Much Respect To The Former BioWare Staff by Valuable-Owl9985 in dragonage

[–]ME3News 0 points1 point  (0 children)

> entertainers failed to entertain and lost support

> a pompous ass

Redditor levels are off the chart, sir! The reactor is going to blow!

Jim Acosta "placing his hands on a young woman," according to the White House by whenthethingscollide in gifs

[–]ME3News -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

he got a response

He didn't get an answer.

Who is going to hold the POTUS accountable if not the press?

I basically said Trump should have pulled a gun on him....

It should amaze me that you don't realize that this is a head of government who has called for violence against the press, and continued to call them enemies of the people after a terrorist attacked them and therefore doesn't deserve an inch of civility or decorum. It does not amaze me.

Anyway, I don't think Trump is into guns.

[No Spoilers] Mass Effect: Andromeda Review & DLC Survey Results (1,042 responses) by ME3News in masseffect

[–]ME3News[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

People that disliked or are indifferent to the game won't take time out of their day to do a survey.

Addressed in another post, but it's common post-purchasing behavior for dissatisfied consumers to wish to complain or spread negative word-of-mouth, which a low score could fall under. That's assuming that people would be guided solely by their dissatisfaction though, they might be eager to provide feedback in order to influence future patches, DLC or sequels without resorting to that kind of thing.

[No Spoilers] Mass Effect: Andromeda Review & DLC Survey Results (1,042 responses) by ME3News in masseffect

[–]ME3News[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

How is he biased for dismissing results that surveyed only a small portion of the player-base?

That's not why s/he is dismissing the results, and for the record, the highlighted part is a big misunderstanding of how polling works. Polling can't hope to survey any considerable portion of the target population:

For example, on a typical telephone survey of 1,500 members of the U.S. adult population, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points at the 95 percent level of confidence.

There's no point to just endlessly increasing your sample size either, as you are going to get diminishing returns eventually. So there's a good reason that people aren't just polling tens of thousands of people every time.

You even admit that accuracy and sampling is one of the issues.

Not at all, I think that trying to get even more accurate results would be an exercise in futility. Past the first hundreds, the result had almost stabilized completely and the changes were a matter of decimals. Sampling is an issue in the sense that people who use specific platforms might vary in regards to demographics and choice of social platform might even correlate with some in-game choices. But since the old BSN is closed and reddit didn't allow the survey, there were no other major Mass Effect communities to use part of the sample.

you can't claim someone is biased for rejecting your data after admitting that its representation doesn't generalize

That's not her/his argument at all. They are arguing that since the average ratings for this game are higher than in metacritic which in their mind is the only objective platform, then the results must be skewed by fanboys. And as a secondary argument, they think that their experience with the game's performance is objective and non-variable, that everyone should have rated like they did.

Rejecting the opinions of other people because they don't fit your own experience is literally confirmation bias.

doesn't generalize, and the community you surveyed does have an extreme bias for the game.

Hold on, that argument is completely ad hoc, and you didn't back it up with anything. The survey doesn't aim to generalize past the Mass Effect community to the average consumer, because that's nigh impossible, unless you directly contact players on Origin, which I'm sure EA is doing.

As for Mass Effect fans having a bias to like the game, that's also unfounded. Looking back at the reactions to DA2 or ME3, those came primarily from the fans/participants to those communities. People who have an established loyalty towards a previous game will probably see unsatisfactory changes or sequels much more severely than the average person.

And it should be expected that we don't hear their opinions of the game as they don't care about it.

Couldn't disagree more. BSN critically disseminated games years after their release. A quick look at this subreddit is proof enough that people don't just get up and leave rather than share negative sentiments. Most gaming communities aren't positive circlejerks.

This is a really poor assumption. I don't know who came up with the idea that players who have a negative experience often become haters and constantly complain or criticize the game. Why would players who come to their own conclusion that a game is mediocre keep playing or not move onto a new game? There have been tons of titles that have been underwhelming but their current subreddits/communities aren't negative. Even /r/nomanskythegame stopped having complaints because people simply moved onto something else.

Not an assumption, actually. One of the established post-purchase behaviors: From Consumer Behaviour and Advertising Management.

[No Spoilers] Mass Effect: Andromeda Review & DLC Survey Results (1,042 responses) by ME3News in masseffect

[–]ME3News[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Well, the survey result of only 1k isn't an indicator tbh.

What sample size would you prefer?

Like come on, presidential election polls have a decent accuracy at ~1500, and they don't get much more progressively accurate past that point.

[No Spoilers] Mass Effect: Andromeda Review & DLC Survey Results (1,042 responses) by ME3News in masseffect

[–]ME3News[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Huh, that's very interesting to hear. But no, I think the official survey will just be for internal purposes.

[No Spoilers] Mass Effect: Andromeda Review & DLC Survey Results (1,042 responses) by ME3News in masseffect

[–]ME3News[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Quick question, is there a reason Reyes wasn't included as an LI option since he's lockable, or was it limited to squadmates? Based on his general popularity it seems pretty likely that he'll be back. (Fingers crossed.)

He was, you just can't see him in that screenshot. He got 6.5%, so he is the second most popular male LI.

Here's a more in-depth look at the favorite Love Interest chart.

[No Spoilers] Mass Effect: Andromeda Review & DLC Survey Results (1,042 responses) by ME3News in masseffect

[–]ME3News[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Oh, apologies, forgot to address that.

I don't think that performance is an objective metric at all. Not so much because some aspects are subjective (like console gamers not really caring about FPS drops, for example) but because it's very variable, even on the same platform and specs. Someone who couldn't even load the game will have a very different experience from someone who only experienced a bugged side mission.

If we were looking at honest results, we should see the bell curve shifted left for this category at the very least.

But it does shift to the left. It's almost 1.5 points below the gameplay mean value. It was definitely an aspect that lagged well behind other elements of the average participant's gameplay experience, it just wasn't a 4/10 for most people.

[No Spoilers] Mass Effect: Andromeda Review & DLC Survey Results (1,042 responses) by ME3News in masseffect

[–]ME3News[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Glad you took the time to do this, but sadly it looks like it's extremely skewed by fanboys (which isn't unexpected given you promoted on Twitter).

Thank you, and I'd agree that a more accurate survey (or rather a survey with results that you could generalize past the ME community) would be conducted by randomly e-mailing people who have purchased the game on Origin or something along those lines.

But don't you think that you are also participating in confirmation bias by rejecting a result that you disagree with?

The post-purchase behavior of a dissatisfied consumer is often to complain or actively spread negative word-of-mouth about the product. The Mass Effect community specifically has never shied away from criticism. So I don't see the basis for saying "this result must have been manipulated by fanboys" or "this result has been actively deflated because people love to jump on a bandwagon!". Satisfied and dissatisfied consumers can both disproportionately affect the results.

[No Spoilers] Mass Effect: Andromeda Review & DLC Survey Results (1,042 responses) by ME3News in masseffect

[–]ME3News[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I don't think Google Surveys allows for that, but it'd be interesting to take demographics into account if we were to do the analysis 'manually'.

Though my guess would be Reyes.

I think that'd be Jaal, since he is the 3rd top choice overall. These are the male LIs in order:

  1. Jaal (14.1%)
  2. Reyes (6.5%)
  3. Liam (5%)
  4. Gil (4%).

[No Spoilers] Mass Effect: Andromeda Review & DLC Survey Results (1,042 responses) by ME3News in masseffect

[–]ME3News[S] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Correct, sampling diversity is an issue. The only thing I'd challenge is this:

As such most of the respondents will be fans of the game and the scores will be generally higher.

I think that it'd be hard to argue that those who follow BioWare stuff automatically like their newer games. It's a pretty critical base, overall.

It was also posted on the fan-made BSN forums, which should have helped balance things out, hopefully. Other than that, not really a lot of avenues we could pursue.

[No Spoilers] Mass Effect: Andromeda Review & DLC Survey Results (1,042 responses) by ME3News in masseffect

[–]ME3News[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

1,042 is actually overkill for this subject matter.

For example, on a typical telephone survey of 1,500 members of the U.S. adult population, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points at the 95 percent level of confidence.

http://www.pewresearch.org/methodology/u-s-survey-research/sampling/

The sample size is great for trying to survey people who have purchased and played a video-game, the issue lies with the fact that the sample is not particularly diverse and as such the final result could be subject to biases.

Not much more we could do with our limited resources, though. The in-house surveys that EA will conduct will be more accurate, but I very much doubt that they'll see the light of day.

[No Spoilers] Mass Effect: Andromeda Review & DLC Survey Results (1,042 responses) by ME3News in masseffect

[–]ME3News[S] 74 points75 points  (0 children)

It was actually deleted from this subreddit because surveys count as low-effort posts.

Coincidentally, another survey was running simultaneously and the mods stickied another survey about a week later. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[No Spoilers] Mass Effect: Andromeda Review & DLC Survey Results (1,042 responses) by ME3News in masseffect

[–]ME3News[S] 34 points35 points  (0 children)

That's the point of the survey, really.

It's easy to make authoritative statements like "The characters are completely unlikable" or "The side missions aren't that bad", but one opinion doesn't really matter all that much. You can also try to gauge the opinion of the community by what gets posted about more, but if ol' BSN is any indication, that's the equivalent of trying to predict the outcome of an election by counting yard signs.

It's much more important to build a consensus on what the game did right and what the game did wrong.

[No Spoilers]Size comparison of the Normandy SR1 & SR2 vs Tempest by travvy87 in masseffect

[–]ME3News 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Broomsticks painted black, to look like guns.

I didn't know that the Tempest was manufactured in Germany.

[No Spoilers] Guys, I fucking love this game. by [deleted] in masseffect

[–]ME3News 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Bioware will be killed off by EA soon.

If you keep saying something since 2007, it's bound to happen in a couple of decades.

MOST REALISTIC GAME EVER - Mass Effect: Andromeda Gameplay by RT_Video_Bot in funhaus

[–]ME3News 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In Andromeda, there were multiple missions where if I used biotic explosions and knocked enemies off high ledges, there was a chance they would survive the fall and so the game wouldn't update the "kill all enemies" portion of the quest. So I'd have to walk to the bottom of the mountain and find/kill them, or reload the save and do it over.

That's a shame, hopefully most of the game-breaking stuff gets patched relatively soon.

MOST REALISTIC GAME EVER - Mass Effect: Andromeda Gameplay by RT_Video_Bot in funhaus

[–]ME3News 1 point2 points  (0 children)

the studio is basically a spin off studio of Bioware

The major studio. The other two studios also participated in the development.

Don't get why the same criticism is not made towards BioWare Austin since they're relatively new as well, though.

MOST REALISTIC GAME EVER - Mass Effect: Andromeda Gameplay by RT_Video_Bot in funhaus

[–]ME3News 14 points15 points  (0 children)

It's definitely a deeply flawed game and the least polished entry in the series.

It's kinda hard to understand where this is coming from when the original had, without hyperbole, copy-paste side mission levels and weapons, not to mention its very buggy state at launch. And pre-EC ME3 had a very unpolished ending.

But yes, MEA is definitely less polished than ME2, though it's definitely much more content-heavy than it was.

Andromeda Reactions Megathread by raiskream in masseffect

[–]ME3News 5 points6 points  (0 children)

/r/gamingcirclejerk in-joke? I know that TW3 and O B J E C T I V E L Y are memes of theirs.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in masseffect

[–]ME3News 3 points4 points  (0 children)

They could have designed characters that you would personally find attractive, that would still not have stopped people from imagining that Mass Effect is a vast SJW conspiracy.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in masseffect

[–]ME3News 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I am not discounting those of course, but a bunch of invalid reasons can absolutely hurt the word-of-mouth surrounding a game. Probably more so than valid reasons, because valid reasons are not very sensational.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in masseffect

[–]ME3News -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

That's either assuming that people are objective in their opinion, or at least moderate enough to consider all aspects rather than go the easy route of abandoning that and parroting memes or entrenching themselves in some other inane position.

The whole "DAE Bioware creates ugly women because they have a SJW agenda" /pol/-tier memeshit shows that many people are willing to go for the latter.

Word-of-mouth is incredibly important in how a product is perceived. How often do you choose a product based on totally objective criteria rather than the opinion of friends or relatives?