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

[LittleImp]

The first part however is all about shifting blame for ones own behaviour onto other people. Nobody is forcing you into a virtue arms race though, just be true to yourself and try to treat others with respect.

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.

[ItMe]

Here's a fun list of things I've seen declared 'toxic' by elements of the FFXIV community:

More like, "by elements of the internet" lol

[Corzado]

Not reading this entire thread you're right. You can see it in the various discords constantly as well.

A lot of people in this community think "friendliness" is a personality and they don't know how to socialize like a normal human being.

[Thi]

The OP is right, the toxicity is here, it's just hidden away outside the game.

I'll be honest, in game I act cordially to each player but mostly stay quiet when pugging.

Meanwhile in discord I'm either ranting about the horrible players duty finder has given me, or on the rare occasion praising the fact I finally got a group with decent players.

But this is also why I don't pug in this game for anything above story mode content. The average player here just frustrates the elitist in me too much.

[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.

[Theodric]

It isn't just noise. I've had multiple, unaffiliated people threaten to kill me, my friends and my family over choosing to role-play a Garlean. They've done as much in-game, on this very forum and on places such as Twitter and Reddit.

I know multiple people in the same situation. They're actively stalked, frequently harassed and all for something as simple as claiming to like the antagonists in a fictional fantasy setting.

[Izscha]

- 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)

This one right there must be the dumbest thing ever and at the same time the thing that drives ppl crazy the most.
Anytime you bring politics on the internet you'll have that one guy that will start to blast everything if you dare having opinions that he dont share, and it's not like ppl disagree and that's it that's more like you're me ennemy and i will beat you up if you were in front of me.
I talk about politic discussion as a whole and every single politic got a lot of dumbs followers, not just the "left/right" stuff made in the US.

[Artemiz]

It isn't just noise. I've had multiple, unaffiliated people threaten to kill me, my friends and my family over choosing to role-play a Garlean. They've done as much in-game, on this very forum and on places such as Twitter and Reddit.

I know multiple people in the same situation. They're actively stalked, frequently harassed and all for something as simple as claiming to like the antagonists in a fictional fantasy setting.

Stalking is something that should absolutely be taken more seriously online, I wont argue with that. A death threat really depends on the situation. Do they know your real name, your address, your place of work, the country you live in, what you look like? If the answer is yes then call the police. If it's no then noise is exaclty what it is, more than likely from someone with the mental age of a 12 year old. I'm not saying it's acceptable because it's clearly despicble but it's not something that shoud be taken seriously.

I've not experienced it in this game but in CoD all you need to do is win a game, use a certain gun or play a certain way and the threats and abuse start. I've had it there plenty of times and nothing actually happened, because it's just noise.

Both of those are very extreme however, the OP is all about petty squabbles. There are millions of players in this game and I think judging the whole community because of such extreme behaviour is harsh.

[Oscura]

It isn't just noise. I've had multiple, unaffiliated people threaten to kill me, my friends and my family over choosing to role-play a Garlean. They've done as much in-game, on this very forum and on places such as Twitter and Reddit.

I know multiple people in the same situation. They're actively stalked, frequently harassed and all for something as simple as claiming to like the antagonists in a fictional fantasy setting.

I've also seen people on social media, the main reddit and the official forums have some pretty alarming opinions about Garlean RPers or people who like the characters.
I've seen them get called racists, fascists, dictator-apologists, etc.

I genuinely dislike when people are attacked for liking a specific faction because the faction is evil in a fictional setting. It is a fictional setting. There needs to be villains written into a story. I don't know why people think it's wrong for people to write their own villains or morally-gray characters.

[Rinhi]

You obviously have a problem with my post I wasn't lying and the post was edited. What I said is true you don't need to turn people into a punching bag to make a point.

huh? quoting you directly

The original post got edited in the OP they wanted to have license to verbally abuse other people and claimed it was the rules that caused the problem. The whole OP has been edited so we are now left with where the conversation has gone. It's now a rambling mess.

nowhere in OP was any of this mentioned and yet that's what your post very clearly implies, that the OP wanted a license to insult people and that they edited the post later to hide that fact, which is, guess what, a lie you straight up made up

If that is too graphic for you the what do you think the original post is about? Is it okay for the OP to want to be able to express themselves including being angry at someone in game bit it's not okay to tell the OP you shouldn't treat people that way.

it's about the OP lamenting the fact that any kind of harsh language or arguing can get you gaoled due to the insane self policing the community does, which encourages a crapton of passive aggressiveness instead of resolving the issue in the first place
you know, the OP explained the issue perfectly, I don't know why you ask me to explain it to you again

You can disagree with me and try and deflect any bad feelings onto me you want. But I will remind you I didn't start this topic if you don't want to read others opinions maybe get off the forums.

what the frick is this projection? I'm not the one morally grandstanding and straight up lying about the content of the OPs post, maybe you should take your own advice instead if you don't want to be called out for lying