(insert "back in my day" yelling at clouds emote here)
Vaguely sad to think that I've been playing FFXIV since the beginning of 2020 (and still feel like a newcomer sometimes but shh that's not the point) and that the FFXIV community I started out with doesn't seem to really...exist anymore?
It seems like people are less willing to talk with new people any more (because who knows if the other person's gonna be a creep, maybe they just want to play the MMO like it's a single-player game, so on and so forth).
Feels like people are less willing to just...play the game, everything has to be planned out, you can't wipe or else you think you're the scum of the earth (even though a wipe in 99% of content doesn't really matter, let's be honest), you have to have watched 8 guides, read 3 more, have to join 12 discord servers just to do any content older than a week. I didn't get to do Occult Crescent's Forked Tower the day it came out, and by the time I was able to level up and get to it - because I have a job - 3 days later, I was told in shout chat that I had to join a discord server for voice comms, otherwise it was unbeatable.
On the other hand it feels like so many people are treating this like a single-player game like I just said above, where any amount of friction is the end of the world. You don't have to watch a guide for the literal first dungeon of the game, but if you're in glam gear (no, not level 1 gear glammed over battle gear, but actual level 1 gear in pre-rework Aurum Vale) then someone saying "please keep on top of upgrading your gear" is not them being a jerk/troll/hating you/saying you're not allowed to have fun.
And yes, those ideas can coexist! This should be a fun game to play and you shouldn't treat it like a job, but if your way of playing a multiplayer game makes playing the game NOT fun for other people then they have the right to be unhappy and speak up about it, and that's not them being an asshole.
And back when I started playing, when trusts were just barely a thing and we didn't have duty support like we do now and squadrons were somehow even more jank, people seemed to be more aware of the fact that we were all playing a multiplayer game together, with people we may never see again, but that it was still CONSIDERATE to not make the game harder for other people while still being like "hey man, yeah, no worries, you don't have to watch a guide and you can just hop in and out but you do have to be able to hold your own and communicate somehow", you know?
And that's not even touching on the more social/less battle-focused content. There are so many PF ads with the block letters that my brain just tunes out, sometimes 3-7 for the same "venue", where the whole draw is out-of-game activities/communications, like discord servers or twitch streams or Cytube playlists or third-party add-ons. (Are you seeing a theme here? Stuff that used to be possible in game, migrating outside of the game?) I used to be able to open up PF, choose from one of 15-20 venue ads with no repeats, and find some low-stakes roleplaying that felt like it fit into Eorzea or the FFXIV world at large with 5-10 other people who were also happy to be there, and now it's all "pair with me through third-party add-ons, I'm a god from another dimension who is tens or hundreds of times stronger than the Warrior of Light, you must tremble before me or be painfully unmade" coming from the owner of the venue, who is also the only other person there because they're competing with 47 other listings of the exact same thing and it's just like–
What do you do with that? Where do you go from there? How is it fun when the only interactions you're getting are from people too afraid to roleplay through any plot- or character-driving interactions with you because otherwise their character will be killed off? When you don't get any return visitors because everyone else is either also an unmaking multiverse god, or explicitly doesn't want to interact with something you're trying to shoehorn into the universe like a triangle into the square hole?
I dunno, man, I miss when I'd just started playing this game and it didn't seem like everything was an island that needed too much work and almost no work at all. I'm sure it's partly rose-tinted glasses and maybe in another 6 years I'll look back and be like "shiiiiiiiit we had it gooooooood back in 2026", but. It sucks. Bleh.
amandla
titsay
snowghoul
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
stormborns
gamechangershow
2087