Before I explain. I'll like to say the community is friendly to new players and overall kind if you don't intend to raid, join free companies, linkshells or the novice network. Basically if you mind your own business and don't actively engage and keep contact to a minimum.

I feel if you stay surface level with the community you'll have a good time outside the occasional aggressive person in your expert and trial roulettes. Now I will speak about two communities. Japanese and North American and I'll give my thoughts which is worse and the most toxic.

I'll start with japanese as I'm the most familiar.

Other than being very quiet outside free companies and linkshells. We have a really REALLY bad problem with stalking, bullying, doxing and witch hunting. My friend has been outted using mods as she had a falling out with her boyfriend and he decided to tell everybody she uses mods on Twitter, nsfw at that. A large amount of people took it upon themselves to harass and violently bully her. It wasn't enough for her to get reported they wanted her just gone from the game for breaking the rules. They harassed anybody that was friends with her (so yes this includes me) and tried their hardest she didn't have a good time playing the game. She got random DM's telling her all the time to die or leave the game. She eventually got pulled into gm jail and banned for 2 weeks but that wasn't enough, these people wanted her to quit so they kept harassing her until she had enough of the bullying and she deleted her account and announced it on twitter with proof and begged her attackers to leave her alone which they finally did.

Since I defended her they also attacked me for a couple of weeks which increased my paranoia. They also found my Instagram and private twitter which included my place of work and leaked it but not before blackmailing me telling me to quit or they'll do this. I of course said no and they leaked it because I had people asking about it and people calling me ugly, bug eyes and they're going to r*pe me or kill me.

I was stalked for weeks until they just stopped. I just played my NA character a majority of the time during all of this as I was afraid on my actual main character.

Another thing, similar to NA. Japanese too disrespect CBU3. Specifically to Yoshida most of the time from what I've personally seen.

They say things such as - he looks like a frog, he's a fool/idiot, he's going to let the game fail, he doesn't know what he's doing, they're going to hold their reservations of dawn trail and so on. It's very shameful and extremely disrespectful.

I don't even see NA insult yoshida like this.

Now about the NA community. Admittedly outside raiding I'm not too~ familiar but I am a bit and I have read a lot of stories about the community from people in twitter. When it comes to the NA. The raiding community is very toxic, racist, homophobic has a lot of cyber bully and a lot of people have huge superiority complex and has a really bad problem with edgy humour.

A majority of groups I've joined that claimed they were hardcore or week 1 or Speeds have been very toxic. One speedrun group I very much remember, had nearly every member saying the N word after almost every sentence or word. Evey joke they said was always dark and racist and they all were extremely mean to each other but I could tell they were friends I think but it was hard to tell.

There was an accident where I failed a mechanic in p6 and I killed the dragoon that was on track to get a 100 parse according to him and he cussed me out. I tried to apologize and he told me to shut the f*ck up and they mocked me because I can't actually physically speak english that well and I try to speak slowly so it's easier to understand me and when I tried to tell them I'm sorry they kept cutting me off mocking me in a stereotype asian accent and called me retarded. Then they were trashing me the whole run while making racist remakes like they wished the hiroshima bomb wiped us all out and saying random words in japanese in a high pitched voice like "stop it" and everybody laughing and not even caring. I wasn't use to this type of heat in voice so I cried and just left group soon as we wiped.

Lucky that was the worst group I ever been in but other groups I joined were equally toxic. Either by just being racist or just really hostile to mistakes. So this wasn't a one off accident and rather come across this behavior numerous times.

Not every group I joined was like this of course and some were extremely sweet and nice and understanding of mistakes, these groups are typically were midcore groups. But I can say nearly every speedrun or hardcore group hasn't been the best. Not all of them but a majority.

Then we have this subreddit that is very against people having different opinions against the general consensus. Im hated so much that people harass me even outside this subreddit or they dm on alt accounts to sexually harass me or just simply insult and tell me to kill myself, call me a cheater or slut.

I want to expose these people but I'm fairly certain that would be witch hunting and against reddit rules if I posted the dms they sent me because some of them still post here and obsessively being me up many times in threads not created by me.

I would be willing to agree it was just me but when I see other posts that post against the general consensus they get downvoted like me and even accused of being me.

Now which do I think is worse? Personally both are equal. Japan has a stalking and doxing problem and NA Is just racist and insensitive but both have a problem with harassment. Now both might say every community has their problems and that's my point...they do but why is FFXIV getting the slide? Why is FFXIV getting praise for having a good community? Is the surface level friendliness that strong that it puts this vail over the blackness of the true community?

I haven't played many MMO so my knowledge of other communities is limited but I know FFXIV can't be that much better. This is very long so...

TL;DR : This community has a problem with doxing ,stalking and harassment and racism and is very aggressively violent with harassing you. This community shouldn't be praised for its surface level friendliness when the true community is very toxic and aggressive.