sans-culottes wrote: »

ADarklore wrote: »

It's amazing that, even with this poll... some players still will make comments in threads about solo activities with, "But this is an MMO" when clearly, VERY CLEARLY, ESO hasn't been a traditional MMO in many many years. I wish people would just stop with that outdated and false argument. It doesn't apply to ESO, it doesn't apply to SWTOR, and many other current online multi-player games that are now mostly filled with solo players.

This isn’t a scientific poll, @ADarklore. At best, it’s anecdotal evidence from a self-selected group of forum users. If you genuinely believe this is a representative sample of ESO’s entire playerbase, then I have some news for you.

And while we’re at it, saying “ESO hasn’t been a traditional MMO in many years” isn’t the mic drop you seem to think it is. ESO still hinges on shared systems, economies, and group-based scaling. Power shifts like subclassing affect everyone, including solo players, precisely because this is a multiplayer game. You can’t just wave that away when the consequences don’t go your way.

sans-culottes wrote: »

@Credible_Joe, this is not what “primary research” means.

You claim that a forum poll on player behavior is “fully qualified as primary research” and “could be cited academically.” You even reference Purdue OWL to bolster this argument. But unfortunately, that’s a fundamental misreading of what that page says, and of how research validity works in the social sciences.

The Purdue OWL page on surveying is a basic pedagogical guide, designed to help undergraduate students think critically about collecting firsthand data. It explicitly notes that surveys must be carefully constructed, account for sample bias, and include demographic considerations.

This is precisely where your claim collapses. A self-selecting forum poll—distributed in a thread about a controversial upcoming feature—fails every criterion of methodological rigor. There’s no effort to define population parameters, no randomization, no demographic controls, no response validation, and certainly no institutional review.

That’s exactly what’s happening here. This poll cannot tell us what “ESO players” think. It tells us what a small group of people who read and choose to post on the forums—and were already invested enough to vote—felt inclined to share. That’s not a representative sample. That’s the textbook definition of self-selection bias.

To call this “primary research that could be cited academically” is not just wrong but misleading. If you submitted this in a research methods class, then you’d receive a gentle correction at best. If you insisted on its scientific rigor in a graduate seminar, then you’d be laughed out of the room.

Finally, a poll reporting that “75% of 300 forum users answered X” isn’t “science.” It’s a barometer of sentiment among a tiny and disproportionately vocal subset of the ESO community. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.

1. Implying respondents on the forums can't be reliably qualified as "ESO Players"
   • Asserting no effort was given to define population, while at the same time asserting that the sample size is too small to represent accurate metrics
   • To be clear, my argument here is that posting this poll on the forums defines a population very well, and both of the above assertions preclude each other
2. Asserting the poll relates directly to an upcoming new feature when no mention of any feature is in the title, description, or poll options
   • Presumably, the self-reporting bias claim is founded on this assertion
   • Baselessly asserting the minority metrics are less inclined to vote in this poll because of this new feature, or that majority metrics are more inclined
   • In fact, the exact opposite assertion can be made with the same level of confidence. Wouldn't power gamers flock to this poll to prove that their voice has the strongest foundation? Even without the minutia of qualified academics, insisting one way or the other is equally unfounded.
3. Conflating academic standards with scientific standards
   • The only purpose you have on holding this poll to rigid scientific standards on its own in a vacuum is to discredit it, and is wildly disingenuous. Yes, basing a full thesis in a scientific program on just this poll would go over pretty badly in high level academia. But it does check every box for general research in fields that cannot be quantified the same way science can (social, economic, etc), and can absolutely be cited in a larger research project.
     • Yes, the surveyed population is defined: Forum Users
     • The distribution is random: No bias was present to encourage or discourage any type of respondent
     • Poll options are are close-ended
     • No poll option is leading
     • The poll itself is not leading or biased

Parasaurolophus wrote: »

Whenever people say they’re solo players, I always have a genuine question — where do you guys find content for yourselves? Each new chapter only has around 30 hours of quests (according to official statements). I usually finish all the quests in just a couple of days. What do you do after that?

Parasaurolophus wrote: »

Whenever people say they’re solo players, I always have a genuine question — where do you guys find content for yourselves? Each new chapter only has around 30 hours of quests (according to official statements). I usually finish all the quests in just a couple of days. What do you do after that?

Parasaurolophus wrote: »

Whenever people say they’re solo players, I always have a genuine question — where do you guys find content for yourselves? Each new chapter only has around 30 hours of quests (according to official statements). I usually finish all the quests in just a couple of days. What do you do after that?

sans-culottes wrote: »

@Credible_Joe, your response is elaborate, but it fundamentally misunderstands both what constitutes primary research and how sampling validity works in any kind of academically credible study—whether in the natural sciences or the social sciences.

You’re correct that no one claimed this was scientific, except you, when you asserted that this poll “qualifies as primary research and could be cited academically.” That is a strong claim, and it deserves scrutiny.

Let’s unpack:

1. Forum users are not a well-defined research population. They are a self-selecting, highly vocal minority, already biased by virtue of participation. This is not the same as a defined and randomized population sample. Posting a poll to a public forum does not establish a legitimate sampling frame. Even casual polling best practices (see Purdue OWL’s own survey guidance) make this distinction very clear.
2. Self-selection bias applies. Whether you call this anecdotal, informal, or “useful in context,” what it is not is academically reliable. The moment a poll is distributed via voluntary opt-in from a vocal niche of the player base, you lose generalizability. This is not about who is qualified to vote, but about who chooses to engage. That is textbook self-selection bias.
3. Your attempt to pivot from scientific to “academic” standards is rhetorical sleight of hand. All social science still requires methodological transparency. You cannot just say, “It’s not scientific, it’s academic,” and hope that floats. If a poll lacks a documented sampling strategy, replicability, controls for confounding variables, and a disclosed margin of error or sample representativeness, then it fails to meet even basic academic standards.
4. Claiming the poll is unbiased because it did not “lead” the responses ignores structural bias. The poll does not exist in a vacuum. It sits in the middle of an emotionally charged forum discourse, one where certain narratives dominate. The wording of the options is not the only factor in determining bias. Platform context matters.

In short, if this poll were submitted in an undergraduate research methods course as an example of valid survey-based primary research, then it would be returned with extensive margin notes. The feedback would say something like, “Define your population. Disclose your sampling method. Acknowledge platform and response bias.”

You are free to treat informal data as persuasive. But labeling this “primary research” or “academic” is not just inaccurate but false.

1. Asserting forum users are not well-defined while at the same time generalizing them very narrowly and incorrectly
   • Yet another pair of assertions that preclude each other. Forgetting about lurkers, infrequent visitors, new participants, old participants, devs, moderators.
     • To be fair, I'm not sure what the rules are for devs and mods participating in things like polls. But if any of them are players inclined to participate anonymously in the discourse, and have accounts separate from their work handle, it is possible their voice is present in any given poll
   • Regardless, in an academic citation, outlining this sample group as forum users within the above context of a greater population of ESO players does fully qualify it as defined
   • Not to mention that all forum users, including poll respondents, require an ESO game account to participate. This platform was likely chosen specifically to preclude non-players from skewing the results, which makes a stronger case for definition than just about anywhere else this could have been posted. The only stronger contenders are an e-blast to registered game account emails and from within the game itself.
2. Asserting that the sample group is self selecting by virtue of the platform the poll is posted to
   • Earlier I had to guess what the self-selecting assertion was founded on, so I won't accuse this of being a pivot
   • Either way, this is a weak attempt to discredit the poll results and can be made of any platform
   • If polls or surveys were disqualified for self-selection because online social platform users are more likely to participate than the rest of the contextual population, the only qualified polls in academia would either have been physically distributed, or pre-date the internet
3. Asserting the poll results are skewed by the overall forum discourse
   • If survey or poll results are disqualified by the zeitgeist, then polls and surveys need to be disqualified as research entirely
4. Misrepresenting the consistency of my argument
   • My original assertion was that this is academic, and I never pivoted from scientific
   • My original argument was founded on cited research standards, which I linked. Not "rhetorical sleight of hand"
     • To review, your original assertion was that this poll is not scientific. I argued it qualifies academically as primary research. You argued that it would not hold muster under scrutiny at high-level scientific methodology, and I argued that it does not need to be presented at that level on its own to simply be cited. This does not preclude scrutiny over the methodology of population, sample size, or distribution, but all of that can easily be accounted for and documented, fully qualifying it as primary research
   • You keep telling me to review these standards to find that my arguments aren't holding up. As much as I re-read the fairly brief guidelines for surveys in both the primary research guidelines, or even the institutional data analytics survey resources, I haven't found any language that precludes my arguments
   • I'm not going to insist you cite these claims. That's a weak ploy to establish an authority and a deferent. But I will reiterate that my arguments are founded on these resources and that I believe they hold weight.
   • We can't exactly present our arguments to a professor, so speculating on what we believe would pass in class is moot. All I can say is with all of the above discourse accounted for, I would confidently turn this in and expect positive and constructive feedback.

Parasaurolophus wrote: »

Whenever people say they’re solo players, I always have a genuine question — where do you guys find content for yourselves? Each new chapter only has around 30 hours of quests (according to official statements). I usually finish all the quests in just a couple of days. What do you do after that?