Final Fantasy XIV and a Culture of Enabling

[Caurcas]

Greetings, fellow players. To get to the point, Final Fantasy XIV has a terrible culture of enabling. Enabling what? A lot of things. Bad habits, such as kicking people from novice network for trying to correct poor play. Creepy habits, such as the various illicit PFs and what happens there in. Enabling poor play and coddling players is probably the most visible. Such as for example a mentor got dogpiled on in Siren's NN for trying to correct a player whom had not done their job quest, because they "didn't feel like doing them". Honestly this probably the most toxic aspect of this game and its community. What can we do about it? It seems to infect almost every corner of this game.

[DrWho2010]

it's an mmo what did you expect? you can't police everyone into behaving like nice little sheep.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

It seems to me your toxicity only really shows itself in novice network.


As a raider(and someone who avoids NN) , I rarely run into any in game.

[LaughingBanana]

It seems to me your toxicity only really shows itself in novice network. .

I'm in Tonberry and I never actually see anything toxic in NN every time I logged in to the game.

In fact, most of the time it's just filled with people having idle conversation about random stuff, people asking for help (and people offering their help), people asking questions about FFXIV and people answering them, etc etc. Or people announcing they are coming back to the game after a dry spell and people saying [welcome back] to them.

I am actually rather confused whenever I see the "NN is a toxic place" narrative being talked about here. Is it really that bad in, say, NA server? Cause I'm not seeing it in Tonberry, at least.

[Vahlnir]

To me, this reads like a thinly veiled NN hate thread.

[Penthea]

Everything you listed is not unique to FFXIV at all. There are hardworking, lazy, talented, hopeless, creepy, well-intentioned, toxic, wonderful, normal and weird people everywhere.

[MPK]

There's nothing we can do about it.

[Keramory]

I think what you're seeing is a symptom of a few things, both a bit SE's fault and nothing to do with SE.

1. Lack of actual long term, goal driven content. We've had the same rinse and repeat tome farm and DDR battles since 2.0. Now everyone just sits in town and glamours up. There's a lot of validity in the common joke about glamour being FFXIV's endgame. And its not healthy for an MMO. A lot of what you're seeing with the RP nonsense is just very bored people with nothing to do but look pretty.

2. There is little to no actual social ramifications on a community level for being well... an idiot. Instances, server chats and multi world is great for a lot of reasons, but the big downside is no one knows who you are in the giant sea of constantly different people. In other MMO's, if you acted the fool, people would quickly remember your name and soon you'll find yourself missing content because no one would team up with you. That truth helped regulate player behavior far more then GM's or devs ever could.

It's not that different then real life in some ways. When you give everyone everything and little drive to do anything else... added with the fun mix of not having to face repercussions for much... humanity tends to get pretty weird.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I think what you're seeing is a symptom of a few things, both a bit SE's fault and nothing to do with SE.

1. Lack of actual long term, goal driven content. We've had the same rinse and repeat tome farm and DDR battles since 2.0. Now everyone just sits in town and glamours up. There's a lot of validity in the common joke about glamour being FFXIV's endgame. And its not healthy for an MMO. A lot of what you're seeing with the RP nonsense is just very bored people with nothing to do but look pretty.

2. There is little to no actual social ramifications on a community level for being well... an idiot. Instances, server chats and multi world is great for a lot of reasons, but the big downside is no one knows who you are in the giant sea of constantly different people. In other MMO's, if you acted the fool, people would quickly remember your name and soon you'll find yourself missing content because no one would team up with you. That truth helped regulate player behavior far more then GM's or devs ever could.

It's not that different then real life in some ways. When you give everyone everything and little drive to do anything else... added with the fun mix of not having to face repercussions for much... humanity tends to get pretty weird.

Your point 2 is simply because the communities are bigger now.

When you only have a few hundred people per server, its a lot easier to do that. No one is going to remember the name and face of several thousand players. That just doesn't happen.

Now, when you get into smaller communities within the game, people do and are blacklisted and shunned from things.

[Keramory]

Your point 2 is simply because the communities are bigger now.

When you only have a few hundred people per server, its a lot easier to do that. No one is going to remember the name and face of several thousand players. That just doesn't happen.

Now, when you get into smaller communities within the game, people do and are blacklisted and shunned from things.

Just server wise, it becomes less big when you break it down by interest, level wise, when you started, content progression, player interests, etc. For example, one of the few things that are still relatively open world in terms of content is treasure hunting. The regular hunters on Famfrit know each other fairly well enough to the point of blacklisting/shunning/kicking a few of the "thieves" who break established need/greed rules throughout the hunts. You add cross server/instances to that, yeah its more chaotic, partially because it opens to a bigger pool of people (your point) but you're also missing the component of likely running into them in open world/town for further interactions based on their behavior. That's kind of an important part of shaping behavior on an individual over time, let alone a community. Facing the aftermath of the action/behavior.

Again, there are obviously benefits to multi server instances and server chats. The decrease in player behavior as a consequence is to be expected as a result though, at least in my opinion. Up to you to argue if that trade off is worth it.