Why are standards seen as a crime in this game?

[SaitoHikari]

This attitude is absolutely not unique to this game at all. I have seen this stuff in literally every multi-player game I played. There are always players who push back against having to meet a standard. This is just how some people are. People can be lazy or selfish in all aspects of life. Stop phrasing it as if it only happens in FFXIV.

While true, I've never seen a community actively embrace it like the FFXIV community has. While content difficulty might be a big contributing factor to it, I feel that it is actually amplified to extreme levels by the fact that gearing differences between players are actually rather small due to how equipment is designed in this game. While in other games, gear differences between two equally skilled players of the same level in the same content might result in one player having like 2-3x the damage output of the other player, the gap in DPS numbers in FFXIV between two equally skilled players that are about 30-40 item levels apart is maybe only about a difference of 20% DPS at the most.

So since players can't exactly hide behind lack of gear as a convenient excuse for under-performing for all but the most extreme cases (like people wearing level 50 gear in level 60 content), it is incredibly easy for most people to tell if someone is really under-performing on a skill level basis.