(12-22-2017, 09:51 PM)Ciel Wrote: It's just to collect data, folks. The questions were selected based on things I'm sure we've all heard from time to time: that Balmung is all kinks and ERP (thus the ERP question), that there are cliques (and there are), that there are so many negatives about it. Kotaku's just an example of writing being biased toward all the negatives.
I'm trying to show that our server has so much more to it than the sum of all of these negatives which, to be honest, is all most people hear about us. I like to think I was pretty balanced in the options provided for each question.Â
I did refine a couple of things after Franz posted some feedback on tumblr about it, but it received so many responses so quickly that I couldn't keep going back to make more changes. Every time something is changed anywhere on the form, that means there will be inaccuracies in the final data, because some of the previous submitters will either not go back to redo or edit it, or there will be duplications.
Since it was first posted, we have received a sample size of nearly 250 unique submissions. That may still only be a small slice of Balmung's population, but that's still a much bigger sample size than I was expecting and I'm grateful to see so many people have been willing to participate.
This wasn't something "needed", to answer the question. This was voluntary. I was asked to write the article, and while I could have gone off of my own perspectives it would not have been fair to anyone else who might have differences of opinion. I created the survey so the players could add their voices and make the results as authentic as possible, and yes, everyone who contributed WILL be counted - even the fill in answers which didn't have exact options available.
This is not being done in response directly to Kotaku, or to the Balmung Blunders blog. Neither one of them will be mentioned at all in the article, and this was in discussion with the head honcho at The Moogle Post a week or two before the BB blog became a thing. The survey and its results are not intended to be something to inspire judgments or callouts, it's neutral and the results are entirely up to those who choose to fill it out.
Balmung is what the players make it. But I think we deserve better than to be known as a cesspool if we have the opportunity to prove there's more to it.
Thank you all for your interest. I look forward to sharing the results with you all at the beginning of February.
Also, if it helps, I'm the only one who has access to the results, so no one else is seeing the submitters' names or details. Â I have full control over this information, and it's not being shared. Â What's going in the article will be mostly numbers and stats. Â If I feel a need to add quotes from submissions, I will get in touch directly with the submitters I'm getting it from to get permission first.
So don't worry!
Thank you for the clarifications.
They still raise some concerns to me and I will respectfully disagree that half the questions weren't biased toward a goal, which you implicitly admitted below (to give another image/perspective of our server). I feel that the part on ERP tries to push people to vote for the only option where it was mentioned "for character development", which naturally leads to wash away all the ERP centric image we often see associated with Balmung. Similarly, the absence of RP elitism answers where the only answers were about "FCs are too lore strict" or "FCs are fine and diverse", will naturally make the result seem more attractive and less cliquish to readers.
The fill in answers sure help to alleviate the issue quite a bit, but they don't remove the bias of the survey. Not that with something more neutral I expect to see much difference in the results anyway, since that bias seems to represent pretty well the mainstream of the community: people naturally tend to answer that they do less ERP than they do in reality (a lot), and not a lot of people are concerned about the lack of strong RP themes in FCs anyway.
So I guess my issue lies more in a problem of principles/form, and that form tends to smother even more the minorities. I sincerely hope that will be taken in account in the article.
In short, I don't like the agenda behind, it biases everything. This is just my opinion of course.
On a matter of principles, I also would be very happy if you could delete all the characters names once you did your character check. I'm not that annoyed that someone knows exactly how I feel on most of those questions since they aren't especially personal, but I certainly feel uneasy knowing that all those names and their preferences are kept in the care of a single person.
Now then, if you don't, that's fine. We chose to answer and knew what we were going into. I just feel it's a matter of good etiquette.
I hope you'll understand.
Balmung:Â Suen Shyu
