Survey available on Surveymonkey on Resource Management (i.e. internal discussion made external thread

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I've voted too.

Can't see the survey statistic.  How to see the result?

Maybe add some questions able pull economy in the survey too!

I believe only the person who made the survey gets to see the results. I will post the results in a couple of days. 12 people have taken the survey so far.

Also, if anyone wants to make their own surveys, it is free to join survey monkey wit a basic account, which is what I did.

 edit: I just tried to share my results so everyone can see, but that is not allowed with a basic account.

Below is a cut and paste job. Also, climber, the question on a pull economy is "resources should be sent to towns based on their needs"

I just voted.

Thanks for the stats.

Thanks for doing the survey!

Up to 20 responses - I will probably give it a day and share the results.

29 results. Some explanation. A vote of "Hate" gave a score of -2. Dislike=-1, Neutral=0, Like=+1, Love=+2. So under the column "Average rating" That is what that number means. Without further ado, Da numberz!

Looking back there were a few questions that I did not word very well, but there were space limitations. For instance "Controlling a resource makes it available throughout Empire" wasn't greatly clear that I was referring to like Civ IV.

Camps 1 and 3 seem to be popular, 2 and 4 are generally not liked. (Camp 2 got ZERO votes in the "Love" column!)

"everything is treated as a resource" was the MOST popular single feature, and there is strong demand for caravans and roads to speed up the caravans. Roads giving bonus resources had a slight negative, But getting bonus resources from city improvements was liked OK. Pull economies beat push economies, but both were reasonably positive. It seems like how it is implemented is more important to people than pulling or pushing.

There you are - if we get significantly more votes I will add another post with those stats. We are at 29 respondents, so if we get up to 40 or 50 and the results significantly changed I would do an update.

It's mostly in agreement with me, so I think you worded them just fine. 

You probably did hose the wording on pull versus push.  I took those questions to be camp 1 and 3 allocation methods.  Under camp 1, you set sliders to send them out.  Under camp 3, they allocate based on where the production is at that uses them.

A pull economy versus a push economy is whether the resources are sent out on demand or when obtained.

Yeah, pull economies seem to have less risk than push economies in terms of 'excessive micromanagement'.

Friendly bump. We are up to 38 respondents, but the only significant change is camp 3 and camp 1 are now dead even. Just want to bump this up, if we get up to 50 respondents I will post the full results again.

I'd like to humbly scoff the 'camps 1-4' items on the survey. There is so much noise on the boards right now that it isn't really safe to assume that any given respondent read Brad's OP carefully and based their choice on his definition of the camps. People could easily have embedded their own or other forum poster's *comments* about Brad's definitions into their survey responses.

Mind you, I'm a lapsed social scientist and a pretty staunch critic of the idea that opinion research produces empirical data. It mostly produces opinions about opinions. Anywho, I'd put more stock in the results from the functional part of the survey than from the camps part.

Well I agree the feature portioin is probably more accurate, however, I would disagree with you on a couple of points regarding the camps.

1. When people read the Dev journals, they tend to read what the Dev's wrote, maybe scan thru the body for interesting tidbits and then post their thoughts. So I think you scoffing at the camps data completely is probably not correct.

2. I agree that it is right to be jaded about statistics, mostly because most surveys are worded in a way to influence the result, among other things. I felt like I suppressed my biases pretty well, and put the wording in as it was cut and pasted from the original thread (sometimes I had to condense due to space limitations on surveymonkey) That being said, I think this is a pretty valid poll, but with the following weaknesses. Sample size was very small with still less than 40 respondents, Respondents were self selected from what could only be referred to as the hardcore/fanboy base (who else hangs out on these forums this early in development AND cares enough about it to fill out a survey) and finally, in a few cases I did feel that I did not word the questions well - not in an influence the outcome way but in a clarity way - There were a couple of questions that when reading them afterwards I had to admit were not very clear.

It is a pity that the "wag the dog" political surveys have made people, especially those who understand the inner workings of how surveys are done very skeptical of survey results. I think if done properly (and I at least tried) that surveys CAN be worthwhile and provide useful information. I honestly think mine does, I know if I was StarDock, I would want that information WHETHER I acted on it or not. I think that the success or failure of EWOM is going to be on implementation, not really which camp they go with or whatever. I honestly believe they could implement features that I put that I hated or disliked and I could be pleasantly surprised by how it all fits together. That is really what is going to make or break it, I think, is how well they integrate all the various pieces.

If there is a weakness in the survey, it is that we don't know much about a lot of those other pieces. We know that, and SD knows that. So they can look at the data and say "Well, x is popular, but that is only because they don't know about y yet." OR they can say "x is popular, but it is only because these guys are hardcore, and we need to go with y to attract a wider audience". Or they may say "Wow, I would have expected more people to go with Y, but they reallys eem to want X. Okay, let's go with X."

Having more information (from a dev standpoint) is allways a good thing, imo.

Denryu, I apologize if I sounded severe. A big part of my typing around here is justified as 'exercise' for my paid editorial work, and I'm on a "be more concise" binge. I should have preceded my griping about the fundamental flaws of opinion research with a direct compliment about you doing a very interesting, and possibly dev-useful, thing for the beta.

That sincere compliment aside, I'm still very committed to taking the polling business down three or nine pegs. Your point about "useful information" cannot be reasonably captured in a repeatable-experiment format, so I stand by my claim that very few survey results yield "empirical data." Statistics is a science when it comes to something like testing a blood sample for a white cell count. The results turn promptly squishy when you include written or spoken answers to written or spoken questions. At that point, being "useful" turns into an eye-of-the-beholder question.

p.s. Wonder how long after RTM we'll have to wait for the Beholder Collection in the custom-content Bestiary? Seems like their pun value alone would help boost them up the D&D modders task lists, not to mention their basic bad-assedness.

Wow, I had a nice huge post and the forum ate it.

In short, no prob with your post GW, it was a polite expression of opinion and I didn't take it as an attack. I just wanted to counter with my thoughts, so I did.

At 44 respondents, some things have changed, among which camp 3 made a move! It's now the top "camp" choice!

And GW, I did remember a few things from the previous monster post that I wanted to mention.

1st, I am pretty well versed on statistics and I agree with you, they should be taken with a grain of salt for multiple reasons. Often the surveys are worded according to the bias of the survey taker to get desired result (I tried to stay neutral), small sample size (a problem here) self selected respondents (again a problem) and the fact that those who are even on these forums are the hardest of the hardcore and probably do not well represent the spectrum of the entire audience that StarDock will be targetting.

Those caveats aside, I agree with you fully about surveys providing empirical data. But that is because the goal of a survey is not in search of facts, it is in search of opinions. Yes the data is "squishy" because peoples' opinions do actually change, they sometimes don't know what they really want, and the concerns I raised in the previous paragraph as well as others. However, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater - I think saying that their value becomes an "eye of the beholder" question is not giving credit where it is due - even with all the faults inherent, it at least can give a snapshot of what a given groups opinion is at a given time. And although the data should not dictateto the developer, it is still worth having and then an INFORMED decision as to whether to have the opinions shape, not dictate design direction can be made.

Case in point, the fact that NO ONE responded negatively to everything being treated as a resource, while either treating only NR or MR as a resource both received strongly negative reactions - I think that is good solid non-squishy data. SD is free to disregard that data, but I still thik better to have the info to make that decision than not. 

I more or less agree with you, although I'm probably too conservative to call it data. A point worth considering, no doubt. Here's hoping we can see more people self-select and give some input. Your project is the most useful broad-based response I've seen yet to Brad's monster econ thread. (I mean no slight to the very good 'single-issue' discussions that are popping up outside that thread.)