Quote Originally Posted by RichardButte View Post
FFXIV's community is on the whole pretty amazing, especially when we're talking about in-game. It's miles ahead of WoW's and we probably have a lot of the wonderful in-game tools that not only encourage but REWARD players for helping out newbies, being a team player, and generally NOT being a gigantic assclown.

However, I can't always say the same for these forums...

While there are plenty of helpful, rational people who post here, there's a mentality that occasionally pops up that is a massive detriment to the forum-going experience.

...
There's three kinds of arguments that take place in gaming forums that are openly hostile:

A) A plea to the developers (to nerf, buff, or change the game to the whim of the poster) - These will quickly get shot down by players who like things the way they are, and because the FFXIV devs are receptive to both positive and negative feedback, people feel the need to shut down any discussion of features that they feel change the game in ways they are not receptive to.

There is a concept known as "feature creep", and "micromanagement" and these things do not belong in games. Micromanagement is fun for people who think spreadsheets and programming is fun. For example, if the FFXIV game client offered Mabinogi-style pets and pet AI (which was quite scriptable) I'm sure people would love the ability to make their Chocobo be less stupid, and maybe have their summoner/arcanist/scholar bets be less stupid. BUT because people will abuse the hell out of this to harass people, it would lose all the useful features over time and eventually people will resort to modding to make the pets behave in ways that the game client doesn't natively support. Hence I've never suggested such a feature because as much as I think it would be useful, it would be useful to the 2% of people who can understand the scripting language, and end up being leveraged by RMT to spam users or should there ever be a mining/harvest/fishing/sheparding pet it would be used for nefarious purposes.

A subset of this is the "doesn't know how to use the search button", where someone will create a new thread on something that is still somewhere in the last 5 pages of the forum or discussed in the last 4 weeks, and people get upset because they though the argument was dead/done.

B) A plea to players to do, or not do a certain behavior - This is entitlement attitude at it's most oblivious. You can come to the forum and vent about some kind of behavior, but the minute you start calling the player names rather than explaining why the behavior has disturbed your experience, you've lost the high ground. Do not punch down. That player might be new, might be having a bad day, might have screwed up, but if you are venting on the forum by calling them names, you are specifically aiming to embarrass them. This sends the message to other players that you are incapable of adapting to play styles, or incapable of de-escalating a situation.

We all have bad experiences, but we do not learn what people consider bad unless someone else posts about it. Hence, any complaint that is not followed up with a solution is not helping.


C) Namecalling, Ad hominem attacks, and straw man arguments to try and turn the opinion of the forum against a poster or to dogpile on someone that they don't like. This is troll tactics 101, you don't like what someone says, so you go look at their lodestone and try to say "this person hasn't done ___, therefor they are full of ****", you drag comments from old threads into new threads, you go look them up on twitter, facebook, youtube, parser sites, hacking sites, bot sites, and try to find something posted outside the forum to the forum to "prove" this person should be ignored or even banned. When in that person doesn't back down, call them a troll, advocate for putting them on the ignore list, etc.

This always happens in discussions dominated by raiders. "You haven't done (something) EX, you don't know anything, get out of here", the reality is that that like argument A, they don't want the developers to take this as a cue to nerf/change something, so they just point to anyone who hasn't cleared the content as being incompetent or unskilled at the game as a whole. Consider that the game caters to all audiences, certain gameplay styles are simply bad to apply to all content in the game. Take the Healer DPS argument before and after 4.0, Before 4.0 you were considered lazy if you weren't DPS'ing because of a myth of healers having downtime, rather than they were playing in a lazy way that the developers had not intended due to gear power creep. Post 4.0 now the complaint is that healers are DPS'ing instead of keeping the party alive. This is the monster you created though encouraging bad healer play styles relying on HoT's to DPS more, now you own it because the developers decided that's not what they want healers doing.


If people want respect in an online environment, they need to resist acting like a baby and shouting down everything you don't like. There is a reason they limited the number of posts people can post per day, as that discourages people from engaging in lengthy arguments with the same people, and dominating the forums with fights between those people.