Ion, is that you?
(Sorry, couldn’t resist. I agree with you.)
Ion is a perfect example honestly. The guy got the job at blizzard without any prior game design experience, he was just a hardcore raider. I think that’s a big part of why the design philosophy has become so streamlined and dumbed down to “get to level cap and raid” in recent years. When you put a gamer in charge of the game’s direction they make short-term decisions that sound great until you have to actually live with them. That’s why the best thing blizzard can do with classic is hire some actual game designers and mute these forums.
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step1-Botters will buy cheap third world accounts.
step2- Boost 1 toon to 58
step3-setup bot program
step4- repeat step 1
Just checking back in to see some of the results.
Very nice survey. I hope someone at Blizzard has at least read it. 
Thanks.
They already have bots running on the servers. Why do they need more?
You do realize this is a voluntary response survey, and because of that, it lacks reliability?
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Yo do realize that just because I’m peeing on your boot that it doesn’t mean it’s raining?
Of course we realize that.
It’s not?
It is raining. Wipe your boots before you come in the house.
Vanilla didn’t have a paid boost - so no bot problem, right? Oh? That’s not right? Then why are we correlating boosts to bots now?
It’s fairly ignorant to completely disregard anyone who simply doesn’t want to level through vanilla to play TBC.
I see your argument a lot about botters but here’s the thing: They aren’t playing the game and are more indifferent toward the time required to level. I would find your argument compelling if you could guarantee that botters don’t want to level toons because they’ll be reported and banned before reaching TBC but if Blizzard was that effective at combating the issue, nobody would be concerned with bots in the first place.
You don’t even need a 58+ character to bot for profit in TBC anyway. One could probably farm up all the vanilla crafting materials like wool cloth and still sell them at a premium.
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You mean as opposed to a mandatory one or one taken under duress? Aren’t ALL surveys (not done in captivity) voluntary response surveys?
I would actually think that voluntary responses would be much more accurate than forced ones. My research tells me that people under duress are more likely to just tell you what you want to hear.
/sarcasm off 
Thanks.
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Um… You’re way off. This has nothing to do with captivity or duress… Look up voluntary reaponse survey vs random sample. In order to have a good sense of what a population feels (a mean of the data) with high “accuracy” (small standard deviation) with solid confidence (a common standard is 95%,) you need to randomly sample the population to avoid any bias, and you need a decent sample size.
You’ll learn about this in any basic stats class. And yeah, it really is important.
Anyone who really knows how to research with data would know what I just said.
couldnt even post from a classic character?
Actually I do know a thing or two about surveys and statistics being a scientist. I was just having some word-play at your expense. However, since you want to don the old mortarboard and school folks, let’s go…
While it is true that voluntary surveys can produce results with a voluntary response bias, the bias is that the sample tends to overrepresent individuals who have strong opinions. In this case the OP is actually wanting people with opinions on the subject (TBC Classic) to opine in the survey. While this does exclude people without opinions on the subject they are not relevant to the survey or the information the OP is after. This is akin to a customer satisfaction survey. The business does not care what anyone’s opinion who hasn’t interacted with them, as their opinions on customer satisfaction would be meaningless. Voluntary samples are actually used quite extensively in research because they are inexpensive to produce.
Random sampling provides strong protection against bias from undercoverage bias and voluntary response bias; but it is not effective against response bias. Although there are a number of variations to random sampling, researchers in academia and industry are more likely to rely on non-random samples than random samples due to the expense, time involved and that there is not always an organized list (sampling frame) to randomly sample from (as in this example).
Once you get out of your basic stats class and examine surveys and sample spaces outside of the classroom, you will see that in the real world they are not as cut and dried as your teachers made them out to me. Is there bias in this survey? Of course there is. It is reaching out to a select group of people who have an opinion on the subject (and most likely a strong one at that)? Yes, it is. But that is exactly the data the OP is looking to obtain. Random sampling a group of people who most likely have no opinion or knowledge on what the OP is asking will not garner any appreciable results for him/her.
Is it 100% accurate? No, but then no statistic is (when dealing with people and their opinion) due to the limits of sample size, set theories, and bias.
It does not mean it should be excluded because it does not meet your sterile standards that you learned in a basic stats class.
Thanks.
Well, if all you were doing was trolling, then consider that a success. Ya got me. You successfully sounded like a moron, and I bought it.
It was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, yes. Not trying to troll, but upon looking back I can see how it can be viewed that way.
My apologies if you took offense. Sarcasm is hard to type. 
Edited my previous post to hopefully make it a bit more funny. My apologies again if you feel it is at your expense.
Thanks.
I’m not too easily offended.
I do worry about data literacy, however. I’ve only taken a few stats classes during my undergrad, and I’ve taught the basic stats a few times.
Opinions on the forums are important. They do not represent necessarily the opinions of the playerbase, however. At best, I find it a good starting point.
Wriiting a good survey and capturing the right sample is a lot harder than folks think.
Here’s the problem with this poll.
People are able to fill it out more than once.
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An important topic to be sure.
I was not aware of that. Hopefully that can be filtered by the OP, but it is relevant information that could skew the results.
Thanks.
Do these surveys track the IP addresses of those who fill out the survey?