Why is the FF14 Community So Adverse to Banter?

[BigCheez]

People coming out of the woodwork to prove the theory correct is lowkey hilarious.

[DiaDeem]

personal insults

All I said is I found it juvenile and rude. Or was it being called tactless? I'm sorry if you find that as an offensive "personal insult" lol.

[DPZ2]

The issue isn’t whether banter is “low brow” or whether people can laugh at themselves. You’re assuming everyone shares your norms. FFXIV’s community doesn’t use competitive banter, so a line like “sit lol” reads as dismissive instead of playful. If you don’t know your audience, the tone won’t land.

When people react badly, it isn’t hypocrisy. It’s a difference in expectations. If you want your jokes to be taken as jokes, you have to read the room.

[JohnLakeside]

The issue isn’t whether banter is “low brow” or whether people can laugh at themselves. You’re assuming everyone shares your norms. FFXIV’s community doesn’t use competitive banter, so a line like “sit lol” reads as dismissive instead of playful. If you don’t know your audience, the tone won’t land.

When people react badly, it isn’t hypocrisy. It’s a difference in expectations. If you want your jokes to be taken as jokes, you have to read the room.

People keep saying "read the room." My question is: Why is the room so prickly? Never online or IRL have I experienced a community as prickly as FF14's.

[BigCheez]

The issue isn’t whether banter is “low brow” or whether people can laugh at themselves. You’re assuming everyone shares your norms. FFXIV’s community doesn’t use competitive banter, so a line like “sit lol” reads as dismissive instead of playful. If you don’t know your audience, the tone won’t land.

When people react badly, it isn’t hypocrisy. It’s a difference in expectations. If you want your jokes to be taken as jokes, you have to read the room.

The issue is that the room is often filled with people whose heads have been surgically implanted in their own rear ends, and the question that was posed by the OP was "why is this so often the case in FFXIV?".

There seems to be something about the game that just draws people with an ineffably self-righteous, holier-than-thou attitude for some reason.

[Ath192]

People keep saying "read the room." My question is: Why is the room so prickly? Never online or IRL have I experienced a community as prickly as FF14's.

Because people get offended easily now a days. Simple as that. My question is why do you talk or chat in this game? Take a hint from all the silent duties. This isn't a game to be social in to my eyes.

It's also designed so you don't need to say anything either unless you're doing hard content, for which you'd talk outside of it in discord or something.

[JohnLakeside]

Because people get offended easily now a days. Simple as that. My question is why do you talk or chat in this game? Take a hint from all the silent duties. This isn't a game to be social in to my eyes.

It's also designed so you don't need to say anything either unless you're doing hard content, for which you'd talk outside of it in discord or something.

Why do I talk in FF14? Because I'm a yapper. I am that I am

OSRS also isn't a designed to be a talkative game per se. I mean, theres no need to talk at Forestry trees, Gemstone Crab, Shooting Stars, yet people still talk because its fun to just yap and argue and talk trash and all that good stuff. Talking to randos online existing in the same world as me is one of the reasons I play MMORPGs.

[BigCheez]

Because people get offended easily now a days. Simple as that. My question is why do you talk or chat in this game? Take a hint from all the silent duties. This isn't a game to be social in to my eyes.

It's also designed so you don't need to say anything either unless you're doing hard content, for which you'd talk outside of it in discord or something.

It isn't that simple though. If you hop on any other game, even another MMO, the environment is not the same. Sure, people don't interact as much as they used to back in the good old days - partially because MMOs generally no longer require it, and partially because interacting with people via the internet simply isn't a novel experience anymore - but they aren't anywhere near as stuffy and miserable as the FFXIV community when they do interact.

I would rather get flamed for inting in LoL (and I don't even play LoL) than interact with some of the specimens in this community.

[TheOperator3712]

People keep saying "read the room." My question is: Why is the room so prickly? Never online or IRL have I experienced a community as prickly as FF14's.

Ask people in this community about WoW, and you will commonly be told that it is a game full of toxic elitists that are rude and cuss everyone out over simple mistakes or nothing at all. If you actually go play WoW though, you will find that to be mostly wrong. What explains the discrepancy? They're not lying, they really were treated horribly in WoW. However it was because of their own incompetence and refusal to improve at the game (see "It's Rude to Be Bad At Warcraft"). Those same people came here having heard that XIV's community was nice and friendly, and turned it into a safe space for not only playing badly, but also a place where you were never allowed to criticize anyone lest the game turn into WoW. Then the ToS change in ShB happened and gave them the cudgel they needed to chase out anyone that didn't comply with their agenda. These sorts of people also tend to be extremely fragile and have poor social skills. Which explains all of the drama.

The unfortunate thing, is that the original community was nice and friendly, but they were not... whatever this "community" has become. It was a bunch of XI, 1.0, and Beta vets for the most part who had a shared culture that was civil, but could take a joke. That culture mostly persisted up through Stormblood. Then, in ShB it changed fast. There had always been loony WoW refugees, but the amount of drama and weird crap just started multiplying exponentially. I don't blame the Shadowlands exodus entirely for this though. That certainly created a small Eternal September episode for the game which we've never really recovered from. However, ShB had been seeing cultural shift even before that happened. SL failing was just gasoline on the fire.

[Jeeqbit]

Finding a person adverse to banter and extrapolating that as the whole community is adverse to banter is quite a leap. There are plenty of the game that banter all the time.