How did the community become this toxic?

[Kadrothan]

After over 12 years of MMOs, I noticed that there is an ever increasing number of "toxic players" in all MMOs. It's not just contained between FFXIV and WoW. Less courtesy, less consideration for other players, more bashing of anyone who isn't spot on perfect in their dungeon run/raid, etc. However, there are still some really cool people playing. You just have to be patient enough to find said people.

In reference to WoW pvp, I remember before Alterac Valley when our server used South Shore as an unofficial pvp arena. All it would take was for one side to get ganked one too many times while hunting and the whole area would grow into an all out battle from both sides.

[Arkune]

Here is one big reason that's killing it for me, FFXI was all about being geared, this game is becoming the same thing, You are after better gear that is your focus and less story line and quest to progress.

Well no lol, gear wasnt all in XI, the Endgame Linkshells helped u to Gear up even Years after the release of ZM and CoP they rushed you trough the Mission Content to get acces to Sky and Sea. Sure there where Linkshells they were asking for Acces to Sky/Sea and different Jobs but not every Linkshell had that high Gear required to join Status out there. You could have Tanked with the Crafted Gear + AF 1 near every Single Boss Encounter (expect some Special ones) it was hard but possible. Gear only made the fights easier for every class. Here some examples:

DD's better Gear means Higher WS damage + Skill Chain Damage
Black Mages better Gear means Higher Magic Damage + Magic Burst
Tanks better Gear means higher Block,Selfheal and faster Ninjutsu casts and more HP which means Higher damage with Spritis Within
etc..

face the fact take a PLD with AF to Titan HM and he will suffer so much damage or probably get oneshottet by the game Mechanics lol

Back to Topic: Vertical Progression and Ilevels plus the fact that the economy died with the housing Prices force People to farm Money from other Players and use the fact that they maybe dont suffer under lag Spikes and can kill them easily and ilevel creates Elitism.

[Tashigi]

Seriously, what happened?

Approximately 5 million years ago, humans happened.

[Synestra]

[spoiler]Turns out humans were the real monsters all along.[/spoiler]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hsDn2kNriI

Yup.

[DubstepNinja]

Looking forward to playing with people from Colorado on the duty finder over the next few months.

Those should be some fairly chillaxed funny and enjoyable runs.

[synaesthetic]

A few things. Editing my reply to fit them all in.

Ah, there we go. Time to be as long-winded as I wish! Take that, arbitrary posting limitations!

The economic issues are something all of us are familiar with and the causes are not quite as obvious as people would think. Yes, part of the issue why everything is so worthless is because everything is worthless. Relic weapons, dungeon drops, raid loot and token gear (darklight and AF2) are equal to/better than five-melded two-star crafted gear.

People get the crafted stuff made to gear alt jobs, or to fill spots when stuff doesn't drop, or to make minor tweaks to their attributes--I recently had our company crafter make me a pair of rose gold earrings, which I melded to replace darklight and gain a modest boost of critical hit rating and determination.

The philosophy tome materials are so cheap now because the roulette and LotA are flooding people with philosophy tomes they have no real use for. Most people either have all the darklight gear they'd ever want and/or have no interest in buying more. These tomes would otherwise go to waste, so people use them to buy potash, coke and animal fat, then put that stuff up on the market boards. The supply far, far outstrips the demand and thus the prices plummet.

There aren't many worthwhile things to sell on the market and what good markets there are quickly are crashed by a combination of a design flaw in the system (I'll explain this later), the concerted efforts of Real-Money Traders (RMT) to intentionally sink any given market and the sheer ignorance of players who do not understand economics and just want to get money ASAP.

Why the RMTs want to crash markets should be obvious, and it is twofold. They play the market, methodically undercutting in order to bring the average prices down very, very low, and then they buy up all of the supply and re-list it for a profit. This also has the added effect of creating more customers for the RMTs themselves--if nobody can make money off the market, then more people will be more likely to convert real money into fake money.

The real problem--and why all of these things save for the "worthwhile" issue can happen at all--is that the market board system has a serious fundamental design flaw:

There are no listing fees.

It really is that simple. The market system charges a tax after a sale is made to function as a currency sink, but the system does not charge you to list an item and you are only charged if your item sells. Worse still, the system allows you to freely alter the price of your item without removing it and re-listing!

This system is broken and it should be clear as to why. Without listing fees, when a new seller posts an item, it's very easy to undercut them. This leads to rampant, unchecked undercutting--and most players aren't especially smart about undercutting and tend to slice off huge chunks of their buy prices in order to sell as quickly as they can.

Fixing the economy completely would require making trade goods that were actually worthwhile, of course, but listing fees would go a long, long way to stabilizing the economy and allowing players to make money (assuming they had something worth selling).

The revised system would work like this: when a player lists an item on the market board, they would be charged a fee equal to 2% of the list price. This fee would be completely non-refundable--that gil would be gone forever. When the item sold, the tax would be levied less the listing fee. If the item did not sell, the tax would not be charged. Every time the player changed the price of the item, another 2% fee would be charged, just as if they were re-listing the item.

Two percent isn't a whole lot, but it adds up, especially for those people who undercut their items multiple times per day. By charging that fee, players would be loathe to change the price of their item more than a few times at most. The markets would stabilize as a result. Additionally, the RMTs would find their efforts to crash the market stymied. Further additionally, this would be a far more effective currency sink than those hilariously stratospheric Free Company housing prices! Consider just how many transactions take place on the market boards on a daily basis... then compare that to how many plots have actually been purchased.

Now, the "raid carries" thing is a thing in every MMO where there is an endgame. It just happens, especially in games where there is a specific bottleneck fight that prevents players from accessing content--Titan HM is a very good example of this because it's an encounter that requires a considerable amount of practice in order to complete successfully. Raiding guilds will generally do something like this as a method of making money for the guild. Many guilds in World of Warcraft and HM statics in TERA would do this often--people would buy rights to certain loot and they'd come along on the runs to pick it up (though TERA further facilitated this by making almost everything a trade good and not bind on acquire).

I don't see why selling a service like help with Titan HM would ever be a bad thing. It's a good thing and to be honest, I would start selling Titan HM runs as a service from my Free Company if we weren't completely cursed when it comes to Titan HM! (Seriously, we can one-shot Coil up to T5, but we'll wipe for hours on Titan HM due to random derp.) You're going to see a lot more Titan HM runs and raid loot runs being sold by endgame FCs as more and more of them get the existing content on farm status, especially considering the absurd housing prices.

It's actually more presumptuous to expect that experienced raid statics would voluntarily help random people with Titan HM--even though some FCs actually do that. I know that on my server, Blacklisted was handing out free Titan HM kills. Speaking as someone who has done Titan HM so many times I see his rotation in my dreams (seriously), I wouldn't put my company members in a group to help some random I've never met to carry them through a kill.

My company and I spent a few weeks bashing our heads against Titan HM until we finally got it down. Then for weeks after we fed other members through the meat grinder until we had enough people with relics and Coil access to really start working on the harder raid content. This was the result of concerted effort from the most active members of the company; it's not something we would do for no particular gain. We gave out "carries" to newer members in order to get them into Coil, so we could have people to fill out our second static and to have enough "floaters" to ensure we didn't have to bring in randoms or call runs off. So if some random came to me and asked my company to help them with Titan HM, I would not have any particular issue with charging them for our time and knowledge.

So yeah. Long-winded post, but I think I hit most of the issues the OP brought up.

[Lumiin]

Ugh, the community is not toxic because people are selling stuff ._. gesh

I just started doing my first relic today and everyone that helped me, every single person, were people that did not need it. They were all random people that just wanted to help.

Sounds like a real toxic community to me /sarcasm.

[Raminax]

Rawr

Implying Metzen's desire to rewrite and retcon lore is a new thing.

As for why humans suck/communities will always have some bad apples... (My opinions, at least)

You're rarely, if ever, held accountable for your actions. I'm honestly not sure if the few jerks I've reported ever got banned... and if it was any significant amount of time, either. Heck, just the fact that people need investigation so there aren't unjustified bans flying all over the place means that by the time offenders actually get banned, they'll already have forgotten why they got banned. Human memory is shit in that sense, most sure as hell aren't going to remember what they did two weeks ago that got them punished. Most jerks are also narcissistic to such a degree that standing up against them and calling them out on their behaviour rarely works, either (in my experience).

On the same topic, anonymity, which further problematizes the issue. If you really want to, you can level up everything yourself to not bother relying on others. Together with the Duty Finder, the chance that you end up playing with people on your own World is very slim. Again, there's barely any reputation to maintain because of cross-server technology, because you'll be getting to play all the group content regardless. I'm not saying that everyone needs to be a messiah, but if one could at least prove to be reliable and friendly, you'd be sure to make some new friends down the road which you could play with for a few dungeons or raids... which happened to kinda be a requirement back then. Yes, even in WoW, gosh, that cancerous game. *cough*

MMOs have also become far more difficult compared to back then. Yes, one could argue that hardships through requiring days of grinding for a single level and camping the same spawning spot for hours was difficult in a sense, but it's an entirely different climate now. Quick reactions, extensive knowledge of your character and gearing options and so on means that people have different standards now, which may or may not turn ugly depending on the person. It doesn't matter what you play, you being bad will have an effect on the group's performance, which will eventually upset even the most patient people when you're regularly jeopardizing their success. Comparing Molten Core to stuff like The Throne of Thunder, you could have half your raid consist of lazy pillocks who hadn't farmed their Fire Resistance gear, yet succeed. Now a single DPS dying on Heroic Lei Shen more or less means you can wipe. And of course, the chance of encountering a quality player who wants to take the gamble of teaching someone bad in the hope that it sticks... are probably very slim. We've gone from mages simply standing around and spamming their biggest nuke to having to maintain flowcharts of varying degrees of complexity in your mind and avoiding AoEs while pushing out the highest DPS to not get the boss to enrage.

[HeroSamson]

@Arkune well I yeah of course back then the game was story driven up to 75 level, when the content was getting dry it became about getting gear but that took a very long time. SOA was released and its about getting bigger better gear to survive.

but here you are already 50 and we have to wait for content which becomes gear driven quest are all gone and once you finish gearing nothing else to do but level up another job to get gear lol

just saying

[Sunah]

You have absolutely no way of qualifying that statement and it is absurd, nobody would leave WoW to play this game anyway

Not sure if intended to be sarcastic, but I sure as hell left WoW to play this.