Quote Originally Posted by Theodric View Post
Multiple people have spoken at length of their experiences with the more dangerous and creepier elements within the community. Within this thread and elsewhere. As such, I don't think it can be brushed off as a tiny minority at this point.
We do have a fairly large community, so I don't think that the presence of multiple complaints can suddenly make them not a tiny minority.

There's also a large portion of players who, willingly or unknowingly, cover for the abusers in turn. They downplay the problems that exist. It reminds me very much of Yotsuyu's background, funnily enough. Plenty of people come to recognise that abuse is happening, but they are all to happy to maintain the lie that everything is fine or that it isn't a 'concern' because it isn't affecting them directly.
This one, unfortunately, is something that will always happen because there is no actual judicial system, especially outside of the game. Unless it's out in the public for anyone to see, it's just a case of having to trust someone when talking about private experiences.

In a way, the growth of the community outside of the game makes it harder to police the community. That's why when people say this community is great, most are referring to their in-game experiences.

It also doesn't take much for vocal elements within this community to get incredibly enraged. Again, as posted about repeatedly earlier within this thread, simply liking or disliking the 'wrong' characters is enough for many individuals to get horrid death threats and persistent campaigns of harassment both in-game and outside of it.
And that's why rules matter and the platform matters.

People act like having rules means the community is bad, when those rules are what makes the community better than it could be.

A gaming community's purpose is not to change people's inclinations, but to foster a place where people can have a "safe place" to interact with one another over common interest (mainly the game).

As much as people like to champion "inclusivity," any community, by nature, has to be exclusionary. So when people do take things too far in their behavior, you cut them off and report them as necessary to whatever appropriate authority (be it in-game GM or a social platform's enforcement team).

People sending death threats, for example, is not acceptable in FFXIV as far as I know. Therefore, it is easy to conclude that people who behave in such cannot represent the community in any way that would reflect on the community.