Debate this: Community Rep Forum Involvement

[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?

[ExKage]

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.

This is probably the biggest thing.

[The_NPC]

"I did not understand a single word you said. Try speaking american, it's the only language I understand

YuGiOh: The abridged series... at anyrate I just think the "Host" language of any games companies forums will usually always be monitored & responded to more often than "Foreign" language Forum sections (as somone mentioned Blizzard has this same thing just reveresed) so as Square-enix is a Japan based company the JAP forums section being replyed to & watched over more seams right to me. Its not a they are more right then us, even if they can be, just more sticking to their cultural circle as its more familiar while respecting the potential differences a different cultural circle may have (Hence why our Moderators are from Square-enix's ENG team as they "Should" have a better understanding of most English speaking culture's & styles)

[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.

[ReplicaX]

The other issue is the Forum Rules are not enforced on a consistent basis.

Many of us that have been on these forums or ones prior for a longtime have seen users banned for little things, yet there are users consistently breaking rules on a daily basis without any actions. Many which are not "little things".

Certain users are literally record players going into threads unrelated just to post their agenda everywhere as well. Thinking the Dev Team will notice them when that is simply not the case.

In short: Many English users abuse the forums, yet SE doesn't enforce their own rules enough to counter this abuse. Which requires manpower as well.

[sarehptar]

My biggest concern with this is what happens when the 10+ threads on one subject get merged into a super thread... I don't have time to sit there and read through 100+ pages on a thread looking for dev responses or worthwhile additions.

Even if it is annoying to have 10 different threads on the same subject, shorter threads are easier to get through faster, so our constant topic bloat has something like a benefit, at least...

[Khaidal]

I don't think we need more regulation. I think people need to realize the forums aren't their personal blogs, and that their opinion isn't so special/different that they need to create a brand new topic for a discussion currently in progress. For example, today someone decided to make another WHM complaint thread when there's already 2-3 on the front page.

[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.