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

[Midareyukki]

Here the funny part, you praise the game and the community, oh yea people wanna jump on and agree! But when someone says they dont have the best experience, players will jump in to try to invalidate someones experience....So only my good encounters count at all?

We define toxic positivity as the excessive and ineffective overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations. The process of toxic positivity results in the denial, minimization, and invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience.

"You experience cant be bad, because the community is good!"

My experience for the most part has been pretty chill.

But what you said still rings true. Whenever I point out the in-game racism problem that I and my friends have experienced as both Hrothgar and Roegadyn, people bat their eyes and say "Not on MY pure Christian server!". And at one point someone asked if Zodiark or Light as a whole was racist. When not necessarily, people in other datacenters may also encounter crappy moments. I just saw them happen to friends and to myself at least three times, enough to say "Yeah, this sort of thing exists, and no one talks about it enough".

All I did was say my experience and that that sort of thing does happen both in-game and out. You hear comments from people about Lalafell being potatoes, Elezen being giraffes, Hyurs being plain, but that's mild in comparison to what I've seen people say about Roes and Hrothgar. And the moment I say this, people get incredibly defensive. As if their game wasn't populated by human people, just 11th Doctor levels of cute people.

Hell, the FFXIV Reddit is the worst example of this. You absolutely cannot mention the problems going around in the game without people actually raging at you and insulting you. Like "how dare you criticise the game!?". I know these forums are plagued with the exact same, but you'll find a mixed bag of both here. On the Reddit, it's almost sacrilege to do so.

FFXIV players are, in general, nice. They're still human beings capable of doing the dumbest things, but they're not League of Legends chat levels of bad. But the community isn't good. It presents itself as good like in those American suburb TV shows where there's that perfect family next door. But you know by watching the show they're full of BS. And that's exactly what the FF14 community is like.