Forums as a player sampling?

[Billie21]

While I don't believe that the forumers are an accurate representation of the ingame population, it doesn't mean that what they voice is only happening in their own point of view.
Usually, an ingame group of players will have a minority of posters amongst their ranks, but those posters also talk ingame, and share their ideas there, and get their ideas from what other people do/say ingame too.

So basically, each post on the forum actually represents several silent voices.


The variable here is the proportion.
There is a voice for about everybody ingame that reaches the forum. The ratio between different opinions however might differ from the ingame population, considering that a part of said population is less encline than the rest to go to the forums.


As for SE, well, they can only do with the information they have to get feedback. Part of it comes from the forum, but seriously, they probably giver more weight to money flows (and maybe they have ways to check some specific player behaviors? I know it exists in other places somewhat, and it would make sense, but no idea of the details of the practice).