That's a lot of words for a lot of vague guesswork about how they do things. What is the percentage number for "very satisfied?" What is the percentage for "satisfied?" And so on. It's all well and good to just make a claim of, "They run it through the ringer and come up with a mystical magical percentage," but it's actually impossible for them to tell.
It is not impossible for them to tell. It is simply impossible to say "A vote for Satisfied means 75%" when you are processing this data. And the reasons why are blatantly obvious. They have a variable number of respondents and a variable number of responses on a particular subject.
Think about it Max, it is completely possible that out of 1,000 people who vote on the Bard that not all of them actually vote on all of the abilities. They might leave it blank. So if the Bard has 225 Very Satisified Answers, 615 Satisfied answers, 140 Dissatisfied and 20 Very Dissatisfied, but Bardic Inspiration has 310 Very Satsified, 350 Satisfied, 140 Dissatisfied and 80 Very Dissatisfied... what's the final tally? What percentage of the percents do you carry over from Bardic Inspiration into the percentages of the class? If you are talking about Counter charm, a less iconic ability, do you alter that percentage of the percents?
The reason I can't say that Satisfied means you want a score 75% is because these surveys are FAR more complex than a single answer leading to a single percentage.
There's no way that they can tell that my "very dissatisfied" means I like it 8%, but yours means that you like it 3%. There's no way for them to know that my "satisfied" was almost at the "very satisfied" level, but your "satisfied" on the same question was almost "dissatisfied." And if they are assigning arbitrary constant numbers to everyone's answers, they will never be correct with what they come up with.
Sigh Have you ever heard of the Wisdom of the Crowd Theory? A classic example of it occurred in 1906 in Plymouth. They had 800 people guess the weight of a slaughtered ox. The median guess, when all the data was processed, was within 1% of the real weight.
Yes, there might be a 5% gap between your answer and my answer in "I can objectively read opinions as statistics" mode. But when you are averaging THOUSANDS of answers, that difference is scoured away. And if they are "only" 97% accurate? Heck, literal scientific papers can have 95% certainty with a margin of error of 4 to 8 %. There is actually a calculator online that takes population size vs sample size to calculate margin of error. With 1 million players and 40,000 players taking the surveys? They are sitting a around 1% potential margin.
They don't need to be hyper-precise. Aggregating that much data and using the proper tools, they have about as accurate of a picture as is humanly possible to get.
How on earth is dissatisfied = satisfied going to help anyone understand? Dissatisfied = less than 50% or less, because if you are more than that, you are at least somewhat satisfied with how things turned out. And I love how "very dissatisfied" or "I hate it" = a 60% approval.
I never said dissatisfied = satisfied. I said that dissatisfied fell into the range of percentages that would indicate WoTC feels the subject needs to be salvaged, but also can be salvaged.
You may insist that dissatisfied is less than 50%, but that means you don't want it at all. You don't even want them to try and fix it. And which point, there is no reason to have a lower level. You can't just apply these things arbitrarily and expect to convince anyone. And yes, I gave 10% spreads on the range, because the highest end of Very Dissatisfied blends into the lowest end of Dissatisfied. What else would you expect? That there is a 5% gap between each answer where responses are sucked up by the nether void?
