Quote Originally Posted by LittleImp View Post
This kind of stuff genuinely erodes my interest in the game. I've joined random mostly-casual FCs a few times, only for people to immediately develop a negative predisposition towards me as soon as they find out hardcore content is my main interest, even if they're people I've never personally interacted with. I've taught people to raid, only to have their friends accuse me of "ruining" or "tainting" them. I wish I was kidding. If you spend time on twitter or in facebook groups for this game, there is genuine "beware of raiders" and "don't befriend raiders" discourse pretty frequently.

When I started playing the game in HW I was fed the same kind of stuff by my gr00mer FC leader at the time, and embarrassingly ended up engaging in 'you pull it you tank it' behavior under his encouragement. Newer players are trained to be in a state of constant insecurity and told that the elitist boogeyman is constantly watching them, when in reality truly elitist interactions are extremely rare in game, even in higher difficulty content. This insecurity and frankly, paranoia, is what causes casual players to lash out when they feel they've been slighted or demeaned, even if they're just reading something completely incorrectly.

I've had to talk grown adults down from literal hissy fits in voice chat, simply because they misunderstood a literal compliment someone else in the group gave them, and assumed they were instead being criticized by an "elitist".
I've had similar experiences and I wouldn't consider myself a 'hardcore' player so much as someone who just likes to dabble in as much of the game as possible and collect minions, mounts and neat glamour.

I've never played a game with such a flaky community before. It's a real shame - I like a lot of stuff about FFXIV. It's not a perfect game and I have my beef with it, but out of all the options where MMO's are concerned it's at the top of the pile for me on almost every front.

It's just...so hard to find people to do stuff with, though. From treasure maps to deep dungeons to BLU challenges...