Thanks to this Final Fantasy 14 roleplayer survey, I know exactly how basic my Warrior of Light’s backstory is

I roleplay in MMORPGs because I am a big, stinking nerd—I’ve written about the joy of such activities on this website before. But in case you’re uninitiated, here’s how it works: You and a group of your mates spend time “in character”, roleplaying as one might at your average D&D table. Just swap out a defined ruleset for the background dressing of an MMO, and you get the general jist.

In Final Fantasy 14, I’ve easily spent several hundred of my 5,000 hours (don’t look at me) milling about and telling stories with my friends—as do many others. This is a game bumping at all points with activity, everything from high-stakes plots to cosy cafes and… yes, nightclubs. But that’s like its own subculture.

It’s been a creative joy. A joy that I will now get to measurably feel self-conscious about, because one curious player has assembled a census specifically for giga-nerd writers like myself. The Crystal RP Census, put together by Reddit user CevicheLemon, is genuinely really fascinating.

It collects the information of over 10,000 roleplayers, painstakingly collated over the period of two months, and then scrambled for anonymity, and the findings are legitimately interesting—but before I put my analysis hat on, here’s how basic I am.

Final Fantasy XIV Crystal RP Character Census for Aug 2026 from r/ffxiv

My character, a male hyur born in Ul’dah that identifies with Limsa Lominsa more these days due to backstory reasons, is approximately the 2nd (most common) in terms of gender, 4th in terms of race, 11th in terms of origin, and 8th in terms of current faction association. Hey, not bad! I’m sorta kinda unique, maybe!

The most popular backstory for Warriors of Light is, if we smush all this data together, a female miqo’te from Ishgard who hasn’t really gone elsewhere. The least popular Warrior of Light is a non-binary lalafell from the long-extinct magical empire of Mhach that’s now slumming it with the Omicrons (I omitted the Omicron planet because it would’ve been impossible for a lalafell to get there).

These pictures aren’t actually likely to bare out, though. Behold, my lore knowledge: miqo’te aren’t all that common in Ishgard. They do, however, have tribes located all around the place. I’d take a guess that the 21.8% of miqo’te players are scattered all over the place in terms of origin, whereas Ishgard is instead over-represented by the elezen and hyur population.

This is in direct contrast to the Azim Steppe, which, lore-wise, would have to be the origin almost entirely taken up by the next-most popular race, Au Ra.

I’m genuinely fascinated that two people are just roleplaying Omicrons, a basically-extinct robot race from another planet—and that ten characters seem to be invested in them. I have basically never seen anyone doing this and I would like to know who they are so I can needle them with questions about their creations.

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