Awesome. Nobody is suggesting to remove the forums and replace with surveys. Having a survey about x topic isn’t inherently a bad idea.
OP is just making a suggestion, because of their experience with what is all too common behavior of posters to be antagonistic and argumentative.
That is the real topic here, IMO. They want to give feedback on a part of the game, and don’t want to deal with people who out of boredom just argue against whatever they said.
I don’t see why the idea of a survey, in addition to sorting through posts on GD, Reddit, etc, is conceptually such a bad idea that people are arguing against it.
And we know that these people aren’t doing so out of good faith, because Blizzard has paid for third party firms to administer surveys in the past.
I agree with OP that there are people here on GD that love to argue contrarian points in bad faith.
Do some people simply disagree about a topic and post their opinion in good faith? Yes, absolutely.
Yes I agree. I am not saying the forums are a bad place for feedback.
OP’s suggestion for a survey (in my opinion) is more a response to bad faith actors that post on GD, and I agree that those posters are wildly annoying.
OP posts the same thing every few weeks (raid/profession lockouts are from mobile games and the entire gearing system is trash and I only play legacy content) and is apparently fed up with the responses they get, which are mostly “… what?” and various flavors of “that/you sound(s) crazy”.
People often disagree on the best way to allocate resources, and OPs “but other posters disagree” isn’t a strong argument in favor of adding the survey.
It might be understandable if there wasn’t already several methods of giving feedback that continuously generate much more detailed info than most surveys, but that’s not the case.
Anyone who disagrees is now arguing in bad faith? Interesting, but it sounds like someone’s looking for an echo chamber.
Who gets to be the judge of each poster’s intentions?
They are already doing player surveys. The issue is that the results may only represent the sample participants.
For instance, if you want to know opinions on how proposed mythic raiding changes would affect mythic raiding, you would want to use a group that is mythic raiders. If you want to understand how proposed changes would affect top raiders, you use top raiders. But if planned changes will affect raiders in all difficulties, but will have a major negative effect on LFR and normal, that won’t come out in research on a group of top raiders.
Even worse if you are planning changes that will affect the entire playerbase but your research group has singled out the only demographic that would benefit. And asking top raiders what should be done to “solve” the “casual problem” would explain why casuals/solo players who are longterm paying customers are finding less reason to play the game and support the hideously expensive cost of instanced content that they hardly use.
If you have already made your decision and are able to put together a study group that you are sure will confirm your decision, that’s a problem. That happened with Cata Classic, where they did a survey of players who had played the right Cata content while it was current and were likely to agree that the Cata changes after wrath should never have happened, even though the realities are that…
those changes drove away a lot of players;
hardly anyone thought Cata Classic was a good idea, and it had been discussed extensively for literally years;
hardly anyone said they were interested in playing it.
Blizzard already sends out periodic surveys to players that have opted into them. They do not send every surveys for every issue or to every player. But I would guess they send them to a statistical number that they are happy with.
That’s because the “polls” that are posted in the forums are not intended to be surveys that give useful data. They’re a PR tool. Any survey that every employee with 60 level 10 characters on their company-provided account can vote on is inherently unreliable.
I consider you uninformed about casual/solo players.
They were trolling players by allowing randoms to vote on Grimrail Depot. It’s purely a show. The results have already been determined. You will be expected to blame “players” for a decision that Blizzard made. And you will do that.
All of this is entirely under blizzard’s control. If they want result, and they release numbers that say that players voted for result, how do you know the numbers reflect the players’ votes?
Remember in Shadowlands, where they had that vote for which mount players wanted? And everybody was saying they wanted the slime kitty, but instead we got the tree?
