The Reach of the Forums (an informal survey)

[bokaboka]

Ah so I hear the Offerwall debacle is officially over (emphasis on "officially"). We all saw how it lit up the forums like nothing I had ever seen before. I was pretty steamed myself.

So I mentioned it several times to my PUGs over the course of the next day. Not a single person had heard of the Offerwall XD. I guess our world here on the forums is a small one after all!


Details:
0/15 people, running Sentinels stuff, Sarlona or Argonessen (I've been switching to favor farm), early afternoon.

[rimble]

It's for them we were rioting. Most people partaking in the civil unrest appeared tech-savvy enough to not be taken in by the Offer Wall. However, were it left in it's implemented state, word would spread, and less tech-savvy users would be boned.

[Tinrae]

My husband was the same way - he never even heard of the Offer Wall until I asked him if he'd looked at it after the issue became a hot topic here. He pretty much never reads any forums unless I ask him to look at a particular thread. Says he hates wasting time on a website when he could be playing the game. ;)

I'm positive that the majority of players either never read forums or read them only occasionally.

[biggin]

I would say about 10%. Same thing happened when I was discusing the Bastard Sword/Dwarven Axe update. Only about 1/10 even knew what I was talking about, and who knows how many actually heard from word of mouth over the forums.

(shrugs)

[KualaBangoDango]

Compared to what the forums usually are, the offerwall created what appeared to be a huge response.

BUT, my guess is that if you actually go back through ALL the offerwall threads and count the number of different people who participated in the threads you'd probably only count 200-300 people which is really quite small compared to the actual player-base of the game.

I believe the statistics are that only around 10% of a game's players even read the forums and maybe only 10% of those that do read them post anything themselves. The remaining forum users tend to lurk-only. So, most players never even heard of what was going on.

[Mockduck]

The Offer Wall definitely got people talking, but I've seen numerous issues and changes bring out this level of activity on the forums! Enhancement system change, vorpal change, vorpal change again, the F2P announcement, exploit issues/bannings, heck - even the change to evasion a while back brought out a similar level of activity! And it's true - there's a HUGE section of the player base that never ever looks at the forums, listens to my podcast, visits DDO web sites, etc. If I was to guess I'd agree with Biggin and Kuala that it's probably about 10% that visit these "extracurricular" places.