The toxicity starting to happen.

[Ramesses]

Summary: Whats with the drama?

Any one else notice this or am I on drugs?

No you are not, my friend-- indeed, you are not and there are many of us who have noticed this toxicity madness eons ago.

More importantly, I absolutely agree with your edits regarding the "learn to tank" rantings. Unfortunately-- quite often-- a great many people on the forums love to latch onto a single example and maintain a fixated tunnel vision onto that example without understanding the greater context.

Before I go any further, I'm going to disclose two more things to you:

• I actually remember reading your post within a few hours of it populating onto the forums about ten days ago-- at the time I read it, I nodded in agreement, smirked at some of the responses then had to go offline. Today, it populated again and I thought it was time I chimed in on your remarks.
  
• Two, the toxicity has been permeating this game exponentially for almost eight years now-- I saw the seed beginnings of that toxicity as far back December 2012 on the 2.0 Alpha test forums.

Now that we got that out of the way, bear with me a little longer-- and allow me to paint a picture of an ancient history of the FFXIV community from 1.0 which will help you grasp how one aspect of this dangerous toxicity has evolved. This will be a long post and many will not agree with my rant so grab some tea and biscuits beforehand. I'll mention a lot of history here-- some might be out of context, some might be disagreeable, some might be slightly skewed due to fuzzy memory-- but I assure you that all of it will be based on a foundation of truth and facts as best as I remember it.

When FFXIV 1.0 began, a large amount of its initial player base were FFXI players; in fact, the core theme for FFXIV-- with its three main starter cities and original five races-- were all loosely based upon the FFXI universe. In a nutshell, this was an intentional move by SE so as to provide various incentives for FFXI players to make the switch over to FFXIV-- and after almost seven years of playing FFXI, this is what made me start playing FFXIV during the beta of 1.0 in September 2010. That, and the incredibly well-woven FFXII tones that the Devs incorporated within the game from the start-- I've always been a massive fan of Ivalice.

FFXI was and continues to remain a beautiful game that brought Japanese and western players together across two platforms (PC and PS2)-- it was the first cross-platform MMORPG ever created. The Japanese players had a year-plus start on everyone else but their receptive attitude towards the new western players-- despite the language barrier-- helped set the tone for a mostly warm-hearted global community.

This warm hearted community could be felt when people actually used the bow and hug emote when greeting each other-- it could be seen when higher level players would do "Zone protection" for new players in Dunes, Qufim and Khazam. It could be seen when people would help random players in their subjob quests or in helping new players make it to Jeuno and so on and so on. And believe it or not, that feeling of unity is still felt (for the most part) in FFXI till this very day.

Bear with me here-- I know some of these places might sound weird or strange but FFXI players who read this will know exactly what I'm talking about. Don't get me wrong, everything wasn't completely rosey-- there were end game linkshell fights (internal and external) that evolved into into seasonal dramas, there were stories of thefts, dishonorable PK killings here and there-- but for an MMORPG game, FFXI definitely still had one of the best global communities in gaming.

Naturally, when FFXI players began transferring over to FFXIV in 1.0, that sense of unified camaraderie carried over and was maintained (for the most part). People were cordial to one another, helped one another-- and it's that same sense of togetherness that made us all put up the Gobbue wall and fight side by side till the very end when Dalamud came crashing down.



Which leads me to my next point: 1.0 eventually shut down in November 2012 and Alpha testing for 2.0 commenced in mid-December 2012, to which I again had the humble honor of being invited to play. When I first logged into New Gridania on the Alpha build, I was totally stunned by the game's transformation and knew then and there that Yoshi had delivered a winner.

This was exactly the point where things began to get sour with the first hints of toxicity. During the alpha test, there were many 1.0 players invited together with an influx of new players who came from a bevy of other MMORPG games. Right off the bat, several of these "new" trolls players complained and whinged about EVERYTHING.

It was beyond ridiculous.

So ridiculous and so irritating-- there was so much whinging on certain threads of the Alpha test forums that several 1.0 players decided to create separate threads -- away from all the negativity -- so that we could exchange our 1.0 player identities, discuss solid ideas for future expansions, and provide clear concise honest feedback to the Dev team. While we were busy providing suggestions for quest lines, game mechanics and cheering on the SE marketing team to push for this game into China, South Korea and Hong Kong, these negative buffoons were constantly tossing toxic comments onto the forums-- it wasn't rampant, it wasn't distracting from the positives, but it was there.

The toxicity continued to rear it's head more often as we moved into the beta stage and we began to confirm this perpetual pattern from several of the influx of new testers who came from WoW, Guild Wars 2 and a few other MMOs. Don't even get me started about how they actually dissed Soken's music, complained about not being able to progress past level 20, complained about not being able to get around the new Limsa, and even complained with their stupid arguments over the pixilation of the grass.

Yes indeed, these wretches didn't know what to complain about anymore, so they complained about the grass. The freaking grass-- I mean... seriously?

Thus, as we moved towards launch day in August 2013, a large amount of hardcore 1.0 FFXIV players -- exasperated and fed up with the whinging-- decided that they would isolate themselves from the new players once early access commenced and just focused on enjoying the game with mainly their FC mates. There are a lot of intricate nuances involved when establishing the approaches of veteran casual players with veteran hardcore players at the time, but I have no need to delve into that here. What is important to note is that there was another contingent of veterans who truly wanted to play with newer players and coach them on how to maximize their efforts on high end gameplay but were met with the usual clichéd entitled, arrogant yet ignorant responses:

• I don't need to watch a video
• Shut up, I know what I'm doing
• You don't pay my sub

Hence, at some point many of these veterans who wanted to help just shrugged and said-- "Screw this, I don't need to interact with this trash. I'll only hang out with my own mates, with other veterans, and develop a cold wall."

Several new players might have viewed this behaviour as elitism but if one examined this whole situation through another facet of reasoning, could anyone blame the veteran players? Many of the new players also mocked the legacy status of the veteran players out of spite and jealousy, they mocked veterans when they proffered a lending hand or gave advice on game dynamics.

Heck, I've been mocked a couple times by new players for giving him/her 300k gil-- here's the context: Back when ARR started, I was already quite wealthy even after the Devs took 90% of the wealth we had amassed from 1.0. As such, I would sometimes stand in Limsa giving out words of encouragement and money to new players while I waited for our Coil raids to start.

And yet I got mocked for it by entitled little snots.

Best believe that I stopped donating money to new players till this day. That's not all-- since 4.0 launched, I very very rarely help new players when they shout for help-- I only respond back to the polite quiet singular tells asking for guidance and then I go all out, helping them. But in general, I just maintain a very distant stance with new players-- and if they act up, I calmly put them in their place and also remind them that players like us have played long enough to have our names in the freaking credits for the game.

Sheesh, I even stopped greeting or responding to greetings whenever I go into Duty Finder -- I almost never even say anything in chat. If the party is bad, I simply disband and take the 30-minute penalty-- I have nor the time nor patience to banter back and forth with these insignificant jokers-- besides, I can always craft, chat to friends or log onto my other characters on the European or Japanese servers. Most of the time, I rather prefer to get my weekly tomes through hunts and as one of my old friends once said on discord (he's a hardcore style player):

"I'm a Legacy, I'm true FFXIV royalty, I'm on the lists of some world firsts, I've been endorsed by Yoshida himself, I have no need to run the filthy dungeons with these entitled stupid plebs"

And truth be told, we all laughed at the time after he said it but I can totally emphasize with his thinking. I also AFK at my secluded spots in Crystarium so I don't have to be near the toxicity-- yes indeed, I waited 14 years to access that place, so that's where my main character always hangs out. At some point, toxicity reaches a level whereby one just develops an impressive immunity towards it-- and veterans have now developed all sorts of brilliant strategies to cope with it. What is indeed fascinating though is that the toxicity is extremely much lower on the Japanese servers-- I have another charcater on Aegis server that I sometimes play when I need to hang out with my Japanese and New Zealand friends and a lot of the toxic crap is almost nonexistent there. Yet it blatantly persists on several of the Western servers.

Here's another minor example of toxicity -- Earlier today, I joined a Duty Finder on my main tank job (on Primal) for Deltascape so I could farm runs for the mount. When I joined, I noticed that a lot of them were new players and this got me weary but I maintained a calm silence. After just one run, the leader and his/her mates suddenly kicked me because they apparently assumed I was wearing level 50 gear-- I literally smirked while reading the chat and kept silent-- I don't banter words with fools and knew it was just trolls being toxic. I however did find it funny that I had glammed my level 50 Warrior of Light gear over my lvl 500 gear only because I wanted to honour a certain character from the 5.3 MSQ and because of this-- and I kid you not-- a group of toxic snots thought it would be acceptable to use that as an excuse to kick me. All because I glammed my Paladin from this:



... to this.



And thus, the toxic party leader and his mates decided to substantiate the stupid toxic excuse that I was "undergeared". Yes indeed, that was their flimsy excuse for trolling. The ignorant idiots -- drunk on the illusion of power -- decided to abuse the vote kick function once they got their clear. Mind you, the leader's behaviour was already sketchy from the onset-- were they a new FC group just trolling on DF? Don't know, don't care-- heck, perhaps these idiots wanted to invite one of their mates to join the party and their toxic solution was to simply kick me with an outrageous excuse. A few minutes later, one of the party members actually messaged me to say he/she thought that was unnecessary, they had loved my tanking and had subsequently disbanded after seeing what the leader did. I ignored the message and shrugged -- not my problem. Sod off mate.

An hour later, this same party leader who kicked me had the audacity to send me a message, begging for a tank for an Alphascape run. Alright you muppet, you're playing with fire now. I simply raised an amused eyebrow, /blisted all the idiots and then sent in a GM report. Job done.

This example and subsequent reaction here is one of the many catalysts for the chain reactions that have emerged from this toxic environment-- ultimately, vets will simply continue to dissociate themselves even more from helping newer players. It's their loss after all-- after this happened, I was already logged onto my secondary charcater on Diabolos, chugging along.

Furthermore, like hundreds of other veterans, I rarely come to the forums anymore because its just filled with so much ridiculous toxicity and whinging... emphasis on the word "whinging". To whine is one thing but to whinge is to complain to an unreasonable extent. Sadly, that's what most of the forums have now succumbed to... disillusioned entitlement, complaints, rants, insults, racial slurs, negativity and yet barely any real posts with solid critical suggestions.

So no my friend-- you are not tripping on drugs at all-- this is the sad reality of the game environment as it were in this day and age. I find it hilariously ironic that many of these toxic players are beginning to wonder why their progression has began to stall.

The freaking irony of it all will eventually become apparent.