Lost Ark has three CMs constantly replying to forum threads and address concerns

[LaylaTsarra]

I agree wholeheartedly we need CMs in the forums that at least pretent like they care, as it is now it's anarchy in the OF.

Mods would be nice to deal with some of the persistent trolls here. Consolidating threads too would be a plus.

[GaiusDrakon]

Also what this thread is missing is that we get huge live letters where the devs talk to us for hours.
To act like we don't get good communication is just ridiculous even if it's not perfect.
And the CM's for Lost Ark both ignore and even censor feedback they disagree with they're infamous for locking and even outright deleting threads for that.

I'm so tired of FF14 players instantly going into defense mode. Attacking Lost Ark. Derailing the thread into criticizing Lost Ark even when this thread is clearly about what FF14 can improve on with respect to communication. Something that they can learn from Lost Ark. They don't need to learn the BAD parts of what they're doing in Lost Ark. They can just take the good parts and the good parts only.

Please shed your tribalism for just one moment in your life. I know it might be hard. But you all can do it.

There is literally no point in mentioning the live letters unless your purpose is to try to get into a dick measuring contest on which game has the better communication overall. But I hope you realize that I'm strictly talking about engagement in the forums.

[SaberMaxwell]

Honestly I don't even think community managers communicate with the players at all, or if they do its such a rare occurrence that it's become an event seeing any mod or above actually post.

[Kolsykol]

I'm so tired of FF14 players instantly going into defense mode. Attacking Lost Ark. Derailing the thread into criticizing Lost Ark even when this thread is clearly about what FF14 can improve on with respect to communication.

Please shed your tribalism for just one moment in your life. I know it might be hard. But you all can do it.

There is literally no point in mentioning the live letters unless your purpose is to try to get into a dick measuring contest on which game has the better communication overall. But I hope you realize that I'm strictly talking about engagement in the forums.

I wasn't attacking Lost Ark, I was criticizing their CM's... There is a difference.
I also said that the communication isn't perfect which would imply that I think there are still problems.

Don't act like there isn't extreme levels of tribalism in favor of hating on everything the devs for this game does lol, or like people aren't bending over backwards and going out of their way to find excuses to go into '' attack mode ''.
Your whole premise here is essentially a dick measuring contest so I dunno what you're complaining about when someone responds to that.
Do/ did you actually play and follow Lost Ark or did you just take a quick look around their forum?
Because their CM's are really not that good and very little actually comes out of anything they say or do and they've had pretty huge fuckups in communication and how they handle negative feedback.

And yes the live letters are valid to bring up because they're infinitely more valuable than CM's sitting around giving pointless statements.
I'd rather hear directly from the devs, the CM's usually either don't know or can't say anything 99% of what they say is essentially just pointless PR that means nothing.

[Colt47]

No the problem is that Community Managers cost money. They provide a lot of value to the customer and company, and typically it is a far better position to be in than the majority of customer service jobs. In the situation of FFXIV they basically just respond to trends and relay feedback to the company on how changes were handled.

If they had community management there wouldn't even be so much talk around Dark Knight right now. We'd probably have either a fixed Dark Knight or an idea of what the Devs are planning to do already so people can wait and not be repeating themselves for the one-hundredth time. At least assuming we are talking about ones that actually communicate via forum regularly.

[Wingale]

Ahhh Yes, Lost Ark is the best of the best and in the best of MMORPG in these all years. Everything in that game are so perfect, gameplay, development team, story and graphic. It's better than this FF14.
And I quitted that the best perfect game for 2 months

[Thi]

The engagement of the CMs on these forums has always been lacking and obviously not a priority to them.

A long long time ago I used to be a CM on a different AAA MMO and the lack of engagement or even moderation in terms of merging threads and locking troll threads is insane to me. Like does Square even employee CMs? If so what do they do?

[Welsper59]

But I hope you realize that I'm strictly talking about engagement in the forums.

I will admit, you're not wrong on a 1:1 comparison of current. You do need to also understand though that LA is new and AGS is still in recovery from not just New World, but also their own self destruction of LA upon launch... and it's only been 3 months lol. You might be giving a little too much credit to AGS on this one, just by logistics alone. Having said that, more CM interaction isn't a bad thing. It just doesn't seem to be a fair comparison when context is taken.

Do note that when this game was in a similar situation prior to and shortly after ARR, Yoshi-P himself posted frequently on the forums to communicate what was happening with the game. Communication dies down as time goes on and even AGS was and still is pretty quiet about negative topics for LA.

[GaiusDrakon]

I will admit, you're not wrong on a 1:1 comparison of current. You do need to also understand though that LA is new and AGS is still in recovery from not just New World, but also their own self destruction of LA upon launch... and it's only been 3 months lol. You might be giving a little too much credit to AGS on this one, just by logistics alone. Having said that, more CM interaction isn't a bad thing. It just doesn't seem to be a fair comparison when context is taken.

Do note that when this game was in a similar situation prior to and shortly after ARR, Yoshi-P himself posted frequently on the forums to communicate what was happening with the game. Communication dies down as time goes on and even AGS was and still is pretty quiet about negative topics for LA.

There needs to be way more communication in FF14 though. Right now we are getting basically the equivalent of zero communication. Communication might die down as time goes on, but surely not all the way to zero?

[Kolsykol]

No the problem is that Community Managers cost money. They provide a lot of value to the customer and company, and typically it is a far better position to be in than the majority of customer service jobs. In the situation of FFXIV they basically just respond to trends and relay feedback to the company on how changes were handled.

If they had community management there wouldn't even be so much talk around Dark Knight right now. We'd probably have either a fixed Dark Knight or an idea of what the Devs are planning to do already so people can wait and not be repeating themselves for the one-hundredth time.

If we had more active CM's then there probably wouldn't be as much talking about certain Jobs and disliked changes because the threads would be much more heavily moderated.
As much as I hate the Kaiten removal, Yoshida already responded to it live on Stream and people still act like he didn't.
Not saying I disagree with people mad about it I think it's dumb and want them to revert it too, but he did say what their reasoning was and it changed absolutely nothing.

It's the same with the Healer thing, he responded to that too.
This isn't a commentary on whether what he said was good or not because I think that it wasn't.
But the difference is that we get the communication directly from the devs rather than CM's who essentially can't say anything or don't even rly understand what the devs are doing and why.
CM's normally don't have much insight rly into the thought process of the devs and there's a lot of red tape to go through before they can say anything about that.