Comments from the Devs

[Kami]

FFXI's community has always been shitty but there were less subscribers to begin with so it wasn't that obvious to some. And you had to deal with the BS anyway to get through the game or you were simply wasting your time.

I was missing the OF/BF/FFXI/FFXI's community hate !

Seriously, what was up with the actual FFXIV ARR last couple days ? I'm glad we're back to what BG does best!

[Eagleheart]

It still amuses me how the ramblings of the official forum of a game define it's community. Moreover it amuses me how the opinions people hold, no matter how retarded they are, count in-game.

It's how people act that counts, not what they say. XI forced people to act nice - ARR most likely doesn't. There goes the 'nice community'. Of course the trade-off is worth it.

XI forced people to act nice?

Dude, I was on Kujata. Our motto was We Know Drama.™ Dunno about the other servers >_> I heard tell that Lakshmi and Bahamut were stuffed to the gills with legendary jackassery, and I know how Valefor is, having been merged there.

There was no nice community. o.- There were cutthroats, cliquers and cliquettes, malcontents, and blowhards all around, and all that was before we got to the actual endgame spots.

[Arc07]

XI forced people to act nice?

Dude, I was on Kujata. Our motto was We Know Drama.™
There was no nice community.

lol so true

[Don Katsu]

Alexander drama thread on KI reached 400+ pages before it was locked. Then they made their own site to continue the bitching

[Gulkeeva]

The 2 servers I played on, caitsith and hades.. drama from day 1 of NA release.
At first it was NA vs JP sort of drama thing (oh god the random stream of shounts, especially I got to jeuno it got crazy) thing then it moved to stanislav LS vs everyone else drama at every HNM camp/jeuno etc.

[Stanislaw]

As a former mod of KI during its heights...

...on second thought, nevermind. Brings back so many memories I can do without.

The motto among JP players when it came to describing FFXI (pre-Abs) was Kyousei Kizuna Online, which roughly translates to 'personal bonds forced online'.

[Sephiroth]

Competition promotes assholery. Even in XIV V1 when camping those 5 "HNM"s there was drama on my server. Some lovely linkshell who would try get hate on Dodore just to run it out of range so it would leash back and you lose claim. Or instead of wiping so other LS could fight it they'd stay dead/abuse return until the weather changed so they could depop it. Yet people are crying in the BFs about the lack of XI style NM camping.

[Raldo]

And to reinforce that argument, as someone who avoided HNM camping like it was the plague, I thought FFXI people were pretty nice overall.

Personal bonds forced online, haha, so true.

[Kami]

I was on Ragnarok (arround 2005-2009) and I feel like it's the best community i ever played with during almost 10 years of mmorpgs. Sure we had more than our fair share of drama, but I made great friends during that time. I wonder how other "oldschool" Ragnarok players feel about that. Perhaps some servers had slightly better community than others..

[Melena]

Bismarck had some awesome drama due to Killuminati, Rusty Metal and his crew. Especially when they started posting conversations they had with GM's over the phone.

[Pharaun]

I was on Ragnarok (arround 2005-2009) and I feel like it's the best community i ever played with during almost 10 years of mmorpgs. Sure we had more than our fair share of drama, but I made great friends during that time. I wonder how other "oldschool" Ragnarok players feel about that. Perhaps some servers had slightly better community than others..

Pretty much agree with everything you said here. Sure Rag had it's share of drama, but compared to what I heard about on other servers it was fairly minimal and even the big competing linkshells got along for the most part. I made many great friends and we ended up in several different LS's over the years, sometimes I miss the old feel from Ragnarok server.

[Pharaun]

Hooray for double posts!

[Hatedregret]

So glad to have been on Unicorn. I only experienced a handful of shyte encounters during my years playing. Maybe two shells total.

[Lucavi]

XI forced people to act nice?

The dude's Whiteknighting hardcore. He's cherry picking the 3 or 4 instances where people act nice while ignoring the years upon years of stolen LS vaults, camp drama, MPKs, account stealing, and other rampant douchebaggery that existed, much less THRIVED in XI.

What's hilarious is that, looking back from 2013, he could still type that with a straight face.

Every game has nice pockets within the community. Hades was a joy and a pleasure in some respects, but you're delusional if you think that you could ever say that XI forced people to, overall, "be nice". Certainly no more "nice" than in any other game. Rift's player-base was far more "nice" and cooperative than XI's, and that with two fucking separate factions that took every opportunity to gank the other with reckless abandon.

[Kelenae]

I was in the middle of that drama on my server. Was pretty much running the LS while the LS holder was playing EQ2... Split off to a new LS because the other LS was doing nothing.. other LS griefed my LS a crap ton because of that. When my grandmother died and said to myself "Fuck this.... i dont need to take this anymore" Then quit FFXI. So i know first hand the drama on ffxi.

[Churchill]

I was never really a part of any drama in XI

[Waraji]

I was never really a part of any drama in XI

lol, the majority of Valefor BG posters just firsthand witnessed the drama from my understanding.

[Niiro]

I was never really a part of any drama in XI

^
Not that I'm about to defend the XI community but I think people overvaluing the (extremely) vocal minority of people that were actually involved in all the shitstorm-level drama.

Though it is worth pointing out that the blame ultimately rests with SE for their shitty design decisions (world NMs, non-instanced battlefields [ie. dynamis, limbo, ein], near complete absence of progression-based models with worthwhile rewards, and ofc the all-powerful-lord-god-RNG) which all greatly contributed to hostility between players. You had to compete for content on the group level and then for rewards on the individual level, it was really just shit design.

(I don't play XI anymore but they seem to be doing better on the progression based stuff from what I've read at least)

[Lucavi]

^
Not that I'm about to defend the XI community but I think people overvaluing the (extremely) vocal minority of people that were actually involved in all the shitstorm-level drama.

Kinda hard not to considering not only the history of BG (the LS and forum, but especially the forum), but also of the average BG poster of the day, who was heavily invested in the drama.

Go back and read the salvage ban threads before you starting arriving at the conclusion that drama and douchery didn't rule the day like a band of scurvy freebooters.

[Niiro]

You see the flaw in that logic don't you?

People don't come to post on public forums about how chill everything is with them.