Reset time with xpansion. Lets deal with the cheating finally.

[Miles064]

Didn't help, no. But it is more of a symptom of the bigger issues.

Raider.io exists because of all the risk of running keys is on the leader. I don't fault players for it at all tbh. I also don't apply to +10s when I've only done +2s even if I have the ilvl for it and will do like a 5 then 8 then 10 to ease into it a bit. If it wasn't IO it would be ilvl or achievements or armory anyway. I hope blizz will change it at some point but they seem to really like doubling down on dumb decisions lately even if current mythic+ is a few steps up from the past.

Ive never seen cactbot but I have heard it compared to WoW's deadly boss mods which means it doesn't do much if that is all it does. FF has huge arrows telling people what to do and they still mess up. Knowing about something doesn't make it free though. If anything I wish this game had real addon support but I do get it would kinda suck for the console players. At least FF has much better base UI control so things like hotbar and bag addons don't feel as needed. I refuse to play wow without at least dominos(hotbar addon) at this point though.

[Vahlnir]

Raider.io exists because of all the risk of running keys is on the leader. I don't fault players for it at all tbh. I also don't apply to +10s when I've only done +2s even if I have the ilvl for it and will do like a 5 then 8 then 10 to ease into it a bit. If it wasn't IO it would be ilvl or achievements or armory anyway. I hope blizz will change it at some point but they seem to really like doubling down on dumb decisions lately even if current mythic+ is a few steps up from the past.

It's not really the players' fault, I agree. It comes down to overall content design, though it is still 100% voluntary to stick around. Having put so much time, effort and money into the game I had a hard time really letting go. I get it. I'll probably return at some point, but it's no longer an addiction. It's more along the lines of "welp, I've got nothing better to do" when I need something different to play. With how competitive things are across the board and the punishment for failure being so high, it breeds resentment and toxicity for the players themselves and for the developers. Not quite League of Legends levels of bad, but it is still rather unpleasant. I've seen people compare leaving WoW for other games to leaving an abusive relationship. It's...not entirely inaccurate. FF XIV tends to be a breath of fresh air for a lot of people. But basically anything but WoW is after dealing with them for years. lol

[Miles064]

It's not really the players' fault, I agree. It comes down to overall content design. With how competitive things are across the board and the punishment for failure being so high, it breeds resentment and toxicity for the players themselves and for the developers. Not quite League of Legends levels of bad, but it is still rather unpleasant. I've seen people compare leaving WoW for other games to leaving an abusive relationship. It's...not entirely inaccurate. FF XIV tends to be a breath of fresh air for a lot of people. But basically anything but WoW is after dealing with them for years. lol

I guess I never really saw it. Most of the toxic stuff in wow is performance based so as long as you dont play like trash you dont run into much. FF's feels more toxic in that I seem to clash with players a lot more here over the most basic stuff though. "dps pls aoe", "rdm why are you spam hardcasting verthunder?" "drk pls use tbn", and such which I feel is way harder to deal with compared to racial slur spam(which i can ignore/report) or trolls(kick/report) or something and even then trolls and slur spammer seem to get dealt with pretty fast. I will say the worse I've had to deal with in WoW was way worse then anything I've dealt with in FF so far so maybe there is some truth to it. I've also played wow for much longer though.

Feel like the people in this game are too afraid to get their feelings maybe hurt which goes back to this game's "addon hate". Things like the addon that puts deathblows in chat and dmg meters are useful tools that can help performance for everyone. "what happened?" can be answered by just looking at details/recount/skadda and saying "oh I took a ton of dmg from this" or "these adds need to be interrupted and only 2 interrupts went out", "tank a is taking way more dmg then tank b", "all our healers together are doing well according to details but we just don't have the hps" and such . The more I read the forums and play this game, the more it seems like I'm the outlier here though.