I think a lot of the rose-colored glasses come from people that never or rarely saw the worst of the worst that FFXI had to offer. Most people in FFXI stuck to the level treadmill. In there you might run into the occasional princess BRD who would bail on a party that wasn't performing to their demands, or maybe getting booted as a DRG for not having a Scorpion Harness yet, some elitist mentality that seeped down.

If you really wanted to see toxic, you needed to be at the competitive end of content, particularly endgame. People organizing Dynamis shells and splitting with millions of gil worth of currency, LS leaders raiding banks, having to have an extra party at fafhoggs spawn to deal with repeated mpk attempts with darters if you got claim, rampant bot use, rival shells trying to steal your pop any way they could... It was at least as disgusting as anything i have seen in this game, and often moreso. One thing that will always stick with me and the reason why I will always scoff at anyone saying that FFXIs community was so much better; my LS was in the process of killing Fafnir, while a rival LS taunted us and were trying to steal claim. my LS leader said something along the lines you guys might want to watch it we already called a GM, and a member of the other LS said he might want to watch as he skull-****ed his mother.

This community is no better, and certainly no worse.

The big thing about XIV is that with the treadmill so short, the hardcore and the not hardcore are colliding far more than they did in older MMOs, and the mentality is coming as a shock to a lot of people.