Quote Originally Posted by Kanitezz View Post
I get you were posting your opinion. I guess I thought people were thinking I was saying that the only reason was because of WoW. Which isn't close to true. Sorry If I offended anyone.
It's just one of those things like when you hear of people 'cleaning' their ears with cue tips or making buildings out of asbestos and you're like, "...Really? Still?"

I've been here since a month or two after 1.0's release. Its just that in the time from the reboot to now I've seen a constant trend of "if they're not how I want my fellow party members to act, they must be toxic, and probably from WoW", when there's been nothing to substantiate that generality.

Unsurprisingly, I've also played WoW since its original game, and probably only with the end of SB eclipsed my hours played there with hours played here. But, as anecdotal evidence is apparently enough to go by... the opposite trend has mostly held true for me.

1.x held some of the most exclusive parties for its endgame I'd ever seen, where you practically needed the gear that a piece of content would reward just to get into that piece of content and in other areas only certain jobs were even permissible, leaving it open and friendly... until you hit endgame. 2.x opened the floodgates for placation whereby anyone who informed you that there's more to learn from the game or how you might improve your performance could be threatened into silence and spending the majority of your time idle as a healer could be defended as "a difference in playstyle". Since then, I've seen more animosity and hostility in XIV, at anywhere but the higher ends of content, than in any of the several MMOs I've played seriously. (Effectively, it was the reverse of the 1.x trend; if you were willing and able to learn, you were welcomed in more serious content, but outside of that content you could still be met with mild hostility even for just silently doing your job well when with people who refuse to partake in the more serious content.)

Just look at the number of forum topics on tangential subjects like one's right to actively underperform. You just don't these, in such quantity if at all, in other MMOs.

Of course when you have one group of players playing by the normal rules of "I should probably do whatever my toolkit allows me to and in whatever way best helps my party," and the other by "What are the exact limits of what I'm technically responsible for?" But, above all else, that's an XIV thing, not the result of some interbred spawn of invaders from other MMOs. Design and especially developer feedback decisions allowed for this.