Guild Wars 2

I just wanted to write a quick post about this “vocal minority” argument I see popping up quite often here.

The fact is that this forum is probably only a small proportion of the total Guild Wars 2 community. I think we can all agree on that. I think we can also agree that this small group is very vocal about their opinions of the game.

What we can’t do, is make the mistake of assuming that just because someone is in the vocal minority, it automatically makes their argument valid, or invalid.

This is a very important point because using that argument is actually nothing more than an ad hom attack. It’s like saying that because only a small minority of people were speaking out against the nazis, that their points were invalid.

We have no way of knowing what the silent majority thinks without gathering proper data and feedback. All arguments on this forum can easily represent a large, or small percentage of the community as a whole, but we simply can’t know this without a bigger sample size.

So, if someone makes an argument or an observation about the game, by all means agree, or disagree with what they say. But make sure you don’t fall into the trap of automatically dismissing the argument, just because they are the vocal minority.

Thanks for reading.

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

I just wanted to write a quick post about this “vocal minority” argument I see popping up quite often here.

The fact is that this forum is probably only a small proportion of the total Guild Wars 2 community. I think we can all agree on that. I think we can also agree that this small group is very vocal about their opinions of the game.

What we can’t do, is make the mistake of assuming that just because someone is in the vocal minority, it automatically makes their argument valid, or invalid.

This is a very important point because using that argument is actually nothing more than an ad hom attack. It’s like saying that because only a small minority of people were speaking out against the nazis, that their points were invalid.

We have no way of knowing what the silent majority thinks without gathering proper data and feedback. All arguments on this forum can easily represent a large, or small percentage of the community as a whole, but we simply can’t know this without a bigger sample size.

So, if someone makes an argument or an observation about the game, by all means agree, or disagree with what they say. But make sure you don’t fall into the trap of automatically dismissing the argument, just because they are the vocal minority.

Thanks for reading.

I agree, but please don’t start the thread with directly activating Godwin’s law

I figured if I went right for Godwin’s law, then it could only go up from there.

The “vocal minority” bit is, and always has been a farse, a last ditch attempt by someone who doesn’t get the majority of the people to agree with them in the first place.

Fact is the people here represent a cross section of the community, hence why there is never 100% consensus of people even on the messageboard.

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

This is a very important point because using that argument is actually nothing more than an ad hom attack.

Actually no, you’re mixing up your fallacies, technically it’s argumentum ad populum. Ad hom would be saying you’re stupid and thus your argument is wrong. An appeal to the majority is when you argue that 1 million people can’t be wrong, or that the minority must be wrong because they do not agree with the majority. Although I guess you could twist argumentum ad verecundiam in order to support the opinions of the minority while negating the opinions of the majority.

But point taken none-the-less.

I think that the more logical take-away from a consideration of the issues is that there is no such thing as a vocal minority on the forums or in the game as a whole. What we have on the forums are voices of players and they are either in the majority or the minority; again there is no vocal minority. As far as the game as a whole, we here, have absolutely no way of knowing one way or the other what the majority or minority thinks. We do know that the forums are the official channel for 2-way communication so the population here would be significant for the purposes intended by the forums. Be very careful about people who suggest that majority opinions in any given population actually represent minority opinions, vocal or otherwise. It is simply a weak device that is employed to say I don’t really have a rational argument to put forward but whatever you do don’t believe the majority of people giving you the other argument because they are actually the minority. It’s the ultimate non sequitur, it simply does not follow. I think this should be clear on the face of it, but still we have people talking about a vocal minority when they have absolutely no way of knowing, whatsoever, whether they are minority or majority of the total population, only that they are vocal. It’s sad that the discussion proceeds on these irrational grounds.

It’s actually much better to accept that here we have a population. It is the population of players using the official channel for 2-way communication. Does it represent the total population? No, it represents the whole population of those who use the official channel for 2-way communication. No one commenting knows what the majority thinks.

The forums are a slice of the playerbase. The entire community here is a vocal minority, regardless of the opinion they hold. Neither side of these arguments has any basis when they claim whether or not they are representative of the larger spectrum because the sample size is not big enough.

But here’s the thing: while the quantity of forum-goers may be dwarfed by the rest, they still range in the thousands. This is an important fact that does not get nearly enough attention. Regardless of percentile value, that’s still thousands of dissatisfied customers.

When a company conveys the idea that they do not care about this segment, by action or inaction, what does that say about them? And what do you think it will do for player retention?

You do not want to throw away the internet credit you had. You built this up with your marketing campaign and fans rallied to you in support of the underdog that promised wonders.

We can accept failure, but not betrayal. Be straight with us. Communicate with your players.

CureForLiving.5360:

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

This is a very important point because using that argument is actually nothing more than an ad hom attack.

Actually no, you’re mixing up your fallacies, technically it’s argumentum ad populum. Ad hom would be saying you’re stupid and thus your argument is wrong. An appeal to the majority is when you argue that 1 million people can’t be wrong, or that the minority must be wrong because they do not agree with the majority. Although I guess you could twist argumentum ad verecundiam in order to support the opinions of the minority while negating the opinions of the majority.

But point taken none-the-less.

Yeah, “Vocal Minority/Silent Majority” is basically a variation on argumentum ad populum. “I’m right because I have more people on my side.”

It’s also a False Dichotomy, because it takes complex controversies with a complex range of responses and divides them into neat little “For” or “Against” piles.

It also misses the point. Minorities matter in this community, vocal or otherwise. Pretend you have some reliable means of polling, and you discover that 75% of players are in favor of or neutral toward a design decision, while 25% of players are against it.

25% is a pretty obvious minority, but what if those 25% play less and spend less and participate less? Suddenly the minority matters. And it doesn’t even have to be 25%. If even 1 in 25 players stop playing for a few months because of a certain design decision, that’s a pretty massive loss.

This happened in Cryptic-era City of Heroes too. They implemented the massively unpopular Enhancement Diversification system. The forums exploded with outrage. A lot of players critics as a “vocal minority,” but they left. Not nearly enough for a majority, but easily enough to cause a very visible dent in subscribers, which Cryptic didn’t recover for a while. Paragon developer BackAlleyBrawler talked about the phenomenon a few years ago.

Minorities matter more than we think.

This post really needs to be stickied! There are simply not enough +1s available.

CureForLiving.5360:

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

This is a very important point because using that argument is actually nothing more than an ad hom attack.

Actually no, you’re mixing up your fallacies, technically it’s argumentum ad populum. Ad hom would be saying you’re stupid and thus your argument is wrong. An appeal to the majority is when you argue that 1 million people can’t be wrong, or that the minority must be wrong because they do not agree with the majority. Although I guess you could twist argumentum ad verecundiam in order to support the opinions of the minority while negating the opinions of the majority.

But point taken none-the-less.

Well, I see it as an ad hom attack because its basically saying, “Your argument is wrong because of who you are…the vocal minority.”

But, I don’t disagree with you.

Eveningstar.6940:

CureForLiving.5360:

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

This is a very important point because using that argument is actually nothing more than an ad hom attack.

Actually no, you’re mixing up your fallacies, technically it’s argumentum ad populum. Ad hom would be saying you’re stupid and thus your argument is wrong. An appeal to the majority is when you argue that 1 million people can’t be wrong, or that the minority must be wrong because they do not agree with the majority. Although I guess you could twist argumentum ad verecundiam in order to support the opinions of the minority while negating the opinions of the majority.

But point taken none-the-less.

Yeah, “Vocal Minority/Silent Majority” is basically a variation on argumentum ad populum. “I’m right because I have more people on my side.”

It’s also a False Dichotomy, because it takes complex controversies with a complex range of responses and divides them into neat little “For” or “Against” piles.

It also misses the point. Minorities matter in this community, vocal or otherwise. Pretend you have some reliable means of polling, and you discover that 75% of players are in favor of or neutral toward a design decision, while 25% of players are against it.

25% is a pretty obvious minority, but what if those 25% play less and spend less and participate less? Suddenly the minority matters. And it doesn’t even have to be 25%. If even 1 in 25 players stop playing for a few months because of a certain design decision, that’s a pretty massive loss.

This happened in Cryptic-era City of Heroes too. They implemented the massively unpopular Enhancement Diversification system. The forums exploded with outrage. A lot of players critics as a “vocal minority,” but they left. Not nearly enough for a majority, but easily enough to cause a very visible dent in subscribers, which Cryptic didn’t recover for a while. Paragon developer BackAlleyBrawler talked about the phenomenon a few years ago.

Minorities matter more than we think.

Eveningstar, I must say I enjoy your posts. They are holistic in a way I can’t seem to pull off. Whereas mine deal merely with the rightness or wrongness of issues, yours deal with rightness and wrongness on more levels and everyone tends to get included. Just an appreciation.

I’ve never seen anyone outside of this forum say they think GW2 is an awesome game, that’s including people I’ve seen in game.

It’s not a terrible game, it’s just the pure definition of meh.

Gohlar.3671:

I’ve never seen anyone outside of this forum say they think GW2 is an awesome game, that’s including people I’ve seen in game.

It’s not a terrible game, it’s just the pure definition of meh.

in YOUR opinon. its not a fact

As for the vocal minority thing. If people hate something and cba to even voice it then sod em. They have their chance to put their feelings forward and dont. So they cant complain afterwards. And the community dont need these donuts who stand on their soap boxes preaching how they speak for the minoritys. Cos ya dont. Ya speaking for yaself and thats it. Im sick and tired of hearing how someones speaking for others to try and promote what their saying carries more weight.

If you need to pretend your speaking for others its usually cos your own arguement carries no weight so your trying to boost it up.

+1 OP I agree.

Something I hope that we can all agree on is that all of the posters on this forum (whether minority or majority/ or for and against etc. etc. etc.) are here because we care enough about GW2 to hold, express and hopefully discuss our opinions.

Of course, it’s generally more pleasant when it can be achieved without name-calling, flaming etc.

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

I just wanted to write a quick post about this “vocal minority” argument I see popping up quite often here.

The fact is that this forum is probably only a small proportion of the total Guild Wars 2 community. I think we can all agree on that. I think we can also agree that this small group is very vocal about their opinions of the game.

What we can’t do, is make the mistake of assuming that just because someone is in the vocal minority, it automatically makes their argument valid, or invalid.

This is a very important point because using that argument is actually nothing more than an ad hom attack. It’s like saying that because only a small minority of people were speaking out against the nazis, that their points were invalid.

We have no way of knowing what the silent majority thinks without gathering proper data and feedback. All arguments on this forum can easily represent a large, or small percentage of the community as a whole, but we simply can’t know this without a bigger sample size.

So, if someone makes an argument or an observation about the game, by all means agree, or disagree with what they say. But make sure you don’t fall into the trap of automatically dismissing the argument, just because they are the vocal minority.

Thanks for reading.

One only needs to look at how vibrantly populated the endgame zones are after last week’s patch to see how popular this last patch was……err…ya

I would only use the vocal minority argument if someone was acting like they’re the voice of the entire community. Which happens more often then it should.

well here are the facts as I see them

the forums are a large sample of the players/customers ( obviously how large is up for debate) hence without a larger sample to use to gauge opinions the forums are a valuable yardstick.
Taken that MASSIVE amounts of very angry/dissatisfied players have been ignored , infracted , and opinions deleted from this forum and yet STILL the annoyance is very clear. Then i would say ANET has a huge problem of its own making.

now we can argue about how big and how relevant the sample size is, but what cant be debated is that as a sample its very real and to ignore it is utter folly.

The term “vocal minority” is uesless. A store could sell a 60 dollar gadget of some sort and I know people who would just throw it away rather put up with the hassle of taking it back. Now lets make that something that does technically work and the person just subjectively doesen’t care for it like a video game. You thnk my friend who couldn’t be bothered to take something back that didn’t work for a 60 dollar return can be bothered to voice a complaint on a video game forum?

I think that people who make and sell video games know a majority HAS been vocal with their wallets. Two years of steady decline in video game sales with much sharper declines in PC than console and in before someone derps out “economy,” video game sales were higher during worse economic times than now.

So yeah, the real tangible numbers outside of pure speculation on forums suggests that people are liking what game makers are doing less and less. To add my very own brand of useless forum speculation, I think alot of people stopped liking it a long time ago and it actually shows that more people are starting to wise up hence are no longer “supporting game developers” who haven’t made a game they actually like for a dog’s age.

The forums are not a cross section of the player base because you can’t assign multiple opinions to one post and expect to be accurate. Just because the crazy homeless guy at the bus station rambles about being a dentist does not mean 1% of all dentists are crazy homeless guys.

Most of the “suggestions”/demands posted here are actually under the wrong forum, which tells you how well thought out they are.

The most reliable data is gathered by directly monitoring player habits. Everything from how many fractals are run a day and at which levels, to who participates in them, to general account activity is easily track-able. This information is completely void of opinion or speculation, the numbers are what they are.

The proof that it is a vocal minority can be seen by testing what you read on the forums. Servers are populated, I’ve seen virtually no complaints about gear in LA chat, and it’s still easy to find a group. Sorry guys, you are indeed a vocal minority.

These forums are a sample of the player base. What you asking is how do we tell whether it is a representative sample.

In the absence of evidence showing that the sample is not representative, we should assume it is representative, because there is no reason to think otherwise.

So … is there evidence to suggest that the distribution of opinions on these forums are at odds with the distribution within game?

Well, we might suppose that people posting here are not playing, whereas people not posting here are, which would suggest the forum dwellers are more negative towards the game than the people who never post (i.e. the majority). However this is speculation, there is no real evidence to support it.

What we need to look for is a prevailing opinion here which is not mirrored by the actual playing habits of the user base.

Equanim.5471:

The proof that it is a vocal minority can be seen by testing what you read on the forums. Servers are populated, I’ve seen virtually no complaints about gear in LA chat, and it’s still easy to find a group. Sorry guys, you are indeed a vocal minority.

Even if I believed you, (which I don’t) by that standard every single game player with a complaint since pong has been “indeed a vocal minority.” Your very own claim that LA chat is business as usual which you could never substantiate, is a “vocal minority claim” as you are voicing that claim in this forum and using your own personal heresay local sampling via the times you play. You really do make plain why the term “vocal minority” is as useless as the opinion’s of the person using that term.

What many of these posters fail to realize as well is that even if it were true that in the greater scope their targeted posters where in fact the base minority, within the confines of the forum they are, in fact, the vocal majority. And, not unlike elections wherein only small percentages of the population actually vote, it is that smaller outspoken and involved percentage of the population’s ideology that eventually shapes government and rule of law.

Same applies here. The players who post on game forums are generally the more passionate, informed and involved of the gaming community. They have been there, done that, many times before. Their complaints are not limited to that game’s forums. If they are posting here in dissatisfaction, there is a good chance they are posting elsewhere and spreading the word. So that in the virtual world they do become the majority. Words have impact that influence reaction. Silence does not. If I were a game developer I would much rather have 10 vocal customers, than 50 silent ones. Why? because the potential for the revenue generated by those 10 vocal customers is far greater than the potential revenue generated by the silent.

Sorry guys, you are indeed a vocal minority.

What’s wrong with being a vocal minority? The problem with this line of thinking is that it implies the only legitimate problems are the ones that upset a majority, and as long as there are still people in Lion’s Arch looking for a group, everything’s fine.

In order for players to leave every server en masse in waves large enough to leave ghost towns behind, ANet would have to implement something absolutely catastrophic. I don’t know if there’s ever been an MMORPG in recent memory that lost massive numbers across the board in a two week window.

The indignation on the forums doesn’t have to spill over into Lion’s Arch mapchat. Players don’t have to leave in numbers so massive that you can’t find a group.

If even one in twenty players puts their money where their mouths are and either leaves the game or stops spending money in the Black Lion Store, ANet will notice. Because that constitutes a pretty severe blowback. You won’t notice, because the game will still be populated and groups will still be plentiful.

No one needs to be part of a majority. Being a statistically significant minority is enough. (In fact, if that minority ever becomes a majority, then it’s far too late already.)

It seems a few of you may still be struggling a bit with this.

I would only use the vocal minority argument if someone was acting like they’re the voice of the entire community. Which happens more often then it should.

You have to be careful making statements like this. It’s like saying, “See, we had a cold summer, so that proves global warming is false.”

Taking small samples of information, without considering external factors, will almost always give you skewed results. More players may be playing the game (or not) this week due to factors such as a week of holidays.

What you have to do is look for trends over time. Games like this will always see variation in player participation due to any number of reasons, but what really matters is what the overall trend shows.

The most reliable data is gathered by directly monitoring player habits. Everything from how many fractals are run a day and at which levels, to who participates in them, to general account activity is easily track-able. This information is completely void of opinion or speculation, the numbers are what they are.

Sort of… you have to be careful not to confuse correlation with causation. Just monitoring player habits without determining all factors (internal and external) could lead to making false conclusions.

The point is, if you have a specific argument / opinion about the game, by all means voice it the best way you can. What you have to be careful of, is that you’re not dismissing other arguments simply because someone’s opinions happen to be in what you interpret to be the minority.

The fact is that none of us really know how the game is doing. Anecdotes about population and how much your brother hates the game now, don’t really have much use when discussing the game.

(sorry, I have to cut this response short…brunch with my mum )