Where are the NA Community Devs? :(

[Vahlnir]

SE gotta cut costs somewhere lol

Especially since they can't stop shooting themselves in the foot. I'm getting pre-ARR vibes when they were just as big of a mess. A reckoning will happen sooner or later.

[Palladiamors]

Especially since they can't stop shooting themselves in the foot. I'm getting pre-ARR vibes when they were just as big of a mess. A reckoning will happen sooner or later.

This. Its all sliding that way and people just don't want to realize it. I've been on sinking MMO's before and this attitude of "It can't happen to us!" occurs every time. I don't say this out of any sort of malice, I LOVE XIV and I want it to do well but the quality is slipping more and more. We aren't at, say, Warlords of Draenor levels of slipping yet but we're sitting around Catacylsm levels. Having MMO's devolve to the point I no longer enjoy them is not a good feeling and I'd much, MUCH rather something as close to my heart as XIV just get better instead of having people be in denial about its condition right up until its downfall.

[Jeeqbit]

SE gotta cut costs somewhere lol

It's not about cutting costs, because they still have jobs, their job just has a different focus than some people here would like. They also usually have jobs available for these things in all regions but don't seem to always find suitable people.

They can gather feedback, but if they actually respond to the people here it's opening a pandora's box that becomes a huge time sink. They used to respond to bug reports as well and they stopped. It's just not worth going down the rabbit hole of trying to reason with people here, who are full of hot takes that, much of the time, are uninformed of all the facts SE would prefer you to take into account. I don't necessarily talk about regulars here either. We get people who come to the forums for the first time and post their 5 minute hot take that doesn't consider any statistics, data or anything and then never visit again.

You know which people aren't uninformed and overly inconsiderate? Content creators - particularly ones like MrHappy. And guess what, the community team works with them, invites them to the media tour and gives them plane tickets to fan fests and offers interview time with Yoshi-P. They can actually engage with someone who informs themselves, keeps an open minded and doesn't just throw out hot takes all the time.

But if you would like a better understanding of how feedback is gathered you can see the blog post on it https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/blog/003178.html

On the bright side though, outside of the forums the developers do a pretty good job with communicating via live letters

This is a point we should remember. We get two live letters per patch that involve us watching Yoshi-P, for around 3 hours, casually tell us almost everything that wouldn't completely spoil the story or all the mechanics of new fights and the reasons for every change, and he has adapted to reacting to stream chat sometimes as well.

He also does more interviews than any game developer I've ever seen. When he goes to events like gamescom or E3 he will spend 2 days doing around 50 interviews and he occasionally takes email ones as well.

[Bunnycake]

I'm sure they're all

[Takamorisan]

I don't expect then to go post in every thread tehee we are here. But at the same time would be cool to know what data got collected from all places be twitter, reddit and so on, and what is the consensus and give us an insight.
Because the current state of the forums don't inspire much confidence that they are collecting any feedback or have any desire to communicate with us. They are just doing the bare minimum to not devolve into 4chan and have people posting porn and racist slurs.

[PeaTearGriffin]

Square Enix doesn't want to pay community reps or mods a fair salary.

[Heroman3003]

The english forum moderators/Community Managers exist. They just don't speak to the community of the forums specifically, only through various other outlets. Honestly, looking at state of just General Discussion, its perfectly understandable why, really.

[TheGrimace]

Kinda seems like a "chicken or the egg" scenario, frankly.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Square Enix doesn't want to pay community reps or mods a fair salary.

They certainly couldn't pay me enough to herd this place.

[Vahlnir]

Honestly, looking at state of just General Discussion, its perfectly understandable why, really.

You are not necessarily wrong, but this place is also a nightmare of their making since they give us nothing but radio silence. Situations are permitted to fester far longer than they should.