The survey really could have been made better. With one question and 92 items to try to evaluate at once in one giant image, I wonder if a lot of stuff that would have been popular was overlooked, or if a lot of people who would have participated didn’t because they were overwhelmed by choice.
I ended up literally cropping the image into individual pieces on my computer and running a local copy of a “favorite picker” on GitHub (you can see the original, which is for Pokemon, here: https://www.dragonflycave.com/favorite.html) to be given options in smaller batches that were easier to evaluate and narrow down until I had a top 15.
But this isn’t the first time one of these community surveys has struck me as being really poorly designed to try to get an accurate read on people’s wants, which then always leads me to question decisions made based on the surveys. In this case it’s relatively harmless (it’s just a fun popularity contest for a stuff pack), but in other cases I know that major gameplay elements have been overlooked based on that data, and if all their data gathering is as it seems in the surveys I’ve taken over the years then I do really wish they would work more on their methodology for this stuff.
The boots are cute. None of the clothes struck me as hideous, so I’m sure the pack will be fine and, like with all packs, I’ll wait to get it on sale. I do wish I had a sense that the people running this data at EA actually seemed to understand data collection and analysis and effective clear opinion gathering. It’s really not as easy as showing a layperson 92 novel items and asking them to just pick a top 15!
