Well, I don't really have a story of my own to tell, because..seriously, if you are too ashamed to tell your gamer friends which game you play just because you could be harrassed for it, you either need to man up or just find real friends o,O

But I really noticed how bad reviews influenced the reputation of FFXIV, even a year after release (and after all those great changes we got).
A little while ago I was talking to a friend about it, tryin to convince her to try it out.
I was all hyped up about all the great stuff we got with patch 1.18 and 1.19 and I told her about all the fun things and awesome stuff she could do if she joined us (me and another friend who are playing FFXIV) and somewhere in between, I guess the sentence "Oh, and the graphics are way more beautiful than in WoW." slipped out.
As if she had waited for me to say that, suddenly she started talking about how she would never try such a bad game of which the only good aspect is the graphics, that she is not playing a game to look at pretty scenery but to DO stuff and that's impossible in FFXIV, bla bla bla.
I went like: "Erm..okay, I just told you about all the stuff you can do, it's not like it's just beautiful and nothing else. Why do you think so?"
So she told me how she read reviews about it saying SE only concentrated on graphics when they made it and everything else is just horrible.
She didn't care that those reviews were outdated, about all the stuff I explained to her, FFXIV was just a really bad game to her for no other reason but some old reviews.
It even went es far as to her calling me a "graphics whore" so..we kind of had a fight about it x)
Needless to say, she refused to at least try it out.

Haha, I told a story of my own after all
But I wouldn't call it "pressure".
But I really hate the stubborness of many people.
If you look at comments on youtube or websites about gaming, everyone has a mindset along the lines of "Even if FFXIV becomes the best MMO one day, I'm still not gonna try it."