What happened to players?

[Altheras]

One thing to keep in mind is we have a lot of FF players just now trying FFXIV who never tried FFXI and who have never played any other MMO. I've run into quite a few of them. They have that solo gamer mentality and they are used to dealing with NPCs rather than real people, which doesn't help matters at all.

Also, I see FAR too many people blaming WoW for all the problems in this community. The truth is, you can't blame WoW as a game, but more accurately you CAN blame the 'random dungeon finder' system introduced in WoW in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, which has since seemingly become the norm across most MMOs released since.

Before the dungeon finder was added, you had to form a group of people on your own server, walk to the dungeon together, and then do the dungeon with these people from your own server. There was no anonymity. Instead, people made lasting friendships and got to know people. If you played on a Normal or RP server the instances of people being total jerks was relatively low. I can't really speak for the mentality on PvP servers as we know what sort of attitude open world PvP games attract. Still, I have to say that WoW used to have a great community, and now it doesn't. Modern WoW and the dungeon finder killed its own community. :/ The situation was made even worse when they added the 'Raid Finder'. Before it, even though you could do randoms with 5 man dungeons, you still had to look to the community on your own server for raiding and end game content.

I know we do have a lot of WoW players on this game, but the majority of the 'now now now' crowd just stayed on WoW. Most of them did not subscribe. Most of those people who are here from WoW probably came here hoping for a better community, as well as a ton of people from FFXI who also came here hunting for the kind of community they were used to on FFXI.

I think the real key to building a community we can be proud of, is to slowly weed out those with bad attitudes. Don't play with them, don't help them finish dungeons, and join linkshells and FCs with positive attitudes. Over time the good groups with decent people will grow stronger and slowly but surely the elitist people with bad attitudes will find themselves more and more isolated, forced to play with only like minded individuals. I've already seen the number of bad attitudes take a serious nose dive now that the free trials have all run out. I think with 2.1 and 2.2 adding even more to do, that less people will be bored, and thus have better attitudes. A lot of people can be real jerks when they're bored.

If you aren't enjoying something because of someone else, black list them. If they are in a random group, leave the group, they'll be forced to find someone else, or maybe no one at all. If enough nice people take a stand and stop playing with those who have bad attitudes, then they'll either realize that maybe they do need to respect others, or eventually quit because they have no friends, no one wants to help them with anything, and they aren't having any fun.

I believe that with time and effort we can make this a good community, we just have to have patience, and give the game time to grow and add new features to duty finder and other things that help build community and increase accountability.
We are the community. Each and every one of us. Only we can make it what we want it to be.