This is a Japanese game, and many of the development team do not speak English. This is understandable. What I worry about is how the questions/suggestions from the English-speaking forums are rarely brought up compared to previous years (first 5 years since ARR), which is a substantial number of subscribed players.
In the Live Letters, we hear terms like "this has been a much-requested item from the community" but it's rarely something we see on the English forums. Typically the suggestions came from the Japanese forums (understandably so).
My concern is that, even if you don't use any of our questions, anything we post on here isn't necessarily being heard. I know Yoshi P used to ask one of my questions on several LLs when the Live Letter thread was ongoing, and a lot of other excellent English-posed questions posted were answered too, and that felt wonderful.
We felt like we were heard.
But when there's thousands of forum posts that aren't keenly watched like that Live Letter thread, really good suggestions get buried very quickly. There's a lot of really great suggestions that died because they were bumped off the first page from threads that already had hundreds to thousands of posts, and a typical forum structure just doesn't feasibly build that developer-player trust. If it's not on Page 1, people aren't going to go looking for it. They did during the Live Letter threads. We'd have upvotes all the way up to page 50.
Especially during COVID, when the virtual fan festival was a place to ask questions, there's a lot of questions built up that will likely never be answered. And that was half the fun of the Fan Festivals: the interaction.
Continue reading...
In the Live Letters, we hear terms like "this has been a much-requested item from the community" but it's rarely something we see on the English forums. Typically the suggestions came from the Japanese forums (understandably so).
My concern is that, even if you don't use any of our questions, anything we post on here isn't necessarily being heard. I know Yoshi P used to ask one of my questions on several LLs when the Live Letter thread was ongoing, and a lot of other excellent English-posed questions posted were answered too, and that felt wonderful.
We felt like we were heard.
But when there's thousands of forum posts that aren't keenly watched like that Live Letter thread, really good suggestions get buried very quickly. There's a lot of really great suggestions that died because they were bumped off the first page from threads that already had hundreds to thousands of posts, and a typical forum structure just doesn't feasibly build that developer-player trust. If it's not on Page 1, people aren't going to go looking for it. They did during the Live Letter threads. We'd have upvotes all the way up to page 50.
Especially during COVID, when the virtual fan festival was a place to ask questions, there's a lot of questions built up that will likely never be answered. And that was half the fun of the Fan Festivals: the interaction.
Continue reading...