I've never really met what you'd consider close friends in an MMO.  Not like real life friends.  They come and go with the MMO.  I had two from EQ1 come to play SWG & FFXI, and some came from DAOC to WOW.  I usually end up moving on and meeting new people except theres never really a close friendship so to speak.  

I'm curious how it is for others ?  My close RL friends always looked down on online gaming, it really pissed them off when I didn't come out opting to play EQ.

A friend is someone who is your friend regardless of what game you play.

These people sound like people that play the same games as you that you just happen to get along with.

In response to your question, I personally have made friends as far back as march 1999 in eq1 that i know today.

Some of them play different games than myself but we still stay in contact.

I have my close friends I play with, we have fun in our own lil group and we hop games together.  That's who I play with pretty much if I group at all ingame.

 New people each game.  Lately games haven't kept attention long enough for me to get to know online people well enough to transfer games.

Once tried to convince one of my CoX officers to try Wurm, she did for 10 minutes then sent me an email asking to change the base.  Oh well.

I'm kinda old-fashioned about this.

I consider my real friends to be the people in my real life.

I have more of a "colleague" view of people I meet in MMOs; a friendship that exists within an enclosed environment and, to all extents and purposes, doesn't exist outside of said environment.

Naturally, colleagues can graduate to "real" friend status but that's unlikely to ever happen in the case of MMO acquaintances unless you manage to stumble upon someone who lives really close to you or something.

Given the opportunity, I'll always stick with my RL friends in an MMO, though that doesn't stop me integrating into the online community as well. I'm just more likely to prioritise my RL friends over my MMO acquaintances.

My rl friends dont play MMOs so both worlds are separate to me. I actually like it this way as each world allows me to take a break from the other. I would agree with ilvaldyr in that i consider people i meet online more peers than friends, we may chat and shoot the breeze but in the end people in my friend list are those who share or respect the view that our main objective lies in playing the game and acomplishing our goals in it.

Interesting discussion. I've been thinking about this lately since my circle of online friends has dwindled lately.

I normally have a little of both. Friends online who are more like associates, and a few friends online that are closer and I like to talk to like once a day and I try to move from game to game with them. Like I said though, that circle of friends is pretty nonexistant now and I blame the current crop of MMOs. They're so lackluster that most people game hop more now than ever. I don't think I've stayed in one game for longer than 6 months in a few years, and I used to be the sort of guy to be very loyal to a game.

Now it's just me and my girlfriend of about 3 years, we game together. I've got a couple friends who I still talk to regularly on AIM but we don't game together. Hopefully a game comes out worth sticking with so I can get another group going. MMOs are meant to be social after all.

None of my RL friends are interested in MMOs and I tend not to talk about my RL in-game either so my MMO friends have always been entirely separate. I've never really thought about it this way before but I guess maybe on some level I kind of view my MMO friends as my character's friends rather than my own.

The result is almost always lose touch with MMO friends when I stop playing and I must admit that is something I rather regret.

 This is a really interesting question. When I first started playing MMO's with EQ1 the game mechanics were such that it encouraged grouping. From those group experiences a number of friendships would be grown as you got to know the individuals and there reputations on the server.

However, in todays WOW and WOW clone like games the game mechanics lend themselves more to a solo experience. That same social experience of grouping that I had in EQ1 and the ability to foster longer term friendships ingame seem not to occur. It has become a much more casual gaming experience.

When I started playing mmo's with Dark Age of Camelot I made quite a few friends through it.  I managed to actually meet my real life friends of the past 14 years due to it.  I've also gotten to know a good portion of the guildies I played with and we've gone out and had a guild meet and I got to physically meet them in person.  A lot of them live down in the states and I'm here in Canada.  I still talk to a few of them.  The others have "grown up" and now have kids and responsibilities and stuff and don't have time to keep in touch or have just moved on.  Since then none of the games I played after DAoC have ever evoked this in me.  Never found people that I wanted to get to know at that level.  Somehow I get the feeling that it will never happen again.

I guess it depends. I still communicate with my long-distance friends in Ragnarok Online even after four years.

I've actually broken the barrier of RL and online gaming, I met several of the people I played with and hanged out with them on several occasions. However I hadn't chatted them up in awhile - sad face-

I do have had some good friends in MMOs but I lost them when I moved or when they quited.

 My friend and I actually became pretty good friends with a married couple when we played Everquest 2. We never actually were friends outside the game (mainly because we were still in high school), but we did make a pretty good effort to play together in the game a lot. One thing that was pretty cool was when I logged back into the game after having quit for about a year and a half and I instantly got a message from one of them being really excited to see me on.