The Inconstant Dribble of Non-Information

[SpankWustler]

Somebody could translate the extraordinarily weird personal blog stuff that Fujito posts on the Japanese forums from time to time, maybe when there's not much else to post on the English forums, depending on how the staff is arranged?

It wouldn't be terribly productive but it would be fun. I think the cultural references being totally out of any recognizable context would just make those posts funnier and the guy deserves as large an audience as he can get.

[Yinnyth]

So I suppose to answer your question in short, the way to fix the problem is to have reps be more chatty on the forums, yes, but not with small talk or anything like that, but with more frequent responses to our questions. If we got more information on subjects, if we got more descriptive responses, and if we had some way of talking back and fourth with them about things rather than getting a singular response, I think people would be much happier with it.

I must admit, that would be really nice if they could do that for us. FFXI is somewhat handicapped towards that end, however, so I can also understand why it would be so difficult for the reps to achieve. Small talk would be a piece of cake for them. Substantial information would be more difficult because the FFXI devs are pretty tight-lipped and also from another country.

So I think the best way to achieve this would be to convince the devs to be a little more forthcoming with information instead of keeping it all to themselves and leaving us to figure out the details when the time comes.

The second big thing that should change to achieve that end should be a reliable system for the forum reps to send questions to the devs themselves. I'm not sure how they run that sort of thing, but I honestly think there should be a weekly system where the reps send the devs a list of questions/requests every Wednesday, and the devs answer those questions before the next batch of questions arrives on next Wednesday. Then the reps would just get the replies translated and posted for Thursday, and we'd have a reliable line of communication.

[Xerius]

So what's the fix for this problem then? They can't say "yes" to these things because that would be a lie most of the time. People already accuse SE of being asleep at the wheel as far as relations with their English customers go, so if the reps stayed silent, those accusations would only get worse.

Is the fix to have the reps be more chatty on these forums? Engaging in small talk with the playerbase?

Well, honestly if they say "no" a little more than "due to technical limitations" would be nice. Maybe a bit about why it interferes with the current build. I'm not saying a complete breakdown of the code that's used but something that feels more personal. Also, as was stated earlier a lot of the SoA information has come from third party sources or the FFXI main page. This should be the second place it should be posted in all languages after the main site. More information about the going-ons of the test server would be nice for those of us who can't go on it or don't have any interest in going on but are still curious of what's going on. And honestly I think that they should set aside time in the roadmap for player driven projects. I mean I know they can't implement all the ideas on the forum but the point of the test server was to test things live without having any bugs or exploits being able to be used on the main server. Instead they've been testing the new 2 hour abilities for about 6 months now.