Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
Okay, let me get into it in a bit more details as to why I think this.

1) The forums don't have a dislike button. You mention 240 likes - how many people dislike that post? More? Less? Do you know? No. So we can't really use that as a solid metric since, even WITHIN THIS COMMUNITY of forum goers, we don't know how many hold the contra position.

2) For a poll to be accurate, the sample has to reflect the whole population. You're not just taking any sample of the population. Go to CPAC or the RNC and poll people on some hot button political issue like abortion or gun control and you're VERY LIKELY not to get a representative sample of what the nation as a whole things. Same thing if you went to the DNC instead. Sample bias, self-selection, and getting a representative sample are huge issues for pollsters, which spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to control for and get a good sample. "240 likes" does literally none of those things.

3) We all know most of the playerbase does not use the forums. Many of us didn't even know they existed until we ran across them randomly in a google search or something. More or less everyone here has agreed that the forumgoers are ON AVERAGE much more antagonistic towards the game than the average player is. So we already know the sample is biased (see (2)), and is not an accurate representation of the playerbase.

Even Ty noted, when we started up these surveys, that they would likely lean more to the "Healers are bad/boring, change them" side since that's what the bulk of the sample will be between here and FFXIV_Discussion.
Forums doesn't need a dislike button in this case for something like this to work -- If someone does not favor OP's post, a following post countering OP's argument in the same thread will be made and people will upvote that like crazy if the majority disagrees with the OP. There has been many precedents of this happening if you look all over the forums. It happens a lot more often than you think in General Discussion threads as well when the trolls show up. Just look at the thread about rescue, you can clearly see if people don't agree with the OP, they'll upvote comments against OP's suggestion. This is pretty much the "Dislike" method.

I'm confused on what accuracy you are still missing for these samples. Haven't you and ty said you were posting the poll on alternate forms of social media? It has been in the forums, on reddit, twitter, tumblr, and twitch. That's pretty much as diverse set of group you can get. If the results from all those collective sources still resulted in a negative review to a job... that's pretty damning to me.
I only bring this up because you say many people posting online don't like the way the game is when they vote on the polls, yet the feedback and results from other jobs have proven otherwise. Have you looked at casters or melee results? Other than SMN, the ratings for those jobs are sky high. People will still vote regardless as long as they play the job - whether people love the job or hate it surprisingly has no bearing. Otherwise, there wouldn't be such a positive reception towards these jobs (With BLM reaching over 70% consensus saying no rework is necessary no less!). It's actually more surprising that these jobs are still rated as high as they are, which only proves the results aren't skewed to negativity but are actually unbiased opinions from people who play those jobs.

The only thing I can think that can truly improve the data is spreading the poll to Discord servers. I've seen and met a surprising number of players, from casual, to RPers, to hardcore raiders, large swathes of FCs, etc. on discord. If any biases still exist in this data, having them also contribute to the poll can definitely remove any remaining biases for these jobs by drastically increasing the sample size of all types of players who play that job.