What's with the forums?

[Arzalis]

I really think it boils down to YoshiP and the devs mostly telling players to give their feedback here.

The part they leave out though is giving feedback here is basically the same thing as throwing your complaint into the paper shredder. It's been painfully obvious for years the devs don't really pay much attention to the EN side of the forums.

[Sensui]

I really think it boils down to YoshiP and the devs mostly telling players to give their feedback here.

The part they leave out though is giving feedback here is basically the same thing as throwing your complaint into the paper shredder. It's been painfully obvious for years the devs don't really pay much attention to the EN side of the forums.

You ever notice that the English forums are also called the "child forum"? Lol

[Avoidy]

People will say it's because everyone who enjoys the game is busy playing it, but I've dragged myself on all week just to do some roulettes and the queues take so long to pop that I just give up and log out. The CWLSes I'm in are really really quiet, PFs just sit waiting for healers, etc.
The main story that everyone's cared about this whole time is over, and DT did not carry the mantle very well if reactions to the bad writing and new lead character were any indication. Story fans who kept subbing for the narrative are gone. Gameplay bros liked the direction of a lot of the battle content, but like always there wasn't enough of it to keep anyone entertained very long, so now here we are again, in the post-expac lull with 2 more months of nothing to look forward to before we get like... an alliance raid and that's it? This game's problem isn't even hard. Just give folks more things to do so they don't get bored and quit. That, or have a compelling story so they feel compelled to resub for the next chapter. You can't be a story focused mmo with a bland story and bland/lacking gameplay and then make the surprised pikachu face when people don't want to play anymore. This happens so often that you can see the trends on steamcharts. It's happening right now. Big influx of people for the expansion, but then there's nothing to do afterwards so people leave and the game has like a 30% drop.

Hell, as I typed this out I was just sitting in an expert roulette queue. 8pm on a saturday night, 10 minutes and counting. I've been the #1 role waiting list number for like 7 minutes lmao. But yeah! I'm sure allllllll the people who love the game are totally just online and playing it, right?

[Priddy]

The forums are a quarantine zone for the worst this game has to offer. It serves an important purpose, and keeps these types of people confined to one easily avoidable space. It's good to pop your head in here to leave feedback when necessary (though I would recommend using the in-game feedback tool to avoid contracting a terminal illness), or ask for technical advice or something, but generally just stay out of here unless you just want to people watch. Most people here are simply here to vent their frustrations. It's pretty miserable for your mental if you stick around here too long trying to engage in good faith.

Edit: Also, it's worth mentioning also that in my experience, the JP forums are a lot more useful and cordial. If you don't mind dealing with the jankiness of machine translation, I encourage you to check it out over there if you find things too ugly on the EN side of the forums.

[Priddy]

Hell, as I typed this out I was just sitting in an expert roulette queue. 8pm on a saturday night, 10 minutes and counting. I've been the #1 role waiting list number for like 7 minutes lmao. But yeah! I'm sure allllllll the people who love the game are totally just online and playing it, right?

The stats disagree with your anecdote, FYI. You can check SteamCharts to get a rough idea of player retention trends, and Dawntrail's retention levels are comparable to Endwalker's, Shadowbringers' and Stormblood's, at approx. -32%, -32%, -28% and -30% respective player drop off in the first player-count decreasing period after expansion release.

Except the difference now is that we have a substantially larger starting playerbase than we did years ago, so you're actually logging in with more players today than you ever did prior to Endwalker's launch, outside of expansion release dates.

Of course, SteamCharts only tracks players who play through Steam, but that player count is representative of the playerbase as a whole.

[Voidmage]

Huh... I admit it hadn't occurred to me that the forums are the only place I see most criticisms while the Reddit/Twitter tends to be full of those only praising the game while downplaying/dismissing any problems. Even when the bugged out female Hrothgar cutscene first came out, you had more than a few folks over there calling it "faked" and being made up just to attack Square-Enix... until Square-Enix themselves admitted "yeah, this is real, sorry about that" and fixed it, and the "fake" callers disappeared without a single apology or even acknowledgement that an issue was addressed.

Of course, in the same vein, the forums have definitely had the highest concentration of players spouting off transphobic remarks relative to the Reddit/Twitter, so regardless of whether a place has extreme positivity or negativity, it can make all of those places (and by extension the game's overall community) appear toxic and insufferable, and then you're left wondering if it's "just a minority" or encompasses more of our populace than we want to admit to, and only the risk of being banned stops the most unhinged sycophants and sociopaths from really letting loose within the game its self. (And even then... sometimes the sludge oozes through.)

Reddit (both of them) are full of negativity towards DT though and so are YouTube comments outside of OST’s.

Regarding the original post from Striker:
Even if we take the notion that Twitter is overwhelmingly positive, it is twitter.
If SE has more than two brain cells left they would know that other games that failed also had twitter on the positive end.
Twitter is full of comments of people who don’t even play the specific game.

Also in my opinion, being hated by twitter is akin to a batch of honor nowadays.
Be it movies, games or other things. Doing what twitter likes often brings the bad end of the romance route for video game developers.
It’s the one thing good about 2024, that this stupid bubble is finally exploding.

[PapaIggy]

You got a bunch of zero life trolls who live on these forums making 100s of post weekly, best just to block their accounts and move on 1000% not worth engaging them or poking them.

[Raven2014]

Twitter is full of comments of people who don’t even play the specific game.

I hope Developers eventually realize Twitter isn't a good place to gather feedback for gaming. It's not a gathering place for gamers, but full of people who want to dictate what games other should play.

[TheMadParadox]

This is actually quite normal. I don't mean just for the FF14 forums. All of this behavior is for every forum, every game, every comment section, across the entire internet, it's just human nature. The amount of community places online that are not like this is extremely few and far between. Every game forum I've been to and been a part of has been like this. I go on the Overwatch 2 forums a good amount since I like and play OW2 enough to want to do so. You should go there and see how bad it is for yourself. I haven't been on the FF14 forums long either, but from what I've seen these forums are for the most part like a walk in the park compared to OW.