Do people 'meet' each other in MMOs that much anymore?

[signal]

I never really played much of an MMO before FFXIV, so I'm curious if the MMO itself used to be the main method for players to meet one another. Playing XIV, even with many people around, it doesn't seem like there is much random interaction between players. I'm assuming that most people meet elsewhere, e.g. Twitter or Discord or wherever, then play together and continue using those things to interact rather than doing so in game.

I know previously people could have used mirc and teamspeak and whatever for actual interaction, but when it comes to actually 'meeting' new players, is this something that's not as present in modern MMOs?

 

[Warukyure]

Well before COVID, there was a Final Fantasy XIV meet up at an Anime convention in Edmonton, so I think they can happen in those types of events as well. I'm pretty sure people agree to meet up at things like the Fanfests in either NA or EU as well.

 

[Centzontotochtin]

Back in 2005-2010 days meeting people in mmo was an ordinary thing. Now with high amount of any kind of sns it's became too unnecessary

 

[pikachief]

I spend about 60-70% of my time in PSO2 just talking to people, so yes. But phantasy star games have always seem much more social than most currently online games.

 

[Hasemo]

While it was a thing before, I think nowadays even within the game itself, you have multiple ways of communicating with people that other players don't see from outside. Party chat, LS chat, FC chat.
Back in the day where the text would actually show up on screen (RO), I think it lead to more interactions.
That said, the biggest reason is probably the fact that most of the content which needs communication is instanced.

 

[Snowfruit]

I still talk to friends and play games together that I met in an MMO in 2013. Some MMOs are just more social than others.

XIV has the problem of not having chat bubbles, so just walking up to someone and talking to them in a city isn't really a thing. You just have to hope they're looking at their chat box somehow.
There's also a huge PS4 player base that might not even have a keyboard.
if you join a free company in XIV though then it's much easier to meet people and talk that way.

 

[sredgrin]

In a lot of MMOs it not neccessarily practical to meet on discord first, at least in my experience. I'm sure some servers / regions have a huge discord full of active players, mine haven't. So I've met plenty of people in the game itself.

Discord helps get to know them quicker though.

 

[Abominuz]

In the old days people seems to help eachother more and chat. When there where no dungeon finders, discord, etc. And i think the actual game design nowadays in a mmo is actually much more focused that you can do everything solo and group activity is just press group finder, que and get in and out.

 

[Android Sophia]

Game design in MMO has kind of de-emphasized interactions outside of the most hardcore content. FFXIV, being as instance heavy as it is, is no exception to that.

That being said, I still try to encourage random interactions when I play. If I see a player out in the field, I'll say hello or whatnot to try and get a response.

 

[aiswyda]

I played FFXIV a few years ago, and only started knowing one IRL friend. He introduced me to a handful of his other IRL friends who were also playing--but I only interacted with them in the MMO for the first 4-5 months we played together. I also had another IRL friend introduce me to their friend bc they were also playing FF14 (and we happened to be on the same server!)

At some point when I was ready to do the then-current content I ended up making quite a few friends from just joining farm parties or pugs. I'd say I was at least friendly with twenty some odd people on my server, most of whom I suppose I had chatted with in discord during a run of something. Some stuff happened, so I don't keep in contact with a lot of them, but I'm still good friends with my original friend and one other, and keep in contact with two other ones, even 4 years later.

I think it's totally viable to make friends via mmos--but being on a smaller server helps (since pretty much everyone knew the people on the server who put more time into playing, so it was easier to network and meet people).

 

[PRrambo_]

I met a lot of people in Destiny if that counts. Using LFG sites introduced to me to heaps of folks.

At one point I was in a clan where a married couple broke up because one of them fell in love with someone else across the world who they met in game. Shit was wild.

 

[signal]

While it was a thing before, I think nowadays even within the game itself, you have multiple ways of communicating with people that other players don't see from outside. Party chat, LS chat, FC chat.

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But how do they meet to get invited into the LS or FC!! Though you're right I guess because a lot of the chat is taking place outside of /say then it also ends up leading to less interaction.

There's also a huge PS4 player base that might not even have a keyboard.

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And this

That being said, I still try to encourage random interactions when I play. If I see a player out in the field, I'll say hello or whatnot to try and get a response.

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Does it work? I say hey or emote to people I see clearly doing the same questline as me but that's about it.

 

[Android Sophia]

Does it work? I say hey or emote to people I see clearly doing the same questline as me but that's about it.

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Ehh... in FFXIV about 50/50. Sometimes I'll get replies back that lead into cool stuff, or sometimes I'll get party runs with great conversation. Other times people just don't respond. A big issue is that a lot of players are on PS4, and may not have a keyboard.

That being said, I've met some cool people this way.

 

[aiswyda]

But how do they meet to get invited into the LS or FC!! Though you're right I guess because a lot of the chat is taking place outside of /say then it also ends up leading to less interaction.


And this

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Most people I met IG either would be introductions from other players (like add them to the linkshell and we'd chat there) or we happened to run content together--(once we started running content, people would be like oh hey go to this discord link for callouts and then we'd end up chatting mostly that way). There are a handful of folks I met from chatting ig while doing hunt or fate trains though, without ever getting into discord.

I think most PS4 players who are invested end up buying cheap keyboards--at least in my experience /shrug.

 

[signal]

Most people I met IG either would be introductions from other players (like add them to the linkshell and we'd chat there) or we happened to run content together--(once we started running content, people would be like oh hey go to this discord link for callouts and then we'd end up chatting mostly that way). There are a handful of folks I met from chatting ig while doing hunt or fate trains though, without ever getting into discord.

I think most PS4 players who are invested end up buying cheap keyboards--at least in my experience /shrug.

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I've been playing on and off since 2014 and I don't think I've really met anyone in game (._. )

I was invited to a random FC a single time, joined, went to the house where people in the FC were, saw two lalas roleplaying and refer to the male Hyur as father. Left FC.

 

[DiscoShark]

I'm convinced that half the problem with FFXIV socialization is that chat is siphoned away to a box on the bottom corner of your screen. In a lot of the MMOs I played as a child what you said in chat was placed in a text bubble above your head, in the center of the action and where your eyes are more likely to immediately pick up on it.

 

[aiswyda]

I've been playing on and off since 2014 and I don't think I've really met anyone in game (._. )

I was invited to a random FC a single time, joined, went to the house where people in the FC were, saw two lalas roleplaying and refer to the male Hyur as father. Left FC.

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Huh, that's so interesting. I played for like...10 months on a small server and found it really easy to make friends ig. A lot was via introductions and the like but I found it pretty easy to just meet people generally. Maybe bigger servers are more difficult? Or your server isn't as focused on the content you enjoy? I don't recall really meeting many people (outside of IRL friends who introduced me to their IRL friends) until I hit endgame content, but from there on out I knew most of the people running end game content.

 

[Mamoniadas]

Im really bad with telling stories but to be really brief, I definitely met my FFXIV FC leader while I was traversing a random area. It's been a year since I joined and I initially didnt do much socializing but ive started to befriend and chat with other members and definitely consider the FC my FFXIV home.

 

[Hasemo]

I've been playing on and off since 2014 and I don't think I've really met anyone in game (._. )

I was invited to a random FC a single time, joined, went to the house where people in the FC were, saw two lalas roleplaying and refer to the male Hyur as father. Left FC.

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FCs inviting random FC-less people (like it happened to you), messages on the Lodestone board, and party finder parties specifically made for recruiting are the main ways of finding FCs/members.
My FC did the 2nd and 3rd and we got a whole bunch of people looking for someone to play with.

 

[Harmony]

So long as guilds/the equivalent are a feature in MMOs, meeting people will always be a thing

 

[signal]

FCs inviting random FC-less people (like it happened to you), messages on the Lodestone board, and party finder parties specifically made for recruiting are the main ways of finding FCs/members.
My FC did the 2nd and 3rd and we got a whole bunch of people looking for someone to play with.

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Oh yeah I haven't looked at PF much. Seems to be people paying for clears mostly but that is kind of a cool system of searching for people.

 

[Yankee Ruin X]

With FFXIV I found it way more difficult to build friendships ingame compared to say FFXI. I think that's mainly down to accessibility. With FFXI you were kind of forced to interact and build up relationships with people in order to get anything done. With FFXIV you can pretty much do everything in the game without interacting with anyone really. You get thrown into a group via duty finder, complete the task and you all go off on your separate ways.

I feel like this has been way more prevalent across gaming in general with things like party chat and 1 game matchmaking. Nearly all the people on my friends list come from the old days of joining a server and playing with the same people for hours on end on something like Rainbow Six on the original Xbox. These days it is incredibly rare to send anyone a FR as you pretty much play 1 game and off you go to a new group for the next and while in that game most people will be in party chat already with their friends and so on.

 

[Killyoh]

I thought it was a thing of the past but I recently was approached by someone and joined their free company in FFXIV. They're all very nice.

 

[Bufbaf]

I for one am absolutely convinced the old school no hand holding type of mmo where you actually have to talk to people will be coming back at some point.

 

[Deleted member 8166]

In FFXI, vanilla WoW, and during FFXIV 1.0 I talked way more with people and the community grew way tighter.

now with dungeon/party finder/better tutorials etc things have changed quite a lot in the last 8 years

With FFXIV I found it way more difficult to build friendships ingame compared to say FFXI. I think that's mainly down to accessibility. With FFXI you were kind of forced to interact and build up relationships with people in order to get anything done. With FFXIV you can pretty much do everything in the game without interacting with anyone really. You get thrown into a group via duty finder, complete the task and you all go off on your separate ways.

I feel like this has been way more prevalent across gaming in general with things like party chat and 1 game matchmaking. Nearly all the people on my friends list come from the old days of joining a server and playing with the same people for hours on end on something like Rainbow Six on the original Xbox. These days it is incredibly rare to send anyone a FR as you pretty much play 1 game and off you go to a new group for the next and while in that game most people will be in party chat already with their friends and so on.

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Yeah this!

 

[His Majesty]

Modern MMO's automate everything, from trading to finding dungeon groups and most new content is soloable anyway. Back in the day I actually enjoyed going to the big market in Runescape to advertise my wares or buy an item from someone else. All you do now in most games is put in an offer on some virtual exchange market. At least ESO still requires you to trade through guilds, encouraging player interaction.

 

[blonded]

If you actually want to interact with people in FFXIV play Eureka. You actually have to communicate and work together. Completed it recently and its honestly the most fun I've had in FFXIV in a while.

 

[Leandras]

Met my partner of 5 years in FF14. She was the leader of the free company (guild) that a friend asked me to join. It just sort of happened that we enjoyed hanging out on our own.

But this was about half a year before Heavensward launched so it was comparitively still early days.

Now I just stay in touch with my other friends in that group and am not as attached to the community of FF14 as I once was.

 

[Deleted member 5491]

FFXIV is my first MMO and thanks to the Duty finder and all that stuff that got first introduces in WOW before, you don't really need to interact with people to play the story. A friend of miney used to play WOW in it's early days and remembered how you HAD TO meet and interact with people in front of a dungeon to clear it.
These modern systems and QoL improvements bring many advantages and disadvantages along with it.

I'm convinced that half the problem with FFXIV socialization is that chat is siphoned away to a box on the bottom corner of your screen. In a lot of the MMOs I played as a child what you said in chat was placed in a text bubble above your head, in the center of the action and where your eyes are more likely to immediately pick up on it.

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And that the chat is flooded with spam messaged ever time you enter one of the main cities

 

[Hasemo]

Oh yeah I haven't looked at PF much. Seems to be people paying for clears mostly but that is kind of a cool system of searching for people.

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It's not bad. You set up a party, put a link to lodestone or wherever in the description and wait. And on lodestone in the FC part you can actually set what type of an FC it is, what classes you're looking for. It's a really well made system.

 

[Kaivan]

Yes, nowadays most people only chat in their own guild/company channels when in-game, and in Discord when not in-game.

People don't really talk to a random stranger in public chat anymore. But it also depends on your server, perhaps.

 

[Reddaye]

MMOs used to be designed to force social interaction by not being particularly solo friendly. Everquest, as an example, is pretty hard to solo in. As a result you would look for other players to go grind mob camps or dungeons. While grinding the pace in EQ is pretty slow, which left a lot of time to chat with your group and make friends.

Now MMOs are designed with soloing being totally viable, so people aren't forced into interacting, unless they randomly queue for group content. Even Everquest is solo friendly now. The only place in a lot of these games you're forced into interacting is end game raid content, which the majority of the player base in MMOs don't even do.

Long story short: convenience killed the social aspects.

 

[Kenai]

It depends. FFXIV for example modernized a lot of the former busywork MMOs were known for regarding character progression and made it reasonably easy to solo so interaction isn't needed much if played casually, but then you have RP heavy servers, reasonably challenging content that requires statics like savage content, farm parties or timesinks that are difficult to solo like Anamos/Pagos/Hydatos and whatever the new upcoming relic system will be.

Older MMOs it was more of a necessity since things like Dungeon/Duty Finder simply didn't exist and World Boss style monsters were a wild-west first alliance come first serve deal, and even "easy" monsters could kill you or were agonizingly slow to kill alone so you had to rely on others to do the most basic things like level up and get halfway decent endgame gear (for getting more gear of course). Most of the people that I ended up becoming reasonably close to long-term was after I started using Vent/Mumble/Discord in WoW and FFXIV when I was in endgame raids or some other group activity. Anything older than that like FFXI and EQ I didn't want to talk to them in person at all even if I would have had the option lol

 

[skeezx]

not really into MMORPGs these days but i made some close friends on the Division so i guess it's still a thing,

seems like online gaming is less of an "escape into your own reality" prospect like it was 10-15 years ago, in general. more like you just log in, do your thing yadda yadda, k thanks bye

 

[LossAversion]

I've had several interactions with random people in XIV. It doesn't happen all of the time, but certainly more than it did in my years playing WoW.

MapleStory was by far the most social MMO that I have ever played. The fact that it was on a 2D plain basically forced social interaction. In 3D MMO's (especially when you take flying into account) there's so much space that it becomes less likely that you'll run into other players. And even in highly populated areas like the auction house... people just aren't interested in social interaction outside of their guild. Of course there are always exceptions. But I had more random conversations in a week of playing MapleStory than I did in my years of playing WoW. XIV fairs a little better on that front but I think it has to do with the community that XIV has fostered. People take WoW very seriously. The world is literally split into two competing factions. XIV is a much more laid back experience and it shows in the community. It also puts an emphasis on glam (fashion) which is another thing that MapleStory focused on.

I would love another 2D MMO to become popular these days. The monetization in MapleStory was honestly the worst I have ever seen in a game but the way it emphasized interacting with other players was unmatched. It was as much a virtual hangout space as it was a game.

 

[modernist]

In terms of WoW - the game offers the base layer of gameplay and the tools for accessing them in a seamless and fairly anonymised way, you can cut through most if not all of the content without needing much conversation and I think a large portion of the player base does. I think the fact that you can easily group with other language regions on the European cross server queue systems (and therefore end up with a group that doesnt speak the same language or use the same alphabet) is indicative of this.

But higher difficulty/progression gameplay still requires socialising and teamwork, and the scale of the game and it's options means you can find something to do which leads to conversations. I've found a great guild to play with recently of other UK players but I'm not exactly sure how that happened. I think I messaged someone to ask what requirements I needed to join a group in the public group finder tool and they were vaguely surprised that someone would do that and invited me to join?

So much of the modern MMO network seems to have developed and been reinforced to keep social interaction as closeted or segmented as possible - MMO parties are created and dissolve wordlessly, dungeons and raids are generally examined from a perspective of convenience - raid healers will join a group, ask to be summoned, then leave instantly if one isn't available rather than walk to the dungeon because it's usually faster just to requeue for another; there'll be a flurry of leaving party members after a raid wipe because it's usually faster to find a new group that cuts through the content like butter - but I guess this isn't really any different to console lobbies or Discord channels, and the ongoing economics and escalation of min/maxing as the means and the end.

 

[Issen]

In FFXIV, people sometimes organize social events (often in the form of RP). It's a good chance to meet new people.

 

[Belthazar90]

I think the theme-park structure mostly drive people away from social interaction in those games, as most of the time they just wait in hubs for matchmaking and whatnot. It's also what drove me away from MMOs, as I much prefer the old structure of having a huge shared world with people just being there and having to actually talk to them if you want to party.

 

[Baphomet]

That was a thing?, I would consider that a a bad idea, meeting people from online is so suspect.

 

[sumo]

FFXIV is my first MMO and thanks to the Duty finder and all that stuff that got first introduces in WOW before, you don't really need to interact with people to play the story. A friend of miney used to play WOW in it's early days and remembered how you HAD TO meet and interact with people in front of a dungeon to clear it.
These modern systems and QoL improvements bring many advantages and disadvantages along with it.

Click to shrink...

Yeah I played Aion when it was released and it was like that, standing in front of a dungeon to try and get a party together, doing shout messages advertising yourself. It was alright at first but after a while the early dungeons were abandonned so if you re-rolled a new character it was basically impossible to even progress the storyline because you couldn't get a party together. The best you could hope for was being in a big enough guild with enough people with similar level characters who happened to be online at the time. Dungeon finder is much better.

 

[CaviarMeths]

Man every main city in FFXIV is full of people just hanging out or RPing. I have to turn off say chat and emotes every time I port to Limsa.

 

[Qikz]

It's not an MMO (maybe it is? it's definitely not an MMORPG) per say but I've met a lot of nice completely random people in VRChat.

 

[SoulsHunt]

My friend met a girl on PSO2 and she's now his girlfriend. It's recent.

I guess this kind of thing still happens.

 

[MnM]

If any Lineage II player is still alive, he must crying now.

 

[Theswweet]

If you end up doing content like hunt trains, or treasure maps, you'll start meeting and interacting with randos a ton. Granted... that's endgame content.

 

[Callibretto]

With duty finder, does looking for group still a thing in ff14 for end game content. I'm currently catching up heavenward and honestly, for an mmo, it's pretty lonely game, do everything solo and waiting dutyfinder to start dungeon and trial etc.

I remember playing ff1 back then, and sometime I'm just waiting in front of dungeon putting up LFG sign, it can take up to an hour before we got full party. Mages had to sit down and replenish mp every now and then so we just chat around.

I kinda missed it, but I don't think I can play that kind of game again now. Lol

 

[Deleted member 21709]

Sure, if you are open - looking for it.

 

[Mona]

All the people I really connect with in MMOs turn out to just be quest NPCs, so its not as simple for some of us

 

[Theswweet]

With duty finder, does looking for group still a thing in ff14 for end game content. I'm currently catching up heavenward and honestly, for an mmo, it's pretty lonely game, do everything solo and waiting dutyfinder to start dungeon and trial etc.

I remember playing ff1 back then, and sometime I'm just waiting in front of dungeon putting up LFG sign, it can take up to an hour before we got full party. Mages had to sit down and replenish mp every now and then so we just chat around.

I kinda missed it, but I don't think I can play that kind of game again now. Lol

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Endgame hardcore content requires communication and is done through party finder, not duty finder.

 

[DarthBuzzard]

In FFXIV, people sometimes organize social events (often in the form of RP). It's a good chance to meet new people.

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Bard concerts are great fun, and there's the whole A Stage Reborn play that one community puts on infrequently.