/shrugs. I'm just saying thoughts that popped in my head. It's not that deep tbh.
Whether or not it's a slap in the face, it's objectively embarrassing. Grown adults bullying strangers over a video game is cringe and reflects very poorly on SE. None of the content creators in other parts of the FF Fandom behave that way.
And again in some cases you're talking about adults who have already been banned from their own platforms for egotistical and abusive behavior, not some kind of innocent mistake by Twitch/SE.
Any survey done by polling firms poll a tiny, tiny, tiny slice of the population.
Pew's polls, which are the gold standard, poll thousands at a time. Out of hundreds of millions of Americans.
You need to demonstrate why the forums are peculiar in its composition. And you haven't.
Finally, the people complaining back in HW and SB never got the same number of likes as current threads. A lot of the replies also just told them to get good.
This really shows a lack of knowledge on the subject and a lot of assumptions.
The ppl surveyed in a serious sociological study must meet a series of criteria to make said group representative for the population that is polled.
Ofc a forum does not meet said criteria for a lot of reasons. Take the fact that usually unsatisfied ppl tend to come post on the forums. But most important, the respondents are not selected, they post here by their own impulse and volition
There is definitely sample bias, but you also have zero evidence which direction that sample bias goes. You have no evidence that the forums contain more unsatisfied players than the general playerbase. The forums are going to be the most representative out of all social media because only players who are subscribed can post, and because all official channels point towards the official forums.
We could agree that the forums have an intensity bias, in that people here generally have more intense opinions because they feel compelled to post in the first place. But which direction is that intensity pointing at? You have no evidence for any of that.
For example:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...y-in-Endwalker
This thread, one of the most major "criticism" thread on the forums (in fact I believe it is the fourth in size out of all threads), got ratioed:
387 likes on the comment saying they liked the story versus the 254 likes on the topic.
There are plenty of examples of negative threads getting ratioed. With these examples, how can you confidently insinuate that these forums naturally slant negatively? The healer strike thread is one of the few major criticism threads that has virtually zero "ratioing". This looks VERY, VERY different from the situation in the EW story thread.
Someone only has to be unhappy or otherwise feel like talking about one (1) thing and they've now they're here and easily roped into every other topic.
This is really the closest you're going to get to a representative sample.
So why the comparison in the first place? You probably have a bias, you have no idea what intensity or in which direction so you could at least compensate for ot, how can you even compare a thread on a forum with a sociological study? It's useless.
You can assume stuff, if it makes you feel better, or right, but the truth is either forums, or reddit, or x are not representative for the ppl playing the game. They might be, but we have no way of knowing. The only ppl with metrics are SE. So if they see the number of healers plummeting, they will do something, for sure.
But if you want to talk about subjective evidence or small samples, a lot of the healers in my dungeons (when I don't play healer myself) kinda struggle. Hell, in the strike thread you had someone supporting the strike while also saying he struggles to heal a normal wall-to-wall. Making healing more difficult will certainly be funny. But it's also gonna lead to some wipes, some kicked healers, some complaints. I am all for it, popcorn is ready.
One flaw in this is there is no dislike option. In your example, 387 liked the comment. If there had been a dislike button, and it got to 2k, that would be an indicator of something. However, the flip side is this opens things to be abused, so likes on a thread are not really the best indicator in my opinion.
Polling done by an official company such as the Pew Research Center uses the gold standard for reliability of a "simple random sample" (everyone in the population has an effectively equal chance of providing input) and the "margin of error" reported in these polls is based on the size of the sample. These forums, on the other hand, would constitute what is called a "voluntary sample" from a statistics perspective (data is obtained from people who *choose* to post here), and is recognized as one of the two most *unreliable* ways of obtaining representative data.
You are the one (or rather, the "healer strike" crowd) trying to claim the voluntary sample is valid. The onus is on you to prove it is so, not on others to prove that an unreliable approach is somehow reliable in this particular case.