Do you ever think about how people play games to escape yet...

[Amarande]

This always happens people will troll, or bring in political stuff into chat all the time. However maybe because I'm on the newer servers but the amounts I see in this MMO compared to WoW is as different as night and day

Political stuff rarely seems to be a big thing from what I've seen (at least in NN, which tends to be the most active and noticeable ingame chat). You get the occasional political troll (and some of them can be pretty persistent about coming back on alts for quite some time before giving up - or perhaps running out of different addresses/credit cards to create new accounts with after they get banned? ...), but that's a minority of things, especially compared to WoW where trade chat on larger Alliance servers is practically FOX News apart from the ads being for guilds and carry services instead of Medicare Advantage and your car's extended warranty (trade chat on larger Horde servers is such an endless ticker of guild and carry ads that conversation of any kind is usually impossible anyways).

Most conflict and perception of "trolling" (which is a fuzzy term anyway, as the nature of internet arguments is that one person's spirited disagreement is ALWAYS another person's trolling, just as "toxic" usually gets applied as an umbrella to "any culture I don't agree/feel comfortable personally with") seems to derive from disagreement over the conduct of battle content (e.g., should sprouts be expected to keep up with speedrun culture for the sake of burned out teammates just there for the roulette, or should everyone be expected to aspire to Savage/Ultimate raider precision regardless of how casual the content they do is, or the eternal debates about PF etc. etc.).

The one thing consistently chill is crafting. It's weird. People will get more bent out of shape over dungeons taking a few minutes longer than over blowing up over a million gil's worth of mats by a macro error or fat fingered craft action ...

[Raven2014]

We live in a time where "influencer" is actually a legit "job", why would something like this even considered weird? Or among others:

- People commission art of their characters and post it on reddit.
- People try to squeeze every last bit of performance for cute little number on FFlog.

So the whole instagram mentality exist in many form rather than just modding. And it's not just MMO, it's the modern culture that promote this stuff hardcore. I got my Fire Emblem Engage last week, it's a tactical RPG franchise. Guess what it came with this time? A feature to create your own post card to share around! I looked at it and was like "eh?".

Also, people may play game to escape life, but also to fantasize about what they can't do in real life. It's why The Sims has been a successful and long running franchise.

[Vyrerus]

Honestly, the reason why FFXIV has such a heavy lean towards purely social content and interweaves so much with social media posting is because the majority of our playerbase are not gamers first and foremost.

They are writers, artists, photographers, creatives, and what have you. They aren't subscribed to XIV for its gameplay. They're subscribed to create social circles, share glams etc. There's a whole bevy of folks who want the gameplay dumbed down as much as possible, all combos consolidated into single buttons, and for Trusts to be available for all content.

Escapism for them is different than it is for others. They're not really into FFXIV because it's a fantasy world. For them it's just another place for them to get a muse from. Another place for them to find someone like minded who wants to talk about FFXIV and how it's just like their other favorite fiction, be that Buffy the Vampire Slayer, LoTR, or anything else.

Basically, some folks escape by slaying dragons. Others escape by drawing a still life of that dragon, and then showing it to all the people who know what that dragon is, and can comment on how accurate or cool their artistic interpretation of it is.

There's also the beauty angle of it. In FFXIV, even without mods, all of the player models have idealized body types. Some people want them to reflect the real world, while others take extreme comfort in the fact that everyone is presented as beautiful (less desirable face models not withstanding).

Anyway, it's only human nature to want to socialize with others like you. That's all it is, really. The game doesn't hard enforce you having to do battle content(or anything really) when you login, and so it attracts people who don't want that, or can handle doing the bare minimum to get access to what they want (glams, areas, vistas, venues etc).

[Iscah]

Honestly, the reason why FFXIV has such a heavy lean towards purely social content and interweaves so much with social media posting is because the majority of our playerbase are not gamers first and foremost.

They are writers, artists, photographers, creatives, and what have you. They aren't subscribed to XIV for its gameplay. They're subscribed to create social circles, share glams etc. There's a whole bevy of folks who want the gameplay dumbed down as much as possible, all combos consolidated into single buttons, and for Trusts to be available for all content.

I am "a gamer" and I still think it's silly having each step of a combo on a separate button. No other game I've played has that, except maybe if the combo is all that you have, and even then it's probably because you're expected to use those buttons in varying order to perform different attacks.

Having three buttons purely so you have to hit 1-2-3 instead of 1-1-1? This game is the only one I can think of.

Also, people can be creative in FFXIV and still enjoy a challenge in the gameplay.

[Melorie]

SNIP

I feel like you've summarized it perfectly.

I am "a gamer" and I still think it's silly having each step of a combo on a separate button. No other game I've played has that, except maybe if the combo is all that you have, and even then it's probably because you're expected to use those buttons in varying order to perform different attacks.

Regardless of your personal experience, this is by far the MMO where I have meet the biggest amount of people that barely plays other games. Or other MMOS. It's actually a curious thing about it. And many of them don't really care about the gameplay aspect, at all. They sub because they have this social experience.

There are probably people that aren't like that, obviously, but that doesn't really exclude the point.

As for the combo, I don't see how pressing one button can be more fun than actually getting your dance of buttons right, but eh, it's taste.

[Iscah]

As for the combo, I don't see how pressing one button can be more fun than actually getting your dance of buttons right, but eh, it's taste.

I prefer the challenge to come from the unique mechanics of the battle and what I see happening on the screen, not from learning a fixed sequence of buttons that you need to perform the same way every time.

It's why I like red mage, where at every turn you just need to do an action based on the current state of your gauge.

[Melorie]

I prefer the challenge to come from the unique mechanics of the battle and what I see happening on the screen, not from learning a fixed sequence of buttons that you need to perform the same way every time.

It's why I like red mage, where at every turn you just need to do an action based on the current state of your gauge.

As I said, taste. I enjoy the fights and the mechanics as well but with how syncing and powercapping works in this game there's very little available when it comes to that. At least a rotation that keeps you involved can save you from a boring fight, that ends up being a huge amount of the game if you're not doing current-content, which is the vast majority of the game. Even the cool fights with interesting mechanics end up meaningless.

Imo I don't see the reason why we can't have both tbh.

[Raoabolic]

I feel like you've summarized it perfectly.



Regardless of your personal experience, this is by far the MMO where I have meet the biggest amount of people that barely plays other games. Or other MMOS. It's actually a curious thing about it. And many of them don't really care about the gameplay aspect, at all. They sub because they have this social experience.

There are probably people that aren't like that, obviously, but that doesn't really exclude the point.

As for the combo, I don't see how pressing one button can be more fun than actually getting your dance of buttons right, but eh, it's taste.

To be fair, i'm sure they are talking about the basic combos that most melees have. Funny enough, the _____ that the person is talking about doesn't really mess with dancer too much, just consolidates the basic combos into a single button. I'm shocked that the devs don't just add that to the game imo. They complain about button bloat and that would remove a minimum of two buttons for most melee jobs, lol.

[Melorie]

To be fair, i'm sure they are talking about the basic combos that most melees have. Funny enough, the _____ that the person is talking about doesn't really mess with dancer too much, just consolidates the basic combos into a single button. I'm shocked that the devs don't just add that to the game imo. They complain about button bloat and that would remove a minimum of two buttons for most melee jobs, lol.

I see. I'm not familiar with melee gameplay. I'm a healer main so I can attest to tendinitis by pressing 1 button 80% of the gameplay in the majority content of the game.

[NekoMataMata]

Snippity

I feel like some of this explains a lot of what I was feeling. This game feels like a massive creative outlet for all sorts of things and I'm not against it. I appreciate a lot of the different works that comes out of it. It just sometimes feels really overwhelming.

Here's some background on myself I came from a really old game/virtual space called IMVU. I was on there for 3-4 years but at some point it just started dying, and I end up following other people here. I had a trial account for a long while but I wasn't really into this like I am now, but that was also partly due to me being in the phase of going from secondary school to college. When I came back and tried I had more time to spend on it and I actually got into it.

Even coming from IMVU though it's a bit of a culture shock it feels? It's way more cliquey, and it feels weird that people focus so much on purely social stuff when there's activities that you can actually do. A lot of people don't even feel like they're that interested in the game either. You go into any FF14 discord and you find people talking about other games or literally anything else but the game. I've joined specialized discords for different group activities in-game and I've had people in there literally tell me they don't play the game anymore.

There's nothing wrong with people being social, and people can do it however they like, but I guess it's just coming down to a case of me not feel like I fit in. Even if I hadn't gained a taste for playing the actual game and enjoyed doing the content in it, I still don't really think I'd have fit in with the super social cliques on here.