Debate this: Community Rep Forum Involvement

[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.