Where are the amazing MMO communities you guys claim and the WoW one is problematic?

[potis]

I was gonna write a wall of text explaining things but i chose against it.

Will be brief, currently playing ESO for the first time, all i have met in ESO is toxicity, and not even at higher level of the game because ESO doesnt even have that, we are talking daily LFG completely braindead irrelevant Normal dungeons toxicity while trying to do their Daily Dungeon Quests.

The game is a joke in terms of difficulty, we are talking even in Veteran Dungeons, 9/10 abilities do not do anything to be considered "dangerous" and the 1/10 is the hard mode last boss ability that either leaves you with 10% and even if you die the continuous reviving makes everything a joke, it makes LFR seem like Mythic raiding.

Quick examples: 99% of the people are silent, the moment anything delays them even for 1 minute, they leave the group, they demand to be kicked or they AFK if they know the dungeon is gonna take 13mins instead of 10mins cause its not one of the easier ones for their daily EXP bonus dungeon, we are talking about a game where you pull 20-50 mobs and AoE them down in 3 seconds in terms of difficulty daily dungeon, they are that pointlessly stupid and easy, and instead of playing, they rather sit and whine about who queued for this dungeon (Newsflash, its me trying to farm my items).

Two times the people that knew it was me that queues for the dungeon cause i am farming a particular set, they kicked me as punishment for making them waste their queue

There are many more i encounter daily the last 15 days that we are playing ESO, but there is no point in writing it all, i will just say that any form of communication has literally failed in the past 15 days, apart from 1 guy that i will admit was awesome and patient, since apparently the game fucked us over at the random veteran dungeon queue and it put us at one of the harder ones at our newly max level characters, we didnt have the DPS :< so kudos to that 1 guy out of the 400 different ones i met.

This isnt in the Mythic, or +15 content, that game has no such thing, this is literally the lowest possible form of content that game has and its like that.

GW2, despite playing since the start as single player MMO experience, is mostly the same the last couple of years.

Get on to get my freebie Hero Story and eventually do it when i have time all together cause its fun-->Proceed to read in general about WoW argument (For some reason they love to argue 24/7 about it)--> Proceed to see requests for help only to be met with silenc --> Alt +F4 cause i dont care to play, just getting the hero story.

Eventually play, try to check out the new areas they add for the story line -->Try to do the event -->Watch people ask to do it, myself included-->Be met with mockery or silence, or "Go back to WoW, that event is so last month" was a legit response i saw once.

The GW2 is spread over 3 years so i will say the "toxicity" is probably low, but my point stands.

So i sincerely ask you guys, where are these communities you are talking about and WoW is the only MMO with a problem? I already know if i try FFXIV i will meet something similar, but i dont really enjoy the FF games, and neither my friends so that probably wont happen.

[Daedius]

FF 14's community is pretty good.

[potis]

FF 14's community is pretty good.

The same is told for the other two, try reading for a change.

[Fkiolaris]

I haven't played ESO for a couple of years, but from what you say then you did not play past level 48 (or whatever level it was), when the DLC and expansion dungeons get in the rota for the LFG if you are paying sub or bought them. Why does that matter? Because those progressively got harder and harder to the point that normal dungeons were practically undoable for groups full of casual players, regardless of gear or Champion Points. ZOS seems to have this bizarre fixation about dungeon difficulties and it was just keeping a massive chunk of the player base out of the them.

Having said that, ESO's strong points in relation to WoW is that it has a more "serious" story and tone, there is bigger build variability (even though the nerfs and combat changes were too frequent for my liking), the housing system is apparently great and the outdoors content is probably the/one of the best in the industry. For PvP, you are also mostly encouraged to do the massive faction map rather than the small 5v5v5 maps (which were an utter shitshow due to premades and lack of matchmaking). If any of these is to your liking then stick to it.

For GW2 I only did levelling to 80 with a couple of characters and I really loved the outdoors content and the build variability without the "meaningful choices" shite from WoW. I hate that the only dungeons going really are the fractals, which was the big negative for me, plus the story of the base-game was a bit too cheesy and cartoony for my taste. Unfortunately some of the stronger builds are behind expansions, but that's the same with WoW really.

I guess my point is that they are different games than WoW, so if you are going in expecting WoW then of course you will be disappointed. The 2 games that share the most with WoW in some way are FFXIV and SWTOR, each in their own way. For all of the above games, whenever I play(ed) them the community was the same as in every MMO- you can be lucky and find golden people, you can be unlucky and find arseholes. If you are not used to that by now, well, unfortunately there is no escape.

[potis]

I haven't played ESO for a couple of years, but from what you say then you did not play past level 48 (or whatever level it was), when the DLC and expansion dungeons get in the rota for the LFG if you are paying sub or bought them. Why does that matter? Because those progressively got harder and harder to the point that normal dungeons were practically undoable for groups full of casual players, regardless of gear or Champion Points. ZOS seems to have this bizarre fixation about dungeon difficulties and it was just keeping a massive chunk of the player base out of the them.

Not sure what this means, i am nearing 300 CP already cause the game is that easy, i wont go into further detail picking apart the rest of the post, but yes, the story zone quests are fun, despite the overall insanely low difficulty of the whole game, ESO has that going for it, the single player experience seems to be top notch.

And yes, i am not expecting anything out of the games, this is for all the mmo-championers that claim how every MMO apart from WoW has a good community, where exactly? At Level 1-10 the first 2 hours and then never play it again?

[Edge-]

I mean...I don't play MMO's as much any more but your experiences don't remotely match up with anything I've experienced in ESO or GW2 lately at all. There are occasionally bubbles of WoW discussion when there's a content drought (like now) and some WoW players are on their "backup games" complaining, but honestly outside of starting zones I rarely ever see that.

Everyone's gonna have a different experience, but honestly it almost sounds like you're looking or disappointment.

[Thoriangun]

Games don't decide or create/foster a great community.

People in general are dicks and they just happen to play a number of games.

Thats it, nothing more.

on topic with FF14, its TOS is far stricter then any other title, so it doesn't create a great community, it merely silences them. (if anything I consider the community in FF14 to be amongst the worst especially when it comes to sexual harassment, never seen a game where so many players try to treat the game like Tinder)

[Acidbaron]

Well mostly it's the grass is greener on the other side kind of thing,

Final Fantasy 14 is as others have said for the biggest part a "nice" community, in the sense that people will help you out and guide you. Their large discords are also full of helpful people, there will always be outliers. This is mostly speaking about the levelling phase not sure how it is at the top as i kind of got burned out before i finished the third expansion i believe.

Can't speak for ESO and haven't played GW2 in ages, not sure if my account still stands there.

If your search is really a community, in the sense of finding like minded people. I believe you first need to decide what you really want, something casual or something more competitive i don't believe neither is from nature more toxic. And then go looking for a community that suits you and just play whatever they are playing, i will say that sandbox games due to how they are made often are more "social".

Because what you are describing here as something you find problematic is that you seem to be playing online games that are actually for the largest part not multiplayer games and if they are multiplayer a community or even guild isn't needed since the game group finder structure has turned that experience into a lobby based game structure, easy in and easy out of a group. Maybe look for MMO's that require more teamwork to do usual day to day activities, those do -force- it but those also create communities easier.

Or maybe, accept like i did for the biggest part online gaming now is a different beast and you'll never really get that sense of community back that you used to have for a host of reasons. Or if you have the time and energy you can start putting your shoulders under a community and build one yourself in a game of your liking and attract other like minded people that's how MMO's used to get great communities, people who literally turned their online gaming experience into an intense hobby of managing people.

[Thelxi]

Most MMOs have pretty chill internet communities tbh. The people tend to be a bit older, and people are more invested in their avatars.

[Kumorii]

Communities are the same everywhere. In general that is. Majority of people aren't dicks. It's about some form of confirmation bias and I also think it relies heavily on the recipient claiming its bads attitude. Usually the ones claiming X community of any game is shit it tends to coincide with their thoughts on that the game is shit. Their own frustration with the game is then affecting how they percieve interactions.

We had a thread yesterday, I think, maybe two days ago. In which a user expressed the frustration in doing some maw event which resulted in them dying and then whispered a random ret Paladin who were there also fighting, why they didn't heal him and let him die.

It was apparently a sign of how shit the community was because he got an angry response. Not reflecting on how very passive aggressive the inquire sounded which probably sparked the angry response. But it was the problem of the community and not them phrasing a question in a bad way due to frustration.

I mean I recently started to play LOL and it has the biggest meme about being toxic. Does it live up to the amount of meme? Hell no, do I meet douchebags? Absolutely.. But majority is still good.

People claiming x is better than y is often taking their personal experience and actions, someone who enjoys the game and treat people well will often have a better experience in all communities, to make a general statement over the majority they have no experience about.

Then you also have the fact that people tend to perpetuate the common sensus. If you go in thinking a community is shit you will most likely be on guard in preemptive measure which can result in you being a dick and thus you receive a poor attitude back. Voilà, the community is shit as you expected.

But I've been rambling on for too long. These are my thoughts about it and speaking from my experience throughout all these years I've been gaming in a shit ton of different games and way more years spent behind a computer than is healthy.

[Cracked]

No game has a good broad community today because of how ephemeral every relationship ends up being. Why be nice to someone that you will with high probability never ever play with again, especially if the content doesn't even require you to cooperate on any meaningful level.

Toxicity was always there, but the less the general player base knows the game, the harder it is for an average Joe to act elitist. That's why games seem to get more toxic as they age.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Quick examples: 99% of the people are silent, the moment anything delays them even for 1 minute, they leave the group, they demand to be kicked or they AFK if they know the dungeon is gonna take 13mins instead of 10mins cause its not one of the easier ones for their daily EXP bonus dungeon, we are talking about a game where you pull 20-50 mobs and AoE them down in 3 seconds in terms of difficulty daily dungeon, they are that pointlessly stupid and easy, and instead of playing, they rather sit and whine about who queued for this dungeon (Newsflash, its me trying to farm my items).

Two times the people that knew it was me that queues for the dungeon cause i am farming a particular set, they kicked me as punishment for making them waste their queue

This doesn't seem toxic to me. Seems like your usual lobby MMO queuing system where people where there are black sheep dungeons people don't want to deal with and are willing to eat a leaver penalty for.

"Go back to WoW, that event is so last month" was a legit response i saw once.

That's rather mild, and that's the most notable example of "toxicity" you can come up with?

Alright. Real talk.

I've seen very little actual real, "yes really" toxicity in a MMO's ingame chat channels, be it WoW's tradechat or GW2's map chat or in FFXIV or whatever. And by real toxicity, I mean people bending over backwards to make you miserable. But randos in tradechat or in a PUG or a dungeon group? Hardly ever any toxicity. Nobody has got time for that crap. People just want to get on with their lives. Saying someone "ur dps sucks" isn't toxic; he's not trying to hurt you for the sake of it, he is simply frustrated that things aren't getting on faster, and once the dungeon run is over you'll never see him again.

If you want to see "yes really" actual, real toxicity, join a discord for your favorite video game, or a guild, where you have cliques you're going to be interacting with on a daily basis, and people start talking behind each other's backs and people start becoming black sheeps of the group who are ostracized and then eventually humiliated and kicked out.

FF 14's community is pretty good.

The same is told for the other two, try reading for a change.

FFXIV's public chat channels look tamer than WoW's but the toxicity in the community is still there. It has simply been entirely repressed from public chat channels and moved over into private discords.

In WoW, you learn to develop a thick skin pretty quickly. People throw words at each other all the time in chat, so the fragile people were filtered out long ago, or they quickly acclimated to it. Seeing a screenshot of a WoW chat seems shocking to non-WoW players, but once you've acclimated to the environment you don't think too much about it.

The real nice thing about WoW is that people have no tolerance for crap. If someone is under performing, people aren't afraid to call it out and offer advice. If you don't get with the program and take that advice and change what you're doing, you're going to get kicked real fast. People's time is precious and they're not going to waste the few hours they have after work to raid on people messing around.

Contrast that with FFXIV, which has a more fragile demeanor in my experience. People like to act nice... if only because if they say anything remotely negative, they're going to be dogpiled. FFXIV's English fandom seems to have a lot of overlap with the r/Anime fandom, which is a niceness echochamber and creates fragility. People are content to spend hours in party finder carrying people who clearly aren't capable of performing basic mechanical checks, and god forbid kicking them. No one calls out anyone on anything and problems are never addressed. But if you go into a discord, it's no holds barred and you could be in for a nasty experience. As I said before: in a discord, without the threat of being banned by Square, people aren't going to hold back and they're going to say what they're really thinking and it can be a lot, lot worse than just people in a WoW LFG saying "lol ur DPS sucks" and then that being the end of that.

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on topic with FF14, its TOS is far stricter then any other title, so it doesn't create a great community, it merely silences them. (if anything I consider the community in FF14 to be amongst the worst especially when it comes to sexual harassment, never seen a game where so many players try to treat the game like Tinder)

^^^THIS^^^

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Then you also have the fact that people tend to perpetuate the common sensus. If you go in thinking a community is shit you will most likely be on guard in preemptive measure which can result in you being a dick and thus you receive a poor attitude back. Voilà, the community is shit as you expected.

Also this, and this problem is magnified in game communities where the discussion is centered in echochambers, specifically any place with an upvote system implemented. The very nature of the upvote system means that people are incentivized to regurgitate popular opinions to get that dopamine rush of upvotes and seeing replies in your inbox. The most upvoted posts is the stuff that gets pushed to be seen by other people. People with unpopular opinions see that their posts are buried and nobody talks to them, and eventually realize that they are wasting their time, so they stop participating in the fandom (or quit it entirely), which turns the echochamber into a feedback loop where eventually nothing but the most popular opinion is left. FFXIV's Western fandom suffers from this a lot, as it is concentrated on the r/FFXIV subreddit and on Twitter.

There has been a lot of talk about a "silent majority" of WoW players on this forum over the past several years, but FFXIV really takes the cake give how if you say certain things, you will be ostracized... or banned. So you have a lot of the same opinions being touted but you have no idea just how many people actually agree or disagree with those opinions but don't say anything out of fear.

[dope_danny]

WoW's entire world is dead and guilds have become gated communities because people don't want to spend time with the toxic cesspool of entitled babyrage mcshitfit players that make up the average person you run into. In other games ideas exist like "the party is only as fast as its slowest member" or "anyones first time? i need to explain X mechanic" or simply "hi guys". As opposed to [TOTAL CRUSHING SILENCE] where everyone may as well be bots or some malding asshole with an ego trying to have a power trip because the MM part of MMO means people that exist to silently carry them.

Saying the wow userbase is not majority asshole leaning is like saying england is known for its droughts and desert climate. You can say it all you want but theres years of evidence and personal experience that the game has catered, cultivated and promoted being a defensive asshole living in a minefield at best. With everyone else hiding behind their guilds walls never interacting with the world at all because why would they want to?

[Local Skinwalker]

i have played world of warcraft since around wrath of lich king but on and off thru xpansions.....personally the community has been fine for me. but i have been on the same server since then and that server has been Stormrage-US

i also fall under the "cross server connections killed the community" banner

[unfilteredJW]

The same is told for the other two, try reading for a change.

From this reply, the problem is most likely you.

[Loveliest]

FF 14's community is pretty good.

I guess it depends on your luck. I tried ff14 and in two different guilds (free companies, was it?) and the members bitched about WoW most of the time and the rest they were making gross remarks about cat girls. Ugh. I dunno, compared to that my WoW guild is way better. So i suppose there's bad apples in every community, hard to evaluate it all... esp since in ff14 i was just leveling and in wow i stick to my guild and never pug.

But i did notice one pattern. Ppl who are extremely unhappy with wow seem to be so because they have no ppl to play it with and expect to be able to play with the mindset of a solo player and never be part of anything, never making friends, not playing to keep up with gear and then they get disappointed they can only pug and pugs don't take them. Puggers are not really a community and do not reflect the core values of what a true community can do ingame.

[unfilteredJW]

This doesn't seem toxic to me. Seems like your usual lobby MMO queuing system where people where there are black sheep dungeons people don't want to deal with and are willing to eat a leaver penalty for.



That's rather mild, and that's the most notable example of "toxicity" you can come up with?

Alright. Real talk.

I've seen very little actual real, "yes really" toxicity in a MMO's ingame chat channels, be it WoW's tradechat or GW2's map chat or in FFXIV or whatever. And by real toxicity, I mean people bending over backwards to make you miserable. But randos in tradechat or in a PUG or a dungeon group? Hardly ever any toxicity. Nobody has got time for that crap. People just want to get on with their lives. Saying someone "ur dps sucks" isn't toxic; he's not trying to hurt you for the sake of it, he is simply frustrated that things aren't getting on faster, and once the dungeon run is over you'll never see him again.

If you want to see "yes really" actual, real toxicity, join a discord for your favorite video game, or a guild, where you have cliques you're going to be interacting with on a daily basis, and people start talking behind each other's backs and people start becoming black sheeps of the group who are ostracized and then eventually humiliated and kicked out.



FFXIV's public chat channels look tamer than WoW's but the toxicity in the community is still there. It has simply been entirely repressed from public chat channels and moved over into private discords.

In WoW, you learn to develop a thick skin pretty quickly. People throw words at each other all the time in chat, so the fragile people were filtered out long ago, or they quickly acclimated to it. Seeing a screenshot of a WoW chat seems shocking to non-WoW players, but once you've acclimated to the environment you don't think too much about it.

The real nice thing about WoW is that people have no tolerance for crap. If someone is under performing, people aren't afraid to call it out and offer advice. If you don't get with the program and take that advice and change what you're doing, you're going to get kicked real fast. People's time is precious and they're not going to waste the few hours they have after work to raid on people messing around.

Contrast that with FFXIV, which has a more fragile demeanor in my experience. People like to act nice... if only because if they say anything remotely negative, they're going to be dogpiled. FFXIV's English fandom seems to have a lot of overlap with the r/Anime fandom, which is a niceness echochamber and creates fragility. People are content to spend hours in party finder carrying people who clearly aren't capable of performing basic mechanical checks, and god forbid kicking them. No one calls out anyone on anything and problems are never addressed. But if you go into a discord, it's no holds barred and you could be in for a nasty experience. As I said before: in a discord, without the threat of being banned by Square, people aren't going to hold back and they're going to say what they're really thinking and it can be a lot, lot worse than just people in a WoW LFG saying "lol ur DPS sucks" and then that being the end of that.

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^^^THIS^^^

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Also this, and this problem is magnified in game communities where the discussion is centered in echochambers, specifically any place with an upvote system implemented. The very nature of the upvote system means that people are incentivized to regurgitate popular opinions to get that dopamine rush of upvotes and seeing replies in your inbox. The most upvoted posts is the stuff that gets pushed to be seen by other people. People with unpopular opinions see that their posts are buried and nobody talks to them, and eventually realize that they are wasting their time, so they stop participating in the fandom (or quit it entirely), which turns the echochamber into a feedback loop where eventually nothing but the most popular opinion is left. FFXIV's Western fandom suffers from this a lot, as it is concentrated on the r/FFXIV subreddit and on Twitter.

There has been a lot of talk about a "silent majority" of WoW players on this forum over the past several years, but FFXIV really takes the cake give how if you say certain things, you will be ostracized... or banned. So you have a lot of the same opinions being touted but you have no idea just how many people actually agree or disagree with those opinions but don't say anything out of fear.

Maybe don’t bring your hatred or your approval of incest up and you won’t have these problems.

[Crimznrain]

"I was gonna write a wall of text explaining things but i chose against it."

-proceeds to write a wall of text.

lol

[Acidbaron]

Communities are the same everywhere. In general that is. Majority of people aren't dicks. It's about some form of confirmation bias and I also think it relies heavily on the recipient claiming its bads attitude. Usually the ones claiming X community of any game is shit it tends to coincide with their thoughts on that the game is shit. Their own frustration with the game is then affecting how they percieve interactions.

We had a thread yesterday, I think, maybe two days ago. In which a user expressed the frustration in doing some maw event which resulted in them dying and then whispered a random ret Paladin who were there also fighting, why they didn't heal him and let him die.

It was apparently a sign of how shit the community was because he got an angry response. Not reflecting on how very passive aggressive the inquire sounded which probably sparked the angry response. But it was the problem of the community and not them phrasing a question in a bad way due to frustration.

I mean I recently started to play LOL and it has the biggest meme about being toxic. Does it live up to the amount of meme? Hell no, do I meet douchebags? Absolutely.. But majority is still good.

People claiming x is better than y is often taking their personal experience and actions, someone who enjoys the game and treat people well will often have a better experience in all communities, to make a general statement over the majority they have no experience about.

Then you also have the fact that people tend to perpetuate the common sensus. If you go in thinking a community is shit you will most likely be on guard in preemptive measure which can result in you being a dick and thus you receive a poor attitude back. Voilà, the community is shit as you expected.

But I've been rambling on for too long. These are my thoughts about it and speaking from my experience throughout all these years I've been gaming in a shit ton of different games and way more years spent behind a computer than is healthy.

Very well said,

How you approach a game or community is going to determine what your interaction with others will look like, as most people are really okay.

[qwerty123456]

On Xbox I never had problems with groups in ESO but the trading system causes alot of toxicity. You have guys shouting in zones trying to buy shit for 1/3rd the price they are worth hoping to get noobs to sell them shit, You got people who create guilds and require donations then "fail" to get a trader for weeks at a time keeping all the dontations until people get fed up and start leaving then either recruit more or start a new guild, and then you also got the massive superguilds that create multiple alt guilds to buy valuable trader spots to fuck over other guilds and set the prices for specific items.

On Pc addons cut some of the above down a bit but I would still see it. Oh and having to spend 8 hrs teleporting around checking every fucking trader on the planet hoping to find something you wanted was also total bullshit.