Has anybody actually made friends through FFXIV?

[KaivaC]

Title.

Has anybody created any actual friendships through FFXIV? Or...you know what, let's expand this and and say through MMOs, too, since community is a big thing within this genre. I am not going to lie, friendship through MMOs is a foreign concept to me, so I tend to keep everyone at a safe distance. What are your personal experiences in regards to friendship through FFXIV and MMOs as a whole? Is it possible? Odd? Natural?

Lemme know.

(also, I don't know why my icon is blank. It just is.)

[BillyKaplan]

I certainly have. To begin with I came to this game through my bf at the time and he was playing with people he was friends with before, and two years later I'm still a part of the group, very close to a few of them. Furthermore, my chara being a reference to a Marvel comics chara, I became friends with some of the people who actually recognized the guy. It's how I got to the single social linkshell I'm in right now, and how I met the person who's now one of my best friends.

[ElHeggunte]

Well, there’s a group of friends that I met in the early days of FFXI and we’ve generally gamed together ever since. We’ve drifted apart a little between school, careers, and starting families, but we still keep in touch.

These days I can never imagine myself forming that level of deep friendship though. I mean I’m on friendly terms with plenty of people in the games I play(ed). In fact, I would consider most of them more as friends than mere acquaintances. Just not to the point of feeling like family like the above group.

[Nhadaly]

I made made both friends and enemies playing MMOs, but the friends that i do have feel like true friends and i find that very valuable.

[SachiMizora]

Yup. I've made a few friends in this game but mainly made some from another game.
I live in Australia and they live in NA, and I've traveled and visited them before and met them IRL.
We still keep in touch and play other games/FFXIV together too.

[Okamimaru]

I've gotten a few gfs to play ff14... met a few coworkers who play... but never met anyone in a MMO I'd call a real friend

[HyoMinPark]

I met my best friend in this game. I’ve met a lot of people that I would consider friends that would have a lasting relationship, or one that extends outside of the game. There are some I’ve met where our friendships are pretty contained inside of FFXIV, but there are others that go beyond FFXIV.

[ToniRomo]

I made friends when I played Asherons Call and vanilla WoW back in the day. Older MMOs forced you to always create your own groups so a lot of times if you met someone decent you added them to your friends list and partied again in the future. Servers were smaller local communities where people had reputations. I've met a few people I played those games with in real life.

Modern MMOs are less social and everyone comes and goes quickly with duty finders. I haven't made any friends in modern games like I did in the older games. I'm also 20 years older from when I first started playing MMOs, so maybe I am just old and grumpy and it is my fault.

[Reinha]

I met my fiancé in WoW but no other online relationship of mine has gone far enough to count as a real life friendship (like doing video calls or meeting irl, etc).

[MOZZYSTAR]

Yes, actually. XD Most of my friends I've made via online, but in FFXIV in specific I've made some of the best friends that really helped me out through some tough (and good) times. We knew what each other looked like, sounded like, etc. We almost met up IRL as well but it was too costly at that time (some were from Canada, US west coast, US east coast, the UK). Unfortunately, for me, they haven't lasted. My best friends became too busy with their lives after their wedding, and the other was getting to be too toxic for me after about three years. And while my UK friend moved to EU servers, we're still friends and chat when we're both online on Discord or Steam. :3