We need better comunication with the Community team

[KisaiTenshi]

A couple of responses to this.

(1) The community team gets paid to have thick skin. While I'm not condoning abusive language or the like, receiving criticism for a variety of little things is an objectively poor reason to wall off community outreach efforts. Housing is a terrific example; the development team, to this day, literally years after implementing Housing, has not managed to resolve player concerns. Not only has this surely cost SE subscriptions they might otherwise have kept, but they can't even find out how many - because there isn't any feedback process. Is this really the proper approach to take?

Square-Enix never listens to player feedback, even during beta tests, otherwise they would have not released V1.0 at all. While they do seem to listen to PR embarrassments, eventually, just go look at anything else they release for the PC. Buggy, ugly, and broken, and not even a "Sorry we will do better and fix it." Even the Mac Version of FFXIV, completely fumbled.

Either Square-Enix employs no beta testers, or their beta testers are afraid of actually reporting anything that might be seen as "this is a bad design", and can only report things like localization errors (which is in fact how most english-language versions of Japanese and Korean games are during beta tests.)

(2) We don't need an immediate plan from the developers, but we need to feel heard. Right now, many of us don't. There's absolutely no reason why SE cannot make intentional efforts to build a formalized feedback process so people at least feel like their opinions are being listened to.

This is a kind of millennial type of "I'm a snowflake, I'm important, I'm entitled to be heard" type of opinion that many people think their opinion matters to a large company. Reality check, unless you are helping their bottom line (eg MrHappy, MTQcapture on youtube) you will never have the ear of the developer.

If Square-Enix actually had active GM's and community management, there would be zero bots, and zero rude posts on the forums, but you can only throw so much staff at money-losing abuse-reduction. SE's solution for the forum was to limit how many posts you can make in X hours and how long you can make a message that people quickly figured out how to circumvent by immediately editing the post. Otherwise you wouldn't see so many fights on the forum about the same thing over and over.

As soon as you see how the sausage is made at a game company, you never want to play the game again. We're sitting here thinking maybe they have 30 GM's or so, it's more likely they have two.

https://support.na.square-enix.com/c...382&la=1&fty=2

This is what they are letting us give feedback on now. Bugs, Harassment, Copyright Infringement, and RMT. No "suggestions". Even on the forum, you only have "Bugs" and "Technical support", no suggestions.