So...Spontaneity...

[Tashan]

You respond by thinking like a developer / community manager not a player.

The developers do not play this game, at night they go home and relax with their family's. They also don't speak English as a first language, and most likely don't speak English at all. When you combine these two things you realize that the only way to get anything to a dev is through their PR team, in this case the community managers / organizers. Now CM/CO's aren't players either, their forum moderators who's assigned job is to be a go-between for the FFXI development team and the player base.

What you have to do is make a clean post explaining the situation and asking them to look into it. Don't use gamer jargon or slang, don't flame, yell, sigh, or use emoticons. Just be clean and polite. They'll notice, their paid to read the forums (but not every post of a 30+ page thread) and if there is enough positive feedback behind something they'll take the idea / concern to the developers. The devs will go over it during their daily / weekly meetings (or whatever schedule their PM has them on) and that will be that. Just look at the DRK forum, the idea's were so off base and the reaction so loud that the CM's brought it to the dev's who agreed to rethink some of their planned DRK update. Also Dev's don't have much time, their extremely busy, so keep things short and don't ask for complicated implementations.

The job of the Forum Community Manager's is to address this, not the players. They do and have played this game, which is why they've been chosen to fill this role.

It is our job to think like players, not like developers.

[saevel]

It is our job to think like players, not like developers.

And that is how you get exactly nothing done and why FFXI dev's were out of touch with the players.

And no CM's may have once been players, not their just reading forums and running back and forth between SE and the players. Or haven't you noticed one CM posting dozens of messages across just about all the job forums. That much traffic means they won't be reading 30+ page threads trying to decipher what a flaming / screaming / emoing fan base wants done.

Want to get a message to the dev's, make it was easy for the messenger as possible, else they'll just throw your request into file 13.