What are the largest issues plaguing XIV currently?

[Derio]

1. PS3 textures and technical debt from 1.0 still haunting the game

2. Housing situation

3. Glamour limitations including character customization such as beards, tattoos, etc.

4. The current problem with healers after the SHB simplification.

5. A deep need to enhance the dungeon formula. They tell a great story, but dont capitalize on their potential which can be difficult due to only 1 dungeon per patch.

[Zakka]

1. PS3 textures and technical debt from 1.0 still haunting the game

2. Housing situation

3. Glamour limitations including character customization such as beards, tattoos, etc.

4. The current problem with healers after the SHB simplification.

5. A deep need to enhance the dungeon formula. They tell a great story, but dont capitalize on their potential which can be difficult due to only 1 dungeon per patch.

How I would love a HD texture overhaul option.

And of course more customization.

[Alleo]

1. Limited housing, this is especially bad since they love to give housing items as rewards..yet not everyone will ever get a house on their own. Having instanced houses for the players and wards for FCs could also give us a healthy market. More people owning houses would make creating all those housing skins not so worthless..and gives a great Gil sink just by selling those houses to players.

2. Limited glamour options. In a game that also focuses so much on glamour that people joke that this is the true endgame (and are they really wrong?) its truly bad how they dont have a way to store all the glamour. Everything is limited..from the amount of space to store it to the way to change up. I would love to have a true glamour catalogue..in Rift every single item that I got was put in its own catalogue as soon as I got it. If I did not need is as gear I could just throw it away because if I wanted it for glamour one little click was enough. And if I remember it correctly you could glamour stuff from other jobs too..This would create massive amount of long time "content" in FF14. Imagine every single piece of gear being in that Catalogue. This would give me the motivation to run all the old content to get it all. Right now I barely even get old stuff because my dresser is nearly at maximum and I dont want to store it all in retainers..

3. Better achievements. As someone already stated they either make something that is way too easy to get or so hard that grinding for it either takes years of dedication or a highly unhealthy way of playing it..Honestly some of those achivements remind me so much of these F2P asian grinders..they should not be in FF14. Tone it down please then someone like me might even try to grind for it..but no amount of carrots on the sticks will make me do those huge ones..I just give up from the start..also give us more creative ones..each dungeon could have their own special achievements. Maybe if you run it synched with only healers or only tanks. There should be many ways how they could give us some sort of fun challenge without them having to create new dungeons for it..

[Iscah]

Not the game itself, but forum moderation.

It could make such a difference having an active moderator or two that speak up, enforce the rules, observe conversations and step in where necessary. The best forums I've been on are ones where moderators have a real presence.

Warn people that a discussion is getting out of hand and that they should be careful.

Lock duplicate threads when there's already an active one on the same topic.

Recognise patterns of behaviour instead of moderating individual posts in isolation. We can all identify certain recurring trolls, so why is it so hard to shut them down on sight? Any observant human should be able to see what the poster is doing when they bump ten different controversial threads with nonsense answers, and yet it takes a week of this for the moderators to act.

And a minor one, but valuable - take the time to actually remove the offending part of a post instead of deleting the whole thing, where it's a long post replying to multiple quotes.

[Amnmaat]

Not the game itself, but forum moderation.

It could make such a difference having an active moderator or two that speak up, enforce the rules, observe conversations and step in where necessary. The best forums I've been on are ones where moderators have a real presence.

Warn people that a discussion is getting out of hand and that they should be careful.

Lock duplicate threads when there's already an active one on the same topic.

Recognise patterns of behaviour instead of moderating individual posts in isolation. We can all identify certain recurring trolls, so why is it so hard to shut them down on sight? Any observant human should be able to see what the poster is doing when they bump ten different controversial threads with nonsense answers, and yet it takes a week of this for the moderators to act.

And a minor one, but valuable - take the time to actually remove the offending part of a post instead of deleting the whole thing, where it's a long post replying to multiple quotes.

A review of the ban system needs to happen as well. The fact that permanent bans don't have a "decay" system where after a year you can post again is bizarre. I know a someone who got 2 strikes on the same thread/same day because they handled the people reporting them as 2 separate "bans" so it got them perma banned. And no, it wasn't adult images or cursing, it was just a heated thread, which the moderating team allowed to go for like 20 pages. I don't know who they outsource the moderation to but they don't seem to have a grasp of how people abuse the report system; you can just ask 15 people in your fc to report the same person in a heated discussion and get them banned. All the moderator sees is something like "who are you to tell me what to do," and see that 15 reports of the same post; boom, banned. I don't know how World of warcraft forum bans work but I can guarantee it's not as draconian as it is here.

[Alleo]

Not the game itself, but forum moderation.

It could make such a difference having an active moderator or two that speak up, enforce the rules, observe conversations and step in where necessary. The best forums I've been on are ones where moderators have a real presence.

Fully agree on that too.

Honestly I dont understand the priorities sometimes...people are getting bans because they post otter pics but you have some trolls running around causing trouble with their threads and they are still there..heck you have quite some really passive aggressive people who can still do that without any consequences. But otters are seemingly too much...

When the Viera thread just disappeared I truly believed that they just deleted it and that was making me angry..until suddenly its there again, without any hints on what has happened..

[Shurrikhan]

Not the game itself, but forum moderation.

It could make such a difference having an active moderator or two that speak up, enforce the rules, observe conversations and step in where necessary. The best forums I've been on are ones where moderators have a real presence.

Warn people that a discussion is getting out of hand and that they should be careful.

Lock duplicate threads when there's already an active one on the same topic.

Recognise patterns of behaviour instead of moderating individual posts in isolation. We can all identify certain recurring trolls, so why is it so hard to shut them down on sight?

I have mixed feeling on this.

Anyone remember the 1000+ posts Summoner thread here in the NA forums? I still have yet to learn why that was shut down. So many good concrete and detailed ideas, instantly purged. The Monk thread before that? Purged. ...And then we're told we don't provide detailed feedback or scatter it across too many threads.

Heck, the iconic "WAR/DRK" conflict likewise, in just a small port of total posts in each, has managed to shut down several otherwise constructive threads.

Likewise, I'd rather allow for satirical posts, trolling or otherwise, than censor certain posters "on sight". If they haven't done anything bad enough to be banned according to a reasonable evaluation of the TOA, then why should they be censored? I, for one, enjoy the occasional Titan-man/fist/bro post, and the discussion they prompt are more often pertinent than not, even if for seemingly the wrong reasons.

Personally, I think just improving on the forum infrastructure -- similar to as was done for Overwatch's forums or the like to make replies and relevant new posts, etc., more visible to users and allow for varyingly more general or specific (i.e. more "threaded") communication -- would do far more than more community "management".

[Iscah]

Likewise, I'd rather allow for satirical posts, trolling or otherwise, than censor certain posters "on sight". If they haven't done anything bad enough to be banned according to a reasonable evaluation of the TOA, then why should they be censored? I, for one, enjoy the occasional Titan-man/fist/bro post, and the discussion they prompt are more often pertinent than not, even if for seemingly the wrong reasons.

The thing is, it's not "occasional". It fills up the forum. He starts multiple threads pushing his agenda-of-the-day and bumps others. It clogs up the forum and the discussion revolves around him.

Just now, multiple old threads bumped by him. At least one was previously bumped by his previous account, and another was started by him. He stirs up old arguments and negative threads that ran their course and went quiet years ago. He's digging them up systematically and it keeps the forum boiling in a stream of complaint threads - and instead of these multiple discussions on the same theme taking place one-by-one over time, now they're all bumped up together. It looks like everyone is complaining at once, and it drowns out the actual current discussions.

It's disruptive posting and an active human moderator can see that, where a "no single post is offensive" approach leaves him free to carry on.

And where the discussion is interesting despite the trolly start? It's still just... it's not someone asking a genuine question that you can have a conversation about. The respondents are genuine and that's where something interesting can happen - but the original post is still insincere and trying to start an argument.

[Shurrikhan]

The thing is, it's not "occasional". It fills up the forum. He starts multiple threads pushing his agenda-of-the-day and bumps others. It clogs up the forum and the discussion revolves around him.

Then, ignore him?

If someone is so clearly cut and dried as to obviously be a troll in every post, we can't say we aren't knowingly complicit in allowing his disruption when we respond to him. He's either so painfully obvious as to need to be effectively banned, and we're half the problem, or he really is a mixed bag as, sure enough, hasn't broken the rules.

He's allowed the same posts per day per account as everyone else. If he, triple-account as he may be, singlehandedly has that huge an impact, it's either because people are more than willing to "be baited", forum activity is just that little (at which point we should probably ask... why do so few people see any reason to use the forums?), or this place's infrastructure (and people's usage habits) are far too channeled towards and around New Posts.

The respondents are genuine and that's where something interesting can happen

And, with your suggested censorship, there would be no such response, genuine or otherwise, all while giving all necessary excuse for the CMs to silently purge unofficial community leaders or the most trusted and informed job spokesmen and shut down threads that would otherwise be too detailed, concrete, or constructive to blame the playerbase for not properly communicating. That may seem a "slippery slope", and yet we've already seen the latter since late ARR. (Thread contains sizeable constructive value. Certain posts are removed, including from people no one remembers speaking out of line. People ask why they were removed. The thread is shut down. Yoshida then blames the community for being unclear or silent when some of the very things those threads detailed would be poor implementation are then released.)

Given how we've been treated thus far, that's therefore not a slope I want to start down except perhaps by the most tentative and explicit steps.

On the other hand, I can easily see tremendous advantage coming from improved forum features. Just think of how much good a curated thread does (where the OP comes back daily to quote in brief each of the most-liked suggestions and "big questions" so they're immediately visible from the first page). Think of how much good that does to keep discussion on track. We could have that for every lengthy thread, almost automatically.

[Iscah]

Then, ignore him?

10 of the 20 posts on the front page are either started or bumped by one person. Another two are by someone widely assumed to be another account of the same person. It's hard to ignore and harder to see actual current discussions.

The examples you talk about of a single organised thread being unfairly deleted (while being a genuine issue) are the opposite of what this person is doing.