What's with the forums?

[ZXN]

I am also new here, and given some of the threads I have responded in I would no doubt have people giving me the side eye for some of my responses.

But I have glanced at the forums from time to time way in the past, and I am sure each expansion had it's fair share of negative posters and threads. But I don't know if it's been THIS negative this quickly. It's barely been 2 months into Dawntrail and it's just tons of threads about the story, characters, job design, etc and players criticizing and/or tearing everything to pieces. I wouldn't be surprised if the other language forums have many of the same threads with people doing the same things, although much more moderated then the English one I assume. Given Yoshi-P still directs feedback to the forums, I guess the copium is still strong they'll listen eventually even though so many things seem to have fallen on deaf ears despite the massive amount of complaints.

The state of Tanks / Healers / DPS jobs and their balance, the current state of PVP Frontlines, Female Hrothgar rigging issues [Although that video with the Female Hroth clipping through the floor during a certain Shadowbringers scene was funny], Data Center Travel issues. Those are just a few of the things that people have been complaining about for months to a year or more and there isn't much else to really do besides voice concerns and hope the devs and writers actually listen for once. Yes there are people who do reply to the threads who are rude and/or dismissive of feedback and criticisms for the sole sake of being rude and/or dismissive and not actually caring about having a conversation or helping anything out with their own "feedback" and "suggestions." But those are things you just kind of have to deal with on a forum that isn't really moderated much by the looks of it.

The copium is probably slightly higher then normal with Dawntrail too given Yoshi-P did mention they would look at the feedback about the story and whatnot during the patches and fix things accordingly, but only time will tell if they were actually serious about that or if it was just some PR bullshit to try and give themselves some slack for the next two years.

[LyraShu]

Well, as you can see from most responses, this is how the forums just operate. The fact is, "One man's vulgarity is another man's lyric", which you can see translate in a lot of these postings. Just because one person says "ew you suck", it doesn't necessarily mean they are being mean (I like to give benefit of the doubt), but they could be in the mentality of "I am not going to sugarcoat anything for you". This is NOT in all cases that happen (people are people and some just want to hurt feelings), but I also have noticed more people adopting this mindset (which I am a fan of). Now, I am guilty of this also, when you read someone else's post and you feel like they are attacking you, you attack back (not defending this, just a mistake I do) even if they did not mean it as an attack. I mention all of this because these are things that I see in almost every forum I have gotten into. If you throw a bunch of people into a room from different parts of the country, lock the door, tell them to share opinions....do you really think there wouldn't be some stupid/venomous conversations going around? Now take that same room, drop the Bill of Rights in the middle, and tell them to talk about it and share their thoughts.....you might need to get law enforcement to help you with this kind of experiment though cause I wouldn't want to see the aftermath.

You also see troll postings/responses, bait postings\responses, and emotional postings (posting in anger, ext)... that are all DESIGNED to get a rise out of you, and while these have always been around, if you are just joining the forum community...well then ya it can be a ton of new things to sift through. I will say, I wish that these forums seemed more moderated, but I also enjoy the freedom it seems to give you with posting your thoughts (I say seems cause I know there is a lot that happens that I am not privy to).

In the end, most posters love this game and want to see it succeed/continue to succeed and most posts come from that original mindset. What I can say is that, if you agree with a post then give it a like. If you don't share your thoughts. If people don't agree with you, then don't take it as an attack. If people attack you, don't play their game. Aside from that, use the forums to help you with your game/learn new things. I can say I have gotten better at the game since joining the forums and that is because of the high-level conversations I get to read and have.

[LilimoLimomo]

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.

My guess is it's because of a lack of moderation. In a well-moderated forum, behavior that serves to undermine constructive dialogue gets moderated away — things like players insulting each other and/or the devs, troll posts that are just meant to create conflict, etc. Without these toxic elements, players can still be openly critical of the game, etc, but this criticism occurs in a way that's more productive and less likely to devolve into a playground fight. It's a win for everyone, though it does cost more for the SE because that kind of moderation requires more work and is thus more expensive.

Whether you do or don't remove toxic elements like these goes a long way to shaping discourse in the forums. If you allow toxicity to exist unchecked, then many of the people who don't want toxicity won't enjoy their time in the forums and will leave. And that creates a cycle where toxic are more likely to stay and non-toxic people are more likely to leave. But if you moderate away that toxicity, the opposite cycle happens.

This is absolutely not a 1-to-1 comparison, but it is very similar to the so-called "Nazi Bar Problem"; just replace "nazi" with "belligerent net dweller":
https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYo..._they_walk_in/

[Gember]

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.

I have to disagree with this comment here. There was a lot of complaints in Endwalker, and about its story.

I don't know if you recall the thread called "What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?" That thread almost has 1000 pages, and has been on the front page almost all of the expansion's lifecycle. It only went away because Dawntrail took the spice. I'll put the link below:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...walker/page946

There was also a lot of complaints regarding jobs and the two minute window. I don't hear as much about it as I do now in Dawntrail; but it made a lot of people upset because it made the game's combat system feel a lot more boring.

..and don't get me started on the amount of troll threads that were just getting put up on the forums daily, and bored players had a knack to always reply to them to keep them on the front page instead of letting them fade away. There was a lot of negativity in Endwalker, so your comment here about this "positive" talk is simply not true.

[CNitsah]

That's what happens when the moderation team barely moderate. Let F word in a post and you get a 10 day ban, but obvious trolling and being aggressive is mostly safe.

[Brynne]

I basically just pop into the forums when I'm bored at work to see what's up. Sometimes you get valid criticisms, sometimes nonsense and hyperbole, sometimes duplicate threads, sometimes troll threads. It's a mixed bag.

I would not expect much in the way of positive feedback here. Those threads do happen sometimes, but for the most part, people post on the official forums when they have something to complain about. It's natural for it to seem like everyone here is miserable about the game based on thread titles, but it's not necessarily the case.

[CidHeiral]

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.

Official forums for any game are usually pretty miserable because that's where people go to complain. Neckbeards demanding people lose their jobs over video game pixels isn't anything new or unique to this community.

[Striker44]

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.

In a word, yes. These forums have long been an echo chamber of negativity. The worst expansion is always (insert current expansion), which is such trash compared to (insert previous expansion which is now suddenly amazing despite being trash when it was current).

It makes sense from a psychology perspective, though. People are much more likely to complain than they are to praise something, especially like a video game intended for casual gamers. Most people really enjoying themselves are...well...playing the game.

EW is now regularly spoken of positively here, but during EW itself, there was the usual multi-hundred-page thread trashing everything about it. Heck, even ShB was ragged on here despite widely being viewed as the "top" expansion.

Which, again, makes sense. The people who posted here during ShB were mainly those who didn't like how it retconned Hydaelyn and Zodiark. Then EW happened and retconned the retcon, and it was those who didn't like the new retcon that cycled in to complain. Now, it's the people who don't like the new direction of DT who proliferate. But each of those groups generally liked the previous installment before the changes, so suddenly the conversation about past expansions gets a lot more positive.

The sad part is when you create an echo chamber, it's easy for the people in it to get a greatly overinflated sense of how large their "movement" really is. "Hey, everyone here agrees with me - therefore the whole playerbase must!" Nevermind that we represent nothing more than the proverbial grain of sand on the beach, and the rest of the beach is having fun playing the game.

That said, I'm here banging pots and pans in certain threads about these issues because I do deeply care about this game and want to see it improve.

I think conversation could become so much more productive if people could separate their own personal opinions from objective facts. For example, I have no doubt that you care deeply about this game. However, what you really want to see is not for the game to truly improve (objectively speaking), but rather for it improve for you. The same thing any one of us views as an improvement could just as easily be seen as a disappointment by someone else. If we could make that distinction, we might start realizing how comments like this inherently come off as telling other people they are "wrong" for enjoying the game as it is.

[Akonyl]

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?

It wasn't always quite this way, there have always been complaints, but checking the forums recently the entitlement of the complaints has definitely had a noticable uptick.

It's kind of tinfoil-y, but in a way I almost blame the handling of the graphical update for the change. When the benchmark came out and there were issues, there was a big hubbub about it, and SE had a very quick response to it (including action) which was a lot faster than the turnaround on the majority of other feedback seen here. I feel like that kind of emboldened people into believing that if they just blow things as out of proportion as possible, that they're more likely to be heard, so they pull the "this person should be fired", "the game is unplayable because of (minor graphical nit / gameplay issue) and SE should issue an apology" etc cards.

[Raven2014]

I have to disagree with this comment here. There was a lot of complaints in Endwalker, and about its story.

I don't know if you recall the thread called "What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?" That thread almost has 1000 pages, and has been on the front page almost all of the expansion's lifecycle. It only went away because Dawntrail took the spice. I'll put the link below:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...walker/page946

I used the word "dominant", not "only". And use that word for a reason. Yes I'm aware of that thread, and do you know what else I'm aware of? That is also one of the very few threads that was negative. The majority of thread back there were gushing positives, people talk about Elpis, Venat, the Walk, how "the Answer" came in full circle .etc. Comparing to now where the majority of thread are negative, and can you find even one thing in the DT MSQ that have people "gushing" about?

so your comment here about this "positive" talk is simply not true.

Only if you decide to misconstrue it. If the sentimental spectrum is -100 to 100, than EW was around the 80 to 90, that means it would still leave room for 10-20 negativeness. Whether DT is more closer to a -70 to -80. Yes there is some people can still find some possitive to say, but to pretend things are the same as then just 'because" is whataboutism at its best.

Do I have to explain the concept of ratio to you? What you're saying is akin to saying because every youtube video will have both Like and Dislike so they're all the same, while ignoring the fact a vid with 10k like and 2k dislike is not the same as one with a 2k like and 10k dislike. That's not an honest assessment. Yes, there is always both positive and negative on the forum, but the split between them are not the same all the time, and it's safe to say the split between DT and EW is pretty much polar opposite.