Quote Originally Posted by JohnLakeside View Post
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.