The Official Forums is an EXTREMELY poor example of a "Good Community"

[Zaniel]

I didn't read 11 pages of replies but this forum is EXTREMELY small compared to other MMOs I have played, even ones with much smaller playerbases. If you read WoW's forums or even a smaller game like Warframe you will hardly see the same people posting twice (other than a few regular trolls). Here? Literally every post is one of the "usual suspects" (on any particular side of a viewpoint).

When you get small population samples like this, the people posting tend to be extremists in a general sense and so views are condensed right down to the far ends of each limit of the bell curve. Just picking numbers out of the air in somewhere like WoW you have 1% of the population posting and 99% ignoring the forums and that's already super concentrated for opinions, then you come here and its like 0.01% posting and 99.99% just playing the game. There is no way that is conducive to broad-based, population representative discourse, in fact I would pretty say every single OP in this forum holds extreme or generally unrepresentative views (regardless of topic or side).

[Amenara]

I didn't read 11 pages of replies but this forum is EXTREMELY small compared to other MMOs I have played, even ones with much smaller playerbases. If you read WoW's forums or even a smaller game like Warframe you will hardly see the same people posting twice (other than a few regular trolls). Here? Literally every post is one of the "usual suspects" (on any particular side of a viewpoint).

When you get small population samples like this, the people posting tend to be extremists in a general sense and so views are condensed right down to the far ends of each limit of the bell curve. Just picking numbers out of the air in somewhere like WoW you have 1% of the population posting and 99% ignoring the forums and that's already super concentrated for opinions, then you come here and its like 0.01% posting and 99.99% just playing the game. There is no way that is conducive to broad-based, population representative discourse, in fact I would pretty say every single OP in this forum holds extreme or generally unrepresentative views (regardless of topic or side).

To be fair, there is an actual shot (albeit extremely small) that a blue will respond to your topic if it is a worthwhile discussion on the WoW forums. I'd imagine the FF14 forums would be a bit more popular if there was any semblance of SE caring about our opinions at all here.

[Zaniel]

To be fair, there is an actual shot (albeit extremely small) that a blue will respond to your topic if it is a worthwhile discussion on the WoW forums. I'd imagine the FF14 forums would be a bit more popular if there was any semblance of SE caring about our opinions at all here.

That's sort of a chicken/egg problem. If the forums are extremist and/or unrepresentative then the devs have no real reason to view them. Which came first? Dunno, but it's the end-state in which it currently resides.