Results of a reddit job satisfaction poll

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I'm assuming those on reddit will be more of the high end FFXIV players and less casuals than in the actual game

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If the 14 reddit is more at the high end, the official forums would be more in the "ultimate clear omegalul disband after i even think you might wipe casual scum" range, based solely on post content, where reddit is up to 80% "look at muh catgril / dagrongal isnt she cute uwu".

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Casuals don't care about the META. Hell, most of them don't even know it exists.

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If we're defining casual as a player who will make no effort to learn anything about the game, or any effort to learn how things work relative to each other, then that might be correct.

But thats usually not what gets referred to as casual. That form of casual player wont play an MMO long enough to know how they even feel about a class.

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so HC playerbase is, likely, somewhere in 10-15% range. No matter how you look at this, HC playerbase, while isn't small, is very far in size from what this poll suggests it to be

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Theres multiple scales of whats considered "hardcore", of which completing "raid" content (which isnt even a raid) is only one.

There are plenty of people who consider themselves hardcore that arent completing savage content, or who have any ability to do savage content.

Play on Hawaii time on Crystal (or in most any MMO in the world right now, or on a timezone that doesnt match the place you live)? You're probably not getting to find groups to do some/a lot of content outside the "world is needlessly panicing itself into oblivion" month and a half we're due to wrap up shortly.

The poll is pretty accurate and quite reflects my opinion on tanks and healers.

GNB and PLD plays well, DRK is on the weaker side, however warrior is a shadow of his former self.
WHM is pretty nice to play with but AST and SCH i just cannot even lvl up due to the how terribly boring they are, i dont see my one single target spell upgraded as anything exciting.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

The thing is, those people criticizing the survey, what form of feedback do they accept if that one wasn't enough? Do they value these forums more as a form of feedback? By their standards these forums would be completely meaningless.

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A poll conducted across the entire playerbase sent to randomly selected players via email (with required-or-incentivised responses so everyone selected will respond) would be a far better representation of what everyone thinks of the game, not just the small intense few that frequent the forums.

Yes, 2700 votes is enough to tell you what a considerable number of people think of the game, but does not tell you whether they are representative of the entire playerbase. Certainly not enough to claim it sufficiently random to have a 95% confidence level that this accurately represents the whole, because it's inherently biased sampling.

This isn't even about the results of the poll, it's about being honest with the maths. If they all left glowing reviews I would still object to it being called a random sample and talking about how many people would be required to guarantee the accuracy of a random sample, because it isn't random. It's an opt-in poll on a single website.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

This isn't even about the results of the poll, it's about being honest with the maths. If they all left glowing reviews I would still object to it being called a random sample and talking about how many people would be required to guarantee the accuracy of a random sample, because it isn't random. It's an opt-in poll on a single website.

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I've responded to this in post prior to the one you've quoted here. And again, I've said from the beginning it's only true for a random sample, this doesn't mean those measurements won't be used (true random sample is usually impossible). It's to give an idea of how truly big a sample of 2700 is and then subjectively consider how accurate the results may be (considering how representative the survey entries are).

Read and respond to my reply prior to the one you've quoted here.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

Read and respond to my reply prior to the one you've quoted here.

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You mean this one?

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Originally Posted by SamRF

2700 entries is more than enough. You'd only need about 400 entries to have a 95% confidence level considering active FFXIV population (using 600 000)

With 2700 entries you have a marginal error of about 2%, meaning the real result will be within +- 2% of the survey's result.

This is of course only truly the case when you have a random sample, but having a truly random sample is usually impossible.

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I read it. I was already responding to it.

2700 entries means nothing if they're concentrated within one part of a whole.

It's hard to get a truly random sample, but this isn't even an attempt.

If you stood outside a political rally (regardless of which side of politics) and polled attendees on who they wanted to win the election, even if you polled hundreds of thousands of people, you couldn't then use it as proof that 99% of the general population want X to win.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

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No, this one that I posted after the first one as reply to you. (quoted you as well, looks like you've missed it)

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Originally Posted by SamRF

I mean, I've literally said in that post that it's only truly the case if you have a random sample. However, as I've also said, true random sampling is usually impossible. This doesn't mean that those statistical measurements won't be used or taken into consideration (they would be useless if it only gave meaningful information for true random sample). It's not accurate but gives you an idea of what the true accuracy would be when you afterwards take into account how representative the survey entries are.

It's true you need more surveys to confirm this and some results may be up to interpretation but 2700 entries is still quite a lot, imo you can't say the results are meaningless with such large amount of entries assuming vast majority of those were indeed from active FFXIV players (which is a fairly safe assumption to make). Consider that this survey reached more people from the population than many actual (scientific) researchers (any topic) ever hope to be able to reach for their study. It's more than valid material to work with and perhaps right now the best source of feedback for the developers considering the alternative feedback mediums. (It's much better information than the usual feedback on these forums with a thread with perhaps 100 likes or a couple users going back and forth on an issue.)

The fact that it's by far more hardcore players you reach instead of casuals isn't that problematic imo, because casuals likely don't care nearly as much about job satisfaction as those "hardcore" who spend much more time in the game.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

If you stood outside a political rally (regardless of which side of politics) and polled attendees on who they wanted to win the election, even if you polled hundreds of thousands of people, you couldn't then use it as proof that 99% of the general population want X to win.

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Never understood this line of reasoning. Like the election, not everyone is allowed or feels inclined to vote either. Plus the opinions on the poll are varied and aren't as biased as you'd see from a group that supports one figure/cause.

Feedback is taken when people actively do it. If they wanted feedback from absolutely everyone, they could've messaged mass surveys to everyone right now. If we go to specifics, that would probably be way too much information to go through since the game has about hundredth thousands of active players. Information like this is still credible even if it's a small part of the community.

Most of healer complaints have nothing to do with a specific healer not being meta, but rather how boring and similar to each other they are to play.

Too much downtime to fill with 1-2 button spam.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

It's true you need more surveys to confirm this and some results may be up to interpretation but 2700 entries is still quite a lot, imo you can't say the results are meaningless with such large amount of entries assuming vast majority of those were indeed from active FFXIV players (which is a fairly safe assumption to make).

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As I already said: 2700 is a lot on its own, but it doesn't matter how many players you poll if those players are not a cross-section of the entire game population. Thus my example about the political rally - you can poll every single person in attendance about their preferred political party, and gather far more responses than you would need for a reliable random sample, but if your sample isn't random then no sheer number of responses will make it an accurate representation of the whole population.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

The fact that it's by far more hardcore players you reach instead of casuals isn't that problematic imo, because casuals likely don't care nearly as much about job satisfaction as those "hardcore" who spend much more time in the game.

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You're assuming here that hardcore players' opinion of how the jobs should work is the best one that would be appreciated by everyone. It isn't, necessarily.

Case in point (which has already been raised in this thread just above) is healer complexity. It's a constant complaint here that only having one attack button is terrible and boring.

Personally, coming from console games mostly, one attack button is normal. Having a one-two-three combo spread across three buttons is needlessly wasteful of buttons, and the overall number of skills is immense. I'd rather have less skills than more, and have the complexity come from the game environment or the fight. Also I know for a fact that I tend to "tunnel-vision" when following a DPS rotation, and and making healers do that would be a surefire way to make me do a terrible job of either healing, DPSing, or both. (I do miss Aero 3 though.)

Is my opinion common? I don't know. But increasing the complexity level to suit the small number of people asking for it might have a negative effect on job satisfaction for others. People who are happy with the current gameplay are inherently not going to be complaining about it.

Edit to add: The "one button is boring" complaints also overlook the fact that you are doing that while monitoring your party's status and breaking to cast healing spells when needed. One mindless skill is exactly what I want when my mind is on other things.

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Originally Posted by dinnertime

Never understood this line of reasoning. Like the election, not everyone is allowed or feels inclined to vote either. Plus the opinions on the poll are varied and aren't as biased as you'd see from a group that supports one figure/cause.

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I'm not saying the poll is as biased as that hypothetical one would be. Just an extreme example of why "we polled a large number of people" doesn't guarantee that the result means anything if you didn't poll the right selection of people.

Also, while it's not really relevant to the example either way, voting is compulsory in some countries.

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

Most of healer complaints have nothing to do with a specific healer not being meta, but rather how boring and similar to each other they are to play.

Too much downtime to fill with 1-2 button spam.

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It's not even a 1 2 button spam. It's 1 button every 30 seconds and 11-12 casts of your filler spell.

Such riveting gameplay.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

Personally, coming from console games mostly, one attack button is normal. Having a one-two-three combo spread across three buttons is needlessly wasteful of buttons,

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You know how other games get around button bloat for things like that? By making combos on 1 button. Many have been asking for this in FFXIV for a while but the developers refuse to do it in the main game but have no problem doing it for PvP which very few people play.

The system is there, SE refuses to implement it in the core game.