Are we alone?

[Necrotica]

There are many people who assume the devs never read the NA forums. That the mods never post. There is very rare moderation/bans but nothing to point to real human beings.

With advancement in AI chatbot capabilities we could actually have absolutely 0 interactions or responses from anyone that works for Sqaure Enix.

IF that were to be the case, how would it change your posting habits here? I complain a lot, don't expect anyone important to read it, but I can always hope and use it to vent. But if this was truly just some random website the devs abandoned years ago to maintained by bots...don't know.

We can talk to eachother, have debates, share ideas, but knowing for an absolute fact that this is a dead site as far as the devs are concerned would be sad.

And I am starting to think that is the case more each day.

[Vahlnir]

I feel that the mods spend most of their time sitting at their desks with a bowl of popcorn watching the drama unfold. I could be wrong, but I don't feel like I am. There have been times when they have taken a post with a hot take from one section of the forums and tossed it here, seemingly throwing the person in question to the wolves.

[SturmChurro]

The universe is a very big place, and, on occasion, something - or someone - not us comes here to delete posts, ban players, and many other things we may never know about. We are not alone. Could they be be some form of ai, or sentient species? We may never know.

[DrWho2010]

we DO know from interviews that part of the community reps job is to look at social media/reddit/official forums daily to gather information to pass along to the devs. the devs themselves do NOT read the forum, they rely on the reports they get from the community reps. BUT the comm reps also have to do things like write posts for the lodestone, do the special blog posts, help facilitate translations among other things, arrange the twitch live stream broadcasts.

[Heroman3003]

There are many people who assume the devs never read the NA forums. That the mods never post. There is very rare moderation/bans but nothing to point to real human beings.

With advancement in AI chatbot capabilities we could actually have absolutely 0 interactions or responses from anyone that works for Sqaure Enix.

IF that were to be the case, how would it change your posting habits here? I complain a lot, don't expect anyone important to read it, but I can always hope and use it to vent. But if this was truly just some random website the devs abandoned years ago to maintained by bots...don't know.

We can talk to eachother, have debates, share ideas, but knowing for an absolute fact that this is a dead site as far as the devs are concerned would be sad.

And I am starting to think that is the case more each day.

We know for a fact that there are human moderators policing this subforum. We also know that there is no interaction with specifically 'english forum' part of community. There are occasional interactions with community, even english, on other social media, simply not here. I get why, seeing the state of the forum as a whole. But we do know that this place is not completely abandoned. I'd like them to clean this up but at this point if they did clear out all toxic assheads and trolls, the forums would end up as barely-living as other languages' forums are; so the endeavor might be seen as pointless. Regardless, if you have ideas to share, there are other places to deliver feedback that is not the forums that would almost certainly have higher chance of going places.

[Bunnycake]

[Vahlnir]

Me too.

[Atelier-Bagur]

They clearly still do watch whats going on here as some few hot threads and posts have been deleted. They're just probably not allowed to interact here as often as they would like due to risking their posts being misconstrued or being taken out of context or being used to fuel misinformation of the team. So basically PR, which is super important for the NA side of things; so its only when it can be clear cut and absolutely necessary to make a post will they do it, but thinking that they should come here and post non-chalantly and engage with our shenanigans is just out of the question.

[Gemina]

I've been banned before, so there is moderation here. That ban was for a typo when I mentioned shinobi, but there was a 't' between the i and n, which tells me I don't have a lot of friends here either and it was reported; so I also don't think they're bots.

I've been part of other discussion forums that were heavily moderated and threads were locked, posts deleted, and bans given out like candy that it made the place seem like an outdated bar on a Monday afternoon. I've never really seen much of a middle ground. I also was a moderator at one point, and I was told that I had to stay out of the conversations. If I had to delete posts, threads, lock topics etc. I just did it, and there was no need for an explanation. However, these forums always let you know who the moderators were, and how many of them there are.

We could continue griping about lack of moderation here, but understand there would be a tradeoff if it were heavier as the majority of topics wouldn't be allowed to take off, let alone fly to 18-20 pages of off topic nonsense.

[TheMightyMollusk]

There are mods, but they rarely interact outside of doing their job, and then seemingly only when someone reports something.