Quote Originally Posted by AwesomeJr44 View Post
Sadly, when you have a sizable and vocal portion of a group of people prove themselves to not be worth engaging with, it builds up the sentiment that that group isn't worth engaging with in general. The solution would be for people who like Endwalker to show that there are good faith people to be found amongst them. Although I believe that more of them must exist somewhere, I have yet to see more than a handful of pro-Endwalker people who are not also lunatics, people who argue in bad faith, etc.
I have actually seen one person like this in the past few weeks! On Reddit, in fact – but not the cesspools that are FFXIV subs, a more general gaming sub. The person asking me my opinion liked Endwalker and was genuinely curious about why I hated its handling of Ancients when they had never heard of any negative opinion about EW. I replied, naturally, with a massive wall of text, and they thanked me for it and it was all very civil.

I wish more interactions were like this.

But no, instead, this fanbase tends to be as toxic as it gets when you offer criticism. Which is just weird to me, frankly, because it isn't something I had experienced in my recent fandoms of WoW, Pokémon and ASOIAF. Dissent was common and a normal part of discussion. Like, yeah, Game Freak is lazy, Blizzard is Blizzard, and AFFC was slow and the series peaked with ASOS.

I have no idea why FFXIV, in contrast, feels such like a cult.

To say that Endwalker is the sole culprit for my rebound depression last year would be a lie. Because I would ascribe a large part of the blame on how the fanbase has treated me and people like me. We're pushed out of discussion so much that people like the Reddit person I mentioned have never heard negative opinions. I now mostly keep my FFXIV opinions pointedly outside of FFXIV subs, because I'm less likely to get attacked for daring to say something negative about the story. Still get downvoted, of course, but that's par for the course.

Oh, and it is disingenuous (as always with this community) to say we "can't take criticism" because a particular thread has been brought up by a big name content creator and some people might be feeling iffy about that. These people have a massive audience and platform, and FFXIV players are notorious for being rather unhinged outside of the game (which, thankfully, has a draconian enough TOS that it stifles them as they deserve). Now, Mr Happy in particular did not name names, and that's cool of him. But honestly, I am not putting it past some members of his audience to act like psychopaths over a game they've built their identity around, honestly.