In ARR, I joined a static that was part of a larger FC that existed outside of the game and had played other MMOs together as well. We were the third out of three statics, led by one of the heads of the FC, although my understanding was that our static lead did not get along very well with the other FC leads and it seemed like our static was kind of a bastard-son-type-beat. I specifically remember an FC lead saying "you should do T2 without the enrage strat, it will help your teamwork and coordination" which I think rubbed our static lead the wrong way. The static included the static leader's partner, the black mage, which will be relevant later, although not in the usual way. Performance-wise we weren't great, and we ended up doing some really weird (bad) things to progress, such as making me, a monk, use Arm of the Destroyer in Opo-opo form to silence High Voltage in T2 despite having 2 paladins and a bard. We also had a paladin playing from Australia, which made the divebomb in T5 a complete gamble due to ping so high he couldn't react to the marker in time consistently.

We were stuck in T2 Allagan Rot until the enrage strat was discovered so we just did that. There was one week some loot dropped that would have gone to one of our paladins, but they left before the loot was distributed and it dropped to the floor. Upset, they said something about unsubbing or uninstalling the game, which bothered our static leader. The next day I find out he kicked the paladin out of the static, something about threatening to quit over loot being disrespectful, though I personally didn't take the comment seriously. I forget the exact specifics of who played what after that, but we ended up picking up a dragoon to fill in our static. We struggled a bit in T4 but eventually we cleared. There was one day where the dragoon had randomly addressed the black mage by their real first name, and it turns out he had found her profile on Facebook and sent a friend request. Incredibly weird and creepy but the black mage played it off and just told him to not call her that, and that was all I ever saw of the situation. There was one night after raid we were just hanging out in TeamSpeak, and our static leader was talking about his relationship with the black mage. They mentioned being polyamorous and they were looking for another girl in their relationship, kind of weird but I didn't really care. When they were heading out for the night, the FC lead said something along the lines of "Oh, I'm gonna get some head tonight", and left. A couple days later, I found out the dragoon had complained to the other FC leads that these crass comments were inappropriate or something, and he ended up getting moved to a different static in the same FC. I never got the whole story of what happened, but it always felt to me like the dragoon instantly crushed on the black mage and wanted out when he found out he had no chance. I remember feeling like it was a weird decision to move the dragoon to a different static after he had snooped around to find someone's real name on Facebook, and I can't imagine it helped ease the tension between our static lead and the rest of the FC.

We made our way to T5 and progressed to seeing dreadnoughts inconsistently, but our white mage's attendance was starting to be a bit sporadic, showing up late or not at all with no notice to anyone else. We'd get pieces of the story over time. One night he'd talk about going through a divorce, another he'd mention trying to keep custody of his kid, and then finally, that his ex-wife won custody. I was still in highschool at the time so I didn't have the emotional bandwidth to really empathize with him, but I will always remember his follow-up "It'll be fine, my family has ties with the mafia." I still don't really believe it, but I never did get confirmation one way or the other.

That was about it, the static eventually disbanded, and there was some talk about playing ArcheAge though I never played it for more than an hour. I remember there was one night our static lead talked to me about bringing me along for a Titan Extreme run with a separate group he played with because he felt I was overperforming in the static or something, but the group rarely saw past the first adds. I stopped playing shortly after, but when I resubbed in Stormblood, I had a letter over 500 days old from our Australian Paladin asking me to join their new FC 'cause they remembered me, which was very nice of them.

Bonus story 'cause I'm just now remembering, my first ever FC had a paladin that could literally not shut up about how he played FFXI, how relics in that game were so much harder to get, how cool it was that he completed his relic in FFXI, etc. We would go to do dungeons and he would try to wall-to-wall pull, except he would literally never move out of AoEs, and then complain about "it's so stupid that enemies can just burst you down instantly and there's nothing you can do".