Results of a reddit job satisfaction poll

[Elladie]

I have polled a section of the player community - namely folks in my FC, folks in my hunt linkshell, cross world linkshell, people of my friends list, folk on the various XIV discords - and the only complaints about jobs I received were that SMN is too busy and DNC relies too much on getting procs. When I say 'polled', I mean I asked if they had any complaints about the jobs they mained, already a loaded question. Obviously i didn't get 2000 odd replies - more like 200 - but most who replied said they were having fun with their jobs. Some healers - myself included - are actually happy with the healer changes because the last thing we want or need is a complex DPS rotation.

Please don't presume that because a sample on Reddit/these forums are unhappy with some changes, that's in any way representative of the general opinion. As Iscah says, a poll conducted by SE that selected players at random - or even by number based on different criteria such as 200 from different regions, 200 long term players, 200 sprouts, 200 returners etc etc etc - is far more likely to be unbiased (Because it isn't taking data from a specified, single group of people) than either mine or the Reddit one

[SamRF]

I have polled a section of the player community - namely folks in my FC, folks in my hunt linkshell, cross world linkshell, people of my friends list, folk on the various XIV discords - and the only complaints about jobs I received were that SMN is too busy and DNC relies too much on getting procs. When I say 'polled', I mean I asked if they had any complaints about the jobs they mained, already a loaded question. Obviously i didn't get 2000 odd replies - more like 200 - but most who replied said they were having fun with their jobs. Some healers - myself included - are actually happy with the healer changes because the last thing we want or need is a complex DPS rotation.

Please don't presume that because a sample on Reddit/these forums are unhappy with some changes, that's in any way representative of the general opinion. As Iscah says, a poll conducted by SE that selected players at random - or even by number based on different criteria such as 200 from different regions, 200 long term players, 200 sprouts, 200 returners etc etc etc - is far more likely to be unbiased (Because it isn't taking data from a specified, single group of people) than either mine or the Reddit one

Actually, most seem fairly satisfied if you look at the actual results of the poll. Remember OP of this thread is simply making couple interpretations and assumptions based on the data. Monk is the only job with below half (2.4/5) score. Scholar is 2nd least satisfied job and has 2.9/5 score.

Some here seem to just assume the poll results are vastly negative towards the current game, perhaps without looking at the actual poll.

Here are some graphs: https://imgur.com/a/ymqa7ju

the main one:

[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.

[dinnertime]

Please don't presume that because a sample on Reddit/these forums are unhappy with some changes, that's in any way representative of the general opinion. As Iscah says, a poll conducted by SE that selected players at random - or even by number based on different criteria such as 200 from different regions, 200 long term players, 200 sprouts, 200 returners etc etc etc - is far more likely to be unbiased (Because it isn't taking data from a specified, single group of people) than either mine or the Reddit one

It's not a representative of the general opinion, sure, but where else would they find feedback for the game? Again, if they wanted an official poll, they would've done it and they should, but right now this is what it is.

Looking back, the forums have talked about the following 'issues' within Shadowbringers and the dev team has addressed them. Examples being: Scholar's Energy Drain, Ninja and Summoner's high APM, Low DPS of all the Ranged Jobs (Physical Ranged still being problematic), Bard losing Bard attributes, Monk's Greased Lightning uptime problem (somewhat), Gunbreaker sound issues, The Firmament exploit etc. Opinions here, even though we're a small margin of the community, is definitely not meaningless.

[Ursa_Vonfiebryd]

Snip

I agree with most of this, and I miss Manashift (since that was BLMs only support skill beyond the shield skill we had) but I don't miss the 'party-wide enmity management' which made tanks into divas. I miss my agro dump skills but many many tanks abused this system in order to squeeze out more dps. I high end it was a given but in lower end content, if you accidentally ripped aggro, a lot of tanks would just let you die or if you started creeping up the list they'd shirk you. I'm glad tanks are the only ones who deal with enmity now. This is as it should be. The rest of the poll I pretty much agree with.

[Satarn]

I'm glad tanks are the only ones who deal with enmity now. This is as it should be.

The problem is they don't actually.

If SE stopped at just removing enmity dumps from DPS/healers I'd agree with you - the system where aggro management was mostly on anyone but the tanks was stupid - but they've also removed all threat management from tanks themselves at the same time and buffed the new, cost-less tank stances so hard, that it's near impossible for tanks to lose aggro unless they die. I'd say this certainly isn't as it should be.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

The problem is they don't actually.

If SE stopped at just removing enmity dumps from DPS/healers I'd agree with you - the system where aggro management was mostly on anyone but the tanks was stupid - but they've also removed all threat management from tanks themselves at the same time and buffed the new, cost-less tank stances so hard, that it's near impossible for tanks to lose aggro unless they die. I'd say this certainly isn't as it should be.

And yet, my friends and I still rip hate off tanks in lvl 80 dungeons....