My Horrible experience with most (not all) WoW players in FFXIV so far

[Gothicshark]

... aggressive, toxic, over-complaining, defensive, etc. ...

Report them and what they said that was Toxic, Square is highly responsive to reports of Toxic behavior in chat. Just copy paste their chat into the report, do not engage with them, as it can backfire if you get into a flame session with toxic people.

didn’t have a sprout

or they typed /nastatus which deactivates it.

To the idea of WOW players here in FFXIV, you might be surprised the Majority of Long time FFXIV players came from WOW. I Started MMOs way back in the Ultima days. (well technically I was a BBS RPGer first, but I'm old)) I played most of the Big MMOs prior to WOW. EQ, SWG being my two big ones. I eventually ended up in COH, and then Purchased WOW in 2005. I maintained my Sub in WOW from 2005 until the Announcement of No Flying in WOD during MOP. I Quit WOW and Moved to FFXIV, eventually after finishing HW, I reupped with WOW and continued to play WOW as Square at the time had some policies that made it difficult for me as a Transgender person (Policies that they changed BTW) I continued being abused by Blizzard Emotionally and in game until 2018 when I came back to FFXIV by then my legal name was officially changed, and Square made it easy to fix the issue I had faced prior. Yeah!

This said I haven't tried the latest WOW expansion, but I was a full time WOW player from Vanilla WOW until they nerfed the player levels. I was a 120 Void Elf Warlock, and refuse to log any of my old characters at the new lower level.

This said, you will find that FFXIV's community has always been filled with EX-WOW, it's hard not to have us since that game has been around for a very very long time, and had over 12 million active subs at it's peek. I need to say Active Paid Subscriptions in bold this didn't count Free subs, or people who purchased the game and never played past a month. That was 12 million active players at it's peek, a feat no other MMO has even done, and never will again the way things are going.

...doesn’t read the party chat ...

Also big time assumption, I minimize Chat most of the time when playing, and a lot of people do, esp when sitting in a city and you don't want to be bothered with "FReegold" spam. I personally learn the mechanics of everything, and have had years to work things out, but you will seldom if ever see me chatting or listening to chat esp in random runs. You will find a significant portion of players prefer not to engage socially in a MMO, we are the silent lurkers. Also you assume they are WOW players, sure the odds are great a new player might have played WOW prior, but it's just as likely that they are just a Newer player, and might have never played an MMO before or played Destiny or Guild Wars or something else. You seem to assume and generalize too much, and your justification seems more like confirmation bias than the truth.

[Lunalepsy]

I have been playing FFXIV for 8 years, I can say it has been a good experience overall, but this has deteriorated in the last months, every day I run into a Duty with at least one player with an aggressive, toxic, over-complaining, defensive, etc. attitude towards FFXIV in general. These people identified themselves as WoW players and playing with them has become horrible, for example, in the last 8 years I had reported 5 players, but in the last 3 months, I had reported 10 players.

So far, I have identified 2 kinds:

First, the vocal one, complains about almost everything, from how we play to how “weeb” the community is or the way we do things. An example, in a dungeon with 2 WoW players, they didn’t have a sprout or flower icon, so they were not new (probably jump potion or rush through MSQ), so normally with standard players the party goes and do the normal pulls, but the tank (WoW player) was absolutely lost, this person began to complain about how fast we were going and not letting him conduct the run, so I said, “well this is how a normal run goes right?” what of course only opened the flood gates for this person to go all-out on how bad FFXIV players are because we only want to run dungeons fast and not respect new players, this person never said he was new, for 10 minutes I had to read how WoW players do dungeons and how FFXIV players suck, so I said: “In FFXIV we let others know if we are new, so they can adjust, you could do that from the beginning instead of complaining and attack us”, after that the other WoW player came in and begin complaining too and also threatening us with harassment reports for not letting them play the game, and he said: “We WoW players are half of this game population now so you must play this like WoW, also, did you know that we can report you for harassment?”, so these WoW players not only think they are a huge part of FFXIV (which is far from reality), they also think we must change our way to play to fit their needs otherwise you will be reported.

Second, the reckless one, doesn’t read the party chat and just goes ahead and attacks, which is no good in a duty that requires party coordination or basic knowledge of mechanics like a Trial, after some wipes when FFXIV players try to explain mechanics or give some advice, the rushing WoW players begin using the chat just to say that we are treating them like stupids because we are telling them what to do. These players are also the ones that don't read their skill tree and get mad if you tell them what a skill does.

Usually, when one goes to a different place, one tries to fit on it by learning the ways and customs of the people living there and in that way become part of the community, not by complaining about everything and trying to impose their own ways. Sorry for the bad English (not my native language), this is something that is really bothering me and I wanted to share it with the FFXIV community.

Thanks.

People love being passive aggressive in this game. So sorry that happened to you!

[Breakbeat]

Maybe it's you if you have a horrible experience with most (not all)?

That's absolutely true, and I've upvoted your post.

===

Relative side note. I want to point out that OP hasn't even had "experiences with most WoW players," as they claim. OP has had the same experiences most of us have had, perhaps interacting on some basic level with a few dozen different individuals, maybe on a busy day, even a hundred people. So, say fifty a day, on average.

If you did this for an entire year, at the outside and given the benefit of the doubt, you will have interacted with ~15,000 ex-WoW players. Assuming, further, that you determined who was and was not an "ex-WoW player" because most folks don't mention it. If someone is uber-awesome and the perfect group leader... you still need to ask if they're ex-WoW. No skewed data, now. Everyone you interact with has to be asked.

Anyway, doing this for a solid year, you'd end up interacting with perhaps 5% of all "ex-WoW players" that have moved to Final Fantasy, assuming the wave was 300k players moving from there to here; adjust accordingly for different estimates.

With that kind of data resolution, you can determine nothing. You can't even make an educated guess. Hell, you can't even reliably take a stab in the dark and hope to hit something.

Also, consider that each player you interact with must be briefly interviewed, so you can determine their actual demeanor, and not base assumptions off heat-of-the-moment interactions in a frustrating raid, etc. This would be a full-time job and then some. Of course - of course, right? - you would want to at least have a question-and-answer session with people you are going to label as "such-and-such," especially if "such-and-such" is something negative.

2021 Sociology: I met and interacted with four hundred people out of a group of several hundred thousand, and I am ready to declare my findings about the entire group.

Good luck with that. You're going to keep running into social issues if you go about life this way. When you make a determination about a larger group based on limited interaction with their constituent members, you end up with racism, bigotry, sexism, (sexual preference)-phobia, etc. Every single one of the preceding exists because people make baseless assumptions about groups of people made up of hundreds of millions of individuals, when they, themselves, have only interacted with twelve members of that group. The rest, they read on the Internet.

Can I really complain, though? We Americans eat this stuff up. Someone polls 1,500 people, and somehow this turns into "44% of Americans say 'yes' to this, and 56% say 'no'". And we believe this garbage. It really is a fairly serious issue in our society, all of this pre-judging asinine nonsense and polls of 0.5% of a group that are extrapolated to represent the entire group.

It frustrates me because I have no issue judging individuals individually. Is it really all that friggin' hard to judge individuals and leave groups out of it? Who cares who played what game before? Are all players of a certain game the same? Of course not. What game(s) one has played in the past matters about as much as the skin color of the player.

"Ex-WoW" indeed. My mom (rest her soul) played WoW up until she simply couldn't anymore, at about the age of 65. She was not exactly the same as the angsty teenager that rages at someone in a failed raid. I resent the insinuation that she was, to be honest, and that's exactly what one does by suggesting all "ex-WoW" players are the same.

[Lexis]

'Most' WoW players don't go around announcing to every group they join they're former WoW players. In fact, in my 3 months+ of gameplay since leaving WoW for FFXIV, not once did I feel compelled to announce my former WoW player status to my teammates. I also have an incredibly long list of fun/pleasant interactions I've had so far and I couldn't tell you if said players are former WoW players or not, because why would I even need to know that?

I'm sure you've had an unpleasant time with self-identified WoW players, but to claim that 'most' current/former WoW players are toxic is... a little out there. It doesn't matter what game people have played or currently enjoy alongside FFXIV, even this game's own developers will tell you that. Tribalism does nothing beyond breeding negativity.

[EzekielBook]

As a former (and current) WoW player, let me just add that most players rush through normal dungeons there as well. The speed kill method surprised me in FF.

But as a sprout, in my first week, going through the duty that is the haunted house early on, I got lost. Very lost. Nobody told me I could use the Return button in the dungeon to go to the start, as opposed to going back to my actual home. (That's not clear *at all*.) So they finished off the last boss of the place without me. And, frankly, the mechanics of most of the ARR raids that come up in roulette (Labyrinth/Syrcus), are almost never explained, even if someone says they're new. Nearly all of the time, if I think to ask, I get a "LOL, don't die."

Toxic players aren't exclusive to one game or the other. You've just internalized the toxicity for your game, that the other toxicity becomes more noticeable.

I encourage any FF players to try WoW for a while, and find a group to run Wailing Caverns to see what things are like from the viewpoint of a new WoW player.

[Leigaon]

Is this where I'm seeing all these posts about WoW? From what it seems is that the two examples are not uncommon in FFXIV in general before, for whatever reason, this increase of WoW players came to be.

Last night I ran MSQ. Once I got in, it was instantly "Oh god this one? ..the long one?" and the rest of the run was just complaining. That's not unusual though, usually it's from a person who has played a video game for way too long.

Then I had someone a roulette, we were taking on Alexander prime. The stacking marks with the green marks on others came up and the whm with the stacker ran away, and the ones with the green markers kept running after or stacking. Someone kept explaining when to stack and the person just responded they didn't know and wasn't aware.

I just figured these were your regular "you don't pay my sub" and users who paid to level skip and figured they could wing it. I wouldn't think someone like in the OPs example would be from WoW unless they specifically said so or had a chat about it like in the O.P.s example.

[Flipityflu]

Just as many trolls like the OP here as there are in the WOW forums. Don't think you are any different or special.

[Kyuuen]

Maybe leave the troll threads to professionals, like MPK or Ativan.

If that's the defining point of professional in this sense can they be fired?

[Jeeqbit]

I have done dungeons regularly for many years and almost never come across this toxicity including recently. People have been coming from WoW for the last 8 years and in my experience they are very pleasant.

A lot of people that you have talked to over the last 8 years have probably played WoW at some point but didn't tell you that they did. Most people don't go around advertising what games they used to play unless you ask them.

normally with standard players the party goes and do the normal pulls, but the tank (WoW player) was absolutely lost, this person began to complain about how fast we were going and not letting him conduct the run, so I said, “well this is how a normal run goes right?” what of course only opened the flood gates for this person to go all-out on how bad FFXIV players are because we only want to run dungeons fast and not respect new players

Most tanks don't do big pulls and go really slow and would get confused about people running ahead whether they have played WoW or not.

They don't need to announce they are new because if they are they will probably watch a cutscene and the bonus text will appear. If there isn't a sprout it's usually the person with returner.

[Gothicshark]

As a former (and current) WoW player, ...

As a veteran WOW player, I am more suspect of Current WOW players than Former ones. After what has come out this past year, I actively hope everyone leaves that game, and that the company goes Chapter 11. Because I was annoyed by the needless Sexism in the game for a long while before I quit, but when it came out it was more than use the typical stupid stuff. I am now openly hostile to ALL Blizzard products and will never return. Which is sad if I think about the many tens of thousands of dollars I spent on that company over the years including going to Blizcon. Sometimes its better to burn the house down and start over.

As to Toxic players in WOW, depended on server and faction honestly. Go to some of the Servers like Emerald Dream and the Toxic players would be kind of loud but easily avoided, while go to Feathermoon and you would have to actively look for them, and then you might only find them Horde Side in Orgrimmar. Most people running dungeons don't talk, they just do them and leave not even saying hello.

But the community in general is a lot more angry than the community here, and that is 100% due to Blizzard treating the players badly for a lot of years. The Faction Wall also feeds the Community toxicity, a group of Horde players wouldn't think twice about damaging an Alliance Players car at Blizcon (an Actual issue that happens). Meanwhile here, sure people make jokes about all the races, but there is no Faction bias, no forced PVP storyline, the Game Devs don't reply with Gitgud memes, and treat players both male and female with respect. It also is telling that sexy clothing is not limited to women. I have seen more male skin than female Skin in this game. Which shows a strong difference in core values at a company level.

Also Wailing Caverns... hard eyeroll, one of the worst laid out low level dungeons in WOW, in someways even worse than the Manor that you mentioned. Even then, half the time players will just do half of it and ditch.