Polls for proposed in game changes - given the forums Jekyll and Hyde nature :)

I thought an ok suggestion would be to

- when you go to the launcher screen (or where ever is best) there is a Vote link. This could take you to a screen to vote (one vote per account) on a proposed change and then at least SE would have an idea of what the whole community wants. If you don't vote then that is taken as don't care.

- Would need to keep vote open for say a 1-2 weeks to make sure most of the population is captured.

- Naturally square can do what they want but seeing the vote results means the community as a whole and SE can see what people think of an idea easily.

As an aside I think some stats as to how many are really at level 50 etc would help as I remember in Borderlands 2 the forums were full of people at end content having their strong views on matters and then the company came out and said only a tiny % of x were actually at end game (cant remember the stat).


ps I would really like to see polls added to threads

lol - close to 100 views and only 2 likes..

I guess people are definitely not in favor of this idea.

Or i could also construe it to mean that people don't want this as then it may cause thier own point of view to actually be in the minority where as at the moment it seems everyone's viewpoint is "most of the players......."

I mean who ever let facts or actual numbers get in the way of a good argument! :)

They took these kinds of polls during the reformation of 1.0 and to say the least some people weren't really happy at how their answers were interpreted by SE.

so its a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't then.

I guess interpretation is one thing but also depends how broad vs narrow the poll/questions are.

Ie AFK kick. Yes, no. If Yes after how long. Would not think you could interpret that too far out of the answers. Poll results could also be broken down via class/levels etc for all to see.

Anyways thanks for your response.

True, but then there's the good old, 'Would you welcome changes to FINAL FANTASY XIV that would drastically alter the rules already set in Eorzea?' or 'Another animal-like race (IE: Viera)?'

Yes, yes, 1.0 was bad etc etc, but we've seen these polls so often had loaded questions in them or were asked with zero consideration for the situation they were presented in. The first for instance was never going to get a meaningful reply because it was asked at the height of the rage against the release mess, so the answer was inevitably .. well, then again they probably knew that though, it was almost certainly just asked to cover their backsides in the event of the rebuild somehow going horribly wrong ('Ah but you said you wanted fundamental changes!'). I know it would probably still have come out in favour of a drastic rebuild had they asked fairly but it always felt fairly clear they were trying to engineer a landslide vote to wave at potential dissenters - not least given there were only extreme yea or nay options. And the second.. I mean they seriously didn't think attaching a nostalgic race to one of the options would unbalance the new races poll?

I hate to sound crotchety but those polls really did have a bad habit of being at best ill-thought-out and at worst downright manipulative.

.. Ranting about the dev's inability to recognise when they're (or deliberately trying to) skewing the results aside though the basic idea isn't bad. It'd definitely get a more meaningful response than just asking on the forums given the limited number of players that look at them and how emotional most of those who do tend to be. The only problem is, they often don't know which features are actually going to prove controversial and benefit from a vote until time's already been invested and they've been implemented. Admittedly it's often incredible that they don't guess ('Wait, you mean you didn't want the dye system to have certain colours class locked and change gears' stats?') but..