Lets tie a time based faction lock to something like the war council orders So imagine the SM war council puts out a round of objectives that last anywhere between 1-4 hours to attack and hold the majority of the vehicle factories on the continent. They send out the "Mission" the players receive it and a prompt that says "Warcouncil mission! If you choose to participate in this event you will be unable to play the other races for its duration of Xhrs" Accept or deny mission? If you willingly accept to fight for this faction it is likely because its your main character, the faction your friends play on, or even just your current clan so there is very little reason to gripe about not getting to play with your friends..you choose your favorite race or wherever your friends are during that alert its that simple...imo there is no good reason to refuse such a lockout unless you are a player who always wants to flip flop to the winning side. The battle goes on for that 1-4 hours and everyone is locked in until its complete ensuring no bandwagon jumpers. You can log off at anytime but when you log on you cannot access the other factions until that mission is complete...heck you can even allow them to switch over to the other faction for PVE if you can drop straight into an instance from the strikecruiser imo. As for multi-server arguments, that is irrelevant atm since the game is being build around single server massive gameplay like no other...to segment the playerbase would defeat part of the core design
Cool, I hope it can be redone, if not i will make a new thread. But the question remains: how many people is enough to satisfy you and consider the poll valid? Krage said: Interesting idea, I wonder if it can be well implemented. I just hope the number of this kind of missions would be high enough to play them almost constantly to minimalise exposure to the toxic behaviour.
It is an interesting idea, but I have one thought about the application, being that the server is a constant open world and the "mission" cannot be instanced, how do you propose locking anyone in or out? The only thing that I can see that could be restricted is if you don't sign up you don't get the XP and RP rewards for completing the mission. There is still no way to stop someone from not signing up to the mission and simply forming a group and joining in, OK maybe they don't get the mission details but they can still turn up where everyone is congregating and get a gist of what is going on and simply join in.
Since the poll has just been re-opened thanks to Djemo and ofc our allmighty techpriest Savij I think it's reasonable to remind the new voters what's it all about (in case somebody doesn't read Brother Kane's explanation on the first page). Faction Locking means implementing several hours of cool down between switching from one faction to another to prevent\reduce various kinds of toxic behaviour like: spying, trolling, hopping to the winning faction, cheating etc. Faction Locking is not permanent.
The comments about the sample size being <1% of the community are irrelevant. The whole purpose of survey and polling research relies on statistical sampling, and very rarely would you go to more than 1% of the population you're sampling. What you're looking for is to show beyond reasonable doubt that there is a statistically significant difference in opinions. Three main components there; 1) An unbiased and non-leading question and unbiased and non-leading answers. This poll (IMO) has a problem because the poll refers to a 'faction lock' where its explanatory text indicates "yes" is actually a vote for a temporary lock, not a permanent one. That may have distorted voting in favour of the 'no' responses if people didn't read the explanation before voting. 2) Ideally it should be a random sample. There's nothing we can do about that here, since polls are self-selecting, so its safest to ignore any result where less than 50 people responded. 3) Enough respondents and degree of difference to be confident it reflects a genuine difference in opinions and not blind luck on the part of who responded. The general standard in research is 95% confidence that the result is genuine and not down to chance, and you'd normally slap a health warning on surveys with fewer than 100 respondents. A poll of 100 people from EC's c.15,000 strong community will have a margin of error of +/- 10% either side of any score. So if 55% of those people say "I prefer faction locks", you can be fairly certain that between 45%-65% of the entire community feels that way. If you have fewer than 100 people, you can still demonstrate a strong indication if the poll is heavily biased towards one single option, because that can have the statistical quirk of reducing the margin of error more than the reduction in numbers increases it by. TL;DR In a two option poll on these forums, where the options are opposites and not misleading, if you want to demonstrate a majority of people prefer option 1 over option 2, then you need to aim for one of the following; At least 55% prefer option 1 (slim majority) 50 total - 69% vote for option 1 100 total - 65% vote for option 1 150 total - 63% vote for option 1 At least 65% prefer option 1 (sizeable majority) 50 total - 79% vote for option 1 100 total - 75% vote for option 1 150 total - 73% vote for option 1 Kanthric, you headcase, I don't do stats - just tell me is this flipping poll defensible or not? Yes, as an indicative view. At the time of this post, the poll has 57 responses and 74% favouring faction locks, suggesting between 63%-85% of the community will favour faction locks. Confusion about the question favours the 'no' vote, so its unlikely to be significantly impacting the results. The poll heading and wording aren't biased, so there's no reason to believe it attracted 'yes' or 'no' votes unfairly. The main problem is that 57 people is too low to entirely write off the impact of it being chance. Its not robust, but its a darn sight better than "I personally believe that most people think that..."
Its always nice to see someone smile after a conversation about statistical significance. Such a rare event - can't think why. Also, I didn't think my work would be following me home this evening.
Just to add, that was a misleading way to put it. It should have read "suggesting between 63%-85% of the community who have a view one way or the other will favour faction locks." I originally put in a note about the benefit of having a 'neutral/don't care/don't know' response if you want to scale it up to talk about what the entire community thinks, because in the absence of one you have to be a little bit careful as the clear 'yes' and 'no' views may both be minority positions (e.g. 42 say 'yes', 15 say 'no', 597 say 'couldn't give a toss'). Then I took it out, thinking "Come on, this is complicated enough for people. We're not doing research stats 101, I'll just point it out if anyone does misinterpret it in that way." Evidently I turned my brain off three minutes later, since I forgot to add the disclaimer, and am now in the slightly embarrassing position of publicly pointing this out to myself. Go me. Its been a long day...
