How do you deal with your RL friends?Follow

Please let me start at the beginning.
Well my name is johnma and I play FFXI. I suffer from many of my rl friends believing i play this game too often. I am not a full time player in fact im quite busy irl. I'm currently working as construction worker and mostly work from 9am - 6 or 7pm. I also work and train with New Wave Pro Wrestling(NWPW) based in san diego. I train with NWPW one day a week. sometimes a saturday from 10am to 3pm or sometimes I go straight from work to training which on a weekday would be 6pm-9pm. On top of this I am returning college august 20th to be a part time student. I have a set group that I meet with once every monday and a I have a sky ls I have been unable to meet with in the last week because I've been so busy irl. I truth I havent logged on in almost a week and a half now.
Now My problem is this I am constantly told by rl friends that I play the game to much and that the game controls my life. How can the game control my life when i spend so little time playing? In the 3-4 years Ive played I have just barely over 100 game days. If for some reason I dont see a particular group of them I constanly am told "Well if you spent less time on that stupid game" Or "Oh yeah man man we had a bbq yesterday but you were too busy playing FFXI to come over.". So I ask you my mmo friends wtf do I do? I know i dont play that often and Im tired of these jokes. Please help.

It is true that you spend most of your time doing stuff IRL as you mentioned..but in your time your. Your YOU time..how do you spend the majority of that? Ask yourself that. :P

a lot of people think i play ffxi too much but its only because
i dont watch tv so the game is always running on the POL top
screen. most of the time if i am logged on im afk doing something
else anyway if im not exping which really isnt very often.

most of my friends have played this game too but the ones who don't
we still have our happy mediums to go on. i never talk about ffxi with
any of them and whenever i hang out with them they get all my
undivided attention.

dont worry about it too much they are just poking at you because
they know it bothers you... or does it really?

If you missed out on a BBQ for this game, you're playing too much! How can you turn down good food, good drinks, and maybe some good girls (or guys if you're into that)? Sounds like your plate is full enough as is. If you don't enjoy friends that want to be around you often, find more friends inside the comfy confines of Vana'diel. Someone in there will cook you some ribs.

Take out the wife, and insert the GF and you'll have Nuhn^^ LOL

I had been playing as much as humanly possible inbetween 2 jobs, school, and balancing RL, but as soon as my daughter Annah was born it just became so much less of an option to play as much.

I'm one who hates my house to be dirty as well, as my GF has 2 older children besides mine and they are little tornados(and she doesn't like to clean up after them >.>). But I found that just 5 minutes a day cleaning clears all that crap up, and I can get to my gameplay.

I get maybe an hour a day to play, and my only night to actually play comes on Thursday nights. But if I'm in a good enough mood to take the decrease in sleep I'll play for an extra hour or 2 after work, lol. But sometimes getting only 3-4 hours of sleep night after night kinda sucks, because alot of the times my daughter decides to wake up when I'm heading to bed after deciding to play that extra hour or so, so I get to be up for at least another hour. But it's worth it both for my daughter and for when I actually accomplish something IG in that hour or 2 I'm on, lol.


But to the OP, I've had RL friends that played this game though they only lasted for 2 months each and quit. But alot of my friends play alot of other video games, so when they give me crap about FFXI, I just turn around and give em crap about what they play. But if they give me crap about playing FFXI too much, I'll turn around and give em crap about partying too much, spending too much time watching TV etc. Basically everyone has that certian something they spend too much time on, so no one I have ever met has been totally innocent when it comes to vices. So I wouldn't let them get you down, because there's a 100% certianty that they spend too much time on something you consider a waste of time. But missing free food/beer such as a BBQ? Bad!....Bad boy! Missing free food/beer....shame on you! LOL j/k. I wouldn't miss free food/beer, but that's cuz I like getting free s**t, lol(after having a kid you'll appreciate free s**t, trust me^^).

But anyways, only you can decide what you spend your freetime doing. Don't let friends dictate what you do with it. If they don't like it, I'd say "That's too bad.", if they're your friends they'll let you have what freetime you decide you need to play FFXI since it is your freetime. If they're not true friends then they won't hang around and you don't need them anyways if that's the way they choose to be, because like I said there's a 100% certianty that they have their own vices they waste their freetime on that you'd most likely consider a waste of time. So they shouldn't judge, unless they'd like to be judged. Besides it's not likely you'll be playing this game for the rest of your life, but then again at the rate SE is going you and I might be in our 60's or 70's before they retire this damned game to the annuls of online history. But then again you probably shouldn't be using all your freetime playing this game either, it just not healthy to be that obsesive. But idk...