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

[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.