When did the dev's stop reading the forums?

[genuine_stranger]

I remember they used to talk about things everyone was discussing on the forums all the time. Then one day they got upset because some of the comments on the forums were critical and it hurt their feelings. Now no one seems to moderate it anymore. I'm sure you've noticed with some of the things people are saying in the Wuk Lamat threads - there's a complete lack of moderation going on which means that officially no one from Square Enix reads the forums in regular intervals anymore. Maybe a GM shows up when their automated system detects a ton of reports or something. It seems when the dev's get feedback they don't like they just tell us to post it on the forums - their "file 13." What happened?

My guess: Square is siphoning almost all of FF14's revenue into NFT's and whatever the hell Babylon's Fall was and making more flopper games like it. They don't have enough money for GM's or CBU3 anymore

Why would we think they receive any feedback outside the JP forum they might browse occasionally, due to the language barrier?

We have no direct line of communication, not to community managers, no polls, not even threads addressing current issues people have.

Now we have three options from which we can choose:

• A: They get a list with all the issues people have with the current state of the game.
• B: They get a curated list with a heavy bias from the curator in favor of the current status of the game, which makes the feedback seem much more positive than it actually is, or not reflect the actual issues people have.
• C: They ignore all feedback, go only on metrics and engagement data, do their own thing, and reverted to the same arrogant mentality before the 1.0 release and think they can do no wrong.

Choose your poison, I guess?
I hope that it's A, but with the 'holier than thou' mentality of people from the western side it's most likely B. Couple this with a lack of communication outside LLs' and you get the impression that the devs don't listen at all or act far too late.

[Astronis]

I was as well. They used to actually reply to the forum posts with bug reports, but they stopped at a certain point and I understand why they probably did, because it adds a lot of extra time and complication to try and deal with volatile emotions on forums and compose posts when there is a job to do.

That, and it's much easier to get a hold of someone in game than it is on the forum. I was pleasantly surprised though, the in-game response made it clear to me that someone both read the report and took it seriously enough to reach out for more information. I don't expect that devs read everything posted here, but knowing they do some and will follow up if it's something they can fairly easily address with a bit more info is quite nice.