I imagine the FFXIV like the typical "perfect neighbourhood".
As long as you follow the neighbourhood rules things are fine.
But if you don't you'll find out that under the surface it's far from perfect.
"Just like in the movies"
The healer strike was a wake-up call for me. It made me realize that the content creator community, despite being high-end world racers themselves, is surprisingly out of touch with what we truly desire. Our so-called influencers are not effectively representing us; instead, they often treat us like cringe-worthy fools, solely for content. When that 1T3D dungeon was cleared, what kind of reaction did they expect from us? To find it cute or adorable? Their role should be to make jobs exciting and build hype, especially at editorial tours, but their actions achieved the opposite effect. While it's no secret dungeons can be cleared without healers, the media tour was not the time or place for creators to act like world-firsts, especially when the community is already concerned about job changes and the controversial Dawntrail update.
To be further mocked by the community and used for reaction content, and to be told we're exaggerating our concerns, highlights the vast disconnect. I'm tired of seeing mediocre tweets from creators that offer no real opinions, only directing us to wait for their next video. It shows how little they truly care. When people ask, "who cares?", we care. That's why this strike is happening. I admit the strike itself may seem silly, but when people aren't being heard, what choice do they have?
If disrespect and harassment are your only metrics for negative behavior that makes sense.
This community as a whole is so anti-confrontational it's absurd. I played from 2.0 to 2.3 and came back in 3.55. Since the end of HW I've been subbed non-stop for those 7+ years. In all of that time, I can count on one hand the number of times a DF group has successfully kicked someone from a party. Despite dozens and dozens of instances of sandbagging, freestyling, cure botting, verbal abuse, slur slinging, intentional griefing of fight mechanics, etc. People refuse to stop for a moment, discuss an issue, and find a resolution that requires conflict of some degree. They will just keep saying "chill" and "can't we all just get along" in the face of people actively trying to make the party's game experience worse. If you criticize this trait of the community at large, people will send the most vile words your way and feel justified about it.
Personally, I'd rather play a game with a linked city chat, or a global chat that experiences common trolling, but has actual meaningful interactions than just the stale false politeness of FFXIV.
This, 100%.
You have content creators whose first instinct in covering the strike is to look up whether someone has cleared Savage or Ultimate through FFLogs/tomestone.gg.
They're not even pretending to try to be in touch with the majority of the playerbase who are not doing high-end content. In fact, they take pride in dismissing them.
Content creators especially streamers mostly covering this for content, they don't actually care about the issues its purely for entertaining their viewers. If anything the developers should never take them seriously and only use them for advertising the game, there are very few people in the content creator space who understand why healers are so fed up with the game. Their fanbases also only echo what they think so they aren't worth anything if a content creator said they agree with the strike their viewers would agree and vice versa, just ignore them its the only thing we can really do.
They use elitism as a shield and most of them don't play healer and even so the extreme argument isn't even the main argument people also hate the jump from using zero healing kit to all of it in savage and thats part of the discussion as well as hundreds of other things.
Go pester them if it bothers you THAT much. I'll never understand why some people put so much stake in content creators.
I don't know which content creator specifically you mean with this (I don't follow them in general). Some are better than others though (I enjoy Peri or Eksu, but might be my BLM bias).
The issue with XIV is that the most popular ones are bullheaded people with very hyperbolic takes (like Xeno and Arthars) or very non-confrontational/unwilling to take a hard stance (like Happy). I remember watching Xeno pf O12S for a bit years ago and he was railing on his BLM (that was doing over 10k dps, basically orange parse levels of dps) and making no mistake whatsoever because someone else died and he couldn't rez because he didn't join as RDM. Sure, it's a persona and he was probably joking, but that struck me a the kind of narrow-sighted, self-centered takes these people make (I also remember him murdering someone with a tankbuster in P7S by moving last sec and blaming them for being in his general vicinity).
Particularly, none of them play healer much (and when they do they're pretty terrible), and are overall biased towards their mains, so yea, I'd expect their coverage to be facetious and mostly biased. It's sad really...
I also don't want to name any specific CC, especially since it's not one or two or even three people doing this but several of them.
Speaking of BLM, it's also sad that there is this sentiment going around that the healer strikers are the ones cheering for other jobs being gutted. But I mean... just look at what we were saying in just this month in the BLM thread:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...eally-tonedeaf
Bizarrely, there are some DPS players who are spreading this lie that the healer strikers do not care about other jobs being gutted. I've seen this sentiment shared quite widely on The Balance. You would hope that these players would be happy to use the healer strike thread as a launching pad to discuss their own grievances with their jobs, and together show a united front to show just how dissatisfied players are with the game stripping ALL jobs in the game of their complexity, but the reality has been very different.