Results of a reddit job satisfaction poll

[althenawhm]

Biggest problem with that poll is that it only asked about peoples main job.
If someone abandoned a job due to it sucking they might not have rated it.

[Iscah]

2700 entries is more than enough. You'd only need about 400 entries to have a 95% confidence level considering active FFXIV population (using 600 000)

2700 entries might be enough if you randomly sampled players from all across the active playerbase.

An opt-in poll inherently skews the results because people with stronger opinions are more likely to respond, and you can't say it represents the entire audience of the game just by the numbers. 2700 responses from mostly hardcore players will yield a very different set of responses to 2700 casual players who've never ventured into EX trials.

[Billythepancake]

Even if the results aren't 100% accurate, it's nice to see I'm not the only one upset about the current state of SCH even outside of the forums and my group of friends.

[Liam_Harper]

It's not 100% fact or concrete statistics or anything, but it still serves as a decent view of how some of the playerbase feel about class design. We can sneer at reddit, but a 2700 person poll is still more accurate than some of our little divided 5-10 page forum discussions (or arguments) which inevitably get derailed.

It lines up well with what I've seen too. AST least popular, WhM more popular, WAR and DRK much less popular than GNB and PLD design-wise.

It's also interesting that AST is the least popular, but currently the strongest healer in the game. There's an important lesson there that players prefer enjoyable gameplay over having the best numbers.

[ReiMakoto]

2700 entries is more than enough. You'd only need about 400 entries to have a 95% confidence level considering active FFXIV population (using 600 000)

With 2700 entries you have a marginal error of about 2%, meaning the real result will be within +- 2% of the survey's result.

This is of course only truly the case when you have a random sample, but having a truly random sample is usually impossible.

I'm assuming those on reddit will be more of the high end FFXIV players and less casuals than in the actual game (as you can see by the results). From statistics point of view it still looks like a very decent survey you can get great information from imo.

Also the fact that I think nobody is surprised by those results if you've been on these forums for some time, I feel like kind of seals the deal on its credibility.

You can only make statistical claims like this if the data was sampled pseudo randomly from all over the playerbase, as it stands it all comes from r/ffxiv, thats like asking people what their favourite fast food restraunt is while standing outside McDonalds. You also need to take validity into account, you say that its unsurprising that the results agree with sentiment here, but when the most common reason is place in the meta it seems like theyre agreeing for entirely different reasons. Without more statistics to back it up this survey is credible to give you an accurate view of the views of r/ffxiv users, not the playerbase as a whole.

[SamRF]

2700 entries might be enough if you randomly sampled players from all across the active playerbase.

An opt-in poll inherently skews the results because people with stronger opinions are more likely to respond, and you can't say it represents the entire audience of the game just by the numbers. 2700 responses from mostly hardcore players will yield a very different set of responses to 2700 casual players who've never ventured into EX trials.

You can only make statistical claims like this if the data was sampled pseudo randomly from all over the playerbase, as it stands it all comes from r/ffxiv, thats like asking people what their favourite fast food restraunt is while standing outside McDonalds. You also need to take validity into account, you say that its unsurprising that the results agree with sentiment here, but when the most common reason is place in the meta it seems like theyre agreeing for entirely different reasons. Without more statistics to back it up this survey is credible to give you an accurate view of the views of r/ffxiv users, not the playerbase as a whole.

I mean, I've literally said in that post that it's only truly the case if you have a random sample. However, as I've also said, true random sampling is usually impossible. This doesn't mean that those statistical measurements won't be used or taken into consideration (they would be useless if it only gave meaningful information for true random sample). It's not accurate but gives you an idea of what the true accuracy would be when you afterwards take into account how representative the survey entries are.

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). Consider that this survey reached more people from the population than many actual (scientific) researchers (any topic) ever hope to be able to reach for their study. It's more than valid material to work with and perhaps right now the best source of feedback for the developers considering the alternative feedback mediums. (It's much better information than the usual feedback on these forums with a thread with perhaps 100 likes or a couple users going back and forth on an issue.)

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.

[Stanelis]

2700 entries is more than enough. You'd only need about 400 entries to have a 95% confidence level considering active FFXIV population (using 600 000)

With 2700 entries you have a marginal error of about 2%, meaning the real result will be within +- 2% of the survey's result.

This is of course only truly the case when you have a random sample, but having a truly random sample is usually impossible.

I'm assuming those on reddit will be more of the high end FFXIV players and less casuals than in the actual game (as you can see by the results). From statistics point of view it still looks like a very decent survey you can get great information from imo.

Also the fact that I think nobody is surprised by those results if you've been on these forums for some time, I feel like kind of seals the deal on its credibility.

The issue isn't the amount of players but the representativity of your sample. I, as an example, didn't see that poll.

[Vivi_Bushido]

I don't use reddit, so I never voted. Never saw the poll.

[Niyuka]

Nice work OP, and I agree, but on these boards the white knights will never ever accept any realistically achievable metric for FFXIV not being near-perfect, or at least any complaint being invalid.
Even if SE would use an ingame poll and published the results, the white knights would go "casuals dont take that poll, they dont have the time or just click away", or "people happy with the game wont do the poll" and dismiss any criticism.
At this point, this has gotten toxic to the point of being laughable, and I just ignore any opinion that basically says everything is great because you cannot prove, to an arbitrary level of confidence, that its not.

ShB did a lot of things well on its initial release, but both lifecycle of the patches and class design are not good, and its starting to show. The playerbase, by all metrics we have, is shrinking faster (please, white knights, tell me how this is due to the game being older, people not playing being intended, or that its normal even though it didnt drop that much around the same time in HW or SB) and getting more inactive, and looking at the ingame tools for activity (PF, queue times) nothing is really working.

I main GNB and SAM, and got lucky, but I shelved my MNK (in favor of SAM) due to the bad design, and DRK in favor of GNB because the dumbing down of tanks for no reason at all was just painful.

I swear, SE thinks most of us cant even hit 4 buttons in order.

[SamRF]

Nice work OP, and I agree, but on these boards the white knights will never ever accept any realistically achievable metric for FFXIV not being near-perfect, or at least any complaint being invalid.
Even if SE would use an ingame poll and published the results, the white knights would go "casuals dont take that poll, they dont have the time or just click away", or "people happy with the game wont do the poll" and dismiss any criticism.
At this point, this has gotten toxic to the point of being laughable, and I just ignore any opinion that basically says everything is great because you cannot prove, to an arbitrary level of confidence, that its not.

ShB did a lot of things well on its initial release, but both lifecycle of the patches and class design are not good, and its starting to show. The playerbase, by all metrics we have, is shrinking faster (please, white knights, tell me how this is due to the game being older, people not playing being intended, or that its normal even though it didnt drop that much around the same time in HW or SB) and getting more inactive, and looking at the ingame tools for activity (PF, queue times) nothing is really working.

I main GNB and SAM, and got lucky, but I shelved my MNK (in favor of SAM) due to the bad design, and DRK in favor of GNB because the dumbing down of tanks for no reason at all was just painful.

I swear, SE thinks most of us cant even hit 4 buttons in order.

The thing is, those people criticizing the survey, what form of feedback do they accept if that one wasn't enough? Do they value these forums more as a form of feedback? By their standards these forums would be completely meaningless.

In the end you have to work with something , and that survey seems like the best and most credible feedback they got in a while. If you dismiss that than you may as well claim it's nearly impossible for devs to get realistic information from their playerbase.