Toxicity and Community

[Kes13a]

so.. now its the people who are trying to be good, and respecting others helping out etc that are ruining the community because they are "virtue signalling" by their actions? being good and positive is now a vanity?

I am failing to see much of the logic being tossed around these days at all

the internet has never been a toxin free zone and it never will be, anonymity allows people to sink to the level of least effort for them, which in a lot of cases, is that of the school bully. more than a few act how they want to be treated. the whole place is a homogenization of different personality traits, simple as that, the more extreme you are (not in a good way) the longer your internet "fame". I have never in all my time playing ever heard anyone saying FFXIV was toxin free. but now we have a portion of the community literally dancing in the streets because, I assume, they have found fellow toxic people here and can have "friends" and be toxic together or something.

I enjoy the community, mostly. there are people here I prefer not to be around, because they are rude or what have you, but thats no different than the real world. might my in game friends have a darker more toxic interior, its entirely possible, who knows? I was raised to treat people how you want to be treated and to respect others, didnt specify as to whom, just thats how you treat other people. FFXIV has nicer people generally in my opinion because of this, we are not all saints, and in my experience, games with less baked in interpersonal conflict such as pvp seem to be "nicer" or "less toxic" is the term these days I suppose. only the truly delusional confuse "nicer" with "toxic free"

I guess the reality is, that unless you have met or interacted with a MAJORITY of people in a game, you cannot reasonably label anything toxic or not. in mmos, thats simply not possible. if most of teh people you meet are jerks, my feeling is examine your own behaviour. for me, the interactions have been in the majority, positive. have I met jerks, of course. but I hardly think that they compromise a majority without meeting everyone else first.

meh, tired of this whole "the illusion is broken" garbage. it was only an illusion if you created it. its a game, with people, and people are what they are. as with any society, if you follow the rules or TOS, chances are you contribute in a "good" way.

sorry for the ramble

[Iscah]

I guess the reality is, that unless you have met or interacted with a MAJORITY of people in a game, you cannot reasonably label anything toxic or not.

This is a key point – though I think you mean "the community" rather than "anything". If you have come across that behaviour, you can label the specific behaviour from that person. But you can't say it represents the entire in-game community.

If people say "everyone in the game is nice", that's wishful thinking. But they can truly say "everyone I've met in the game is nice" if that's their experience.

And if someone else comes back and says "people have been awful to me so your 'nice people' must be fake", you can't confirm that unless you can somehow research who each person has interacted and confirm that they are dealing with the same people acting in very different ways.

Even then, it's inevitable that there are some people like that who are nice to their friends and awful to others. That, unfortunately, is humanity and you'll find some degree of it anywhere a community forms. But it doesn't mean that's the majority or the "true face of the community", just an unquantifiable portion of it.

The best you can do is say that if statistically most people have a positive experience, the community is probably generally "nice".

Also, if a portion of the community does want to act "toxicly", there's nothing anyone else can do to stop them besides attempt to summon a GM. They can't physically prevent the person from acting in a way they disapprove of.