Quote Originally Posted by Sylpharia View Post
When I joined this game I, like everyone else was promised that this community was not like other games and way more positives. I would say up until my first ex attempts, this was true. Personally the biggest spike in toxicity I have seen has been the end of Endwalker and the entirety of DT,(especially Cloud) and I don't just mean ingame. On youtube, reddit, forums and also ingame it has gotten a lot worse.
I have thought about the trend in the last couple xpacs and I've often wondered if the game ever really recovered from COVID.

ShB was a real banger when it first hit ... Then the pandemic started in between 5.2 and 5.3 (I actually wonder if SE already sensed something was wrong when they dropped 5.2 - that patch represented a noticeable difficulty spike as if they expected that it was going to need to be current content for longer than expected).

Then when Endwalker dropped it was still going on, on top of the influx from WoW due to both Asmongold hype and folks (I want to say largely performatively or finding an excuse to be done with Shadowlands than genuine solidarity, especially since the Diablo 2 remaster that dropped around the same time as EW managed to have just as much of a server congestion problem) expressing disdain for Blizzard's practices.

I feel like this further cemented XIV's metamorphosis into a hardcore-or-gtfo game despite player insistences that it isn't: to even play on 6.0 (unless you were on Gaia DC, pretty much) demanded a hardcore player's level of dedication just to log on.
People resorted to all kinds of extreme measures to ensure they got through the queue, and the whole affair probably made working adults especially quit in droves (working outside the house made the game almost unplayable unless your job allowed remoting into your home PC ...).

Then add in that WoW has finally found its legs again in the last expansion or two, and things are looking seriously bad for Team XIV (especially so if WoW actually delivers player housing in Midnight and does it well) ...