Yeah, basically if you see someone playing you can join their session (lobby) and to actually see each other you have to go to the gathering hall which no one ever does.
Anyhow if you're in their session they can invite you to their squad and/or send guild cards.
At the start when you pick your lobby, you can pick your squad's lobby. This will be a lobby that only your squad is in. The problem is that unless your squad has like 50-200 people in it, there's a good chance whenever you join a squad session you're going to be the only person there which doesn't help because the game is geared to MP.
So we have a squad, but it's essentially useless and besides trading guild cards so we can keep track of each other's progress and borrow each other's cats, the best thing to do is if you go online and see any of your friends playing, join their session.
Then even when you're in the same session, actually playing together means:
1. One person has to post a quest
2. The other person has to see that quest is posted and goes to join quest and finds it
3. And this can't be a story quest where one person hasn't seen all the cutscenes
4. And this has to be a quest that both people are high enough rank to take it on
Whereas if you just want to play with randoms, you either go:
1. Start quest up to 4p, jump in solo and fire SoS = get full team shortly
2. Join SoS and pick from tons of people playing and jump right in
Basically the playing with players you know thing only works if you join a big guild like Resetera or something.
