What's with the forums?

[CKNovel]

It has been a cesspool from the start.
People trolled on the forums since there was no moderation or people just thought no one read the forums.

You'll find genuine feedback and 3 other things:
-Olympic level trolls
-Complaints from people who wants to play a different game
-Healers on strike

[lolnotacat]

It has been a cesspool from the start.
People trolled on the forums since there was no moderation or people just thought no one read the forums.

You'll find genuine feedback and 3 other things:
-Olympic level trolls
-Complaints from people who wants to play a different game
-Healers on strike

Sometimes all of them at once!

[dwodmots]

Whining on the forum is easier than getting good, that's why we have 9999 threads about how unfair it is to require that players PCs are on to finish normal mode content.

[Eyrilona]

Also, possibly some effect of people "seeing if there is anything new" on the forum after they close down the game, which not rarely means they're responding and writing things while tired very late at night.

[TDawnstar]

I'll admit, I haven't been here that long, but why are the forums so... miserable?

Two words: Dawntrail released.

I mean people demanding staff members be fired over mild grievances

Screwing up a whole expansion MSQ as well as post-patch story (6.1 to 6.55) is more than a "mild greavance". It clearly shows professional incompetence and inability to perform the assigned duties. A game (or any other project) cannot run well just because its lead producer is micro-managing everything and the moment he stops doing so, everything goes to the dogs.

claiming there's some kind of conspiracy to ruin the game

They want to turn the game into an instanced raiding simulator. Unfortunately, we saw how it ended with WoW already.

there's a line between criticism and entitlement

Expecting people to do their job correctly isn't entitlement.

You expect your dentist to do the job on your teeth properly without putting you into unbearable pain. This isn't entitlement.

In the same way, I expect game devs to not release a horribly written story (and I am very lenient with stories in games I play) and screwing up every other game system they do.

[BabyYoda]

the idea is we expect a quality product but we got dawntrail..

giving feedback is the purpose of this platform

[Carin-Eri]

Whilst am reluctant to post a whataboutism type response, I feel I have to say that I've seen much worse.

Whilst I don't wish to name the game, I came to FFXIV from another MMO I'd played for twelve years. I'd been a regular on the forum of that game for almost as long.

From experience, there is a vast amount of territory that lies between the extremes of 'no moderation' and 'over-moderation'. I do think the balance is better on this forum, having come from one where the moderators deleted any thread/post that had anything remotely negative to say about the game and were very quick to either warn, or outright ban, players who engaged in such feedback.
I'll be honest - I was perma-banned from said forum myself. The Community Manager, who was called out on Twitter for having completely ignored the forums for literally years, posted a thread titled "Better Communication", in which he made a bunch of (empty) promises about how how he would visit the forum more frequently in a effort to improve relations with the game's community. He subsequently completely abandoned that thread and the forum.
A few months after he posted that thread I submitted a reply in it, about how ironic it was that he'd posted a thread like that only to completely invalidate it by disappearing again and stated that I felt it was clear he preferred to hide behind pointless 'update' threads on Twitter. That earned me a perma-ban.

As 'bad' as these forums may be, it is at least worth noting that we can express an opinion here and not receive a warning/ban from easily offended moderators with a zero-tolerance approach to negative comments about the game.

[Kacho_Nacho]

I'll admit, I haven't been here that long, but why are the forums so... miserable? I get that people come here to give feedback, but it feels like some people see it as permission to be as toxic as possible. To be clear, I'm not talking about just any criticism. I mean people demanding staff members be fired over mild grievances, claiming there's some kind of conspiracy to ruin the game, portraying anyone who isn't as negative as them as idiotic, that type of thing. I guess what I'm trying to say is at some point, there's a line between criticism and entitlement. Have the forums always been this way? Even before I set up my forum profile I heard they have a reputation.

What you are seeing is due to the lack of moderation on the English language forums as opposed to the Japanese forums. When there are no consequences, people feel empowered to be awful.

If the ban hammer was used more often, a lot of the more toxic posters would either be gone or they'd start posting more respectfully.

[Raven2014]

I'll admit, I haven't been here that long, but why are the forums so... miserable?

Part of the reason is because people like you can't help but making YET another topic just to show off your 2 cents despite there is already a full cookies jar of it.

Look at your thread tittle, look at your post. Do you think it makes the forum more positive or even more miserable?

I always love people who love to address problem by becoming the problem.


As for the people who say "it's always like this". No it's not. I recommend you to find your nearest time machine and go back 3 years when EW was release. You'll see the forum was oozing with positivities back then. And you know why? Because the story was actually good. Yes, the forum only contain a section of the players, but it's still representative of the trend. Any form of media will always act as an amplifier for the most dominant sentiment. So while the state of the game is not as bad as the forum makes it out to be, it doesn't change the fact that negative sentiment is the dominant trench as this moment, and that's because the story suck.

[Derio]

Negativity is pretty much common here. The biggest thing is what is not being negatively talked about. Thats the key take away that devs take from this place. One big problem with the forums is the over look of negative feedback.

An example of that is DRK, SMN and MCH along with healers. Where those have a large amount of negative feedback and still have some issues but fall on deaf ears.

If you want to see where feedback is mostly picked from is probably X( formerly known as twitter) and Reddit.