Confessions of a Toxic Elitist

[KaivaC]

Over my time here in the forums, I have engaged in a multitude of topics, and started some pretty engaging threads (not saying all of them were good...but some of my topics did invite discussion). I went from rallying on about WoW to sharing my opinion about the player base, and recently, where FFXIV should go from there. Somewhere down the line, I seem to have picked up the title of a Toxic Elitist. For a while, I just kind of rolled with it.



But now I'm presently at a point where, honestly, my confidence is shaken. I like to think that the majority of the forum is still full of decent human beings (I've seen the forums on Blizzard's side of things...I would never ever post there personally), so I don't mind sharing that...I don't quite feel like a toxic elitist. Depression is a real pain to deal with, and for all my bravado, something as simple as a bad performance is enough to shake me.

I'm not going to lie, and you can check my logs for yourself, I feel like I suck. Thought I was good at Summoner, ended up finding out that I haven't been able to break out of the 9th percentile. It kind of messes with me, because here I am, advocating for a better player base and instead, I am playing at a below average level.

Like I said earlier, I like to think that there are decent folks in the forums, so I don't mind posting here. I like the community here. More so than I thought I would a year ago with the WoW fiasco I started.

Has anybody here dealt with something related to this? Like, you think you're good at your job, and then something - whether it be friends, FC mates, your own logs, etc. - shows you that you're not even close to the average baseline? Or has shaken in the game done something to truly shake your confidence, to the point that you strongly considered dropping your sub?

I'm curious. Mind sharing with me?

[SenorPatty]

"No one has ever picked up a sword and became a master swordsman in day."

I think the greatest problem people have when it comes to performance is themselves. They look at other people and feel like crap or try to make others feel like crap. Being self-critical is one thing but it's not what actually makes someone better at their job. It's acceptance of one's weakness first. As long as you can't take that headspace moment to say "It's okay that I'm at this level, I'll just get better", you'll fall into a deep chasm of depression.

Once you make peace with your own weaknesses, the next part is naturally deciding if you want to improve. Don't look at other people to judge yourself harshly. Look at them as inspiration or goal. People doing optimal gameplay also had to start somewhere and so do you.

Last but not least-and probably the one self-critical people have the most trouble with-is coming to terms with your limits. Whether that'd be physical or mental limits, you need to understand and accept that you have them. That doesn't mean you should give up. It just means you'll probably have to find ways to go above or around those limits. If you can't accept this, you'll go right back to spiralling.

One final note: remember that at the end of the day that FF14 is a game. Yes, its a game where you have to work together to complete certain objectives but it's a game nonetheless. As long as you tried to do all in your power to better yourself at it, you should have nothing to worry about.

[Vidu]

Yes and no - I main a tank, a paladin even, which meant til SB you were basically told: "Your class is not capable of dealing damage anyways", so I honestly never cared about FFlogs or seeing my numbers or anything like that. Its slowly changing now, but as tank I also take into consideration that there is more for me to do than just deal damage, so I dont sweat about my dps-numbers that much, as long as I know that I did the best I could, tried to improve and performed my main-job well (holding aggro, positioning the boss well, mitigation).

I remember three instances (höhö... sorry...) though when I felt pretty bad about my performance and the feedback I got - two of them rather old, when I was still learning, so they dont completly count, the last one at the end of HW when the problem wasnt really me...
But, well, lets share all of them:
1) 4 years ago, decided to help out some guys with Brayflox NM - they were shouting for a tank (no PF back then) and I offered... and well... I couldnt tank that last boss. Couldnt get out of the breath-AoE (my lagw as horrible back then and I'd never bothered learning to dodge because I had noticed early on that I'm not able to get out of AoEs anyways) and the scholar couldnt dispell the poison. Killed me several times, we wiped two or three times and in the end didnt clear the dungeon. Until then I hadnt felt confident about my tanking, but I was at least convinced that I was doing "good enough" - I had cleared that dungeon before, but apparently only because my WHM-friend back then had Esuna and made up for my mistakes.
2) Cutters Cry - first boss. Again, I was still new and had answered a shout (or some randoms tell? I dont recall). Tanking again. We had no idea about healer-kite, so I was trying my very best to pick up all the adds... the dps however wasnt good enough to kill them, I was running out of CDs, had no idea what to do - it was stressful enough that I remember it even now, 4 years later. The BLM was complaining he couldnt cast with adds on them, the healer was complaining he couldnt heal against me taking so much damage... we gave up after 40 minutes and I felt as if I had let everyone down without knowing what I could have done better.
3) Nidhogg NM, in trials roulette, with two friends. I had a bad day already. Nidhogg was the current trial back then - I hadnt cleared the EX-mode yet, but we got paired with some people who had and they insisited to kill the adds in the order you do in EX. Thats bullshit. The roaming, not-tankable add should die first since it doesnt put a debuff on, but well... my suggestion to do it that way was greeted with so much hostilty that I left the group - got blamed for not tanking the add and for not knowing what to do (well... I did...) and it just made me feel very bad about my performance.

Oh and for the first 2 or 3 months of playing, I basically was thinking of dropping my sub or just sticking to crafting each time I reached a dungeon...

I know those stories dont really match your experience, since they're not really about DPS... I do play bard on occassion, but most of the time I get paired with people doing so, so much worse than me, that I dont stress to much about that.
I also made the following rule for myself: I dont look at FFlogs. If I want to know wether or not my damage is enough, I'll go and do the matching Stone, Sky, Sea. If I can beat that, I'm okay. It means, my damage/performance is good enough for that content - I'll still push myself to try and get better, but I dont need to put myself down by seeing that other people are doing so much better than I am, when, by the games standards, I'm doing good enough (which is also all I ask if I talk about expectations I have from other people: I fyou do some EX-primals or something like that, be able to beat that SSS - dont care about comparing you on FFlogs).

[Irisdina_Wiloh]

I don't think you're the first person to be in this situation and nor will you be the last. Things like savage and extreme primals can be a real eye opener to those who thought they were good at this game and it turns out perhaps they're not so great. It's important to remember that doing mechanics right is how you, for the most part, beat a fight.

When I first hit endgame back in HW and did Sophia, I thought I was doing ok. Then an FC mate basically told me quite bluntly I was trash and it was true. This is why I advocate ACT and fflogs because it's the best way to track personal performance and how to improve. It's something you just have to take onboard and work to improve. My advice is practice on dummies, look up guides for the job you want to play etc. If you look at my logs, I was awful in HW. I've improved a great deal since then purely through putting in time and effort into practicing and trying new things out whether it be a new job or tricks for uptime in savage etc.

Try not to let it get you down too much, I think I can speak for most players who track their dps that we all started out bad, you can't just get good at a job overnight, it takes time and dedication. Pick the job you like the most and make it your challange to work on it and improve as best you can. Just remember, we're all human and not everyone is capable of doing everything at the highest possible level, it's something you'll just have to accept and move on from.

[Lambdafish]

I had this at the beginning of sigmascape. We recruited a new tank to be my co-tank and after playing a few runs he turns to me and said "you know... your damage is really low and your rotation kinda sucks", something which had never really come up before and I have been raiding since first coil. At this point I had one of two options: become defensive and upset, or listen to what he had to say. I chose the latter and I am a better tank because of it.

Just remember OP, its all about perspective. I believe a good player is defined by their ability to try and improve, not their ability to succeed, and you certainly seem to be that.

[Tridus]

Over my time here in the forums, I have engaged in a multitude of topics, and started some pretty engaging threads (not saying all of them were good...but some of my topics did invite discussion). I went from rallying on about WoW to sharing my opinion about the player base, and recently, where FFXIV should go from there. Somewhere down the line, I seem to have picked up the title of a Toxic Elitist. For a while, I just kind of rolled with it.

But now I'm presently at a point where, honestly, my confidence is shaken. I like to think that the majority of the forum is still full of decent human beings (I've seen the forums on Blizzard's side of things...I would never ever post there personally), so I don't mind sharing that...I don't quite feel like a toxic elitist. Depression is a real pain to deal with, and for all my bravado, something as simple as a bad performance is enough to shake me.

I'm not going to lie, and you can check my logs for yourself, I feel like I suck. Thought I was good at Summoner, ended up finding out that I haven't been able to break out of the 9th percentile. It kind of messes with me, because here I am, advocating for a better player base and instead, I am playing at a below average level.

There's good news in this. Confidence is good. Arrogance is not. If you want frank commentary, I think you showed some arrogance at times before towards other players. You probably know better now.

Has anybody here dealt with something related to this? Like, you think you're good at your job, and then something - whether it be friends, FC mates, your own logs, etc. - shows you that you're not even close to the average baseline? Or has shaken in the game done something to truly shake your confidence, to the point that you strongly considered dropping your sub?

I'm curious. Mind sharing with me?

You know how popular opinion is that Susano Ex is one of the easiest Ex primals ever put into the game? Yeah. That guy threw me around like I was a rag doll. I showed up thinking I knew what I was doing because I was a progression raider when I played WoW and this game is way easier than WoW, right? He had a different opinion than I did, as it turned out...

The worst part about it wasn't actually wiping a lot. Having been a progression raider, I've done lots of that. It was actually in my head, I'd internalized the "this is easy" message this forum had given me and getting my butt handed to me repeatedly led to the conclusion that I must just be terrible. Confidence is a funny thing, in that if you lose it, nobody can give it back to you except yourself.

It was only after I finally beat it (which was satisfying as hell) that I put a few things together:
1. At some point I got old, had a family, and have less time for it. I used to raid 20 hours a week, now i don't. That's going to make a difference in results.
2. I'm okay with #1 and if that means other people are better than me, that's fine. (Also means if they think I suck because I found that fight hard, I'm fine with that too. )
3. The forums skew towards the high end and their definition of "easy" is wildly out of whack with the playerbase as a whole. If you're not actually in the elite level of player, you may very well find stuff hard that the forum consensus doesn't. That's okay.

The same thing happened with Rabanastre, on the parser end. I met Moro and started going in as SCH. Turns out I sucked at SCH, which I figured out real fast when I got access to parsed data. That was the real value of having the parser: there was no guessing about my performance. No overconfidence. I could see exactly how it went and had something to work with to fix it.

I fixed that by having every Rabanastre I ran parsed for a couple months, comparing them, noting what worked, and looking at what some other SCH players were doing. The result was a fairly steady improvement up into the realm of not sucking. My SCH is still well below my WHM, but now I can take it into stuff like Byakko Ex and feel like I can probably carry my own weight once I learn the fight. So, now I flip between the two interchangably depending on what the group needs. Now it's my RDM and PLD that suck.

In your case, the parser data is a harsh awakening. There's no way to sugar coat that. But, now you know where you really are. You can take that and seek tips from other SMN players. If you keep getting parsed (and we'll happily arrange that for you), you'll be able to see any improvements. And if you put the work in to get better at it, you will. Either that, or you'll find you like another job more, which is also fine, because not every job will suit every player well.

Almost all of us have been through this at some point. When it comes to wanting to get better, the community is honestly pretty great at helping out. The hardest part is the stage you just hit: realizing that you need the help and having the courage to admit it.

[Ilyrian]

KaivaC you're not a toxic elitist. You do seem to have a need for attention, however, whether that is in game related or about something else.
My issue is that you tend to make topics bemoaning the lack of skill in others to somehow shore up your own confidence and that is particularly irritating but I can see now that you're probably not doing it maliciously.
As others have said, it's a game - it's here to be enjoyed. If you to participate in the higher end stuff it's going to take some effort; you just have to decide if it's worth it - as we all do.
Don't define your self worth by your game play

Edit:

1. At some point I got old, had a family, and have less time for it. I used to raid 20 hours a week, now i don't. That's going to make a difference in results.
2. I'm okay with #1 and if that means other people are better than me, that's fine. (Also means if they think I suck because I found that fight hard, I'm fine with that too. )
3. The forums skew towards the high end and their definition of "easy" is wildly out of whack with the playerbase as a whole. If you're not actually in the elite level of player, you may very well find stuff hard that the forum consensus doesn't. That's okay.

This is exactly how I feel now - and coming to FFXIV I think I've started to make my peace with it.

[Sylvina]

Nobody ever uploads my runs to FFlogs so my sample size is so small its irrelevant. this is why I hide my logs atm.

[Kerwin]

It's the people who use Fflogs to try to prove a point in an argument. It's like their small pea brained minds can't look past the website. I don't need a website to tell you how I play.

[Malzian]

Ask yourself these questions:
1) Has my inability to reach a high percentage of FFLogs inhibited the ability of my group to progress through and clear content?
2) Have I been consistently at this point or have my numbers changed? If they've changed, does it coincide with any changes that have happened in the game that is reasonably beyond my control (battle system changes, job changes, ping increases, ect.)?
3) Has this low percentage in any way interfered with the fun I have had actually doing the content with my group?
4) If I am unable to raise my percentage does that preclude me from participating in future content?

Now don't just answer those questions off the cuff, your first instinct will be to doom-say and lament over them but you need to stop and think long and clearly about them. The problem is that society today extols the virtue of "always being the best in everything you do", but the reality is that is a completely unattainable goal. We hammer it in from grade school all the way through adulthood with all of the testing, entrance requirements, job competition... No one ever can be the best at everything they do all the time, if you were then you would be a perfect being and that type of person doesn't exist.

What you need to strive for, instead, is looking at how much you've improved from previous, and where you have not improved or instead fallen behind figure out the why it happened and how to recover from it. Stop focusing solely on the result, focus on the process, because you can't improve the result by starting at it alone. Giving up won't help either, it's just a quick, easy way out. Improvement only comes with struggle, and it's painful and off-putting, but by giving up to avoid that you're cutting off any chances you ever had of getting better.

Honestly, by admitting your failing you've already taken the first step. Learn from it, be humble and accept that you're not perfect and that is perfectly fine. Only when you realize that you aren't perfect and have room to improve will you be able to... Those that cling to the idea that they are infallible will never improve simply because they will never see the need to do so.