Not to be too rude but...

Does anyone know any active forum mods? Or any CMs? Like I know they do the feedback gathering and send it to the devs, but they react rather minimally I suppose? They pop in from time to time, but most introduce themselves and aren't seen much outside of bug reports and the like. I'm not saying they need to be here 24/7 answering every player concern because I doubt they'd have all the answers either but I think the occasional " We are sending 'x' feedback to the devs for consideration would be more than enough at least for me anyways. I think they do things rather well. But I know some people believe they don't communicate at all, and this might alleviate that notion. Sorry if it's a tad rant-y. Nothing against you CMs just wish you spoke alittle more on some pressing matters to the community is all.
:D

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Originally Posted by Kiurai

Does anyone know any active forum mods? Or any CMs? Like I know they do the feedback gathering and send it to the devs, but they react rather minimally I suppose? They pop in from time to time, but most introduce themselves and aren't seen much outside of bug reports and the like. I'm not saying they need to be here 24/7 answering every player concern because I doubt they'd have all the answers either but I think the occasional " We are sending 'x' feedback to the devs for consideration would be more than enough at least for me anyways. I think they do things rather well. But I know some people believe they don't communicate at all, and this might alleviate that notion. Sorry if it's a tad rant-y. Nothing against you CMs just wish you spoke alittle more on some pressing matters to the community is all.
:D

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given how people usually are these days on forums, especially gaming ones, I can see why they would avoid things like general all together. Aside from things like technical areas, they probably avoid them like the plague

They used to be a lot more active and interactive.

Honestly, I believe the community itself drove them off. A combination of bad behavior and being unable to let anything go and seeing every change as a perceived slight.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

They used to be a lot more active and interactive.

Honestly, I believe the community itself drove them off. A combination of bad behavior and being unable to let anything go and seeing every change as a perceived slight.

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I get that CMs are the community's lightning rods after all. If you give them a name and face to blame they'll strike it. But I don't think they should just never interact but that's just me lol

It's not optimal, and it leaves people unfulfilled until it may e gets addressed in a video...but I think this is better for them.
Cause look at these forums....if people had a direct line and got direct interaction, the poor guys would be constantly flooded with 'ideas' or someone complaining about 'something'
And if people think communication is bad now...whoo boy

They have all been transferred to the FF16 customer support team.

I've been wondering about this a lot myself.

I played the game way back in 2013, and have followed it since the days of 1.0, and I can say for absolute certain that dev/rep communication used to be miles ahead of what it is now. The forums feel like a lawless wasteland at this point.

Honestly, I'd even be okay with the reps just popping in to reaffirmed us "we're constantly reading and gauging player reactions, so keep posting even if we don't respond directly" but even that seems like a far-off dream at this point.

Haven't you seen Wreck-it-Ralph 2? Never read the comments.

Yea this forum is pretty wack.

it's like law enforcement on freeways. When everyone is speeding do you pull over the people driving too fast or do you pull over someone driving below the limit. Because most would pull over the latter since they're a bigger hazard to the majority that go faster than the limit.

Twisted I know, but the forums mods operate in a similar fashion. On a forum where everyone throws out mild unpleasantries and it occasionally riles something up does it warrant their attention? The answer is no because its the majority. I've seen mods ban folks from the forums for things that cross the line like lewd screencaps or derogatory language.

I personally picture the mod team as a small group of virtual ninjas; Ever present, but rarely spotted.

One other thing to consider is legal liability when responding to questions on these forums.

If I take your suggestion and put something new into a game, I am now setting myself up for legal action because I 'used your idea'. It's why writers don't read emails suggesting future plot lines.

At on point we had cms or mods post details and background for pvp changes, but even that has stopped.

New mods will introduce themselves and will then disappear into the aether and moderate/administrate from afar. You'll never hear from them again.

I forget that we even have them until a new mod introduces themselves, and then they too vanish into the void to be forgotten with the rest.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

They used to be a lot more active and interactive.

Honestly, I believe the community itself drove them off. A combination of bad behavior and being unable to let anything go and seeing every change as a perceived slight.

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I doubt it's the players as much as changing job duties as companies try to give them more to do instead of hiring additional staff. If FFXIV is like other games, the community team has other responsibilities than just gathering feedback from the forums. They also need to gather feedback from other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, coordinate local publicity and events, etc.

Also any time someone "official" appears in the forums, posters tend to start behaving in unusual ways, whether it's trying to curry favor or gain attention for their pet ideas. I used to watch the WoW forums with some amusement as a controversial topic would get limited discussoin until a Blue decided to post something. Suddenly a thread with 100 replies in 2 days would have 500 within 6 hours of the Blue post.

By keeping their distance, posters are more likely to offer more genuine feedback rather than just post in the thread because a CM had also posted.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

They used to be a lot more active and interactive.

Honestly, I believe the community itself drove them off. A combination of bad behavior and being unable to let anything go and seeing every change as a perceived slight.

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I agree with this. The Community Managers are still around and collect the information from the forums, which should be sent to the developers. However, they will usually reply, if they have something to share with us. The information that is given to us will have gone through several layers and formulated in a way which is approved by those layers.

By replying in a thread, saying "Thanks for the feedback on the subject. We have collected and forwarded your feedback to the development team, so that they are aware of the subject." will help getting recognition, but nowadays that's not enough for a community. They want to know when their voices will be heard and the issues have been resolved. However, not every issue will have an easy solution (even when the community feels like its easy enough to change), because they have to take a lot of things into consideration.

Can this be "fixed" in this way? Does this conflict with other systems we have in place? How many players does this affect? What is the impact of the issue and what is the impact of implementing a solution for it? Does this solve the issue for the general player base or a fraction of it? Does this still fit in our vision of the game, or our future plans? The list goes on...

The best thing we can do is keep on providing feedback. If the issue is pressing enough, even the Yoshi-p will write a comment / post explaining the situation and their plans for it.

One thing I wish works differently is the template they use when they move a thread to General Discussion. Some of those threads I see that are moved here leaves me confused as to why they can't help the thread creators.

CMs have nothing to gain and everything to lose from talking to the forums. They have no authority to answer any questions, and often no knowledge of future events. They are given things to say and authorize to pass on certain information. They can't come here and volunteer information or speak on behalf of SE whenever they feel like it.

Ask yourself if you would ever be a community manager for these forums if it required you to keep a constant public presence. It's basically the equivalent of a customer service desk.

Yes, it's a joke the forums are useless when you remember it's one of the very first thing Yoshda decided when he took the direction.
(or maybe it was already planned and he made it sound like it was his decision)

During 1.x, there was this "everything's possible" ambiance, so they could just answer to anything and every little question (and of course a lot of these small things "announced" got lost with time and never made it to the game). With 2.0, the game started to follow a very rigid template, thus the communication around it got rigid too (fanfest, live-letter, nothing more)

Another "problem" is the translation in 4 languages, they've been ostensibly limiting budget on translation in the game (less guildleves because it was too much text, and some quests don't have summary since stormblood)

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

They used to be a lot more active and interactive.

Honestly, I believe the community itself drove them off. A combination of bad behavior and being unable to let anything go and seeing every change as a perceived slight.

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Well its kinda their job isnt it? Also I barely remember that GMs themselves got badly attacked. Any slight was mostly against the devs. Heck if they maybe would be more active some of those really bad apples could have been banned. Instead of mostly letting them go and just ignoring everything.

Anyways you do need a thick skin and not take any feedback on a game forum so personal. It does exist for this after all even if some people overdo it but those could be banned..if someone was here to bann them.

And its not like they truly need to answer our questions either. Just take the more active threads and post a bit of a "we heard you and we will gather more of your posts to forward them to the devs. " Of course we will never know if that happens but at least its gives the feeling that someone is still there. How about all those troll threads that remain active for a long time including their OP? Again they dont need to engage with us, close it up with the last post being from them saying why they did that and then ban the OP if its truly a troll.

Look at the Viera thread. Some day it was suddenly gone without any notice why. Then it was there again without anyone knowing why..one little post could have done much. Like "We are cleaning this one up, dont worry it will be back soon" and then lock the thread and not just take it away completely.

There is so much more than just answering our questions that they could do. Yet other than some threads being deleted or moved you dont even know if they still exist or not..

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Originally Posted by Alleo

Well its kinda their job isnt it? Also I barely remember that GMs themselves got badly attacked. Any slight was mostly against the devs. Heck if they maybe would be more active some of those really bad apples could have been banned. Instead of mostly letting them go and just ignoring everything.

Anyways you do need a thick skin and not take any feedback on a game forum so personal. It does exist for this after all even if some people overdo it but those could be banned..if someone was here to bann them.

And its not like they truly need to answer our questions either. Just take the more active threads and post a bit of a "we heard you and we will gather more of your posts to forward them to the devs. " Of course we will never know if that happens but at least its gives the feeling that someone is still there. How about all those troll threads that remain active for a long time including their OP? Again they dont need to engage with us, close it up with the last post being from them saying why they did that and then ban the OP if its truly a troll.

Look at the Viera thread. Some day it was suddenly gone without any notice why. Then it was there again without anyone knowing why..one little post could have done much. Like "We are cleaning this one up, dont worry it will be back soon" and then lock the thread and not just take it away completely.

There is so much more than just answering our questions that they could do. Yet other than some threads being deleted or moved you dont even know if they still exist or not..

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Reminds me of the whole Otter fiasco honestly. Deserved or not I do think that that incident shows pretty handily that the mods often let situations get far too out of hand when a simple 'knock it off' warning would calm most of the shenanigans instantly. Nearly half the active posters in the General Discussion were temp banned while the people that inspired that memery with actual vitriol dodged their ban for another two weeks. It still boggles my mind.

Then again I question if their hands off approach isn't company policy at this point. The only time I ever see them posting with any consistency is in the feedback forum which is to be expected and when topics need to be moved to one section or another. If it was just a couple mods seeing themselves as above us rabble I think we'd still see them on occasion as opposed to the near radio silence we currently have. At this point I think it might be safe to say that there might be a company mandate to be more hands off at this point - though as we all know that was probably one of the worst solutions they could have implemented if that was the case.

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Originally Posted by Enla

Then again I question if their hands off approach isn't company policy at this point. The only time I ever see them posting with any consistency is in the feedback forum which is to be expected and when topics need to be moved to one section or another. If it was just a couple mods seeing themselves as above us rabble I think we'd still see them on occasion as opposed to the near radio silence we currently have. At this point I think it might be safe to say that there might be a company mandate to be more hands off at this point - though as we all know that was probably one of the worst solutions they could have implemented if that was the case.

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I highly suspect it is company policy being made by people several steps removed from the forum and with no idea of the practical impact of their decisions.

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Originally Posted by Kiurai

Does anyone know any active forum mods? Or any CMs? Like I know they do the feedback gathering and send it to the devs, but they react rather minimally I suppose? They pop in from time to time, but most introduce themselves and aren't seen much outside of bug reports and the like. I'm not saying they need to be here 24/7 answering every player concern because I doubt they'd have all the answers either but I think the occasional " We are sending 'x' feedback to the devs for consideration would be more than enough at least for me anyways. I think they do things rather well. But I know some people believe they don't communicate at all, and this might alleviate that notion. Sorry if it's a tad rant-y. Nothing against you CMs just wish you spoke alittle more on some pressing matters to the community is all.
:D

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they're probably helping with constructing the ff16 forums sadly

Mods do not exist or half the forum would have been banned a long time ago. Trust.