Has posting in these forums ever changed anything ?

[NaoSen]

PVP seems like it exists to pad patch notes.

[Valence]

PVP seems like it exists to pad patch notes.

As someone who is involved in ranked, I do appreciate those pvp changes every time actually. They could certainly do more, but at least they tend to patch in the right direction most of the time (unlike pve). It's not just to "pad patch notes".

[Buttobi]

PVP seems like it exists to pad patch notes.

It exists cause PvP deserves balance patches the same way PvE does. I know it's annoying for people who don't play PvP to see half a patch be just those changes, but I think that is more of an issue with the content per patch rather than PvP getting small number tweaks.

[Jeeqbit]

I haven't' been using the forums long but now that I do it seems to be a collection of things that SE might make a side note of in an address

No, it's a collection of things that the Community Team are meant to take note of and deliver a summary of feedback to the developers. This is necessary because the developers speak Japanese, so it has to be translated, you see.

The feedback they gather includes other sources though like social media and the game (the community team clearly participate in the community, learning savage in a static etc) and show this understanding in their streams. So you see, they will gather it from actually playing the game and managing social media as well.

I recall there being something about the "10 most popular topics get translated each week" but I don't know if that still happens. In general, anything with a lot of pages of posts and likes will probably draw attention, and in some cases this has led to a response from the community team. The developers poured over the post related to character appearance, for example.

In most cases, I think that developers just look over forum posts when they actually want feedback on something they are working on. So I assume they look around or use the search feature.

The developers that speak English have mostly only participated in the Localization forum before and that's quite rare. Obviously that is the team that translate things.

usually if it's that big a thing then streamers and youtubers have made videos of it.

Despite the feedback summaries, it doesn't mean the developers will act on it, since there is a bigger picture than just your own opinion. There could be business reasons, technical reasons, statistical reasons, developer opinion reasons, human resource reasons, expertise reasons, operational reasons, why things don't happen that you would like to happen.

But if it's "developer opinion reasons", the thing that tends to influence that more is the YouTubers because they watch YouTube stuff a lot. They invite many of them to media events and send them promotional stuff. They tend to find out about popular memes going round. So if a YouTuber says it, it's more likely to get through.

I'm genuinely curious because it feels like the only people even remotely related to SE that read the forums (Or care about the content) are moderators doing their job.

The moderators are GMs. Just like GMs only act on reports, the moderators mostly just moderate if a post is reported.

Has anything that one could tie back to the forums ever happened?

Yes, but very rarely. Usually small QoL things that I saw on the forums at some point and could clearly remember a post saying it. The General Discussion forum in particular has so many posts that each day there's an entirely new set of topics sometimes, so they are likely to miss a lot of them.

The more specific forums don't get so many posts, and where they do, they are often much worse echo chambers than here which so obviously need a more balanced debate. Nevertheless, I've seen feedback listened to from there as well (but not in the way people want):

• They made healing "harder" in Abyssos in response to feedback. The reaction by healers was to avoid joining PFs and only to join statics, because they didn't want to heal bad tanks.
• They gave healers more attacks and this was stated in the notes that it was in response to feedback about lack of healer attacks. However, these additional attacks were every 2 minutes, so make of that what you will.
• They acknowledged a common topic in the tank forums of "returning to 3.0" design but said they are happy with 5.0 design and want to continue in that direction.

Localization reports in the localization forum used to be addressed quite regularly but, to be honest, they stopped at some point and my last report there was ignored.

They still read and handle bug reports (they contacted me about one I reported and it got fixed for example).

[Moqi]

The forum is used as content fodder by influencers and there's a higher chance they listen to them than us.

[DeltaCyan]

When they announced that Viper was going to receive changes and have half of its positionals removed, the forums responded by asking them not to.

The response was, "Okay we wont remove positionals, instead one of your core mechanics is gone now. Did anyone ask for this? No, we made this change without the feedback in mind."

So basically, they will only listen to feedback that they can agree with or can use as an excuse. If they dont, it gets ignored.

[Hallarem]

You are looking for the japanese forums friend. Thats the only thing they probably listen to.

[Tint]

I remember they improved WHMs Lillies before SB release (they were still awful) and the graphics update with DT (which some people still dislike) after backlash in the forums.

[Batbrat]

Isnt that how we got the current housing lottery system? People were literally begging on the forum for a lottery system for like a good solid 2 years, and then we finally got it and those same beggers were 10x more hysterical, screaming about how terrible it actually wound up being lmao. That and the changes they did to that one Nier raid I think because of eye issues or something.