Not to slander Max or Rai or anything like that but...

It'll be part of the job. Without a doubt. They're on the PR side of the company, it's part of what they are paid to do. It's why the yes men make me laugh, they can't see through it and take it at face value. Like you said, if you've worked in a similar industry, you know the act. I've done it myself. Active listening and all that, all to create a friendly demeanour. 

Definitely part of the job description. I'm guessing that there is some personal in it, as well, because you just can't help it. However, a bulk of their engagement is PR / customer service related.

It's also why they rarely answer definitively about a decision or must refer back to the developers. They have zero decision making ability.

Max is one of the dumbest people on the forum.

The amount of dumbshit things he's said, which some people take as the Gospel, just sickens me.

Rai is just ditzy eye candy for the most part. She does nothing but post cat pictures or says 'We'll pass it along'.

That's true, they could. Max however thinks the game is perfect and WG are infallible, even before he worked for them. No idea about Raibot tbh, she seems nice enough and is willing to have a joke at least, but other than perhaps pushing through tickets and collecting feedback im not sure what else she would do.

I do know of another WG employee who was still very much a player of the game and tried to push for improvement, he also helped get the tank restoration policy implemented as well as colour blind feature improvements. Even added me on his personal account to platoon and have a laugh, he seemed to be geniunely friendly and it was interesting hearing his opinions as a player and not employee. Such people tend to be rare though in my experience, IRL i met 1 guy like that, the rest were always just going through the motions. Not bad people, but whilst they were still clocked in, most of what you saw was simply a mild facade. 

Some people are better at it than others. PAIN for instance is bad at it, questioning his decisions annoys him, as does people repeating questions or critisizing things he sees no fault with. Hard to see it on the forum, very obvious on streams though, his body language and tone gives a lot away. I feel like i've gone a bit off topic, so to sum up, most of them are decent people but they're employees of a business that we are the customers of, so i take any pleasantries with a pinch of salt. Akin to a receptionist at a hotel being friendly for example, or a cashier in a shop etc. 

Is it easy to tell who is part of the system? People like you and R35T have all sorts of tags suggesting you are paid. Then others don't seem to be anyone special; but they clearly post hardline WG. This thread made me go looking and I saw the thread where a guy was gone for a year and when he got back, he was unpleasantly amazed by the new mechanics, the out-of-control RNG, and all the little annoying bugs associated with match making, intermittent uncontrolled movements etc. Three guys with 2 or 3 thousand game said it was clearly his fault and he probably had a bad controller. No discussion on that thread after those three. Well, I switched to a new controller and still occasionally see the problems reported on Bunker but not really discussed on the Console Forum. I would hate to think thread management interdiction is deliberate. I want to believe that Wot is just getting big, beyond the span of control for the core design team. Call me naive.

There are still fewer annoyances in Wot than in many MMPO games. I just live with them because I think that everyone is putting up with it, too. It's called "the rub of the green".

Participating in non-controversial threads is human nature. It's even more true for them since they can't speak to a lot of specifics about game mechanics and the like in the bitchy threads.

^^ This, tbh I like the way raibot comes across as derpy and friendly at least, but even before he was a mod, max acted like an absolute ass. He would pop up on every other fucking thread acting like an absolute authority on the subject matter.