WotC Wants You To Help Shape D&D

Lord Mhoram · Sep 14, 2018

As I recall they said something to the effect that they had the first 5 years release schedule and types of books planned out. I expect this is to get more data for where they plan to move now.

Satyrn · Sep 14, 2018

dave2008 said:
It is survey design 101 though. @schneeland explained it better than i did in post #36. But it gives them statistically more accurate results. You may not like it, but you can't fight the math man. Rapiermetrics if you will.

FTFY

Katanametrics?

BookBarbarian · Sep 14, 2018

ad_hoc said:
It's probably more about wanting to figure out how to reach more people. Find out what other things the current players like and then reach out to people who like the same things.

Is it strange that I feel like that's exactly what I meant?

Perhaps my tongue was too firmly in cheek.

Satyrn · Sep 15, 2018

BookBarbarian said:
Indeed not just more D&D books, but they want to know what our current favorite board games are. Probably wanting to rip them off and through out a D&D branded version of them.

Danggit. It turns out I lied on the survey. I said I had no interest in D&D branded stuff that was the D&D RPG.

But now you've made me want a D&D branded version of Citadels . . .and Railways of Eberron

SkidAce · Sep 15, 2018

Jacob Lewis said:
Well, now that's much less amusing.

Sorry friend...

Jay Verkuilen · Sep 15, 2018

dave2008 said:
I had a similar feeling. There is a reason for making surveys like that, but I can't remember the precise explanation.

In general it's a dumb idea to make super long surveys. Length would give measurement precision or potential nuance at the individual level but I don't see a realistic reason for the need in this case and there are lots of downsides. The main reason is that a very long survey induces differential dropout. This has a strong potential to bias your inferences and it's very hard to correct for those biases. It's classic amateur survey design to make it super long and not use an explicit sampling design. There are ways to generate a long survey where you don't ask every participant all the questions and then predict the responses on the parts not asked, but this requires fairly substantial expertise to pull off. (Basically, you'd need to hire someone like me. And, no, I do not want the job.)

In sum, I would never advise someone asking about survey design to make something super long with many redundant questions. It's bad practice. The right thing to do is get your nuance from focus groups or smaller interviews after you've determined profiles of your market using survey research.

Source: Self. Education, PhD in statistics.

Jay Verkuilen · Sep 15, 2018

schneeland said:
If I remember my books about survey design correctly (that was for research, but I think marketing should be similar), the main reason behind this is that depending on the exact wording, people might answer differently, so you try to come up with multiple questions that refer to the same factor you are interested in and average them later (or calculate the median).

There are reasons one might want to do that in a survey but it's almost never necessary for a market research survey for things to be that long with that much redundancy. When you're designing a survey you have to work through the tradeoffs. One of the key tradeoffs that people ignore is dropout. My guess is that they'll have a lot of dropout due to the length. They would have been better off cutting some of the redundancy down.

And, yes, I took it so I looked first hand. Some of the questions were fairly good, but a lot were much longer than necessary.

Henry · Sep 15, 2018

Doctor Futurity said:
When it got to the "Which of these editions have you DMed/Played*" I was able to check them all.....wooooo yay old age!

*I assume it asked "played" if you had never DMed. But it asked me which I'd DMed iirc. Bad memory also a sign of old age sigh.

Yeah, more than once in that survey, I moved to the next page with every option on the current page checked off.

Henry · Sep 15, 2018

MNblockhead said:
I wonder what sounds my sons are growing up with will disappear by the time they are adults?

Someone on Reddit once made a great observation: With the ascendency of online ordering and instant delivery, your sons might find the “shopping cart” icon becoming for them what the “floppy disk” save icon is for you.

Henry · Sep 15, 2018

DMMike said:
The execs took one look at the success (?) of Paizo just selling a playtest and said, "yup, it's time for a new edition."

At least now they can come full circle, back to their demonic roots, and call it version 6.66.

Just curious, were there any survey questions about pricing? Like, "on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to pay $70.00 for a hardcover D&D book? $30.00 for a .pdf?"

Why don’t you take the survey yourself and find out? Sounds like you have some pretty strong opinions about the management’s motivations and their current M.O., so why not go through and tell ‘em what you think?

WotC Wants You To Help Shape D&D

Lord Mhoram

Hero

Satyrn

First Post

BookBarbarian

Expert Long Rester

Satyrn

First Post

SkidAce

Legend

Jay Verkuilen

Grand Master of Artificial Flowers

Jay Verkuilen

Grand Master of Artificial Flowers

Henry

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Henry

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Henry

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