If you want to go around believing that every racist person admits their racism, every drunk calls themself a drunk, every addict, an addict, every thief a thief, and that your not arguing your position to maintain your ego, that is fine by me.

If you want to believe that people fully considered all the pluses and minuses of powercreep (or whatever it was you were trying to get at) (off the top of my head)
- how it may help out new players and expands the player base.
- how it might be better than the alternative powerloss
- how it may interact with all types of players and game mechanics

then they considered how that interacts with their own purchasing habits (off the top of my head)
- how buying or not buying into the new set would decrease their playing viability
- how buying or not buying into the new set would affect their ability to play based on the powercreep's effect on other players, old and new
- how buying or not buying into a set effects the whole structure of their gaming community

Doing all this in the face of being primed by the word Powercreep, which is a word with a negative slant.

Then be my guest, it didn't happen, it isn't happening and it won't. People use simplified rubricks to answer virtually every question, whether they know it or not. I do, you do, not doing it means wasting large chunks of your day on meaningless drivel, like this thread.


And GG, my post was much more akin to method 2 of Mind control, a forced choice between two alternatives. I would ask you what other alternatives are there if neither appeals to you.

This thread is worthless as there really is no way you'll look at what I'm saying.

1.Do I like Powercreep= Yes and no. Powercreeps are needed to balance the game.
2.How does Powercreep affect on the amount you spend on sets= None, I buy the sets because I love this game and new figures are always fun to play with/ trade.

To be fair, *he* wasn't equating anything to anything. He was providing an extreme example of how what are essentially the same questions worded differently will vastly affect how people tend to answer polling questions.

-Peter

What you're saying isn't the determinant of the worth of this thread.

P.S. I know you think that you believe this thread is worthless, but are you sure that you really believe that?

Yeah, I suppose that part of my responce was taking thing down an unnecessary tangential path.

But the hypocritical part was that several pages ago he said in order to make the poll more viable there needed to be "unrelated questions" to the actual question....then he proceeded to give an extreme example of trying to use these unrelated questions to attempt to manipulate peoples opinions. (interestingly everyone who saw this said they would answer both of his questions the same way) I would think that would be an indicator that it's pretty darn hard to sway someone's opinion, even when you're trying to do so....I made no such effort in this thread, and if I did it was unintentional....and that is one of the reasons these guys think the results are "Meaningless". My theory is that if Wizkids had asked those exact same questions, the validity of the poll never would have popped up in discussion.

If the word "Powercreep" has such a "negative slant", then why is it that people seemed perfectly capable of overcoming that negativity in the first question as answers there were somewhat equally divided between pro-powercreep, Anti-Powercreep, and Indifferent to powercreep?

Do you think folks just ran out of energy to overcome the negativity in that word by the time the second question rolled around?

Your supposition isn't a bad one, but if flies in the face of the responces from the first question.

AND...how do you feel about your own answers to the question? Are you confident that your own answers were correct? I'm totally at ease with mine. There is no chance I was wrong about my opinion on either answer.

Yeah, see, the way he posed those questions was simply for illustration (i.e. "Have you stopped beating your wife?") rather than to indicate any particular belief he had one way or the other.

Which, when doing actual data collection is standard practice--assuming you are trying to determine people's feelings on X, it is always good to have some questions relating to Not X, just to keep things on the up and up, statistics wise.

Well, I dunno--I think it was a pretty good example of how the way questions are worded affects how people respond (i.e. "Do you feel the government should be responsible for people's health care?" as opposed to "Do you think SOCIALIST health care is good?" will tend to get different responses).

Sure, but that was all about context--we knew what was going on and saw the questions posed next to each other. Which gives us extra information.

I dunno, man. Indications are the people, as a whole, are pretty dumb. And easily swayed. At least on a macro statistical level.

Oh, I think you are probably right. All the discussion of statistical validity in regards to this particular poll is, more or less, completely silly. You asked some questions, people answered them, that is as good as you need for what you are trying to do (collect some opinions on a given subject). It isn't like this is your PHD thesis or anything.

-Peter

I dunno man, I've been arguing with people on this board for years, and I bet I can count on one hand the number of times someone has said "You know, you're right...I've changed my mind on that." It happens but it's pretty rare.

And the dumb one are the hardest to convince!! (You ever see anyone convince DCFan#1 of ANYTHING?)

Well, you might notice that I went with "macro statistical" level. Individual people are difficult to convince of anything. But large crowds seem to swing all over the place with minimal effort (see: Current Election Polling).

-Peter

You're awesome.

Not like those other guys. They suck.


Seriously? I think that part of it is you.

It's undeniable that stuff you write has a polarising effect - some would say that you've built a reputation as a nutter when it comes to rules changes. My hypothesis is that people read a post that you make using a negatively-slanted word, they are more likely to respond positively in reaction to you.

Similarly, were hair10 to poll people about powercreep, many would assume that he was on an anti-WizKids tirade, and that would affect their responses (in a less predictable way - many more people agree with hair10 than agree with you, or so it seems).

Read the first url that llyrghy posted, if you haven't already; I put it to you that agreeing with Brazil is perceived by many to be ridiculous, and people don't want to look ridiculous, so that affects how they'd respond. It's unfair but there you have it.

Okay, so that DOES explain the answer to question#1 where 2/3rds of the people did not answer the same as me. BUT those same people answered the same as me on question 2. So that arguement doesn't hold water either. The one arguement that "certain people" are making up excuse after excuse after excuse against is...that people actually responded honestly to the questions at face value...and it's pure conicedence that 2/3rd of the people had dissimilar views from me on the first question but almost everyone believed the same thing about the second question..and it actually is true that Powercreep has almost no affect on set sales.

I know it's not as "Fun" of an answer as "Brazil is wrong about everything"....but you can take some solice in the fact that I actually was surprised that there were as many people who like powercreep as there are people who dislike it. That was quite unexpected to me. And you know what....I'm not making up excuses for people's anwers. I'm taking it to heart that I'm not necessarily in the majority on that view. This is actually the first poll I've presented where I was surprised by the outcome...I was neither expecting there to be so many supporters of Powercreep, nor was I expecting such nearly unanimous results from the sales question (though I was expecting it to be the majority view....just not as overwelming of a majority, particularly in the light of how many people claimed to like Powercreep....but even they said it didn't affect their purchases.)

Okay, let's try another tangent:

Without finding out, if people that respond to your "poll" actually believe there is something like Power-creep, it's darn impossible to categorize the given replies.

Only those people that believe Power-creep exists can actually give relevant answers to the questions. The "non-believers" can say whatever they want, as it will not truly reflect their opinion. How can you like/dislike something that doesn't exist? How can something that doesn't exist, influence you purchasing habits?

I'm going to make an extreme example here. Imagine question like this:

1) Do you like God?

2) Do you think God influences how you behave in your private life?

Everybody who doesn't believe in God can answer what ever he wants.

A survey like this should have the option of "don't know/don't care/is not applicable to me". Otherwise people are forced to respond to something, which they can't really answer.

Can you exactly say, who of those that responded is really convinced there _is_ powercreep?

If someone doesn't think powercreep exists, then they are really really unlikely to have taken it into account when purchasing....but I suspect you're thinking that it goes into their thinking "unknowingly" because for some reason they can't identify, they like this set more than the last one.
That's all well and good...but the thing is most of the people who answered the survey actually identified their prime motivation in purchasing....for example they would say "Their purchases are based on the characters in the set....or they are a collector so they always buy the whole set....etc. However I think I can provide you the information you asked for:

If I eliminate all the people who did not state their opinion on liking powercreep from the "does it affect sales" answers then we only have:

4 people who think powercreep affects their purchases. (2 who said it increased their purchases, and 2 who said it decreased their purchases)

29 people who said it didn't affect their purchases. (that only eliminated 3 people from the "It doesn't affect their purchases" pile.

I didn't say that. I said, if someone thinks powercreep doesn't exist, they can't correctly fill our your survey.

In other words: this creates yet another uncertainty factor for the results of your "poll" (on top of all the bias and everything mentioned previously).