Selfishness and people not being willing to give other people the time of day let alone teach them is not a FF14 unique issue. It is a modern MMO issue. GW2 has it when you set foot into Strikes/Fractals/SPvP. WoW has it when you pug M+ or RBGs or arenas. MOBAs have it. Overwatch has it. And so on.
The issue isn't a lack of sharing information or teaching, it's the unwillingness to learn or want to do effort.
Games like OW and MOBAs have people who all want to win. Will some of them chimp out and lose their minds, blame others, etc? Yeah, absolutely.
But you won't find people (who aren't griefing/trolling) who are just running around the spawn area doing nothing and having the rest of the team chide you for asking what the hell they are doing. I get that
a lot in XIV to the point I don't bother saying shit anymore.
People gave a hoot about each other in Vanilla WoW and FF11 because the game was hard. You had to spend time forming a party, stock up on supplies (expensive!), and hike across the world to reach the dungeon. There was a time and monetary commitment, and in FF11's case there was exp loss on death. So you really, really wanted to do your best and make this run succeed. And when the run was over, you added each other as friends because you wanted to find good, committed people to play this game with. Before you knew it, you are forming guilds. This was also pre-megaserver days, so you would be seeing the same faces in your level bracket, and you weren't going to be a bad actor because word spread fasts and there are only so many people to party with and you don't want those doors closed.
There are grains of truth to this, but you also had a lot of cutthroat behaviour amongst the various guilds (eg, Kazzak, Azuregos, the Emerald Dragons,), strats and details being shared, camps for things like certain enchants being on lockdown, etc. Similar shit in EQ and 11 where uberguilds would lock down older content to deny lesser groups the chance to get in. Running trains of mobs on people trying to prep for certain encounters, etc.
The idea of this one big happy jolly community is rose colored glasses, IMO. You had shitters who would still get groups because they had mezzes, or were a healer, or whatever. You had people who were ninja looters or griefers who still got groups or were insulated because they were in a guild. Johnny Retard the level 13 WAR/WHM in Valkurm Dunes wasn't getting a permanent mark on his social credit score, but you could say he was being garbage and boot him from the party instead of it being a fucking production and the e-wife throwing a hissy fit or whatever.
There was some of what you're describing, but you had to do some real hinky shit to get the blackballing you're talking about, and even then the person in question would either have friends, or people who didn't care, or folks who couldn't be assed to look into a name change or whatever. Or you'd be some poor DPS who has been sitting 'LFM healer Sunken Temple' for the last 40 minutes and some known shitter offers and you're willing to take that risk because you
really want to do the dungeon.
With modern MMOs, you can reach level cap having never made a friend, because you didn't need one. You can just hit that button to be automatically matched with randos who you will never see again. The megaserver system means that you will never run out of people to run with no matter how bad of an actor you are. So there is no incentive to befriend other random people. In WoW, there has been a gradual exodus over the years of M+ players from the pugging pool to their private friend groups, people who will only PM each other and run with each other and are invisible to the rest of the M+ population, which proportionally is left with a higher and higher amount of selfish players who berate each other and desert and brick keys at the drop of a hat.
Yeah, a lot of what you're describing is what happened 'back in the day', just with guilds instead of Discord groups or whatever.
The thing that's changed in my experience has been people who aren't receptive or wanting to learn/improve and the larger community essentially condoning it, at least in XIV. I can't speak for a lot of other modern MMOs.
