Quote Originally Posted by Senn View Post
Thanks for the explanations. So I'm asking because I'm a bit confused but, since people can't dislike posts, how would 1577 likes be an accurate sample size?
Even though I linked the poll in my first post, I'm not counting that since people could take the survey multiple times.
Forum posters are only a very small fraction of the community, which the active playerbase is somewhere over 580,000 potentially, maybe even smaller as that figure includes potential alt characters. When taking a sample you don’t need a LARGE percentage of the potential respondents, generally a few hundred-a thousand is sampled in most major statistics depending on what they’re testing. Obviously a larger response pool would be more accurate but that’s not feasible with a population this size in most cases. So they used the data that is available and able to be worked with to determine a sample size that would be large enough to show demand , in this case 384 likes would do so. Think of it this way, in any poll you read about, the average sample size is anywhere from 500-1000 and that’s usually accounting for TENS of MILLIONS of people, far more than the community. Statistics allow you to take a smaller sample size and compare it to a larger pool and that’s where the margin of error, deviation and confidence level come into play to say that while it can’t be 100% accurate with this size this is what it’s believed to be with X confidence and could be + or - X%.