PLEASE Learn from your mistakes......

[ViolentDjango]

I really liked what you had to say, mainly because you made some very valid points. However... I do take umbrage with one comment.



You are correct that SE gave us less information. It's been an issue that has been happening since the game was launched and just now, 9 years after launch it's starting to improve. We can credit this to FFXIV ladies and gents, but that's not what I have umbrage with.

It's the second part of that comment.

I'm one of those that feel that XI has a much better community than XIV simply because the design of XI doesn't allow for a bad community.

SE didn't release much information so it was up to the players to well, help the players.
Players were willing to help each other out more and communicate with each other. You couldn't progress through the game otherwise.

As a result a very tight knit community ended up forming. Which also meant that because you had to rely on other people you couldn't wantonly be an amazing dick to others and expect no consequences for your actions. Yeah, XI had their fair share of dicks (such is life) but overall it was a fairly welcoming game, and much more tolerant of new players.

You also mentioned WoW in your post and yeah, I'd say as someone who has both played WoW and XI, WoW's community sucked. The overwhelming majority of the players I, my friends, and my sister ran into while playing WoW were rude and were jerks. (Not that all players are like that, just... most...)

There was no reason you had to be nice. You could go through the entire game without having to deal with people at all. The only time you relied on others was when you hit end game and you needed players to help you get more stuff.

In WoW you get crap for asking questions. The worst thing you can do to some of the WoW players is tell them you're new to the game. Dear God, sometimes it's like you spat in their face. But I digress.

So now, here we are, in FFXIV and no, I don't think it has a very good community. I don't think it's as bad as WoW's, I mean you gotta try to be that bad, but I wouldn't call it good.

The fact that I ran into kind players more than once in a blue moon on XIV speaks for itself. Which means that the community is kind of stuck in-between.... which is unfortunate, but I choose to take it as a positive sign. ^^;

Not when you consider that half of the current community only plays for a week or two after major updates -- myself included.

As a side note, have you played FFXI lately? The massive amount of BS you get from people with regards to Abyssea is painful and was enough to make me quit again, even though I just bought all of the expansions. In-game communities =/= out-of-game communities. You can't really assess the quality of FFXIV's community because 90% of the ingame communication is between people who know each other irl due to the limitations of the current systems. Forum communities suck regardless of the game -- some are better than others, but all-in-all they are far from indicative of the -real- community of the game , i.e. the people who actually play.

As it stands, what made FFXI's in-game community so good is the fact that cooperation and good communication among players was mandatory to get anything done. If anything, the quality or lack thereof with regard to FFXIV's community is due to a lack of content that brings players together. Instances and raids are far from a unifying activity structure, because 90% of the time most of the people you're dealing with are your competition for rewards.

Ultimately it brings us back to the understand that a good community is made up of people who just play the game -- all SE needs to do to recreate a community of caliber similar to early FFXI is foster more content that brings people together, which they are already doing with the reworking of the EXP system to facilitate parties better.