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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8984083" data-attributes="member: 18">Agree completely.With FFXIV there are three ways I'd identify that Square-Enix keeps the community in line:1) The rules on being a dick in game are strict as hell. Stuff that's "the normal cut-and-thrust of online gaming" in WoW or ESO or the like, like insulting people, demanding their change their character, and so on, is going to catch you time off in FFXIV.This has a double-benefit - it absolutely enrages the sort of people who are just horrible human beings and can't not do that, so they can't even play the game, and it generally makes people think about their behaviour a bit more, knowing that even "fine" things to say in WoW or the like might see you doing time off or even banned.2) Square-Enix monitors fan trends, and speaks out against ones it doesn't like.For example, when people worked out how to make absolutely hysterically filthy "calling cards" or whatever they were called. Them speaking out had a huge calming influence on what had been an increasingly rage-y debate on whether they were okay. Did they come down on the side of prudery? Sadly they did, though we'll still have the memories of the astonishing faux-filth people created, and I respect their decision, because suddenly the argument just stopped, even though the majority were pro-filth. Nobody wanted the cards locked down more, either.3) Square-Enix models good behaviour themselves. They don't scream at people. YoshiP isn't negative or nasty. They just generally seem like a bunch of nice, polite, overworked people. You might add in that none of the positive characters in the game is a massive jerk, either, but I think that's more minor and depends on how  you a certain young elf.This is a huge distinction from how Blizzard used to run WoW.1) It used to be in WoW, you could get away with almost anything in-game verbally, so as long you avoided certain trigger-words and phrases. People played the system for many years. On one server I played on, there was a guy, in general chat, who post pedophilic fantasies of a quite explicit nature, but he'd avoid using any "swears". Often got caught a short ban, but because of the short leash that Blizzard kept CSRs on re: banning people for bad behaviour, he didn't get perma-banned for over two years. Truly astonishing. Someone once set graphic threats of sexual assault to my wife (who they didn't even know was female IRL, but I guess a female character was enough to trigger them), and Blizzard gave them like a 12-hour ban or something ridiculous - the kind of ban you could accidentally miss because you were logged off (the clock always used to run on bans in WoW, before you saw them), where in a game like FFXIV, that would be perma-banned, no question about it - possibly his credit cards banned too.2) Blizzard did not really monitor fan trends, except in that it listened to a few people who were a sort of echo chamber to it (sometimes it even hired one of these entirely unqualified people.)All male, almost all white (a few Asian people), most frat-y/bro-y in behaviour/nature, and all obsessive raiders or PvPers. This lead to them getting increasingly out-of-touch with the playerbase. The most famous incident being the RealID one, where Blizzard proposed a system wherein your account's actual email address (which was extremely hard to change) would be revealed to everyone who was a Friend, and to Friends of those Friends (!!!). People pointed out that anyone with a female or non-white or Jewish or Muslim or similar name on their email was going to get harassed by chuds because of that, and Blizzard casually dismissed the idea because their frat-friends weren't saying it. People pointed out it would make it a lot easier to stalk and harass people, and again Blizzard dismissed the idea - until Blizzcon, when they were talking RealID, someone asked a question about stalking, Blizzard's guy casually dismissed it - on the grounds that his own name was "so ordinary" (because everyone has "ordinary" names, right? White male privilege MAX POWER action there) - so an audience member with a laptop proceeded to doxx the hell out of the guy on the spot, using his name, and was fifteen minutes was showing him that he had his home address, his phone number and phone numbers of family members, pictures and names of his wife and kids, and so on.A bonus example when they hired a loudmouth frat-bro guy who ran an obnoxious and sleazy fansite - and not even a major one, just one that a lot of the WoW high-ups of the era liked (I think all of them gone from Blizzard now) - and had him doing some sort of PR role. And he was - as any non-idiot might have predicted - a complete human disaster, just starting fire, not putting them out, and they had to fire him a few months later! I mean gosh who could have predicted a trolly, sleazy little man would make a bad PR guy? Only non-frat-bro-nerds I guess.3) They modelled absolutely appalling behaviour.This is getting long so I won't go on too much about this, but suffice to say, a couple of major early WoW devs were incredibly badly behaved and abusive on WoW's surprisingly sedate early forums. The forums weren't actually toxic at the time, in part because the moderation was fairly tight. But these two made utter mockery of the moderation, because they were immune to it, and constantly turned normal threads into raging flamewars - and the mods would have to ban the people the employees baited and directly abused, and couldn't do anything about the employees. Until like, some way into TBC, when the worst offender just POOF vanished from the forums, and didn't post again until several years later under a new name (this was Tigole, btw - classy name too huh? Everyone loves misogynist objectification), and was then a reformed person, and didn't get up to his old tricks. But it was way too late - the forums literally turned from "normal" to ultra-toxic over the period of his "rampage of terror".And those aren't remotely the only examples.But together it all adds up to WoW having a hideously toxic community next to FFXIV, despite many, perhaps most FFXIV players also being WoW players.</blockquote>

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