PS Survey

[Alfonso Knaf]

I thought about creating a PS survey to cover the following questions:
What wishes does the commuinty have?
What problems does the commuinty see?
What does the community likes most/what annoys them most?
Many statistical data (how long do does one play/ since when/ why/ whats the OS/etc...)
Well I think this could be of use for the devs. What do you think (mainly the PS-team) would it be helpfull for you?
Of course I would analyse and interpret the data, so you don't have to worry about any work.
So if you like the idea you can also tell me your fileds of interest for such a survey...
(I am a student of sociologie [social sciences], so I have some experiences in doing such work - and thats also a reason for me to do this -> experience)

[Kerol]

I personally would find the results interesting, but I guess that some people wouldn't like to pose all their statistics openly.
I suggest you develop a questionary in this thread and when you are done gathering all ideas, questions for it and all that, you create a page where to enter the data (you may ask for assistance in this thread, maybe?) and place it either on a private domain, ask Josephoenix (ps-mc.com), Talad (planeshift.it) or Acraig (hydlaa.com), post the link at the end of this thread.

[Alfonso Knaf]

Well yes that was mostly what I thought, an anonymous survey on an extarnal page.
However, where it will be hosted is rather irrelevant to me :-D I also have own space, so this is the smallest problem.
Maybe the survey could be linked at a more visible place, but this is only finetuning.
And I do not wnat to gater concrete questions here, only subjects. The concrete questions will be done by me - of course if some has allready some concrete questions he can tell me :-)
To be honest I allready have a big set of concrete questions 
(PS: is concrete the right word?)

[Kerol]

Topics I'd be interested in, concerning mostly things related to development and evaluation of PS:
- if people are content with the advisors in /help recently
- by which way people found PS (google, friends..)
- how many players are interested in RP /how many seriously RP / alternate between RP and PL / don't like to RP
- the age distribution of players
- from which countries players come from / what languages are spoken natively
- what OS'es (if linux what distro) are being used majorly
- if one isn't playing on his favorite OS, what OS would they like be able to play PS on?
- what features / area of features would be most liked to be implemented
- if people are content about GM decisions generally
- what sort of other games people play
- how many people would be interested in getting involved more deeply in development/forum moderation/ GMing if they had enough time and/or had the qualifications

Things I'd be interested in privately:
- to what music people listen to
- how many females/males are out there
- how many hours per day people play PS (max ever, average, now)
- how many people have family members playing as well
- how many people have met in RL after meeting in PS (and whether a relationship was the result ^^)

@ Alfonso:
Maybe you can make a short survey, concentrating on one aspect, let it run a week or two and do another survey concentrating on another aspect a bit after?
Some things (for instance the number of hours people play) is varying heavily over time, so you could ask those questions in each survey, giving a more detailed picture on those things.
It also would be interesting to see if the number of people participating in surveys is altering as well or stays constant.

And yes, concrete is the right word ^^

[Alfonso Knaf]

Maybe you can make a short survey, concentrating on one aspect, let it run a week or two and do another survey concentrating on another aspect a bit after?

Well the advantage of doing it all in one is, that it is possible to draw connections...
For example we can see if female players, play more often or that linux users stay longer or whatever :-)
This is not possible if we split the survey...

[Seytra]

If you ask anything about "RP", you must first give a description of what constitutes RP, since a lot of people mistake questing for RP (blame the SPGs). Otherwise, the results will be meaningless AFAICS.

[Kerol]

Well the advantage of doing it all in one is, that it is possible to draw connections...
For example we can see if female players, play more often or that linux users stay longer or whatever :-)
This is not possible if we split the survey...

True. Then a survey each 3,4 or 6 months?

If you ask anything about "RP", you must first give a description of what constitutes RP, since a lot of people mistake questing for RP (blame the SPGs). Otherwise, the results will be meaningless AFAICS.

True too. Link to an RP log / RP section of the forums?

[steuben]

simply add this to the survey rather then the link
which of the following do you do as part of your role playing
1. questing.   not all --> all the time
2. scheduled events  not all --> all the time
3. sponateuous rp with other players  not all --> all the time
4. scripted rp with other players  not all --> all the time

run it on a 1-5 scale and it will yeild more information then an iffy yes or no question do you rp?

[Alfonso Knaf]

Yes we can repeat the survey, good idea.
Of course the questions have to be clear... thats why it takes time to set the survey up :-)


Layout is done, I have to translate the questions I made into emglish, that could take another while :-)

[Alfonso Knaf]

Okay I'm almost done with everything, I only have a question on te OSs.
If you are a Linux user you can choose betwenn the following distributions:
    Ubuntu         
     Debian       
     Gentoo       
     FC       
     Mandrivia       
     Suse       
     Redhat       
     Zenwalk       
     Slackware       
     Others

If you are a BSD user you can choose betwenn the following versions:
    The DragonFly BSD Project         
     FreeBSD       
     m0n0wall       
     The NetBSD Project       
     The OpenBSD Project       
     OpenDarwin       
     PC-BSD       
     PicoBSD       
     TrustedBSD       
     Others

If you are a Windows user you can choose betwenn the following versions:
    Windows 95         
     Windows 98       
     Windows Me       
     Windows XP Home       
     Windows XPPro       
     Windows 2000

If you are a Mac user, well I do not have any idea what MacOSs are existing.

So did I miss something? Linux/BSD Distributions, Windwos versions.
Do you think it is more reasonable to have a free textfield for BSD/Linux, than this list - consider that it is a lot more work to analyze it if you have a free textbox (some will write MS-Win XP, some will write Windows XP, etc. pp.)

The next step will be that I need some "pretesters". I have to see if some formulations are unclear, if I missed important things, if there are spelling errors - and there will be - and so on...
I think I can find up to 5 "usefull" pretesters by myself, so if some GMs or Devs would join, it would be great!

[steuben]

lets see for mac it runs basically 10.x, and 9.x
you may want to drop 95 off the list
and xp for the most part is xp
add in a don't know/unsure

[Alfonso Knaf]

Thanks for the feedback steuben!
I didn't thought of an unsure element for this question, but yes you are right.
So are there any newer used versions then Windows 2000? And suddenly NT crossed my mind, although I think it is highly uncommon for players I think I will add it and also keep 95 - I lerned one thing by creating surveys: excpect everything! So the Windows list will be the following:
95, 98, Me, XP, 2000, NT
And Mac will be: 10.x, 9.x - aren't there major differences for, lets say 10.1 and 10.3 (I thought I have read something like this in the Mac forum here, but as said I really do not have a clou)

[hook]

MacOS X (=10.x) has completely different code-base as the previous versions - it's based on the BSD kernel. And since there's only a PlaneShift binary for the 10.x series, I don't think there would be much point in offering older versions as options.

On the other hand, I think it would be good to provide an option where you could type yourself which other OS you're using. You never know - maybe there actually is someone who was brave enough to port PS to MacOS 9.x or even Amiga or BeOS.

Also, it's important to ask for the architecture - Linux and BSD run on pretty much everything you can throw at it (I know there's quite a few Linux AMD64 users here on PlaneShift) from x86, amd64, to RISC, SPARC, Alpha, PPC, handhelds, heck! even your toaster could work! And MacOS X now runs both on PPC and x86.

[DerMika]

Would anyone be running PS on Windows Server 2003 or Vista?

I wonder

[Cyl]

As Linux user I would say: Gentoo.