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Jax_Cavalera
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Feedback on the forums tends to fall into a handful of categories:

  1. Subjective with minimal arguments supporting requested change
  2. Claims that all / most players want what the OP requests
  3. Click Bait posts that don't attempt to provide any meaningful feedback often sprinting towards 100% communication breakdown and inevitable lock
  4. Cloned posts all saying very similar things

Giving us the ability to include a poll on our posts won't fix all of these problems, but here is how it can at least give us the chance to make things better.

  1. Provides actual community data to reinforce feedback
  2. Shows a better indication of what percentage of players agree / disagree with provided feedback out of those who have viewed it
  3. May help give posts that weren't intending on being click-bait a chance at stimulating meaningful discussion
    • May also help to quickly identify troll posts if poll content is at odds with forum rules that are intended for supporting civil discussion
  4. The core similarities of cloned / similar posts could now be captured by a poll
    • More organised and focused replies by the community
    • Helps establish keywords replies can leverage vs duplicate posts worded differently that essentially say the same thing

Additional Features / Details

Spoiler

Details:
So having a poll system could work in one of 2 ways:

  1. Polls are embedded via a 3rd party tool
  2. Polls use the built-in system currently available to DE members

Features:

  1. Support creating Poll Snapshots
    • When a poll is edited, this resets the poll stats
    • We can view the poll history to see / quote previous "final states" of a poll right before the stats were reset due to changes made
  2. Editing a poll is treated like a post bump
    • The first time a poll is edited without any new replies being posted by the community bumps the post back to the front of the pile
    • Helps encourage OP to incorporate feedback from the community
    • Aligns with goal of reducing number of cloned / similar posts
    • Avoids abuse where it only works the first time the poll gets edited, until someone other than the OP makes a response.
    • Should be pretty easy to spot abuse of the system (OP bumps their own topic then edits the poll then bumps again etc.)
  3. Supports single select / multi select options
    • Can choose One / X (set by OP) / All provided options
  4. Enforce unique responses
    • OP can set a poll to limit one vote per user (default: enabled)

 

Think it's a good idea? Please show support with a like and a comment 🙂

Open to feature ideas / ways to improve the options etc.

Edited by Jax_Cavalera
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Forum polls are always bullS#&$, not to put too fine a point on it. The forum population is NOT representative of the full game population, either in number or in player type distribution. Moreover, the majority of polls I've seen of this sort - usually of the strawman poll variety - are badly formulated with either "funny" or straight-up ambiguous answers. If your goal is to address people making unsubstantiated claims of majority, relying on forum polls does the exact opposite. It's just as unsubstantiated due to the low and biased turnout, but it has the appearance of being factual. Statistical data is VERY prone to misuse as its meaning and significance can very greatly with interpretation, and I don't trust most people on this forum to do proper statistical significance analyses on their polling data at all.

A little data is often worse than no data at all. Neither gives you any useful information, but the latter gives you the conviction that you know what you're talking about.

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12 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Forum polls are always bullS#&$, not to put too fine a point on it. The forum population is NOT representative of the full game population, either in number or in player type distribution. Moreover, the majority of polls I've seen of this sort - usually of the strawman poll variety - are badly formulated with either "funny" or straight-up ambiguous answers. If your goal is to address people making unsubstantiated claims of majority, relying on forum polls does the exact opposite. It's just as unsubstantiated due to the low and biased turnout, but it has the appearance of being factual. Statistical data is VERY prone to misuse as its meaning and significance can very greatly with interpretation, and I don't trust most people on this forum to do proper statistical significance analyses on their polling data at all.

A little data is often worse than no data at all. Neither gives you any useful information, but the latter gives you the conviction that you know what you're talking about.

Well you raise a good point that trying to derive meaningful outcomes from an inadequate sample size will provide too many false positives to be of much value. I'll play devil's advocate and ask the question, "If we get a misrepresentation of the full playerbase by those only engaged in the online forum, how can DE ever expect to draw conclusive, actionable information from posts made in the Feedback threads?"

If we don't try to better organise the feedback simply because it's probably going to be ignored anyway then we're all just wasting our time even trying to provide our opinions or to +1 similar player experiences. I agree it may not be a smoking gun of evidence using a poll to back up your claims, however it's surely better than having multiple scattered (essentially duplicate) posts about the same issue that some poor sap from DE has to crawl through and try work out if any of this is actionable right?

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34 minutes ago, Jax_Cavalera said:

Well you raise a good point that trying to derive meaningful outcomes from an inadequate sample size will provide too many false positives to be of much value. I'll play devil's advocate and ask the question, "If we get a misrepresentation of the full playerbase by those only engaged in the online forum, how can DE ever expect to draw conclusive, actionable information from posts made in the Feedback threads?"

No, you have a point - DE can't draw actionable information from the Feedback forum. I'd argue that they shouldn't be trying to, either. As far as I'm concerned, the feedback forums are there not to provide "votes," but rather arguments supporting underlying feelings and ideas. It's how I've treated them, anyway. My goal when providing feedback is never to use my post's weight as an implicit vote, but rather to change hearts and minds through a proper argument - be they other posters' or the developers'. The simple fact of the matter is that even if everyone in the Feedback forum were to unanimously agree on any given thing, we're still a pitiful fraction of the game's overall playerbase. Unless we actually have a point, then weight of numbers means nothing.

Where numbers matter are in metrics that we simply don't have access to. If you ask these forums, they'd tell you that literally nobody plays PvP in Warframe - we saw that with Universal Medallions. We can argue either way from anecdotal experience, but DE have access to the actual player counts, player activity engagement and so on. Granted, they themselves have said words to a similar effect - that PvP and Lunaro have been a failure largely ignored by the playerbase. However, they and they alone are in a position to know this. We simply lack the tools to derive conclusive information to this effect, and any forum polls on it are going to be misleading. And if you're thinking "Yeah, but we were right anyway!" - sure, on this subject we were.

What about Nightwave? We saw massive backlash against it, then massive backlash against the backlash. I don't know which side had more numbers - the side which felt it was too grindy or the side which felt everyone else is just an entitled crybaby. DE did, however. They extended Season 1 by at least four weeks, then tweaked the numbers substantially for Season 2. I'm already 30+20 in Nightwave for various reasons so from MY perspective the system is incredibly generous, yet DE made it this way based on metrics from Season 1. The only conclusion I can draw there is their metrics showed a plurality of people were falling behind and no-life whales like myself were an actual outlier. That's the thing to remember - pretty much all of us here on the forums are outliers because the vast majority of players never post anything, and this is true for just about every game.

 

44 minutes ago, Jax_Cavalera said:

If we don't try to better organise the feedback simply because it's probably going to be ignored anyway then we're all just wasting our time even trying to provide our opinions or to +1 similar player experiences. I agree it may not be a smoking gun of evidence using a poll to back up your claims, however it's surely better than having multiple scattered (essentially duplicate) posts about the same issue that some poor sap from DE has to crawl through and try work out if any of this is actionable right?

I'd argue that +1 posts are entirely pointless and in some instances actively detrimental. There's a reason that some forums tend to ban those kinds of posts via forum rules. City of Heroes did way back in the day. They offer nothing but the attempt to give a post or thread the veneer of popularity without addressing its actual content. I'd argue that even a single solid, convincing argument has far more weight than dozens or even hundreds of +1 posts. You've seen what happens when people try to dog-pile and force an idea through. I don't want to keep going back to Universal Medallions, but look at what happened to that. Thread after thread, post after post - if you'd hosted a poll, it would have come out nearly unanimous. The result was the threads being merged and their weight of numbers disregarded - at least so it appeared. That decision was made not based on how many players wanted it, but as a result of an internal discussion from the standpoint of a specific core argument.

I've been hanging out on online forums for years, speaking with game developers on-and-off. I can tell you from experience that developers aren't swayed by number of posts - not usually. A hot topic might raise the issue for internal discussion within the team or for review if it's fairly old, but numbers alone aren't going to sway opinion either way. If you're lucky, you might convince developers that something inconsequential is popular, such as carrying four Dragon Keys when that bug cropped up. They offer meaty debuffs, sure why not. It's a low-impact popular change, might as well. But decisions like these are fairly rare. For anything actually contentious, such as introducing a rare and powerful consumable as a form of "sustainable reward," you can't go by volume of forum posts. You go by sentiment, you go by argument and - ultimately - you go by metrics.

The reason I'm against polls in general is because their primary use - at least whenever I've seen them - has been to attempt to add weight to an opinion in the absence of a convincing argument in its favour. They're not useless, but their use is far more likely to mislead than to inform. I personally prefer a forum structure which encourages posters to convince than to gang up.

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I don't care about having polls on our posts. I wish DE would use polls on the forums to get feedback so they can ask specific questions and have the community provide directed feedback without going off topic or dragging on. 

Once they have information, they can start another poll to elaborate based on the previous results. 

Poll: Does Vauban need a rework?

Result: 99%: Yes

               1%: No

Next Week

Poll: You decided that Vauban needs a rework. Will giving him an affinity ranged Armor passive, along with additional useless items while overlooking his overlapping CC issues improve him?

Result:  0%: Yes

10000000%: No (Why would you even think that?)

 

Ideally that would've been what the Development Council was for, but that's mostly meaningless fluff. For the Nyx rework, the parameters given for the players for Psychic Bolts ability replacement were completely disregarded after the fact and DE decided to keep Psychic Bolts. I ended up liking the changes to that ability, but that's besides the point. Absorb was not changed in a way that it needed.

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59 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

The simple fact of the matter is that even if everyone in the Feedback forum were to unanimously agree on any given thing, we're still a pitiful fraction of the game's overall playerbase. Unless we actually have a point, then weight of numbers means nothing.

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

That's the thing to remember - pretty much all of us here on the forums are outliers because the vast majority of players never post anything, and this is true for just about every game.

Fair call again a lot of truth in those words. Taking this into account, I just got this interesting thought, what would happen if a player were able to pay a platinum fee to get their poll in front of X% of players that log in.. so when you log in, your inbox comes up with a poll vetted by DE that costs a player X platinum and can be linked directly into their forum posts.

If a player chose to Opt-Out of this feature when they go to the settings in game or via their profile in here.. or they check a box on the actual in -game poll. One poll inbox message is unlikely to be a big deal forcing players to rage quit.. especially if it's easy to opt out of future polls should they noot want to have their say. It'd lower the threshold needed for feedback, and should open up to a statistically meaningful qty of respondents.

Interested to get your thoughts on something like that as a tweak on this idea. It's pretty rough and could definitely use a bit of polish but that's the underlying thought i had.

 

53 minutes ago, (PS4)Ozymandias-13- said:

Ideally that would've been what the Development Council was for, but that's mostly meaningless fluff.

Yep sadly the design council is more or less used as an early test bed for ideas. In all the time I've been an active participant, most of the feedback we've provided was overlooked, which I guess is well idk I suppose I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of the design council is these days, it used to be a first line of feedback and input into new content being worked on but now it's more just a mash up of random ideas on a given topic with no clear way to organise that feedback.

The most well organised topic I've seen in a while there was around new dojo colours and it used strict feedback guidelines + polls to filter down the ideas.

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