It shouldnt be about polling people what they should do is survey people. There is quite a difference between the two and their ability to tell you what ur customers want and respond to.

If Blizzard do survey players I have never seen/heard/read anything about such activities or the results from them. As far as I know all of their feedback comes from the forums and the comments from PTRs.

It can be argued that the PTR comment are some sort of survey but in reality theyre more of an open ended poll.

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"One telling note from the first poll, however, is that while most of the people who voted chose "yes," most of the people who actually wrote a response chose "no." What does this tell us? Perhaps that most people just go with what their guts tell them without really stopping to think?"

Except yes is definitively the correct answer, I'm not going into it look it up. What's is disturbing is that such a high percent are are wrong on something that has a definitive answer. Also the idea that you think from looking at it that those who are actually correct are not thinking is interesting.

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Polls and surveys are meaningless.

Lies. Damned Lies. Statistics.

You can make stats say anything you want them to. You can do the same with a survey or poll. Often, its more revealing to know what was the motivation behind the survey/poll.

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@3

yes people can make stats up to support a argument or whatever but that doesn't mean that well designed and implemented surveys are useless.

They are in fact very useful and powerful research tools used by professionals everyday. I mean think about it... what is the best way to find out what your consumers want? Ask them!

It is a very obvious solution and if you know how to ask questions to be clear and concise you can find out a large amount of information, useful information.

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I suppose this particular poll is telling evidence that at least 1/3 of WoW players (or at least, European WoW forum readers) are morons.

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@5

That ratio seems to be a bit low based on experience. Further proof that polls are totally inaccurate.

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If .999~ implies an infinite number of 9's, then of course it equals 1. Duh.

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if you want to get OCD about the question... it doesn't equal one it is o.999~ however if they wrote the question in a more specific way then there would have been less ambiguity:

'Does 0.999~ round to 1?

Would most probably invoked a more reliable response. This 'poll' is an example of manipulating the masses. We see politicians do it all the time. They have deliberately asked a ambiguous question in order to provide a less than confident response, thus supporting their argument that polls will tell them little to nothing.

Again, considering the resources available to Blizzard and the fact that the WoW community is so easily accessible via the internet - surveys could be set up online and receive a very high participation rate.

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This really scares me. Not that so many people are wrong, but how strongly they advocate their wrong answer and assume the correct answer is only because of retardation.

Of course .999~ equals 1.

Suppose .999~ = x
10 times X = 9.999~
9 times 1 = 9
10 times X - 9 times 1 = .999~ = X
10 times X - 9 times X = X (obviously)

so, 9 times X = 9 times 1
X=1

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I think the first few responses to this post support the point I was going to make...

In my experience the saying "the squeaky wheel gets the oil" is most definitely true and nowhere do people squeak more often or more loudly than through the anonymity of the internet. Some good suggestions come through the forums. Lots of bad ones are screamed loudly and often from the forums by "hardcore" players with a "hardcore" brain cell deficit. Even fairly reasonable people often fail to see the potentially disastrous consequences of seemingly simple actions. (For evidence of this phenomenon, look no further than our government in the US.) Bliz knows what they're doing, mostly, and I'm happy with WoW. I don't want the forums voting on my play experience. BLECH!

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There's a simple proof for it:

Assume
x = .999~

multiply both sides by 10
10x = 9.999~

subtract x from both sides
10x - x = 9.999~ - x
or
9x = 9.999~ - x

since x = .999~, substite it on the right side
9x = 9.999~ - .999~
or
9x = 9

so x = 1
therefore 1 = .999~

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"...while most of the people who voted chose "yes," most of the people who actually wrote a response chose "no." What does this tell us?"

Don't trust the collective intelligence of posters on the WoW boards, I'd say. Except I think we knew that already.

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try some more maths... does 1-0.999~ = 0? no it equals that infinitely small difference between the two numbers.

Why? Because the '~' means a recurring number, it means that number will forever fall short of 1, if only by the smallest of imaginable numbers, it still is short of 1.

So with that in mind there is no mathematical way you can say 0.999~=1 it will only come as close to one as mathematically possible, but never to equal it.

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@11

Don't bother. I've had this stupid argument before - the response (if it's not just blustering about how you're playing "tricks") will simply be that 10 * .9999~ is not equal to 9.999~, but "9.999~0". Which, of course, is not a number - since you can not have a zero at the end of *infinite* nines - but there is no arguing with these fools. They would rather call into question the entire system of mathematics than admit that they don't understand recurring decimal notation.

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@13

There are no infinitesimals in recurring decimal notation. As a part of the definition of decimal numbers, they are infinitely divisible - so, since there is no "middle number" you can point to between ".999~" and "1", they are *by definition* the same number.

This is not up for debate. This is a matter of mathematic fact, as established in literature. If you want to create some *other* system of notation in which ".999..." is NOT equal to "1", then by all means do so - but you will not be using the system that the entirety of the rest of the world is primarily occupied with, and it will not be meaningful for you to communicate with us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...

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@15

Yes, I stand corrected - clearly my basic high school understanding of maths is insufficient to have fully understood what is on the surface a mathematical paradox, but with better understanding just not the case.

However, we have all digressed from the real purpose of the article, Blizzard's implementation and choice of first poll question... that being a ambiguous and somewhat misleading question.

I reiterate my suggestions that well constructed surveys with appropriate implementation would yield useful information to Blizzard. But I believe 9million subscribers has given them a arrogance which will only be matched by a greater fall from grace.

In a couple of years many will talk about WoW like people do for other MMORPGs that predated it.

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if you understand that the poll or question rather is vague an unspecific then you can justify any response as correct with a little data to back it up. So most ppl that show some sort of justification are correct. if they poll was rephrased in a more straight forward matter then we would have a better time discussing this. in a sense .999 repeating is approximately equal to 1 because the difference is so infinitely small that we ingore the remainder. Thus we round and say yes. but in a different context where say in computer science that the game is created on. we cannot say that 1 =~.999. most computer scientists or programmers have heard of the floating point problems in computers that understand everything in 1 and 0. the problem is precision vs. accuracy. a computer does not see 1 =.999 (repeating) unless told to do so.

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@17 I was going to comment that while the mathematical literature will call 1 and .999~ equal, when you apply that to logical calculation and programming environments, they are *not* the same number. They *can* be equal if we were to impose a precision of 0 and cause .9 to round to 1, but that means we are influencing the outcome by establishing an arbitrary control.

On the top of polls think the idea Blizz is going with will be just another way to engage the community and draw attention to topics of interested (or what they perceive topics of interest are). True customer surveys are very complicated and easily biased (and are in most cases). It takes massive amounts of data from a huge population of respondents to have an accurate depiction of what the average respondent wants/needs/means, but various industries rely upon statistical sample to achieve such results.

All-in-all Blizz should use as many methods of accumulating customer feedback before deciding what the player base desires as each method lacks the pro's of another and vice versa.

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I would just like to add too that Blizzard are very good at misinterpreting the data they ave available to them. In such a way I think the biggest danger to the Polls they could run is not the WoW player base but Blizzard themselves.

Take BlizzCon for example, a lead Developer was interviewed and claimed that Karazhan was their most successful raid ever. They put this down to the size (10man) and the length of the raid.

However, he didn't think to consider it's position in the raiding progression of TBC. How many guilds have you heard of that just skipped Kara and just hit up Gruul's Lair? Not many, if any at all.

Also, by taking the raid size to 10, your going to get 4 times the number of Kara raid ID's issued weekly than compared to the same number of raiders on pre-TBC content. Then factor in the extra players they attracted with TBC and you have a lot of confounders that appear to have mislead Blizzard.

I am not saying Kara sucked or anything, its simply an example of how Blizzard are selective about how they assess their game and what makes it popular.

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ah, god and infinitesimals

i'd say it's a brilliant poll question

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