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

[LittleImp]

It's circumstantial, isn't it? There have always been WoW players who have either moved to FFXIV or started to play both games. The difference is that there seems to be a lot more recently and it's being done more publicly. As far as I know, those terms are recent terms, especially refugee.

They aren't really new. They've been in use in the same context since as far back as Legion, which was actually still a time of success for WoW.

And I disagree that they are used as generic insults. They are used as a label, sure, but people use labels to identify. It's what people associate with those labels that determine whether it's a positive usage or negative. Streamers welcoming new WoW players can title their stream with "WoW refugees are welcomed." If anything, the term refugee is an insult for WoW, as if it's a game that has refugees, not the refugees.

I see them used as insults pretty frequently, usually as a way to explain why someone is playing poorly. I've even been called a WoW refugee nonsensically a bunch of times, usually when someone gets angry in a prog or learning party. One time I had a healer in a dungeon get extremely angry that I was pulling big and "facing my back towards the mobs" as a tank, and they proceeded to repeatedly and baselessly accuse me of being a WoW refugee and went on a rant for the entire remainder of the dungeon about how all WoW players are stupid. I've seen similar things happen to friends; if you browse r/talesfromDF you'll see it fairly frequently in both the posts themselves, and the comments. A lot of the time when someone recounts a negative experience in a dungeon, people will immediately start saying things like "must have been a WoW refugee".

Why would that be interesting? You would expect to find people that are happy with the game as is then not.

It's not normal to repeatedly imply someone is stupid because they're struggling to register a code and think the mogstation UI could be improved. Some 14 players tend to be so ardent in their defense of the game as a whole, that they'll take bizarrely aggressive stances defending against extremely minor, and honestly well-founded quibbles and criticisms about certain aspects of the game. The Mog-station thing is just one example of many I've seen over the years. "WoW bad, FFXIV good" isn't just some random thing someone made up to assail FFXIV. It's a humorous statement about community attitudes that came about because a lot of people started collectively picking up on what was going on.