f13.net

I need a bit of help. For various reasons I need to cobble together some quick and dirty data on gamers and their habits. Not what you get up to when the girlfriend is out of town and you can intercept the credit card statement before she sees it, but rather how you rate various sources of information about games.

If you could take a few minutes to do the very short survey on my blog I'd be very grateful indeed. Yeah I know it's not very scientific but I don't need that much depth, I just need some numbers I haven't pulled out of my ass.

Survey is here (http://antipwn.wordpress.com/2008/03/13/help-wanted/).

Prolly work better if it was an actual poll. ;)

Yeah but the basic version of Wordpress hosted on the Wordpress servers doesn't let you do that. I should probably get a domain and some hosting eventually.

Sorry for the double cut and paste.  My mouse got twitchy and I didn't realize it until I posted

I fixed it, thanks for taking part.

Might want to be letters or something by the choices so people could just type 1b, 2a, etc. Also makes it easier to parse the results with a script.

I'm pretty sure Wordpress has a poll plugin you could add, somewhere.

I think most of my 5's should of been 4's.  Oops.

(http://whiteafrican.com/wp-content/_snake2.jpg)

I put this comment in question #7:


Basically, I trust patch notes from the official websites but as a good source of in-game information they are generally outdated, and for opinions I view them as propaganda (so skewed as to be worthless). "News" is a pretty broad term and so a more narrow definition would have probably gotten more specific and useful data. I go for one place for my opinions, another for my news/previews, and another for official releases such as patch notes.

What he just said.

I did it, but i'm not sure my comment posted.

For some reason yours went to spam but I rescued it. Not sure why it singled you out.

The terms are a bit vague I know but I'm trying to put some ballpark numbers to replace gut feeling. I'm not trying to make any kind of statistically accurate survey of all gamers. I say news to mean anything that might be of interest to a gamer - including reviews of community events, interviews with staff, analysis of announced features etc. I take your point about certain sources being much more reliable for different things but again, it's more of a general 'If I saw this posted on Kotaku would I be more likely to trust it than if I happened to read it on the WoW forums instead'.

The only thing I'd note is that by pulling in this group, you're going to get people who are strongly predisposed to make decisions about games based on trusted social networks. Now I think that's the more valuable group of gamers anyway, for a whole host of reasons, but asking for responses from here guarantees that this is what you'll hear back.

I agree. I think most of us here are a little weary of trusting "official sites" and "the gaming press" in general. I know I am.

I did the poll.

This isn't the only place I spammed the link. I asked on some forums that aren't specifically to do with computer games as well as my guild forums and a few other places.