The forums are flawed as the main way to collect player feedback.

[CNitsah]

Forums are bad for feedback becasue:
Only a minority of the playerbase actually read/use/watch the forums
Also a lot of players dont want give feedback on forums - because they get atk'ed for their opinions.
And it dosn't help that the forum consists of mostly of the same "players" - it's a huge echo chamber.

It's overall a hostile and bad environment for feedback lol

you can say the same about all of the feedback collection method. Reddit is an echo chamber, active twitter users are mostly from a few demographic (public figures, activists, etc...) the average joe is pretty invisible. Most people just ignore survey, plus the way they write the question and possible answer limit the reach of feedback, etc. No feedback method is enough by itself, but that doesn't make it bad.

Especially when such a small percentage even use the forums, yeah. Seeing the amount of views that a post on the English speaking forums gets vs. the Japanese (100k vs 3mil for one of my posts), and only an even smaller fraction of that posts... it's definitely skewed.

There is a reason for that, japanese tend to do long ass megathread on one subject that last for YEARS (I mean look at this thread, 2.2m view, first message 10 years ago). As much as western forum tend to create 20 thread about the same things, and would benefit from posting in the thread existing about hte subject, japanese forum have the opposite problem. A thread last for years and talk about anything remotely related to one subject, making it a difficult to get a point if you were not there at the moment it was discussed. In western forum, thread rarely exceed a few week to a month of lifetime (the one that live longer are major subject. Over the past month, that was Wuk Lamat, downtrail writing, the graphic update thread and the healer strike). So of course they will have less view than the 3 year old thread about one subject. Japanese and english forum are two extremes, but honestly, none of them is ideal. At least here, the subject of threads are more focused.