Healer Changes Straw Poll from Reddit

[Gaethan_Tessula]

And we have 330 million people in the US and 1000 polled respondents is a good metric of almost any topic. Polls are samples. Nothing more. They're supposed to be representative of the whole.

A professionally conducted poll will carefully consider what populations they randomly select from. 1000 people living in Portland metro are going to think different than 1000 people in the rural southeast. Polls try to select at random, since that's the only way they actually approximate a population accurately. The issue with this poll is that the population engaging with it is highly unlikely to be random and the answers to the question posed are too broad imo. It also has no way to weight the population for sampling biases.

As much as I am dissatisfied with the healer changes, I have to agree with the other side here: this poll is poorly constructed (blind yes/no), poorly controlled (possibility of duplicate votes, onus is on those polled to find poll, weighting sample is impossible), and pulls from a population (people who have enough investment in the game and issue to participate in a poll on English language fan forums) that is arguably not representative of the playerbase as a whole. I mean, most casually created internet polls given to the public at large are, so I don't mean to imply anything against its creator.

It's a quick way to gauge opinions in the broadest strokes possible, it's not meaningless, but I'd never call it valid or statistically significant and therefore wouldn't use it as a tool in debate.

A better poll would likely call random active players, and would be more involved with the questions asked. Of course, I doubt anyone is going to actually DO that.