The Community Is Fine - people are not perfect, neither are you

Too many threads are being are commenting on the "toxicity" of ARR's community, too many posts about experiences with individuals who were anti-social with exclamations that these singular happenings spell the downfall of everything.

This community is the exact same as every single commercial game ever made. There are "decent" people, and "bad apples", and the reason these are in quotation marks is these people are largely one and the same.

Yes, there are some who are constant days of sunlight.
Yes, there are those who lure storm clouds wherever they go.

But the vast majority are just normal people, people who have good days and bad.

I've been gaming for 20 years, from child to adult, and every single online community has been the same.

There's no difference between CoD or Battlefield
There's no difference between Dota or League
There's no difference between ARR and any other MMO out there

If you think there is you're one if a few things:

Deluded
Extremely unlucky (an outlier)
Ignoring the good and focusing on the bad
One of the extremes

Remember folks: bump into a jerk in the morning, you bumped into a jerk; bump into jerks all day, you're the jerk.

What always amuses me is the belief that there needs to be a reason to be nice to someone. You should never need a reason to be nice to someone. You should, however, always have a really, really, really good reason why you aren't.

"You're not stuck in traffic, you ARE traffic"

i do believe people are alot ruder, obnoxious and generally d-baggier in xiv than when i played XI 2005-2008

Completely agree! I do think it's more common to run into people acting badly now, but I attribute that to there being more people in general playing (which isn't a bad thing). So there's more bad, and more good... and as far as personal experience goes, I've not ran into too many bad in this game (we're not counting the forums).

I think the problem is that just like with RNG, the bad times stick out more than the good. So that one icky person you run into is memorable, while the 8 runs you did without an icky person aren't as likely to stick in your memory.

Exactly Sunarie, people remeber/report the bad much more often than the good. It's just how humans tend to operate.

The true nature of people will not change.

However, there are certain measures you can take to prevent the 'bad apples' from being as bad. If a player knows he will get nowhere with endgame if he is rude/hostile toward everyone he meets, he'll be less likely to tell people off. A viable "Vote Kick" option would prevent jerks who cannot be punished from leeching DF runs while insulting people in /p and telling them to 'carry you'.

I do not think this community is any better or worse than real life -- but there are zero measures to keep the jerks at bay. We're on the internet, and with that certain level of anonymity is a lack of accountability. People who are selfish or uncaring will act in the most selfish way if they are able. Nice people will be nice no matter what.

In games that have countermeasures against rude players, you will see less hostile activity. The 'punishment' for being rude is an active deterrent, much like the threat of the law in real life. Right now, Square Enix is way too occupied with other issues to be worrying about the woes of the community. This is where that toxicity comes from. People are people, but if we are being realistic... these preventative measures MUST be implemented.

i think game addiction has taken over a lot of people and made them general angry people... have to agree with everything you're saying though, it's not just online games it's the world... you meet bad people, unhappy people, miserable people everyday but do we remember these and moan about them? not really we get over it so why don't people just do the same on games ignore the miserable/moaning people orrr just be really nice to them and that will make them worse (you'll get a thrill from this)

JP community IS fine, but English community IS NOT fine.

I would have already quit this game ages ago if there is no JP community.
Imagine I can only party with *English players in this game. Ew! Disgusting!
*Again, most of them are rude, arrogant but not all of them*

Someone out there thinks you are the jerk. ^^ ahhhh.. I love people, so complex and wonderful.