A Note on the Request for Feedback

Eidotrope at OutDPS: I see a lot of comments here and in other places like the Arena Junkies forums accusing these feedback threads of being deeply cynical placations of the playerbase.  The comments question, “how could Blizzard possibly still need our feedback?  The problems are obvious and we’ve been posting about them for ages.”  They question, “why would Blizzard want the opinions of all these poorly-informed players?  Any of the good points will be lost in the flood.”  I believe these comments miss the point of the feedback threads.

These threads are opinion polls and their goal is aggregate data.  The wording of the questions, the standardization of the questions, the insistence upon pasting in and using the questions, the sheer volume of the answers, the solicited audience, the timing, and the centralized location all point toward these threads being opinion polls.  Their purpose is not finding diamond in the rough arguments or expert analyses, otherwise Blizzard would have just contacted gladiators, theorycrafters and hardmode raiders directly.  Their purpose is the identification of trends, averages and propensities in player sentiment.  Their purpose is aggregate data on player opinions, something that Blizzard cannot normally get from the class forums (because they’re unorganized messes) or game data (because they don’t reflect opinions).  In this light, the threads are not so much deeply cynical ploys but data-gathering endeavors that anyone who runs a game like WoW would want to have occur on a regular basis.

Why might Blizzard want to conduct an opinion poll?  Because knowing what players want or don’t like in large groups helps Blizzard make decisions that help the success of its business.  For the purposes of the poll it doesn’t matter how well-informed players are; what matters is what they think.  We see a similar dynamic in democracies where politicians obsessively watch opinion polls not because they think the average potential voter is an astute observer of politics and can offer them good advice; no, politicians watch polls because they know they are accountable to those being polled come the next election.  Blizzard likely sees things in a similar way: if they can identify a popular yet reasonable change to the game they can implement it and increase their chances of subscription retention.  They likely also use the polls to identify things they can afford to ignore because no one cares enough to speak up about them.

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