I'm fine with FFXIV serving as a containment zone.
I've seen similar remarks regarding D&D 5e and tabletop RPGs, but I have doubts. To me it seems that such games draw people to the genre who would not otherwise have touched it, and, from there, they leak into the rest of the genre but with their expectations shaped by its casualized form. They come to each new game demanding that it be made more like <casualized popular game>; some will retreat if denied and others will eventually change their minds, but, many times, they get their way. This has a deleterious effect on the genre, reducing what should be its core to a niche within a niche, one that often goes unsupported. Thus, I regard such games not as "containment zones" but as "plague fountains".
My experience with "containment zones" is 4chan allowing My Little Pony and ****** communities to thrive instead of just having one janitor do his/their/its job. Didn't go so well!
My long-time PbP group offically moved to 5e 2024 today, after years of resistance. The reasoning was because it would be easier to get new people to join if they updated. And they were apparently correct, as over the past month there have been about 10 new people join the community of around 80 people.
So, these things are far from containing the problem and are instead allowing it to thrive.
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FF14 did not start out as having a large percentage of mentally ill people. That didn't start happening until the slow decline that Shadowbringers brought on, where subscribers started getting less and less content that had a shorter lifespan (3 dungeons per patch, then 2, now just 1. Four endgame grind zones, then just 2, then none. One deep dungeon per expansion, and then none. Long relic weapon grinds to keep people playing, and then welfare relics you can just buy with tomestone currency after a couple hours of daily roulettes. Etc). The time between patches lengthed from 3 months to 4 months to 5 months. So there is just less motivation for people to remain subbed year round nowadays (unless they fell into the housing trap where you have invested a tremendous amount of time and gil into trying to acquire a housing plot and then decorating it, and you will lose your house and your decorations if you don't walk into the house once every 45 days). The gameplay has also been notoriously simplified. All story dungeons and trials are now very easy, classes play almost exactly the same, there is no utility/CC/buffing/debuffing/etc anymore, etc. And then there have been complaints about the direction of the story starting with the ShB patches, escalating with the last two expansions Endwalker and Dawntrail which are very long but are mostly running around talking to people and have some unsatisfying resolutions and eyebrow raising messaging. So much of the playerbase now unsubs after checking out a new expansion, only periodically resubbing for a month to catch up on the story, or using the now increasingly frequent welcome back free login campaigns. Who are the people who are still subbed year round? The people who treat the game like a new Second Life where they go to player run casinos or ERP. Or the mentally ill tumblerinas who don't care about story or gameplay quality and love their husbando G'raha Tia or are sexually attracted to house cats.
Same deal with WoW and GW2, where the playerbase was overall normal until the decline began and normies began losing interest, leaving an increasingly high percentage of mentally ill players behind.
Another big issue is filtering. When you look at a fandom online, you are not looking at everyone who likes that thing. You are only seeing the people who are allowed to talk about that thing online. Case in point, most online fan discussion of something takes place on a forum, a subreddit, or a discord, but as of current year most of those forums of discussion have been converged by leftists, who have banned people for wrongthink, leaving behind their brand of mentally ill people left. So the end state is that no matter which subreddit or fan site or discord you go to - be it a Star Wars or a Pokemon forum/subreddit/discord, or a Genshin place, or a WoW place, etc, you will see a lot of craziness. There are lots of normal people who like Pokemon or Genshin, but you just don't see them as much in those online spaces. It is very difficult to find places for discussion that have not been converged, if they exist at all.
Plague fountains for sure. The entire internet is a giant version of this where people feed their worst desires and habits that would have never come to light before. Eventually it spills out into reality.
Another big issue is filtering. When you look at a fandom online, you are not looking at everyone who likes that thing. You are only seeing the people who are allowed to talk about that thing online. Case in point, most online fan discussion of something takes place on a forum, a subreddit, or a discord, but as of current year most of those forums of discussion have been converged by leftists, who have banned people for wrongthink, leaving behind their brand of mentally ill people left. So the end state is that no matter which subreddit or fan site or discord you go to - be it a Star Wars or a Pokemon forum/subreddit/discord, or a Genshin place, or a WoW place, etc, you will see a lot of craziness. There are lots of normal people who like Pokemon or Genshin, but you just don't see them as much in those online spaces. It is very difficult to find places for discussion that have not been converged, if they exist at all.
This is 100% true, since back in 2017 - 2018 I joined discord and reddit thinking that I would find communities of like-minded people to discuss about similar interests, and then the years passed by and now both sites are libtard cesspools where people barely cares about the supposed topic of the subreddit/discord channel and instead everyone is just bitching about Musk and Trump 24/7.
Does anyone remember when old Tumblr was a containment zone for rabid women and gays? Then they become the culture itself, and started dominating all other spaces. We used to conduct raids on Tumblr in /b/ back then, and in our young ignorance we thought they'd never be taken seriously. Of course, /b/ and 4chan as a whole became the target of incessant fed and liberal raids and became the very thing it mocked.
Containment is a temporary measure until you can solve a problem. You contain an infestation and then you eradicate it. The problem is we never got rid of anything, it just got pushed away, quietly plotting to worm its way out. Those of us who saw the coming tide, in some form, got largely ignored as radicals getting mad about nothing. Honestly, little has changed.
Undertale is a decent game and its fanbase is notoriously rabid. Still, several JRPGs that released afterwards don't have nearly as much degeneracy, and that partially has to do with UT (and Deltarune to an extent) acting as a containment zone for those freaks.
If a game becomes popular, it leads to idiots with money trying to imitate it because they think they can steal from the pie. Just look at the explosion of farm sims after Stardew Valley came out, and there's at least two cozy farm sim MMOs: one for people that like anime, and the other for those that like Fortnite's aesthetic.
I also believe it is a plague fountain, but am truly usure if it does work in some cases or not as I am reminded of Fortnite, for example, where some people play that game and that game alone. Yet, while I am willing to believe they truly do, people naturally gravitate towards similar games to play, and those types infect them by pushing for the developers to make changes to make it as the other game they were playing, being very vocal online about it, and making the rest of the players, that are just playing the game instead of checking every web page day and night, suddenly seem the "minority" and the game environment changes, especially chat. Two examples that come to mind are Destiny and Team Fortress 2, where it is a sort of "we hear you!" dialogue suddenly popping up that no one asked and, though Team Fortress 2 seems largely unchanged to me (still hearing "******" being said in the sudden voice chat XD ), Destiny was completely changed in tone, keeping only a skeleton of what the game used to be and losing a grip on many previously key lore points to add some ******** "inclusivity" instead, but it truly disheartened me too much to speak of more on the details
Does anyone remember when old Tumblr was a containment zone for rabid women and gays? Then they become the culture itself, and started dominating all other spaces. We used to conduct raids on Tumblr in /b/ back then, and in our young ignorance we thought they'd never be taken seriously. Of course, /b/ and 4chan as a whole became the target of incessant fed and liberal raids and became the very thing it mocked.
Containment is a temporary measure until you can solve a problem. You contain an infestation and then you eradicate it. The problem is we never got rid of anything, it just got pushed away, quietly plotting to worm its way out. Those of us who saw the coming tide, in some form, got largely ignored as radicals getting mad about nothing. Honestly, little has changed.
