This here is not even really community management, this is more of customer support, which shouldn't really be all the community department does, and it shouldn't even be the main bread and butter of their work, maybe one person max, so what are exactly the rest of them doing?
Considering the size of their department, which is like somewhere 5+ or some such (including of course someone for graphics, some web things, and such, but still), it's really funny to see them complaining about lack of time looking how they're not exactly dealing with Fortnite-level player base. Probably also speaks to the unusually high level of problems and mentioned general mismanagement, also due to not understanding the games, community, and therefore priorities, and then there will be the funding as well (even though when they have such a team, maybe just wrong allocation of it - maybe an extra community coordinator would be helpful instead of someone else, or how about instead of one 50k tournament we use those funds to hire a new team member, hmm? I know it's just a year salary, but you get the gist).
In general you need to understand Microsoft is not doing community management, and never did during the era of the remasters. On purpose. Community management is something altogether different than what they're doing, what they're doing is community marketing and to some degree customer support (just like this here), which they try to outsource to unpaid community volunteers (the Community Sages on their Discord and community mods on their forums and such). True community management would mean actual deep, daily involvement and active steering of things and, mainly, resolution of not only technical problems and potential harmful tendencies in the community. They do nothing of the sort at all, and let the community be in a complete free fall and general dark about things, also allowing enterprising individuals take advantage of it as much as they can. And even the parts mentioned above they do they obviously struggle with.
Makes you really wonder what they have that big team on the community department for when the only things you see are announcement posts and uninspired events (is it really that hard to make a historical event e.g. around Joan of Arc, an iconic AoE character, that was burnt at stake 30th May? I don't know, make a speedrun challenge for a campaign scenario, commission a special scenario for the anniversary depicting something tied to her that's not in the campaign or not as detailed, make Joan-inspired graphics for Franks, make a Franks vs. Britons challenge, like really anything, instead we have "Build 20 walls" - yeah I know, you would actually need to know the game and the community for this...). Though yeah, as mentioned, making 2km long patch posts probably does take considerable time. Every month and still coming amazingly.
Considering the size of their department, which is like somewhere 5+ or some such (including of course someone for graphics, some web things, and such, but still), it's really funny to see them complaining about lack of time looking how they're not exactly dealing with Fortnite-level player base. Probably also speaks to the unusually high level of problems and mentioned general mismanagement, also due to not understanding the games, community, and therefore priorities, and then there will be the funding as well (even though when they have such a team, maybe just wrong allocation of it - maybe an extra community coordinator would be helpful instead of someone else, or how about instead of one 50k tournament we use those funds to hire a new team member, hmm? I know it's just a year salary, but you get the gist).
In general you need to understand Microsoft is not doing community management, and never did during the era of the remasters. On purpose. Community management is something altogether different than what they're doing, what they're doing is community marketing and to some degree customer support (just like this here), which they try to outsource to unpaid community volunteers (the Community Sages on their Discord and community mods on their forums and such). True community management would mean actual deep, daily involvement and active steering of things and, mainly, resolution of not only technical problems and potential harmful tendencies in the community. They do nothing of the sort at all, and let the community be in a complete free fall and general dark about things, also allowing enterprising individuals take advantage of it as much as they can. And even the parts mentioned above they do they obviously struggle with.
Makes you really wonder what they have that big team on the community department for when the only things you see are announcement posts and uninspired events (is it really that hard to make a historical event e.g. around Joan of Arc, an iconic AoE character, that was burnt at stake 30th May? I don't know, make a speedrun challenge for a campaign scenario, commission a special scenario for the anniversary depicting something tied to her that's not in the campaign or not as detailed, make Joan-inspired graphics for Franks, make a Franks vs. Britons challenge, like really anything, instead we have "Build 20 walls" - yeah I know, you would actually need to know the game and the community for this...). Though yeah, as mentioned, making 2km long patch posts probably does take considerable time. Every month and still coming amazingly.