EA Survey: Share Your Thoughts on Battlefield 2042

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@AngrySquid270 wrote:

I got the survey too, though I was never asked about 128p matches.  I play on last gen where that isn't an option...so it seems EA must keep a pretty accurate profile on us and is able to tailor the surveys.

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Yeah - that would be determined by "version owned" - basic data about the account that the devs already have. There's no point in asking you about 128p breakthrough when you can't play it. There are probably even different versions of the survey for the different platforms and different versions owned for these platforms (i.e. basic, gold, etc.) - for instance, a basic account might have questions investigating how likely the holder is to buy cosmetics, if at all, while Gold and higher accounts have basically already bought skins, so the the questions might instead focus on how much they would pay for them and what kinds they like.

The reason EA/DICE do these surveys is that not everyone is a member of these forums, the Reddit community or following/participating in official social media accounts. For two of those three segments, they can't even associate an account with a customer anyway. Indeed, given the numbers, only a small fraction of players will be interacting in a way that is visible to EA/DICE. If you look at these forums, it's pretty clear that the majority sentiment towards the game is generally negative-but-patient - we wouldn't be here if we didn't want the game to be better. We'd be playing a different game and annoying each other on a different forum. Given how many players the game has lost since launch, we are clearly the minority.

While I appreciate that yes, there are obvious and deeply irritating issues with the game, a self-selecting pool of respondents is the quickest way to kill any claims to generalisation to the whole population. If the developers want representative feedback, they need to take a representative sample. Periodic surveys through the Origin client make perfect sense in that context.

In this case, the questions are telling in that they show that EA/DICE are well aware of the issues reported (by the visible community) that have led to such poor player retention. It doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to focus their efforts on improving 2042 though - if there is another Battlefield coming out in 2024 (something I have heard, although I am not sure of its provinence or veracity), it would make perfect sense to understand what players like and dislike about the current iteration. I would suggest, though, that improvements to 2042 would make a good base to build the next game on and to recover some goodwill from existing players.

The 400 character limit is basically about how much time it take to process and tag the data - qualitative data is extremely time-intensive. A survey with 10 questions with 400 characters is going to weigh in at about 600 words. That's just three or four paragraphs, but if you are doing a mass survey, that quickly becomes a ridiculous number of words for humans to read, tag and organise. If only 20 people anwer the survey, that's 12,000 words, which is getting into master's dissertation territory in terms of length. if 200 people answer it, you're looking at a short book. Some poor souls have to not just read it, but analyse it.