Does the forums need a rework?

[Shougun]

If you want those other areas to be more populated then just remove the General Discussion forum (/turn GD into off topic, anything that isn't feedback for the game but relates to the game itself, or heck any FF game lol- and make a sticky note that it will be generally overlooked in the curation of feedback). Add a few more descriptions to some of the other forums so the entire or near entire breadth of the game has a place for each section.

Sometimes I could have posted in those other areas but they're so quiet, and sometimes more bogarted, that I just feel General Discussion is the best place for the most open / quantitative discussion. Sometimes the conservative and focused nature of the sub-forums can produce better results, especially if you were looking into lore perhaps, but that approach can also be chains to the future and more creative discussions as I've seen on a few occasions (as the conservative and focused nature produces better grasp of the now, but a limited scope in return for the future- stereotypically speaking not everyone is the same of course lol).

Something I think would be interesting is with things the team thinks were successful and influenced by the forums just creating a small showcase of how feedback is taken into consideration and those successful examples. You could show the 'bad' ones but then you might be encouraging people to find those forum posters lol. "Timmy suggested we do that, the team thinks it bad, I knew it, everyone knows it, the game would be better without him, he is a huge dodo".

Of course more CM interactions would be nice but I'm aware that's stressful and not always feels productive lol. So that's just like "yes please come and try the poison, it tastes horrible but drink it anyways thanks" ;3.. Not noting just for the individual but potentially for the company as well. "We're looking into that" == you promised me by the third Tuesday of the 4th month that this would be done!

Certainly might be an internal confirmation bias but people who say the forum moderation is inconsistent or harsh, I sometimes wonder.... since I've probably one of the highest post counts, am not always in agreement with people, and am not posting in fear of punishment. I've reported very few people and of those I've seen something done each time. It's hard for me to agree that rules are not consistent or are hard to understand as at at least to me it seems pretty easy / straight forward. Like I remember someone told me to gdiaf and they /hope/ a door hits me in the rear. Wishing someone physical harm I thought worth a report, even though they were part of a fairly big media group for the game yet moderation still removed that person.

Technically I half wonder if one of our medals relates to reporting because not too long ago I got my fifth medal shortly around what I'm going to guess was my 10th report. . . .(mentally counted them, fairly certain it's 10 or under). All pretty obvious things, telling / hoping people have physical real life harm, someone who looked like they might inflict self harm (seemed like a joke thread in the beginning but it quickly got dark so I reported myself and said I think this thread is going south in a very bad way), one post that just had a "flower you" but they didn't say flower lol. If anyone is wondering now "omg has he reported me!?" if I've responded to you then no, I never respond to someone I've reported (another thing I see sometimes "they said something diabolically horrible and so I'm going to quote it and spread it around even more" lol- don't). Not liking my idea or being a bit rude is not report worthy, launching into a tirade of hyper-aggressive inflammatory pejorative personal character attacks (rather than the discussion itself) well that'd be different (and of course like I said I'm pretty sure I'm at or around 10 now).

Personally believe there should be forgiveness opportunities, assuming you didn't dox* someone in real life or something extreme as people have bad moments and perhaps need to be reminded to be 'in check', but sometimes I've a hard time believing when someone says they got banned for no reason. Like at this point I believe you're not telling me the whole story so it looks like 'no reason' but there totally was one. Often I see people excuse their poor behavior because of someone else, "they looked at me (or SE) aggressively so I punched them in the throat- it's fair, I don't understand these rules!!!". Like the common thing on the internet where you make your opponent the monster so all the harm you do back is 'justified' or not an issue. * (with information not made available by the person posting, like if you link your youtube channel to your account I'm not going to think that really counted lol.. I'm talking more like personal phone numbers, address, real name, things you didn't put out there for the intent of being known for and especially in context of 'having something done' with that info)

"I don't like what you're posting so I'm going to derail your thread". Two wrongs don't make a right. And generally it appears it's one annoying wrong is responded to with a more aggressive and particular 'to that person' wrong. Like I said "they looked at me rudely", and maybe they did, but that doesn't mean you get +1 them and be like "burn them in the grave".

To me it appears the moderation team wants very open discussion without targeting the personal person and in part use each person's perspective as a variable in determination of that "targeting" (which is why you might sometimes see someone confused "I called 5 people a simple name and nothing, but then the 6th time something?! so inconsistent!). Simply if you just didn't call people the pejorative you'd probably have been fine, because you used it 5 other times wasn't a badge of honor as much as it was it seems the conversation wasn't damaged at it's use for whatever reason as no one reported it. It seems discussion/feedback is of one of the higher priorities, even if it can be a bit difficult, like the GMs for the most part allowed us to talk about gay rights and marriage way back when Yoshida was determining what to do with the marriage system. So if you're trying to silence someone you're going to have a harder time if they've not directly broken the rules, which I think while sometimes can be 'annoying' is a good thing. Personally think formats like reddit are terrible places for diverse discussion and only work well of like minded people (good for somethings, bad for other things).

Here, if you don't like a conversation to the point you need to 'shut it down' then the best choice is not to participate.

tl;dr- seems a bit like mentor discussions sometimes where a few bad moments or people paint the entire community, maybe here and there we could tweak some things but I've a hard time thinking it's really 'that bad' and generally think "it's one of the better places to be if you want to discuss diversely and have feedback considered.

Sadly the devs acknowledge reddit more than they do their own official forums. It's immensely frustrating.

Curious what you mean by this. I know Reddit gets to interview the dev sometimes, but in essence so do we (and more of our questions are answered than reddit's). It would be weird to have our own CM create questions and then interview them, would feel like a a PR stunt lol. So in so much that it makes sense our community gets more attention than reddit's I believe. Could always nominate an interviewer or entirely free form question interview with the forums (most upvoted questions get asked), but if it's free form I think you'll get a lot of thicc bum questions and if it's a specific person then how in the world are you going to decide who without making someone annoyed lol.