We need better comunication with the Community team

[Remedi]

Mm. Which is a valid point and hardly a 'conspiracy theory' like the poster before you suggests. Many businesses cut corners if it means making a profit. In Square Enix's case we can only offer up speculation, though.

Furthermore, the existence of bots has been a constant thing in the genre for...as long as MMO's have been around. Yet despite knowing how and where they operate there's no immediate action. One needs to seriously consider why a portion of the budget in any MMO isn't spent on hiring a 'squash squad' that identifies where and when bots will strike and eliminates them if they're caught out.

Instead, many players have expressed their frustration at reporting a bot and seeing them months later in the exact same spot. This isn't limited to FFXIV, it happens in other MMO's too. Now, some do get banned - but it's staggered and often quite some time after the damage to the economy is done. Then there's the dire situation in FFXIV's PvP with Frontlines being infested with them and causing higher queue times/lessened interest in the game mode as a consequence.

Problem is that the only real way of stopping bots from beign used is if the community itself ceases to use them, you can patch a bot to not work only for it to be working again the next day.
Also ppl should be more mindful of asking immediate actions against bots, because that could be used against normal ppl aswell. Don't ask for a witch hunt if you don't know exactly the possible consequences

[Stormfur]

I seem to remember reading that they wanted to do the Letter from the Producer leading up to 2.0, but it was received so well (despite their trepidation) that they continued doing it. I like those letters, but I wish they'd answer more of our long-standing questions and not just wave them off.

As best as I can piece together the situation with the community team, is that there are things they can and cannot say because development work is ongoing and ever changing. It's like trying to pick out one raindrop from a storm.

[Alleo]

And because some are bad means that they are right with not talking much at all? Most of us are not even talking about them having to appear in every single thread and talk about it or answer it. But they barely even post something when its a hotly discussed topic like Eureka or even things like housing. Yoshida may talk about some of it in some interviews or on some servers but these information would not even reach our ears if we did not have some nice people that would fan translate that to us which often will have some mistakes in that. They have their own forums. Why not use that and post more big Yoshida posts in them? The one big one about the change to the inventory was nice because we finally got one that explained why they did that..its just bad that this stuff often just happens after they release something or after its discussed a lot. (If they had given us a head up that they will change that with the next patch and included that post in it, we might have still discussed the change for abit but I am quite sure that most would have understood the reason for it)

If they dont know something for 100% then they could simply say that this might not be the end version of it. Or they could later openly talked that they have promised X but thanks to reason y we will get Z now. Them not even talking much about it before releasing something often hurts them. Maybe if they have shown us their ideas for Eureka our posts could have given them more ideas or showed them that certain parts are not that great. And honestly..they have lied before..(or gone back on their words) If you go and say something is different (like private and FC houses) and then its kinda the same but without certain FC stuff you are shooting yourself in your own foot. If you go and say that we will never have housing timer or fees to keep your house and then turn around and still do it...when you go and oversell your stuff without talking much in detail beforehand and let people down..well then its no wonder that you will get a lot of rage back. Communicating with us about that may have changed nothing..but imo there is a bigger chance that at least some things could have gone different..

If they are too afraid to talk about certain things because some small minority will react badly (which will happen anyway) then they are going at it the wrong way imo. Butts may be talked about sometimes but they are still not quite a hot topic. And if people are of the opinion that they are lazy thanks to that..well we have the freedom of speech here. So let them believe what they want to believe but dont keep quiete because of a couple of writers that are like that..because you will only hurt yourself (as in SE) and the other customers with your silence. (And people are already setting the forum on "fire" for some hot topics..imo it cant get worse than now..imo a lot of the rage and fire comes from the frustration of feeling that SE does not listen and that feeling comes from their silence and small informations we get)

[Vhailor]

imo a lot of the rage and fire comes from the frustration of feeling that SE does not listen and that feeling comes from their silence and small informations we get)

Couldn't agree more.

Also, this isn't helped in the slightest by SE's tendency to pull a mea culpa whenever an issue begins attracting bad press beyond the forums. Housing is a good example, as is 1.x. This gives the distinct impression that players should go out of their way to raise hell whenever something goes wrong, because if they can make enough of a stink for some outside site like Kotaku to publish about it, they'll get SE to listen. That's a very, very bad incentive to give to your own player base.

[Vstarstruck]

Not related to Solarra post which I agree but I feel like of late the thread has become more of a way to brood over perceived feelings of what the company does, which is why I said I was wary of surveys.
The fact that the company changed ways about housing or the braz/russian subs debacle should've been a victory for everyone yet this thread is saying that ppl in the forum were not heard. What if they both were heard?

not really, I point you to this:

Couldn't agree more.

Also, this isn't helped in the slightest by SE's tendency to pull a mea culpa whenever an issue begins attracting bad press beyond the forums. Housing is a good example, as is 1.x. This gives the distinct impression that players should go out of their way to raise hell whenever something goes wrong, because if they can make enough of a stink for some outside site like Kotaku to publish about it, they'll get SE to listen. That's a very, very bad incentive to give to your own player base.

[Theodric]

You only need to look at the backlash towards the way that European promotions were handled to see that the developers only lift a finger when there's bad press involved. None of the news sites bothered to cover the story of European players being screwed over by dodgy, awkward promotional campaigns that were far less smooth than what Japanese and North American players had access to. It took over six months for an official response from a member of the community support team (who I don't blame, since they likely can't do much on their own) and then it took many more months before the original campaign items were thrown onto the Mog Station.

Yoshi-P never brought it up in any of the Live Letters. Ironically, around the same time a portion of the Live Letters began to revolve around advertising additional merchandise to sell.

Unfortunately European players tend to be treated like dirt in MMO's. Unintentionally as an afterthought, perhaps...but still. It was the same in WoW, too. Which is strange given that we make up a notable portion of the player-base.

[Theodric]

A simple opt in/opt out feature for surveys would be wonderful. As it stands, it's pretty hard to get our voices heard - especially when official Q&A sessions are at the mercy of the 'like' system. Legitimate issues have a habit of being overshadowed and when it comes to picking which questions to answer...many companies tend to avoid those that have the potential for negative PR. Furthermore, I'm often left baffled by the amount of questions that end up being answered as 'we can't tell you anything yet'. For story spoilers, it's understandable - but it's frustrating when a question that can't be answered gets picked.

[Solarra]

One of the things that attracted me to this game was the fact that the devs appeared to listen, and unlike other companies (Blizzard *cough*) didn't respond with snark when facing heavy criticism.

However, it's clear we don't get as much communication as we did in the early days and there does seem to be a disconnect between players and developers.

Off the top of my head:
-Nothing done about housing until it reached crisis point
-An FC 'ranking' system that is open to abuse, has been the subject of numerous threads on this forum and is still unchanged.
-Botting, again numerous threads on this forum airing concerns and no official response
-Diadem 1 leading to Diadem 2 (huge improvement in gathering but the same issues for the battle missions)
-Eureka
-The forum-post word limit
-Male glamours

I think the overwhelmingly positive response to the explanation we were given over the inventory changes shows that the community can accept unpalatable changes as long as we know the reason.
As things stand it's hard to know if we are being heard or not.

The fact that there seems to be more communication with the Jp player-base just rubs salt into the wound.
It would be cool to see GMs in game for fun stuff occasionally and it would also be nice to see official translations of interviews posted on the OF rather than us having to rely on fan-translations being posted.

[Remedi]

Not related to Solarra post which I agree but I feel like of late the thread has become more of a way to brood over perceived feelings of what the company does, which is why I said I was wary of surveys.
The fact that the company changed ways about housing or the braz/russian subs debacle should've been a victory for everyone yet this thread is saying that ppl in the forum were not heard. What if they both were heard?
Frankly it's easy to tinfoil hat things out of feelings, which is why I said that questionnaires won't really solve anything.
And TBH flooding threads with this kinds of brooding posts will not help either, since the good feedbacks and criticisms will be simply buried under those which in turn will make it more likely to community managers to ignore certain threads.

Frankly We as a community should push heavily for a more active community management not because the devs don't listen to us, but because we lack informations provided in jpn community.
We should ask for more informations on interwiews
We shold have something akin to what yoshi-P does in jpn on new year's eve. Granted it will be difficult but It's only fair.
We should also ask for a better internal comunication between the ENG community managers and the main dev team since apparently the ungarmax problems was also bottlenecked somewhere there

But imho just saying oh they don't hear us execpt during money loss or bad PR frankly is not helping and is counterproductive.

[Remedi]

Tinfoil hat conspiracies =/= raising hell, beign critical of something doesn't mean using arguments without sources. 1.x, housing and the subs were a fact not something that players had come up because they felt it was that way, true that most criticism of housing could be better focused like asking the dev that since their goal for housing is actually harmful to their clients MAYBE they should reconsider it OR work harder to fix it and in that case we should get an idea on how they want to fix it, but I guess that's not very important since ppl don't ask those kind of questions and just mope around how shitty the system is