The Forum Community - in your opinion.

[xxmiamorecadenza]

So this has been on my mind as of late. How does the forum community - which is likely a small percentage of FFXIV playerbase - view the English Forums as a whole?

And to be more precise, what's your opinion regarding the community who often occupy the 'General Discussion' tab?

I often joke with my friends that 'It's a place where unfiltered discussion happens between people who are either overwhelmingly neutral toward their fellow user or genuinely dislike each other.'

Of course this is my perspective after reading through a decent number of threads in my months to a year of occupying the forums.

Basically, my question is, if you could describe your general experience here - how would you describe it?

Enjoyable? Annoying? Infuriating? Decent conversation? Trolls everywhere? Good people? Nice community?

[SenorPatty]

It's like a high school cafeteria at lunchtime: the first thing you hear is the noise. Some people are just trying to have lunch quietly. Some people are incessantly noisy. The teachers are there but are only on the lookout for phsyical altercations or if happen by chance to hear up close some truly unsavory conversation and even then, they try decide if it's worth getting into it.

All you wanna do though, in this mad jungle, is chill with your friends and complain that the cafeteria food really needs to change its menu, until you're accosted by some random who feels the need to vent that the whole school needs to change by offering hot takes.

[Sotaris]

Forum represent the FF14 community as much reddit does.
Problem with forum it got a major troll issue and little to none moderation from SE.

Outside of that, I just come here to have a laugh tbh.

[Jin-]

Forum is mostly fine and I like the community here. I dislike reddit ffxiv community

[Kolsykol]

It's a mix of everything.
The only thing that legit actually bothers me is the general stuff online with people trying to shove their views on other people and limit other peoples options or control what they do.

Like not talking about here necessarily, but for example I used to frequent a DnD forum before and I left because I started getting really tired of people policing and nitpicking other peoples characters and their OC art ( particularly female characters and how they dressed ).
I think a lot of people are a bit narcissistic about it and they only think about themselves and not how it comes across to others.
It's like they think that their opinion on it is very important even if it's going to hurt someones feelings and they need to say it, when the best thing to do would simply be to not say anything and let people have fun.
It's as if they can't just let people have fun, they feel like they have to tear it down because it doesn't suit their tastes.

And I think this is kinda a thing generally speaking too.
I think a lot of people are just really judgemental about things and kinda have no filter.
Instead of saying that you weren't into a character in the story and giving reasons why in a calm manner that can actually result in discussion it kinda turns into '' this character is horrible I hate them and I want them to die ''.

I definitely think that the Reddit is worse by a very large margin tho, but that's also because it's Reddit.
The Karma system promotes incredibly toxic behaviour and it's actually often counter-productive to have a nuanced take and to approach things in good faith.

Forum is mostly fine and I like the community here. I dislike reddit ffxiv community

The Reddit page is insanely antagonistic to anything that isn't a meme shitpost.
I've never seen another Reddit page with such an overwhelming amount of heavily downvoted posts, it's so common to see totally normal threads sit at like 50-% upvotes.
It's truly baffling and feels like an alternate reality to some extent I even doubt most people there even play the game because holy shit.

At the very least on the official forums you know because it requires you to be subbed.

[Doozer]

The Reddit page is insanely antagonistic to anything that isn't a meme shitpost.
I've never seen another Reddit page with such an overwhelming amount of heavily downvoted posts, it's so common to see totally normal threads sit at like 50-% upvotes.
It's truly baffling and feels like an alternate reality to some extent I even doubt most people there even play the game because holy shit.

My partner made a really nice drawing of my character once and I thought I'd share it there and they downvoted it so hard I think I lost all my accumulated karma. They claimed it was traced or a modified screenshot. I literally saw how it looked in progress, from sketch to finished, but they were all so certain that it was too good to be a real drawing. I refuse to back there after seeing such awful negative behaviour.

As for the forums here, it's also antagonistic, but much more elitism and demanding of certain behaviour in-game. People talk big here but are probably dead silent in duties. Harmless suggestions get shot down, and the only threads that pass 2-3 pages are about tank pulls, parsing, or trolls that people won't ignore. There's still plenty of normal people, but it's still a cesspool.

[xxmiamorecadenza]

I do agree that the reddit community does have its issues.

And I don't even want to contemplate the twitter community, seeing as there's very few filters present there aside from who you can add to your blacklist.

[Kolsykol]

I do agree that the reddit community does have its issues.

And I don't even want to contemplate the twitter community, seeing as there's very few filters present there aside from who you can add to your blacklist.

I think that both on Twitter and Reddit you get a lot of people jumping on bandwagons or who are just seeing things on their timeline etc.
When I look at peoples profiles on Reddit for example they often frequent like a billion different games pages to a level it becomes hard to believe they even play any of them.
Like they just go from page to page and shitpost.
And on Twitter it's pretty clear sometimes that people don't even play the game and just see that it's trending and want to jump aboard, especially when it's drama related.

The one good thing that can actually be said about this forum in contrast with Twitter and Reddit at least is that you know the people here play the game.
On the latter literally anyone can talk about it and act like they do when they actually don't.

There's also a lot of overlap on Reddit and Twitter, people just use it anyway and maybe go to the pages and Tweet about what they play but they'd use the pages even if they didn't.
But on this forum people have to actively go out of their way to post in it specifically for FFXIV.

[Remish]

The NA forums really needs to utilize that Like button more. From what I can tell between the JP forums and NA forums, that like button makes a difference and it seems to be how the JP get's their thoughts heard a lot more than we do. Even on Reddit, we would rather downvote everything than upvote. When every post sits at 0 or 1 likes, it's no wonder the moderators never listen to us because we don't even like ourselves. Even that one post with 15likes, you can easily feel cynical about and assume it's their closest friends that upvoted it. I really don't understand why NA seems to be so anti like button. It's not like anyone can see that you did hit the like button. If nothing else, at least it would make this place feel more positive.

[ItMe]

The NA forums really needs to utilize that Like button more. From what I can tell between the JP forums and NA forums, that like button makes a difference and it seems to be how the JP get's their thoughts heard a lot more than we do. Even on Reddit, we would rather downvote everything than upvote. When every post sits at 0 or 1 likes, it's no wonder the moderators never listen to us because we don't even like ourselves. Even that one post with 15likes, you can easily feel cynical about and assume it's their closest friends that upvoted it. I really don't understand why NA seems to be so anti like button. It's not like anyone can see that you did hit the like button. If nothing else, at least it would make this place feel more positive.

I 100% agree.
The like button is really underutilized.
I'm not sure how much this effects official involvement with the forums, but at the very least it's def a shame that people aren't using that tool more.