Quote Originally Posted by Lauront View Post
I am curious - when people try use Metacritic, Reddit or Twitter as "proof" that the game is fantastic, would you maintain in that instance that we're dealing with a "small, self-selecting group"? I would hope so.
This is a non sequitur, but sure - the point is that none of these are representative of the player base as a whole. Further, internet fights about the game being good or bad are incredibly silly regardless. If you like the game, play it. If you don't like the game, don't play it.

Quote Originally Posted by Lauront View Post
It's not like SE bothers to orchestrate any other means of soliciting feedback. So we've exhausted the main areas where it gets it from - reddit, Twitter, the forum. For all intents and purposes, if SE doesn't undertake any work to obtain more representative & systematic feedback from elsewhere (e.g. via surveys) - and to my awareness, it does not - what is the functional difference between that and the actual truth of what most players believe? It may - and probably - differs, but if you're not asking them and SE isn't, what real notion of it do you have above anecdotal evidence? Sales figures and profits going up? Great, now get to the bottom of why.
Your lack of access to good evidence does not make your bad evidence good. Put another way, Generalizing from a small, self-selecting group of players isn't more valid because you don't have systematic data. SE has some revealed preference data, such as subs, online store, content completion, etc.; that data isn't available to you, but it doesn't follow that SE never looks at it.

A toy example: if you want to know something about the American population as a whole, surveying 50 seniors in an Iowa retirement home won't tell you much of anything. That doesn't change even if it's the only evidence available to you. The opinions of those people are very, very unlikely to look anything like the median opinions of the whole population.

Here's my real point: instead of saying "players hate X," just say "I hate X." Saying "players hate X" is supposed to make your argument appear stronger by implying or outright stating that it's a majority position among players, but you have no basis for that assertion. Instead, say "I hate X," because you actually have good evidence for that. (However, if you say that you hate X but you constantly spend your time doing X, we actually should question whether you saying that you hate X is stronger evidence of your preferences than the fact that you spend your free time constantly doing X rather than other things that you could do - a discussion topic for another time.)