"Everyone's so open and friendly" is a lie

[Artemiz]

It's more that it can be difficult to remain a 'good person' when bad actors are constantly and intentionally shifting the goal-posts to suit their own purposes, in a never ending war to be the 'goodest' person and weaponize morality against people they don't like for unrelated reasons.

My SO is a moderately popular member of the art community for this game, and is by all accounts an absolute saint compared to me. If anything, she's essentially too nice and struggles with people taking advantage of that fact. She had a particular user, who happens to be a very active member of the FFXIV morality discourse, become intensely jealous of her growing popularity and decide to cancel her. This person, who she'd never spoken to a single time, started to make twitter callout posts about how her art triggers their mental illness and makes them depressed, and that making art of a certain character a certain way was toxic. Other people, who didn't look into the origin of the situation (The person trying to cancel her literally had a string of public tweets where they admitted they were doing it because they were jealous of her growing popularity), band-wagoned on and she was forced to lock her account due to all of the insane abuse she was receiving from supposed 'good people' fighting the 'good fight'.

This community tends to unquestioningly give these types of people the benefit of the doubt on issues of morality, which ultimately does a significant amount of genuine harm.

The bulk of your post is about a situation I have no knowledge of so cannot comment. The vast majority of players howerver don't have this problem as it's a lot more to do with being well known than being an FFXIV player.

The first part however is all about shifting blame for ones own behaviour onto other people. Nobody is forcing you into a virtue arms race though, just be true to yourself and try to treat others with respect.

[LittleImp]

The first part however is all about shifting blame for ones own behaviour onto other people. Nobody is forcing you into a virtue arms race though, just be true to yourself and try to treat others with respect.

Not really. I haven't seriously been called toxic in a long time (unless you count people disagreeing with my views on the forums), so I really have no blame to shift. I mostly teach content and help parties in this game; in particular I like to help out newer content creators / small streamers that share my passion about the game. This means I community hop a lot, and spend a significant amount of time sitting in voice chats and text chats with a really wide gamut of people. Most of my observations here are informed less by being the target of this behavior, and more by me watching other people engage in it from a third-party standpoint.

Here's a fun list of things I've seen declared 'toxic' by elements of the FFXIV community:

- Giving advice, regardless of how it's phrased.
- Making lalafell jokes
- Making miqote jokes
- Pointing out that Lalafells are based on children
- Roleplaying as a garlean
- Undercutting on the marketboard
- Kicking a fresh learner from a farm party
- Swearing at someone who has been stalking and abusing you for months
- Asking someone to obtain gear that is above the minimum ilevel requirement of a dungeon
- Not making makeup mods you make and release for free compatible with all character skin-tones
- Not making free Reshade presets compatible with all skin-tones
- Skipping cutscenes while doing the MSQ
- Criticizing the mog-station
- Drawing certain characters or talking about certain ships
- Continuing to play any games made by Blizzard
- Watching or supporting Asmongold in any capacity
- Having any conservative political views (I am very liberal myself, just putting this here because I see people get viciously attacked over this one sometimes)
- Ending a message with a smiley face

There's a lot more, but I think you get the idea. In my experience, most of the time these issues are just flimsy justifications to create moral outrage around a person that someone else doesn't like for completely personal reasons. A lot of the time this can come from something as simple as a predisposition towards not liking players that participate in a certain activity in-game (Anti-roleplayers, anti-raiders etc). It also can happen, more disturbingly, with people who do not like certain RL demographics.

This very much applies to people who attack others over their word-choice, or try really heavily to police 'tone', as it's one of the lowest effort avenues to assassinate someone's character with. Particularly because it's really easy to reframe someone else's tone through text chat. It's even worse when you consider that this game is international and that not everyone speaks English as their first language.

[ItMe]

Here's a fun list of things I've seen declared 'toxic' by elements of the FFXIV community:

More like, "by elements of the internet" lol

[Artemiz]

Not really. I haven't seriously been called toxic in a long time (unless you count people disagreeing with my views on the forums), so I really have no blame to shift. I mostly teach content and help parties in this game; in particular I like to help out newer content creators / small streamers that share my passion about the game. This means I community hop a lot, and spend a significant amount of time sitting in voice chats and text chats with a really wide gamut of people. Most of my observations here are informed less by being the target of this behavior, and more by me watching other people engage in it from a third-party standpoint.

Here's a fun list of things I've seen declared 'toxic' by elements of the FFXIV community:

- Giving advice, regardless of how it's phrased.
- Making lalafell jokes
- Making miqote jokes
- Pointing out that Lalafells are based on children
- Roleplaying as a garlean
- Undercutting on the marketboard
- Kicking a fresh learner from a farm party
- Swearing at someone who has been stalking and abusing you for months
- Asking someone to obtain gear that is above the minimum ilevel requirement of a dungeon
- Not making makeup mods you make and release for free compatible with all character skin-tones
- Not making free Reshade presets compatible with all skin-tones
- Skipping cutscenes while doing the MSQ
- Criticizing the mog-station
- Drawing certain characters or talking about certain ships
- Continuing to play any games made by Blizzard
- Watching or supporting Asmongold in any capacity
- Having any conservative political views (I am very liberal myself, just putting this here because I see people get viciously attacked over this one sometimes)
- Ending a message with a smiley face

There's a lot more, but I think you get the idea. In my experience, most of the time these issues are just flimsy justifications to create moral outrage around a person that someone else doesn't like for completely personal reasons. A lot of the time this can come from something as simple as a predisposition towards not liking players that participate in a certain activity in-game (Anti-roleplayers, anti-raiders etc). It also can happen, more disturbingly, with people who do not like certain RL demographics.

This very much applies to people who attack others over their word-choice, or try really heavily to police 'tone', as it's one of the lowest effort avenues to assassinate someone's character with. Particularly because it's really easy to reframe someone else's tone through text chat. It's even worse when you consider that this game is international and that not everyone speaks English as their first language.

Yeah I've seen most of that too, it's all just noise and comes from a small minority of vocal sub groups. The list you provided might be FFXIV specific but the internet has always been like this. The point of this thread is that the FFXIV community is awful and I dont think that's even close to true, not by the standards of online interactions.

Ultimately we all have a choice, we can engage, on either side, with all the stuff you just listed or we can ignore the vocal rabble rousers and find the chilled out people who just want to enjoy the game, which happens to be the massive majority.

You are obviously looking at this from a streamer/content creator point of view and that is a different beast to be fair as the cave dwellers will walk over broken glass to antagonise those people. For the average player though engaging in that stuff is a choice. I am very confident that the majority of players who are so convinced this playerbase is full of horrible toxic players are in fact toxic themselves and they are just reaping what they sow when people treat them the way they treat others.

Having played FF MMO's for nearly 20 years I've met plenty of horrible people but they don't stay in my orbit for long and they are completely outnumbered by the amount of people I've known who go far out of their way to help others and most of my interactions have been neutral to pleasant.

[Theodric]

It isn't just noise. I've had multiple, unaffiliated people threaten to kill me, my friends and my family over choosing to role-play a Garlean. They've done as much in-game, on this very forum and on places such as Twitter and Reddit.

I know multiple people in the same situation. They're actively stalked, frequently harassed and all for something as simple as claiming to like the antagonists in a fictional fantasy setting.

[Artemiz]

It isn't just noise. I've had multiple, unaffiliated people threaten to kill me, my friends and my family over choosing to role-play a Garlean. They've done as much in-game, on this very forum and on places such as Twitter and Reddit.

I know multiple people in the same situation. They're actively stalked, frequently harassed and all for something as simple as claiming to like the antagonists in a fictional fantasy setting.

Stalking is something that should absolutely be taken more seriously online, I wont argue with that. A death threat really depends on the situation. Do they know your real name, your address, your place of work, the country you live in, what you look like? If the answer is yes then call the police. If it's no then noise is exaclty what it is, more than likely from someone with the mental age of a 12 year old. I'm not saying it's acceptable because it's clearly despicble but it's not something that shoud be taken seriously.

I've not experienced it in this game but in CoD all you need to do is win a game, use a certain gun or play a certain way and the threats and abuse start. I've had it there plenty of times and nothing actually happened, because it's just noise.

Both of those are very extreme however, the OP is all about petty squabbles. There are millions of players in this game and I think judging the whole community because of such extreme behaviour is harsh.

[Oscura]

It isn't just noise. I've had multiple, unaffiliated people threaten to kill me, my friends and my family over choosing to role-play a Garlean. They've done as much in-game, on this very forum and on places such as Twitter and Reddit.

I know multiple people in the same situation. They're actively stalked, frequently harassed and all for something as simple as claiming to like the antagonists in a fictional fantasy setting.

I've also seen people on social media, the main reddit and the official forums have some pretty alarming opinions about Garlean RPers or people who like the characters.
I've seen them get called racists, fascists, dictator-apologists, etc.

I genuinely dislike when people are attacked for liking a specific faction because the faction is evil in a fictional setting. It is a fictional setting. There needs to be villains written into a story. I don't know why people think it's wrong for people to write their own villains or morally-gray characters.

[Izscha]

- Having any conservative political views (I am very liberal myself, just putting this here because I see people get viciously attacked over this one sometimes)

This one right there must be the dumbest thing ever and at the same time the thing that drives ppl crazy the most.
Anytime you bring politics on the internet you'll have that one guy that will start to blast everything if you dare having opinions that he dont share, and it's not like ppl disagree and that's it that's more like you're me ennemy and i will beat you up if you were in front of me.
I talk about politic discussion as a whole and every single politic got a lot of dumbs followers, not just the "left/right" stuff made in the US.