Does the forums need a rework?

[Shougun]

It's not a matter of what they functionally acknowledge. It's about the resounding lack of communication in regards to forum feedback. And I'm not talking about how a few players would say something and SE would do otherwise. I'm talking about an entire subsection of the forums asking for a slight change of gameplay for over 4 years and then getting slapped with a pretty big modification in the opposite direction. Or the constant addition of new features that are then left to collect dust as unfinished products. Regardless of whether the community has been voicing their desire for improvements. Instead we get more new shiny, unfinished features.

Is there perhaps some logic behind their decisions? Do our expectations not meet some criteria? Maybe, but How would we know when SE never address us. It's even more frustrating from the fact that SE hasn't traditionally been bad at communicating with it's player base.

I can definitely hear your feeling, mostly I was responding to the part of reddit and it being evidence they're unaware or have a bias against us. That feeling that they're in the shadows, perhaps listening to some other person you've never heard speak before, such like that- sure okay lol. Of course they've multiple forums so the shadows can easily just be someone speaking in another language within the very same community .

Just wanted to say putting a website's name in a few live letters doesn't mean they're no longer listening to their forum or even other websites, I mean I remember reading a decent amount of "oh noe" on reddit as well about the healer combat simplifications.

Not a disagreement on anything other than that I think there is evidence they have listened to us before, here, and that they don't have a particular bias "well if blue gartr says it then we have to do it!" lol. Even exampled my own, as part of like three other blue mage fans at the time years and years ago, that heard they wanted to turn blue mage into a side content and not make it a real job because they didn't think they could (early beta 2.0 era) and three of us going "what.. seriously, no- you can make it a real job". Clearly they wanted to do what they did anyways. Still think it was a mistake and that if it was the style of content they could have done better with magitek mechs like a xenogear sort of content, and if it was just the role play of being blue then they could have done that and still have kept it 'normal' as well on an aside note they can and (I hope should/will) improve the role play of other jobs too.

So yeh no yeh? lol

I feel they have listened (on occasion at least), I've seen too many examples that not one of them was at least feedback listened to and implemented (some could have just been chance/circumstance), but I do agree they're very quiet and don't really interact too much beyond their streams (they do have community streams lol). I've thought about joining those but they tend to be during times that don't work for me, which isn't their fault since my schedule is so random. All of that is to say why I, at least in this thread, I tried to suggest some mild ways they might improve that without going from 0 communication to penpals (seeing as an extreme change might be unlikely and awkward for everyone to 'want' to try). I imagine they were burned pretty hard, or perhaps just burned out, and it seems like they respond less on all the forums in comparison to long ago (at least when I randomly check the Japanese forum it seems to be less there too, it used to be very frequent).