No Community

One place where i see SE has missed a golden opportunity is the housing wards. Sure, you might stumble upon one of your close neighbor once in a while, or one of the few RP free company on your server might host an event, but for the most part, they are deserts.

This is the place our characters are supposed to unwind and relax when they are not out saving Eorzea from the most recent menace. There are a few things that could be done to improve the activity there.

First, why not add FATEs that are non combat related (ex: Cleaning up trash, carry fireworks to start a show, cleaning the pool, etc...) that would give players housing credits they could spend to get special furniture.

Then you could add up a weekly ranking for each ward depending on how much points their occupants have won, awarding the highest ranking ward in each housing district a small banner at the entrance that would basicly say "Best Ward in Town"

Lastly, what if you could have an option to set your character in one ward, doing a certain action when you logout? It could be brooming the front of your property or appartment building, or walking around the market area shopping, or just relaxing/swimming in the pool or beach. Sure it might not create social interaction, but it would liven up otherwise empty instances.

Right now, i feel housing districts are for the most part used for three things : Cheap teleportation, Airship/Submarine voyages, and fill the decorating desires of a small proportion of the population (Im not saying its a bad thing, so dont hate me). Having a sense of belonging would help to connect with others and improve the otherwise pretty dry social community.

I'm a bit in the same boat OP.

I guess, for me, this community just doesn't 'fit' with me.

I’ve played MMO’s since around 2005, my first one was Guild Wars 1, later in 2007 I also started with World of Warcraft (those 2 are still my most played games), I have also played RIFT, Star Wars: the old Republic, The Elder Scrolls Online & Bless Online.
Destiny 1, Destiny 2 & Tom Clancy’s The Division as well (I list those separate as they are not like the traditional MMO’s but they all are online only and you also have ‘raids’ where everybody has to do certain mechanics).

In all these games I’ve had friends and/or clan or guilds. I was constantly doing group content and had a lot of fun and made some good friends.
Back in Destiny 1 I was an organizer for one of our EU divisions (we were a big international clan), I leaded 5 runs / week, sometimes joined on other organizers their run if they needed a hand and whenever there were no run or anything happening I would get frequent PM’s from people If I wanted to do stuff together.
In the other games I’ve never been in any organizer or leading position (apart from Guild Wars 1 were I was an officer in a pretty successful guild), but there was always something going on that I could join or ask others if they want to do content X or if they want to help me with something. Or just to play together just so I wasn’t alone.

I joined FF XIV pretty late, my account is back from 2013 somewhere but I only played the first month back then, then I played again for a bit in 2016 where I made a new character on the Moogle server and then finally since early 2017 until like a month ago.
Despite my weeb side being hyped by SB I really didn’t liked it and found the story so much better in HW. I finished up the HW stuff just before the EA of SB.
The start of SB was quite ok but soon after everything I was hyped about in SB was a total disaster like the swimming and diving …

Anyway, I’ve constantly read how an amazing community FF XIV has and how toxic WoW was and other game communities are but for me it’s been the total opposite. I’ve played WoW for 11 years and I have over 15K hours in it (that’s only my main) and I have 3 people on my ignore list.
I have around 2.3K hours in FF XIV and I have 80 people on my ignore list … and I cleaned it out 4 times already.

I’ve tried to join multiple FC’s but they’ve always failed, I was in a pretty decent one back at start of SB and we also raided together for like 2 weeks, but we had a few people wo were underperforming and showed no signs of improving themselves, drama started some people stopped raiding and some left and eventually the leader also stopped. The majority of my time I stayed FC-less.
I have always had a hard time finding ‘decent’ (or maybe I should say fitting) people to do stuff with, most of the people I’ve seen are the ones hanging around in Limsa 24/7 taking thousands of screenshots daily post on twitter and say ‘look how cute I am’.
That’s all nice and all but I don’t really care about that stuff.

I have one friend in the game, I’ve played with her for many months, she’s actually a bit in the same boat as me also being alone all the time in the game. And It’s because of her that I still played for so many months and we still talk on Discord.

Other ‘friends’ I had always ended up in drama fests while I’m not here for any of that. Other ‘friends’ I had were those that play 24/7 now I have a full time job, 3 hour daily commute and evening school so I can’t really play 24/7 so those end up leaving you instantly even though I’m only 4+ hours every evening.
And then lastly the other ‘friends’ I had were people I met on this very forum, they all looked nice and friendly in the beginning but not so long after they stop talking and remove you out of the blue.

So one could say I’m the ‘weird’ one and the one at fault because it happens with everybody?
But then what about the communities on those other games were I have friends and people to play with?
So it got me thinking, these communities are all very different from each other and this one just doesn’t ‘fit’ with me.
Only thing I ever wanted was a handful of friends I can do in game stuff with and some others were I can talk with or both combined even. I was wrong to think I’d find that here.
At least that’s how I think about it now.
No tl;dr version, Sorry it’s so long, I actually was surprised myself too when I finished writing this but I want to give some background info and I’ve always been bad at keeping it short.
For those who read it well nice of you. For those that didn’t well nothing I guess?
I wrote this in word so I hope my editing will not go to waste when I copy paste this.

Extra note: I obviously have a sub currently, otherwise I wouldn’t been able to talk. My account was inactive actually but when there was 1 day left on the house demolisher I got an extra month and logged back in so my house wouldn’t be gone. Not sure what I want to do with that later but at the very least I’ll check out the new expansion.

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Originally Posted by FoxPaw

I think people spend the vast majority of their "free time" in game searching for social connections because the actual game doesn’t provide any. This game is suffering from a fatal lack of community. It sought thru mechanics to empower the solo gamer and in the process precluded them of evermaking a real friend. Some of the prerequisites to a meaningful friendship are shared hardship, sacrifice, and trust - all of which have been meticulously removed from this game lest it be “too hard". I think in not forcing people to eat their veggies they've gotten fat, unhappy and restless - which does not bode well for XIV.

Edit:
A comment made by someone (Niroken) far more reasonable than myself which says it all (Page 15):

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Social activity in mmorpg's generally work off of how the game is developed, how you develop a game and it's environment will effect how the player interacts within that world. It seems SE decided to go with lower social interaction to get high accessibility, while it can turn out high sub numbers the amount of sustained gameplay is lower which is why you hear suggestions from Yoshi-P to take breaks between content. Duty Finder allows a person to easily jump into content even from a low populated server relatively easily, it comes at a cost of server options looking subpar. Easy and cheap teleportation, lack of server side content, easy FC creation, massive solo-able content, meaningless non-instanced areas (which are server confined), etc. All of those make it easier for a solo experience made bite sized which doesn't encourage social interaction.

While you may not be suggesting this but I don't think people who see less interaction in FFXIV are more anti-social, it's one of the first things I've noticed while starting this game and I don't consider myself anti-social (as I've played many, many other mmorpg's and had no problems socializing with various guilds/groups). While a great game in almost every other respect, FFXIV does have it's problems encouraging and (more importantly) maintaining social activity, which is one of the main features of a mmorpg which I don't think can be contributed merely to the modern age.

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be helpful if you could link it:

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Originally Posted by Niroken

Social activity in mmorpg's generally work off of how the game is developed, how you develop a game and it's environment will effect how the player interacts within that world. It seems SE decided to go with lower social interaction to get high accessibility, while it can turn out high sub numbers the amount of sustained gameplay is lower which is why you hear suggestions from Yoshi-P to take breaks between content. Duty Finder allows a person to easily jump into content even from a low populated server relatively easily, it comes at a cost of server options looking subpar. Easy and cheap teleportation, lack of server side content, easy FC creation, massive solo-able content, meaningless non-instanced areas (which are server confined), etc. All of those make it easier for a solo experience made bite sized which doesn't encourage social interaction.

While you may not be suggesting this but I don't think people who see less interaction in FFXIV are more anti-social, it's one of the first things I've noticed while starting this game and I don't consider myself anti-social (as I've played many, many other mmorpg's and had no problems socializing with various guilds/groups). While a great game in almost every other respect, FFXIV does have it's problems encouraging and (more importantly) maintaining social activity, which is one of the main features of a mmorpg which I don't think can be contributed merely to the modern age.

Character limitations is dumb, SE. Let me write my novel.

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Anyways I been looking over that one housing purge thing and I just got to say this. People seem to have a soloist mentality over a group one. I am not sure if it is more to blame of a target audience thing or just flaws in design. I will say this though, I found the idea of encouraging people to have their own solo FC because you gain more gil that way over having a personal house and a real FC group a bit absurd. So what determines what select few can have their solo FC house? luck? luck in beating the disconnect when servers go live with their new wards? I do not get the mentality behind only yourself matters. Why have a core design on the idea of a "solo one player game that you happen to need the internet to connect with others and sometimes do things with other people? If the idea was to have tons of solo fcs, why does it require 4 people to do shop projects and 4 people to make the fc to begin with?

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Originally Posted by Fhaerron

Anyway, I’ve constantly read how an amazing community FF XIV has and how toxic WoW was and other game communities are but for me it’s been the total opposite. I’ve played WoW for 11 years and I have over 15K hours in it (that’s only my main) and I have 3 people on my ignore list.
I have around 2.3K hours in FF XIV and I have 80 people on my ignore list … and I cleaned it out 4 times already.

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Yeah I do not get it, I asked that very question in the tales of the duty finder thread because of a story I was just told today. "I am not healing the group because someone pointed out how I am not doing anything on trash pulls" makes sense.

I need to ask, where did this idea originate? just seems like some false rumor. I mean I was also just in a thread on what I hope to be a compilation list of good ideas to consider changing to the game and i left out of the hostility from the topic creator.

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Originally Posted by Omegabear

That's a commonly recycled sentence that I see every now and then. I have a healthy circle of friends, and they are nothing like the general MMO community. They are mature, patient and pleasant to converse with. Even when we can't see each other as often now that we're all married, we stay in touch very often and it's as if we still hang out often.

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This where I'm at. I'm not here to develop a lot of friendships as I have plenty of those and family in RL. We did have a small family and friends guild on WoW but none of us has been on for a couple of years. Another reason I don't care to look being an older person with grandchildren I don't feel like spending hour after hour hunting down folks also at my stage in life so we have something in common. The game does a good job of supporting me to play mostly solo and to find groups when needed.

As to the discussions about discord and other outside game communication methods ruyining in game chat. To that I say I like it. I don't have my chat filled with inane comments and bad attempts at trolling. Instead it contains things like how/where/what do I do questions, world boss positions or folks asking for open world help and all easily seen because of the lack of clutter.

just want to throw in I'm a lot like many others, played a little years ago and only recently started to get back into it on a serious level and really dont know for how much longer...

It's not uncommon for me to die during a boss fight and never be revived purposely, because I don't understand the boss mechanics, because nobody explains anything or talks at all.

It's honestly hard to even think of think as an MMO with how dead the community seems to be, even toxic at best making fun of new players for asking questions on dungeons and boss fights.