idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
Seriha wrote:
Forum-goers are a minority in any game, I'd boldly claim. Though without knowing what unsavory elements displease you, I can only say they're probably everywhere anyway. Just hope the game doesn't force you to interact with people you dislike too often.
I'm honestly not sure that was true of FFXI. POSTERS, sure. But between alla and whatever that ifrit site was, I feel like nearly everyone was engaging with forums. You didn't really have much choice.
Even if you split ye olde 500k users of FFXI to 250k English speakers, I'd be skeptical a fifth of that visited any kind of FFXI forum regularly. Yeah, I made friends here and interacted with some on Fairy/Sylph, but I can also think of a large number of people in the endgame shell I was in that didn't really know anything about the ins and outs of content where I'd basically played in-between ferrying info I'd gathered here and there. We had a JP guy that did similar from their side, too. But yeah, was basically explaining to them how to maximize Campaign progress when it was the thing, how lights worked in Abyssea and what dropped what. Indeed, stuff more readily found in a wiki nowadays, but even when those things weren't common, I still saw people lost in quests and the like. If I had to estimate my influence on people within the game, I'd probably worked with a few hundred over a decade. I'm not really counting random PUGing or just EXPing here, but just answering questions or maybe whipping something obscure up for a synth if needed.
Relative to XIV, I figure I'll do similar as I go along, but info sites are more common these days. As long as we don't have a slew of NMs with obscure pop conditions, finding a drop would just be as simple as going through a list. Maybe you'll have someone list possible mechanics or even link to a video if it's hard enough content, but I wouldn't necessarily call info-gatherers the hardcore raider types. The former can certainly be beneficial to the latter, but not everyone thrives on endgame drama, world firsts, or even some of the "site wars" I mentioned above. And I know it's dreadfully optimistic of me to believe the game will be better off the more people share, I'm not blind to the fact that if there's profit to be had in a secret, it'll be exploited as long as possible. And I guess these are the types I don't like helping because I get the vibe of being disposable if someone isn't what they need at that very moment. My last days of XI certainly saw that happen, which contributed to why I quit alongside lacking/poor content.