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

[Illmaeran]

After watching Zepla's recent video where she talks about former WoW players having to "reprogram" themselves, so to speak, something clicked in my head. I believe most WoW players actually *want* to play in a non-toxic environment and be non-toxic themselves, but the culture over there has become so pervasively aggressive that they've been conditioned to strike first to preempt receiving aggression from other players. I've never encountered the levels of toxicity as I did on a brand-new server when Classic opened up. Those players were absolutely, no doubt, 100% "WoW refugees", either from the retail version or people who'd been playing on private servers. Having been on RP servers for a decade (the closest thing to the XIV community in that game), having the Classic RP server get flooded with people who would have otherwise played on a Normal or PvP server opened my eyes to just how toxic and aggressive the general WoW community really was at that time. It was a daily, sometimes hourly, kick in the face. While I don't condone aggressive/toxic behavior in any way, shape, or form, the realization that these people need time to let go of old habits and adjust to the new social contracts of the XIV community is going to help me have a little more empathy and patience for people.

I play on the Elemental (JP) DC and interactions are generally very good over there. There's one server that's traditionally been on the more aggressive side as it's got a high percent of non-Japanese players and I've encountered "toxic" behavior from people there in the past, no doubt. Aggressive behavior has absolutely increased with the increase in people leaving WoW, but correlation isn't causality. HOWEVER, and it's important to note, those people are still in the minority of people from that server that I've played with.

There will always be jerks in any game, and each game's community has different levels of interaction that they consider too aggressive or toxic, but I honestly believe the large majority of recent "refugees" to XIV truly want to get away from a toxic community and break their old toxic habits.

[LisSquid]

I believe most WoW players actually *want* to play in a non-toxic environment and be non-toxic themselves, but the culture over there has become so pervasively aggressive that they've been conditioned to strike first to preempt receiving aggression from other players.

I agree with your post, but want to isolate this part specifically. There's always been the notion in FF14 that if you say anything negative in /say you can get a strike. We know this isn't true, but we have to acknowledge this is a pervasive belief that kid gloves need to be present at all times.

On the other hand, in WoW, ribbing and banter is the norm. Most people don't even mean anything malicious about emote spamming or jokingly giving someone a hard time, but that doesn't translate to 14 in how sanitized we have made our chat. I remember seeing "I messed up I'll kms" or "You messed up, kys." used liberally for a few years when that was the meme on WoW. Most people didn't mean it, it was just a weird turn of phrase you pick up when the general community is hostile and it is a sort of joke on it.

So we have a bunch of people who are just used to breaking the ice with a joke at someones (self or stranger) expense clashing with a population who seem to believe you'll wake up in the Gaol for saying the f word. I've found it extremely fascinating.