How did the community become this toxic?

I blame Obamacare personally.

This game is also total troll bait. It only takes one or two bad apples to wipe a crystal tower run, extreme primal, or dungeon, . A lot of the content is easy but expects people to be some level of decent.

The duty finder does allow for a certain level of anonymity and for people to be mean without any consequences since chances are you never see those people again; but you could say that about the internet as a whole.
I think part of it is the ease of the game, in some of the older more "hardcore" games had more barriers between the player and endgame and would filter out some of the less mature players.

At the same time, certain content break the learning curve (e.g. titan) and don't serve as a barrier because people can be carried through with little trouble.

It's not WoW players; FFXI was full of players like this too. Some people have low self-esteem and need to take it out on others, unfortunately.

the difference was in XI and WoW I had maybe 5-10 people on my blacklist. in XIV I have closer 60 without counting RMT bots. Maybe I've lost all patience for stupidity at my ripe old age of 22, but there is certainly something in the water here that makes everyone awful.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Xerukm

Seriously, what happened?

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Hello Xerum.

I don't know if you'll ever read this and I didn't check the other pages so excuse me if I'm repeating something that was already mentioned.

In 1.X the community was small, so small that if a player would act like a douchebag the remaining players would punish him by not playing with him.
Meaning that player would not be able to do the Hlvl content of the game.

Also everyone knew everyone in those small comunities and that made them friends, that's why lots of v1.x player still stick together.


Now it's different, there are so many players that if you don't friendlist someone you might actually never see him again.
And that's exactly why people are more toxic now, they don't care for eachother since it won't affect their game experience.

Also wow players /joke

PS: this has absolutelly nothing to do with the game not being like XI or not being like XIV 1.X, it's purelly a community toxic phenomena.

I suppose we can sum up the reason why this and many internet community groups, in gaming and pretty much anything popular tends to get toxic in two words.

Disposable People.


We're free to spew whatever bile and arguments we want because we don't care about the person across from us. By many people's concern they'll likely never play with that individual anyways and even if they did, there are hundred of thousands or even potentially millions, depending on the context, that you can simply replace them with, and find people with your own particular sensibilities, no matter how fringe they are in truth.

This creates little pockets of clique like echo chambers where people pad one another's egos. They're never faced with the reality of consequence because they can simply discard that grouping for another that suits them better. There's little to no actual investment in a community of faceless individuals who in can in no way affect your life aside from an argument

Therefore, everyone here has no tangible worth, aside from the worth another imparts upon them. Apathy and the way of the Sociopath are encouraged in such environments. And with little fear of swift retribution or consequence due to a business-centered enforcement policy, there's literally nothing preventing us from treating each other as exactly what we are to one another: Disposable People.

There isn't enough accountability. Negative behaviors don't get punished, and so they continue.

Squenix establishing a real GM presence in this game would be a great start to remedying this, but that would require money which they don't have or don't want to spend. And ideally they should ban the worst offenders in order to make the community better, but that would result in a loss of revenue. So I don't really expect this to happen.

It's the same reason that McDonald's has a different crowd than a nice French restaurant. When you cater to the masses, you get the masses.

Ever shopped at Whole Foods... and then Wal-Mart? Much different.

People blame WoW players... but that's not true... WoW was the first successful mass marketed game... now that this game uses the same strategy - it gets the same type of players. That's not WoW's fault.

A couple of people have hit the nail on the head here- there's just no accountability for players being jerks. And the reason, in my eyes, is XIV's overdependence on cross-server interaction. If content was at least limited to the server, you could avoid players that are toxic and eventually enough of the server will shun them that they'll get the message. But with so much cross-server content, there's far too little punishment for people who abuse their position/kickpower/gearentitlement/etc, nobody ever really has any consequences for the actions they take.

My biggest advice? Make a linkshell, and when you find somebody on your server you enjoy playing with, ask them if they want to join. In my experience they do, and now I've got a fairly stable base of cool players on my server that I can run dungeons or coil with.

The community became toxic in my opinion due to the design of the game. This game frustrate players, the lockout system, the extreme grind, many quests, primals mechanic, lag just lead people to be less and less forgiving because everyone doesnt wanna waste time.

It might sound stupid but people usually rage and lose their patience because the game itself leads you into a stupid grind/time sink, on repetitive content, with all the major problems we all know. Coil lockout on job and class was one of the most stupid thing they did, second was the myth/phylo/soldiery lockout. You should never limit any kind of player to play the game.

my2cents

I think the real toxicity comes from the fact that SE is fairly catering to the casuals AND the hardcores. Every other patch is meant to cater to one or the other: 2.1 was casual and 2.2 was hardcore.

This naturally polarizes the community into two camps that will constantly be at each other's throats. Like right now all of the casuals are complaining about Atma farming and the best gear being in Coil. Next patch, all of the hardcores are going to complain about SE going "backwards" and being bored because they finished everything.