Quote Originally Posted by Tupsi View Post
Hmm..no it was far from significantly worse - far from it. In XI the only "general" elitism was in regards to people not doing what's expected em, i.e "Haste Set", "TP set", "WS set", "Nuke Set", "HMP Set", "Cure Set" and so on and the people who refused to have sets were the ones that ended up stating FFXI has a "horrible community". Here, it's almost no choice but to conform or never get to do anything as the OP is basically getting at.
Back in the day, many jobs were outright snubbed in FFXI. And for those that weren't, if you didn't have a full range of subjobs (RDM? No /DRK for Chainspell Stun?!?) you were frowned upon in certain situations.
Same with certain stats (capped Debuffing/Healing/Elemental Magic, for example). I DO NOT miss skillup parties in the slightest.

And Gear progression/expectation was just as bad if not worse - because instead of just running an easily-completable dungeon for tokens to swap for the exact item of gear you were lacking, you were expected to camp a NM for months for a 1% drop chance or spend millions of gil (Peacock Charm anyone?) for key components in your endgame sets. And grind a LOT longer for relic gear.

In XI, people were smart enough to realize you won't immediately have everything after you hit max level (75 for argument sake), because it will take time to get geared and to get your merits and so on so forth - People realized that. In XIV though, a lot of people seem to feel you should have a relic+1. full DL or Myth gear and capable of speed running everything instantly at 50. It's simply not possible and if people think so that means this game is pulling in no new people and it's only the same group of people playing You can say "don't join premade", yet we all know people are trolling DF and the "rejects" are all that's left because they can't join groups on their servers just because they're new.
You get idiots in both games.

We all need to start somewhere, and I'd take a sensible player in AF1 over an idiot in AF2 any day because the newbie will gear up eventually but you can't fix stupid.

Myself (Pld) and my brother (Sch) walked someone through AK last night for their first time. We had one DD slot free so Duty-findered it.
We beat every boss without any problems, including the Wall (for those keeping score, that's with one "undergeared newbie" DD, and one "DF reject" DD)

The new DD stayed on with me and we were joined by two other FC members (no names, but their gear was perfectly fine! ) for a second AK run immediately afterwards. We wiped 8 times straight at the Wall, and 3 times on the Final Boss because for some reason dodging stuff was suddenly impossible. There was a bit of teasing and a lot of self-recrimination by the end of the run, but suffice to say that Lack of Lag and a Clear Head play a much bigger role in this game than being obscenely well geared!

My third and final run of the night was a "join the Duty Finder, tick the in-progress box" where I came across a group whose Tank had just ragequitted on the Demon Wall. We took a single test run at it to see if we needed to kill the bees first, or had enough DPS to kill the wall (during which the Healer ragequitted and was immediately replaced) and then just ignored the bees and SLAUGHTERED the wall, the trash mobs and the next boss without a single death or derp moment.

I hate /shout PUGs with a passion, but I wish there was a cross-server friendslist for some of the absolute gems of players that I've come across in random DF parties.

I'm not saying "don't join premades", I'm saying "don't join premades populated entirely by elitist asshats" (and "don't bite your FC teammates heads off when they have a Derp day"!)