Changeover Poll

[Edena_of_Neith]

Again, thank you very much, Jeff. Cheers to you, sir.

Yours Truly
Edena_of_Neith

 

[Treebore]

If your question is "How is the transition from 3E to 4E going for ENWorlders" then, yes, this is a very viable poll.

IT is also applicable to the general market. IF you don't wish to believe that, its fine. It isn't like anyone is trying to bust up our respective parties. I worked very intensely for 2 years (1998 to 1999) with statistical data, a job I got based on over 20 college credit hours I have in statistics. So I know I can turn this poll into valid statistical data with a very high degree of accuracy, and what I know about myself and my abilities is all that matters to me on this issue.

If people want to think otherwise, thats fine. I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

 

[Jack99]

Oh please! Your just showing why people don't understand statistics.

Where is Hong when you need him..

This poll is no different than going to a convention of gamers and asking them to participate in a poll. Its no different than calling registered voters and asking them to participate in a poll. Meaningless? Nope.

Both polls are finds if you want a poll on how the people attending the convention or how registered pollers think about a subject think. If you try to use the result of either poll on a nation-wide basis, you are screwed. At least over here. I must profess I can't speak of the laws and customs in the states. I hope they are indeed better than you seem to think they are.

Internet polling useless? Well thats news to a number of marketing outlets.

Internet polling is not useless, but this kind, with no control of who votes what and the possibility to vote multiple times the same way, yes, it's pretty useless.

This poll is just as viable as going onto a college and asking students there what they think of the college, or going to a mall and asking what people think of the mall, or going to a city and asking what people think of living in that city. This poll is very viable.

Once again, if we translate the result by what you just said, this poll is viable in finding out which edition ENworld voters (presumably the regulars) play. Ergo it is arguably of very little value in determining which edition the D&D community plays the most.

 

[Treebore]

Edena,

Just to let you know, even though my game is Castles and Crusades I count it as D&D because I still use my 3E, 2E, 1E, and my Rules Compendium, and have even stole a rule or two from 4E. So to me I look at it as not only playing D&D, but playing all of D&D.

Yeah, I may use the SIEGE engine as my core mechanic, but when you pull monsters, magic times, "house rules", spells, etc... straight from D&D books, I still consider it D&D.

 

[Treebore]

Where is Hong when you need him..


Both polls are finds if you want a poll on how the people attending the convention or how registered pollers think about a subject think. If you try to use the result of either poll on a nation-wide basis, you are screwed. At least over here. I must profess I can't speak of the laws and customs in the states. I hope they are indeed better than you seem to think they are.

Internet polling is not useless, but this kind, with no control of who votes what and the possibility to vote multiple times the same way, yes, it's pretty useless.

Once again, if we translate the result by what you just said, this poll is viable in finding out which edition ENworld voters (presumably the regulars) play. Ergo it is arguably of very little value in determining which edition the D&D community plays the most.

Just read my post prior to yours, I don't need Hong to justify my knowledge, experience, or understanding about statistical analysis. Plus, like Hong, we heard from our professors about the great arguments between statistical analysts about what can and cannot be made into valid interpretations. So even the so called experts cannot agree, when you get down to it.

Nothing new there, the experts argue about who is right all the time.

So you believe what you want, and I'll believe what I do.

 

[La Bete]

Nerd rage.

I would like to add, I find it hilarious that folks think the responses of the internet's largest/best D&D community are meaningless. There is no other forum with the cred of ENworld.

I think "meaningless" is probably a bit much. However, the self-selecting nature of the poll severely limits the randomness of the sample.

The result is that the poll can be used at best as a broad brush view of what enworlders are playing, who are a (large) subset of all d&d messageboard dwellers, who are a (unknown) subset of all d&d players.

To parapharase one of the mods - the polls are good for entertainment, but probably not such a good thing to base a financial decision on..

---

As for the poll itself - have finished my 3.5 campaign off with a great finale, and happily moved on to running 4E. Have even picked up a new player who's never played any roleplaying games before, and he's finding it pretty straighforward.

 

[Mistwell]

IT is also applicable to the general market. IF you don't wish to believe that, its fine. It isn't like anyone is trying to bust up our respective parties. I worked very intensely for 2 years (1998 to 1999) with statistical data, a job I got based on over 20 college credit hours I have in statistics. So I know I can turn this poll into valid statistical data with a very high degree of accuracy, and what I know about myself and my abilities is all that matters to me on this issue.

If people want to think otherwise, thats fine. I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

It's a self-selected non-random internet poll. Any claim that such types of internet polls are accurate is not a good claim. It's not about quantity, it's about the non-random sampling nature of it. It's useful for entertainment purposes only

 

[garyh]

It's an internet poll. Any claim that internet polls are accurate is not a good claim. It's not about quantity, it's about the non-random sampling nature of it. It's a self-selected poll with no checks and balances on it, and therefore useful for entertainment purposes only

Exactly. To put it clearer, if you posted the same poll on Dragonsfoot, Paizo, WotC, and RPGNet, I'm sure you'd get different results on all of them (which would also be interesting, to be sure). Obviously, they couldn't all be right. And the problem would be that each of those forums tend to attract a different type of poster with different opinions. EN World, having been created and spent 8 years as a 3.x board, probably skew towards 3.x more than the general populace. Paizo would skews towards Pathfinder, Dragonsfoot towards the older editions, etc.

 

[Mistwell]

Just read my post prior to yours, I don't need Hong to justify my knowledge, experience, or understanding about statistical analysis. Plus, like Hong, we heard from our professors about the great arguments between statistical analysts about what can and cannot be made into valid interpretations. So even the so called experts cannot agree, when you get down to it.

Nothing new there, the experts argue about who is right all the time.

So you believe what you want, and I'll believe what I do.

Tell you what, run this exact same poll on Paizo's boards until you get the same number of votes. Then run it on WOTCs boards, and RPG.net. When you see it gives you an incredibly drastically different result depending on the board you run the poll on, maybe you will admit that this kind of poll is not a representative sample of 4e in general.

[Edit - Ninja'ed by garyh!]

 

[Scribble]

I don't think the answers here are meaningless, you just have to take who and where you're asking the question into account.

If I were to say I polled several people as to whether or not they had murdered someone in the past, and then said 95% of the people polled said yes... Could I then say 95% of Americans have murdered someone in the past? (When I conducted my poll in a federal prison death row wing?)

Similarily I think if you ask the people on the Steve Jackson forums if they prefer GURPS to d20 you'll probably get a much different answer then if you ask the same question on the WoTC boards.

It might be a "valid" poll sure, it just might not be valid for the question it's being used to answer.