Nah. Miz isn’t wrong about CCP’s misreading of their own data, in the past. They’ve got activity numbers, but what hard data do they have other than ‘I’m quitting’ surveys (and we all know how scientific those are) that tells them why beyond a correlation in order to establish definitive causation? I can’t think of any they’ve talked about with us in the past, so reading those numbers is a lot of speculation… and let’s face it, man, they’ve been… shall we say ‘overly confident’ in their speculation in the past. It’s not an accusation of ‘stupid’ it’s ‘analyzing data on behavior without hard data on motivations makes it hard to accurately determine causation’.
That’s the job of the career sociologists and behavioral scientists in your line of work, man… but you know damned well that the survey data they use is far more comprehensive and cross-references numerous batches and methodologies. (Because really, political strategists are behavioral scientists, they just don’t call themselves that.)
How is this relevant for this discussion? We aren’t discussing people’s freedom. Of course they are free to leave a game at any time. We were however discussing game changes and the big word “player retention”. So unless your next goal is to take away people’s freedom do I not see how your argumentation makes any sense in the current context. So we’d have to come back to a good versus bad decision if we also want to use it for game changes.
I’ll give you an example… I don’t like WoW’s graphics. I find them silly looking. I leave the game and I hate everyone who plays it, because they’re all dumb and stupid.
It’s a perfectly valid reason for leaving the game. Any value judgments you make about the players for not making the same decision, however, are on you.
At that point, the game developers need to look at why you’ve left the game (don’t like the graphics), and how common a complaint this is, then decide if taking steps to retain those players is worth the investment of time and effort involved.
It’s a reason. Isn’t “good” or “bad”, it’s just a reason not to like it, and how much that reason weighs depends entirely on you. Not liking an aesthetic choice or graphics design is a perfectly valid reason not to play a game. You strawmanning it with “because they’re all dumb and stupid” doesn’t make the reason any better or worse, just you become so much worse as a person.
Of course it’s a reason and it’s a terrible one. Obviously am I lying when I first state something about the graphics and then go hating on the players. I wasn’t giving you the real reason.
… you have a delightfully meandering kind of argumentation style, don’t you? Do you even remember what your initial point was, and do you think you’ve built any support for it?
No, it’s not obvious. There’s a lot of people out there who decide ‘I don’t like this, you do. Therefore you are stupid and wrong-thinking’. (G’wan. Tell me I’m wrong. Then look at most political parties in a good half of the countries of Western Europe, and the US.)
That’s why relying on ‘I’m quitting’ surveys is bad, mm’kay?
Just because someone lies about their reason, or the fact that they’re lying isn’t obvious, doesn’t make their actual reason any less valid. It doesn’t even make the reason they gave invalid, it just makes it not their reason. Someone else might actually feel that way, and hopefully they’re being honest.
Or are you claiming there’s a systemic effort to obscure ‘why I’m really quitting’ out there? You can’t rely on the exit surveys because a lot of the time, people will be thinking about one thing, even though a lot of other things have brought them to the point of enough dissatisfaction that that final thing pushes them over. That’s all.
We aren’t talking about entitlement reform or the ramifications of drug legalization here. We are talking about war decs.
These are things that a literally handful of players are abusing - players who are smart enough to know how to mix-max these things to get the outcomes they want and who have generally been playing a long time. The chances of them quitting when this changes is relatively low.
Doing nothing means players are still leaving the game.
I don’t particularly care if the latest know-it-all with incomplete information thinks he hasn’t seen enough compelling data to draw a conclusion. The decision makers have the data and they look like they are poised to fix this.
It’s time folks start shifting out of should-we-fix-this mode into how-do-we-fix-this mode.
Let me try this again, because you seem to have missed it the first time I said it.
They sure as hell have never proven that they can actually read and analyze data in any reliable way. Nor have you. The only thing we have right now is the claim that the data leads to certain conclusions, without there being even the slightest hint of evidence that this is in fact the case. With CCP’s history of poking at the tips of icebergs without understanding what might happen when the rest of it flips, this is plenty of reason to be a bit conservative when it comes to trusting CCP or CSM with this stuff.
Yes, but how does that invalidate that it is a behavioral issue?
I think seeing some numbers at this point could be helpful in that it will help give people an better understanding of the issue. Frankly, I don’t see why such data cannot be presented as it is unlikely to violate privacy/confidentiality aspects of such data and could help relations with the players.
For example, was the data activity at the corporation level or at the player level? You saw the results of the analysis (I really doubt you saw the actual data, but hey maybe they did show you account specific data).