Toxic positivity refers to an intense or enduring pressure to be happy, often through maintaining a positive outlook, no matter how difficult or troubling the circumstances, according to Erin Engle, Psy.D.,a psychologist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
Although positive thinking certainly has its place, positivity can become “toxic” when it results in avoiding, suppressing, minimizing or rejecting negative emotions we can experience when trying to cope with adversity or challenging life events, explains Dr. Engle.
While a healthy positive attitude is overall beneficial to well-being, the hallmark of toxic positivity is a refusal to witness or acknowledge traumatic or unpleasant feedback.
The Negative Impacts of Receiving Toxic Positivity
A person receiving toxic positivity may feel like their reality isn’t being acknowledged, which can feel frustrating, confusing or dismissive, according to Dr. Kennedy. “It’s like the person doing it is uncomfortable with witnessing the pain or upset,” she adds. “So they are trying to neutralize it or reduce it through their response.”
Toxic positivity may impact an individual on the receiving end in several ways, according to Dr. Engle, including:
Feeling like one’s own emotional experience is invalid
Diminished effective coping
Internalized self-stigma or blame around negative emotions
A false sense of control over life’s difficult circumstances
Limited learning and understanding
Overall, toxic positivity may negatively affect mental health—of either the person on the receiving end or the person eliciting it—because it can actually intensify negative emotions, as it tends to make an individual perceive their feelings or coping strategies as wrong or bad, or it may make them feel like they shouldn’t feel a certain emotion in the first place.
Woah, really? So WoW has sliders for body height, muscles, chin, ears etc. and color palettes for hair, fur, skin etc., aswell as dyeable gear and so much more? That’s great to hear! Oh wait… WoW is still stuck in the early 2000s when it comes to customizations where players unironically argue about 4 new hair colors and stuff like that. xD
FF14 players can be pretty defensive towards their game, but it’s not like WoW players are really any better on that front. I think we’re just more used to seeing criticism towards WoW because,
WoW’s an older game and, regardless what others say, altered the landscape of MMOs for YEARS. It was held as the gold standard for the longest time, and when you’re at the top of an industry, people will micro-analyze everything you do, fans and detractors alike.
WoW has a pretty self-loathing playerbase, and I feel this has gotten worse both with time, and with the addition of game modes like Classic. I’ve never seen more hatred directed towards the game than from Classic players hating on retail, with the exception of seeing retail players hating on Classic.
FF14 was pooh-poohed for years from those outside its community, and I feel as a result, the playerbase is quicker to jump to their game’s defense when it gets attacked. I’m guilty of this as well when people have told me “FF14 isn’t a real MMORPG”.
Really, we’re just more used to hearing criticism about the game because we’re all crusty the old crusty gamer equivalent of crusty old people who complain more. We used to be with it, but hten they changed what it was. Now what we’re with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary to us.
Its pretty wild when you go from ARR to Heavensward. You can just about see the point where the developers stopped trying to copy WoW in a way and decided to go in their own direction lol.
Yeah, very much so. ARR pre-rework (still needs some touching up if you ask me ) was ROUGH with all the little fetchquest things you had to do. Like THAT to me felt like you were being pigeonholed into doing mindless tasks for hours.
Even then though, I argued with my sister over this a few times. She’s of the mind that, while ShB and EW are great, she still had to slog through hours of older content to get to the parts she felt were good, and I’ve seen a lot of people with that same argument. If I didn’t feel like the story was worth it and didn’t come together into the thing it becomes, I might’ve had the same opinion.
Even as someone who loves the game, it’s very difficult for me to judge it critically, because those starting hours are pretty rough, even if you love old and newer JRPGs. I love FF14 probably as much as I do WoW (WoW ekes out a win because of nostalgia and what’s probably a crippling addiction now), but it’s REALLY hard to recommend it to someone who also loves MMOs due to how non-conventional FF14 is to the contemporary MMO.
It’s not bad. Far from it. That said, the fact so many people say “It gets better after ARR”, and an ARR playthrough can take well into 20+ hours for a casual player, that’s… not an insignificant hump to cross, and I think there’s validity in that criticism. Having negative qualities to your game doesn’t invalidate the positives, but if they’re there, they’re ABSOLUTELY worth acknowledging.
What do you mean? I’ve seen a lot less criticism for Dragonflight than I’ve seen for their current expansion Endwalker, even counting Plunderstorm.
Endwalker has been very heavily criticized by its playerbase for the last year and a half (mainly for its direction with class and encounter design, and for favoring solo content over group casual content.) People compare it to Warlords of Draenor, every long-time content creator pretty much disliked it, some even hate the story, official forums are dooming 24h/24 and saying Stormblood was better (tho to be fair, it was,) and even the director said on stage his own game makes him sleepy and needs more spice.
I haven’t experienced the “toxic positivity” in FFXIV. However, I will say…people think the “gogogogo” mentality in WOW is bad, haven’t seen anything yet. FFXIV has that in its dungeons 10x worse than WOW.
I’m not really that much into raiding, so I dunno. But I have a friend, who does savage raids. While that group seems to be chill and more on the casual side, I heard from them that it can be pretty brutal.
communities evolves based on how the games are designed, in wow’s case they encourage a lot of toxic communities to form, once the community is formed though, there’s no turning it back without losing the playerbase, LoL is a perfect example, the more competitive the game is designed the more toxic the community will be, just facts of life
Sliders dont really mean much of anything when other areas of customization are lacking.
Four faces for a character
Facial hair and facial scars are locked per face option and cannot be adapted.
Lack of facial hair options
Certain hairstyles are required to be purchased via real money store or required to unlock via content (or buy them for gil via AH).
Certain hairstyles did not fit to all races (I know this was fixed more recently but that should not have been the case).
The notable issues with certain races and hats
Two races didnt even have a second gender option until Endwalker and Dawntrail.
Like sliders and a color wheel are cool, but there is some very noticeable gaps in customization that SE should fix. Other areas of customization (job) I will not comment on because the game isnt built for it.
Eh, I don’t think it has been quite that bad… but there was definitely a bit of a downturn in interest and interaction for FFXIV after the launch content for Endwalker finished the “main story arc” that they’ve been working on since the game launched.
It’s mostly that the hype that drowned out a lot of the existing issues died down, causing some problems to come out of the woodwork. Heck, even I’ve stepped away from the game to focus more on other things; however, it was more just the ebb and flow of interest rather than the need to stay constantly engaged.
… though maybe being able to finally upgrade to a medium plot helped keep me around.
But to elaborate on some specifics:
Class design has included some reworks for classes, but the process is quite slow with major changes only coming for a handful of classes/jobs with each expansion cycle… and some are definitely behind.
Encounter design isn’t bad, but it does feel a bit “same-y” from time-to-time. I primarily engage in the casual content, and I think the old trend of trying out advanced mechanics on higher difficulties before slowly working them into lower difficulty content has lagged a bit with EW. It probably has more to do with the big finale being more cinematic, and some “spice” to encounters would be welcome.
The story was nowhere near as bad as many have made it out to be, it’s just the hype withdrawl from the big finale. The Zero and World of Darkness storyline was actually quite decent (aside from wrapping up too quickly & cleanly), it just pales in comparison to what preceded it.
While you didn’t mention it, the relics for EW should get special mention… and it did cause a lot of grumbling due to how quick and easy it was to obtain. Technically you had to do all of the Hildy questline to unlock it, but for many that was no issue at all and they just had to farm a small number of tomestones. Though I probably could complain a bit about the last stage of the relics not really “fitting” in terms of the design, from rainbow glows to sci-fi laser-edged weapons was a bit out of nowhere.
Stormblood got treated unfairly due to the split focus on its main story, and I think many are just rediscovering the many strengths it had all along. If anything, it had the best suite of post-launch content in the game’s history. And I’m not a fan of Eureka-style content.
As for Dragonflight, I think it’s important to look at the expansion in the context of what proceeded it: BfA and SL. While I haven’t played it and can’t judge for myself at this point, the previous two expansions set the bar LOW. I’ve seen some complaints come out concerning it, but I think the main sentiment is predominantly “I’m glad BfA and SL are over”.
One of the few areas where FFXIV’s customization options have definitely lagged behind, but it should be mentioned that several details within them are still modular:
Eyebrows, noses and mouths have several options each.
Eye colour, iris size, and so on.
Character voice, though it’s mostly yells and grunts.
One nice aspect is that the “facial details” (scars, facial hair, and other things) are all toggles. There’s usually about 5 options, and every single one can be turned on or off; that means there’s actually 32 options per face before considering other features.
But yeah, the downside is that they’re all still locked to specific faces. And the most awesome of mustaches is specific to Hellsguard, as the Sea Wolves don’t get that face option.
First off, VERY FEW hairstyles are on the Mogstation. And most of them are NPC hairstyles (and often attached to the NPC’s outfit).
But yes, a lot of hairstyle options are unlocked through in-game activities and some can be bought off the marketboard/AH… but to me, that’s a feature more than anything. Regardless, there’s far more options than WoW has even now for the majority of races.
Can’t disagree, something weird happened with Viera and Hrothgar… and I’m pretty sure Viera was the developers caving into fan demands, otherwise female Hrothgar would have been added all the way back during ShB.
Quick search on Wikipedia says…
Developed by Bioware. Published by Black Isle Studios (itself a division of Interplay).
And besides, it’s fairly evident that many in-jokes from BG1 and BG2 made their way into Bioware’s later releases.
) was ROUGH with all the little fetchquest things you had to do. Like THAT to me felt like you were being pigeonholed into doing mindless tasks for hours.