Quote Originally Posted by Rainbows View Post
What is my hot take?

For a game that prides itself on having the most welcoming community in gaming, the actual daily reality of Eorzea feels less like a vibrant world and more like a room full of mannequins running programmed loops. We have traded genuine human connection for a hyper-individualistic, transactional culture where everything is plastic, performative, and deeply shallow.

The mandatory "Hi, let’s do our best!" at the start of a duty isn't kindness... It's a scripted protocol. The moment you break that script by answering a casual "How are you?" with actual honesty, people recoil with awkward resentment because you forced them out of their comfortable bubble. No one actually wants to socialize or build mutual support; they want a low-effort echo chamber where they can protect their personal comfort at all costs. This weaponized positivity is used as a shield to avoid any baseline accountability or real human messiness.

Layered right on top of this apathy is the inescapable, performative lewdness that dominates every major hub and the Party Finder. It's disgusting... Walk into Limsa or open the venue listings, and you are flooded with hyper-sexualized attention-seeking and superficial flexing. It has become a cheap substitute for actual intimacy, reducing a vast fantasy realm into a cliquey high school playground. If you refuse to play along with this counterfeit performance and actually want substance, honesty, and respect, you are immediately iced out. The community isn't inclusive, it’s just aggressively complacent and utterly indifferent to anyone who calls out the rot behind the "wholesome" PR hype.

Connection in online games, not just FF14 no longer exists because almost everyone online is too fearful to allow you the chance to have depth and empathy for them and too shallow and apathetic to have actual depth and empathy for you.
Agreed. Not only that, but one of the reasons public chat is dead in this game, with the exception of Balmung-Uldah, is that the community is so oversensitive and PC that there is a stifling effect on people joking around in chat out of fear of offending someone and saying something politically incorrect. It blows my mind how you can be in a crowded Limsa with hundreds of players and no one is talking in Shout Chat. That would NEVER happen in Old School Runescape. I honestly wish that there would be an OSRS exodus into FF14 because those dudes know how to have fun and shoot the breeze.