Live Letters - Why No More Live Letter Questions?

[Iscah]

The lore Q&A a while back accepted lots of questions from the English forum thread.

Also not every live letter has a Q&A session attached, and they're usually on specific subjects. People try to force in their unrelated questions and then wonder why they aren't getting answered.

[Haruka_R]

Because we, the english forum, are petulant little poop heads, and Yoshi don't wanna deal with us.

[Vahlnir]

They usually only have a Q&A if they have a special guest of sorts, like the art director or some other department head on the dev team. The upcoming LL will have...Yoshi P, and probably the guy who's usually next to him that I don't know the name of. Sometimes they do a Q&A just for the heck of it, but I wouldn't call it a common practice.

The thing with that deletion is, the responses were exactly what the original post called for - from memory it was claiming the community was "degenerate" and that state was encouraged by SE by arbitrary reasons like encouraging more casual players to join.

Deleting it was equal parts covering their tracks and walking off in a huff.

It is, quite simply, bad forum etiquette to completely change or erase your post after people have commented on it. If the post really has gone off the rails, the original post demonstrates the author's intent.

That's pretty much how it went down, yeah.

And I've made some posts in the past I'm not particularly proud of, but I almost always allow them to remain. I don't say anything I'm not afraid that others will see on these forums.

[Rannie]

The upcoming LL will have...Yoshi P, and probably the guy who's usually next to him that I don't know the name of. Sometimes they do a Q&A just for the heck of it, but I wouldn't call it a common practice.

Foxclon...is the guy who sits next to Yoshi P during the LL in Japan thats his handle for the forums... if you're talking about the English translator that's Ferne (Michael Koji Fox)

[wereotter]

Why not Western questions? One word. Peaches.

[ItMe]

Why not Western questions? One word. Peaches.

One word. Huh?

[Veritas-Ancora]

Why not Western questions? One word. Peaches.

Oh man I remember that.

Though to credit, this wasn't a Letter to the Producer Live, that was actually in Boston MA (funny enough, when that photo of Yoshi P and I were taken).

In-person Fan Festivals bring out some weird questions from the audience. I remember yelling out, "WHYYYYYYYYYYY" LOLOLOLOL. At least in the forum system, he could pick and choose, and it wasn't dealer's choice to the audience.

[linayar]

This is a Japanese game, and many of the development team do not speak English. This is understandable. What I worry about is how the questions/suggestions from the English-speaking forums are rarely brought up compared to previous years (first 5 years since ARR), which is a substantial number of subscribed players.

In the Live Letters, we hear terms like "this has been a much-requested item from the community" but it's rarely something we see on the English forums. Typically the suggestions came from the Japanese forums (understandably so).

My concern is that, even if you don't use any of our questions, anything we post on here isn't necessarily being heard. I know Yoshi P used to ask one of my questions on several LLs when the Live Letter thread was ongoing, and a lot of other excellent English-posed questions posted were answered too, and that felt wonderful.

We felt like we were heard.

But when there's thousands of forum posts that aren't keenly watched like that Live Letter thread, really good suggestions get buried very quickly. There's a lot of really great suggestions that died because they were bumped off the first page from threads that already had hundreds to thousands of posts, and a typical forum structure just doesn't feasibly build that developer-player trust. If it's not on Page 1, people aren't going to go looking for it. No comments, no upvotes, never seen again. Great suggestions that otherwise had 40-50 upvotes now sit on Page 2 to disappear. These great ideas had credence during the Live Letter threads. We'd have upvotes all the way up to page 50.

Especially during COVID, when the virtual fan festival was a place to ask questions, there's a lot of questions built up that will likely never be answered. And that was half the fun of the Fan Festivals: the interaction.

I worry that this, too, will be dropped to Page 2 and forgotten (hopefully enough posts/comments will keep it alive long enough for folks to notice), as this is how the system of forums is built. If there's not enough traction within the first few hours of posting and at an ideal time, it dies. Not because it wasn't a great idea, but because that's how forums work.

But if the moderators are watching this, please forward this to the devs.

They have specific threads for asking questions meant to be answered in live events.

Here is the English version:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...mmunity-Events

So I think it's not a matter of being overlooked, but that there are too many specific questions being asked across the various languages, some of which might not even be on topic to the event.

[DrWho2010]

Well, hopefully you can get some questions in the live q&a that's going to happen at the digital fan festival.

[Awha]

Maybe they just did not want to get a bunch of housing and missing gender related questions.

And peaches questions.