Is there a community management team?

[VerdeLuck]

Journalists and content creators often ask questions in interviews that the community care about. Not always, but sometimes they do and some of them actually ask useful questions and even make suggestions or present ideas within those questions.

A time when content creators especially get to interview them is right before the media tour and the Job Actions Trailer. Content creators in particular are more in tune with issues in the game than casual journalists so the questions are usually much more useful.

That's entirely the problem is all feedback being filtered through content creators and journalists. They are not getting what the community is saying or feeling, only what filters through people who have an agenda of their own.
Streamers are going to ask a bunch of questions about Bozja/Eureka equivalents and increasing grinds because it serves their interest, no mattter what the community sentiment is, because having super long, grindy content extends their ability to play FFXIV for 8-12 hours a day for views.
Content creators who don't play Viera/Hroth aren't going to ask or push about the topic. Content Creators who don't fish aren't going to ask about fish quality of life, streamers who only raid are just going to ask about getting more ultimate content, etc.

It's an entirely flawed way of doing things because now you're not getting feedback, you're getting the biased slant of feedback that a streamer or journalist wants to ask you about. It's always been a part of the media tour that SE basically picks their chosen known quantities to lob softball questions at Yoshi-p but in the past people thought they actually paid attention to other discussion channels to get the feedback from real players. Yoshi-p says to discuss things on here if you want them to be seen, but they don't even seem to be seen. We have a 280+ page thread complaining about viera and hroth hair and headgear that doesn't seem to be heard since they KEEP releasing new rewards that those races can't use, and from the DT previews, those races can't use the AF gear headgear for most jobs. Ping and connectivity issues in NA have been a problem for a literal decade and they don't even seem to know about it because they don't read feedback from here.

[DPZ2]

That's entirely the problem is all feedback being filtered through content creators and journalists. They are not getting what the community is saying or feeling, only what filters through people who have an agenda of their own."

Written by someone with their own agenda. People write about things in the game because they don't like X, want more of Y, and, at times, want to be contrary as heck.

Writers here complain about X, let's use "the lack of Bozja-like content this expansion". In the previous expansion that complaint was "the lack of Deep Dungeon content this expansion". Others say "I don't care for Bozja/Deep Dungeon content". None acknowledge the fact that the Deep Dungeon contingent complained in ShadowBringers, and SE decided to put that back in and skip another Bozja.

What none appear to acknowledge is that complaints have at least a two-year turnaround, as that's typically when a new expansion hits. The direction of this game's patch content was decided in the year prior to the Endwalker release. You weren't suddenly going to get Bozja because you complained about it in 2022. For those who asked for Deep Dungeons, to complain about that content is to basically declare "if it doesn't match my specific desires, the content is dead to me", which ensures exactly zero Deep Dungeons in the future.

Face it. We are the influencers, whether we do so consciously or not. The forums can't force an immediate change in plans for the current expansion, nor should they.

And sentiment expressed about the game comes to Square Enix in a multitude of forms, not limited to these forums. Some are more forgiving than these forums. That feedback is as valid as what we read here.

[VerdeLuck]

Written by someone with their own agenda. People write about things in the game because they don't like X, want more of Y, and, at times, want to be contrary as heck.
Face it. We are the influencers, whether we do so consciously or not. The forums can't force an immediate change in plans for the current expansion, nor should they.

And sentiment expressed about the game comes to Square Enix in a multitude of forms, not limited to these forums. Some are more forgiving than these forums. That feedback is as valid as what we read here.

We are not the influencers and I do not expect every single post and poster to be taken seriously. What I expect is that someone from SE reads the forums every other day and gets a vibe of the direction of where things are trending. The fact that there is a 280+ page thread on viera and hroth headgear and hair with hundreds of posters complaining about it, and there's not any kind of response or action on it is dumb. Having a huge long megathread that encompasses thousands of posts of people upset about the issue should communicate pretty clearly where the community stands on it, and it's the eaisest to show where the cracks are other than the ping and connectivity issues that have plagued the NA part of this game for a decade.

It's feedback that for 4 years now, and 2 years pretty intensely, the players have been communicating that they want to be able to use the AF gear, raid rewards, tome rewards, shop rewards, etc on every character regardless of race. It has been such a huge amount of feedback on the EN side from Reddit, Twitter replies to SE posts, on the Forums here.
It is literally impossible to ignore that there is a large sentiment about this from players who play these races and not just the bias of a few players. Is anything done about it? not reallly! That's the issue is you can play by all the rules the posters say here, you can be clear, honest, and concise with your feedback, you can make megathreads to communicate what you want and have hundreds of others voice the same thing, but there's no one home. No one is communicating this up the chain if you aren't a streamer or content creator, or I guess if Yoshida experiences it himself like is the case with the RMT ads.