The state of the game...

"SamAccountX;c-2041680" wrote:

"ScummerAntilles;c-2041669" wrote:
I am literally a social scientist, you are talking about the method in which data is collected. In this case, I collected it over years of experience, observation, and commitment to knowing how the game is being perceived because I have made managing a guild in this game a major hobby. You are calling data anecdotal because a person collected it, rather than a person designing a collection system. At the end it is all a human collection system. Except in my case, variables examined aren't limited to "total cash spent aggregate" nor does my position posit that the measure of a community's health is whether the designers made money.

I don't think you really understand how data works and what constitutes good data.

I have no problems with a person designing a data collection system as well as the data, but it still needs to be done in a methodical, quantifiable, and consistent manner to actually stand up to scrutiny and peer review. As a social scientist, you should know that.

All data is qualitative. This is one of the first rules of data. A question like health of a community or an ongoing shared experience is not a quantitative question, and attempts to make it so require a qualitative evaluation of what health even means before you can try to (and why you would add this step, I don't know - I mean you could if you think numbers help answer the specific question... but do you need this step for *this* question?) take human experience, translate that into a quantitive measure, and then re-translate that into a qualitative conclusion that answers the question.

I don't know - do you just totally dismiss the findings when the methods are surveys, interviews, or anything that can't go through the alchemy of translation to numbers then retranslation back to qualitative assessment?

BTW a long direct relationship with 300+ gamers from a position to assess the experience of those gamers is significant.