What is up with this toxic community

[MiaGrey]

I've posted a few time here about the in game community and culture. People get pretty touchy when you start comparing this game to its predecessors (XI, UO, EQ).

You have a lot of people who take any criticism of this game personally - as tho they're insulted by proxy because they enjoy it.

I posted fairly recently and so most of the comments on my thread (complaining about the lack/quality of community in XIV) were negative and to the tune of "if you don't like it here leave".

Well I did some digging and found a thread from years ago which brought up the same issue as mine did but it was full of positive feedback from fellow XI/UO/EQ players. The only thing I could conclude is that all those old XI players have abandoned the forums or quit the game.

Further forum crawling just turned up even worse news, I started seeing posts by people who had been active on the forums for long periods of time commenting to the effect of: "The devs never reply to these types of threads regardless of how much activity they have - they only ever comment on feature requests like new minions."

That was hard to read because I knew it was true having crawled a ton of those threads. There is seemingly no acknowledgment from anyone on the other end that this is even a problem.

There are so many things hindering the in game community - we can all debate on which mechanics specifically need to be modified but it seems even getting a consensus on whether or not there is a problem is a struggle.

I really wish I could know what their reasoning is. Is it true that long-term / hardcore players (or however you'd want to classify the XI/EQ/UO folks) are really the smaller pool? If so by how much... I mean, most of the people I'm aware of have been playing XIV for years now, would they really have left / not played if the game was slightly harder and slower paced? Ok so you're pulling from WoW's player base because why? You figure there's only X amount of MMO players and you have to poach from the competition? I suppose, maybe they know something I don't. I always figured if you built an amazing game people would play it - i.e. UO/XI/EQ.

I understand that those games weren't for everyone - but I feel like there are several options for people who want to just chill after work. The whole point of doing this thing online IS THE COMMUNITY? Right? Why not just play an RPG or GTA or some FPS? I mean, treating an MMO like this where everything is instanced with people you never see again and everything except end-game grinding is made solo-able, I honestly have to ask, why is this even online - is the "community" truly nothing more than RP/ERP hook up channels and "glamour" compliment fishing in town?

I predict it's only going to get worse, there seems to be no player consensus on this forum that there is even a problem and in the rare cases where there is there's no acknowledgement from the devs.

I'm a little salty about this if you can't tell.
I realize there are other game on the market that are harder and more closely resemble the older MMO's but they're not as pretty, they don't have Mithra's... I mean 90% of why I played XI vs. anything on the market at the time was because of it's art direction, ditto XIV...

I'm only here playing this because there is no alternative at the moment. Maybe there never will be again. Maybe it will have to wait until a smaller company willing to take risks can enter the market with mainstream graphics before this genre gets shaken up and pushed into the next gen.

[Magic-Mal]

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There's.. not really anything FFXIV can do to fix that "issue". Really. The issue, at its core is that FFXIV isn't FFXI and that can't be fixed unless Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Re-Reborn is created or a FFXVII is like FFXI. Almost anything from XI will probably kill FFXIV or be viewed badly. Such as no teleporting or waiting for a boat.

That will not fly in XIV. Truly... the best advice someone could give is to just not play XIV. It's like being upset that Destiny isn't like Call of Duty. What can the makers do?


Also... Mithras aren't in XIV either : P. We have Miqo'tes! Different!

[MiaGrey]

There's.. not really anything FFXIV can do to fix that "issue". Really. The issue, at its core is that FFXIV isn't FFXI and that can't be fixed unless Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Re-Reborn is created or a FFXVII is like FFXI. Almost anything from XI will probably kill FFXIV or be viewed badly. Such as no teleporting or waiting for a boat.

That will not fly in XIV. Truly... the best advice someone could give is to just not play XIV. It's like being upset that Destiny isn't like Call of Duty. What can the makers do?


Also... Mithras aren't in XIV either : P. We have Miqo'tes! Different!

I don't understand the rush to hyperbole "anything from XI will probably kill FFXIV".

Based on what? UO, XI, & EQ were all wildly popular and successful games.

Everyone is making this MASSIVE assumption that the decision by SE to not use XI’s mechanics was based on solid data. Data that presumably showed XI players were a dying breed and the only market worth pursuing is the casual, console based w/e… or the WoW demo. I simply don’t buy that. I’m sure there is some truth there justifying moderation toward more casual play but abandonment of XI/EQ mechanics?

I realize WoW has always had the larger player base and I can clearly envision the boardroom rationale as to which demo they need to be targeting. If any of you have ever spent any time in corporate America you know that these people aren’t all Steve Jobs types that have a vision and a passion for producing quality products but rather prioritize based on short terms gains whatever will look best in presentations to stakeholders. I think in some ways what Steve Jobs did with Apple in the iPod era is somewhat analogous to what needs to happen in the MMO realm - someone has to be willing to take a risk and even produce something new - something that isn’t already popular (i.e. WoW…).

Trying to make the game more appealing to a broad market (casuals) means the game will be treated like casuals treat other games - they pick them up and then leave when they’re board. Casuals don’t invest. Now we’re at the stage where the game is paying for that decision - the people who want to invest don’t have a game platform that allows for it (i.e. armor being worthless every 3 months, the whole vertical progression thing).

I’ve never advocated to recreate XI, I’ll be the first to say I wouldn’t play XI from 12 year ago today even if it existed. That’d be silly. XIV has a ton of wonderful systems and experiences that XI would benefit from.

To me it seems odd that people put so much stock in this notion that “a game like XI doesn’t exist so there clearly isn’t any demand for it”. I think there is a massive problem in most of popular media (movies, music, tv, etc.) where a the creatives aren’t producing anything anymore (i.e. most new pop songs have an average of 15 producers). The same for Hollywood, movies aren’t the vision of a single person anymore, they’re recut and remade post production by a comity of movie executives. This is happening in the game world as well, it’s stagnant everywhere not just MMO’s. There’s very little innovation in big titles - the only place I’m seeing somewhat original stuff is on the mobile platforms where smaller studios can get in.

[DPZ2]

The whole point of doing this thing online IS THE COMMUNITY? Right? Why not just play an RPG or GTA or some FPS?

There could be millions of copies of "FFXIV: The RPG" sold. I don't think that it would take that much to turn it into a single player RPG.

The problem is that the word "Massively" has changed meaning, from thousands to tens-of-thousands to hundreds-of-thousand to millions of players. Community works best in small increments -- your friends, your Free Company. Even there you will come across conflict.

People who play MMOs do so for a number of reasons -- including "I like to make other people's day feel horrible". Solo play in today's world, or small sub-group play with friends, is preferable to being actively scorned by players, regardless of reason.

Enforced group-play (aka "Main Story Quest") scares the heck out of some folks, who do just enough to get through it in order to get to the next non-group part of the story.