Lets talk about the FFXIV player base..

[KaijinRhada]

Yeah, I really don't get why people think the WoW community is ultra toxic while praising this one. The only thing I can figure is that toxicity in this game is often very passive aggressive, while in WoW it's just ordinary aggressive aggressive. Both games in my experience have always been filled with the standard array of MMO players, and FFXIV is noticeably more WoW-like these days than it was back in ARR.

I feel like it's a bit different in WoW in how toxicity presents itself, and perhaps in part because of PvP, and a faction-driven game. The way the players and devs communicate with each other, and the forum culture on WoW is also very different, and I would say it feels a bit more like a cesspool, but you get used to it if you've been around there for 15 years like I have. PvP and faction tribalism is the main driver of toxicity I've found. Sprinkle in the variance of spec balance gaps and feeling like X spec is showered with attention by the devs, while other specs languish, and you'll get a pretty spicy playerbase.

Actually running PvE content, I did raids in BC, HM/Heroic in WotLK, and Mythic and M+ in Legion, I don't think I ran into a lot of (if any) toxic players. Granted a number of those are done with my guildies, but even LFD and pugging across various levels were pretty okay. Not back when we had to LFG in chat channels good, mind you, but it wasn't bad.

[Nixxe]

and the forum culture on WoW is also very different,

Really gotta disagree there. General Discussion on both forums is basically the same. The only major difference is that the FFXIV playerbase generally has more positive feelings about SE and Yoshi P than the WoW playerbase does about Blizzard and Watcher (or Ghostcrawler and Kalgan before him). How people interact with each other, the sorts of gripes they have about the game, and the lines of conflict are basically all identical. Unlike WoW itself, Blizzard has always treated the forums as a totally optional privilege and is therefore utterly merciless when it comes to banning people from them, no different than SE.

[KaijinRhada]

Really gotta disagree there. General Discussion on both forums is basically the same. The only major difference is that the FFXIV playerbase generally has more positive feelings about SE and Yoshi P than the WoW playerbase does about Blizzard and Watcher (or Ghostcrawler and Kalgan before him). How people interact with each other, the sorts of gripes they have about the game, and the lines of conflict are basically all identical. Unlike WoW itself, Blizzard has always treated the forums as a totally optional privilege and is therefore utterly merciless when it comes to banning people from them, no different than SE.

The less-positive outlook form the WoW forums, I feel, makes a pretty big difference. There's going to be shitposts on both forums, but it's a lot more prevalent there. The ire that the playerbase on WoW towards the dev team is more highly pronounced; while it maybe because it's a longer running game, and some of the ire is deserved (the lack of QA on a lot of content and patch releases, and terrible dev to community communication, the cognitive dissonance in the writing, etc...), the negativity and the quantative amount of it does add to a lot of the difference in the atmosphere.

Just going to add that on the WoW forums, you can get away with a higher level of belligerence, combativeness and aggression there than you can here. As some of my WoW friends have put it, the general population of FFXIV in game and on the forums feels a lot more carebear than that of WoW's.