Why is there so much animosity between raiders and RPers?

[OdinelStarrei]

I'd actually like to throw my 2 cents into this one, usually I try to stay out of situations like this, but the recent occurrence really exemplifies that total lack of trust people in both each other and the GMs.

There are a few incidents that have been occurred throughout the years that have just driven a wedge in between two "mindsets" of players. I don't think it's raiders vs RPers, because there's more cross-over there than you might expect. I don't really want to say it's hardcore vs casuals either. Maybe "very-invested" players vs "not-invested" players is the most accurate way to explain this. Both of these players are minorities in the grand scheme, extremes on the scale, but their voices are very loud, and a lot of players in the middle inevitably will lean on one side of the discussion, a discussion that has almost never been willing to concede anything on either end. It's a phenomenon of radicalization and total polarization that as far as I know, does not happen in JP.

I initially wrote out "History of XIV's playerbase from my perspective" but it got way, way too long. Basically, Gordias Savage in HW splits the community, those who remain become very good, and teach others to be as good as them. The lack of ingame tools for improvement, alongside the MSQ content itself becoming very easy to faceroll, stagnates the general populace's skill in actually playing the game. Situations like Dungeon/Palace of the Dead speedrunning, aftereffects of the Steps of Faith nerf, SKIP SOAR OR DISBAND, phase skipping due to high DPS, become commonplace amongst certain parties, incentivizing closing your ranks and not using the Duty Finder to avoid "You don't pay my sub" and "150 X 6 is more potency than 400 X 1"-level arguments with people and potentially getting warnings from an unclear ToS policy.
Side note: The Official Forums becomes a complete joke around this time with frequent permabans, and little to no communication to NA/EU from official accounts/developers. Reputation remains low to this day.

This continues all the way up to 4.55. By this point, you've had many events that serve to further distance the players from each other and into their, for lack of a better word, "echo chambers". Ultimate, Savage only phases, nerfs to the MSQ to make it easier for people, the widespread acceptance of discord servers, skip potions. A ton of little stuff that over time really started to separate people. I am not saying those things are bad, just that it separated people. In my opinion, the thing that finally ignited the fires that you see smoldering now was Hydatos, specifically the ToS change and the BA entry portal dilemma.

"What!? We just spent TWO hours getting 48 people prepared and ready for this content, and you stole their portal! All you do is AFK in the town until we do everything anyway!" -invested players
"I didn't steal anything. Dungeon is public, you can't keep people from going in, regardless of what that person does. You don't own the instance." -not as invested players
An absolute disaster of a situation born from SE not thinking this wasn't going to immediately blow up in NA.

On top of the dreaded "compelling a playstyle" and "unilaterally denying someone's opinion", stuff that is the epitome of subjective, and wide-open to player abuse, it seemed like a siren to every single person that had ever said " I'm not saying anything in chat, I don't want my account that I've spent X years into banned because someone took what I said out of context and reported me. These people are out to get me." GMs do not care about intent, or context of the reports, they are anti-transparent to an extreme degree, and every time someone ever brought this up, it was a lot of whataboutism and specifically, "You know what you did, stop lying." (There was a topic like last week about this exact thing!) So those people get buried even farther underground. A lot of people said, "Fine! You know what, I'm done! I'll never say anything in XIV ever again." Myself included. If you can find the topic about the ToS changes, you'd be astonished how similar some of those comments are to ones getting posted right now.

How did this relate to RP? RP, despite what it actually is, is perceived to have a lot of casual, drama-filled players who treat the game as another Second Life rather than a MMORPG, and therefore you would not accomplish your in-game goals if you played with them, which you could in theory back up with the clear rates of savage content on RP servers such as Mateus and Balmung relative to the overall population. Ergo, RP = Casual combat player. Nowadays, it's the Crystal Data Center. This isn't really correct, but it's the stereotype, similar to all raiders that use parsers are toxic. GMs never go after RPers, particularly the ones doing the more "questionable" things. So the mindset morphed into "Oh, I can't ask this WHM to stop using Cure I at Level 70, but you can have people actively soliciting unprompted with no clothes and suggestive emotes in Limsa and Uldah public channels?" More division.

Now, with more lifestyle content coming into the game, with the combat system heavily criticized by long-term players for being far too simple in comparison to even SB, "invested" players might feel like their voice is getting drowned out by people who want nothing more than to buy cute mogstation glamours and sit around doing nothing. No one gets any of the bug fixes or combat changes or developer feedback for an entire expansion relating to combat, but we'll get stickers for GPOSE, parasols, we'll get traveling into dungeons solo for RP, we'll get Very Easy combat encounters, and these people will eat it up because XIV is the best thing ever or something.

And for those who aren't as invested, they see the exact opposite. They see "invested" players getting savage only phases, they get ultimates, they've broken the holy trinity, they're always mean and hate on other players, they've broken the game down to only numbers, they have all this time in their life to "dedicate" to XIV, must be a whole bunch of stupid, toxic basement dwellers.

What I'm trying to say is that two groups of people in their different mindsets have essentially created their own massive strawmans of the other side of the playerbase who isn't playing the game for the same reasons or to the level of dedication that they deem acceptable and constantly war over Square Enix development time. We've essentially created a reality in NA where it feels like portions of the community don't even play the same game, yet we're all forced into content together, and SE takes such broad strokes with their actions, usually placating and angering people with the same act. This is why DF and Bozja/Eureka got so heated, and if not that, incredibly passive aggressive. The line has been drawn in the sand for these types.

So with no real outlet or action to bridge the gap, now it's a competition to see who gets hurt more by Square Enix. Ultimate deleted? Good, content is dead anyway, no one can complete it, minority communities shouldn't be represented or get developer resources. No Female Hrothgar/Male Viera? Good. Probably just going to deplete even more resources from the dev team, and all they'd use it for is some kind of furry smut. Homogenization of jobs? Good, raiders ruined everything by complaining, they need to lie in their beds, seems fine to me! Jobs too complicated/jank with no ingame tools? Good. What's wrong, unwilling to learn unintuitive gameplay mechanics? We need an actual skill ceiling in the game to separate the wheat from the chaff, don't like it, don't play, go back to Limsa. Streamers deleting vods and getting banned for dubious, inconsistent reasons? Good. They're 100% always toxic, the bad guys, XIV streams are trash, SE is setting an example, watch out raiders. RP getting GM attention? Good. Those people are probably stalkers in their down time, or grooming children with their sick kinks, on top of clogging party finder for when I actually want to play the GAME I subscribe to, and not some kind of life sim. Lack of empathy? Flip the coin, and you get unwillingness to even try. And so on and so on. Even if none of the things are correlated, in terms of dev cost or to each other directly, as long as it hurts someone else, people are usually ok with at least downplaying the importance and enjoyment that content brings to others, if not outright scorning them for their engagement.

It's insane, honestly.

For the record, I'm not saying that I am some kind of "enlightened centrist." I don't RP. Never been in GM jail, but I'm no different, I just keep my head down, and get disappointed when I see people tear each other apart rather than ask SE why they intentionally develop situations, systems and environments where players cannot reconcile their differences without silent votekicks or fear of GMs getting involved. This is also a very loud minority of people. To the vast majority, nothing is amiss, and I doubt SE will even do anything, because they usually don't once the heat dies down,even more so outside of JP. Subscriptions and overall player investment still going strong, after all.