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

[Setesh45]

You need to keep in mind that in the last 6 months the community has changed a lot. I've been around since day 1 of ARR and imo the community has been changing for the worse since Stormblood, but until recently it was still way friendlier than most other communities from other games.
After the recent influx of new players the community has changed again, this time in my opinion overwhelmingly for the worse. There's a ton more toxic players, a ton more of would be elitists, a ton more vulgar people.
Why do you think they had to update the ToS? It was clearly in reaction to the changes in the community.

[tangentcat]

You need to keep in mind that in the last 6 months the community has changed a lot. I've been around since day 1 of ARR and imo the community has been changing for the worse since Stormblood, but until recently it was still way friendlier than most other communities from other games.
After the recent influx of new players the community has changed again, this time in my opinion overwhelmingly for the worse. There's a ton more toxic players, a ton more of would be elitists, a ton more vulgar people.
Why do you think they had to update the ToS? It was clearly in reaction to the changes in the community.

That sums up my experience. The community was never perfect, but the frequency of negative experiences I've had has been steadily increasing since June, especially on Crystal which had the most preferred worlds/new player destination. A lot of it in my experience has come from overly defensive players lashing out (e.g. a healer struggling to keep a tank alive, instead of asking for help, insulted the tank then rage quit). The negative effect is I got so sick of bad players being snippy, it's made me more grumpy (and maybe elitist seeming) to the point I had to stop playing with PUGs.