First Saturdays - Good way to poll players on potential changes/events/etc?
Just had a thought. During First Saturday, players are required to check-in and use a Google Form to upload their stats. This ends up getting processed and then shared to a website.
Would it be a good avenue for Niantic to use the First Saturday stat upload as a location to do a focus group where they ask true/false, multiple choice, and/or open ended questions to get more direct feedback from players who are going out of thier way to participate in the game? It might provide a good pulse from active players beyond just Vanguard/XMA.
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Could work, though there will be a bog wad of players who don't do first Saturdays, either from not enjoying it (like me), not wanting to do it or other reasons, so the focus group might not include certain types of players
Though, there is also the issue that niantic tend not to listen to their player base enough to make a focus group/survey worth the effort
Agreed. It's more possible now with virtual First Saturdays, where the entry requirements are lower and there's no travel required, but there is still a portion of the playerbase that would never get reached. This could be partially mitigated by having a single Google Form that can be emailed to players, posted on Twitter and Instagram, and posted on the Forums.
I recall a survey going around well before the CORE subscription was implemented, asking what kind of benefits players would like from an eventual subscription. I really want to see more surveys in the future that outline a vague list of potential changes (new Drone features, bug fixes, new items, new medals, etc) and ask players which are the highest priority for implementation.
Do people not get the monthly survey? I mean, they have all our email addresses. If they wanted more global surveying, they could do it on the 20th of each month, with more indepth questions.
Someone didn't really understand what I wrote. Probably because you're tilted at me over the matroshka event argument and just wanted another avenue to say "no".
I get a survey maybe once every 6 months or so. Each time I've received it, it has had the same questions:
Or something to the effect. I just checked through the last four months or so of emails from Niantic, and the last one I could find was from January and the survey is no longer available. If there is a recurring survey with varying, specific questions on future changes, I'd love to know how to increase the chance of being sent it.
I get one on the 20th of every month.
But the point is, they can send us surveys whenever they want, with whatever questions they want, if they thought that they'd get usable and useful information out of it.
I've never had a survey about ingress, I've had a couple for pogo but thst was only after paid events like go fest or kanto day.
Do you have the "send me events, offers and updates" option ticked under Email in Settings?
Ah, thst would be why then lol, I dint have ut ticked
I have it ticked and only received 3-4 surveys over 7-8 years...
Check spam? At one point they all got flagged as spam for me, because they were identical posts month after month. I had to add Niantic as a contact and mark it as Not Spam and then I got them back again.
Nothing in spam (I keep my spam folder clean aswell). Probably just never "lucky" to be part of the selection
But again, the point remains. If they want to do a Survey of players, they have a far better option in just sending everyone the survey instead of using First Saturday attendance.
They'd also get the people who quit but might come back, responding.
"Would it be a good avenue for Niantic to use the First Saturday stat upload as a location to do a focus group"
"to get more direct feedback from players who are going out of thier way to participate in the game? It might provide a good pulse from active players beyond just Vanguard/XMA."
@Perringaiden
You're completely missing the OP's question. Yes, we all get surveys already.
Sure, but if they wanted to survey people, they have a ton of methods of doing so. For instance, they could send a survey to all the people who got to a First Saturday, since they know who they are. They don't need to piggyback it on what is actually a player form that Niantic doesn't control.
The Stat Upload form is player created independently for each site. If Niantic wants to ask questions, they can't use that method. It isn't a Niantic controlled "thing".
So you're missing the point that, they can do all these things already using their existing systems. They know who went to First Saturday by what accounts got a point. So they could easily send a survey out to each and every one of them.
The "Stat Upload Form" will never work as a method, because each site's form is owned by one of the organizers of that site. I have a dozen of them on my Google drive from when I led an IFS.
The suggestion has an insurmountable technical limitation, not a conceptual issue.
To put it another way, if you came to a Boston IFS, would you be ok with me personally having complete and unlimited control over what responses were sent to Niantic. That's what you're proposing.
Maybe the email survey participant parameters could be extended. Maybe Niantic set certain qualifiers for recipients of surveys a long time ago [such as: attended x number of events, multiplied by time played, and further similar possibilities]. Niantic could re-evaluate these parameters.
I personally received more email surveys after responding more regularly.
Definitely. A First Saturday survey, through their usual email system, targeting people who attended a First Saturday would be a great way to get focused feedback.
But what about us casuals who don't attend First Saturday?
They can still send you a survey if you have the Email option ticked. It's their best avenue for asking questions (and under utilized).
It would be a good avenue if Niantic wanted to survey players who were specifically interested in engaging with their local community and attending events focused on boosting personal stats. If the questions were about general gameplay then they would be getting biased results from that subset of players.