups for content I feel like running, or playing dress-up dolls with my WoL collection.