A rant about the Surveys about the game you sent by mails

[hugo.4705]

Along the years I already saw several reddit posts of players speaking about surveys by mail about the future of gw2 and similar topics. Never did I received one nor my brother who is playing GW1 and is a large gw2 vetteran with surely currently 35k+ AP.. But this isn't about me but all the peoples which are invested in your game since its release and received no survey.

Example of posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/o13tkk/did_anyone_else_get_chosen_for_the_future_of/

 

And that's why, by default, all account with a character who received at least a 6 year gift should be automatically written on your list and receive a survey. Plus the players with an amount of AP above 25000 or very high number of episode mastery achievement completed (Have them all apart two from HoT). Or even, if the player have at least crafted one or two legendary!

 

I don't see how your company can make good decisions when you aren't even taking everyone in account when you do surveys. I played 3149 days, it is 8.62 years, 2 legendaries, ton of episode masteries achiev, fractal level 95, do t4, did several world completions , made the mawdrey collection and the caladbog one, and my opinions don't matter? I play festivals every year and give feedback about them already. How many post of gh decos posts i did thanking the designers.

Again, it is about everyone playing the game, don't you feel like those players who spent time in wvw, pvp, farming fractals, doing raids, fans of living story, dungeons or those who do world bosses need to be heard and voice themselves through your survey?

 

I can totally understand you may not want to crawl under repplies by registering every account in the survey, but it is hard to have a fast overall view and see who log regularly? I log almost everyday.

Sure I didn't do the beta, but since ls4 and ls5 I participated on the wiki but stopped participating lastly during champions, because obvious reasons (psst bad story, psst bad content).

 

I ask you to consider more players and put add them into your surveys. Wherever their horizon are pvp, wvw or pve as long they spent a long time in your game, sorry but playing since 8 years, you should be able to voice your opinion through a survey. Even google map, which in I am local guide send me more surveys. Plus it is not like there is a feedback button in game, there isn't.

 

What I only see through this is that the game is going even more into a wall, and I am more than scared and worried for EOD expansion.

 

I'm sure many will twist that into "You are angry because you aren't part of the chosens". Nah I'm angry because, we, many players who play that game since 2013 aren't in the survey list. 8 Years of playing the game, never was I asked of what I think. Plus, it isn't the AP grinder with 40k AP that will tell you what is to upgrade. You can definitely learn more about the mistakes by asking players who left after ls2 and returned during ls4 as example, they can tell what pushed them to go away. What they were not fan of. AP surely is a metric of investment; but you can do them just for the AP points without enjoying or caring of content, whereas if based on what is the daily time spent in game or the number of days logged in is more representative, number or logged in days would take in account peoples with work who spend only 1 hour as example, but also peoples who spend like me 5+ hours a day.

 

Plus the survey should be targetted, if the player is axed on fractals, ask him/her about fractals in addition of the mode played the most between pve/pvp/wvw, with like a question about it least played mode: Why you don't play it?

 

 

Long story short, Anet review your Survey criterias. Include 6+ years characters players that log regularly or have most of living world achievs done or more than half of all achievs done.

[Sobx.1758]

58 minutes ago, hugo.4705 said:

Along the years I already saw several reddit posts of players speaking about surveys by mail about the future of gw2 and similar topics. Never did I received one nor my brother who is playing GW1 and is a large gw2 vetteran with surely currently 35k+ AP.. But this isn't about me but all the peoples which are invested in your game since its release and received no survey.

Example of posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/o13tkk/did_anyone_else_get_chosen_for_the_future_of/ 

 

And that's why, by default, all account with a character who received at least a 6 year gift should be automatically written on your list and receive a survey. Plus the players with an amount of AP above 25000 or very high number of episode mastery achievement completed (Have them all apart two from HoT). Or even, if the player have at least crafted one or two legendary!

It seems to me that "and that's why..." part should be comming after giving the reasoning for why something should happen, but tbh I didn't see anything other than "I didn't get the invitation despite having tons of AP, but it's not about me! (but it is)". Did I miss something?

What I know is that if they actually want to read through the opinions shared in the survey, then sending out those "invitations" en-masse doesn't make much sense. They probably had their own reasons for certain people to share their input and you or your brother didn't fit. Who cares.

 

Quote

I don't see how your company can make good decisions when you aren't even taking everyone in account when you do surveys.

And again, who's supposed to read through all of them later? If they'll need more input, they'll send another batch. Why are people so entitled even about something as trivial as surveys that they can literally just not care about if it doesn't fit their vision anyways?

 

Quote

I played 3149 days, it is 8.62 years, 2 legendaries, ton of episode masteries achiev, fractal level 95, do t4, did several world completions , made the mawdrey collection and the caladbog one, and my opinions don't matter? I play festivals every year and give feedback about them already. How many post of gh decos posts i did thanking the designers.

Again, it is about everyone playing the game, don't you feel like those players who spent time in wvw, pvp, farming fractals, doing raids, fans of living story, dungeons or those who do world bosses need to be heard and voice themselves through your survey?

See... Above you claimed it's not about you. But it very clearly is. Less entitlement will give you more peace of mind imo.

 

 

 

 

Edited June 16, 2021 by Sobx.1758
"server" > "survey"

[JustTrogdor.7892]

I think the idea as part of a study is to send them to random players instead of targeting a certain demographic.    I could be wrong on that though.  But my guess is they would like to hear from a broad spectrum of players.   Players that play a ton and players that maybe quit playing after some time and everything in between.  Just because people here or reddit with a lot of AP and playing time say they didn't get one doesn't mean that also excluded a lot of similar players.   Also they tend to send these things out in waves that take several days as I recall from the last one I heard about.   So you may still get one.   I think the phrasing that states a person has been individually selected may just be kind of for flavor and to make the person receiving the invitation feel more valuable.   I doubt they really sit around looking through accounts to individually select hundreds if not thousands to send a survey to.

 

Edited June 16, 2021 by JustTrogdor.7892

[Ayrilana.1396]

Surveys are not some loyalty/veteran thing. 
 

Overall surveys about the game are best done using random sampling otherwise the results may get distorted. Imagine if Anet did a survey about what GW2 players wanted but they were only sent to raiders. 

[costepj.5120]

Imagine if Anet did a survey about what GW2 players wanted, but they were only sent to people who post on the forum ...

[Cyninja.2954]

The primary question would be:" who is the survey aimed at?"

 

Very often surveys are targeted at random as to not contaminate the data beforehand.

 

In the question of veteran versus new player, who do you think is more important aim a survey at: the veteran who has stuck with the game for a long time and is still active, ultimately suggesting they are satisfied or in some other way stuck with the game, or newer players who are more likely to leave?

 

The irony here is: the most loyal players who are sticking with the game might not be of primary concern when creating a survey (though there is some value in targeting these players with questions). Far more important would be the players who are NOT with the game any more.

 

Aka: it depends on what the surveys goal is.

Edited June 16, 2021 by Cyninja.2954

[Blude.6812]

I understand that The Anet surveys (not the ones here on the forum that are generally useless and skewed) had a non disclosure terms that had to be agreed to. Time for Anet to have a look at those reddit links.

 

 

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

7 minutes ago, Blude.6812 said:

I understand that The Anet surveys (not the ones here on the forum that are generally useless and skewed) had a non disclosure terms that had to be agreed to. Time for Anet to have a look at those reddit links.

 

 

There's no NDA.

It merely says:

 

You've been individually selected for this mission, so please don't forward the invitation to anyone else. This is your chance to be heard and to help us make Guild Wars 2 the best game it can be.

[Danikat.8537]

Often the point of a survey is to get data from a selection of people rather than everyone, because that would be too much to manage. The important thing is to make sure your sample is either statistically random or selected to be represenative of the whole population, depending on the type of analysis you're planning on doing.

 

I do them for work periodically, starting with groups of about 1,000 - 10,000 people and even with relatively small numbers like that I can't realistically survey everyone, especially if there's open ended questions and I want to actually use that information, it would take forever just to go through the answers. So I narrow the selection down to about 200 people who between them include representatives of all the different groups and survey them.

 

I have to admit I am now curious about whether I'll get one and which account it will be for, but so far I don't appear to be included.

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

Sending such a survey to any forum user is some kind of an overkill. Of all the players, we are the ones who already talk in public about our thoughts and ideas regarding current and future content. 

 

A regular survey has its limits. You can ask plenty of questions, but in order to get it done in time, many have to be multiple choice or rating-questions. In the end someone creates a few line & bar-graphs showing tendencies. With a survey you can only get an idea of the situation. 

 

Regarding the criticism on the forum-polls. Yes, most of them are biased and lead nowhere. But once in a while we do get a poll which gathers a lot of useful feedback. Opposite to a survey, people here write texts instead of clicking options. We react to those texts and so highlight the ones which hit the mark. A survey is anonymous.  No one sees what another player has picked or wrote and no one can comment or rate that. 

 

 

[Infusion.7149]

I have gotten a survey before on my account but because I don't open the email I use for GW2 all that often it expired by the time I went to fill it out. So I can definitely assure you they do get sent to people that play regularly and not just people uninterested they are trying to get back.

If anything they should use the rollerbeetle survey technique where the survey person is ingame.

[Chaba.5410]

Dang I didn't get selected. Gonna quit playing now because it's clear Anet doesn't care. (/sarcasm)

[Hesione.9412]

58 minutes ago, HnRkLnXqZ.1870 said:

Sending such a survey to any forum user is some kind of an overkill. Of all the players, we are the ones who already talk in public about our thoughts and ideas regarding current and future content. 

 

A regular survey has its limits. You can ask plenty of questions, but in order to get it done in time, many have to be multiple choice or rating-questions. In the end someone creates a few line & bar-graphs showing tendencies. With a survey you can only get an idea of the situation. 

 

Regarding the criticism on the forum-polls. Yes, most of them are biased and lead nowhere. But once in a while we do get a poll which gathers a lot of useful feedback. Opposite to a survey, people here write texts instead of clicking options. We react to those texts and so highlight the ones which hit the mark. A survey is anonymous.  No one sees what another player has picked or wrote and no one can comment or rate that. 

 

 

Survey questions, and their options if multiple-choice, are written by people with training in these areas. They also run a random sample so they can get a range of views (although the largest demographic of players will always get the largest number of questionnaires unless they do an alternative to random sampling completely at random).

Methods are normally implemented so that the same survey cannot be answered multiple times by the same person, or forwarded around for other people to answer. Doing either destroys the randomness of the survey and thus biases the responses.

This is a technical area, and multiple university papers cover various aspects of this specialist area, so I will finish my comment at this point.

[keenedge.9675]

Curious .. do we have any confirmation other than a single Reddit post ?

[Zavijah.2695]

I've been playing on again, off again probably the last 7 years? I have only 6k achievement points, and I did the survey. 

The questions related to feedback around 'Champions' and the game in general. I didn't answer all of the questions as some questions were unclear, irrelevant, or excessive on detail requirement - which is also a telling metric for them and their future data collection. 

Putting aside both ourselves, OP. Do you know much about sample data? Or the different types of data collection?

 

It's nothing personal, it's a broad stroke of the brush to get feedback from all segments of the community but not in a targeted individual way. I'm sorry this may be counter to your expectations, but it's possible that they specifically do not want to hear from the dedicated masters of all content in the game, but to get an idea of what would get traction with newcomers (see new form of income), or the key interests of the majority of players within a certain provided content period. 

 

As others have said, this isn't a rewards program. We are all genuinely pleased you have such dedication to this game, but that doesn't lead to entitlement. 

Another thing you could do, is contact their customer service directly and say 'hey, I have great passion for this game, can you please send me a survey to my email to complete'. That would be a pro-active way of going about it rather than this post which does honestly read as an 'It's not about me ((but it secretly is)) post. 

 

[Luthan.5236]

Is this supposed to be kept secret? Seems on the Reddit some stuff got removed? (Maybe a screen of that mail.) I guess they are sending it randomly or based on other criteria. To get a lot of differnent types of players to take part in it. I mean: Not only the hardcore players that play since release are relevent. Most money probably comes from casual players that are new and buy stuff and do not even pay much attention to optimize by going for sales.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

I don't think it's a secret.  Every time a survey happens, threads pop up on the forums.  Either someone feels left out, someone questions whether it's a scam/phishing, etc., etc.

 

Many have received them over the years; some more than once. 

[SexyMofo.8923]

Wish I could give you mine. 

[Nogothanc.5014]

If Anet wants to know what the players think... why not send an ingame mail to all players with a link to a survey? Best would be an ingame survey. I guess more peoples will participate... especially if you connect it with a reward... Sure you have the difficulty with multiple accounts but I think the result is way more representative than just reddit or just forum or just a selected group of players.

[Vayne.8563]

I have over 40 k achievement points, but I don't necessarily think I should be surveyed.  I have ideas, but I'm pretty vocal about them here.

[mindcircus.1506]

Didn't you make a post not so long ago about why you were quitting the game?

You did.

 

Given this, why should the developers be interested in your thoughts on the future of the franchise, when you are clearly not going to be there for it?

Edited June 17, 2021 by mindcircus.1506

[Danikat.8537]

1 hour ago, Nogothanc.5014 said:

If Anet wants to know what the players think... why not send an ingame mail to all players with a link to a survey? Best would be an ingame survey. I guess more peoples will participate... especially if you connect it with a reward... Sure you have the difficulty with multiple accounts but I think the result is way more representative than just reddit or just forum or just a selected group of players.

Because there's over 11 million GW2 accounts. No they won't all respond of course, but it could still result in far too much data to reasonably manage, especially if there's open-ended questions where someone has to read and collate the responses.

 

A lot of that data is likely to be redundant as well. People are all individuals of course, but as we know from this forum there's often a lot of cross-over in GW2 feedback with the same complaints, problems, requests etc. coming up over and over again so there's no need to survey everyone individually. Unless you use a highly biased survey sample (like only picking people with the highest AP or something) it's unlikely that a survey of 1/4 of people will miss something the other 3/4 might have brought up and it makes it much easier to analyse the data.

[zealex.9410]

17 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

The primary question would be:" who is the survey aimed at?"

 

Very often surveys are targeted at random as to not contaminate the data beforehand.

 

In the question of veteran versus new player, who do you think is more important aim a survey at: the veteran who has stuck with the game for a long time and is still active, ultimately suggesting they are satisfied or in some other way stuck with the game, or newer players who are more likely to leave?

 

The irony here is: the most loyal players who are sticking with the game might not be of primary concern when creating a survey (though there is some value in targeting these players with questions). Far more important would be the players who are NOT with the game any more.

 

Aka: it depends on what the surveys goal is.

Players who bounced off imo. Sub mmos give you a survey when you unsub, gw2 best alternative would be targetting ppl who dropped the game i feel like, along with a random selection inside the playerbase.

[Cyninja.2954]

1 hour ago, mindcircus.1506 said:

Didn't you make a post not so long ago about why you were quitting the game?

You did.

 

Given this, why should the developers be interested in your thoughts on the future of the franchise, when you are clearly not going to be there for it?

Which poses an interesting philosophical dilemma, if he had quit, maybe he would have received a survey request. Alas we shall never know. 🤷‍♂️

 

Note to self: never make a multiple page long farewell post. Just take a break if I feel like it (as I have in the past). No one cares and the internet does not forget.

Edited June 17, 2021 by Cyninja.2954

[HotDelirium.7984]

18 hours ago, Ayrilana.1396 said:

Surveys are not some loyalty/veteran thing. 
 

Overall surveys about the game are best done using random sampling otherwise the results may get distorted. Imagine if Anet did a survey about what GW2 players wanted but they were only sent to raiders. 

The point this person was trying to make despite the grammatical issues was that on some level its best to survey the most experienced players because they have done/seen/played the most so their opinions might be a bit more thorough and accurate. What constitutes an experienced player could certainly be another post and debate. I never received a survey but I think it would have been useful if one was sent out to every single player in the entire game or a link to vote on things was. Regardless of the logistics, 40,000 opinions falls in comparison to 800,000.