Debate this: Community Rep Forum Involvement

[SenorPatty]

In line with MomomiMomi - also adding our forum is not only spiriting that freedom sense but that we also have a /massively/ more diverse culture pool meaning we will more often not see eye to eye. It would be difficult for us to conform even if we wanted to... where to start the line itself would be confusing lol.

Would be nice to see our community leaders more often though. I'm sure they have a lot of hoops to get through but if we could lower / make easier / more often that would be cool.

That's a really good point.

Now I'm torn lol.

On one side, I like that our opinions aren't swept under another's rug, agreeable ones or not.

On the other hand, it'd be nice if community reps could more involved, not just on an organizational scale but also on a interpersonal one.

(Insert something about having my cake and eating it too here)

I can't say for sure, but I think our reps are lower on the totem pole, so to speak. They have less access to the devs and therefore less ability to answer questions and engage with the community.

And we have a lot of inane threads that probably drive them nuts. They'd have to wade through a lot of garbage to find things worth responding to. And any post they make is like a shining beacon on a thread that drives activity into it and probably gives them even more work to do.

I keep thinking of those movies scenes where everyone's trapped in a dark cave/hole with hostile people then suddenly, this ray of light pops from above ground and everyone scrambles for it.

[Kosmos992k]

In line with MomomiMomi - also adding our forum is not only spiriting that freedom sense but that we also have a /massively/ more diverse culture pool meaning we will more often not see eye to eye. It would be difficult for us to conform even if we wanted to... where to start the line itself would be confusing lol.

Would be nice to see our community leaders more often though. I'm sure they have a lot of hoops to get through but if we could lower / make easier / more often that would be cool.

I think it's a classic contrast between the pronounced individualism of North Americans vs the more interdependent collectivism of other cultures. Individuals care less about the opinions and feelings of others than they do their own, and collectivist a care more about the community and those around them. The net result is that highly individualistic cultures are louder and more contentious than collectivist cultures.

[Kingmanath]

French section is easier to moderate, less topics

[Texa]

I don't think anyone with harsh and mean spirited things to say would vent it out in the Japanese forum on their side of things. That's what 2ch is for. If you want actual dirt you have to check stuff like http://hakkisi.blog.fc2.com/ . They're going to be civil with stuff that actually has their name attached to it.

As for the community rep thing, I think people would get really angry if they attempted to manage things anymore than they already do. Knowing my fellow Americans people would start yelling censorship and nanny-state micromanagement. If people start completely flooding general with multiple thread about the same thing like the ping issue then yes we do need moderated thread consolidation. But generally people get ruffled about any minor change here for a few days and move on after a while.

[JunseiKei]

I can't say for sure, but I think our reps are lower on the totem pole, so to speak. They have less access to the devs and therefore less ability to answer questions and engage with the community.

And we have a lot of inane threads that probably drive them nuts. They'd have to wade through a lot of garbage to find things worth responding to. And any post they make is like a shining beacon on a thread that drives activity into it and probably gives them even more work to do.

As for the community rep thing, I think people would get really angry if they attempted to manage things anymore than they already do. Knowing my fellow Americans people would start yelling censorship and nanny-state micromanagement. If people start completely flooding general with multiple thread about the same thing like the ping issue then yes we do need moderated thread consolidation. But generally people get ruffled about any minor change here for a few days and move on after a while.

Pretty much, these two things, too. Again, back when I worked as an in-game moderator, customer service rep and bug tester (it was kinda great trying to purposely make the game crash through legitimate means on a test servers ) for a completely different game (I absolutely need to state this every time before someone accuses me for posing as a staff member for FFXIV), there were lots of times were communication was an issue and we often did not have answers in timely fashions. When things don't get answered quickly or reasonably by some, flooding does tend to happen, especially if the community feels it's an important issue. This is then made further into an issue when the developers don't regard the situation as important, compounded with any foreign developers and having to wait on information to come as well as if releasing certain information is O.K.'d. Wading through the debris of what can be a disaster zone is not something that is appealing and often times information will come in the form as a completely different topic in a manner that does not address any one comment, but tries to be a cover-all of what will probably happen and the status of what is going on. Great example on our forums: Naoki Yoshida's Comment in Regard to Jump Potions Boost Potions

Again, going back to my days of moderating, I did also have the option of moderating the forums. I did not do this, and I had told my boss why, and he was pretty cool with it and understood. Basically, when we tried to interact with the forums often and speak with community on a regular basis (some people loved it because they felt they could talk with us directly), it became a cesspool of negativity because when you started to say things people don't like. Let's take disabling PvP chat as an example since this is still a hot topic for some, people resort to personally attacking. We had the option of stripping the ability to speak/post or simply banning the person, but sometimes that does compound the issue. Especially if the community, again, feels this is important, the poster has made some valid points (or not, I'm not being exclusive here), but said things in a way that violates the ToS or any "rights" the poster had, people tend to attack the staff as they feel they are justified and in the right.

There's a reason I don't moderate anymore. I won't ever moderate for anything I love. I can understand the grief the players put moderators through.

Basically, it's like working in retail. Once you work in retail, you understand what people that work that job go through. You try not to be that person who makes their day utterly miserable.

[KisaiTenshi]

Again, going back to my days of moderating, I did also have the option of moderating the forums. I did not do this, and I had told my boss why, and he was pretty cool with it and understood. Basically, when we tried to interact with the forums often and speak with community on a regular basis (some people loved it because they felt they could talk with us directly), it became a cesspool of negativity because when you started to say things people don't like. Let's take disabling PvP chat as an example since this is still a hot topic for some, people resort to personally attacking. We had the option of stripping the ability to speak/post or simply banning the person, but sometimes that does compound the issue. Especially if the community, again, feels this is important, the poster has made some valid points (or not, I'm not being exclusive here), but said things in a way that violates the ToS or any "rights" the poster had, people tend to attack the staff as they feel they are justified and in the right.

There's a reason I don't moderate anymore. I won't ever moderate for anything I love. I can understand the grief the players put moderators through.

Basically, it's like working in retail. Once you work in retail, you understand what people that work that job go through. You try not to be that person who makes their day utterly miserable.

I tell my clients that if they want forums, they hire a full time moderator for every single one of them, or they will do without, no volunteers. Due to the propensity for forums to go "abandoned" and fill up with spam and illegal content, there absolutely has to be someone available 24/7 to be able to delete such content. Otherwise the next step is being contacted by the data center operator or the the upstream ISP that "illegal content is being hosted by your IP address, you have 24 hours to resolve it or it will be null-routed", anyone hosted in the US will comply within 4 hours.

Unfortunately game-centric forums and art-centric forums are incredibly toxic, probably more so than retail. Retail you deal with a lot of people with entitlement issues, and after trying to be nice for about a week, you realize that these people grew up without any consequences for their bad behavior, so you might be the first person who told them "no" and didn't back down. Once you start moderating forums, it becomes something of a "well X did that and didn't get ninja-edited/edited/banned/ip-banned" escalation until you just ban everyone who mentions a certain keyword regardless of context.

Part of this mindset comes from the current generation of over-sharing on social media, and the kinds of bullies we have running in elections. So right now we are living in a state of "enabled hate" by willful ignorance.

However it's very clear that nobody is moderating the general forum, otherwise the amount of harassment and rudeness going on would be stopped in it's tracks, and there would not be a half dozen threads with the same argument going on in all of them. However Square-Enix has categorically ignored feedback from the English players in the past, ever since V1.0. It is not a new thing. Every game forum is like this, there is often only one person for the entire game moderating the forum, and they basically don't raise the banhammer for anything less than posting porn.

[LalaRu]

...Should we have Community Reps manage our threads a la Land of the Rising Sun style?...

Merged thread are usually hard to follow because the intersection of posts. I view the threads being merged more as a "please stop make new threads for same thing" alert, than "forum cleanness".

Forum modding here is at its best, mods are barely noticed other than some announcement they made, and this is a good thing. I don't see anything to change.

[Alleo]

I agree with Airget. People often talk like this NA forum is bad but this is an English forum thus people from all over the world will write down their opinion. I am from Germany yet I am barely in the German forum simply because there are way less people who talk about things and the chance is way bigger that moderators and SE staff will read something on the English forum. But with that you will have lots of people who do not have English as their main language which can lead to some confusing posts because of the language barrier. I am always kinda questioning my posts because I am afraid that people might misunderstand it or that it might come over as aggressive or something like that. With so many different cultures you will also have much more different views on things while on the Japanese forum you will have mostly Japanese players. And the Asian countries are known to be more about the group and not the individual.

But lets not forget that they at the same time have official black lists thus name shaming people on the internet and their reaction towards things like the 280 weapon was also way harsher than yours. They even wanted to kick people in other content if that person had such a weapon. They also were the ones that wanted Yoshida to go away after the housing fiasco. So its not like they are without criticism and anger too.

I would love if the community reps would show up more often. We do have bigger threads, for example the one about the butler and maid campaign that is over 160 pages long. We maybe had like five or so comments from some rep, so most of the time they stayed completely silent even though people had more than enough good reasons to be angry. Even with the new campaign these things stayed mostly in that thread yet we still got no answers. We also had that really long thread about Au Ra faces and horn styles that got barely any answers at all..so I am not surprised that people try to catch the attention by creating more than one topic, maybe even in the hope that if you discuss it often enough someone will have to answer it. Sadly they mostly just ignore it, delete posts that are not even attacking someone, or just closing and deleting topics..I know that there are enough threads that are only there to start a flame war..and its fine to delete those. Yet more than enough we have people being banned that are most of the time discussing fine and yet pure trolls still can create threads.

My wish would be: Let us feel like you read these threads, even if you cant give us more information or only some PR talk..its still better to read something like "nice idea/criticism we will direct it towards Yoshida", even if it might not change something, than getting no answer at all.

And I wish they would clean this forum up but in a fair way. Instead of deleting threads just merge them together. Take out pure trolls and give people warnings that are just creating threads to spite someone or to make fun of an actual discussion. Dont punish people that are normally posting fine and are just overdoing it once or twice. (Its strange how often you see someone getting banned or their post deleted when nothing bad was said, yet there are post that are outright insult people and that are either banned really really late or not at all)

This would be imo not an attack on the freedom of speech but more a way to have order in this forum. Just because you can say anything you want does not mean you can get away with it and I feel like they do that here inconsistently.

[Laerune]

Japan is a collectivist culture, whereas the United States is more individualistic. We should also take into account that this part of the forum is for all English speakers, so people who have English as their second or third language also come here. One forum is a clash of cultures and the other shares the same culture.

[Ama_Hamada]

I do not know but I like to see more rep involvement here. Like this:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...woldmap-revamp

How come we do not see them responding?