My writing attempts are all, completely jammed. So I’ll start with the easy.

There’s a fun post from Caydiem to explain the sense of the copycatted Grab Bag they added on the forums:

Sure. We know that sometimes some significant posts we make get missed in the general banter that occurs from day to day. We don’t want you to miss important or interesting information, so we decided to compile the pertinent posts we’ve made throughout the week and put them up there for you to see. :)

So. “Significant posts” that may “get missed in the general banter”. Of course they do not “want you to miss important or interesting information”. Such as this one:

My latest character is currently 105g away from obtaining his epic mount, and most of the gold was obtained from being aggressive at the Auction House from the point the character was created. There are points when I’m undertaking activities such as raids on high level instances or pvp’ing where I lose a little bit of money, or break even at best. If too many days pass where this is the case, I often find myself farming various locations for gold, so that I’m at least moving forward towards my goal of having a cute but fast as heck raptor.

We need a paid moderator to write that? Now I know that I shouldn’t flag negatively this attempt to organize some information. DAoC’s Grab Bag has exactly the same purposes and has been praised (not by me) more than once as a positive way of communicating with the players.

What I think is, again, the these Community Managers are completely useless. Their role is an important part of the game even if it’s not directly in the game and still it gets ignored or considered superficially. They do not have a direct responsibility over this since they aren’t put in the condition to do much better than that. I guess it could be even frustrating to not be able to say anything if not answer the silliest questions of some newbies.

I still believe that the role of a Community Manager is to encourage, promote and contribute to the discussions, trying to steer them in a positive way that can be useful for both parts. As I wrote many other times the role is a support and organize the communication between the developers and the players. An integration but not a direct replacement.

This is another example of a pattern repeating in many other situations. These are fundamental resources that the industry systematically ignores and wastes.