4Game

Hello fellow Escapers!

Some of you might remember the Rule Feedback Survey we did about a month ago. I am here today to show the results of that survey and give some insight into the data we collected, how everything was run, and what became of the survey and suggestions you gave.

The idea of the survey was thought up and run by myself with help from the rest of the mod staff. The survey was a sort of experiment with 3 main goals: See how much of a response we can get, see how effective this form of feedback is, and to see what kind of discussion it can generate among the mod team to help improve the sub. On all of these points I feel that we met or exceeded what was expected. The survey was run for a total of just 4 days (April 30-May 3). The number of responses were monitored each day to see how it was doing. At the end of the fourth day we had gotten just a handful of new responses, little more than the previous day; this is the main reason why it was up for such a short amount of time, but that’s alright because we still got a lot of useful information!

I will be attempting to embed a few photos later in this post, but in case they break, as well as for transparency reasons, here is a link to the graphs of each rating question.

In total we received 238 responses on the survey. As of the time I am writing this up there are currently 326,230 subscribers on the sub and we are getting an average of ~2million unique pageviews per month. So, doing the math the survey responses represent only 0.0007% of subscribers and only ~0.0001% of unique monthly page viewers. I think this clearly shows that the results of the survey need to be taken with a grain of salt as such a small portion of the sub is being represented. While the turnout was quite small, I still see it as a success as we had no idea if we would even get 100 responses. I feel that with a survey held for longer and held during a more active time for the community we could get far more responses next time.

Side note: As stated in the survey post, any responses that were abusive, hostile, included hate speech, etc. would be voided and not counted. There was a total of 11 responses that were excluded due to these conditions. Any and all suggestions by those 11 people were not considered.

Now I’d like to show you some of the data and point out some interesting points I found. Below is a screenshot of the results for the rating of the rules overall.

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https://preview.redd.it/fimbxygbqi251.png?width=686&format=png&auto=webp&s=6b651b698db187c566caf1446ba062711fa909c9

The overall ratings were a good mix across the board as you can see. After putting all the data in a spreadsheet I was about to do the math and average the ratings for the rules overall, which came out to 6.2. This is important and I will be referencing this average in a bit, for now lest move on.

Below is an image of the ratings for just rule 1.

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https://preview.redd.it/1ciy75qcqi251.png?width=686&format=png&auto=webp&s=4c8fc25229e02353c900b8bb58b7a6760f81d1b3

I feel it is important now to mention that there was a massive amount of 10/10 ratings for rules 2-9. This means that out of all of the rules the community seems the most unhappy with rule 1, and as you can clearly see, rule 1 has a fairly even split between 1/10 and 10/10 ratings. After looking over the comments/suggestions for rule 1 it becomes quite clear that these ratings are due to people either being in favor of bringing back memes or happy with having memes on another sub.

Side note: There were a LOT of other suggestions for this rule besides memes concerning megathreads, low effort content, images of the game, etc. Memes, however, were clearly a major issue for this rule.

Thanks to the spreadsheet I was able to find the averages of the ratings for each individual rule, then take those individual ratings and average those in order to compare the individual ratings to the overall rating. The result was quite interesting as the average of the individual ratings came out to 8.2. Compare this to the 6.2 average rating for the overall rule rating question and we see a startling discrepancy. By glancing at the graphs for the rules its clear that since rule 1 is the only one without a mass majority giving it a 10/10, in fact, its totally split. What does this mean? Simply that people found rule 1 to be the biggest issue out of the rules as a whole and thus weighted it heavier when thinking about the rules as a whole.

Now that we have looked at some of the interesting points of data I’d like to go over what happened after the survey ended. What happened with all the data? Why’d it take so long for this post to come out? What the hell is going on with the other stickied post?

After the data was collected and survey closed I exported all the ratings, comments/suggestions into a spreadsheet. From there I single handedly read over every single comment/suggestion, which took me 8+ hours over the course of 2 days to do. I went through the comments on each individual rule one at a time and copy/pasted the suggestions into a word doc to be discussed by the mod team later. Once the suggestions were copied I organized them based on the general topic they talked about. This proved extremely helpful as it gave us a basis to direct our discussions around.

Side note: Since I was just looking for the suggestions I did not copy any positive comments like “I like this rule, keep up the good work guys, This rule works really well, etc”. I did however, read them all. I would like to point out here that on the whole for every negative comment about a rule saying it was terrible there was a positive comment saying it was just fine, which I found interesting (again, another split in the community like the rule 1 ratings). Moving on…

After each suggestion was listed and organized I organized discussion and voting on each suggestion with the mod team. The discussions and voting took us 5 days to do (seriously, you guys rock! There was so many suggestions to go over). I strongly feel that the discussion generated was greatly needed and highly constructive. All said and done we ended up rewording every single rule and even removing one of them. After a few days it became clear to the team that there was still more to be discussed. Everything had sparked some extra discussion amung the team and some mods had brought up several good suggestions to issues raised by the community. So we organized the first official meeting to tray and talk and hammer out everything.

The first meeting took some time to organize but it ended with us removing a couple rules and totally rewriting every single one. Several suggestions were proposed, discussed, and worked to be added into the rules. We took time to look at the rulesets of other popular gaming subs to help us reword and rework our own (taking into account that Tarkov is a different game with a different community).

About a week after the first meeting a second one was organized to allow for those not present for the first to more vocally voice their opinions and allow us to hammer out the final few details. In the end, the rules got a total rework, some were scrapped altogether, and we discussed and cleared up some slight confusion concerning moderation of a few cases. I won’t get into all the nitty gritty details of the changes here, that’s for the other stickied post.

Thats the basic jist of it! Although it was a short lived survey I feel that it was a success overall simply due to how much discussion it generated within the mod team. I hope to run another survey for much longer next year in the hopes of getting a fair portion of input from our subscribers. Thank you to everyone who was able to give feedback!