Both my friend and I have World of Warcraft. Unfortunately it doesn’t run on my computer. “No problem,” says my best friend. “You can play it at my apartment”. So when we are done with work in the evenings, and during our days off, we hang out at my friend’s apartment and both play. Now being partied with someone that is physically in the same room as you has definite advantage (We used to do something similar to this in another MMO game, Planetside. We would crew a tank and it was LOTS of fun because you can talk to someone much faster than typing messages 
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There are other advantages to the buddy system as well. For instance, neither one of us is really into guilds; we don’t have enough consistent free time to really make the most out of being part of a guild (I know it has other advantages, maybe we’ll change our minds later). When we chose our characters, we wanted to pick something with relatively little overlap. We picked similar races, just for simplicity’s sake (so we’d start in the same areas/have the same quests) but different classes and tradeskills. Each of us also has a couple of alt characters, so we can mix and match different pairs when one duo starts to get tiresome. We will also occasionally go off and do our own thing if we start to get sick of each other, or disagree on what quest to do.
The tradeskill aspect in particular is nice with our setup because we are almost entirely independent. It is really fun thinking about how we can potentially make virtually anything we want/need largely from raw materials that were gathered as opposed to purchased. I suggested to my friend that we stockpile a certain portion of gathered materials (leathers, metal bars, herbs, etc) that way if one of us learns to make something new, we’ll always have plenty of materials on stock- either with that character or another character who can mail him the stuff. My goal is for us to be ‘outfitters’ of sorts- capable of equipping somebody head to toe with gear: bags, enchanted armor, enchanted weapons, equipment, and potions. There’s lots of potential for charity- often times I’m making equipment not for money (people don’t really seem to buy lowbie blacksmith/alchemist/enchanter stuff in auctions, its not cost-effective to simply hawk it to the vendors) but rather to raise a skill. Since both of us work together, we raise our respective skills fairly quickly. This is particularly important for my friend’s enchanter character, who would otherwise have a rather hard time building up his skill.
It would be fun to make the “Outfitter’s set”, a full loadout of stuff culminating the tradeskill efforts of all our characters- It’s too bad they don’t let you make your own ‘sets’ of stuff right now, it would be lots of fun. In the meantime, we will be churning out low-level gadgets, clothing, and junky copper armor/weapons faster than a warehouse full of sweatshop workers