Quote Originally Posted by Kabooa View Post
No, I'm not accusing you of anything.

I am speaking of specific things that still make the circles in the various subforums, that frankly do nothing but stomp out any actual discussion happening that could lead to positive action for a majority of players. Maybe that's a lofty expectation of the forums.
Fair enough. I do agree that there are a lot posts that fail to add to the discussions to be had here—and I do think that turns off any members of the dev team (or anyone who may report to them) a fair bit. I think that is true of any forum to an extent. While I’m certainly guilty of having my heated moments, I should try to not succumb to them as often as I have in healer threads. They don’t add to fair discussion.

And, simply put - Whether or not I agree with you doesn't matter. Your feedback on the subject got to be seen. So did mine. So did CJs, and everyone else's. No one got filtered out at the basic level. No one was removed from the pool because they aren't a streamer with a follower threshold, no one got filtered out because they don't take part in the circus that is the parsing community.

Filtering yourself out is fine. Being filtered out is not. The difference is "Kabooa doesn't play Astrologian so he has no insight on Astrologian" vs "I answered yes to 'Can you fit the hours you've played Astrologian at level cap on one hand across all four expansions?' ".
At the end of the day, though, data will be filtered. Should surveys be ever conducted in this manner, the data will be subject to filtering; and it will be subject to exclusion should it prove to be irrelevant to the questions being asked or the general scope of the survey. That will always be the case. That’s just the nature of research.

I don’t think labels like “streamer” or “content creator” or “follower threshold” hold any more bearing than those who don’t have those labels or a whole lot of followers. I think it all boils down to experience, aptitude, and the relevance of said experience and aptitude to what’s being asked. For example, I don’t think Momo is qualified to speak on healers purely because he’s a streamer. I think he’s qualified to speak on healers because he plays them, he plays them very well, and he’s extremely knowledgeable about their functionality and toolkits. And in a very productive way. I’d like to see him at media tours discussing healers with the developers since I think there is a lack of knowledge on the dev team regarding healers.

The fact of the matter with regards to your first statement (“Kabooa doesn’t play Astrologian so he has no insight on Astrologian”) isn’t entirely without its merit with regards to whether or not your feedback on the matter of AST should be considered relevant or bear a significant amount of weight to those reading and considering the feedback.

The way I see it is like this— we’ll say that you don’t play AST, have no experience on it, and you don’t even have it unlocked. What gives you credence to speak on its design? What weight do your survey responses in regards to AST’s design hold? Compared to, say, someone who has played AST since 3.0 launch, has cleared various types of content on it from dungeons to Ultimate, and who has an above average performance on the job? There is a difference between the weight of your feedback versus the weight of the other AST’s feedback. Regardless of things like “you’re a streamer and they aren’t” or “they’re a streamer and you’re not”. And the amount of weight does need to be considered when looking at feedback.

As an aside, I think there are people that feel like those who play the jobs (and are good at them) are listened to less than those who don’t routinely play them. Or who play them casually, but not very well or very seriously. And that has caused contention between the former group and the development team.


Anyways, that’s just the way I look at these things. My saying that there should be filtering and some feedback does hold more weight than others doesn’t come from a stand point of trying to be toxic or hatefully exclusive.