Public Discussion: Community Feedback - Is it being heard?

[Shougun]

We are a minority. We are probably 1% of the playerbase. Regardless of how much time the CMs spend here(which I think you overestimate how much of their job is just looking at the forums, having known a few CMs for various companies over the years - they have very varied jobs that involve a lot more than just staring at forums but that's neither here nor there), the devs know exactly what percentage of the population we represent AND they know that we typically don't represent the 'happy' portion of the population since typically happy players avoid forums as a general rule. As a result, any feedback they see here is automatically taken with a grain of salt and checked against other sources of data they have to determine if it's just '100 angry players ranting in a circle' or 'feedback representative of the community'.

Definitely still easily flawed data but I just I want add in statistics you can very successfully extrapolate info from very small subsets. Of course the more data the better, especially if there was an unforeseen flaw, but you can see something like 1% accurately predict 99%. Surprisingly small samples can be used for exceptionally accurate results. Then again given the nature of the -insert anywhere- places of feedback... it does obviously move about the data. People for example are more likely to come here if they have something they want to change rather than something they want to praise. This is where someone would make a mistake if they just blindly followed feedback, but if the players can accurately articulate why they want given feedback I believe some of the consequences of listening to a small portion of the community can be alleviated.




Obviously being hyper accurate would be... difficult... lol, but I just want to make sure people know that if you had good samples / only minimal sizes you'd not really need huge swathes of the community to fairly accurately represent the community as a generalization (which that in and of itself could create problems, like generalizing sentiments to extreme content that was intended for a narrow bandwidth of players).

Since they wont get pristine data they'll have to navigate it carefully but using all forms of available info, including their own internal data tools, they could probably have pretty good ideas of what's what... if they wanted.