Forums as a player sampling?

[Hycinthus]

i'm wanting to say the past player poll showed only about 3% of the games population comes into the forums and only close to 5% go on the lodestone. the question is does the 3-5% accurately represent the overall players in the game in general.

Agree with this. From everquest polls also from MMO dot com polls, only 5 % goes to the forum, and only 3 % of them makes a post.

The other 95% of players are flying blindly and never know whats going on in forums. A majority of them are casuals. So in my opinion, the forum is not a good representative because those who visit and makes a post are generally not casual player.

The casual player could not care about making a post because they just dont care about anything too much. Unless it hurts them and the game is too hard, and they just hop to another game without making a fuss. This is why this crowd is so dangerous because their demand is very elastic in economic terms.