The WotC Polls

[jodyjohnson]

I'd like to see them use the polls as a means to remove the outliers from the jury pool.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Flabbergasted how many people even pay attention to the polls.

The polls exist as an advertising excercise, to get you talking and interested in the game. No one with any experience in stats would think a public poll of this type (no matter how its worded) could reflect the fan bases views on the game.

A lot of the fan base DOESNT go onto forums, read articles about D&D or have any clue what would make the game more fun (because they barely know what the rules are anyways, they play houseruled, DM modified games). My 8 players meet twice a month in a basement and roleplay a character they think is cool. Occasionally they buy a players option book that gives them different powers. They switch systems if someone who is DMing tells them to or invites them to a D&D 5e session.

WOTCs game research will not be done on a public web site.

I think you're probably overstating the case a bit, but this is true. The problem is that most people aren't rabid message board posters. When designing 3e, WotC did a commendable job of market research. Let's hope they can return to the mentality of trying to engage the whole base.

Personally, one of my reasons for answering the polls and making posts is that I suspect I am the sort of person that usually doesn't (and I know my players aren't big into this stuff either). I'm trying to give a voice to the non-charop perspective.

I don't think the polls are completely meaningless though. I think someone's at least reading the results and the comments.

 

[mudbunny]

I don't think the polls are completely meaningless though. I think someone's at least reading the results and the comments.

I can guarantee that the staff at WotC are reading the threads about the polls and the columns. WotC knows that, as much experience as they have, the eyes of hundreds (and hundreds) Of The Rock's Fans....Ooops, wrong line...The eyes of hundreds (thousands) of posters looking at it and discussing it at a rate that WotC staff members could not hope to find stand a very real possibility of bringing up ideas/arguments/points of view that WotC had not come up with.

Whether those ideas are good or not, or whether they fit in with the rest of D&D Next is a complete other question.

 

[Iosue]

Count me among the "Polls aren't meant to really mean anything" folks here. (Of course, that option wasn't available in the poll for this thread.) Just about every RPG forum has a poll feature, which people use to make pointless, meaningless polls just to generate discussion. And that's all the WotC polls are. Legends & Lore, Rule of Three, the D&D Next blogs, the Dungeon Master Experience, all of these are essentially blogs for the designers to share their thoughts, get some raw feedback, and generate ideas. Mearls' twitter poll on levels being a good example. He throws up an off-the-cuff poll, takes the results and says, "What would it look like if we designed something with this result in mind? Would it be something in the core game? A module?" Then he can throw up the idea on L&L, and with a new poll, and most importantly, some comments, he can make up a playtest package and see what the testers think.

The nature of the polls should have been apparent when gender-based stat restrictions was included in one of the polls. Instead people threw a fit. Personally, I don't get it. You can comment directly to an article, you can comment on WotC's boards, you can comment on RPG.net or here at EN World and someone from WotC will probably see it. You have all these options to provide complex, nuanced feedback. Why do people care about getting their click on a radio button?

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I think that the problem with the polls is not so much that the writers favor certain answers (which they do sometimes), but that the questions themselves are framed by their biases.

Let's take this recent one:
The existence of this question presumes that it is possible or desirable to play "by the book" and, even stranger, that a particular pace of gaming should be assumed by that book. So the question is in itself rather narrow-minded. There are many others like it.
Again, a really strange question to ask, and one to which a consensus answer could not be expected.

D&D is a far more intellectually diverse game that its designers seem to give it credit for.

So on one hand, it's good that this time around, they are at least displaying some interest in what their audience thinks, and making some efforts to solicit opinions, but I think they really need to go back to basics with some of these things.

As i said elsewhere:

those polls need to be biased. You really can´t ask a single question in a short article and expect it to give unbiased results. "Good" polls need more than a few hours of work. Making up the question catalogue needs some days of work. Not speaking of the time needed to really analyze them.

I believe the polls are just a reality check for the designers to see how a certain idea resounds with the community. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

[BobROE]

I suspect people are right when they say that the polls are basically meaningless...

But that raises the question of why do them then? If they're there as a marketing tool of some sort, why not try to make the meaningful. THen at least the data you got out of them could be somewhat useful.

 

[wrecan]

But that raises the question of why do them then?

Because they're goofy fun, and sometimes thought-provoking. Do they need to be more? It keeps people engaged in the process. I don't think anybody at Wizards thinks these polls are giving them reliable data.

 

[Agamon]

Does the "Echo chamber" option mean that this dead horse has little to no flesh left to beat from it? Because, well, yeah.

 

[Incenjucar]

I think the source of this issue is that the people writing articles and designing polls are neither article writers nor poll designers. They're game designers, and their skill set does not extend far past there. We saw with Monte's gender gaffe and, earlier, the gender gaffe with the articles written about teaching D&D to kids, that WotC doesn't have anyone keeping an eye on what's written to ensure its content and quality; it's being run more like a startup indie shop.

I'm not yet cynical enough to assume that their poor communication and shabby polls are deliberate - if I did I'd write the company off entirely until the next string of firings.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Short answer: Meh.

WotC polls never have "Lemon Curry" as one of the answers.