FFXIV The Return of Adolescent Jerkiness

16 January, 2014. 271 words.

When I first started playing FFXIV sometime around October 2013*, it was extremely quiet. Very few people made comments in the general chat. I’m sure we’re all used to a more-or-less constant scroll of adolescent jerkiness going on in MMO general chat, so it was weird and kind of nice that there was none of that in FFXIV. Most of what you saw, to be honest, was gold spam.

Now, however, I see a lot more activity in the general chat. And by “activity” of course I mean adolescent jerkiness.

I’m curious why things changed. I suppose it’s related to FFXIV 2.1’s new ability to right-click on chat and blacklist names directly from the context menu. Previously, general chat was basically a solid wall of constantly scrolling gold spam. To blacklist them, you had to manually bring up a box from the social window and key in the name to block, and you can imagine that gold sellers didn’t always have easy-to-type names. I usually took the time to do it, but I would guess that most people simply unsubscribed from chat altogether rather than try to blacklist the gold spam.

Now people can easily clear out the gold spam with a few mouse clicks, leaving general chat ready and waiting for adolescent jerkiness to ensue. That’s my theory, anyway. The only other thing I can think is that more people are playing on PCs (as opposed to PS3s) than before.

(By the way, the adolescent jerkiness still isn’t that bad, comparatively speaking. Most of the talk is actually about the constant, obsessive running of FATE groups.)

p>* Date corrected.

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