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

[AnimaAnimus]

They also gather information from reddit and twitter, as well as youtube and twitch, which is also highly skewed. There is no solid way to collect information, but I am willing to put more stock into a place that doesn't have a downvote button that can negatively effect someone's account or an account that makes it easy to dox someone. So, unless they do surveys the forums are actually the best way to gather feedback. Like it or not, the lack of a downvote button that messes with accounts and the lack of an easy way to idenify someone that lets some fragile fanboy from bringing the drama into and effecting that person's real life let's a lot of us be a lot more open to our true feelings of the state of the game and have a lot broader of a conversation. There will always be trolls, but that is just part of the internet and you will find that anywhere.

There is no way to get away from bad faith actors, but other forms of social media have a lot more of that. If we were able to speak openly about things we dislike on other sites without it directly effecting our accounts or life because we said something some manchild did not like, than those other sources would also be a lot more valid. Just because there is a lot of criticism on here, literally the only place we can post criticism safely, that doesn't mean everyone is a bad faith actor or that there are more bad faith actors than other places.

Imo they should do surveys of both active and inactive players every couple years, esp at the mid point and the end of an expansion, but that takes time and money and if there is anything the past couple expansions have taught us, it's that SE is willing to put neither of these things toward FFXIV.