Funny thing is that people believe every single "survey" and "study" they see or read on both Fox News and the more liberal media like CNN and MSNBC, etc. And those are collected the exact same way. They poll a few hundred households, preferably not cherry-picked for certain political views, for opinions and use that to extrapolate a figure over a broader range.

 

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Which is why I refuse to participate in polls. Never accurate and always misleading.

 

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Yeah kinda like when a news agency polls their own viewers about the President. Fox watches usually poll that the guy is a schumck and CBS polls that hes a saint.


Cant get any "real" numbers when you only ask one side.

 

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As my statistics professor once told me, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.."

IF you obtain your samples in a completely random manner, then you can make VERY accurate inferences about the population as a whole, based on the sample.

If your sample is biased, you will obtain very WRONG inferences about the population as a whole.


So, asking every 3rd person you see wearing orange, walking south on a rainy day in 15 different cities.. who they voted for in the last election would probably give you a very accurate sample to judge the population on..

Standing outside the Republican or Democratic national headquarters and asking the same question as people leave the office would probably not give you an accurate sample.


Blizzard has the numbers for the entire population, there is no need for statistical inference for them to know whats up.

Without them releasing that information, the best we could hope for is a guess.

With that said, however, there are people on this board who play differently, have different goals in mind when they login, and lets face it, even people here who despise each other, all agreeing on several points...

Friends/guildmates are leaving/have left the game.
The game is not as fun as it used to be.
The devs don't care.
Classes are broken (healing)
They have left the game personally for the reasons above.


While this is not a scientific study, to ignore these facts is folly. People that post such things here are seasoned gamers...They are not blind, nor stupid.

They see this decline happening...and it is real.

Based on that, I would wager that even though those graphs are somewhat biased, in that only those with the plugin actually report anything, that bias can be accounted for, and we would find that they are a fairly accurate representation of the population, especially given the size of the sample...(it only takes 30 or so data points for a sample to take on the characteristics of a normal distribution)...


Again it all amounts to a "guess" without some properly and randomly sampled data..but I feel confident that sub numbers are not holding steady, and are not increasing, which only leaves them moving in the direction that these graphs imply....

Downward.

 

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Well, said Gutter. That sums up my point above.

 

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Gutter just made a fanboi cry and somewhere a kitten has met its maker o.0

 

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