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Friday Fun Thread for January 23, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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It's far from perfect, but the big explosions in FFXIV I've seen are things like 'guild relationship problems' or 'rando loots the free company chest's gil stores', rather than the more standards Barrens chat or outright griefing. Even gameplay-focused pain points like someone pulling early on an S-rank or trying to sneak a newbie into an 'experienced' party aren't anywhere near as common as you'd expect compared to WoW, and casual play it's outright expected and player-enforced for people to be patient with 'suboptimal' play.

That said, I'm not sure how much in a result of the teaching -- though the number of times Bartle-style player archetypes show up in minor NPCs is pretty noteworthy -- so much as selection effects, Pavlov, and arguably Proteus Effect. If you put hundreds of hours into getting through the main story quest to current-game content (dozens of which are cutscenes!), you're going to be the type of person that wants to do that sort of gameplay. And for quite some time, that was really the only option. Even now, with paid level boosts and story skips, it's a non-trivial investment per character.

I'd also add that there are morals and explicit morals beyond the social ones. I don't think anyone could play GTNH, Factorio, Satisfactory, or even The Witness without seeing problems in the world as things to be solved, and it's as close to explicit as any Jonathon Blow moral could be with The Witness's true ending.