"Elitism" vs "Casualism"

[Vyrerus]

I can count on one hand...

Can you though? I've seen both sides of the issue more times than I have toes or fingers. Generally people who lean to one side of this issue don't perceive elitism in the same way as those who lean to the other.

Those who trend towards elitism are like me. We expect and want everyone to use everything in their arsenal, at the very least. Participate for the entire duty timer. Miss as few GCDs and oGCDs as possible. Complete dungeons in 15 minutes or less.

Those who trends towards casualism have an entirely different perspective, and honestly, it's not necessarily wrong. Lots of casuals don't understand the need to not miss GCDs, gingerly taking in the entirety of their combat animations. Often they miss out on using the oGCDs or save them for a pinch, thinking of them as a resource rather than a gated amount of DPS. If they're a healer, they often stand doing nothing, or spam their lowest MP-cost heal, because they aren't paying attention to numbers or doing math before, after, or during. They're watching HP bars, fight animations, and trying to not get overwhelmed by information overload.

At their worst, elitists will demand that everyone play just like them or so similarly as to be indistinguishable from them

At their worst, casuals will demand that everyone play in lieu of them, making up for their deficiencies, because it's just a game and they aren't there to do work or get stressed.

Both mindsets are awful, particularly the more a player trends towards either extreme. Sometimes I really wish I could have the perception that a real casual player has, because all I really have is what I believe some of my friends' perceptions are.

[Awha]

Personally I wish this game made harder content mandatory for story progression, added more raid elements into dungeons so people can get a general feel for more mechanics. Would not even mind more instant desth mechanics added to even dungeons that cannot be cheesed with gear.

Though I also wish they would add mythic style 4 man content to the game.

[esra01]

The only time i have ever seen elitism in this game is in ff14 reddit and this forum. In game people tend to keep to themselves. Plus this forum breeds its own elitist player as well with the "Tales of Duty Finder" megathread

[Canada_bangs]

Personally I wish this game made harder content mandatory for story progression, added more raid elements into dungeons so people can get a general feel for more mechanics. Would not even mind more instant desth mechanics added to even dungeons that cannot be cheesed with gear.

Though I also wish they would add mythic style 4 man content to the game.

It'll never happen. When the game was actually abit hard people cried and cried until everything was nerfed into the ground. And even after that people still don't play correctly so it's never going to happen. If you want harder content gotta unlock it. It'll never be in story mode ever again. Blame people who couldn't beat steps back in 2.0ish.

[Veis_Alveare]

Can you though?

Honestly? Yes.

I can clarify if it helps - when I say I can count the number of times I've seen toxicity from an elitist mindset I mean actual toxicity.

I don't include things like asking a healer to dps in here, or asking for someone to use AoE on trash in a dungeon. I wouldn't include asking a tank to not cleave the party with tankbusters here either.

There are some gameplay basics (like the aforementioned ones) that I believe once you're into 70+ content should be common sense at that point. If you decided to jump potion a job or god forbid your first job it's up to you to get up to speed on these things on your own time.

When I say actual toxic elitism I'm talking about real bullying, like kicking someone from a party because their logs aren't good and telling them that's why it's happening in a way that is... not courteous? Like by all means PF leaders make their own standards but I remember seeing someone in a Tsukiyomi farm towards the very end of SB kicking a DRG because they only had grey clears of the fight and specifically saying "my of said no scrubs, outta here [DRG]" then trashing that person in party chat after.

That's toxic elitism. It's gratuitous rudeness or power tripping just because you pressed buttons slightly better than another person. No one needs that but it's also woefully less common than "u dnt pay my sub" style responses to basic requests.

[Videra]

Expecting basic competence isn't toxic. What is toxic is 'casuals' who insist that they can do whatever they want, like not DPS as a healer, or are completely okay with wasting my or other's time by knowingly grey-parsing and not doing anything to improve. End of.

[Lucy_Pyre]

-snip-

Your 'fix' of the meme just shows that you fall pretty straight in line with the more toxic casual mindset, if that's what you got out of the original meme. Also, not a single soul unironically thinks TBN is bad and claiming such is just disingenuous.

[Liam_Harper]

Here we go again... :/

I personally feel, based on my experience, as well as comments and activities mentioned by twitch streamers and youtubers, anyone failing to pull orange parses, or world first, or week 1 final fight progs are now considered casual.

From "skip soar" to now "everything uptime" the community is more and more accepting of "dps mentality."

You can't just lump the community in one basket like that and generalize. The reason there are so many arguments on this subject is people taking extreme examples from a tiny handful of players and using them to argue that elitism is rampant. The majority of players don't want orange parses, perfect rotation, no mistakes, flawless wall-to-wall pulls. We're really not fussy. If you're pulling the basics of your class, not afk and open to friendly advice, and want to learn, that's more than enough. You can make mistakes, you're still trying. In Savage I'm happy if I see players above 10th percentile (not counting deaths) and paying attention to mechanics and asking if unsure. It's not a high bar. Even if you're performing way below minimum, I'd be happy to sit there for hours and help you if you had the mindset.

Yes, toxic elitist players exist. We are not arguing that this is ok. Stop using them as examples. We're arguing that it's not reasonable behavior to go into groups, perform way below minimum effort, react aggressively to friendly help and refuse to contribute or learn how to.

[Daniolaut]

There is a great deal of exaggeration in this. So lets dissect some of them!

There is no exaggeration in my post at all whatsoever. It is also not a troll post. Everything I say is taken directly from either someone elses mouth, or on a website, and then has been experienced by myself first hand.

Shiva required enough DPS that even a single death meant you'd wipe barring absolutely stellar performance. Even now, twenty odd weeks later, it remains impossible to clear her without reasonable DPS contribution from both healers. Furthermore, none of the Ultimates can be cleared by your typical grey parsing players. What do I mean by that? A grey parse in Ultimate will be much higher than Savage simply due to their being significantly less players to average out. Now you certainly don't need to top tier orange across the boards, but you can't limp through Ultimate DPS checks when they're current.

If you go look at rankings speed for static groups, for Shiva, mind you. Then edit the URL at the top so it says "&page=46" at the end, it contains multiple records of groups who are "registered" statics and contain groups who's members 6/8-7/8 have full grey parses, with 1-2 people pulling green. This means, there are pugs out there not registered as statics on this site, whom havent posted, who have cleared with full grey. Very much likely.

I also wasnt saying you can clear ultimate with low damage, I said having grey parses does not make you a bad player. Which is what people very openly spread around the FFXIV. Are we even playing the same game? In your post everyone is nice and just tries to help. On twitch, and in my experience, that is not what is happening at all. I literally gave two examples of well known twitch streamers/youtubers who berate players.

You "fix" is nothing but a strawman. It suggests the person demanding more expects 99% orange tier raiders—or has you put it, "state of the art technology." No one has that expectation. What they do expect is reasonable competency and a little effort. Wanting someone to AoE a large pull is not demanding "state of the art technology."

There are no AoE pulls in savage what are you even going on about? Did you just try to respond to me by going completely off topic, and talk about dungeon runs?

You are taking that statement far too literally. NEST "bullies" and frequently jokes about it yet no one would ever consider it actual bullying. That being said, if you care about your damage, Melee players have no choice but to insist on uptime strats, especially when our range options are so pitifully weak. Now you might argue they shouldn't care, however that isn't your business. Plenty of people find increasing their damage and performance fun. If they're forced to constantly lose DPS, thereby making it impossible to reach their goal, they may not find it fun. In which case, they need to find another static.

I'm not taking it too seriously. The people who harass players constantly and refuse to work as a team, are.

The people demanding uptime strategies, even if everyone in their static isnt comfortable with it. I specifically said my point was everyone should work together, and do what is necessary for the group to succeed. That includes casting extra clemencies, using The Blackest Night even if it might not break immediately or at all if it means it gives the healer time to do focus on someone else who needs it for making a mistake. You know, teamwork and understanding, and accepting ideas that arent directly surrounding "pushing more damage."

First and foremost. Anyone who unironically says TBN is bad, has no idea what they're talking about. So long as TBN breaks, it's a DPS neutral ability, i.e., it's free mitigation. Clemency is considered "bad" only outside prog because it's simply unnecessary. Even in that context, those citing it bad are usually referring the Paladins who spam it on themselves whenever their HP dips below 90%. If a single use of Clemency saves your Ultimate run, you won't hear any complaints.

Regardless, the whole DPS mentality is the fault of the dev team not the players. There is nothing else to focus on in this game except damage. One of the chief complaints from healers this expansion is how little they actually have to heal. Likewise, DPS stance on tanks became so prevalent because nothing required tank stance. You gimped your damage for no actual reason. You go on to say people should adapt. That is precisely how the DPS mentality evolved. Players adapted to the low healing requirements, low outgoing damage and scripted nature of encounter design which allowed an increase focus on DPS. In the case of healers, they have two options; focus on their damage or stand around doing absolutely nothing because even Savage requires very little of their healing kit relative to how much downtime they actually have.

A well known youtuber openly said The Blackest Night was a bad skill. These arent my words, they are words from other people, and most people agree if it doesnt break "you used it wrong." Which is not true. The action is designed to reduce damage. Just because you didnt use it to its full potential (it breaks) doesnt mean its used wrong.

Literally if you have a struggling healer, helping them at the cost of what? .000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the boss' HP now makes you such a horrible player?

This is the mentality I'm talking about. Losing out on a little damage here and there is not going to now magically wipe the raid. Not even close.

Why would I be threatened by a vulnerability stack that doesn't carry any significant risk? I've had seven invuln stacks on the last boss of Grand Combos. He still didn't break 60k with his tank buster. With that knowledge, I have zero reason to care about getting them. That doesn't mean I'll go collecting vuln stacks for giggles but if there's a choice between losing uptime and not getting one. There is no incentive to give up said uptime. A damage down, on the other hand, defeats the very purpose of greeding uptime. Hence why people will respect those mechanics. Put simply, the punishment has to be enough of a deterrent or it isn't a punishment.

Because you should be doing the mechanics properly.

Purposefully failing a mechanic to push damage in a situation where its going to cause issues or even a wipe, because now the tank is dead and the boss is running around 2 shotting the party?

Again do we not play the same game? Or have you just never pugged in your life? Because this stuff happens regularly in pugs.

You do realize there are people who are progressing savage at the end of a tier, like some probably literally final day before the next raid drops? Those people.

They do "deserve" and can achieve clears. But so long as there are people who refuse to work as a team and demand high dps performance from the party, and tolerance levels for people struggling are bottom of the barrel, you're going to continuously turn people away from savage, and the community is going to continue to become more entitled.

Seriously. Look at party finder. Tell me how many people are selling savage clears? Do we play the same game??

Lastly, again, people instantly leave after 1-2 wipes. The tolerance is extremely low, and people refuse to work together, and discuss the wipes, and adjust to the group.

Everyone expects high damage "bring da deeps" constantly and people are not helpful overall.

[Daniolaut]

Your 'fix' of the meme just shows that you fall pretty straight in line with the more toxic casual mindset, if that's what you got out of the original meme. Also, not a single soul unironically thinks TBN is bad and claiming such is just disingenuous.

Tell me how wanting more people to succeed, and being helpful is now toxic?

Because I would like to think, it is at least somewhat well known that people who demand high performance and berate players is a thing that happens.

I mean isnt it common knowledge the reason Parsing is against the Terms of Service, because a Japanese player was harassed on a stream by someone who was parsing them?

Go google “Koike incident"

But sure, lets now say people who want to work together, and be helpful, and give guidance and be respectful is now toxic behavior.

I would like to say I am surprised by this comment, but I am not. I have seen a lot over the years.