Seeing hate toward "refugees from other MMOs?"

[NegativeS]

This games player base is a lot more smug than wow's if you haven't noticed already

I'll take a little smugness over WoW's "openly hostile toward anything and everything, including our own devs and influencers" attitude any day of the week.

[CKNovel]

I switched over from WoW after Blizzard decided to break my class for the umpteenth time

Welcome to the game but...
Death Knight? I heard they got a big nerf and will get another one on a cool looking ability.

How's retribution paladin doing nowadays?

[Keramory]

Been playing on and off for 10 years. Can't say I've heard, in unison from the community, genuine hate on a for WoW players. Some people definitely blame WoW (terms of mechanics or existing) because FFXIV took some aspects from it, but not the players themselves. If anything you see people here more irked at FFXI players when they compare FFXI and FFXIV. Not WoW though.

That said, I've met my share of odd balls in the game. Name any topic or side to it. There was a dude screeching about it at some point. Ignore them. They're just weirdos.

[Shurrikhan]

Is this a genuine sentiment among the community? I worry of being ostracized or worse if I even bring up the fact that I used to play WoW while in a duty with people.

Yes, sort of, but those who are unlikely to thereby negatively impact your experience are very unlikely to go uncontested in any given party. They're an oddly large group, but still much smaller than those that who aren't going to remotely harass you just for coming into the game with different expectations.

Give the game a reasonably fair shake, and you're good with ~98% of those here. Sadly, for the ~2%, it won't matter how well you contextualize or intend for a given suggestion if it seems to them you're trying to let WoW or the like "encroach" upon this game.

How's retribution paladin doing nowadays?

Like most specs, not remotely bad, but not quite peak. Chances are you're looking at filling your melee slots with at least one Fury (especially if no Prot) and Havoc each and the rest with with Assassination (top ST damage), but I'm sure even in certain Mythic fights one could make the case for Ret (mostly just due to BoP). For anything less than Mythic, it will not remotely matter, as long as you're not playing a spec that has both the least throughput and zero utility (e.g., Survival), if even then.

[Darksummoner]

Interesting. I am also a WoW Refugee (Thank God) and I have been playing FFXIV over 3 weeks now. I have gotten nothing but kindness and niceness from everyone. Like Everyone. My kindest moment comes from a person who random open traded with me and gave me 5 pets and asked me if I was a new person to FF. I told them yes and they told me "Welcome" and to keep the pets since I was new and told me if I needed help then ask them.

I have had nothing but great experiences from telling people that I was a mythic raider from WoW. And that I wanted to play FF from now. The people here have been so nice to me. So nice in fact that I find it cool and strange all at the same time. I have been so reclused and introverted in WoW that the challenge for me in FF is learning to talk and chill with people who are doing nothing but being nice. I am loving FFXIV. It is a awesome and great community/

[Shurrikhan]

I'll take a little smugness over WoW's "openly hostile toward anything and everything, including our own devs and influencers" attitude any day of the week.

Maybe I've just gotten lucky. Was doing a lot of alt-leveling before I let my sub expire until 9.1, and most of those runs turned into the likes of a very skilled tank letting new folks in on various nuances to their play, to which I added my few cents while stun-locking and interrupting enough for 3 as needed to keep the new healer from getting overwhelmed. I swear, after he and I (on Rogue, until the sprout healer wanted to learn how to DPS, then Monk) had taken them through 6 runs and 2 of them dropped for dinner, our 3 sprouts-equivalent probably knew more in terms of fundamentals than nearly any dungeoneer who hadn't done considerable amounts of higher-key M+. We wiped some, but the fun was in helping the new guys learn, so pushing the limits to the point they felt comfortable or wanted to challenge themselves and dying a few times in the occasional overreach was a given. It reminded me a lot of the old Stone Vigil and Darkhold runs back in the first week of ARR's release.

I've also gotten the occasional toxic guy, of course, but they've been a very small minority, even when PuGing above Mythic 15 dungeons, PuGing heroic raids, or so on.

Honestly, the worst feeling for me has always been the sprint-to-log culture, those who log-in, want their dungeon done seamlessly and silently (beyond perhaps a muscle-memory salutation at the start) just so they can then log out all the sooner until the next daily reset. Such has become increasingly present here since ARR, it feels like, and Shadowlands has only made more obvious that content stages and reward systems have a lot to do with that. Sadly, XIV does add to it a further element: tribalism between those who would learn the game and those who desire zero meta-experience in their combat (i.e., that of better learning or ever talking to anyone about it), and a community policing policy that heavily protects the latter from experiencing the game more fully.

That's not something I felt back in ARR, or even HW, but by deeper into Stormblood, there's been sort of a feeling of a sticky plastic barrier blocking the way between one another when you don't know whether informing someone that, say, Fire 2 is kind of a trap at its present tuning once one has learned Flare will be met with intense and greatly disproportionate backlash. Because of the difference in policy, that's not a feeling I get in WoW. Across 7 years or so of active sub time, I've never once been told there that my throughput or dodging was crap*, even when it was (I've, albeit very rarely, played while inebriated or have intentionally gotten hit so that my bored healer friend would "have something to heal", and honestly Shadow Priest and Demo Lock just would not fully click for me), though I've often been given advice by people of the same spec or who happen to play it on their main, and I've benefited greatly from that over the years. (* I have once been asked politely by the tank to stop stressing the healer only to have to inform them that the healer is sporadically reaching across to my keyboard and holding W for me, especially when I'm surrounded by incoming AoEs.) That's something I'd greatly miss if XIV continues to go the way of the very prickly (over)defensive and those who can help simply decided that joy previously core for them just isn't worth the risk now.

[LittleImp]

It's a mixed bag, but you will never stop encountering it to some degree, at least not until WoW is truly dead and people forget about it.

I join lots of pug raid calls and sub for statics frequently, and just about every time I've made the mistake of casually mentioning that I've played WoW in the past, someone ends up taking the piss. Just never mentioned WoW in this game honestly, I've seen people devolve into raving lunatics and become genuinely hostile and angry because the game was brought up. It's a topic that is best avoided.

[van_arn]

If someone insults or refuses to play with you because you’ve played wow, they’re not worth knowing or playing with anyway.

[Evergrey]

The majority of the players are nice and chill.
But like any other game, it is the other side that is the most loudest and gets the most attention when it comes to a games "community".

There certainly are FFXIV players who are "crusaders" defending FFXIV from external threats.
Heck, there was a big wave against a youtuber who had gives FFXIV a poor review and ESO a good review (his personal experience of both games).
They started threads on the forum, went on his Youtube videos and downvoted and left comments and the whole shebang.
Simply because he didn't like FFXIV.
To be fair though, I don't think he managed to play through the whole story so he didn't experience it all and I think that was the main reason people started the hate on him and his review.

But yes, there are certainly people who will show hate against things outside of FFXIV but those are few and far apart.
Will mostly see stuff like that on the forum where the "louder" people often gather.

[Naaura]

The reason why folks in this game take WoW Refugee as a bad label, is probably because they, themselves, encountered a few bad eggs that brought their habits into FFXIV. Such as: hostility, name calling, dps judgement, meta gaming. Which thankfully can be reported for!

But most ex-WoW gamers make a large margin of FFXIV already and integrate well!

I say, in order to break the mold of such a boogie man label, people gotta break that stereotype and show that they are as nice as anyone part of FFXIV community <3