This also happened in the past with XI as well. I played back in the day and it was very obvious a lot of the players never touched any other mmorpgs before and only got it because it had the FF label. FFXI fans were the laughingstock of the mmorpg community until WoW came out and took that title. I remember fans of other mmorpgs looking down on the FFXI community the same way a lot of people look down on FFXIV’s community today.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the biggest assholes in the FFXIV community were originally old school FFXI players who migrated over.
I admit, FFXI was my first (and last) MMORPG because of the Final Fantasy franchise, although I did play a few MUDs before that (which could be considered text-based forerunners to the MMORPG genre). I can't compare FFXI's community to other MMORPG communities for obvious reasons, but it had some hilariously and publicly stupid players back in the day who were basically lolcows before the term existed. (My favorite was that Rowina girl who consistently misspelled her ADD "attention defecite disorder" oblivious to the fact that she was only one letter away from shitting herself, and had frequent hilarious chimp outs.) Of course, the fact that FFXI uniquely made players all around the world speaking different languages play on the same server caused unique issues for the community as well. It did expose you to other country's lolcows, like that one arrogant French guy whose name I can't remember, the "50% of the time it works every time" guy. Which was funny, but you basically had three times as many asshats because you had three different regional groups (NA, JP, and EU); the ordinary players were just kind of there and you didn't interact much because of the language barrier, but the asshats were bot-claiming your NMs, stealing your Dynamis zones, and so on.
I tried FFXIV, but it was too WoW-ish for me to really love. The world and storyline weren't bad, but too many aspects of the gameplay felt overly artificial, contrived, and over-simplified, in contrast to the organic messiness of FFXI. Balance was greatly improved, but the cost was high. The itemization was so unbelievably bland and boring. I couldn't name a single piece of equipment of note that I ever earned because no such thing even exists. FFXIV's gear progression is a simple ladder going straight up, compared to FFXI's countless weird, unique items with specialized effects and uses that are a vast, sprawling shrub. FFXI's jobs felt more like professions that fantasy people actually did, where FFXIV's jobs are interchangeable components in a three-piece machine. FFXI's jobs keep every ability that they ever had, where FFXIV's jobs get completely overhauled with every expansion to the point where core gameplay mechanics like Tactical Points can just vanish one day. Elements and creature types are just lore with no significant gameplay effect. And so on. Still though the biggest problem was that I just don't have the time and obsessive focus to play MMORPGs like I used to.
