Not to be too rude but...

[DPZ2]

One other thing to consider is legal liability when responding to questions on these forums.

If I take your suggestion and put something new into a game, I am now setting myself up for legal action because I 'used your idea'. It's why writers don't read emails suggesting future plot lines.

[Kisshu]

At on point we had cms or mods post details and background for pvp changes, but even that has stopped.

[MagiusNecros]

New mods will introduce themselves and will then disappear into the aether and moderate/administrate from afar. You'll never hear from them again.

[Vahlnir]

I forget that we even have them until a new mod introduces themselves, and then they too vanish into the void to be forgotten with the rest.

[Jojoya]

They used to be a lot more active and interactive.

Honestly, I believe the community itself drove them off. A combination of bad behavior and being unable to let anything go and seeing every change as a perceived slight.

I doubt it's the players as much as changing job duties as companies try to give them more to do instead of hiring additional staff. If FFXIV is like other games, the community team has other responsibilities than just gathering feedback from the forums. They also need to gather feedback from other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, coordinate local publicity and events, etc.

Also any time someone "official" appears in the forums, posters tend to start behaving in unusual ways, whether it's trying to curry favor or gain attention for their pet ideas. I used to watch the WoW forums with some amusement as a controversial topic would get limited discussoin until a Blue decided to post something. Suddenly a thread with 100 replies in 2 days would have 500 within 6 hours of the Blue post.

By keeping their distance, posters are more likely to offer more genuine feedback rather than just post in the thread because a CM had also posted.

[Aldora]

They used to be a lot more active and interactive.

Honestly, I believe the community itself drove them off. A combination of bad behavior and being unable to let anything go and seeing every change as a perceived slight.

I agree with this. The Community Managers are still around and collect the information from the forums, which should be sent to the developers. However, they will usually reply, if they have something to share with us. The information that is given to us will have gone through several layers and formulated in a way which is approved by those layers.

By replying in a thread, saying "Thanks for the feedback on the subject. We have collected and forwarded your feedback to the development team, so that they are aware of the subject." will help getting recognition, but nowadays that's not enough for a community. They want to know when their voices will be heard and the issues have been resolved. However, not every issue will have an easy solution (even when the community feels like its easy enough to change), because they have to take a lot of things into consideration.

Can this be "fixed" in this way? Does this conflict with other systems we have in place? How many players does this affect? What is the impact of the issue and what is the impact of implementing a solution for it? Does this solve the issue for the general player base or a fraction of it? Does this still fit in our vision of the game, or our future plans? The list goes on...

The best thing we can do is keep on providing feedback. If the issue is pressing enough, even the Yoshi-p will write a comment / post explaining the situation and their plans for it.

[linayar]

One thing I wish works differently is the template they use when they move a thread to General Discussion. Some of those threads I see that are moved here leaves me confused as to why they can't help the thread creators.

[Floortank]

CMs have nothing to gain and everything to lose from talking to the forums. They have no authority to answer any questions, and often no knowledge of future events. They are given things to say and authorize to pass on certain information. They can't come here and volunteer information or speak on behalf of SE whenever they feel like it.

[Cyreil]

Ask yourself if you would ever be a community manager for these forums if it required you to keep a constant public presence. It's basically the equivalent of a customer service desk.

[Genz]

Yes, it's a joke the forums are useless when you remember it's one of the very first thing Yoshda decided when he took the direction.
(or maybe it was already planned and he made it sound like it was his decision)

During 1.x, there was this "everything's possible" ambiance, so they could just answer to anything and every little question (and of course a lot of these small things "announced" got lost with time and never made it to the game). With 2.0, the game started to follow a very rigid template, thus the communication around it got rigid too (fanfest, live-letter, nothing more)

Another "problem" is the translation in 4 languages, they've been ostensibly limiting budget on translation in the game (less guildleves because it was too much text, and some quests don't have summary since stormblood)