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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenobi65" data-source="post: 3152477" data-attributes="member: 1515">And 43% of statistics are worthless. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I've worked in market research for 20 years.  Even talked to WotC about being their director of market research at one point (long story).I can assure you of three things (though I fear I'm reiterating what others have already noted):1) A sample of 1000 is a big, reasonable sample.  Many, many of the studies I've done over the years have been with smaller samples -- honestly, a sample size of about 250 to 300 is usually enough for a high level of confidence in your results, although on a big "strategic" study, like the landmark study that fed into the development of 3E, you usually like to have a bigger sample...though, that's mostly because you will frequently divide the respondents into subgroups during the analysis (e.g., older vs. younger, casual vs. avid gamer, etc.)2) Just because you personally haven't been asked to participate in a WotC market research study doesn't mean their research is flawed.  If their numbers are accurate, and several million people play RPGs, then the vast majority of those who play have never participated in a market research study for WotC.3) Just because their research says something different from what you feel (or, "me and everyone I know") doesn't mean it's flawed, either.  Even in studies I've done in which the results were "overwhelming", there's still 10 or 15% of the respondents who hold minority viewpoints.  Some time back, I was working on a well-known brand of pancake mix.  Our R&D department was charged with developing an improved formula for that pancake mix, and I was in charge of doing the market research on that improved formula.  We tested it among current users of that pancake mix, and the vast majority (like, 80%) of the people we surveyed preferred the new formula over the old one.  The company changed to the new formula, and sales improved.  However, we still got a fair number of very angry letters from people who felt betrayed by us...people who were clearly in the small group who preferred the old formula (only about 5% preferred the old one; about 15% were indifferent).  They were incensed, they thought the new product was terrible, and they thought we were idiots.It's entirely possible (in fact, probably likely) that WotC did find people with opinions like yours in their research...but, if that opinion is in the minority (particularly if it's in a small minority), they're likely to go with what the majority is telling them.  (BTW, this is the same phenomenon that you see with TV ratings, when you're incredulous that that great show you love gets cancelled, while shows you can't stand get renewed....welcome to being an outlier.)One other note...most companies never share the results of their market research with the public; not even their avid users.  They pay a great deal of money for that research, and the information in it represents a competitive advantage.  The fact that that information from that one study in 1999 was released (which, I suspect, was done to help convince other publishers to jump on the d20/OGL bandwagon) seems to have set some unrealistic expectations among the gamer community that we're somehow entitled to see this stuff from WotC on a regular basis.</blockquote>

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