What Got Me Into Playing FFXI

I have never been much of a online game fan. I'm not much of a gamer at all. I have a PS2. I used to play more back in the day. I prefer the fighting games like DOA and street fighter. Then my brother got me into RPG games. I bought Inu Yasha RPG. I was enjoying the game immensely until work had gotten out of hand. So I put it down. Life went really awry this year. Then I met a guy. He got along with my brother. They talked video games all the time. For a while, I thought my brother stole my boyfriend. Well they discussed FFXI. Then one day, my brother got a lot of packages. He purchased the harddrive & network adapter for the PS2, the inital FFXI game and the expansion packs. So he got to playing. I watched him. It looked cool, but I still wasn't interested. Then my boyfriend said that he's been playing for a year or 2 and he has like 3 level 75 jobs for his character. Now I had both my brother & my boyfriend in my ear hounding me about it. My brother said he would pay the extra $1 a month for my character. I said it wasn't necessary. I was not going to play. Then my boyfriend gave me the excuse that we can get together on FFXI to chat & play when we can't see each other. I said we can call each other on the phone. So one day, I went to the mall with my brother and he dragged me into gamestop. I was looking around. I asked my brother if you can play FFXI on a computer instead. He said yes. I said great. I saw the PC game & it was cheap, $20. I was thinking about putting it on my laptop. That way I can play from where ever I am. However, when we were on the bus ride home I decided to read the game box more clearly. I needed to get a graphics card for my computer in order to play the game. We got off the bus and headed into Staples. I was looking for a graphic card for a laptop, but they don't sell them. So I ended up getting it for my main desktop computer. When I got home, I then opened the package to install the software on my system (this is after installing the graphics card). I look at the disc and it says DVD-Rom. My desktop does not have a DVD-ROM. Luckily I have my house networked. I copied the files from the disk in my laptop onto my main desktop. I was then able to install & set up the game on my desktop. I still didn't play it though. I set up my account and all. I had free 30 day trial. My boyfriend came to visit and tried it out. He got frustrated because he's used to using a PS2 controller. Of course I ragged him about it. So I decided to finally try to see what his griping was about. Of course, it cool for a while, then the stupid mouse pissed me off because it controls both camera & direction. The screen would spin uncontrollably. Then I used the # pad on the keyboard for direction & used mouse for camera. It was still difficult. So I gave up. Then my brother said to try on his PS2. I logged in my account on his PS2 and it was sweet. I wasn't having any difficulty at all. I was loving it. I leveled to level 3 in one evening. My desire to play was still not there until my brother ordered me a controller switch for my computer, using my credit card. How about that? I got the switch 3 to 4 days later. We got it programmed to the gameplay as the PS2. Once I started playing with the contoller, I fell in love with the game. I have to play at least 2 times a week. At first, my boyfriend was powerleveling me. Then I went around on my own or w/my brother. Now I'm big & bad enough to play on my own. So basically, the 2 men in my life coerced me into playing by lots of nagging & making the game easy for me to play. Now look at me, a level 16 Red Mage.