D&D 5E New D&D Player Survey!

[payn]

My last game was less than two hours. There was a deadly fight with two PCs downed and an extended interaction/negotiation with an inn keeper and a big chunk with the PCs dancing and exchanging weird trinkets with ghostly glowing lights, ie shopping via barter.

So was my last session, though it was due to one player asking to shift the start time down an hour because they were in a different time zone. They forgot about the change and showed up an hour late to the next session...

 

[beancounter]

The survey asked a lot of questions about which products we've purchased. And that didn't seem necessary.

Why? Because a large company (heck, even a medium sized one) in the 21st century should have ready access to detailed sales data.
The "drivers" and "key performance metrics" of their business...

They should know which products are selling well and which ones aren't. They should know volume and sales $$ data They should know the data by product, by region, by customer type/demographic, by store, or any other data point that's meaningful to them..

So, assuming the above, why would they need to ask customers this information in a survey?

It makes sense for them to ask us about Future purchase preferences, but not about past purchases.

 

[Guest 7034872]

The survey asked a lot of questions about which products we've purchased. And that didn't seem necessary.

[...]

So, assuming the above, why would they need to ask customers this information in a survey?

I'm just guessing here, but I figured they wanted to correlate details of their sales data with people's answers to questions about in-person vs. online, settings, art, races, classes, etc. Knowing you've sold 500,000 copies of Book X is one thing; knowing 75% of those went to hardcore gamers and only 25% to casual gamers is a very different thing to know.

 

[delericho]

My experience with the FR is entirely as game material, never did the fiction. As a bland canvas full of material, it's fantastic. Most of those others are a little too specific in their flavor profile to be as useful.

Agreed. Its relative blankness is a strength when it comes to general use - the DM can project pretty much whatever he or she wants on to it and it will work.

Much as I prefer Eberron, Spelljammer, Ravenloft, and Dark Sun, these are all inherently much more of a niche interest.

 

[payn]

The survey asked a lot of questions about which products we've purchased. And that didn't seem necessary.

Why? Because a large company (heck, even a medium sized one) in the 21st century should have ready access to detailed sales data.
The "drivers" and "key performance metrics" of their business...

They should know which products are selling well and which ones aren't. They should know volume and sales $$ data They should know the data by product, by region, by customer type/demographic, by store, or any other data point that's meaningful to them..

So, assuming the above, why would they need to ask customers this information in a survey?

It makes sense for them to ask us about Future purchase preferences, but not about past purchases.

Some of these purchases go back decades. They might know what people were buying then, but do they know how many of them are still around? Care enough to take a survey?

 

[Jer]

The survey asked a lot of questions about which products we've purchased. And that didn't seem necessary.

Why? Because a large company (heck, even a medium sized one) in the 21st century should have ready access to detailed sales data.
The "drivers" and "key performance metrics" of their business...

They should know which products are selling well and which ones aren't. They should know volume and sales $$ data They should know the data by product, by region, by customer type/demographic, by store, or any other data point that's meaningful to them..

Please tell me the mechanism by which a company learns the demographics of their customers - this information is not collected at the point of sale.

Anyway while they have past demographic surveys that they've done over the years what they'd be looking at here is what the purchasing behavior of the sample being collected is actually like and to see how relevant the old data they've collected is to the current sample and vice-versa. Additionally, the answers to "what kind of products do you want to buy" are absolutely going to have correlations to "what products have you bought" and so being able to see self-reporting on what purchases you have/have not made allow connections to be found in what products you might want to see. And vice versa.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

So, assuming the above, why would they need to ask customers this information in a survey?

maybe and I can't say for sure but I assume they are useing it to catagorize us... People who bought just the PHB think X Y and Z but people who bought the starter set think A B and C...

 

[Lanefan]

The survey asked a lot of questions about which products we've purchased. And that didn't seem necessary.

Why? Because a large company (heck, even a medium sized one) in the 21st century should have ready access to detailed sales data.
The "drivers" and "key performance metrics" of their business...

They should know which products are selling well and which ones aren't. They should know volume and sales $$ data They should know the data by product, by region, by customer type/demographic, by store, or any other data point that's meaningful to them..

So, assuming the above, why would they need to ask customers this information in a survey?

Because while WotC might have sales data around their own products they won't have that data around third-party materials, which I think most people would include in their D&D-related purchases.

So, if the survey tells them that on average we're spending $xx.xx per Y-amount of time but their sales data tells them we're spending $zz.zz per Y-amount of time, they can extrapolate how much $ is going to third-party material.

 

[overgeeked]

Lots of questions about ones first time playing, creating characters, etc. and not about the way you currently play except for some covid related questions.

So looks like WoTC wants to hook more players...
I see another round of streamlining incoming.

I certainly hope so, but the design hints we're already getting suggest the opposite. Adding feat chains back into the game is not what I'd consider "streamlining," for example.

 

[overgeeked]

The point is to encourage them to put out more material around how-to-worldbuild, which has always been sadly lacking in any edition.

2E had some great resources. The most of any edition.

Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide. Castle Guide. Creative Campaigning. Dungeon Builder's Guidebook. World Builder's Guidebook.

The quality and usefulness varied, of course, but those are some fantastic resources.

I wish they'd bring something like those back. Or some 3PP would go for something similar.