What happened to players?

[Ronzeru]

Lemme make it simple. People don't change. So, focus on the people with good personalities. You can't make assholes be nonassholes. Most of them came from WoW. You also have a lot that were from FFXI too. So the best thing to do instead of complaining about it, is change how you tackle dealing with them. Reach out. Make new friends. Get into a friendly FC that fits your specific personality and play style. If Pugs are a nightmare for them, it's probably best not to pug. If you must pug, then become a leader and create the pugs yourself. That way you can fine tune them, and the type that'll end up going into your personal run. Yes, you will always bump into a dick here and there. But that's no different from online than it is the real world, being as we're interacting with a large number of other human beings when it comes down to it.

[Ronzeru]

As 'oldschool saturday morning cartoon special' as this will sound.... you are the largest influence of your own experience of this game. It is what 'you' make of it. When you realize that getting agitated won't fix things for you, then perhaps its time to take another approach... take the way you deal with playing by the reigns, and make the experience the way you prefer it to be. Waiting for other people to get inline and jump on that bus is too large of a variable for you to wait for. That's my opinion on all of this.

[Tooth]

Trolling became 'cool' for teenagers.

[Ronzeru]

Trolling became 'cool' for teenagers.

[jdnyc]

MMOs became more about entertainment, than challenge.

[Altheras]

Here's a question for you guys:

Is there demand for a nice-people-only linkshell/FC or even an unofficial server for those of us who want to make sure to play with genuinely nice people? I'm looking at free server transfers and it's tempting to get this going...

I have a nice people only Linkshell on Midgardsormr. It's called Shinies! =3 I will allow anybody to join and mostly everyone has been really nice. I haven't had to kick a single person yet, but trolls and people with super bad attitudes would either acclimate and learn to be nice, or be kicked. ^^

[Altheras]

Not true. Shinies! LS on Midgardsormr is full of nice folks. We pride ourselves on it. We have even been tossing around the idea of weekly cutscene runs of CM and Prae, for new folks on the server that want to run through it how it is meant to be run.

D= One of my officers beat me here. >.>

[Eekiki]

D= One of my officers beat me here. >.>

They must be punished!

[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.

[Kantide]

^ This. My company is founded on the principle of politeness and remains to be a driving force in what we do on hyperion. If we can all keep the good players away from those who are rude and impatient, they will slowly leave. We can never be rid of them however we all can mitigate the damage they can do and a lot of them feed off of reactions from others.