Normalize criticism

[Shougun]

Definitely one of my pet peeves when I see feedback shutdown. A recent example might be necro / dark job desires, where I often saw people go into threads and tell the OP it's not possible or never going to happen- and certainly "literally necromancer" is unlikely to happen, I agree, but rather than allow the person to describe what about necromancer or what about a dark job attracted them they were often just told "n o". That just being of many examples where some players had determined for SE what SE could and couldn't do and ended up being off the mark. In terms of quality feedback it's far more valuable for SE to know what people want even if SE has no intention to do exactly what is said, especially since that because in the event they like feedback there is still a high chance they're going to be 'inspired' by it rather than directly copy paste it. Like people will often play accountant on the forum to say something can't be done because of budget, that they somehow know what Yoshida has calculated and allocated for.

SE knows what's going to absolutely murder the lore, SE knows what it can and can't do with it's resources, SE doesn't need people being overly active on that side of the fence. I would add there is a difference from "n o" / "can't happen" to "that's unlikely to happen because "xyz"", and even better "that's probably not going to happen but these ideas very like what you wanted I think could, what do you think?" - I really like when I see people help better organize and foster growth and or try to understand / clarify a concept, a lot of people do this, so I'm not narrowing it down to just one person only, but I've seen "Itme" do it a lot so I wanted to give them a shout out for that effort.

Unrelated to shut down and so I don't want to misconstrue it under shutting down, and so is valid, is just expressing desires different than the person (like if someone said make ultimate unsync able and have echo, another saying "please no!" is not shutting down as much as expressing counter desires, as our desires naturally can impact others). There is definitely nuisance there, and I've seen many kind individuals go through all of those different shades- so it's not like "you're a bad person if you did x" but.. really gets my metaphorical hair on end to see certain conversations hit by some of the worst variants of sticky conversation slag for reasons that are, imo, effectively either meaningless or not for them to decide in the slightest (often relates to players speaking on SE's behalf, specifically for things they've no ability to reference, bit different if they're like "here's an interview that literally says no dating your moogles"). . Seems like an anthesis action to the purpose of the forums (an opportunity for SE to have insight in the mind of the players).

Feedback, imo, is the holy grail purpose of the forums. Must protect the feedback! lol. With some shifts depending on specific areas, like new player help or lore forum.

I would add I think most people, most of the time in the forums, do well, while I might say this is a pet peeve I don't feel it happens all that often, of course with our own special moments as people (sometimes there's just a bad day for a person), and in general this is one of the better places I think for feedback. I've seen WoW forums, not that I visit often, and they just kind of scare me lol. Reddit has a lot of neat features but in terms of discussion and feedback I've always put it a bit low, the added element of downvoting empowers a lot of flavor of the moment wild swings and general negative behavior.

Unfortunately for the devs ideas and negative feedback will be more common, as nature of people- people don't really comment frequently on what's going well, so that's a bit sad. Definitely don't forget to comment on things you liked lol.