Open letter thingy / Dear mods, about removing of polls

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mung0

mung0
(Sorry idk if there's a correct sub for addressing stuff to the mod team openly, if there is please feel free to move this there, I usually dwell in this sub so just putting it here for now)

Hi mod team!

Just a bit of feedback :)

You've probably noticed by now that removing polls from the boards hasn't done much to slow down poll spam at all - it's simply taken them over to third-party poll sites instead, where there's absolutely no quality control: no transparency, nothing to stop people spamming votes multiple times to bias results etc.

I'm sure the removal of polls was well intentioned, but from the perspective of a community 'end user', this outcome is most certainly a cure worse than the disease. It's effectively created a kind of shady poll 'black market'. Meanwhile the noisier subs (beta discussion for example) are still riddled with poor quality polls.. Just.. Even worse quality ones.

May I suggest re-inclusion of polls on the boards, but with clear guidelines & tighter control around subject matter / biased question writing / duplicate polls. Those who abuse, get the facility taken away.

Thanks for reading! & keep up the great work all ;)

Mungo ø7
 

mung0

mung0
Robert Maynard said:
There's no guarantee that voters on polls on this forum were owners of the game either.
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No but there is visibility & accountability of the content of polls, and (some) control against multiple voting.

And do you really think people spend their time making capcha-guarded forum accounts to vote once over something in a game they have no vested interested in?
 

Hooplah

Hooplah
I don't pay attention to 3rd party polls nor suggest that anyone else does. The real issue was the abuse of too many polls on the Forum to push an agenda versus being constructive and having merit. Fix that and they might come back. For now just start your first sentence with "What do you think about...". Most people get it after reading a few pages of replies.
 
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StiTch

StiTch
Tbh mate, the message here is really that the vast majority of polls here are meaningless anyway.

If FD really want to know the rough proportion of players interested in each side of a given scenario they can still put one up and I assume still get the feedback they want from it.

But really, what have polls actually been contributing to anything else so far?
 

Hexcaliber

Hexcaliber
Polls are largely pointless whatever form they take, unless posted by a developer looking for feedback.

Most of the polls around here were from disgruntled players looking for others to validate their opinion, and were inevitably biased towards whatever point the original poster imagined they were making. If anything, links to polls on third party sites need to be blocked in these forums too.
 

Whitehair

W
Having checked some of the current polls on externals sites linked from the forum, no-one is going to take them seriously.

That 'Petition' about telepresence for example. 25 votes.
 

racer1

racer1
I'm happy with no polls. The off forum ones will peter out I'm sure.

On or off the forum I don't find they add anything. They just polarise opinion even further - "poll is clear evidence" versus "poll is not representative".

No polls for me thanks :)
 

mung0

mung0
TERMINATRIXXX said:
Polls should return, although some were complete trash. Maybe before they go live, need mod approval?
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Having each & every poll require mod approval would be quite an admin burden. Periodic sweeps to clean out crap ones & hand out advisories / warnings would probably be more manageable.

Shadowdancer said:
Nobody took the on-forum polls seriously either for oh so many reasons, they were just a nuisance.
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Ok maybe you don't take them seriously, but a lot of people take them very seriously.

racer1 said:
I'm happy with no polls. The off forum ones will peter out I'm sure.

On or off the forum I don't find they add anything. They just polarise opinion even further - "poll is clear evidence" versus "poll is not representative".

No polls for me thanks :)
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Take a quick stroll over to beta discussions. It's not petering out any. Just becoming worse quality as a result. The whole polarising of opinions thing is still happening just with even more baseless sources than before. Removal of polls hasn't remedied the bad qualities of bad polls, it's exacerbated them. Meanwhile polls for any canvassing that was actually (arguably) constructive & useful are also negatively affected.

corkblisters said:
I think we should have a poll on whether polls should be brought back. [where is it]
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Agreed, or perhaps we should have a poll to see if this is the correct approach? Yeah sounds good. Off to change.org to add some highly relevant content, brb :p
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
May I suggest the OP makes a poll to gather support or lack thereof.
 
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Kenneth McGrew

Kenneth McGrew
mung0 said:
(Sorry idk if there's a correct sub for addressing stuff to the mod team openly, if there is please feel free to move this there, I usually dwell in this sub so just putting it here for now)

Hi mod team!

Just a bit of feedback :)

You've probably noticed by now that removing polls from the boards hasn't done much to slow down poll spam at all - it's simply taken them over to third-party poll sites instead, where there's absolutely no quality control: no transparency, nothing to stop people spamming votes multiple times to bias results etc.

I'm sure the removal of polls was well intentioned, but from the perspective of a community 'end user', this outcome is most certainly a cure worse than the disease. It's effectively created a kind of shady poll 'black market'. Meanwhile the noisier subs (beta discussion for example) are still riddled with poor quality polls.. Just.. Even worse quality ones.

May I suggest re-inclusion of polls on the boards, but with clear guidelines & tighter control around subject matter / biased question writing / duplicate polls. Those who abuse, get the facility taken away.

Thanks for reading! & keep up the great work all ;)

Mungo ø7
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it would be difficult to police, I am quite enjoying beta forum without the polls last beta was horrendous, hopefully FD are just ignoring the 3rd party polls because they clearly are all just spam as I pointed out to one such creator and was immediately set on by the creator.

polls at any other time than beta I have no issue with , but when they are used to define the game its when I have an issue with them because they are 90% bias,

personally I am of the opinion any thread with a poll in it (3rd party or not) in the beta forum should immediately be closed and the creator issued with a warning, three strikes and you're banned from making threads in that particular beta test, FD are game developers and know what's in the pipeline we don't so voicing that in a poll without knowing all the facts seams counter productive to the games future development.

the worse thing I have seen in Polls in Beta is people vote on them and they aren't even playing BETA!!! along with peoples views on stuff posting again in a Beta they haven't tested, it really grates on me when people haven't even tested it and say its broken.

its a strong view but polls add no value to the games development imo of course :)
 
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Shadowdancer

Shadowdancer
mung0 said:
Ok maybe you don't take them seriously, but a lot of people take them very seriously.
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OK, let me rephrase that. Nobody relevant took them seriously. Staff have pointed out time and again that any apparent opinion on the forums cannot really be considered the expression of a majority among players. Making matters worse, doing a proper poll is hard, and really most of the polls that were posted were asking leading questions, had biased options or plain left out rather important choices, and by and large were just re-hashes of previous polls and discussions, trying over and over again to produce the result their producers were hoping to get.
 

Kerrash

Kerrash
I think the OP is missing the point here.
Polls were never removed because of lack of control, they were removed because the results are always largely irrelevant.

It has been proven time and time again that polls are either heavily biased or only ever show the opinions of a percentage of a percentage of a percentage of people who the topic applies too.
 
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