TYFP

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Final Fantasy XIV Social media groups are full of them; The Toxic casuals. And their latest target is the WoW Refugee. Anything and everything is suddenly the fault of the WoW Refugee. The WoW Refugee made your duty roulette run slow. The WoW Refugee made your duty roulette bad. The WoW Refugee didn’t give me comms. The WoW Refugee is toxic. The WoW Refugee ruined our GCBTW.

I’ve seen a couple groups respond by threatening instabans on people for abusing The WoW Refugee, but its not enough, because it doesn’t educate. This bothers me on multiple levels because just like other issues, some significantly more important and political, its impossible to improve things when idiots are just given free reign to say whatever they want while ignoring any and all evidence that doesn’t make them feel smart or right.

The WoW Refugee is not new. In fact, the WoW Refugee has been here longer than most of the current player base. Since 1.0, before ARR, The WoW Refugee was here. The WoW Refugee travelled here long ago, and has existed in small hidden populations since they first fell in love with the MMO genre. The more modern population of The WoW Refugee, immigrated to ARR during low points of Cataclysm, Mists of Panderia, and especially Warlords of Draenor. The WoW Refugee has been here very long indeed, longer than some of you. I am also, in a way, a WoW Refugee. I played FFXI first, and later when my friends switched to WoW, I joined them there.

The WoW Refugee is not inherently Toxic. In fact, the WoW community is rather wholesome as a whole. As WoW transitioned further and further from any significant PvP focus, and further from competitive raiding (with the addition of easier raids), the community’s multiplayer experience was largely cooperative. When this happened, people became more accustomed to working together, including with enemy factions as each expansion seems to homogenize the factions further. During my experience through Battle for Azeroth, out of thousands of instanced dungeons, raids, PvP matches, etc. I cannot recall one significant negative experience with other players. I am aware that in high end M+ there exists a mean spiritied community revolving around valuable, keys, time, and raider.io scores, however since recent numbers have revealed that less than 10% of the WoW population engages in this content, I feel confident saying that the vast majority of WoW Refugees are just normal people wanting to play a quality MMO. In fact, most of the time I was running content I was unfamiliar with and the other players were extremely helpful. What is, actually, toxic, are people continually finding ways to blame their unhappiness about a situation that was not catered exactly to their feelings on an entity other than their own sensitivity. Now, this is not to excuse obvious harassment or hateful behavior, which happens in any online game. I am referring to a plethora of insignificant interaction having an unproportionate effect on someone.

For instance. The Refugee did not give me comms. They did not give others comms. There’s no way of verifying who got comms from whom, but I know that they did not give comms because they are toxic and they are a WoW Refugee.

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I’ve maintained that while yes, Final Fantasy XIV does have a generally positive and helpful community, it’s just as capable of being obnoxious or hurtful. One of the areas where the GCBTW seems to excel is its weaponization of being bad at the game, often intentionally.

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And these are the people who are showing their ass posting about a certain popular streamer bringing his community to FFXIV. Now, I wont argue that he’s done pretty toxic things in the past, and I wont make any excuse for them; however, if you feel you have to act like an elitist idiot in retaliation, you might also be toxic. This is why I get a bit revved up over this argument.

I can’t help but feel like now that it is FFXIV’s time in the sun, a bunch of the lesser apt members of the community are coming out to exert their deficient opinions on the rest of us, and it only shows just how bad our own community can be.

Before you get all up in arms over The WoW Refugee making a mistake in Sastasha, please kindly remember when the GCBTW threatened to kill FFXIV dev team members because there were no male Viera, no female Hrothgar, and neither could wear every hate in the game. Please, kindly, remember when the community threatened to kill Scottzone because he didn’t like a FFXIV raid. They also threatened the Lazy Peon, for a bad review. I forgot about that one.

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I feel that at this point, we should be welcoming any new player, and not really finding new ways of excluding people, and unfortunately that’s what a lot of these faux social justice warriors are doing. You might have a point not wanting Asmongold in your community based on his actions, but then to extend that ‘ban’ to anyone else who came from the same game or at the same time? I’m sorry, you’re not an ally to anyone at that point. You’re just wanting to keep your fun exclusive. I won’t link to the “streamer” that called for harassment of Asmongold and his viewers or people playing with them, because they are pretty scummy for doing it. I dont like Asmongold, I don’t watch Asmongold, but I know calling for an army of nerds to harass people playing your game because you don’t like them is trashy and elitist, and they knew what they did was wrong because they protected their tweets. Last time they tried to cross tweets with Asmongold they used the traffic to try and monetize the drama, so why should their gatekeeping opinion matter? It’s just another example of how abusive the FFXIV community *can* be.

I’ve often advocated for the community in-game, while decried joining social media groups focused around FFXIV. And if you’ve read even a paragraph of this then you know exactly why I feel this way. The interaction moderation in FFXIV is well enforced, and GMs are given the tools to quickly deal with incidents of harassment, and this shows would be abusers that if you choose to be a dick-hole you run a very real risk of a ban. So even if a person wants to be cruel, they are incentivized to *at least* pretend to not be toxic. In Facebook groups or twitter threads people are incentivized to get ‘burns’ and ‘ratios’ and are not thoroughly or fairly policed. Its easy to ban evade and pick right back up with toxic behavior. This will definitely result in some funny interactions, but for the most part will give newer players a skewed view of what the community looks and acts like in game.

I guess what I’m getting at in the end, is that the FFXIV GCBTW has just as many problems as any other fandom, and that if it wants to keep its reputation for being an accepting and wholesome group, we really need to make sure that’s how we are acting now that there are more eyes on us.