We need a community rep that interacts with the community

[SaitoHikari]

Speaking as someone who did act as a community rep of sorts for an official forum for a different MMO at one point (and also possessed forum moderation powers, short of outright banning people from the forums): It's a much harder task than you'd imagine.

As a community rep for that game, I was not hidden away, but I did sort of take it upon myself to act as an intermediary between the community and the localization team in ways that were admittedly beyond my scope (even going as far as to play in the Korean version to prepare the localization team for future content 4+ months in advance, as content was staggered throughout all the versions of the game in the world). Not really to the developers though - we couldn't tell if most suggestions we had in NA were lost to the ether, either due to the language barrier and/or the developers having a different set of values/priorities than the NA playerbase. Probably the latter, considering it was a Korean F2P game and the disastrous condition the game is in now.

More importantly, should a community rep make themselves public, a certain cult of personality begins to form around them, either assigned by the community itself or otherwise. They are no longer impartial the moment they become known. Doubly so if they actively played the game. People can and will try to worm their way into their good graces using whatever means possible, and really, really lash out the moment they come back with bad news. Another person who held a position like mine for that game had people manage to stalk her facebook and spam vulgar edited photos of herself all over the forums at one point. And all for what?

The localization team and developers usually aren't as blind as you'd think. Whether our concerns are high enough priority for them to do something about it, or they believe they know of something we don't that may allay our concerns in the long term, it's probably not something for us to know. Doubly so because of the language barrier and the NA playerbase likely having a different set of values than the native JP playerbase. After all, our community has proven time and time again that we do certainly value concepts like glamour and cosmetics more than the actual gameplay-related questions that actually do get addressed on JP-side.