How do you view this game? :O

[Raltar]

I mostly play this game for the storyline, so I log in, do my expert roulette, change to whatever class I'm leveling and finish the rest of the roulettes and log off. I've thought about doing savage, but the community in this game is so very different than other MMOs I've played where you join a guild and raid with them. I mean, yeah, you have FCs, but I've never seen a raiding FC. People always talk about "static groups." Just like, I don't have any interaction with a static outside of raid times. I'm used to being in a guild and doing stuff with them and then raiding a couple of nights a week and, you know, being a part of a group. Most static groups I see want to raid every god damn night and want zero interaction outside of that raiding time and that just isn't something I am interested in anymore at this stage of my life.

[Rymm]

I started playing for the story and the gameplay. I stayed for the community.

I was falling out of love with WoW around the time that my husband introduced me to FFXIV; I love story-driven games so he thought I'd like this one. He was right! On top of that, I found the gameplay to be fun and it had enough "side content" to keep my ADHD brain engaged.

Right around the same time I started playing, I moved abroad. The fact that I was thousands of miles from my family and friends, coupled with the language barrier (I could communicate effectively, but it was always a chore), and the fact that I was now a housewife with no job to go to every day meant that I suddenly had a lot of free time on my hands and no real social circle to speak of. FFXIV help to fill that void. I made a lot of friends in the game and got pretty active in the community. It was a nice way to feel at home even when I was in a different hemisphere.

Even now that we've moved back to the States and I'm working again, I think the community is a large part of while I'm still playing (even now with way less time on my hands.) I don't log in and play nearly as much as I used to, but thanks to the way the community has built up around and outside the game, I'm still pretty active in it. I write for Aetherflow Media, I participate in and ENTM, I've submitted glamours to Eorzea Collection, I'm in more than a half dozen FFXIV-centered Discord groups that do events and contests and just hang out to chat.

The great thing about the social aspect of this game is that it isn't just confined to the game itself.