Quote Originally Posted by axetastic View Post
Making things better isn't astroturfing.
The only way that sentence isn't nonsense is if you have no idea what astroturfing is, in this context.
Astroturfing is a strategy for corrupting a feedback process, one commonly employed in politics.
Whether someone employing it makes things better or worse depends and is usually highly subjective.
Some people consider such corruption of a process always bad.
Others think the ends justifies the means -- but then, they often think any means justify their ends, but that other people's ends never justify any means at all.

It's amusing, in a dark way, to watch the "fix housing" advocates with their grand sweeping proposals, because there is no chance at all that any of those proposals would be implemented before patch 7.1, over two years from now, if ever. For that reason, all these complaints will just be filed away, probably to never be looked at again.

Oh, but SE shouldn't ignore customer feedback, people say. Nonsense.

Customers are in general selfish and ignorant: they know only what they want, and it's always more for less, and they don't know the effort required to provide what they want, or whether it will actually improve the game's financials. They often tend to act like little side games the developers threw in to give them something to do between content releases are really important to the game, and its success, when they aren't. And they naturally congregate into echo chambers, becoming more and more strident and less and less relevant to the rest of the player base.

Accordingly, the best strategy is often to usually ignore your customers ... but pretend you don't.
And with that in mind, I give you: the FFXIV English forums.