What is up with this toxic community

[Amariel34]

It all comes down to the individual. If they're a jerk in real life, they're much much worse online cause there are no real consequences for their behavior. If it's people on your server, just black list and move on. I've had to shut off pretty much all chat channels when I play cause people were being annoying. Spamming emotes, bots in /say, people being jackasses in /shout. I just wish we could blacklist while in cross-server dungeons. I seem to end up with two or three people that LOVE to spam those macros that look like pictures, and it's not a good idea to turn off party and alliance chat.

[ValarianHeartbreaker]

I'll join my voice others that have mentioned that the increase in toxicity is probably due to the influx of WoW players coming here, since WoW pretty much sucks atm, they've been looking for something else to complain about, heard FFXIV was good, and they brought the Cartman attitude with them.

[Kallera]

Defensive behavior, or at least a good chunk of it, comes from people wanting to justify the time and money they spent on the MMORPG. The content and systems of an MMORPG are set up to build an addiction, because it is the addiction that keeps the person playing and paying, not necessarily wether content is fun or repeatable... It honestly makes me wonder if some poor gaffes by cartain game developers are intentionally done to justify future decisions. In many other genres, they'd just be bad game design decisions and unneeded tedium that take away from the game being fun.

The decision to make 2.x and 3.x mandatory (unless cash) isn't just out of storyline continuity, There are a lot of quests to do, and a person getting to heavensward at that point will have "a lot to lose" in terms of time and effort.

[Aldora]

I’ve said the following in a couple of different threads, but it still holds true to this particular discussion as well:

The bottom line is that when you are playing a game with other people (like FFXIV), you are actually playing with other people. Everyone has a different kind of skill set, certain amount of experience, etc which might not be similar to your own.

However, since you group up to tackle different kinds of content, you are asked to work together as a Team in order to complete the said task, like for instance clearing a Dungeon. When you are working as a Team, you should look out for each other so that everyone crosses the finish line together.

I read a lot of things like:

• If you don’t keep up, you suck
• Healer: If you don’t wait for me (to finish my buffs), i’ll let you die
• Healer: If you don’t pull less, i’ll let you die
• Tank: If you pull ahead of me, i won’t take the monster off you (and let you die)
• Tank: I keep pulling multiple packs. If you can’t keep me alive, you suck
• Healer/DPS: If you don’t pull more, i’ll pull more for you
• If you don’t switch to DPS stance (referring to Tank and Healer), you suck
• Etc

All of these comments display the wrong kind of attitude when you are playing with other people as a team. It doesn’t really matter if someone is faster than you or even not as fast as you. If they are as skilled as you or not as skilled as you.

Most of the comments i read are rather “self centered” and lack team spirit. Even if only 1 person can’t keep up with the rest of the group, that single person is just as valuable to the team then the rest.

As a member of a team, you are expected to do your job to the best of your abilities. Some people work better under pressure and improve faster when placed in stressful situations, but not everyone will be able to. There are plenty of people who will panic in situations like that, or simply won’t be able to function properly.

That doesn’t necessarily make them a bad player. They might need more time and less stressful situations in order to “blossom”. They may even need a guiding hand in order to teach them things they didn’t manage to figure out themselves.

Which brings us to the next point. When reading comments on the forums, it’s pretty plain to see that we (as in the general populous) are unable to properly communicate with each other. We call each other “trolls”, slap each other in the face with insult, aren’t open to suggestions or even in some cases able to properly phrase a suggestion so that it won't “feel” like it’s “forced upon them”. We take offense to almost anything, take things personal and react rudely to things that don’t go the way we want them to go. We don’t have any patience and insult people/kick players/vote abandon at the first sign of mistakes or even a wipe.



It seems that it’s hard to find a sense of (team) effort, camaraderie, community, support and most of all fun in the things we do as a group. Apparently we don’t see games as a form of relaxation anymore, but a competition or a job.

Perhaps it’s time for us as players to take a good look at ourselves and wonder how we got to this point and how we (as human beings) can change that.

I mean, taking things down a notch to ensure that the entire group makes it through the duty will feel a lot better then rushing towards the end and be frustrated about the amount of damage the group does or the amount of deaths/wipes we faced during the said duty. If you see someone struggle, why throw insults? Why not talk about it and try to help instead?

Sure, not everyone listens. There are bad apples in every community, but for every bad apple there are a hell of a lot more apples that make a pretty damn fine juice when mixed together. Aren’t we all thirsty and crave for such a juice?

Just, don’t go fight fire with fire. You’ll only going to get yourself burned in the process.

Sometimes, mostly when reading threads like this or the “Tales from Duty Finder: Some make you laugh, some make you cry. Let's vent.”-thread, i think to myself: “Why is it that we can’t simply work together when playing this game?” Is it really that hard to talk to one another, relax and play with each other, rather than “jumping at each other's throats”?

As people, we should be able to respect that try to work with them nonetheless. I believe that this is where the main problem lies. We want others to adjust to us, rather than adjust ourselves to others.

One of the arguments used, would be “One most adjust themselves to the majority of the group”. However, this is only true to the extend that everyone can follow suit. When you are running “group content” (like Dungeons) in Final Fantasy XIV, you are asked to work together as a Team in order to complete the said task. This also means that you look out for each other.

You are all in this together. The most important thing about working together, is communicating with each other. And by that, i mean come to a mutual agreement and taking every member in the party into consideration (even the members who are struggling to keep up).

However, this also means that you have to put your best foot forward and give it your all. Put all of your skills to the test and try to improve yourself as well. You can only improve, if you strive to be better with each attempt. After a while you will notice that you will have less trouble keeping hate, or keeping the tank alive during bigger pulls.

“You can’t advance by standing still.”

However, people nowadays want “insurance”. Insurance that they will clear the content they are queuing up for, by demanding others to know the duty inside out, match a certain level of DPS and have the gear to show for it. They want to skip mechanics and burn down their target, so that they don’t have to deal with mechanics that will kill a group if 1 or 2 people were to make a mistake. Some of them are obsessed with performing at optimal levels of DPS, that they require others to perform at the same level as they are. Even if they are less experienced within the game.

To me, that’s a backwards way of thinking. As a group, you need to be able to be prepared for anything the encounter throws at you. This means knowing all of the mechanics of the encounter itself and handling them accordingly. You have to be prepared that the worst possible situation can occur during the encounter, so that you can see it coming and adjust so that you can prevent it from happening.

Which brings me to the point, where people would “demand” that you watch a video of the encounter before joining a group or have cleared it before. Even at day 1, when the encounter was released! That’s just plain silly...

Everyone will be new to an encounter at some point. The people who did it first, had to learn it through trial and error. So, everyone should be able to learn it the same way as the players that went before them. Some people tend to learn better and faster by making mistakes and learning from them. Plus, you don’t need to watch a video to run a dungeon. Even an Expert one.

However, there will be people who have cleared the encounter multiple times and thus want to clear it through a one-shot. At the first sign of a wipe, they would leave the encounter and queue up for again, hoping that they will find a better group (who will be able to clear it with their first try). Then you have the people who try to enter a group, with the intent of being carried towards victory, with the least amount of effort.

Those people are sitting at the extreme sides of the community and can barely be classified as part of the community. They would only think of themselves as an individual, rather than a team player within a group or participate as member of a community.

I tend to call these people the “bad apples of the community”. I once said the following on the forums:

There are bad apples in every community, but for every bad apple there are a hell of a lot more apples that make a pretty damn fine juice when mixed together. Aren’t we all thirsty and crave for such a juice?

The thing is, every bad apple you come across in a community can give sour (after)taste to that same juice. You can't really tell it's there unless you've had a taste of it yourself. Depending on the taste, it can ruin the experience for you completely.

However, this doesn’t apply to just this particular game. This happens in real life too. The problem doesn’t lie with the game they’re playing, or which game they came from. What were dealing with here are people who are projecting a nasty attitude towards others. Why? We may never know… All we know is that they are out there and they can ruin the fun part of playing with others in an online game. But they are not the majority of the community. I won’t say that we have a great community, but it’s definitely not as bad as some people make it out to be.

Since this is a community related issue, only we (as part of the said community) can actually do something about it. That being said, we can’t solve things by simply pointing our fingers towards something or someone.

We can only solve it if we act upon them as part of a community. A healthy community is a community that can support its fellow members and work together in order to keep it healthy and active.

With the introduction of the Duty Finder, this has become an incredibly difficult task since the DF removed the “need” for social bonds to be formed in order to tackle content. The chance that you will meet up with the same people again is rather slim, which will give people the opportunity to behave like jerks and get away with it.

But, if you look closely, there are groups of people who come up with community run events, which attract the attention from the people around them. This is but a small thing that makes people group together and do things with each other, rather than jumping at each other's throats because they weren’t performing their class at their optimal performance.

We can’t fix someone else's attitude, but we can find friendly / like minded people to work with. Not against.

I just want to say that we are out there. You might not find us today, tomorrow or even a few weeks from now, but we are there. We are willing to lend a hand to those who need it. Even if we don’t reach out to you from the start.

Do not be afraid to speak your mind. Ask for help. We will come to your aid.

I might not wear a mentor crown, but… If you are on Sargatanas and you have questions when it comes to the game, like which mechanics to look out for in dungeons or raids, want to talk about having trouble keeping hate as a tank / keeping the party alive, etc, feel free to contact me. I’m sure there are others in here who feel the same as me.

[Yeol]

These players need to be taught a lesson or two.
When I face a player with bad attitude, they usually get kicked or leave duty because they got in an argument with another player.
Just report them is all I can say.

This is very rare though, for me at least. Majority of players I encountered are really nice

[Knahli]

Maybe it cause I'm on Balmung but I have never found there to be a "wonderful community", but then again Balmung does have it reputation for a reason.

True that.

Really? I was intending on posting the exact opposite and how I guess I find that surprising since I should expect worse from such a packed server. Maybe it's that I don't raid or POTD, but I never had bad experiences on the server as a result of the community. In fact, the only time I ever really come face-to-face with it is on the forums since people are way more prone to post threads complaining rather than praising so it often feels like you're just walking into a brick wall of negativity(to the point you wonder why these people continue playing really, but I digress).

Really, the only thing that bothers me about the community on Balmung is the shout chat during events or just... well, Ul'dah acting up as it sometimes does. It's never anything to do with drama though, sometimes it's legitimate conversation, but other times it's just people making random tasteless jokes and assuming everyone reading it finds that hilarious; so, you can argue that it is more a personal distaste I suppose but either way I still wouldn't deem that as a "bad" and certainly not a "toxic" community.

[QuarIm]

snip

I agree. Shame that I can only like a post once.

[Stormfur]

I wish they would actually DO something about reporting the toxic players. I get one or two bad episodes - I mean we're all human, but a "three strikes - you're out" should give them plenty of time to cool off. After all, if everyone you meet is a jerk, it's worth reassessing YOUR behavior.

[Stanazolol]

What kills me is that the most toxic players I've played with aren't even good. If you're gonna start cussing people at least pull your own weight.

[Lexia]

I still wouldn't deem that as a "bad" and certainly not a "toxic" community.

Well I wouldn't really say Balmung is a bad or toxic community to some of the degree this thread most likely pointing at but I wouldn't call it a wonderful community either.