I have a super weird experience from my childhood.
I played Asheron’s Call for a long time. If you aren’t familiar the game had an interesting guild system where you would have a “patron” and XP would pass up to that patron. So experienced players would help out their vassals to both keep them progressing but also to keep them sworn to them and generating XP.
I had found a cool patron who helped me out a lot. We got talking and it turned out he lived in my town, and his younger brother was actually in my class the next year. I never really hung out with the guy I played AC with but me and his younger brother became friends.