Less and less SE interaction with forums community over time

[Loony_BoB]

I'm mostly curious if anyone else has noticed this - while we do get Live Letters and I adore them, two key parts of SE really regaining the faith of the community during the 1.x phase were:

1) Player Surveys, in which SE would ask everyone to advise on what their favoured content is, what they want SE to prioritise, etc.

2) Posts on forums, in which SE would occasionally respond to concerns of the users.

It seems over time the initial part (player surveys) was dropped entirely and that's within reason as there are no major concerns with sustainability like there were before, although I still do feel that this would do a huge amount of not regaining but retaining said faith.

Secondly, the posts on forums by SE staff have all but completely dried up. I used to check the Dev Tracker daily to see what was going on and these days it's months between replies.

I love the game, love the community, love the staff. I just don't want these kind of things to slowly and surely be left to die out. I miss feeling like we were with the staff in the forums. It's been especially noticeable after I took a year out of the game and came back (in May) and noticed the jarring change in communications compared to earlier years.

It's not an immediate major concern, just something I've noticed, wondered if others had also noticed, and wondered what the general opinion was, and generally thought it's one of those things better mentioned earlier rather than much, much later.

EDIT: Decided to check the Dev Tracker, it only goes back to 7th August 2019, but posts per day for each year included are:
2019 - 3.39 posts per day (264 posts over 147 days)
2020 - 0.64 posts per day (235 posts over 366 days)
2021 - 0.32 posts per day (73 posts over 228 days)

[TTiscancer]

Have you seen this forum? Why would anyone bother?

[Juun]

If you do a dev track you can see they only communicate in German or Japanese.

[LianaThorne]

People will blame Covid or Endwalker for it. Don't worry.

Nah the reality is, we're not the market they care about so they don't staff English speakers the way they should. Not much else than that.

[Loony_BoB]

Edited my first post to include post per day. Also, this is covering ALL languages. Not just English.

[Caitlyn]

If you do a dev track you can see they only communicate in German or Japanese.

Thats just myth to be honest. The german part is almost dead. Less 10 active users in total and maybe 1 or 2 new threads per week.
Its not hard to communicate with the german people, when there is almost no activity xD

We try really hard to send feedback. But since it wont get much attention (likes), I dont believe it will get much attention from the devs team.

[Juun]

Thats just myth to be honest. The german part is almost dead. Less 10 active users in total and maybe 1 or 2 new threads per week.
Its not hard to communicate with the german people, when there is almost no activity xD

Oh I figured it was because if Japanese know any second language thats not English its German since Germany has one of the largest Japanese communities.

We try really hard to send feedback. But since it wont get much attention (likes), I dont believe it will get much attention from the devs team.

Ngl the only reason I know you can give likes is because Im a phone user and accidentally pressed the star button once.

[Wavaryen]

I mean the game keeps getting better and better. If that means not talking with NA players. That is OK in my books. We are not really needed, and we will keep playing no matter how "wrong" we feel by the developers. So just do you developers.

[Sotaris]

I don't know if they just lower manpower in CM nowadays but I'm sure WFH and wrap up to new expansion is contributing factors.

Should be noted not everyone in the english sub-forum is NA. I'm EU but I only speak Swedish (native), English (2nd language) and Norweigan/Danish (3rd langauge). No german or french here.

[Theodric]

Have you seen this forum? Why would anyone bother?

The forum itself is generally fine and is still less prone to death threats than Reddit or Twitter. There's no shortage of constructive posters and threads to be found and what issues exist are there as a consequence of the lack of a visible presence on the part of our community representatives. I made a thread in relation to subject a while back, incidentally:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...epresentatives