"Everyone's so open and friendly" is a lie

[LittleImp]

It does amaze me that so many people in this thread act as if not being an abusive asshat to people is some kind of unatainable saintly virtue.

It's more that it can be difficult to remain a 'good person' when bad actors are constantly and intentionally shifting the goal-posts to suit their own purposes, in a never ending war to be the 'goodest' person and weaponize morality against people they don't like for unrelated reasons.

My SO is a moderately popular member of the art community for this game, and is by all accounts an absolute saint compared to me. If anything, she's essentially too nice and struggles with people taking advantage of that fact. She had a particular user, who happens to be a very active member of the FFXIV morality discourse, become intensely jealous of her growing popularity and decide to cancel her. This person, who she'd never spoken to a single time, started to make twitter callout posts about how her art triggers their mental illness and makes them depressed, and that making art of a certain character a certain way was toxic. Other people, who didn't look into the origin of the situation (The person trying to cancel her literally had a string of public tweets where they admitted they were doing it because they were jealous of her growing popularity), band-wagoned on and she was forced to lock her account due to all of the insane abuse she was receiving from supposed 'good people' fighting the 'good fight'.

This community tends to unquestioningly give these types of people the benefit of the doubt on issues of morality, which ultimately does a significant amount of genuine harm.

[Artemiz]

It's more that it can be difficult to remain a 'good person' when bad actors are constantly and intentionally shifting the goal-posts to suit their own purposes, in a never ending war to be the 'goodest' person and weaponize morality against people they don't like for unrelated reasons.

My SO is a moderately popular member of the art community for this game, and is by all accounts an absolute saint compared to me. If anything, she's essentially too nice and struggles with people taking advantage of that fact. She had a particular user, who happens to be a very active member of the FFXIV morality discourse, become intensely jealous of her growing popularity and decide to cancel her. This person, who she'd never spoken to a single time, started to make twitter callout posts about how her art triggers their mental illness and makes them depressed, and that making art of a certain character a certain way was toxic. Other people, who didn't look into the origin of the situation (The person trying to cancel her literally had a string of public tweets where they admitted they were doing it because they were jealous of her growing popularity), band-wagoned on and she was forced to lock her account due to all of the insane abuse she was receiving from supposed 'good people' fighting the 'good fight'.

This community tends to unquestioningly give these types of people the benefit of the doubt on issues of morality, which ultimately does a significant amount of genuine harm.

The bulk of your post is about a situation I have no knowledge of so cannot comment. The vast majority of players howerver don't have this problem as it's a lot more to do with being well known than being an FFXIV player.

The first part however is all about shifting blame for ones own behaviour onto other people. Nobody is forcing you into a virtue arms race though, just be true to yourself and try to treat others with respect.

[LittleImp]

The first part however is all about shifting blame for ones own behaviour onto other people. Nobody is forcing you into a virtue arms race though, just be true to yourself and try to treat others with respect.

Not really. I haven't seriously been called toxic in a long time (unless you count people disagreeing with my views on the forums), so I really have no blame to shift. I mostly teach content and help parties in this game; in particular I like to help out newer content creators / small streamers that share my passion about the game. This means I community hop a lot, and spend a significant amount of time sitting in voice chats and text chats with a really wide gamut of people. Most of my observations here are informed less by being the target of this behavior, and more by me watching other people engage in it from a third-party standpoint.

Here's a fun list of things I've seen declared 'toxic' by elements of the FFXIV community:

- Giving advice, regardless of how it's phrased.
- Making lalafell jokes
- Making miqote jokes
- Pointing out that Lalafells are based on children
- Roleplaying as a garlean
- Undercutting on the marketboard
- Kicking a fresh learner from a farm party
- Swearing at someone who has been stalking and abusing you for months
- Asking someone to obtain gear that is above the minimum ilevel requirement of a dungeon
- Not making makeup mods you make and release for free compatible with all character skin-tones
- Not making free Reshade presets compatible with all skin-tones
- Skipping cutscenes while doing the MSQ
- Criticizing the mog-station
- Drawing certain characters or talking about certain ships
- Continuing to play any games made by Blizzard
- Watching or supporting Asmongold in any capacity
- Having any conservative political views (I am very liberal myself, just putting this here because I see people get viciously attacked over this one sometimes)
- Ending a message with a smiley face

There's a lot more, but I think you get the idea. In my experience, most of the time these issues are just flimsy justifications to create moral outrage around a person that someone else doesn't like for completely personal reasons. A lot of the time this can come from something as simple as a predisposition towards not liking players that participate in a certain activity in-game (Anti-roleplayers, anti-raiders etc). It also can happen, more disturbingly, with people who do not like certain RL demographics.

This very much applies to people who attack others over their word-choice, or try really heavily to police 'tone', as it's one of the lowest effort avenues to assassinate someone's character with. Particularly because it's really easy to reframe someone else's tone through text chat. It's even worse when you consider that this game is international and that not everyone speaks English as their first language.

[ItMe]

Here's a fun list of things I've seen declared 'toxic' by elements of the FFXIV community:

More like, "by elements of the internet" lol

[Artemiz]

Not really. I haven't seriously been called toxic in a long time (unless you count people disagreeing with my views on the forums), so I really have no blame to shift. I mostly teach content and help parties in this game; in particular I like to help out newer content creators / small streamers that share my passion about the game. This means I community hop a lot, and spend a significant amount of time sitting in voice chats and text chats with a really wide gamut of people. Most of my observations here are informed less by being the target of this behavior, and more by me watching other people engage in it from a third-party standpoint.

Here's a fun list of things I've seen declared 'toxic' by elements of the FFXIV community:

- Giving advice, regardless of how it's phrased.
- Making lalafell jokes
- Making miqote jokes
- Pointing out that Lalafells are based on children
- Roleplaying as a garlean
- Undercutting on the marketboard
- Kicking a fresh learner from a farm party
- Swearing at someone who has been stalking and abusing you for months
- Asking someone to obtain gear that is above the minimum ilevel requirement of a dungeon
- Not making makeup mods you make and release for free compatible with all character skin-tones
- Not making free Reshade presets compatible with all skin-tones
- Skipping cutscenes while doing the MSQ
- Criticizing the mog-station
- Drawing certain characters or talking about certain ships
- Continuing to play any games made by Blizzard
- Watching or supporting Asmongold in any capacity
- Having any conservative political views (I am very liberal myself, just putting this here because I see people get viciously attacked over this one sometimes)
- Ending a message with a smiley face

There's a lot more, but I think you get the idea. In my experience, most of the time these issues are just flimsy justifications to create moral outrage around a person that someone else doesn't like for completely personal reasons. A lot of the time this can come from something as simple as a predisposition towards not liking players that participate in a certain activity in-game (Anti-roleplayers, anti-raiders etc). It also can happen, more disturbingly, with people who do not like certain RL demographics.

This very much applies to people who attack others over their word-choice, or try really heavily to police 'tone', as it's one of the lowest effort avenues to assassinate someone's character with. Particularly because it's really easy to reframe someone else's tone through text chat. It's even worse when you consider that this game is international and that not everyone speaks English as their first language.

Yeah I've seen most of that too, it's all just noise and comes from a small minority of vocal sub groups. The list you provided might be FFXIV specific but the internet has always been like this. The point of this thread is that the FFXIV community is awful and I dont think that's even close to true, not by the standards of online interactions.

Ultimately we all have a choice, we can engage, on either side, with all the stuff you just listed or we can ignore the vocal rabble rousers and find the chilled out people who just want to enjoy the game, which happens to be the massive majority.

You are obviously looking at this from a streamer/content creator point of view and that is a different beast to be fair as the cave dwellers will walk over broken glass to antagonise those people. For the average player though engaging in that stuff is a choice. I am very confident that the majority of players who are so convinced this playerbase is full of horrible toxic players are in fact toxic themselves and they are just reaping what they sow when people treat them the way they treat others.

Having played FF MMO's for nearly 20 years I've met plenty of horrible people but they don't stay in my orbit for long and they are completely outnumbered by the amount of people I've known who go far out of their way to help others and most of my interactions have been neutral to pleasant.

[Izscha]

- Having any conservative political views (I am very liberal myself, just putting this here because I see people get viciously attacked over this one sometimes)

This one right there must be the dumbest thing ever and at the same time the thing that drives ppl crazy the most.
Anytime you bring politics on the internet you'll have that one guy that will start to blast everything if you dare having opinions that he dont share, and it's not like ppl disagree and that's it that's more like you're me ennemy and i will beat you up if you were in front of me.
I talk about politic discussion as a whole and every single politic got a lot of dumbs followers, not just the "left/right" stuff made in the US.

[Corzado]

Not reading this entire thread you're right. You can see it in the various discords constantly as well.

A lot of people in this community think "friendliness" is a personality and they don't know how to socialize like a normal human being.

[Thi]

The OP is right, the toxicity is here, it's just hidden away outside the game.

I'll be honest, in game I act cordially to each player but mostly stay quiet when pugging.

Meanwhile in discord I'm either ranting about the horrible players duty finder has given me, or on the rare occasion praising the fact I finally got a group with decent players.

But this is also why I don't pug in this game for anything above story mode content. The average player here just frustrates the elitist in me too much.

[Caurcas]

This one right there must be the dumbest thing ever and at the same time the thing that drives ppl crazy the most.
Anytime you bring politics on the internet you'll have that one guy that will start to blast everything if you dare having opinions that he dont share, and it's not like ppl disagree and that's it that's more like you're me ennemy and i will beat you up if you were in front of me.
I talk about politic discussion as a whole and every single politic got a lot of dumbs followers, not just the "left/right" stuff made in the US.

The issue is that one side increasingly is
gaining influence via crybullying and seeing indifference as 'hate'.

[Maxilor]

I have been playing this game on and off for years and I am proud to say I have yet to have someone call me a Racial Slur. Not once.

Which in most other online games all I have to do is count the minutes between incidents.