The recent discussions about women and the treatment of women in Final Fantasy 14 spaces have been really distasteful.
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About Misogyny in FFXIV…
The recent discussions about women and the treatment of women in Final Fantasy 14 spaces have been really distasteful.
source
People are reaching for content and things to get upset about
It's sad seeing the terrible treatment that other women within the community have experienced. I've been lucky enough to find myself amongst lovely friends who simply see me as a good friend on ffxiv just as equal in ability to the rest of our group. We respect and accept each other & that's one of the things I love about them all.
To those women in a bad crowd (or anyone who feels discomfort in an ongoing situation), I hope you find the courage to get out of it & find people that deserve your efforts & respect you as you are. There are many lovely people out there, just blacklist the bad ones and try to find the ones you can feel safe with.
My experience is just leave the party and find another because their is many many good people in ffxiv and sometimes it also depends on your attitude in the party as well; you being nice and supportive encourages others to also be that way. And then there are people who have to make a whole video complaining about toxicity in ffxiv; who must be either farming for content or soft as hell.
Honestly, it feels like I'm back in high school again with this game, except I'm even more mentally unstable than I was when I was in high school.
I've been too intimidated to really do any challenging content with others (so much so that my first deep dungeon clear ended up being a solo one, although that also was me being a total tryhard), due to potentially facing hostility, and also becoming hostile myself (which is usually conveyed in words that have no intent).
Thankfully I haven't caught any flack for being a trans girl, but I feel like I've caught more for being autistic and socially awkward.
Since being stabbed in the back by a static I was progging UWU with, I cannot really trust anyone in FFXIV anymore, and it's impacted my ability to interact with others greatly. Those leaders were women as well, but they were more of the petty type, the ones you don't usually see past high school or college.
I am AMAB, but I play a female character in game, and, in fact, I started playing shortly before I came out as non-binary & used the game as a way to safely present as female, and I have had some of the same experiences you have had with creeps trying to flirt in DMs & such, even though I generally let it be known that I am Sapphic & not into guys. I have raid PTSD, but it's not due to misogyny, but having the misfortune of joining an FC full of League of Legend try-hards who expected perfection after like 2 pulls on any extreme or savage content, and it took me a while to pick up on mechanics due to a bad combination of this being the first MMO I ever played seriously & having a really crappy internet connection at the beginning….
Of course women will use every opportunity to make themselves victims, because everything bad happens only to them, not to men
This same argument has been beaten to death revived and beaten to death again. Men make fun of a men. Women make fun of women. Men make fun of women. Women make fun of men. Its a cycle. Get over it. Its the internet
It is not designed for your safe space. Don't like ? it turn block people or report them. Hittng a 900 year old dead corpse is just asking for claut . This video is pointless and i think less of you for it
I used to have the female symbol on my adventurer plate and I had to remove it because a lot of men came with the intention of flirting with me and some gave me a lot of bad experiences. I returner to the game this year and I spent 6 months that way just having problems and drama for… being a woman. In the end, it seemed like some people I knew were blaming me and thinking I was weird for putting that symbol on my plate. They were like "Oh, you're looking for it and welcoming that if you put that on your plate xd". Bro, just because I'm a woman and want to be treated like one and not be mistaken for a guy doesn't mean I want millions of guys flirting with me and harassing me. Luckily the drama is over now and I have a wonderful boyfriend who takes care of me in and out of the game, but it was a pain in the ass at the time.
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I know some people actually got married playing FF14. It is how they met their lovers. They use FF14 as a platform to find romance and some even got married in real life all thank to FF14.
Speaking from personal experience, I've found the FFXIV community has got more toxic over the years, especially since the pandemic. I don't think it's strictly just misogynistic or in the raiding space, it's all over the game and it's all different types of toxicity. I was on the Materia server if that makes any difference.
I think because everyone was stuck inside for so long, we needed something to control, considering we couldn't control anything physically at the time. The only thing we really could control was our behaviour towards others, be it online, via phone, in person etc, and as a result, people began letting fly even more than normal, because that's all we as a society could do. I have a front-facing office-job and we've noticed the difference in people's level of aggression over the last 4 years.
I've completely left FFXIV for Guild Wars 2 now and it was the best move I've ever made. I can't stand FFXIV's community any more, I'm too old to waste my time with schoolyard bullying.
I do high end raiding and have never caught anyone hitting on anyone else. I have seen it in other settings where it starts playful and becomes stalking. People often forget any social game will risk these interactions. As you would in real life, politely decline gifts and make it clear you are here to play and that your socialization is for the purpose of gaming. That should get rid of the worst of it.
Sadly, these things happen in FFXIV, even when it happen a lot less often per capita than other in other online games (online fps are horrendous for women because of it), and a lot of people that are into the cutting edge of pve came from those games before ARR even existed, so that's a thing that festered inside that section of the game from the begining, but this shouldnt happen at all.
hopefully all of this being surfaced will make a change for the better
I'm a part of an all female raiding group. Problem solved.
online relationships = mistake
raiding before IRL = mistake
caring what online people think = mistake
thinking men don't think with their dick = mistake
thinking women don't think with attention-seeking = mistake
thinking people will get along by default = mistake
uff the extended list is too long ima take nap too old for this
Whats really crazy is my only experience with a toxic player in this game: it was a girl. To be fair she was doing it to another girl, so i guess it checks out.
I know my experience is not gonna be the majority of peoples experience. But it's like, how do you even find out someone is a woman in a game (without using voice chat)
For me, the only way I ever find out is when they tell me after I've done some thing that made them personally interested in exchanging phone numbers and stuff.
When i first got into FF14, i was one of the tanks that always kept moving, and unfortunately i was playing on an EU datacenter, so i got alot of racist, Sexist Comments thrown at me. and despite moving to the NA datacenter's i still have times where i'll visit an RP venue, find a creep and get stalked in game… it's a big reason why I'm so scared to do trials or any other content by myself, im scared of being alone, because when im by myself and i have a bunch of hate getting thrown at me, i have a habit to just turn off my PC… and now it's gotten to the point where i get flak for simply playing DRK… i just wanna be a cool Fem-Roe and sit in my house… i've been putting off doing the last dawntrail trial because of it…
Never ran into that part of the FF community to be honest. I literally just play the game, I wanted to try and be social on here but it's a lot harder to do that. It's probably a data center thing too I hear primal is more focused on content than community stuff while crystal is more social than raid focused. It does suck that this kind of stuff is in FF too and I do hope there comes a time people realize your gender and skin doesn't determine the content of your character.
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So, been around the internet a long time. I didn't get into current level Extremes until Shadowbringers because Triple Triad Mount. I was also coming out of another comfort zone and becoming a Tank Main for Endwalker… so believe me I had rough edges. I did a lot of PF groups and I found a LOT of very good people who worked with me. I upped my healer and tank games in those times. While I may never see myself as the best raider, I did get comfortable enough to get into a static and try to tackle some Savages.
In all honesty, Men tend to have more desire to take on challenges head on, while women tend to be more cautious by nature. This is not a bad thing and it's a broad generalization – I know there are very confrontational women and very confrontation averse men. This is just generally why, even without toxicity as a factor, you're likely to see proportionately fewer women doing current Extreme/Savage content. But, if there's the proper motivation, it can overcome that.
"Glamour is the End Game" is no lie, and we all want our Warriors of Light to be fashionistas don't we?
I may be going on a bit of a tangent, but I'm a woman and I will say that Triple Triad was my primary motivator – and as a result, I also found some drop dead gorgeous pieces for my WoL along the way that I wouldn't have gotten to obtain if I'd stayed in the safety of MSQ and past expansion extremes. I also took on mount farming with my FC, in the process I have created a monster. We have a good mix of male and female players and one of them had never done any EX or Savage content – so what do we do? Alexander Extreme ^^; She said we were so nice and patient with her, and now she's spearheading her own mounts and raids. 
You play with the good ones, you kick the toxics to the curb and never look back. Do not let them ruin things'; there will always be good people and parties you can join! I have never been kicked from a party in XIV, but I have had people not want to play with me because I didn't have the experience they were looking for. In WOW I was kicked for having rez sickness. It's never been my sex that has been an issue, but I do have a pretty thick skin from being teased relentlessly in my school days, so… why worry about what some dumb guy I'm probably never going to party with again has to say? And… I have been called a lot of things, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter. The bad words don't count. And the people mocking me most relentlessly are the friends I have who I clap back at with just as vile or trashy comments XD.
That timing to avoid firewall death at 5.52 was slick as hell, nice one
Wait, people actually interact with eachother in this game? For the most part, the game feels like a glorified single player game, it took me like 2 years to actually find people who would really communicate and interact with me, and that was in the PvP community of all places
Yeah theres a reason I swapped lalafell actually did it as a joke but realized it keeps creeps away and you dont get weirdos coming up to you randomly much. It helps that im also gay too and found a nice group of fellow lgbt people to play with. There are some loud minority terrible men out there. Its concerning how their voice echoes louder than the good peoples voices despite there being so many more good people in this game.
EDIT: I used to be a cat girl then after some pushing by certain people spent a couple months as au ra and then viera before deciding to just go back to being a lala longterm. Plus the dwarf house in tomra my beloved…
I see that some comments in here just proved her point. How ironic.
It's actually quit simple ff14 community isn't real positivity it's forced positivity unlike other games where you are given more freedom to say what you want in ff14 you so much as call someone stupid you get banned. The problem with this is it only works were Square enix can enforce it and that's only in game. Discord, twitter, YouTube comments they have no control over so people can say what they actually feel and they can't do anything about it. And that's one of my biggest gripes with ff14 you can't force change all your doing is silencing voices and making a pseudo safe space and the second you step out and want to move to something new you realize that the people you didn't like are still there and then you want to make the new thing your moving into another safe space and try to force others to obey your view.
You want to have some female high end raiders fine do it but I'm tiered of people always joining a community doesn't like the way it is and tries to force change on everybody else just so you stay happy and comfortable. Make a free company of women or enforce your ideals on your free company of people I would assume believe the same things you do or at least put up with it and then raid with them but people need to stop trying to force change on others just because they feel offended.
And one more thing showing a bad comment with zero likes and no engagement as proof of sexism is not only dumb it counters your point because no one is agreeing with him he's the one dude standing in a crowd being mean and you point at the whole crowd and say there being mean.
this is something I don't see talked about enough, someone genuinely offered to buy me a fantasia to change my character into a guy
Another thing to keep in mind is that there are literal millions of players in the game. If you've interacted with 100 or even 1000 jerks, that's not even 1% of the game's population. Even on a server by server basis you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people(except maybe Oceanic). It's not an epidemic or systemic issue within the game. It's just a human society issue leaking into the game space. Not that those interactions should be marginalized, mind you. If someone treats you poorly, they should certainly be called out for it.
Lala Avy
Correction… Misogyny in gaming in general. Every community has it
LoL. This is hilarious to hear.