Quote Originally Posted by Carin-Eri View Post
Waits for inevitable reply/accusations pertaining to toxic positivity
I'd attribute it to precisely that. As someone who has been posting around these parts for roughly a decade now, I have met and befriended many individuals here on the forum who I otherwise never would have met in-game due to playing on a completely different server/datacentre.

It's not particularly difficult to curate one's forum experience either. If you can't agree to disagree with someone and find some middle ground then the ignore function exists to settle any major differences. In my experience, there's a vocal group of posters who treat any criticism of the game as a deeply personal attack.

Then, of course, there's the unfortunate fact that a lot of the 'toxic positivity' types have been caught engaging in stalking, harassment and either sending or cheering on credible death and sexual assault threats sent to players they dislike over the perceived 'crime' of being critical of the game's current trajectory and priorities.

It also ignores that a lot of posters critical of the game have repeatedly asked for more moderation themselves only to receive repeated radio silence. For example I made this thread a few years back asking for our community representatives to serve as a more visible and active presence:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...epresentatives

We had one introduce themselves not too long ago and they have not made a single post ever since. Ultimately this forum is under the complete control of Square Enix so blaming players for the current state of the place strikes me as a misguided endeavor - it could quite easily be 'cleaned up' and I disagree with the idea that this place is any more toxic than either Twitter or Reddit. Furthermore, the development team have admitted to gathering feedback from those two places in addition to a certain notorious Japanese site that is prone to being far, far more hostile.