-
NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.
3E & 4E Love and Hate Polls - What does it mean?
- Thread starter Mercurius
- Start date
Yep, the "love it" votes went from appx 150 to appx 500 over a period of six hours...
Rel
Liquid Awesome
You WOUND me sir!
To be honest, it never occured to me to do so. And if it had, frankly I have no idea whether it is possible to mess with such results or how I'd go about doing so. But I'll be sure to look into that for future tampering.
Nonetheless, I think it helps show that such polls are pretty meaningless.
Desdichado
Hero
I'm pretty sure that throwing out data that contradicts the trend you want to see is acceptable polling methodology, so we should be good here.
Dice4Hire
First Post
Well, seems to be pretty prevelent in RL, so why not?
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
I'm probably an extreme minority around here, as I voted that I dislike both. I didn't vote hate for either; I freely admit both have provided some useful ideas and inspiration, but I still don't like 'em as game systems.
Are those polls the type that show, or that can show, who voted for what? If so, it shouldn't be too hard to pick up ballot stuffing...
3e and 4e have made us all look at game design much more closely and wholistically than we ever did in 0-1-2e days; mostly because they are both designed more as complete systems as opposed to a series of modular parts. I suspect that may be causing some of the dislike-hate votes for both systems; in earlier editions it was much easier to change or tweak whatever design elements didn't work for you and thus build the game you wanted (and thus would tend to like), where in the more recent editions you kinda have to take the bad with the good as it's so bloody hard to tweak 'em without undertaking a bottom-up rebuild.
Lan-"still tweaking 1e after all these years"-efan
Are those polls the type that show, or that can show, who voted for what? If so, it shouldn't be too hard to pick up ballot stuffing...
3e and 4e have made us all look at game design much more closely and wholistically than we ever did in 0-1-2e days; mostly because they are both designed more as complete systems as opposed to a series of modular parts. I suspect that may be causing some of the dislike-hate votes for both systems; in earlier editions it was much easier to change or tweak whatever design elements didn't work for you and thus build the game you wanted (and thus would tend to like), where in the more recent editions you kinda have to take the bad with the good as it's so bloody hard to tweak 'em without undertaking a bottom-up rebuild.
Lan-"still tweaking 1e after all these years"-efan
Agreed. That's why I posted the 3e poll. I think they are a mathematically valid slice of the ENWorld community . . . whether that's an INTERESTING thing to hear data about or not depends on the reader.
And whether or not that's applicable to a larger context (like gamers or at least D&Ders as a whole) is debatable -- but I'd guess this sample isn't going to be radically different from the population of D&Ders as a whole. A 10% or more margin of error, sure. But completely invalid, I don't buy it.
Hundreds of responses from a population of a few million should be enough to be statistically valid (1000 is good for professional political polls on 150 million US voters), unless there's some systematic bias that means the people polled have totally different opinions from the wider population. I would agree they would be more passionate -- since they are here, and they answered the question -- but other than the general D&Der population likely having a lot more "mixed bag", "don't care", and "what's an edition" answers, I don't see why the like v. don't like stuff would be directionally wrong.
It's not the word of God, but it's not random number generation either. There's a world of difference between complete hogwash and "as best we can tell" data estimates, which is what this is.
And you base this opinion on what?
