Not to be too rude but...

[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.

[Kiurai]

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.

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

[Jojoya]

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.

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.

[Aldora]

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.

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.

[Alleo]

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.

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..

[Enla]

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..

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.

[Iscah]

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.

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.