Toxicity and Community

[strawberrycake]

When I talk about people being toxic in this game I dont mean the one idiot in your PF or DF run, or that person in your FC who is kind of an ass. I mean those who have sent Death threats to streamers and youtubers such as Lazy Peon, Scottzone, and even some In community members Such as Sfia. People have also Threatend to Rape XenosysVex's Wife, People have also threatend The Devs with violence over Male Viera and Female Horthgar and iirc there were people telling Yoshi P to kill himself on Twitter as well over Male Viera and Hrothgar.

Now I wanna say these are not hot takes, this isnt a jab at XIV, but simply stating the facts, bad actors did bad things, these are people within our community, they've done this in the name of FFXIV, or to stir drama, or because they really are unhinged peoples who need help. If we're truly a community that wants any and everyone to play and enjoy the game, no matter what they're preferred way of playing it, we have to deal with these types of people. We have to remind them that opinions exist, and a difference of opinion is not worth losing your account.

What a lot of people are missing, is that interacting with games like WoW isnt as inharently bad, not just from the devs standpoint but from the community as well.

I've been playing WoW since Vanilla, when I was a child, the game as a whole was like XIV around the time I started playing which was 3.1 in HW, it was a close knit community on each server and over all everyone was nice and helpful, the game a bit more difficult but overall a worth while experience. There were some bad actors but ultimately none that were extreme, just mean spirited people who may ninja your loot or just say something hurtful, but thats life, you can always re-run the dungeon and always blacklist mean people. Now you may be wondering what this has to do with XIV. Well WoW grew, almost seemingly became popular overnight,With that growth we gained peoples from all walks of life and our close knit communities began to shatter and fade away, the game was bigger, our enviornments changed.

The same is happening to XIV as we speak, with this popularity and growth, a lot of the people who think things shouldn;t change start to act, start being tribal even to newer players. They were mean, and even chased away people flocking into WoW from Guild Wars 1, ina similar way to how a lot of the people here in XIV were with Asmongold, It got so bad the GMs had to step in and ban players. To say history repeats itself would almost be appropriate, but no this sint history, this is th enatural growth of an MMO, no matter how nice or good your community is, this is how these things naturally pan out, My advice to those who would listen is to look to older MMOs and how they handled it if the peoples here in XIV are stuggling with how on their own. The Popularity of XIV will attract many, and many from within will show just how much they care, in the worst ways possible.