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.

[Penthea]

While true, I've never seen a community actively embrace it like the FFXIV community has.

I'm starting to wonder if I have consistently weird luck? I keep seeing phrases like this in the forums, but in all my years playing I very rarely see people be both remarkably bad and push back against the idea of playing better. In my experience, when a player's poor performance is pointed out, they usually say nothing, deny it or simply apologise. A few times I have seen someone have a strop. I have only once seen the "you don't pay my sub" response. Yet to read OP's first post you would think that this is a common occurrence.

[SaitoHikari]

I'm starting to wonder if I have consistently weird luck? I keep seeing phrases like this in the forums, but in all my years playing I very rarely see people be both remarkably bad and push back against the idea of playing better. In my experience, when a player's poor performance is pointed out, they usually say nothing, deny it or simply apologise. A few times I have seen someone have a strop. I have only once seen the "you don't pay my sub" response. Yet to read OP's first post you would think that this is a common occurrence.

It's mostly a common topic on these very forums. You don't get debates like this in other communities nearly to the same level that FFXIV has. You will literally get 60 page threads complaining about parsing and healer DPS in this community, while other games will have most people just shrug their shoulders and move on, because the very design of most other games includes a number of factors that makes it harder for the average player to analyze what contributes to differences in damage numbers between players.

But FFXIV's damage numbers are so small and tightly crunched together in comparison that player skill level contributes far more to DPS than anything else, to an incredibly obvious level that even people who don't parse can probably guess how much someone is contributing at a quick glance. (I suppose it also helps that said other games usually have other design problems that drown out any discussion on these kinds of topics. FFXIV is stable enough that these topics are really one of the few things the community really cares about enough to debate.)

[Feidam]

I'm starting to wonder if I have consistently weird luck? I keep seeing phrases like this in the forums, but in all my years playing I very rarely see people be both remarkably bad and push back against the idea of playing better. In my experience, when a player's poor performance is pointed out, they usually say nothing, deny it or simply apologise. A few times I have seen someone have a strop. I have only once seen the "you don't pay my sub" response. Yet to read OP's first post you would think that this is a common occurrence.

My experience mirrors yours. There have been a few incidents where people behaved in such a manor, but most of the time the community has been great. Makes me wonder if the people having the issues are doing something to facilitate those bad responses.