TLDR;
The internet is mankind’s single most amazing and horrendous invention. It has paved the way for international communications in business and travel, made possible the immediate and worldwide knowledge of all celebrity activity, and satisfied our sexual cravings in ways, which used to cost 29.99 on slightly-more-than-basic cable to look at a warped, snow-covered image of a single boob, for nothing more than a mere click.
However, with the reaping of these benefits comes the task of wading through endless miles of trash to reach them. Dragon BallZ fan-sites made by 12 year old boys clog the tubes of the world wide web, beside them eroding away the protective layer of awesome are countless Blogs and V-logs made by people who think the world honestly cares what they have to say about anything at all. The worst offender in this pathetically humorous self-aggrandizing cesspool, next to troll-countering-based furry sites, simply has to be the online gaming community. At least the dinosaurs had their end come to them quickly. Us? No, we’re totally screwed- doomed to wallow in the socially abrasive musings of Gamefaqs go’ers who regularly comprise fourteen page-long reports of why Sephiroth would beat Superman in a match of Uno, or arguments over which Suikoden character would make the best caster class at level 99, despite the fact that those games are grossly easy after level 60. I dare anyone to pick at random 10 game forums and not find the word “keyblade” in it (signatures count too!) or run into a nostalgia-spewing cheeto-fingered troglodyte crying on and on about how today’s games just don’t match up to the old stuff- like they’re the first person in the universe to state such a claim.
Of course, I’m sure by now people who Google’d “Mithra porn” are wondering what any of this has to do with FFXI. Don’t worry, we’re getting to that. But first, we’ll talk a little bit about Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, henceforth referred to as “MMORPG’s”. For those of you decidedly lacking in 12 hours a day to sit in front of your computer (i.e. having a life), an MMORPG is a game where millions of people from all walks of life can assume the roles of fantasy based characters to battle mythical creatures in meticulously organized groups to gain fantastic armor, weapons, money, which they in turn use to battle even harder mythical creatures to gain even more fantastic loot… and cybersex. When Ultima Online was first born, made to popularize the genre, its creators unleashed a hurricane of lame and self-loathing the likes of which this world had never seen before. People spent all day tugging their jerky to disgusting, tasteless mansions they built with currency they garnered from Chinese gold-farming sites. Any monster worth killing found itself at the mercy of the same exact person or one of their twenty alternate characters 24/7/365. People could gather in towns and be absolutely retarded for no reason because most anything worth killing was already dead, or it was just easier to talk about doing things rather than doing. All of this activity rendered UO to be nothing more than a virtual 3D chat room with the ability to kill level one monsters on the side, and being a non-cheating, high-level, level-headed player was nothing more than a monument either to their immeasurable patience, or lack of anything else to do.
Several game developers have since then tried their hand at the MMORPG model, some being rather successful. Of course, only so much success can be accounted for when you play an interactive videogame that can’t scan for the presence of utter tools. With the invention of ignore lists, this problem has diminished greatly in stature contrary to the hoarse, angry shouts of veteran gamers who bitch about anything and everything anyway. No, a problem which has arisen lately, and is especially prevalent in MMORPG’s, though really anywhere that has anything to do with videogames, are people who just take themselves way too seriously. What I mean by this are people who hold themselves in such high regard that they are virtual self-certified aficionados on whatever it is they are currently playing. In my MMO experience, these people have single-handedly ruined the mystique of video games by telling you everything about them that they feel you need to know before you can even pick them up. The day of trial and error has past, ushering in a new age of players that are just quite honestly baby-sat to hell and back. Not only that, but these people seriously think they are God’s gift to whatever they happen to be playing.
This brings to the title of my article, since my run-ins with these people have totaled the most per unit time in Final Fantasy XI. There is no greater gold mine in hilarity than in this game alone. UO was full of assholes, WoW is full of little kids and rambunctious teenagers, RO was full of currency farmers that shared stories of how their last meal consisted of some rice and something they found on the floor, which they told me in broken English, and Furcadia is full of well.. furries from what I understand. But FFXI itself is a monument to how big of a chode a single person can be. Think of it this way- a 6th grader playing World of Warcraft may think he’s awesome, and he’s allowed this stupidity because he’s in middle school. But in FFXI, the average age per player is a bit higher, and the excuse of naïve youth starts to melt and slough away, revealing the ugly truth that this game’s “upper echelon” is really nothing more than a bunch of autistic 35 year-olds. And don’t get me wrong, being an experienced player doesn’t automatically qualify you as a jerk in this game, it just means that as years pass, you have an exponentially higher chance of turning into one.
The qualities exhibited by these players generally exude an air of arrogance or apathy. In trying to hard to become good at a leisurely activity- the game has turned into work. Embittered by the notion that other people might actually be having fun, these players take it upon themselves to let everyone else know just how much better they are than the general populace. They will idle in the middle of cities in the silliest-looking equipment just to show off the stats they garner, usually with a bazaar message quoting Sun Tzu or some other philosophical cliché, listing their job levels, highest damage, or embossing it with a snooty, snappy, 5-word phrase that screams “I just don’t care anymore” that they stole off a Hot Topic t-shirt. In your link shell, if you mention a piece of gear, they will auto-translate a piece of equipment they have to show that they have better. I don’t mean they’ll just say they have it, the retards actually go into their Moghouse, look up the item, then cycle through all the names in their auto-translate history to show you that they have it. I think they do this so that you won’t question their “loot” credibility, as important as that is in social circles anyway. Then again, it may be the only credibility they have at all.
In parties if you mention any discreetly game-related thing, they will immediately jump into the conversation to offer their well-respected opinion as well as attempt to debunk your own or, if the conversation is such that a claim stated can’t be proven wrong, will suddenly change the subject to them bragging about their own in-game accomplishments. Any attempt to talk about something different will do nothing more than encourage them to keep talking more. They will tell you how to do your job, the healer how to do their job, the tank how to do their job, or they will just make backhanded comments about how everyone else is doing so poorly relative to themselves and then throw around words like “6-hit-built” and “parser”. They will tell you they’ve been playing “since launch in Japan”, talk about their Japanese friends, try and show off their wide vocabulary in Japanese by uttering phrases for “kill” and “idiot” which they learned from the latest episode of Naruto. They will do all these things and more, leaving you to ponder one thing: “Just who the hell cares?”.
But there’s more. In some bizarre phenomenon which actually seems characteristic of FFXI alone, leveling itself plays one of the BIGGEST roles in the whole game since you can level a character multiple times in different jobs. What this means is that you constantly have an influx of new players leveling their first or second jobs trying to get them up high running into older players who are on their 2nd or later level-capped job leveling lower jobs for utility or self-enjoyment purposes. What the developers HOPED would happen was that the older players and newer players would learn from each other and forge new friendship. What actually ends up happening more the half the time is that the newer players end up realizing what an asshole reaching level 75 can make a person, and they either end up quitting or become bitter and self-important themselves.
Of course, this doesn’t have to happen to everyone. Some people realize it is “just a game” and manage to maintain a level head through out their FFXI experience, but it seems that this number has gotten to be fewer and fewer as time goes on. Having played the game myself for 4 years, I can honestly say I’ve never been mean to a person because they are new. It seems counter-intuitive to me to be rude in a game where you’re supposed to forge social relationships. Not to mention, if the game has a person that jaded, then what’s the point in playing it anymore?
If reading this has, in any small way, awakened the realization that you might be one of these people I’m talking about, then;
#1 Fuck you
#2 Improve yourself.
There’s no reason to act that way to other players. Get off the fucking playground. If you’re worried that your attitude may actually be somewhat similar to this, here’s a handy list of things not to do when playing this game.
Don’t
-Bitch in your linkshell about players at lower levels not knowing how to do their job. Try helping them instead. Also, no one cares.
-Auto-translate gear you own to answer a question or prove your possession of it. If someone’s retarded enough to call you out on it, they probably don’t matter enough to be shown anyway. And no one cares.
-Go on about your highest damage, exp chain, job levels, merits, or parser results when no one shows interest after the 50th time you’ve mentioned it. No one cares.
-Idle in the middle of city like a douche bag so everyone can see how much time you waste when they check. No one cares, and you just take up space on their screen.
-Incessantly cry about how much easier the game has become. Everyone else realizes it most likely and at most, no one else cares.
-Bitch about what the developers SHOULD do because you totally think it would work better that way. There’s a damn good reason that people like you aren’t developers, and no one, especially the developers, cares.