Results of a reddit job satisfaction poll

[Iscah]

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[SamRF]

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.

Of course you won't get an accurate representation of the whole population, but you simply get an idea of what the actual data would be. That's the whole point of statistics, there are very few scenarios in which you can get anything close to a random sample. It will be subjective but I strongly believe 2700 is a lot, when I'm comparing it to other survey results that are being used all the time which have fewer entries and a much bigger population and taken by imo even less random samples. Imo you can't see 2700 of the 600 000 taken from the most popular forum of the game (reddit), as meaningless. Comparing Reddit to a onesided political rally is a really bad analogy imo, Reddit will be far more representative than that.

In your opinion not too much but in my opinion it's representative enough to give meaningful data and best information Devs may have gotten in a while (compared to other mediums of feedback). Interpretation of a survey, the statistics and how representative you deem it to be will always be subjective in the end so it's up to you how much you'll trust it. If you personally don't trust it enough to be meaningful, it's fine.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Of course you won't get an accurate representation of the whole population, but you simply get an idea of what the actual data would be. That's the whole point of statistics, there are very few scenarios in which you can get anything close to a random sample. It will be subjective but I strongly believe 2700 is a lot, when I'm comparing it to other survey results that are being used all the time which have fewer entries and a much bigger population and taken by imo even less random samples. Imo you can't see 2700 of the 600 000 taken from the most popular forum of the game (reddit), as meaningless. Comparing Reddit to a onesided political rally is a really bad analogy imo, Reddit will be far more representative than that.

In your opinion not too much but in my opinion it's representative enough to give meaningful data and best information Devs may have gotten in a while (compared to other mediums of feedback). Interpretation of a survey, the statistics and how representative you deem it to be will always be subjective in the end so it's up to you how much you'll trust it. If you personally don't trust it enough to be meaningful, it's fine.

Its not, simply by the fact of comparing the data from the poll to the data we have elsewhere.


63% of the poll say they do savage content, while the census shows that to be around 20% at the highest, and 5% at the lowest.


Also the fact that the majority of people said they are unhappy with their place in the meta, when at the moment, almost no one should care, is just silly.

[SamRF]

Its not, simply by the fact of comparing the data from the poll to the data we have elsewhere.

63% of the poll say they do savage content, while the census shows that to be around 20% at the highest, and 5% at the lowest.

Okay, does that mean the poll is meaningless? It's great that this info gives us a better idea of what portion of the population the entries consist of. What you can do now is take the hardcore entries of that survey and generalize them to the the known amount of hardcore players (let's say 10%). Then you generalize the remaining 37% casual entries of that post to known amount of casuals (90%) of the playerbase and you might have a better idea of the actual results. This means you'll get a much more accurate picture of job satisfaction of hardcore players and a lesser but imo still good picture of casual players their job satisfaction. If you add up these 2 generalized datasets, you'll get a more accurate idea of job satisfaction of the whole population.

I think you'll get much more feedback from hardcore players no matter what, in any form of feedback. Most casuals likely aren't nearly as invested and won't waste their time.

[SpeckledBurd]

Its not, simply by the fact of comparing the data from the poll to the data we have elsewhere.


63% of the poll say they do savage content, while the census shows that to be around 20% at the highest, and 5% at the lowest.


Also the fact that the majority of people said they are unhappy with their place in the meta, when at the moment, almost no one should care, is just silly.

The way the poll was phrased was actually "Do you do Extreme/Savage content?" and classified both as hardcore, which inflated that number significantly when there's quite a few people who do Extremes for mounts/weapon for glamour but otherwise wouldn't engage with it. While it would be a misnomer to call that "Hardcore" the information is still valid among that particular cohort of players.

The survey itself also isn't problematic for having a disproportionate number of players who do Extreme/Savage respondents anyway. You can look at the aggregate data that examines the overall satisfaction of the survey, but you can also look at the separate satisfaction of people who do Extreme/Savage and Casual players as individual groups.

Edit: Also you can go in and look at the individual responses to see what the complaints are job by job. Generalizing and dismissing the entire poll because some people care too much about the meta is ignoring useful information, especially when they'd cite that as a complaint even though they were ranked 4/5. For example Monk, the lowest ranking job in satisfaction amongst any player population broadly didn't care about its Meta Position. Monk players were instead disappointed by the lack luster new additions to the jobs kit in Shadowbringers and the way previous skills had been altered (or as the poll listed them "New abilities" and "Changes to old abilities").

If nothing else, this poll is another point of data that can be used alongside other information that's available such as job's play rates in dungeons/trials/raids/etc and the previously mentioned Lucky Banchou Player Census to determine how players are feeling about specific jobs or roles. To continue beating the dead horse that is Monk as an example, the amount of play it sees in Expert Dungeons, normal raids, normal trials, and the copied factory is at the absolute bottom of all jobs by a huge margin which coupled with this poll and the general feedback you see about it in the DPS forums, Reddit, and elsewhere suggest there's an extreme distaste for it from the playerbase.

I'd also like to see a more formalized official means of providing feedback to the developers such as an in game poll about job satisfaction. The official forums and reddit are still going to be subject to a degree of bias in their own ways. Neither is going to be truly representative of the playerbase as a whole and the feedback in either of them is going to trend negative because people who are unhappy are more likely to speak up. The best way they could gather feedback would be in game from the players, or through the launcher or something.

[Edax]

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.)

I completely agree. I play Halo CE on PC and there are only 3 buttons to do damage and it's plenty fun. Having to press 20 buttons to do damage is not really fun and engaging for me, it's needless busiwork that makes it harder for me to switch between classes. I can agree with others however that only have one button to do damage against a static bullet sponge would be terribly boring if there's very little player engagement or risk involved. If there's nothing more going on then just standing still and pushing one button repeatedly, then that's a problem.

[althenawhm]

I completely agree. I play Halo CE on PC and there are only 3 buttons to do damage and it's plenty fun.

. I really hope you appreciate the difference between a FPS and a tab target MMO.

[Edax]

. I really hope you appreciate the difference between a FPS and a tab target MMO.

I only had to click on a enemy to attack them in Runescape, it was still fun. No button presses. It was all about resource management there.