I was inspired to finally write about what happened to me about 2 years ago on FFXIV because of and entry I stumbled on from The Girly Geek Blog. I also posted this on pxahxj and though I didn’t want this to be my first blog post here, I figured I would post it here as well.
Preface: I played FFXI from 2004 – 2012 before hopping on FFXIV when it first came out in 2010 then when it crashed and went to shit they remade the entire game in 2013 called Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (lololol we had hoped that shit was reborn) to which I jumped on the beta for.
So me and Square Enix, we’ve got a very long history man.
I ironically didn’t jump on FFXIV again until April of 2015 and I’ve been playing it ever since. Through the few years I’ve been here it’s been.. an experience. Nothing like the mellow FFXI life I had. Literally. Nothing. Fuckin. Like. That.
There are a million stories out there and especially if you have a character Instagram, people are READY to call out the newest fuckboi in the FFXIV community. You can say we’re pretty tight. Most of us anyway. Though you never know who’ll betray you first. But like I said, there are a million and one fucked up stories swirling around and I’m here to share mine.
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When I jumped on in 2015 it was because I had suggested to my bf at the time (he went by “Chan”) we should play together. We were trying to find games to play/stream together and he asked me what my favorite game was and I mentioned this, so we jumped on.
We started on Cactaur and stayed there for about a year before he got tired of the “emptyness” and so he decided we switch to Siren.
We ended up very quickly in a Free Company (a guild if you will) which name I now can’t really remember but known as Sky.
I would jump on the Discord and it was usually me, Chan, Arto, Ari and Fae who were usually on and at night Dante. I NEVER talked. I was too shy or I just didn’t really relate until I found out that Ari actually lived in the same city I did and she also did the Disney College Program but she joined a year after I had but her roommate who was also in our FC still worked at Disney. So we’d talk about the DCP. Chan was really unsupportive about everything and often times he would call me a bitch or tell me to shut the fuck up in the Discord which I would voice was HIGHLY disrespectful and even the FC would agree and he would laugh it off saying that’s her problem.
I never got close to anyone during that time. There were times I considered Ari a friend but once her and Arto got married in game she got on less and less.
Fae was always really helpful to me and always really kind. She gifted me 2 of my first minions — the Mandagora Queen and the Wind Up Qiqirn.
Oh Chan also played a female dragon avatar who frequently walked around naked, bickered that I wore way too many clothes, never ran ANYTHING with me — in fact the only time I saw him was at the FC house. If I even saw him then (even though we legit played in the same room) and told me I was free to marry whoever the fuck I wanted in the game since he was NEVER going to go male. Weird thing to say but uhm ok.
I’m not entirely sure HOW this happened, but convo came up one night in the Discord about I guess… they asked me to run something? I was level 28 at the time and I only had ONE dungeon unlocked. They had asked me if I had like the third or fourth one and I said no. Then they asked me if I had done my Main Story Quests and I had said I didn’t know what that was. Chan at the time had hit I think 50? And they all yelled at him about why didn’t he make sure I had done my MSQ and he replied with “it’s her job to figure out how to play the game” which they yelled at him SOME MORE about how it was HIS job to HELP me if he knew the answers.
I legit didn’t even know how to use the Market Board. I didn’t know how to do ANYTHING. I had leveled up by doing side quests.
So that night 4 FC members followed me around for FOUR HOURS helping me do MSQ and running dungeons with me. every few levels they crafted new gear for me. Dante had even gifted me with 300k. Chan had money but he never offered to upgrade my stuff or even tell me how or even how to make money.
Sorry Raven, I bought the Dust Bunny minion and Spriggan hat with a bit of that #noregrets.
I don’t really remember much of what happened after that night, I was afraid to bother anyone with any more help so I would go off and just keep doing my MSQ since it seemed like that’s what was needed to get anywhere in the game. I had some Gil so if I needed anything I could buy it off the Market Board.
Next thing I know people are upset in the FC chat and Fae had destoryed her FC room and left the FC. Somehow Chan and I got pulled into it — not somehow, by this point Chan and Fae were pretty close. I didn’t know what was going on and I don’t think I was on Discord at the time. But Raven and Fae decided to switch to Sarg and change their names. So for some reason Chan suggested we switch with them.
I didn’t know much about servers or legacy servers or buying houses or any of that kind of stuff. I hadn’t leveled or ever picked a Grand Company so I couldn’t help with buying a house as soon as we had switched.
There was a small plot in the goblet Raven had spotted in The Goblet. I didn’t know the difference of the housing districts really and I didn’t know that it was damn near impossible to find a house on the server we had just switched to.
We ended up getting the plot.
For some reason Raven felt the need to have someone else buy the plot. I wasn’t able to and neither was Chan so it fell on Fae. The plot itself was 4mil and so he handed her the money and she bought the plot. Raven was in charge of decorating the top floor, Fae had the outside and it was my job to decorate the lower floor. We created our own FC called AFK My Lala Fell but we didn’t make the house a FC house, we bought it as a personal.
At this point Raven changed his name to Dante. And Fae would had changed her name to Lily.
Good God I have a lot of side quests just sitting there.
This was a pretty rare occasion; majority of the time Chan and Fae were off doing whatever it is they were doing whereas Dante would run my dailies with me. When I played solo when he wasn’t on I’d work on leveling my WHM but if I had help I’d work on my SMN.
This is when things started to get weird…
It seemed like the more Dante was spending time to help me level, the more Fae would voice her jealousy at how unfair it was he was spending time crafting me gear as we leveled and not buying her more minions. And the more it seemed she would spend time with Chan by herself. I guess knowing Chan didn’t play or run things with me made it easier her for her to do that too. But Dante had school in the mornings usually and so I would play by myself mostly through the day. Then suddenly I started noticing that Fae and Chan wouldn’t even BE on FFXIV but on Tera or Blade & Soul and all these other PC MMO’s together. I stopped hanging out in the Discord when it was just them two cause they’d always talk about Game of Thrones which I didn’t watch or care for and Chan would constantly voice how lame and boring I was to Fae because I didn’t. So I just blasted music while I played instead.
But it also seemed like the more Fae was distracting Chan the more Dante took it as a chance to hit on me in a really weird way.
For example, if we were the only two left in the Discord he would literally start talking about how turned on he was even though we were in the middle of a dungeon and if the dungeon ended and I had to go finish a quest that required me to do something by myself he would NO JOKE start jacking off on the mic. And this would happen, literally almost every day. I would tell him to stop and it made me uncomfortable and he would do that typical guy shit when they ask this doesn’t turn you on? NO BITCH, IT DOESN’T. Didn’t I just say stop?!
This one time we were talking about meme’s and he had sent me a bunch of meme’s he had saved and somewhere in the sea of meme’s he sent a dick pic and he goes “oh shit, I think I sent something I wasn’t suppose to… uh… did you get it?” and I had seen it in the gallery and deleted it before even scrolling through the meme’s and I was like “oh yah, I deleted it already.” and he was like “Oh.” Uh… I watch a crap ton of porn, is a photo of a penis I don’t really give a shit about suppose to turn me on?
I might be in the minority here but nude photos or pictures of private areas don’t really do anything for me. It’s just oh, boobs. Oh, a dick. Like I don’t understand why people are so crazy about seeing someone’s penis or vagina. Like, it’s a fuckin picture people. Go Google that shit if you’re that desperate.
But that one thing that really bothered me was when he started coming on really heavy after I REPEATEDLY told him I OBVIOUSLY HAVE A BOYFRIEND and I was NOT interested. He would constantly try to talk me into moving in with him out of nowhere. I mean he did witness the stupid way that Chan talked to me and at the time both him and Fae were not impressed with it yet Fae STAYED his friend and even believed the lies he told her about me. It was frustrating that I was just looking for someone to game with and all of a sudden it would turn into this — some person I barely knew hitting on me on a daily basis, jacking off on the mic and heavy pressuring me to move in with them. If those don’t raise red flags, I don’t know wtf does.
So this went on for maybe a month.
One morning Chan comes in and wakes me up saying Fae needed to talk to me. So he gave her number and she called me asking if Dante had been saying stuff to me. Like hitting on me and stuff and I was like “yeah sorta, why?” and she launched into a whole story about how he was doing it to her too and that’s why she had been getting on less and less because she didn’t want to jump on Discord with him anymore. I told her what he had said about her and her husband not being attracted to her anymore and she had told me he told her I had said I would move in with him when neither of us had said any of that to him.
I about had it with him especially after he had left our FC the night before after everyone logged off and I told him doing so would cause drama between me and Chan and he didn’t care.
We knew Dante was at school so all 3 of us switched servers to Faerie. I got to choose the server this time. We didn’t buy a house and we didn’t start a FC.
Or at least not together.
I ended up joining a FC called Solar Flare and suggested they join too but they both declined after the drama with Sky and with stuff that happened with Dante so Chan started a FC just for him and Fae. I never got an invite. But to be honest I didn’t want one.
Later in that day Fae had said that Dante was texting her harassing her about leaving. About taking everything in the house with her and about locking him out of the house on Sarg. I didn’t know anything Fae had done, I stayed out of it. But Chan seemed really sympathetic towards her and Googled ways she could block his number from her phone cause it kept going off, all. day. long.
Later that night Dante texted me.
I had blocked him on FB, Twitter, and IG. I hadn’t thought to block him from my phone because we barely ever texted. If even at all.
The “stuff I told him” was generally that Fae and Chan would hop off FFXIV during the day and be on their own private Discord and things together. Or how Chan would shame me for not watching GoT. Stuff that Dante himself could had witnessed and has witnessed.
It was Fae’s idea to switch servers. It seems wherever Fae goes, Chan follows. I wanted to get on Faerie so I used it as my reason to go. I’ve had alts on other servers to play with other friends but Chan would always yell at me to get back on our server and level. But once we switched to Faerie, I noticed that not only did he make a FC for him and Fae privately but he was leveling his gathering classes to make money to buy Fae a house. As if she didn’t have several 60 jobs or crafters of her own to make her own money to do that.
So not only was I being harassed by Dante on and off and being accused of “talking everyone into hating him” which I didn’t nor did I care enough to do, but I was also being ditched by both Fae and Chan, still. And when I’d tell Chan that Dante was blowing up my phone he would tell me to deal with it myself yet go and comfort Fae.
It took me a really long time to jump on voice chat with anyone on the game after this because I was so afraid of the Dante thing happening again. It took really long for me to try and even make friends again and even the friends I made in Solar Flare I would keep a distance away from. But I am glad I found them and I found a home with them even if it was just for a short while. It helped me to heal from what had happened, it helped me to find the fun in the game again and they helped me find Bubba.
It absolutely baffles me that things like this happen in FFXIV and it happens OFTEN. That people betray other people so quickly. That harassment is just a thing.
And it makes me miss the community on FFXI so much more.
Now a days while I do have a handful of friends and a brothers I can turn to if I ever needed help as well as Bubba, I keep it to just that. I don’t make new friends. I join FC’s on my alts but never really talk. Though I do talk in The Novice Network a bit because I like helping people and finding a reason to run primals I still don’t add people or make friends.
MMO gaming has definitely changed over the last 14 years, and it’s actually pretty scary to see what it’s turned into.