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

[Michieltjuhh]

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 can think of a historic label or two.. or a dozen, used to identify people, that will get you in trouble if you use them (with good reason), while being considered 'normal' back in the day.

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".

This is quite amusing to me, because in my experience having played both games at a high level I find that the average player in WoW is a lot better than the average player in FF14, because WoW fosters a toxic elitism mentality where people have to improve and perform to succeed while FF14 fosters a toxic casualism mentality where players get rewarded for underperforming just as much as the ones doing all the work, with any way of measuring performance being forbidden.

For example, the amount of times I see people go through Castrum Lacus Litore, Delubrum Reginae and The Dalriada while refusing to pop a 600 gil Essence is staggering. They then proceed to warm the floor for the majority of encounters. And you'll be crucified if you don't accept this as the norm. Some of them are new players in which case it's fine - ironically in many cases they're the supposed "WoW refugees" that don't know about Essences and don't know the mechanics yet - but there's plenty of high merit stacked players doing this as well. That's your FF14 veterans right there; the pinnacle of the great FF14 community.