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Any one else wondering why GW haven’t shown us the results of their survey yet? After all they said January. More lies?

You'd be better off asking GW; I don't think anyone here is going to be able to explain it.

Although if you go onto their FB feeds accusing them of lying, you probably won't get much of a response. It's more likely that it's taken longer than planned to analyse the data and formulate their responses.

Or they are still compiling the results. 100,000 answers take a while to filter through.

Don't assume bad intentions/malice over neglect and misunderstanding.

If this is something you actually care about, send them an email. Be polite and they might reply.

Pick one:
1) Yes, it's all a huge conspiracy. Grab your tinfoil hats, clench your buttholes - it's the Xenos' trying to control and/or probe us.
2) 100k responses is a huge amount of data, they'll post the results once they're through it. Special shout-out to all the free form text fields.
3) They didn't specify the year, just January in the future.

 kronk wrote:

Don't assume bad intentions/malice over neglect and misunderstanding.

This. Gw is just incompetent at a surprising amount of levels.

I'm curious to see if they will post the "real" results... I mean, i think many people would had written "too expensive", "low your prices" or something like that, but i really doubt they will show that.

nekooni wrote:
Pick one:
1) Yes, it's all a huge conspiracy. Grab your tinfoil hats, clench your buttholes - it's the Xenos' trying to control and/or probe us.
2) 100k responses is a huge amount of data, they'll post the results once they're through it. Special shout-out to all the free form text fields.
3) They didn't specify the year, just January in the future.

4) They're a game company, not a social science research lab, and they didn't have the foggiest idea how long it would take to meaningfully process all that data.

I once did a month-long research project in a graduate course on 50 survey responses. I wouldn't even consider touching 100,000 surveys with open-ended questions without a team of grad student flunkies whose sole job it was to sit around reading, coding, and categorizing. Meanwhile, this is probably a side project for an employee or two and a couple interns. We might be lucky to see a meaningful analysis by July, or a token effort to get something out there by mid-March.

sirisaacnuton wrote:


I once did a month-long research project in a graduate course on 50 survey responses. I wouldn't even consider touching 100,000 surveys with open-ended questions without a team of grad student flunkies whose sole job it was to sit around reading, coding, and categorizing. Meanwhile, this is probably a side project for an employee or two and a couple interns. We might be lucky to see a meaningful analysis by July, or a token effort to get something out there by mid-March.

Ahh the good ol days before data science, machine learning, and AI made analyzing natural language results trivial. If they gave me a few thousand dollars worth of cloud time with some natural language interpreters I could knock it out in a few weeks tops (and that's being very conservative, it might take me an afternoon to get most of the useful information). In case you're curious I'm talking about services like Amazon Comprehend or Googles Cloud Natural Language API. These technologies were cutting edge even five years ago but today are old hat. If you can't get the talent in house there are plenty of resellers that will happily do it for you. To quote one of my favorite books, the world has moved on from the time when people had to squint at survey results.

So yes, unless they are living in the dark ages and way overpaying for data analysis in terms of man hours, they already have the what they wanted from the data. The nice thing about open ended questions is they probably learned about problems and opportunities that didn't even know about before the survey. As a fan of the hobby and a person in the industry I'd be very interested to see what they came up with.

Anyone who ever thought they were going to post something along the lines of "73% of you said you thought our products were too expensive" is frankly deluded.

Well, I'm waiting eagerly for those results, but I know first hand how such open question surveys can be time consuming to analyse and turned into proper report - it's my wife's bread and butter. You don't really need machine learning or AI to analyse english language in this context, keyword matching advanced enough to get positive/negative/indifferent context is enough for marketing purposes. But the most tedious part is turning such data into usable report, that can be comprehended by marketing team, which usually have absolutely no clue about numbers and charts (speaking from my wife's decade long experience).

So, be patient, there is nothing about "new" GW that suggests they won't publish at least some of those survey results.

 Grimgold wrote:


Ahh the good ol days before data science, machine learning, and AI made analyzing natural language results trivial. If they gave me a few thousand dollars worth of cloud time with some natural language interpreters I could knock it out in a few weeks tops (and that's being very conservative, it might take me an afternoon to get most of the useful information). In case you're curious I'm talking about services like Amazon Comprehend or Googles Cloud Natural Language API. These technologies were cutting edge even five years ago but today are old hat. If you can't get the talent in house there are plenty of resellers that will happily do it for you. To quote one of my favorite books, the world has moved on from the time when people had to squint at survey results.

This smacks of heresy.

 Grimgold wrote:

So yes, unless they are living in the dark ages and way overpaying for data analysis in terms of man hours, they already have the what they wanted from the data. The nice thing about open ended questions is they probably learned about problems and opportunities that didn't even know about before the survey. As a fan of the hobby and a person in the industry I'd be very interested to see what they came up with.

Clearly they just farmed it out to their playtesters, yeah?

On a real note, though, I am interested in seeing what returned. I'd expect them to stereotype the answers so I don't have to go through 100,000 * however many questions there were, though!

sirisaacnuton wrote:

nekooni wrote:
Pick one:
1) Yes, it's all a huge conspiracy. Grab your tinfoil hats, clench your buttholes - it's the Xenos' trying to control and/or probe us.
2) 100k responses is a huge amount of data, they'll post the results once they're through it. Special shout-out to all the free form text fields.
3) They didn't specify the year, just January in the future.

4) They're a game company, not a social science research lab, and they didn't have the foggiest idea how long it would take to meaningfully process all that data.

I once did a month-long research project in a graduate course on 50 survey responses. I wouldn't even consider touching 100,000 surveys with open-ended questions without a team of grad student flunkies whose sole job it was to sit around reading, coding, and categorizing. Meanwhile, this is probably a side project for an employee or two and a couple interns. We might be lucky to see a meaningful analysis by July, or a token effort to get something out there by mid-March.

Well, that's covered by 2) - but yeah, I totally agree, the project is understaffed for sure. It's simply not their core business, as you said.

"What's the ROI here?" - "Well, sir, uh. We will know what people think of us?" - "But how many moneys will we get from it?"