Evening y'all Chris here again. Mike is taking a long weekend in Spain with the fam but we wanted to make sure some stuff was recorded before he took flight. That includes us finally recording Mike's conclusion to Shadowbringers MSQ which I'll have ready for you next week. Otherwise we're gonna be announcing something else super cool next week so keep a weather eye on the horizon.
0.0 EWWWW !!! 0 ^ o Aaaaaaaaaaahhhh! # _ D EEEEEEEeeeeeeee! Text emotes. Sorry I dont speak Final Fanticy Im playing Ark Survival Evolve which is not perfect but Im doing my own thing period.
@@nhagan001 Poor Scripe having an existential crisis trying to make an Adventurer Plate 5 minutes before raid because he knew Preach was waiting to dunk on him in his own FC house
The only reason i kept playing FFXIV is because i didnt get yelled at everytime i wiped on one of the ARR trials. In turn, made me a more forgiving person in paying it forward.
Most of the time the panic that sets in during a botched fight is so funny to me that I end up just laughing along with the wipe. It’s only when the players just refuse to learn from mistakes that it gets aggravating.
When i was new to WoW i clearly remember doing one of my first m+ dungeons as a dps. Before going on the first boss, i asked about a mechanic just to be sure about how to do it. I was met with a "lol" and a ".........." from 2 of the players and they left immediately, leaving me, another dps, and the healer who hosted the key in a dead group. When the same thing happened in a FFXIV dungeon that i never played before, they group took 30 seconds to explain and we went on to roll the dungeon over with ease. This is just an example of how massively different the two communities are.
That's because m+ runs are timed, and thus players are expected to know the mechanics fairly well before attempting them. That one is on you, because as a new player, you should have taken the time to do those dungeons on heroic and regular mythic before attempting keys. You can't expect players to stop and give you a rundown of the fight when time is of the essence. Maybe outright leaving was a little over the top, depending on what level key it was; but they probably just assumed that there were other fights in the dungeon you weren't familiar with and they would have to keep explaining things to you in a timed run. If you don't know certain fights in the dungeons very well, or at all, try asking about it before the run starts.
This right here is a perfect example of why people say the m+ community is so toxic. Your equating the competitive section of a game to its normal counterpart. Of course in ff14 it was not an issue when asking about the mechanics of a particular dungeon because you've never done it before, the same would go for a normal dungeon in wow. In both of these situations there is nothing that is lost when a mechanic is not completed except gaining the experience of what the mechanics are. Here is what the difference between normal/heroic/ff14 dungeons and m+ is, you should already know what the mechanics are to the boss when entering m+ because you should have already done the training and learning in the normal and heroic versions. Are these guys "toxic" for leaving after you asking? Maybe. But I feel there's a bit of toxicity on your side for not doing the bare minimum before even doing the dungeon and using that as an example of toxicity.
@@Hell0spawn0doug Only you are missing a key point in favour to the OP. The healer whose key it was probably wasn't a tosser who thought you needed to revise like you would for an exam just to do a dungeon. The two that left were obviously pugs that were assholes who believed because they watch the MDI their time is too precious to take a few seconds to type basic instructions. There is no toxicity here on the OPs part, implying they should have researched everything BEFORE entering a key is the wrong part here but you don't see that do you? That's very typical of a current WoW player, you do not see your attitude as negative but it very much is. If they are a DPS that signed up and the healer invited them that should be enough. If you insist on there being a knowledge barrier the game would still insist you get gold in each role before signing up. Sorry dude but you are just highlighting but one of the problems at play here.
@@fish5645 I'm not missing anything, m+ is designed to be run as fast as possible. If you don't like that get a guild that shares the same idea as you. And again you should know dungeon boss mechanics long before ever stepping into a m+. What you and people like you are doing is wasting other players time by not being prepared. You can be mad all you want but this is what you have to deal with in pug competitive content and again, you have options like finding like minded players and slowly running with them.
FFXIV changed it a while ago so you can teleport into a boss fight if you get locked out, to help combat early pulls primarily in 24 man content, but it's also helpful in dungeons. It does still suck if you get out of a cutscene and the boss is almost dead already, but in general you wont have to be a spectator
That is the fault who pull it, if you watching cutscene just enjoy it, if they force you to skip just ignore them since it is a taboo in 14 if you skip cutscene even worse forcing someone to skip. (Unless you're in a discord chat and you're ok with it)
I was leveling an alt recently and was in the MSQ portion of Stone Vigil with the super long cutscene. My party insta pulled and I just watched the entire cutscene. By the time it was over, the boss was at like 2% and all I did was get one hit in. It was funny :)
Here's the thing, WoW's "social contract" is basically a set of laws painted on a sign in a town with one cop who is blind and handles every problem by firing randomly into crowds. Also the cop is a robot, and not a smart sci-fi robot, basically just an angry Roomba.
More or less said exactly my opinion on this. It's all social engineering, and WoW really needs to change some of the ways its systems work. Without it, the toxicity isn't going anywhere
As a WoW player my first dungeon experience in FFXIV shocked me so much I could barely believe it happened. I apologized profusely when I got into the dungeon because I didn't know what I was doing, was first dungeon, and they were *nice* about it! I cancelled out of the cut scene because of my experiences in WoW, even though I wanted to see it, but they *waited* for me. They weren't worried about me being brand new at healing (and thankfully no one died). I even got commended at the end of the dungeon, which surprised and confused me so much I had to go ask my granddaughter, who got me started on FFXIV, what it meant. Everything you said here tonight just resonated with me. I will no longer even *consider* pugging in WoW because it's just so disheartening when you aren't very good because people are just hateful towards you. I know what you're suggesting probably wouldn't fix all the problems WoW has, but I really agree they need to do *something*.
@@Thematicz There was nothing disingenous in what they said... just because you could explain WHY it happened (and even then, you don't know for certain), doesn't mean her story is incorrect
@@Thematicz He's not being disingenuous at all, I legit have seen toxicity in a Gnomeregan leveling dungeon in WoW cause the tank was pulling mobs "slowly".
@@Thematicz I only know what my experience with pugs has been, which has mostly been very upsetting. No, not all have been bad, but I've been kicked multiple times, and they've tried to kick when I've run with a friend and the friend prevented it. It's been very discouraging. I haven't even tried pugging in several years. Deep emotional scars from it, man. Maybe I'm less terrible at the game now and it wouldn't be as bad, but I get so nervous even thinking about trying that I'd probably screw up and get kicked again.
I give New players commendations for being able to follow basic instructions. I don't care if you die, suck, wipe the group, etc. I just care that you attempt to do your job.
I think learning from how MMOs create bad social environments and learning how to build environments that purposefully avoid repeating that, is THE thing to learn from the past 20 years. So yeah, good points, very interesting, good video.
FFXI copied the Mythic Plus style originally, and a person or group would have to purchase an hourglass worth a million gil to enter the weekly dungeon. Or work collectively to farm a set of pops for a boss. Or spend hours camping a world boss hoping to claim it. So of course if the group failed, there was a lot of angry finger pointing. FFXIV ARR and Coil removed that barrier to entry, and eventually FFXI went back and reworked some of the boss raiding systems to not even need the pops/hourglasses/keys at all. If the fight is sufficiently difficult, there is no need to add an additional artificial barrier to entry.
Yeah i think the biggest solution to M+ for both the casual players and the high end has been recommended a lot: stop deranking keys unless the player chooses to. It takes so much stress off. It lets you play how you want to play and challenge what you want to challenge. It lets you go hey maybe we can restart guys we wont be this bad next time, etc.
Something that is unique to XIV is how it's story bring people together as well. After Endwalker, I can easily say I want to help sprouts get to the end so they themselves can experience something, and make fun of me if you want, a story that saved me. There's also the collective trauma the player base has from the story as well. You'll always find people to CRY with you hah. Such a positive experience, and knowing most people around you also went through it, does bring this sense of camaraderie I haven't seen in other games.
Yeah, I was there from the start of Endwalker and watching people lose their mind over the first trial even as we tried (and failed many times) was amazing, as well as the sheer hype of the final boss last phase with everyone pretty much sticking around for a second to just stand there afterwards.
I used to work at a game store and I'll never forget when a family bought SWOTR to play with their disabled son. They didn't like games but they all put time aside to play with him which sounds nice but the reason was because they found players in the game would insult and yell at people first instead of asking questions like do you need help, do you understand what's happening here, how can we help? That was really sad and I thought about it, there were times when I was a player who got mad first and asked questions later which is never okay. Don't assume everyone plays at your level, knows what you know, and that this game is their main priority. Just ask questions and you'll find more often than not people will tell you what's wrong and how you can help. Sure you'll get some jerks or people who misunderstand but if you do manage to help someone and they say thank you? Just say "don't thank me, pass it forward. Someone did it for me, I did it for you, you do it for someone else." That's how you make a better community and have a better gameplay experience all around.
or you know I play with my friends, I have limited time, why would I spend it teaching some random guy who I probably will never ever meet after this particular dungeon? Find a guild make friends making friends too hard? Dunno how, thats on you.
I've played SWTOR on and off since launch, I've never been reported or felt the need to report anyone, I've never gotten angry at another player, I've never been harassed by another player. When I've asked people for help, it is given. In WoW starting roughly 2016 I've been reported and banned more times than I can count because trolls realize the system is broken and abuse it. If you let the community sort things out themselves instead of implementing a draconian "code of conduct," the trolls will eventually move onto something else and the people just trying to have a good experience will support eachother.
The funny thing about M+ is, I'm not sure they could have built a system more conducive to toxic behavior than they did even if it was the goal to do so. They had literally dozens of other options while designing it, and yet they chose to do it in such a way that it just makes everyone angry. None of the things that promotes that toxicity are a surprise either, very early in development someone should have raised a hand and said "Umm, I think this is a really bad idea because it'll make a lot our players act _really_ horrible, how about we not do this?" That's why it feels more like a feature than a bug, it was designed this way intentionally for god knows what reason.
Like even the vault/weekly chest system is just dumb. Why does it have to be random? Why can't it be a valor cap that lets me buy an item instead? Works for FF, so why not give it a try?
@@kaster15 used to work for WoW 😉 It’s pretty clear that over the years the philosophy became “if players can get the things they want, they’ll stop playing”. So it’s more about what they feel is customer retention…yet it has cost them lots of customers, so 🤷🏻♂️
@@kaster15 it has never been this easy to get geared . i play a tank one fucking time per week to do a m+ and he is almost equaly geared than my main who raid and m+. i like the idea to be able to 'choose' a loot piece but imo it should a week long process . now that we can upgrade our m+ gear i really have no problems with the current system. it's so easy to go blast a sub 10 dungeons and grab a shittons of loot in the process
Absolutely agreed and one of the main reasons why im not playing wow anymore. Sure, the majority of m+ runs is rather smoothly, but its those times when you are really fighting for those vault slots, slowly grinding through the mud of getting declined, groups that fall apart because someone leaves during the dungeon or whatever, just to be rewarded with...nothing at the end of the week. Thats a quit moment.
3 big contributors to toxicity in m+: 1) the timer 2) random keys 3) the higher ilvl from vault Think about it, if there s no rng key but just a progression through the levels (ie if you clear +2 you can do +3 in that dungeon) people wouldnt be leaving keys. No punishment for struggling other than it takes a bit more time. Secondly the big vault ilvl has to be the same as in regular runs. You re not grinding dungeons you re grinding vaults. If the vault if just a bonus (or a good way to get gem sockets) than people wouldnt be disappointed by it as it literally is just a surplus and the gem socket secures that you always get an upgrade
@@Avdbz Timer doesnt matter for vault, only for rio. No random keys means ppl will leave dungeons so much(like expect constant resets if one person dies early, also very reckless starts to dungeons make them much easier). No vault means loot for m+ is fully worthless and i would be forced even more to raid on the side.
@@highertest people leave now after one failed pull cuz they deem timer lost, there can be no discrepancy between dungeon loot an vault loot or you only play for vault and that just feels worse, systematic leavers are easily spotted and put on temporary ban also with every key being free who cares if you fail timer. You still get the loot. Only turbonerds who wanna go +23 go very hard. Rest of us want to complete a 10-15 on a leasurely pace
There seems to have been a huge shift in attitudes in the MMO community in general. Back in the day, you were considered a hardcore player if you browsed third party sites to attempt to optimize your rotation and if you were raiding weekly. Now there's this prevalent attitude that "midcore" players are expected to strive for optimal play and run dungeons in "go go go" mode. It's not just in WoW. I see it in FFXIV, too. The difference is that Blizzard has really leaned into this and actively penalizes you for not striving to be a hardcore player. I completely agree that WoW's M+ design breeds toxicity. I know that someone is going to counter that adults in the real world experience consequences for their actions. I contend that WoW is not the real world, and that many of us are playing it precislely because we want to spend a couple of hours in an environment that doesn't brutally punish you with consequences for your missteps. Merit-based promotions and stringent deadlines make perfect sense in a workplace that wants to maximize employees' productivity. They have no place in a pay-to-play video game. WotLK really hit the sweet spot in this regard. I remember the Culling of Stratholme dungeon where you were rewarded with an extra loot chest for hitting the timer. The big difference was that you didn't degrade the other chests' loot quality for the current run as well as the next few runs. Missing the timer under those circumstances led to mild disappointment. Missing the timer in M+ leads to serious rage if you're a good player and soul crushing shame if you're a bad player. No one plays games to feel like that.
oh yeah? Then why is Elden Ring the most popular game of 2022? You think no one feels shame in that game ever or frustrated? People do hard content for the reward at the end, if its easily handed out to every player it wouldnt even be even half as enticing to do
Thank you so much for this. I always felt like the design of Mythic+ is itself inherently toxic, but I can never seem to explain well enough why I feel that way on my own.
I feel like WoW is in a really hard spot when it comes to recovering from the toxic reputation, especially after the exodus of players last year. Since over time as the issues became worse you have the people that don't have the patience for WoW's community leaving, making the toxic proportion of the playerbase grow larger and larger. It feels like if we're not at a critical mass of toxicity, keeping any new or returning players that would improve the community away, we'll definitely reach it soon
New player experience is enough to turn away any new players. The trial features are laughable, you can't even directly talk to people through /say who aren't roughly your level, zero interaction with people unless they interact with you first. Anybody who actually pays for a subscription does the tutorial island and then is thrown into BfA where you turn from a regular soldier who was beached along with rest of your crew into top-secret agent and diplomat. The quests in the first zones (as in the descriptions and the story) are monotone and boring and your _first_ experience with dungeons is Freehold of all things where you're immediately rushing to Sweete and any deviation is basically a guaranteed kick.
They reached a critical mass a long time ago. Last time I played wow was at warlords of draenor (2014 ?) and I left because the people I ended up in groups with acted terrible. After that around each expansion I often felt like picking the game up again but quickly reminded myself about the community.... Its primary the playerbase that is toxic and people have to take responsibility in how they act. However the game has systems that is very supportive of toxic behavior. Thinks like cross server grouping, summon people into instances etc.
sadly it is going to take a lot of time to reverse the toxicity, they need to make Dragonflight good and keep that ball running, that will start to combat the toxicity because a lot of the toxicity is coming from unhappy players.
I first tried wow in 2008 most players where very nice then i tried again in 2011 and people where a lot more toxic already i thought it was because of the dungeon finder but its a lot deeper after i plaed classic wow where players where very toxic and it was much worse in classic because you need team work and there are a lot of ways to troll other players . But it gets even stranger because i played on private servers like nostalrius and warmane between 2015 and 2018 at this time retail was already very toxic but the private servers had a nice community that was similar to what i remembered in 2008 the only difference was the slang they used but why did the official wow classic become so toxic? i think its just the mainstream wow player base now the nice guys all left in cata mop and wod.
Before quitting Shadowlands only a month after launch I, as well as I'd imagine everyone else, had the issue where people, especially tanks, would leave the dungeon after only the first boss. Why? Because the legendary memory that were looking for didn't drop. It happened repeatedly over and over and over again. I don't blame any individual player for this, I blame Blizzard for implementing yet another poorly thought out system that actively encourages antisocial behavior.
you shouldn't be blaming anyone for that.. they have to put it somewhere and not every memory can be on a last boss. And please don't think this was ONLY tanks doing it, dps and healers also did. The problem is people like you that seem to think its a massive issue to wait 2/3 mins for a replacement tank/ healer/dps. Get some patience and youll be fine.
@@scrummpybear the problem is that people like you seem to this it's a massive issue to do whatever you have to do in it's entirety not just for what you want in a game involving multiple players. Be less selfish and youll be fine.
@@dracuhl8342 how is it not selfish to force me or anyone to continue for your benefit? Like i said, have some god damn patience and youll be auto filled a replcament. The only exception is M+ which is not where you farmed for memories. You kids need to learn that people play a game for their own fun. If you want people to play with and not leave join a guild, or discord its what they are for. If youre pugging or using lfr dont expect people to stay when your attitude is like that.
Even if I am after a drop from first boss, I still go through the entire thing, It's just common courtesy to do so. Just don't queue into the dungeon if you are not ready to run the whole thing.
The toxicity I've experienced on WoW isn't too different from the toxicity on other games, even in FF14. The key difference is that reporting people spamming racist-offensive stuff on WoW, just like reporting obvious bots on Classic, does nothing almost ever.
isn't too different, but on my part, it was been 100 times less frequent in FF14 than in wow, and most times in game bad situations, weren't even that bad, as like some1 leaving your key, or leaving midway the mythic+ dungeon
i disagree. as preach said in the video wow gameplay environment definitely breeds toxicity. timed mythic+ where failure means ruined keys and no loot with a score system designed to exclude people. its obviously flawed. and their raids aren't that better. also on a clock until all your farm becomes meaningless because of the terrible drop system.
ya i agree. other day in cs go I was top frag, most damage, and still my team was all toxix yelling at me that im stupid as fuck, a retard and i should die, because I bought a mp5 on round 3. "YOUR NOT BUYING WITH THE TEAM RETARD! GOD!! why is there always such dumb morons on this game? You need to kys" Like wtf I swear people play games to be toxic and they dont even care about the gameplay
Imo Preach hit the nail on the head. It always seemed weird that keys incentivized players to already know how to play at a high level over learning opportunities. Gaming is 100% a learning treadmill, and requiring a high level of knowledge to start gearing etc. defeats that inherent quality of the medium.
If they'd just stop reducing key levels when you went over time/failed the dungeon and instead just let you do another dungeon at the same level, it would be so much more friendly because then you'd only lose out on that 1 specific run and not have to find another group to get your key back up to where it was 2 dungeon runs ago.
I find it fascinating that a company coming off of one of the most high profile investigations and lawsuits in the industry for it horrible culture in-house; exemplifies that behaviour perfectly by immediately turning to it's player-base and demanding that they treat others better with one hand, while doing everything in their power to protect themselves from their shitty actions with the other. The notion of a social contract and expecting players to treat others better isn't inherently a bad thing, but the ink isn't even dry on the company's cheques for their own incredible poor way of treating others. It just feel as tone deaf as everything else they've done to this point, and fails to understand that the reason for their awful culture is the company and no one else. They continue to blame anyone but themselves, and place the ownership on the victims of their terrible design choices on others. The exact abusive behaviour that got them into this mess in the first place.
I dont understand your argument. Obviously company is going to defend themselves to best of their ability when they mess up. Once you are trading stocks guess what, its criminal offence not to do so. Its literally a crime. As of ink not being dry, is there some artificial timer that prevents you from introducing such policies? month? year? how soon in ur opinion from "ink drying" is it ok to do that without hearing "too little too late|"? I understnad where youre coming from but your argument is just wrong. Im not playing any blizz games, not a fanboy, and im angry with them for killing my favorite games but your arguments are just factually wrong. Think about it, tell me when it would be a good time for them to start introducing all those policies. What would you rather have them do?
Seems like you were going to be negative no matter what blizzards approach was. They introduced a social contract, something that they should have been enforcing since the very beginning. "Demanding that Players treat others better" is part of their job. And while i doubt they are going to really change, and i have no love for blizzard, your criticisms here seem blind. The in-game toxicity is in no way linked to their companies bad behavior. The players in game could care less if the developers are good or bad people. The players in game are being toxic because the game rewards you for doing so, and there is often no punishment for being toxic. Finally blizzard says there will be consequences for this behavior, which is something players have been asking for FOREVER, and you are lambasting them for it. Personally, i doubt blizzard will be capable of really fixing the toxicity in WoW. But at least when the company tries something good (as poor as an attempt as it it), you should praise them for it. Otherwise they aren't going to learn. There literally is no "RIGHT TIME" for them to implement this. This social contract should have been enforced from the very beginning. No matter how you look at it, its a good thing they are finally attempting to do it, regardless of what triggered it to happen. Will they really enforce it? Cant say. But being toxic and pre-judging is going to get you no good results. The best thing you can do is show positivity when they do this sort of thing, so that way they will be encouraged to continue with GOOD things.
@@gthStan My point is that their design choices are the core of where their toxicity comes from. Outlining a better moderation system, less punishing ways of handling high level raiding/M+, or any other way of indicating how they're going to reduce these issues themselves before demanding players take responsibility would be the course of action I'd expect. As I initially stated, the notion of a social contract isn't the problem it's the fact that Blizzard just never seems to be willing to treat their players like they can trust them, and don't seem to ever take responsibility that these problems are their own fault. Which I'm saying is indicative of their holier than thou attitude
This social contract is going to play out just like a porn site entry page does for a teenager, you will choose the ”I am 18” equivalent option and go about your business. Totally pointless. 🤷🏻
@@kal_brogo517 "all rights reserved" The player has never had any viable through line. You will be able to appeal a ban just the same as before, if not better. If you were in the wrong you've always been in the wrong you don't need a social contract to get banned for being a racists cunt. But if you weren't you can more easily point towards how you didn't brea the rules, certainly so if they say "You violated rule 30.b) of the social contract" or something like that. It's not gonna change anything, it's a PR move and IF changes arise linked to it that is because they changed how they handle reports internally.
Whenever I get the message that a new player is in my group in FF I get happy, cuz I get that bonus Tomestones and the Tails points...I genuinely get happy whenever I get a "noob" in my group..having played wow on and off for years and years it's so different and I wish it becomes better
Talking about how the design influences players feels like a more complete version of what I've told people in the past. Cuz I've seen people complain that XIV is only non toxic cuz toxicity will get you banned, but the thing is its more than that. Players aren't non toxic, a lot of them are FRIENDLY, and that isn't in the rules. If they wanted to avoid being banned specifically, the easiest solution is to avoid speaking entirely, but a lot take the extra effort to be kind and friendly anyway.
One issue I have with the commendation system is that you can't give out commendations during cutscenes or to players who have already left the instance... meaning you can't commend helpful players and view the ending of fight cutscene (this is super important for a lot of story trials) at the same time. For me, this has led me to completely ignore post clear cutscenes (outside of the Trust system) so that I can maybe get my commendation out before everyone leaves the duty.
I love that you brought up the wasted time running the same mythic plus several times. I switched back to my rogue for sepulcher of the first ones after taking a break from the rogue for one tier. I did not get a single dagger until week 9 of sepulcher. That was with full clears on normal and heroic almost every week, as well as a minimum of 15 runs of plaguefall every week trying for the dagger and the phial trinket (which I also never got). So counting vaults, mythic pluses, raids, and even a few rogue stacked Sylvanas kills for that dagger it wasn’t until my vault on week 9 that I finally got a single dagger. Try pugging into a mythic plus with a 239 dagger from 2 raids ago and a green Zereth Mortis world drop dagger for 8 weeks. I also killed the rares that drop the set daggers every time they were available during this time for over 340 times a dagger could have dropped and nothing. Seriously killed my spirit.
That's because they are. The game is so much better when you play with people whose values and interests align with your own. The reason there's so much resentment is because the game is designed to make you play with random people more often than not, and you'll more often be upset that people are playing in a way you don't like because of it. It works both ways. Casuals get mad at elitists linking DPS meters. Hardcores get upset at noobs for not playing well.
thats because, true to how you sound, literally no one wants to be friends with you so you dont know how the game feels when you are surrounded by people who are having fun together.
So, Blizzard has a ongoing lawsuit about sexual harrassment, their CEO threatened to kill someone and the conclusion of this is, that we, the players, have to sign a social contract. Yea, this company is not fucked at all.
They aren't mutually exclusive. Having bad behavior in the company doesn't mean that can't take player feedback about toxicity and try to do something to make it better. What they are trying probably won't work, but that's not really the point.
You have to have an environment where someone else's mistake doesn't impact you negatively (other than time spent). In WoW, the example of mythic keys is a good example of others' screw-ups impacting you negatively. Any team game with a ranking system is similar (League of Legends): someone else's bad play can hurt your rank even if you do everything fine. The more systems that are like that in a game, the more toxicity you'll have. In League, the ENTIRE GAME is like that, thus huge amounts of toxicity; in WoW, some of the game is, thus some toxicity. In FFXIV, very, very little is like that, thus very little toxicity.
@@Thematicz That's exactly what players did - they went and played other games. FFXIV got the attention because it's a direct MMORPG competitor, but most of the story content is solo. WoW's decline was because the majority of players decided that WoW wasn't the game for them anymore. WoW has just become a big competition between every player, with very little cooperative play outside of guild raids. Even then, it's a passive-aggressive cooperation, with people competing for spots on the damage meters. It makes people who enjoy a non-meta class feel ostracized and many just quit rather than conform to the meta. If WoW wants to address the decline in its player base, it has to stop building the game around the vocal minority of top 1% players. It's fine to have content like that, but make it optional and not tied to player power. Give people at the top reasons to run lower content to keep it evergreen, so that people at all levels of play are constantly interacting with one another. You can't have a social divide and keep an MMO alive. You can't have player caste systems and maintain a healthy population. So WoW's developers need to decide what kind of game they want to be and what they want to have as their primary focus. Right now the whole game is directionless and they're just trying to bash out expansions with systems to keep people logged in for metrics.
@@Thematicz Healthy competition can only thrive in an environment when your rewards are not directly tied to your performance. Systems like m+ and very difficult raids make that an impossible dream, because to be competitive, you need the best. Mike also made the point that people who are using their own keys will only bring the best, because they have something to LOSE if it goes wrong that goes beyond just the time lost. WoW right now is so concerned with play time metrics that they create fail states that will set the players back multiple key runs if they don't make the timer for ANY reason. That doesn't feel good or rewarding for anyone, and it causes toxicity among the players when something does go wrong (and it often does if you PUG). That's why so many PUGs are toxic and so picky. I stopped playing WoW when the sexual abuse claims came forward, and honestly I'm so much happier playing literally anything else.
The toxicity doesn't have just one cause, IMO. It's definitely partly the game design, as Preach said. It's also the company's failure to police its game effectively. And it is also the players. Many people just are inconsiderate, impatient assholes when there are no consequences. I remember thinking about this when I started playing GW2 back in 2012. The game heavily encourages cooperative, non-competitive play (outside of pvp). This attracts people who want to play that way and turns off many of those who don't; instant community filter. ANet also would boot your butt if you were a dick, so people who couldn't control themselves would again self-select out. FFXIV has a similar mix of cooperative game play and active moderation. This code of conduct WoW is saving around is just a PR stunt, IMO, and I doubt it will have any effect. I don't expect they'll do more active moderation. Nor do I even think they necessarily should. That ship sailed 17 years ago. Good luck reining it in now. Maybe re-tooling the game to be more cooperative will help, and I'd be happy to see them try, but I'm doubtful. That game would no longer be WoW.
well, on the design part, wow comparedly is a negative reinforcement loop, while loosing or not finishing dungeons/pve content, you have already lost time, but wows design ads on aditional loss (m+ is the key burn for example), this feeds back into the system, as any multilayer game is a feedback system, that fails when the loop stops. In wow, this manifests in the form of not wanting others to waste YOUR time, as alot of systems, tend to be a punishment feedback, rather than neutral or positive feedback. This again creates alot more preassure on the social contract, and made it evolve into a more streamlined a->b objective focused gameplay, rather than player driven gameplay wow originaly hadd. And since you are not entiteled to other players time by default, they are not entiteled to your time eaither, and since time is wasted by default, you can only affect the reward/loss state, so you reinforce higher and higher standards of players that you would tollerate playing with, as the game itself already wastes so much of your time when it does not need to. This leads to a more "toxc" playerbase, as the game itself feedbacks that mindset with it's design. Unless you FORCE players to be entiteled to others time, wich you cant do, the design of the game itself, will continue to convert more players into the streamlined mindset, as the game itself wastes more off your time by no other meaning, than wasting more off your time
i mean there are plenty of assholes in ffxiv. just sit in the sprout/mentor channel and you see mentors fighting with each other all day and screeching at totally nonsensical stuff. not every dungeon run was a blissful experience. but yea, if you know you can say whatever you want at anytime, some people will. but saying a core tenant of wow is player toxicity is ridiculous and disingenuous. acting like only cooperative people play ffxiv and gw2 while only selfish toxic people want to play wow is again, a lame argument and you're just aggrandizing the game you like.
Yeah it really is just about design, recently finished EW and now tackling savage content for the first time ever and honestly I’ve been having a blast, pf prog btw. If you start your community right it trickles down to all the content of the game, I recently finished AS2 and it took almost 2 hours to do, no one left and everyone was helpful and cooperative with asking questions etc.
Running old Savage is a bit different since if you use EW gear in Alexander raids you're actually doing significantly more damage, healing, and mitigation versus doing it in gear that is the actual min ilvl due to how ilvl syncing works. Not to mention most jobs with EW job design at lvl 60 are actually significantly stronger than how classes were back then in HW. Also people running old savage attracts a different set of players since nobody attempts to parse in old savage. PFing the current savage tier is different and unfortunately attracts the same people you'd run into in M+ in WoW.
@@TheFreeshooter no not really, and it depends on what the pf host stated on their pf description, you don’t go to a “weekly clear” savage run while having no idea what your doing, the party isnt being toxic when they kick you but you being an dumbass for not following the requirement, if you want to learn join practice run and not expect to be carried when joining clears. I’ve done tons of practice runs already and I have not seen anyone toxic and I just transferred to an NA DC from a jp one.
@@unloyal4847 I mean you can''t go to a weekly clear run if you haven't cleared the fight unless somebody is dumb enough to put the group up without the duty complete requirement. When the tier is current (i.e. not now), people are significantly more antsy with minor mistakes and will drop very quickly. Group have mellowed out now but back in Febuary groups would disband for very arbitrary reasons like 1 wipe to birds in P3s. Again, its very similar behavior to what you see in M+ where at the beginning if there is any reason to doubt timing the key with the group, you just drop and find another group. It's a similar thing where If the overall raid dps is sub 47k after doing Orbs or the boss still have like 60% after the second set of rotxtethers on the door boss for P4S you just bail because the group is not going to beat the enrage.
yes lets give 2 hours of my time to you because I literally have nothing better to do in my life than help a random guy in a game right? lol what is this comparison
@@Freestyle80 Its more like "Lol we had somebody mess up Pinax/Rot x Teathers on the first pull, time to leave" vs "Ok that was weird, gonna give the group another chance or 2 to see if there's a chance to clear". Most Loot/Duty Complete groups in PF are the former compared to the latter, especially when the content is over.
Oh my god finally, a WoW influencer that actually calls out one of the most aggregious actors towards the toxicity in WoW - the game's design itself. This has been a MAJOR issue since the start of Legion that has somehow, mind-bogglingly gone under the radar. As a Game Design grad and enthusiast, it hurts my soul how awful their efforts have been towards doing anything that would alleviate the levels of toxicity encouraged by their own game's mechanics and inner workings. Adding m+ score into the game itself was the biggest Red Flag to date.
During my time on WoW during the OG late BC/WotLK era, My problem with toxicity was never during the leveling or casual dungeon running experience, it was when trying to get into raiding where I hit a WALL of toxicity. Considering that the raid grind in WoW is supposed to be a massive draw, I say this: Not everywhere in WoW is toxic, but it is toxic in the places where it counts the most.
my stance on WoW's social contract is simple. it's useless unless enforced. and based on their history of enforcing *cough*realmoneytrading*cough*, I'm going to assume the social contract is useless, and is no more than a PR stunt. but we don't want PR stunts, we want tangible game and community changes. it's just like when all the lawsuits were coming out, and their response was just "we are committed to a fair and inclusive workplace" while simultaneously getting employees to sign NDA's so they can't talk about any harassment they've been subject to.
To me this is the main point that Blizzard have to change to make WoW a fun game to me. That "you can never fail" sensation that M+ have, added with the overall "competitive" mindset that WoW players have is just awful. The most refreshing thing that FF provide to me is that is nothing wrong in doing mistakes, and they are a core part in the gameplay/skill development of the game.
Yeah FFXIV reminded me about the "wipe and go again" core principle of MMOs that systems like M+ made me forget about, because wiping there is basically end of the run.
You don't see that because normal content is easier than LFR is in WoW. That goes out the window if you Party Finder Savage content. I'd say you get same toxicity you see in M+ as you do in PF.
It's seems like you are comparing raiding with not raiding... Raiding in WoW is a slow try and retry too. Mythic+ being a bit different is good for the game.
@@Wellshem It's more so to point out that there is clear toxicity in 14 that is purely segregated in a specific form of content that success is contingent on people playing properly unless you over gear the fight significantly If they made a roulette that had lets say expert roulette dungeons scale up damage and health requiring better play tactics like actually needing people to line up buffs, tanks using CDs to survive the busters, or DPS doing their rotation properly then you would see that emergence of that behavior. Though, 14 has an issue with toxic casualism as well that emerges every now and then.
I think there will always be toxicity in every game, but depending on what is allowed in the game makes the toxicity worse or lessens the impact. I played the prepatch and start of Shadowlands, my first time ever playing WoW, and when I tried to match up with random people in the freehold dungeon I accidentally pulled mobs trying to follow the path the more experienced players set out, immediately was kicked when I prefaced I was new and didn't know the "safe path" at the start. From then on I only played with friends. The worst toxicity I've seen in FF14 was when a healer refused to heal two of my friends in our first time of the P3N raid because they were a "waste of mp". We promptly vote kicked him out, got a new healer, and no one died cuz we had learned most of the mechanics by that point. Now that's not the only "toxic" thing I've noticed but it is the most toxic for FF and they are few and far between
Your shadowlands dungeon experience is a part of the reason I came to sometimes hate doing mythic +. The non-linear dungeons would be very frustrating, especially as a tank, if you didn't know what the so called optimal route was. The amount of shit I got even when we succeeded was baffling
Speaking of game design, I remember some design quirks of Wildstar that made the group content so, so very toxic. The rankings of the scenarios and dungeons, the minimum contribution for world bosses, all for the raid attunement.
I totally agree, and I think there are examples of this in wow on even smaller scales. For example, anytime you have to do a quest or a world quest where you need to collect x-amount of an item, but only 1 person can click on the item. How many times have you pulled a mob near the item only to have someone else run in and grab it? They don't stop to help you kill the mob, they just take the one stupid thing that made you pull the mob in the first place and run off. Quests where you need to kill x-number of mobs, but there are caps on how many players can tag the mob. Meanwhile melee players are running around like maniacs trying to get their kills. Stuff like that builds up a really selfish playstyle that I think gets more and more magnified through other parts of how the game is.
I started pc gaming in 2010 and only ever played WoW until recently when I got hooked on Lost Ark. I remember running an abyssal dungeon, failing at a mechanic, and getting called out for it (none of the previous dungeons really had any serious mechanics). I apologized and told them I would leave the group. Instantaneously, everyone was like, no! Don't leave, we'll teach you. I literally teared up. The contrast between the 2 communities is astounding. I don't know that I ever wanna go back to wow.
The toxicity in game is at all levels, sadly from trade chat to regular dungeons to regular battle grounds. I think the solution is at all levels, work on the environment, have a policy against it and enforce it. I don’t think blizzard is totally wrong in the social contract: assuming that they’re planning to enforce it as they haven’t in the past, and this being a “fair warning” The fostering of toxicity is engrained and will take work to correct in much more than a patch, so ASSUMING they are going to enforce this: it’s a good start in my books. (Still not enough to make me return, I admit, but a good start nonetheless)
lol, I don't think they will enforce it fairly. They have some power-hungry individuals in their company. They would create Bots to Super Enforce Bans that don't agree with it.
When WoW stopped respecting the players time and requiring you to be able to play 1-2 hours every day it broke the social contract. When the game is forcing you to play a game mode you don’t like, or do dailies that you don’t want to do in order to do the content you want to do (Mythic Raids) you cease to have the time to deal with people who aren’t playing optimally.
I absolutely agree that the environment teaches people to be negative. I remember the first couple months of the Maw where I felt actually punished for stopping to help someone with a mob or heal someone. And I do think that the way it feels like WoW doesn't treat players' time as valuable makes the situation worse. I remember that building frustration when it was midnight before reset and I just wanted to go to bed, but I'd spent all night having pugs self-destruct and I still needed one more tick for my vault or I'd have wasted my time.
Great video! The commendation system sounds really good. I think you're very right about stopping with time wasting too, like with vault and extremely low drop rates for bis items etc. Frustration naturally leads to being more easily irritated, less patient and being quicker to become toxic.
The thing with the FFXIV mentor system is it incentives a small subset of players to get the silly crown next to their name but they don't actually want to be helpful anymore once they have it. Thankfully in my experience that mostly comes down to the unmarked crown mentors. Whenever I saw a Sword (combat) or Hammer (crafting) mentor they usually were helpful to newer players and were more accommodating to random requests of help in towns. Enough so that I eventually became a crafting mentor and grew a bit of fame on Cactuar because anyone needing random crafts done or bits of advice I would always help, sometimes even when I was about to go to bed but I wanted to make a positive impact.
It’s a combination of game and player. Stressful situations make people with a tendency toward toxic behavior actually act with toxicity. FFXIV tries to make situations as minimally stressful as possible which usually keeps the toxicity at bay, but if it does incidentally create a stressful situation like with PvP or with the world first race stuff, you can see toxic people start to sprout up. I’ll put it this way toxicity is out in the open in WoW, but it’s festering under the surface of FFXIV. Pick your poison.
Well put. I love FFXIV through and through, but there is definitely a level of toxicity in a portion of the playerbase that many don’t want to a acknowledge.
Then what's the point of playing a game if they neuter it on purpose. If they have to make the game a cakewalk then those people should go play candycrush or something instead of an mmo
I have picked the poison of "only gets toxic when something unusually crappy happens" and so I play a lot of FFXIV. My anecdotes are not data, but WoW is where I was too afraid to run dungeons because people were nasty to the point of the occasional death threat, and FFXIV is where people were so willing to give me time to learn that I've now started savage raiding.
The thing with FFXIV is even if you fail at something, it isn't incredibly punishing. Like in a raid, you wipe and instantly are back in the fight with all your CDs reset and your food buffs still on. So you can just try again. So while FF doesn't hand everything to you on a silver platter, it doesn't make defeat so incredibly punishing that it just triples down on the frustration. Then throw in even succeeding in WoW can be really frustrating due to RNG and the Vault system, where as with FFVIX, even if you have really bad luck you still get stuff...and outside a few _super_ unlucky people, chances are nobody is so unlucky they have to 100% rely on currency to gear up. Anything competitive will cause frustrations, it's about the force multiplier WoW adds onto it that really makes a breading ground for the toxicity, and in turn normalizes it.
@@kal_brogo517 you can have a hard encounter without adding in artificial roadblocks that encourage negative feedback and toxicity. you sound like the type of person that plays to hate on others in mythic+ to make yourself feel better. while you run to the forums complaining about those filthy leavers.
Mike you said something years ago when talking about WotLK (I think) linked to the decline or downfall of the playerbase and that was this: "The addition of dungeon finder/raid finder to the game caused so many problems in a large part because it introduced a section of the playerbase to content they had no business otherwise doing. They would never do that content before because firstly their skill level just wasn't good enough and secondly their social skill just weren't there." I remember nodding my head in agreement at the time and I have used your reasoning when talking about random group finder content (which can now be extended to the M+ and flex raids system, it just isn't automatic anymore). Anyway, I have a question. We all get that calling people stupid names on the internet isn't good enough, is clearly toxic behaviour and shouldn't be tolerated. What can we do about the other type of toxic behaviour very prevalent in the game, disrupting groups. I'm talking about: Building your group for your key, getting to a certain point in the dungeon, someone dies or anything unplanned happens and someone leaves your group. Your key cannot now be completed, your time is completely wasted and it even means your key gets depleted. To me, this behaviour is completely toxic and we need a system to identify people who leave keys early. Yeah I can hear it now "just join a guild". Yeah well not every guild is big and busy these days on wow, I rely pretty heavily on the group finder to get my groups filled with 2-3 people. It doesn't happen often that people leave my keys, but when it does it's just ridiculous. We can't name and shame leavers on the forums, as obviously that would just be abused constantly leading to innocent people getting named, but there must be, along with this "social contract" some measure reflecting my compliance with it. I dunno. EDIT: I'm further through the video now and SO SO relieved to hear you talk about the horror of sacrificing your own key, the terrible r.io system now in game etc etc. Thank god my comments are getting validated.
I remember back when I nolifed WoW I was the highest Item level in my guild, equal the mythic raid's gear but, I couldn't get invited to a +15 because my raider I.O was low so I would sit in queue for 30 minutes to an hour just to do my weekly key. *Healer by the way*
I would like to add onto the FFXIV faux pas of waiting for cutscenes in dungeons. At this point, you can load into the boss room after it closes off... but that's a fairly recent change. When I was leveling for the first time, if you were watching a cutscene and someone pulls the boss, you would just get locked out. So the stigma against cutscene pulling was super strong for even more reasons, because people could just miss the whole boss fight, the worst of it being CM and Praetorium before the cutscenes were unskippable.
Back when either Heavensward or StormBlood first launched, I played through the MSQ on a new character. When I got to Prae, it was back to back cutscenes stunlocking me at the entrance while the rest of the party finished the run. I was lucky they didn't kick me.
In regards to the frustration of getting nothing for you time, this was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. It was the 2nd week of raiding in Shadowlands. I got Impossibly Oversized Mitts on Normal the previous week and hadn't gotten anything from Heroic even though we'd cleared 9 bosses, I think. At the start of the week, I got Impossibly Oversized Mitts - the heroic version - from my vault. Then there was a weekly quest for a Heroic Castle Nathria item. Guess what I got? Impossibly Oversized Mitts. We ran heroic that night and I got nothing on the first 7 bosses, but Sludgefist dropped... Impossibly Oversized Mitts for me... Got nothing on Stone Legion Generals. With all of the other problems I was having with the expansion, not getting any gear at all just rubbed me the wrong way and I quit.
I definitely agree with your points. In a big enough group of people there will always be asshats, but decent people have the potential to become asshats in a very stressful environment. If your game is mostly fun and reduces stress to minimum then it’s the case of reprimanding/banning the few toxic people you’ll get regardless. So both moderating your game and creating positive experience for your community is very important to grow a positive experience for people in your game.
A neat aspect Asmon once touched upon in his ARR review that leaves you thinking, the story on both games, without going in depth with either, when you think about it, the bottom line of WoW is "two factions hate each other, and every conflict is resolved by going to war, killing, and always resorting to violence" now that while FF also has some of that, there is a more clear message in some of the stories within it, like trying to help others, prevent the bad guys from winning, things like that. So what Asmon said is that the story itself helps out building a positive enviroment.
@@FisherGaming No, it's not. While there is a huge amount of hate aimed at teammates, there's still a lot of cross-faction hate. The final straw that got me to quit WoW was a nelf following me around killing my quest items for a half hour and calling me a murderer and baby killer in Thalassian while I tried to level a belf character that didn't even exist at the beginning of BfA. It was the culmination of a week of dealing with bs that would have gotten players perma banned from games where the devs actually gave a flying f*ck.
Just a question. After the rest of ShB. Are we gonna get post-ShB and EW reviews? Been waiting for those for a loooong time. And Mike's been talking about them.
The most remarkable thing about this is seeing some of the WoW frustration in that clip (I only found Preach's Channel as he was quitting) - I can't imagine playing a game that consitently makes me feel like that. It's kinda mad to see the difference.
I mean there are mechanics and people fail at them. What's the point of having a game if you can't lose. Is the reason people say ffxiv is better is that it's just so easy that never happens?
@@kal_brogo517 Not really. While yes dungeons are very easy, they are supposed to be. In harder content like extreme primals or even savage raids the problem is alleviated by the presence of practice groups. Also the fact that you queue up for specific bosses and there being no need to clear trash to fight them etc. When I think back to when i was playing WoW and pugged Uldir, it was a shitshow. First trying to find a group took ages, especially if you were looking for certain progress/bosses. Then after almost every boss people were leaving and a lot of the time the whole group would disband before you reached a boss you hadn't killed yet etc. It was a painful experience.
@@kal_brogo517 It's more a matter of, outside of the absolute hardest content in any given MMO, the average difficulty of most content is so, so, SO incredibly low that it is honestly extremely frustrating sometimes when people can't do such simple things. That may not apply to *everything*, but the vast majority of mechanics are pretty much made to be completed by anyone, including the halfway-trained monkey you sat in your gaming chair while you went to the bathroom. That's not to say that there aren't valid reasons for people screwing up mechanics - even though I consider myself to be a decently above-average player, I still mess up tons - but when you have people failing the same easy mechanics over and over and over and over, it's sometimes just baffling. An easy example is the "don't stand in the fire" meme for a lot of mechanics. Often, there is, quite literally, a giant patch of burning flames right under your character, and people will stand in it. And not move. Until they die. And then blame the healer for letting them die. And then they do it again. And again. And again. And you start to wonder how someone could honestly be THAT bad at the game.
I guess I have very different experiences with these two games. Their are toxic M+ groups, but 99% of them are everyone says Hello at the beginning, maybe says something about the plan and says GG at the end. Even when someone leaves, most people say "oh well" and the group moves on. My experience in FFXIV was "speedrun, keep up" or saying "Skip, SKIP, SKIP!!!" for cutscenes. When I first started playing a PLD a healer refused to heal me because "I won't heal you because you got hit by a thing 10 minutes ago". The overall community wasn't toxic, but it was far worse than I see in WoW.
I've always been huge on the philosophy that how a developer designs a game influences how players will behave in it. Surface level, that may seem like a no brainer statement, but I don't believe everyone out there understands the gravity of how every little choice can resonate and compound into an experience that can make it completely insufferable to interact with others on one end and the best thing ever on the other. Take, for example, the concept of a Death Penalty. You have gamers out there that staunchly believe that if a failure doesn't have a consequence, people won't learn from an experience. While I didn't play WoW to get that Mythic+ experience, I 100% understand where the community may be coming from in not wanting to risk their time and resources on uncertainty. FFXI had similar with things like BCNMs and the items needed for access, or just your basic NMs that needed specially farmed pops. Losing those and get nothing out of it was devastating. At the same time, it fed into a culture of following a known strategy even if it wasn't the most successful. Absolute worst case scenario, it could you excluded because your class didn't fit into that meta. This sort of negative reinforcement never really offered anything good, in my opinion, and has arguably contributed to my own desire to solo things as much as possible so that if a failure does occur, it's on me. That said, I consider the Death Penalty a less obvious instigator of bad behaviors. Unrestricted PvP, as another example, could be seen as a more readily obvious source of toxicity and I'd say there's a good reason why PvE servers tend to outnumber PvP if the game is divided in such a way. People don't want to be ganked, griefed, harassed, goaded into conflict, or really just have their night ruined if all they're trying to do is relax. If the attackers can go on to steal something of value from you, it gets even worse as they're basically encouraged to ruin your life. Over the years, you'd see the same tired rebuttals to people who don't really like this happening, such as questing in groups, calling for help on a global chat, and really just putting yourself at the mercy of the kindness of others if they don't have anything to personally benefit from out the situation. Some may even go so far to argue that bad interactions are still good because it is interaction, but if you're not the sort who's wired to one day do all the evils done unto you on other randoms, it kinda puts you in a pickle on what to do with those frustrations. In my experience, a lot of people just quit the game if it can't be avoided. But more generally, forced multiplayer brings with it its own pros and cons. I'm not really a fan of dungeons as traditionally depicted in MMOs, as once you do the initial run, they tend to lose a lot of charm. The speedrunner mentality also kicks in, with XIV being pretty notorious about its wall-to-wall pulling and the notion that healers are really just green DPS. If that's not for you, you're likely to find the community isn't always nice, and it's a safe bet they're trash talking you behind your because a 15m run is now taking 20m. Personally, I've always been more the fan of FATE-style gameplay, or things like zone events from RIFT, where you didn't really need a fixed party to get things done. If people were around and wanted to cooperate, you could. You didn't even need to officially party to do so. Yet, this sort of content also seems to get downplayed and artificially held back just to make dungeons/raids that much more appealing. People try to argue it's to preserve a specific level of difficulty, but I disagree with the notion that variable open world content can't be hard. Reactive (de)buffs based on participation and other encounter tweaks can be accounted for. What's more likely is some take offense to the idea that a "leech" may get progress they don't deserve. My usual sentiment here has pretty much been, "So what?" Content should be in a game to be experienced, not gated behind some nebulous community standard that the unknowing will never know until the gauntlet is thrown in their face. I'd rather these myriad strangers be undeservingly better geared for those times when we do cross paths, so there's a bit more wiggle room for mistakes and helping to teach them if they're receptive. I like blind playthroughs. I dislike having to read a guide, watch a video, sacrifice a chicken, and so on. I won't demand a linking of clear achievements to prove their mettle, as that alone can be flawed. I just want to play, as I assume many others do, without it being some kind of competition when it really isn't. All such things can be addressed in some form or another. Perhaps not completely eliminated, but nonetheless mitigated. It's just arguably up to a given dev team to care and emphatically not listen to those who push for things like exclusivity and prestige at the cost of everything else. Reward good play. Encourage experimentation and creativity. Be on the ball about tackling exploits that codify unintended play. Perhaps most importantly, don't be afraid to show someone the door regardless of how much they've spent in time or money when they've done something egregiously wrong. People needing thicker skin has always been a cop out here, and I'd say that was touched on in part by the acknowledgment of not knowing who's on the other side of the screen. Being a good person isn't hard, even if all you're doing is keeping to yourself. Anyone that can't play without being a jerk is really the one who needs to learn a thing or two.
I think the best part of this video was when you were talking about respect for others' time. The idea of helping new people learn systems is great, and only serves to create a stronger community that will continue to succeed. I've been scared as hell in some dungeons for no reason other than that I was afraid to be kicked for not knowing a fight. Having a system that allows me to then give credit to people who were helpful, or to who improve, makes me and them feel nice. They're happy because the dungeon was done, and they got a better reward, I'm happy because I can probably do it better the next time without help. Instead of just giving rewards because you pushed the tank or healer button, help get people more comfortable in that role by allowing the other members to learn it instead of just get through it as fast as possible. Love this.
I mean at least as far as the answer to the title goes it's pretty obviously both. Everyone has the ability to be toxic, some people are more prone to such behaviour then others. But environment affects behaviour, design decisions as well as moderation can affect the amount of toxic behaviour players engage in and the amount of toxicity in turn also affects which players choose to engage or disengage with that environment. Players are the ones choosing to act in a certain way and are responsible for their behaviour, good or bad, devs are the ones creating the game and are responsible for creating an environment that fosters said behaviour, good or bad.
Open world pvp and competing against other players for things like loot will turn a community toxic. Everyone has gotten a little mad when they saw another player take the mining node they wanted in vanilla WoW. Same thing with open world chests. You can't have a good community in a game where grouping up means each individual player will be penalized.
Dovetailing this into the addons conversation, there was a clip a few months ago of a FFXIV player using another players damage meter numbers to just openly berate them and call them useless. Then he'd show his own 99% parse as "proof" he was better and tell him to shut up. Just horrible, crap stuff. Once you put in systems like that, the "bad' people are going to use it in bad ways, history from long before video games existed has shown us this. The difference with FF for the most part is they build in enough system to counter that kind of behavior with bonuses for not being an a-hole, WoW doesn't do that, the only value in WoW is either RNG or completely results oriented, so you literally have no reason to not be an a-hole. Bad design is bad.
Didn't Arthars get banned for that, though? Like that's the thing: as far as I understand people working for the GM team at FFXIV are much faster to punish people for being jackholes than the moderation bots over at WOW.
@@zenspeed404 No idea if he got banned, although given how the clip went pretty viral, I would suspect he would have which is good of course. It had me thinking of six months earlier when Scripe from Echo was pushing for FFXIV to allow Damage Meters because he said people would only ever use it to better themselves, which I'm sure he knew was BS even as it left his lips. ;)
@@andrewshandle Most of us who do use them actually do use them to better our gameplay. ACT has slowly been helping me get out of grey parses: I thought I was good, then found that I wasn't pushing my class to its full capacity. There's a lot of enjoyment to be gotten out of self-improvement.
@@zenspeed404 No doubt, I imagine 98% of people who use a damage meter are just trying to get better. But when terms like "grey parses" become part of the nomenclature, it is a bit of problem because it gets mentioned quite a bit. What FF needs to do if they want to do a hard stance on Damage Meters is modify those "test your openers" areas that they add in ever expansion (the names completely escape me). Make those more robust and useful for a player to get their openers and main rotation down a bit smoother if they want to. Once you start going to outside sources to measure success, it eventually leads to RaiderDotIO.
Wow became so huge because it removed old mmo ideas that were negative to players. In other games at the time you could 1. lose exp 2. De-level 3. Get put in exp debt. 4 waiting for hours to simply play the game. Wow removed all this but ironically added it all back in for their mythic+ system. Putting your key up and getting punished for it is the old mmo losing exp system. Your key lowering is the de-leveling system. Having to re-grind the key back up is the exp debt system. As Mike said they added raider io to the game filtering players out creating the same old wait times of everquest where you'd wait hours for a group invite just so you could play that day. They basically added in old everquest and called it mythic+. I don't know how people never saw it. When wow players came over to ffxiv and asked where it was I would tell them to keep their old everquest systems away from ffxiv.
Major problem with M+... you can run that one dungeon over and over. Bang your head against a wall trying to get that item. Hard carry people only to finally see it drop and go to a trash player that just made your run a nightmare. It's like blizzard designed thier games to actively encourage toxicity. It's not just wow either.
As has been pointed out, this is something that requires multiple different changes to really be "fixed" rather than one change solving everything. With that in mind, I know this may be a bit of a controversial take but I think one solution is to lower the gap between gear on the lower and higher ends of things. Look at XIV. The gap is extremely small. When a new savage tier comes out, you can literally already craft gear 20 item levels below what it drops. About halfway through the tier, the new Alliance raid (for those who don't play, somewhat the equivalent of LFR, slightly harder but still easily doable in pugs) comes out dropping armor (not jewelry or weapons) only 10 item levels below the savage tier, as well as adding ways to grind out upgrades for both the crafted and alliance raid gear by 10 item levels. The result, at least from what I've seen, is that people don't feel the need to push themselves into content they aren't feeling prepared for. I hardly ever see someone clearly not interested in Savage try to join Savage groups for the gear anyway, but I saw it all the time in M+ back in WoW. Better gear still allows people to have an easier time with things like the brawler's guild, fighting open world rares, going back into old content for transmog and mounts and the like. Is it really *that* big an issue if casuals have access to better gear, especially if it discourages them from forcing themselves into your groups? Of course, WoW's sheer number of difficulty settings makes it tricky to reduce that gap without making each jump feel obsolete, and with that in mind I'd look into reducing the number of difficulties. Potentially remove LFR and tuning Normal to be the pug-friendly version of the raid, with Heroic for friends that just wanna have a good time together and Mythic as the real high end thing. Boost base mythic dungeons up to have their drops be on par with Normal raids and maybe reduce the number of jumps in keys there as well. Make a +10 the equivalent of what a +15 is now, perhaps, and start dropping heroic raid level gear somewhere between +5 to +10? These are rough numbers, obviously they need to carefully consider this stuff. Some people's reaction to that might be "why would I run raids/mythics then?" and... Yeah. That's kind of the point. Discouraging people from doing content they evidently aren't interested in anyway would ideally be a win for those who *are* interested in it.
It's not just the current systems, Blizzard shaped the community to be like this over time. Now it's festered into what it currently is, and it'd take A LOT to change it, if it's even possible.
Well yeah the toxicity stems from the competitive nature the community has, you can do some symptom treatment but but change it on a basic level you'd have to change the entire game to be less competitive. Which oculd ofc be done but that risks losing what little position wow has left in the MMO market. Personally i would argue that a treatment of the unnecessary points of contention and frustration by eliminating them would be best, for isntanc ethe downgrading of keys on failure for m+ (just make an NPC or a tab on the pedestal for that) but as long as the community engages with the competitive system and that's just about all that's left for us to do then they sure as hell shouldn't change the systems and make them casual jsut because there might be some slurs flung around every now and then.
Having a "don't be negative" doesn't mean people will be positive. People will probably instead turn passive aggressive. Which is super sad but that's usually how it goes.
It’s a mix of both. Firstly with so many ppl playing the same game at the same time you have different ppl at different skill/interest levels and sadly there will always be some of those ppl who are going to be “aggressive” (the nicest word I can think of), towards others b/c of their so called “superiority” by being “better” than others. Either by having a better set up, being “better” at one form of content or other, etc. and they’ll end up pushing the way play or believe others should play as the only/“optimal” way. On the other side it comes down to the game developers too and how they design the game & interact with the community. If you have a game based around “punishing” players for “failing” either through limited runs, lockouts, using limited/rare resources to unlock content/rewards or power up to do content, time gating etc. then yeah players are going to become toxic far quicker & blatant b/c one small mistake by them or someone in their group/party could mean they have to wait until they’re able to try again, have to waste time recollecting resources, or even miss events/achievements/content if the time runs out before they can finish it or even take part. And if you have developers who outright mock the player base, obviously perform favoritism (either in-game to classes, content, etc./towards certain players and fan bases in game) you’re going to make everyone else bitter towards you & those players/fans ESPECIALLY when you’re obvious that you’re doing it. So those players who feel like you don’t care or even hate them are going to turn that on the game itself & other players if they don’t outright just quit.
An enormous problem in trying to help players in WoW as well is something you touched on in your anonymous keystone series in Legion, where players are utterly convinced about something that is completely false about certain mechanics and anyone who tells them otherwise is wrong and an idiot. It's something I haven't ran into much in other games, it might just be old players coping with the fact that they're no longer at the top of their game but it's so frustrating. Just the other day I was doing a +6 streets dungeon with two very clearly new players. We ran into a bug where on the instrument boss we only had 4 instruments, no worries just one person step outside the dungeon and that fixes it but they're out for the bossfight. I sat there for 5 minutes typing out what they had to do, but they just stood there and waited. Completely unresponsive. Then one of them tells me I'm just standing in the wrong spot and that's that. I got so immensely frustrated with them being deadset on being wrong that I left, they just refused to listen to anything.
Yeah, the whole putting the M+ key up to the chopping block is related to the early arguments we had against timers in M+. I've been talking about this ever since Legion, that adding more competitive routes in a game isn't something you get without a cost. The social friction is often too much for some people. It also doesn't help how faceless everything is. I've listened to several audiobooks on Anthropology and Psychology that discuss the issues of urbanization and how it can disconnect people from their community. Early human tribes were often small groups of 50 people or less, and you may know a couple neighboring tribes, be a small town (after the agricultural revolution). In a smaller environment, you cannot be hostile to others without serious consequences. Relationships are too important. But in an urban environment today, you can have thousands of different people within a 100 meters of you in a high rise, on a commute, etc, and if you get into a confrontation with someone, you may never see that person again so who cares? Same thing with M+ in WoW. Because the M+ pool is literally an entire region in WoW, bad actors can be bad actors with virtually no consequence because they'll never see those people again. This is really nothing new though. We used to talk about this as well before cross-server LFG opened up and about its effect on server communities, but it appears the ability to play with friends on other servers won out. Its why I think going forward MMOs may have to shift to small communities. IE, upwards of a couple hundred people playing a game on a cycle thats anywhere from weeks to months long, like a DnD campaign.
Unfortunately I've been burnt way too many times to go back to WoW. It overall has always felt exclusionary even after trying out different guilds and M+ groups. I love to learn, and critique doesn't hurt my feelings but so many groups will say trash at the first mistake and leave. I've been on learning nights for normal and heroic raids and watch people get kicked and ridiculed on stream and in front of the guild. I feel the way wow can help curb this frustration is to have a baseline reward even if you are wasting time by helping out clanmates and other M+ players learn fights. The toxicity comes from this feeling of people needing to be maximally efficient instead of wanting to have fun playing. Anyway, I'll definitely watch you play Dragonflight but I'm just not over shadowlands and how toxic the community is to try it myself. Thanks for the great content.
I was a new player in Cataclysm. Where WoW is now, is already FAR better than where it was then. I remember levelling my first character and doing a dungeon in Cata and being told to go and f*cking kill myself because I was so f*cking shit. In almost every dungeon. I stopped doing dungeons. Period. Did I know what I was doing? No. I didn’t know. It was the first time I had done the dungeon and my first character in the game. Those experiences literally shaped my experience going forward. I started recently levelling a warrior for the first time in Shadowlands. Do I know what I’m doing? No. But I decided to take a chance and do a normal dungeon for the FIRST TIME since Cata. Some one PMd me and said “I’m not sure if you knew Arms warriors use 2H weapons?” No. I didn’t, but now I do and I made the change and thanked him. It’s as simple and helpful as that. Be kind and helpful to people enjoying the game. You don’t have to play to be amazing and elitist. You can play casually just to simply enjoy any facet of the game. You don’t have to verbally attack and harass someone for not knowing what they’re doing. It’s called learning.
While i agree with you Preach, i just can’t really think about how blizz could foster gameplay designs that encourage a better feeling of community without it being toxic without a huge overhaul of their systems, because from their very core ever since vanilla, they generate toxic reactions.
Ironically--or sadly, depending on viewpoint--Blizzard has spent a lot of development time and effort to implement system after system, only to throw them away after each expansion. If they had spent a quarter of that effort into updating and polishing core systems, then the game would be in a much better place. Also, the core systems of Vanilla to Wrath were designed around a play style and player type that may not really exist anymore, except for a small (but vocal) minority: The one that wants to play one game, and one game only. Remember, "real" MMORPG players scoffed at WoW because it was the "casual" MMO. Since then, other games have overtaken WoW in that regard, and not only MMORPG titles. For example, we now have games like "looter shooters," that migrated the "character progression through gear acquisition" core loop of WoW to FPS games. Some even copied the WoW talent system, like Borderlands.
Vanilla didn't have the toxicity you're thinking of. People were wiping on the same dungeon boss for hours back in vanilla. If someone was an ass, you ignored them. You couldn't just make another max level character in a day and negate said ignore. If enough people knew of someone -- or of their guild -- they wouldn't get invited, and they couldn't transfer off.The game systems over the years changed to encourage a rapid cycling of players rather than making due with what you have. These days you have a bad player? Kick them, press queue, and get a replacement instantly. Mythic+ keys working the way they do is an attempt to compensate for the instant gratification mentality that developed in WotLK with dungeon finder. Now you get punished for having the bad player in the first place, so people would rather not even start until they're certain they have a good team going in.
@@FisherGaming then in Classic, doesn’t matter if people are an ass, they’ll be invited anyway because they do the most DPS. Internet culture back then was radically different than how it is today, and like the other guy said, the ‘’game designed to be a solo game’’ is extremely outdated because MMOs aren’t in the spotlight anymore ,in fact, they were all in decline until last year, so a LFD-like system today is a must because the old way of doing groups was an unreasonable timesink
@@Fabriciod_Crv Sadly, developer time isn't infinite, and by creating and discarding borrowed power systems, they have neglected the core systems at the same time. It has been stated many times that Blizzard tried to grow the WoW team in an effort to develop expansions faster, but the way they work doesn't scale.
They should do what you can do for raids in FF. You say you need a melee who has done the dungeon at this level and who doesn't share the class with another and then you automatically get one assigned without being able to choose as long as they meet the criteria. And what's great is you can't set stuff above what you meet.
Please bear in mind I am a long term wow fan but I can openly admit its community is the singular most toxic of any I have participated in (and I have participated in many), the unwillingness to accept new or even simply unskilled players is borderline narcissistic and the intolerance in PVP of any who do not adhere to the acclaimed affinity of others in bgs and arenas is just feverpitch levels of toxicity.
I used to run pre-made groups for new players while I was learning to tank and even put in the description ‘noob learning to tank with other new players, first time doing dungeons’ and had some great runs until one dude was just so horrible i stopped playing for five years. Now I solo everything and just drop any quests that involve dungeons/raids. It’s just not worth the hassle.
I don't understand why people only get their 1 key per week and that upgrades/downgrades to random dungeons based on dungeon success. Just have a vendor where the base key has that week's affixes and you slap the specific dungeon and level you want on it yourself.
That is the part I find so confusing. If they make it so the first time you do a given dungeon a week you also get a bonus it'll still get people to do all the dungeons and not just focus on the easiest one to (which is always the excuse people have for not wanting that solution). It's such an easy problem to solve. I do think WoW players are just used to not get their way though. A few months ago someone proposed that it'd be great if they could farm a bunch of mats to buy a new key, like that was some sort of great solution when "just let me go grab a key from the vendor for free" is literally all they need to do.
"gameplay doesn't encourage it" that was a great take. I also remember how going in mythic + season 1 (quit after that, so maybe they changed it) really made you not want to play with people who only wanted to do their weekly on a +2 or something, if you wanted to go for the max ilvl reward or wanted to push.
I started playing Wow at the end of MoP, during a long break from work due to burnout. I knew nothing about the game, or any other game, and I had no friends who played. My few attempts to play dungeons ended in ejections, insults, and ninja loot to my detriment, so I realized that basic social conventions do not apply online. I played alone for several months. One good memory from those early days is a dungeon with surprisingly polite and friendly dwarves. It took me a quite long time to get used to the so-called social life of this game and to become good enough to do heroic raids and mythic dungeons. But there's nothing to be done, my case seems hopeless: a fantasy world, whether in a game or elsewhere, is first and foremost for me a space for escape and freedom, not for competition. This is incompatible with the mentality that prevails on Wow. I stopped playing shortly after BfA started. I get a lot more enjoyment out of listening to your "drama time" than I ever did to witness it on Wow!
Reminds me of how sakurai or whatever his name is says he doesent like people being competitive in smash bros... While still having the default mode being one that keeps track of your kills deaths and lives
Yeah, all those people are blind to the truth, it won't. Blizzard has to change their ENTIRE design philosophy to make it that way, to be a positive reinforcement experience. There are many things in World of Warcraft that don't do that, the endless grinds, the endless gold farming the raids taking too long, etc. Edit: It's going to take more than 1 expansion even to do that. But with how Blizzard is, they might go back to their bad habits *when/if* they become #1 again. Since their bad habits are the reason why they are in this position in the first place. They never looked at the competition, etc.
I actually quit WoW during Shadowlands when I grinded gear for 2 weeks. Mythics: only ever got hands, which was the only gear I didn't need upgraded. the vault that week: inferior hands. weekly quest, castle nathria loot box: hands. An entire week of grinding...
I highly recommend checking out the book Getting Gamers: The Psychology of Video Games and Their Impact on the People who Play Them by Jamie Madigan. It has an entire chapter devoted specifically to this topic, including examples of approaches that different games took and whether those approaches worked or not.
I think that it's not simply MMOS, it's just online gaming and online interaction that can get toxic pretty fast, because people care about their time being wasted, and because there's no filter with a monitor, we'd be more polite with each other in person. The social contract is just a PR thing that doesn't accomplish anything (and nothing can be done either about online interaction)
I really agree with the M+ stuff and I am very convinced that Blizzard should try to rebuild M+ from the ground up. The idea of heaving challenging dungeons all the way to the highest level ist great and but it suffers from flaws that exist since the very first implementation. The most important one is depletion. Depletion was necessary when key's were limited, but key availability has been changed. There is no incentive to try to reactivate a +14 key. EVERYTHING about depleting a key feels bad. I think runs that don't meet the timer should still give full rewards AND shouldn't reduce the key level. I also think that failed runs that didn't finish should also not reduce key level. This would help so so much and reduce the biggest pain point in the system. While I am hopeful that Blizz might remove depletion, I am less hopeful of the respecting players time aspect. They have identified the Trinket-problem of having to run the same dungeon 50 times at the start of every season. But somehow their solution was to rotate dungeons, so that we will have to run a different dungeon 50 times at the start of every season... yeah. When the solution could be so simple. Just implement a justice point shop, where player can buy every dungeon item and reward players at the end of every M+ with justice points. Then balance it in a way where running 20 +15 dungeons gives enough to buy one dream item. This would a) reduce the randomness, b) reduce frustration since you are always do a little progress towards you goal and c) allow players to run different dungeons. My biggest issue with wow is that every time I log in, I ask myself what I could do to improve my character and the clear answer is farm the ooze trinket from Plaguefall. But since I already ran 35 Top Runs to get a Ruby and am already at 25 PF runs I just can't force myself to continue farming. It is so boring. Understandably none of my friends are really interested in helping since it is so braindead to farm the same dungeon for hours. So not only do I have to run a boring dungeon over and over, I also have to deal with all the depletion and random group issues. And the worst part is that there is no end in sight. My 25 runs have earned me nothing and mean nothing for future runs. And well the consequence of that is, that I just log of and play a game that's more fun.. (And yeah I know that 60 runs are rookie numbers, but this is not a suffering contest. Farming an item should be fun.) Note: To still allow players to voluntarily reduce their key level, Blizzard should simply increase the amount of NPCs that can reduce them.
Rio & achievements like keystone master have spoilt it for most of the new to mythic dungeons players. Even in our guild on a mythic Monday guild event people are so focused on getting keystone master & having a RIO score of way over 2k that anyone who isn’t capable of a 15+ mythic dungeon just gets totally left out & simply won’t get a group. Bliz can’t fix this without giving a bonus to those who are willing to help out the lesser players. A bit like how tanks & healers got extra incentives they simply need to give incentives to a mythic plus group who are willing to take along a lower scoring player.
My mythic+ group can 4 man 15s, so when we're looking for a 5th we always try to get someone who's close to 2500 rating. We've had a couple people pop keystone master that way. We will also find some lonely dps trying to get a group together and queue with all 4 of us.
You do realize that the issue lies with the competitive nature of wow? Addressing this issue means making the game even more casual and less rewarding. At least for a time until they figure out how to replace all the content the competitive nature fostered. And they wont have that time if they kill what remains now :D There's small stuff they can obviously do change how keys are downgraded, make a vendor for it or just a selection tab in the m+ pedestal and don't downgrade keys on faiilures, that would help a bit, but people would still leave keys and waste people's time. The toxicity in m+ arises from the competitive nature of the system and that system can not exist without a competitive aspect. There's no reason to engage with it without it. Sure there's some loot but you don't have to do the difficult keys for the best loot, throwing the whole infinitely scaling out of the window. M+ for the best available loot in it is easy about 3 weeks into the expansion and never gets hard thereafter.
Regardless of any game I've played whether it was old City of Heroes, GW2, FFXIV or WoW I've always been of the opinion, "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." Even in PuG's that went poorly I just usually went, "GG everyone, peace," and left the group. Being toxic about it is a waste of time and I saw little or no point in it. If you have that much of an ego problem here's a quarter and call someone who cares because I surely don't. I've been on the receiving end and even then I said, "I tank at my pace," or my favorite, "to each their own, bye," and left the group. That's just me though.
