Yeah probably would look like that. The jsp community alone I wonder why there aren’t more mods/blue posts here and clean up the forums I mean in some posts here I could at least perma ban like 30 people from the get go lol.
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Your point here is that we wouldn’t trust a poll from Mrllama because we would assume his poll is biased in favor of “No Changes” or at least over represent his audience, which would be in some form of disagreement with folks who want changes.
None of the surveys llama has covered in his videos end up favoring no change/purist opinions. none of them. Not before D2R launched, not after D2R launched.
So, now llama makes pro-change wishlist videos.
I am not sure what there is to wonder about regarding how surveys are received via the community. The surveys that have been covered have been shared around Reddit, Discord, YouTube… all over the place. They have travelled far and wide and anyone who spends time outside of the game consuming content creators content, reads forums, or otherwise engages outside of the game has a decent chance of becoming aware of them – so they are generally trusted and aren’t from one ‘camp’.
So, assuming llama created a survey, it had good questions from a survey creation perspective, and it was shared outside of just his YouTube channel, I don’t know what anyone could complain about. That said, I linked those videos as evidence that llama’s audience is largely pro-change anyways, so even if it was just his audience, the results would likely be basically the same as they have been. Over time, the pro-change mentality has only gained momentum, I think. He wouldn’t have gotten off his no-changes horse if his Views, Likes, and Subscriptions (and ad revenue) were positively correlated to how many no-change videos he was putting out. It is precisely the opposite.
Your ‘curiosity’ and ‘wonderings’ seem to be ways for you to try and add some sort of doubt about survey results and how they are received by the community. You seem to be implying that people will either favor them or ignore them based on whether they confirm the their own opinion (confirmation bias), as well as doubting the accuracy of the results with the assumption that the audience/respondents skew the results. I would offer that the only people who are doubting survey results are purists, and they have little to no legs to stand on when it comes down to it.
Many of the questions on these surveys are high level and don’t get into detail on a change by change basis. However, the trend is for people to want more content to do, more ways to do it (competitive build options), and less hassle while doing so (expanded inventory, expanded stash, charm inventory, stackable valuables (runes/gems) or a currency tab, or some intelligent mixture of these things). I think if you review the survey results over the past 10 months you will find those themes to be consistent.
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You can’t have the forums screaming about his inept understanding of the game, with bus tread marks on his back, and in the other hand praise his choices for change.
My remark was pointing out the inconsistencies in the way “we” view MrLlama, trust is too heavy a word.
If you blindly trust any poll you did not at minimum create, then you’d be a fool. You can put a measured amount opinionated validity to their usefulness or representative weight. Trust is not a word to use because it will never apply.
Who praised what? All I did is point out that his original viewpoints weren’t in alignment with the D2R community and provide links showing he 180ed on that position, and insinuated that he did so for financial reasons. Where is the praise…?
Splitting hairs over a word instead of addressing the broader points. Every poll on the topic shows exactly the same thing, so I’m not sure how anyone can doubt that the community at large wants changes, content, etc. None of the polls I’ve seen or heard of have been isolated or targeted towards specific sub groups of the community, which is why I went out of my way to mention that all these surveys are being shared around various platforms before they are closed. Just seems like more vague insinuations that the polls have been compromised/tampered with or that they are all poorly constructed with results that can’t be used to draw any meaningful conclusions from. Insinuations based on nothing.
Polls and statistics can easily be manipulated, starting with the parameters and ending with interpretation.
Our friend sekscalibur already shown how to not make polls, as all his polls had only biased answering option to favor his opinion. He still failed in most of his polls.
The closest to a legitimate poll would be Blizzard adding a survey like on PTR to the game client. But I don’t think that Blizzard is able to create the right Questions/Answers to really have a base to improve D2R.
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I agree that it is difficult to create a well-crafted survey to get accurate results even without considering the issues of sampling bias.
The fact is we can recognize those biases and how the influence the results we can get a sense of the thoughts of a broader population.
For example, let’s say I survey BBQ eaters living in Texas about what their favorite meat is. If this population answered hypothetically 50% favored beef and the rest either pork or chicken/poultry, then we know that the greater population in the US likely favors beef less than half and the other options more than half. That biased poll still informs.
I would differ also in the comment about statistics being manipulated. For statisticians who actually show/describe their calculations in detail, they tend to be accurate. The interpretation of those statistics often leads some faulty conclusions but that is not the statistics itself.
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You describe a “well balanced” survey about different types of meat. But most polls about this game I’ve seen were more like:
Survey about meat
- I prefer beef over pork
- I prefer beef over chicken
- I prefer beef over fish
- I don’t always prefer beef
I think most of the non-blizzard survey were more one needed to decide between option 1 or option 2
- Do you prefer things in D2R staying the same as in D2 for X factor
- Do you prefer that they add to or modify X in D2R
Blizzards own surveys were more of a gradation of do you strongly agree to strongly disagree range to particular statement with 5 selections possible.
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Thanks for going through the same argument that’s been had on this forum ever since the purists saw they were in the minority.
All they have left is to try and discredit the surveys entirely, even Blizzard surveys. It’s sort of sad, honestly.
The community surveys weren’t constructed the best, but aren’t nearly as bad or unreliable as they like to make them out to be.
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Do you have examples of this? What survey? What questions? Can you point me in the right direction? You seem very confident about this, so it should be easy for you to at least give me an example of a survey that you are talking about. I can find it myself even, just tell me what survey and perhaps some questions that were so poorly constructed and I’ll find it and post a link here if I can (there has to be a YouTube video covering it right?)
In this forum, sekscalibur about enigma and teleport
For the surveys that are worth discussing, they have hundreds/thousands of respondents. For example, the big and small reddit surveys and MrLlamaSC poll.
A forum post really isn’t a survey and can’t really be a survey, and isn’t really ‘harvestable’ as a survey. There are a lot of reasons why a forum post can’t work as a survey, a couple of which being the free form response of replies as well as being able to see how others are responding as you ‘take the survey’ which can sway your opinion. Was it a link to an actual survey, or just a forum thread? If just a thread - sure, lets not count that one as a survey. What was the title of that thread so I can find it.
Now, can you point to anything that was actually a survey/poll akin to what Blizzard put together, or the surveys that MrllamaSC has covered in his youtube videos? Like, actual surveys?
I know the one conducted 10 months ago by the community and shared on YouTube, Reddit, Discord, and the linked to these forums had 5,000 respondents and had good questions even though they weren’t extremely focused (“Do you want minor skill balancing” vs dozens of questions like “Skeleton Mages are worth the skill point investment” with the standard strongly disagree/strongly agree responses).
EDIT: I found the poll: [poll] THE DEBATE! Teleport and enigma: nerf or fine?
This is indeed a poorly constructed poll, but do you really think that its results are completely meaningless? it had several hundred respondents, at least. I understand the questions are not as focused as they should be, but they really aren’t as bad at all as the pork/beef/chicken example you gave (that survey had a question bias in favor of putting Beef on top (as the favorite) where the survey on Enigma/Teleport just included all the possible combinations of nerf/fine regarding teleport and enigma)
He made a few polls and tried to force his opinion. The pvp one was cringe too.
My example should clearly show what I mean and not hide some bias that I have. That’s the difference.
But arguing that something should be changed when 60% said they are fine how it is, because 3 other options combined gathered 40% is kinda what I meant with “interpretation” issues.
Im all in for change !! Diablo 2 had multiples patchs in the past and even an expension !
Keep them comming !! 
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Can you maybe get over this one forum guy and realize that the polls you are hung up on aren’t even the ones people are talking about?
Here are three videos from MrllamaSC covering three different surveys.
10 months ago:
5 months ago:
Recently:
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Mr lama is a content creator. I have nothing to do with him, so I don’t know much about his surveys. I got a cert error when it was posted here so I didn’t go ahead with it. I also don’t hang around reddit all day, so those surveys also passed me.
I prefer polls and surveys from the owners of games/objects.
Ehh there are changes… and there are changes.
I’m fine with buffs useless skills/items until they are… usable.
What I don’t want to see is power creep and meta shifting stuff. Nothing added or changed should be any more powerful than anything that already exists. Preferably less so.
And frankly don’t touch anything that is already functional unless it’s an extreme outlier. An example of this would be making Grief a tad weaker as it’s an example of one option invalidating all other options. A reasonable change to Grief would be changing the flat 340-400 damage to 340-400 max damage. Changing it to simply 340-400%ED would effectively just remove the item.
Buff some of the useless runewords/skills touch a few things on the high end, add some new runewords in the mid range, and buff a few unused uniques so they have at least some value.
Just don’t change the game into something that’s no longer D2.
That’s fine to have that preference but I doubt that that blizzard survey was much different than llamas in terms of results (similar in style for sure) otherwise we wouldn’t be getting 2.4 balance patches. They wouldn’t make changes to the game unless it was clear people wanted it.
That said, the surveys llama does are shared on YouTube, resist, discord, and usually someone posts it here.
frankly said, if blizzard didn’t mess up the D2R start and would be better at communicating, I wouldn’t even be in this forum.
All the extreme requests I read here are keeping my attention to this forum, that’s why I’m still here, but if it wouldn’t be for the 2 things above, I would just play the game and don’t care about Youtube/Forum/Reddit. I think there a lot of other people that are just playing the game and don’t care about those youtube comedians.
So most of those surveys might be a little biased to people blindly following a streamer or people that are waiting for something to change.
It might be that the results won’t change, but I like to think about D2LoD and Mods, where the playerbase was split in quite different changes.
D2LoD original
Path of Diablo
Project Diablo
Plugy SP (QoL original game)
So basically the community wants different changes for different reasons and as long as there is no MOD support for D2R, not everyone can be happy. I think the more extreme changes should be implemented in Mods and not the original D2R, while the QoL features like Plugy should be considered for D2R.
I’m fully ok with balance changes, as long as they are done with game knowledge and are mainly focused on bringing weaker/crap skills in a better position or tweaking areas with monster lvl, density and immunities to enable more options to play.