Players and Toxicity

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was an exceptionally stressful day for me as it involved a family funeral where we are not entirely family. It was one of those situations where it was my wife’s Step-Uncle but also where she was not related by blood with anyone that was there. The end result sorta felt like trying to attend the family reunion of someone else’s family. An hour and a half there, two hours for the family dinner, two and a half hours for the service, and an hour and a half back… added up more or less to an entirely lost day. When we finally made it home it was evening and I attempted to rush through a bunch of things quickly to feel like I made some progress in Final Fantasy XIV. You can see my new glamour for my Red Mage that I have been leveling lately. I am thinking it is probably going to be the next thing I push to 80 given that it is already level 75.

In my travels since coming back to the game, I have been running quite a number of dungeons. Effectively at a minimum, I run the leveling, 50+ and level 80 roulettes each night tanking them on my Paladin. Right now Final Fantasy XIV is going through an excessive population boom as “WoW Refugees” show up on the shores of Eorzea looking for solace. I have to admit I have been somewhat worried that this massive influx of players from another community would change the feel of FFXIV, but so far it has not. World of Warcraft is an exceptionally toxic environment. You can’t be in the game for more than a few moments without experiencing some form of negative behavior from the player base. So with the influx of followers of he-who-must-not-be-named and similar World of Warcraft ilk… it was my fear that Final Fantasy XIV would become toxic as well.

The end result however has been nothing but joy. I’ve run into more than my fair share of players who admit to coming here from World of Warcraft, and I have done my best to welcome them with open arms. I’ve experienced some truly staggering acts of kindness as well such as the other night when running a dungeon and our non-English speaking healer disconnected. We all agreed to wait fifteen minutes for them before trying to fill the group, and even then when we had to kick them and replace them we all commented that we felt guilty in doing so. The other two players I was in there with were recent transplants from World of Warcraft. The end result is we just sat down in the instance and chatted as the time passed hoping that the healer would come back. The thing is it wasn’t because it is hard to get a healer, because as soon as we kicked the disconnected player we got a brand new healer almost instantly. Folks just didn’t want to make that healers night any worse, given that a disconnect is stressful enough.

So I am left with the question… were the players in World of Warcraft actually that toxic? Was it instead the sequence of events that a player goes through and the hyper-competitive environment that Warcraft creates that produces toxic behavior? Final Fantasy XIV from the top down is designed to be collaborative in nature and straight-up bribes players for positive behavior. Lower level dungeons need running, for example, so the game rewards players for queueing for leveling roulette and then heaps extra rewards on top of that if you have a player that is experiencing it for the first time. In addition to all of this structure, there is the subtle pressure that the commendation system creates, of wanting to perform well and be cheerful in the hopes of someone giving you a commendation at the end of the run. All of this structure stacks up to create an environment that is pushing players to be sociable and kind and to treat “sprouts” or new players with an extra dose of care given that with them comes bonus rewards.

I am absolutely certain there is going to be some toxicity that I come across in Final Fantasy XIV. However having been back for a few weeks now and throwing myself nightly into random dungeon runs, I can say that so far I have not encountered any. It doesn’t appear that the World of Warcraft Refugees are changing the game, but instead that the game is changing them and applying a certain measure of chill to their gameplay. There has been a lot said about the longer global cooldown system in FFXIV and how World of Warcraft feels more “immediate”. I think this slower pace however leads to combat in the game and all of the encounters as a result feeling more like a dance. It is more important to move with rhythm than to mash your finger against the button as hard as you can and as fast as you can in order to make the numbers go up. This pace though slows everything down… and I think there is just more time to stop and smell the roses along the way. For example I took a moment in a dungeon run in order to take this screenshot. No one yelled at me for taking that little moment.

I do want to close on a very specific note however. A lot of my posts lately have been contrasting the experience of playing Final Fantasy XIV to that of World of Warcraft Shadowlands. I feel it is extremely important to note and make sure that you readers know this, but if you are having a blast right now in World of Warcraft then I am happy for you. I intend no shade to be thrown on the player base of that game that is active and having fun, nor do I intend to try and create some hard press to recruit you away from something that you love. Instead I am sharing the things that I am loving about Final Fantasy XIV and using the only language that I know, a language forged over the course of over two decades of playing MMORPGs of all sorts. Anything I say about World of Warcraft also comes from a place of having loved it for so long, that maybe I care too much about it. If you are enjoying yourself though, keep enjoying yourself and I wish you all the happiness in the world.