Hello, this is a question that's partly for the local community team we have (Bayohne/Camate/Rukkirii/Okipuit). I'm not sure if you guys are "allowed" at your jobs to post in response to us outside of the dev posts but if possible it'd be nice if some information could be given. I hope I don't offend anyone with this post because that's not really my intent.

I'm wondering if we could get some more information on how exactly the local community team gets to interact with the devs. Right now a lot of the time we get update information that's basically passed onto the English/French/German communities after it's first posted on the Japanese forums. While I understand that since obviously the devs are Japanese and thus the information can be more readily given in that language at speed, there's also been cases where JP players ask for things EN players don't really think about that gets answered to, then the translation has to be made in a new thread because there wasn't an existing thread that was close enough to that topic. This, by itself isn't actually a problem, the problem is that there's never been a case of the opposite, that is, something only EN players have asked for being responded to but then has to be posted in a new thread on the JP forums.

So the question is, is the extent of how you guys pass information onto the dev team basically just "collect posts, translate, then forward to dev team"? Because it just feels like this side of the coast isn't getting to have any input at all. Simply put, there's a lot of people that feel that posting here in any language other than Japanese means our opinions will never reach the dev team properly. It would be really nice if we could get some kind of monthly post from Ito himself, or some kind of direct posts from the dev team, or something to make us feel like our posts are actually being read, because while it can be frustrating to have the dev team say "no" to everything, it's worse if our opinions arn't being read in the first place, at all, because that just means we're wasting our time here.

By the way, I should note that I don't frequent the XIV forums, but I understand they do get updates far faster/more often, which makes sense since it's a newer game and all, but as far as I can tell the community team is actually allowed to directly ask questions to the dev team (recent example). So any issues in communication would likely be due to the XI developer side and little to do with the community team.