Quote Originally Posted by FrankReynolds View Post
It was in the beast master thread. They gave a choice of several new pets that they were thinking of adding. They had a couple that were already set in stone, and they offered the players a chance to vote for the last one. The one with the most votes was not added, and instead they put in the one that had the most Japanese votes. Some people argued that they may have done the votes by region, thereby lumping all people who speak English together as 1 vote. Regardless of how the votes were tallied (or if they counted them at all), there was an outcry, which they chose to ignore. They could have just made something up like: "after looking at that pet we decided the other one was better" or even a simple "Balance.", But they chose to leave it up to interpretation, and most people interpreted it as a middle finger.
Ouch. I stand corrected.

That is the problem here. The devs are in fact making that decision regardless of our input. Not because people haven't debated both sides of the coin. They are free to do so. The game obviously can't be a democracy, but if they are making decisions that fly in the face of logic, then people can and will be angry and voice it. When they use language like "in order to maintain balance" they are diluting the issue. The fact of the matter is that what they are actually doing is weakening 1 thing instead of making something else better. That is the opposite of progress.
As it stands now, yes. And yeah, I agree with you that what they are doing, on the face of it, is just a bad idea. And if past experience is anything to go by, SE probably doesn't have a master plan. I'm just hoping against hope, I guess. And like I said before, nothing wrong with being angry and faulting the logic they present. That part I agree with.

I'm just a scientist at heart, I guess. And although polls are easy to construct, polls that do what they look like they do are actually incredibly difficult to construct. And 10 or 100 degrees in stats won't do you a lick of good if you don't have the actual data, which we don't. Things like confirmation bias and other things have led to bigger problems than bad MMO decisions, believe you me. So I get a little hot under the collar about it. Sorry about that.

Yeah, I would feel more optimistic if they gave responses that suggested something good in the works, but so far, they have said things like "working as intended" when people complain about things, and "not working as intended" when people are actually excited about things.
Completely agreed.