I feel like the forums is a very poor representation of the actual community in the game. If you based it on the forums you’d expect people to be mean spirited, aggressive, and vindictive. But after playing since 1.0 I’ve rarely ever seen people argue or otherwise abuse each other in-game. It happens of course, but the general vibe is nowhere near as volatile as it feels on the forums.

Honestly it feels like the forums are some kind of weird black hole of circular arguments that get stretched out ad infinitum but never actually go anywhere. But since it’s all inside this black hole, it can’t leak out into the game lol, so you have the forum community looking like a spaghetti while the in-game community is still an amorphous blob.

Basically, the forums to me seem to give an entirely different impression of the actual ffxiv community. But then, considering it’s the internet, I guess it’s unfortunately inevitable that there’d so many ‘troll posts’ (for want for a better word lol)