Confessions of a Toxic Elitist

[DreadRabbit]

Kaiva, from one writer to another who also deals with depression: I honestly think you're being too hard on yourself.

I don't know you very well, but from what little I've been able to discuss with you, you do seem to be an open minded person. You're a human who makes mistakes. I agree with Ursa: the fact that you do recognize you could improve as a player and as a person shows that you're not a Toxic Elitist. Truthfully you never came off as toxic to me (and I've been around my fair share of toxic people).

As for my own experiences in the game? Absolutely. In fact my mistake was one of many factors that did lead me to unsubbing for over a year.

Some friends of mine at the time wanted to start an FC purely to get a house faster/more easily. I was against it because I had a feeling they'd flake (they were hard core MMO hoppers at the time, and we JUST left WoW because they grew bored despite all the money they dropped on it). What happened? The two of them grabbed two people from an FC they didn't fare well in, party was made, FC was born.

Unfortunately my gut was correct: not only did they not help much with ranking the FC or earning the money for the house, but eventually they just stopped logging in. Whenever I would ask them why they would claim they'd log back in when they had the time/motivation/whatever. So we proceed and boom, we have a house (I was still an officer so I could at least do that). Well eventually they announce to me they're not playing anymore and they wouldn't even log in long enough to switch leadership to me. Me and the two guys who went along with this were essentially stuck and now out of a lot of gil.

When leadership did finally fall to me through the in-game timers I...just wasn't a good FC leader. I enjoyed getting to know the two people who stuck it out with me, but I didn't have the drive to grow the FC. I had no say in the name, the theme, or even in its formation, yet here I was the leader of it all and stuck with the responsibility of letting our other mates know that the original leaders bailed.

The guys at the time were incredibly sweet, but I knew then and now that I didn't do the job I could have done. I was too wishy washy. I could have put my foot down and refused to be part of forming the FC. I could have listened to my gut and warned the people my "friends" sucked in at the time of what might be coming. At the end of the day if I had been more assertive there would have been the possibility of stopping the scenario from happening. And even then I could have just sucked it up and turned the situation into a positive one by stepping up to be a good leader.

But I didn't.

And that's all there was to it. Because I didn't stick to my guns and didn't stand up for myself, multiple people got screwed. And that's not okay.

So where you feel you may be too outspoken and too critical of others while not being fit to do so, I had the exact opposite problem. And I'm still combating that even now. It's not good to be a "toxic elitist" but it's also certainly not good to just be silent and let people do exactly as they please if what they're doing negatively affects you. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting the best from the people around you or yourself. It's how we ask and strive for those things that separates those who are toxic and those who aren't.

So I say: live and learn. You're probably doing better than you think.

[IttyBitty]

I find it amusing that everybody here who supports parsing and the general improvement of the player base has been nothing but helpful and supportive, and the people who are vocally against it are acting like insufferable tools.

Elitists indeed.

[zuzu-bq]

I don't know, expect people to not AFK seems very elitist to me. /s

[HoodRat]

I don't know, expect people to not AFK seems very elitist to me. /s

To be fair, I said something similar earlier today and well....I think my new sig will tell you the response I got.

[Alaray]

I've played a lot of games over the years.

Some I was legitimately a good player, others I sucked absolutely. And then in many, "meh, average". Surprisingly, League is kinda where I learned "You know what, I'll be honest, I ain't good at this game" and from that point, improvements became a lot easier to make.

In XIV, I have a mess of parses and information. But without looking into anything/caring to improve, I hovered around in 4.1 with green numbers/even grey pretty often. Didn't really know, since I didn't make use of FFlogs, but I looked back and shuddered a bit.

This patch I got into Savage raiding, with an overall new-to-raiding group of people, myself included in that. I dropped being a DPS in favor of playing a tank as I've wanted to do that for a very long time and, luckily, I have someone who is extremely helpful who has guided me quite a lot not just on rotation knowledge, but the finer details about enmity/when I should do x or y, proper use of mitigation, etc...

I also try to admit when I made an error, strive to correct it, and if I'm unclear on something I ask someone who I know is knowledgeable. Resources, like people-resources, are hard to find, so I got lucky, but I have also made use of a lot of guides and learned a lot of tidbits (Such as gaining free 20 blood prior to Chardanook since you can Grit + Blood Price and turn off Grit as the boss appears, since the game considers you in combat). And then there's Plunge cheese (which I still am trying to consistently get down).

I main Dark Knight, and as a DRK in Savage I average 60+ on the train (blue, there's still stuff I need to learn in order to maintain better uptime, with the way my group does it, I'm aware I lose out on 14 or so GCD's which is a big deal). My best on the fight is 80th percentile (doesn't show up 'cuz I changed my in game name that night and tried everything to get it to consolidate, but eh it's w/e), which is where I want to average out as my first goal.

I played PLD once on Chardanook Savage (on DRK I average around 70th percentile+), and had little knowledge of what on earth I was doing, netted green for it just trying to figure it out on the fly. Honestly? Better than I thought, and I knew "Okay I made mistakes all along here, here, and here, and this is what I'd need to work on when I'm on this class)

Talking about these fights since this raid group started a few weeks late and we're all still in the process of learning O7S as, primarily, a more casual group that wants to use these fights to improve so we can do this tier of content more reliably later on.

But I know, and I hold to, that I am not a good player. I'll absolutely take compliments and otherwise, and I do understand how percentiles work, but I have a personal bar I want to cross consistently until I could say "Yeah, I'm good at this class" and even then, that's not being *great* at it.

Not to say I can't feel happy about improvement or excitement, or pride even. But I'm not at a position where I can tell someone how to best play or optimize, anything I say as advice is either general knowledge statements, or, information passed to me by players who I do consider good at the game/great at the game.

I don't like to talk myself up in games in a "I'm very good" manner since it makes the fall when you learn otherwise hurt more. And I can always do better regardless, *and* there's a lot of people who are learning and want to get better -- it's just different paces for different people and that's important to remember.

Personally, I don't consider myself doing well unless I'm hitting in the 75th percentile as I know it's achievable. But for others, I'd consider "doing well" 50th+ since that *is* above 50 percent of players. Granted, I don't care about logs/parses/etc... about other folks in stuff I do -- Dungeons/Sigma Normal? Don't give a crap. But if you act like a dick, then you're asking for some words. (have an earlier story about that)

I guess, how I feel, is that if you feel you're doing well but learn you aren't, don't let that dissuade you from going out and finding help and resources and being humble when you receive criticism from reliable sources. It goes a long way into improvement (A friend of mine, who *was* parsing grey consistently, asked for help and changed *1* thing and is getting closer to 50th percentile on average, which is a *huge* improvement). Even use the dummies, or the Stone/Sea/Sky dummies to practice rotations and stuff on or try new things on.

Granted, I also like setting smaller goals for myself to incrementally reach over time with the end being The Big One. Like, yes I absolutely want to be 95th percentile + on average, but I first need to reach 75th, then 80th, etc... while not mucking up mechanics or getting people killed.

So, my approach is "I try to always retain a sense of 'I can do better' when I do anything in this game" it keeps me open to criticism and I absolutely don't want to develop a complex, because no one needs to have that and it tends to do more harm than good.

But it does hit hard when you think you're doing well, but learn otherwise. And at that point, there ain't anywhere to go but up.

Idk I typed a lot oops.

[NoctusT]

The whole elitist thing has gotten over stereotyped in this game. Most of the “casual” people I see are the most toxic of the lot. Not to say there aren’t elitists but those guys tend to get shut down really quickly. It’s why I really don’t debate argue with people on the forums. Just seems like an exercise in frustration.

[AppleJinx]

Yeah fflogs is really an eye opener for me as well. Before I got into it I was a green/blue logger and I thought I was THE shit but a few months later I can get purple pretty consistently after prog in pugs and I still feel like I suck and it makes me more irritated when I see people passing along misinformation and insist that they are in the right even after being corrected with empirical evidence multiple times as well as people assuming how a job plays without even touching it themselves

[Vahlnir]

If I were you, I'd focus on yourself instead of others. When you do that you'll end up feeling and doing much better because the focus is where it needs to be. Personally, I've never, EVER had a single complaint about my dps as a former DRG and now SAM. That is because I focus on my own skill, not the skill of others.

[KaivaC]

First off, @Estellise, I hope you see this, and I am open to your offer. I'll look you up next time I'm logged in and send a request.

On the subject of my parses, up until recently, I didn't have a reliable source of my uploads. 95% of the logs that have been uploaded under me, I had zero control over. Meaning at the time, I didn't know that they were uploaded (and to be honest, up until I joined the forums, I had no idea that FFLOGs existed). And because in a PUG environment, parses are a sketchy subject, I rarely asked about them in groups of randoms, which is where I am the majority of the time. I have gone into Sigmascape Savage every week - unfortunately, those logs weren't uploaded, but the normal Sigmascape runs uploaded recently were indicative that I hadn't really improved. I have to repeat again that if I was on PC, there would definitely be far more logs as SMN for Savage.

As far as my worth within FFXIV goes, yes, I can't lie about that, I judge my own ability to play well and be a good player based on my damage numbers. And yes, I do feel like as a 9th percentile SMN at this moment, I am not good. Is that due to competitiveness or depression? I honestly have no idea. But that's me. Outside of the forums, I don't try to get players to play a certain way. Because of my threads, I started getting called a toxic elitist in-game because some players have recognized my name from here. And that is on me. I've been called an elitist here on the forums maybe a couple of times, and that is on me.

This is not about parsers...this is simply about my own arrogance and my hubris. This is sharing my thoughts, and opening the thread to others who hit a wall similar to mines and seeing how they were able to deal with it. I've owned up to that since the first page - even inviting folks to actually look at my logs and seeing how my big talk amounted to nothing when I personally finally started seeing just how much I did not compare to the raiding community.

[Moomba33]

Hey Kaiva.
I think we've had some disagreements in the past on what warrants acceptable performance but for what it's worth I've never found your topics annoying.

I know what it feels like to find out you're worse than you think. Back during HW I was trying to clear Thordan Ex in DF on Bard and a group I was in had a healer comment that dps was low. Someone posted a parse and it turned out I was doing like 60% of the damage of the top dps in the group. I was really embarrassed and ended up turning off the game for the rest of the day after the group abandoned.

It took some time for my ego to recover enough to try again. I had saved the replay of the fight (I play on PS4) and watched it later. I saw that I spent a lot of time running around to do mechanics not attacking and lost a ton of GCDs. I tried to force myself to be more mindful of keeping my rotation up on future attempts.

I never became a great Bard if I'm honest. I have a lot of greens and blues on that other site. But I tried to be more mindful of my performance since then.

I guess the point I want to make is to not be so hard on yourself. It hurts to find out you're not doing well but it only hurts because you care enough to do better. And you can improve. If I can graduate to "mediocre" I think a motivated person like you could be great.