Why this Live Letter Matters

[Avoidy]

But when a person posts quite prolifically, has multiple front-page threads all created by that person, and the topics are all negative and nit-picky, and hardly a single positive thing is said about a game in hundreds of posts - it will start to leave an impression that the person simply has little purpose other than to search for things to complain about.

I also think it's quite simplistic to think that people who overall enjoy the game have no criticisms of it, and only negative posters have the critical thinking skills needed to identify faults. I doubt any of us enjoys 100% of the content in this game and has no criticism of it. I criticized the housing system in this game in the past, and YEARS AND YEARS ago that I couldn't even log into FFXIV without buying a subscription to some sort of service that allowed me to connect to the game at all (and I live in California). It was incredibly irritating and am glad that is in the past.

I quit FFXIV back near the release of Stormblood as I found myself at the time hopelessly bored by the MSQ. I didn't return until I was convinced to do so by Shadowbringers. I didn't feel the need to post endlessly for months, I just did something else. More recently, I just quit Lost Ark (again) and didn't post on their forums while they existed or their reddit. I just decided to do something else. I also played BDO and while I used to post regularly in their forums when i did play, I left and don't spend any time there at all since.

I know my earlier claim sounds simplistic, but it's based on the simple level of discourse I see here in general. There's rarely any nuance with a sizable portion of this forum. Whenever anyone asks for even a basic quality of life improvement, they're met with people who are passionately against changing the game at all and I'd say it was weird if it wasn't kind of normal for mmo forums to have people like that. I believe they are called fanboys. In the same vein, some people will only bother logging into their forum account when they want to be critical, for the same reason that Yelp! reviews tend to be about bad experiences. They probably only log in when they have a grievance. It just is what it is. Fanboys against critics in an mmo forum, tale as old as time.

Yeah, there're people who don't fall into one category or the other, but it's really easy to spot the people who play a "role" in this farce, so to speak. This game in particular, holy moly, sometimes it feels like Yoshida could just take a shit in the next LL and say "this is what I think of western players!" in English and the same usual people would write a dissertation on why it was fine. 14 has a rep in other game communities for having really passionate players who defend this game relentlessly even when it's not deserving of it.