Is there a community management team?

[Aexnidaral]

If they tried to participate in a discussion here they would probably end up making themselves a victim of endless bait and trolling and opinions based on anecdotal experiences that, in the grand scheme of things, don't paint a complete picture.

It would also be difficult to see them doing all their other responsibilities if they talk in all the forums all day.

While I'm sympathetic to this view -- it's a problem of their own making, frankly. I don't think they can have their cake and eat it too, here, really.

The moderation on these forums is flatly, comically abysmal. I understand why they may be reticent to interact more because of how lawless these forums are, and how insanely off the rails things go; but it's their own fault.

Last month during the height of the Fall Guys discourse someone posted multiple direct links to the the plugin repositories and various downloads to other cheat tools that wound up staying up for like... 16? or so hours despite multiple reports.

Regardless, it is legitimately frustrating to be told by the development team to communicate feedback through "official means" (ie, via posting here) but get no interaction or confirmation that anyone is listening -- it often feels like we're shouting into the void.

I do think there is legitimate criticism here over the role of our Community Team, and how it feels like there's a substantive disconnect between them. No doubt there are many things behind the scenes that we don't see and therefore aren't able to appreciate, as well as the things they do engage with that are neat (Twitter, Twitch), but I think being a little more directly engaged here would be very appreciated!

[Jeeqbit]

While I'm sympathetic to this view -- it's a problem of their own making, frankly. I don't think they can have their cake and eat it too, here, really.

Not entirely. Because even things that aren't bad enough to moderate are still likely to be something that drive them down a rabbit hole discussion that spans 100 pages... arguing with points that are ultimately selfish and don't consider other types of players. They would end up having to try to explain basic fundamental concepts such as "not being selfish" to many people, essentially a lot of the things I've done in my posts, when they have more productive things to do and more useful ways to approach their role.

The moderation on these forums is flatly, comically abysmal.

It is possible for there to be the opposite problem. Most moderators of any forum over-moderate things that are just not that bad, to the point people feel suppressed or like it's not worth posting at all.

My personal perspective is that most things should not be moderated at all. Just really extreme things, such as discussing subjects that are not welcome anywhere on the internet, topics not related to the forum category, topics that are not FFXIV-related, discussing individuals (such as streamers), etc.

Heated discussions can actually be good and very productive in some cases, so moderating anything that gets slightly heated can be a bad thing or misinterpreted as being heated by a moderator.

For all these reasons it's a good thing that they take this approach. I think they do it in response to reports like they do in the game, so ultimately it's probably because nobody bothers to report much.

wound up staying up for like... 16? or so hours despite multiple reports.

It is true that they are really slow with it. Although I can certainly understand the forums being the lowest priority for them when it is only used by a tiny fraction of players.

I think being a little more directly engaged here would be very appreciated!

I think the main ways they could do it different is to create their own topics with questions of their own, and a summary topic of pressing issues in each forum that the replies can steer.

But they could just as easily ask such questions elsewhere (such as in the game where nobody knows who they are), and keep such a list of issues they want to bring up private, which is all what I assume happens instead.

[Sindele]

Communicating back and forth with players is almost uniformly a mistake on big projects for two reasons.

One: people on the internet do not behave like reasonable people, and using punitive methods to force it to be a reasonable space is a full-time job and will create even more problems and more work - ban evasion, review bombing, social media attacks, etc. The moderation here is lacking, sure, but lacking moderation does not explain why it's a dumpster fire in the first place. That's all on the people - and in practice you'll find that they're not going to magically behave vastly differently, they're just going to be periodically kicked out of the pool, and they're going to lash out over it.

Two: most purpose-driven feedback is less useful than sentiment mining from players talking to each other. The long story short of why can be summed up by this Neil Gaiman quote from his storytelling masterclass: "Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong." Unfortunately, most player feedback tries to focus on desired changes, which might as well be filed directly to a shredder for how useful they are. Players complaining to each other tends to be a lot more purely useful - CM/dev presence is actively harmful to that.