Quote Originally Posted by Quanta View Post
The problem with FFXI is that the "You need this quality of gear to participate" rule applied to everything you did in that game when really it should have only applied to dungeons, raids, and end-game crafting. Expecting a Hauby or Kote or a Purple/Brown Belt or whatever else from someone is appropriate when the content you're planning to tackle requires that kind of gear, but hunting crabs for experience/merit points should not have been a part of that, and was terrible design on SE's part.
But exp party efficiency was almost as reliant on gear as BCNMs and end-game encounters. If you brought poor gear, the performance of the party was directly affected negatively and I think it's extremely unfair for someone to expect others with significantly better gear to carry them. You simply have no right to leech other people's exp. A lot of people like to demonize demanding people as elitist pricks when in reality it's the complete opposite: those elitists simply want to make sure they aren't slowing down their peers by showing up unprepared.

Those same rural villages can be equally as terrible as the people in a bustling metropolis simply because of their own social norms shunning, excluding, or outright driving people out of their communities due to differences in opinion, religion, music, sexual orientation, and all that other lovely shit that can make conversations at the dinner table unpleasant. They're also just as willing to shelter assholes so long as the asshole is recognized as "one of their own", because it's okay to hate or be intolerant of others so long as you share the same tastes in music. Don't try to paint them as perfect little slices of heaven, because they're just as flawed and fucked up as the rest of society.
The only instances of driving people out of communities I ever witnessed in FFXI were when someone would repeatedly burn all bridges available to them. We had some of those and they pretty much got what they deserved as far as treatment from the rest of the community goes. In WoW you can pull this type of shit with no fear of repercussion.