The Inconstant Dribble of Non-Information

[Xerius]

I love the forums as much as anyone else and I do very much appreciate the characters we have on the dev team and translation team. These forums are here to facilitate information letting between the consumers and the developers. They're a gate into the minds of the community and should be used as such.

However, at least on the English forums, the information we get is sparse to say the least and the few dev replies we do get in a week follow a very similar format. "While this would be a great addition to the game. Due to technical limitations this would be very hard to implement." It's very disheartening when I log on to the forums and check for new dev posts and all I see are replies to forum posts that almost look like this over and over and over.

I understand that the developers are busy with the upcoming release of Seekers of Adoulin and probably even beyond but why waste time telling us what you can't put in the game. These forums are meant to spread good ideas not to bring them to a grinding halt.

[Demon6324236]

I understand that the developers are busy with the upcoming release of Seekers of Adoulin and probably even beyond but why waste time telling us what you can't put in the game. These forums are meant to spread good ideas not to bring them to a grinding halt.Many people including myself would rather a response to the thread than to get no response and lead us to believe we are being ignored. I suppose though that is a double edged sword, either we get told no, and are disappointed, or are told nothing, and believe we are being ignored out right.

[Ziyyigo-Tipyigo]

But what about something other than a response? For example, why are third-party sites still a more reliable source of information on Seekers of Adoulin than these official forums?

[Xerius]

Many people including myself would rather a response to the thread than to get no response and lead us to believe we are being ignored. I suppose though that is a double edged sword, either we get told no, and are disappointed, or are told nothing, and believe we are being ignored out right.

I'm not saying that they shouldn't respond to threads that have ideas that can't or won't be implemented but they seem to exclusively reply to threads like these.

[SpankWustler]

It's easier to say what's impossible than to say what can be done, generally. The Community Bros might even be able to confirm that some things aren't possible even without sending something down the line to the Development Bros.

If somebody asks me to fly by flapping my wings and emitting a jet engine-like force from my butt, I can tell them outright that isn't going to happen. Probably for the best, because I'd be the worse superhero ever.

If some asks me to fix a car, I'd have to look into that before giving an answer. Is the car on fire? Does it just have a slipped belt? Did somebody vomit up blue raspberry vodka and hot wing detritus all over the backseat and the person asking for repairs just doesn't know the difference between "fix" and "clean vomit off of"? Is the car a 2010 Cloudsplitter designed by a deranged madman who purposefully made the car to burst into flames at 26 MPH and murder entire families?

[Yinnyth]

I'm not saying that they shouldn't respond to threads that have ideas that can't or won't be implemented but they seem to exclusively reply to threads like these.
How can a rep reply "yes, we'll implement that immediately" to an idea when the company actually has no plans to implement it? We see that on the forums so often because there are more ideas than there are resources to implement the ideas.

You may as well be lamenting the fact that your bank continually turns down your loan applications for a trillion dollars instead of staying completely silent and leaving their decision a "mystery" until later.

I get the feeling your issue is not what is said by the reps, it's what's done by the devs. You're not upset at the guy who writes you the letter saying your loan was denied. You're upset at the fact your bank can't afford to loan you that much. Forgive me if my observations are incorrect.

[Xerius]

I get the feeling your issue is not what is said by the reps, it's what's done by the devs. You're not upset at the guy who writes you the letter saying your loan was denied. You're upset at the fact your bank can't afford to loan you that much. Forgive me if my observations are incorrect.

Let me clarify this, I'm not upset with the devs or the reps. I'm not upset at all lol. You should go take a look at almost any other MMO's forum to get a glance at what I'm talking about. Eve Online is a game that's been out for almost as long as this game and it's reps are magnificent. My problem with the forums here is partly to do with the fact that all of the replies we get are all copy+paste "I'm sorry we can't do that" but it's actually more to do with the fact that we'll go 3 or 4 days without any post and then you log in to see 1 new dev post and it's just them saying we can't implement a cut-scene theater or whatever.

[Raucent]

True, compare these forums to League of Legends Forums, the Mods there are far more willing to actually respond to players versus what seems very likely to be CTRL+C/ CTRL+V responses to anything we ask about i.e the post about the Beetles backwards leg we get a GM response asking what our graphics etc are, when it is not a user side issue.

[Yinnyth]

but it's actually more to do with the fact that we'll go 3 or 4 days without any post and then you log in to see 1 new dev post and it's just them saying we can't implement a cut-scene theater or whatever.

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?

[Demon6324236]

Small talk, not really necessary, but more informative. They have threads they make themselves which ask the player base things, which they themselves respond to once or twice, addressing few if any things that we say. An instance, the item thread, many people said how they would like some items changed, how many times have we had a rep come back with info about those items? How about for the 2-hour thread, they were at a time talking to us and updating us quite a bit, but now, silence, we never got feedback on individual ideas, only them jumping ahead. It would have been nice if at some point they addressed why the RDM idea was rejected, and they had to go make an entirely new idea which everyone hated.

We often just get things thrown at us with little warning or reason, it would be nice if we had the reps talking to us a bit more, keeping us more informed and allowing us responses to our feedback. We have many threads pop up with ideas for adjustments to jobs that go without response as though SE ignored them. Now I'm not asking or saying they should answer every single one, after all, many are doubles of previous threads or ideas, but many threads do get attention, and it feels wrong that we never get a response to them. Some cases involve jobs which are just not useful, jobs like RDM, where there are suggestions which pop up all the time, while getting no response from the reps, or jobs like SMN, which is used for a single reason, and while people ask for adjustments to fix its issues, SE says nothing.

In some cases, we come up with ideas, and are given a very blank statement of simply, no. We have no reasoning behind the no, nothing descriptive at least, for instance we can be told an idea we offer is over powered, and could cause balance issues for a job, but without any reasoning behind the issues it could cause. I think the player base would be much happier if we had a more responsive community team, which talked to us a bit more frequently with details like these, so we could be told what the problems are with our requests, and so we could come up with new ideas to work around it. Instead of that though, currently we get a single response to a thread at best, if we get any other official response in the thread past that it is usually finished by locking it with that response, in some cases thats good because it gets off topic, in others it simply feels like they locked it because they did not want to deal with the subject. For example the thread from months ago involving the storage slip for non-augmented relic+2 gear.

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.

[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.