Short experiment : Do players come on the Kronos forums?

The Kronos forums can allow players to see the latest announcements, discussions, player reports, suggestions, guides and much more, yet it always seemed to me that it didn't represent the community correctly by favoring some vocal minorities. Also, knowing where the players look for information can be helpful for the Kronos team to better select how and where they spread their messages (whether on forums, main webpage, reddit, Facebook, in-game messages, etc.).

I thus decided to ask 170 random Horde Kronos players (roughly 30 per 10 level range) with in-game whispers the following question :

Do you read the Kronos forums and if so, is it on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, or randomly? Thanks!

The results :

97 answers total (57% of players polled)

[Google spreadsheet]

 

• 9 Not yet (9%)
• 29 No / never (30%)
• 12 Daily (12.5%)
• 14 Weekly (14.5%)
• 6 Monthly (6%)
• 27 Randomly (28%)

About 40% of the players never come on the forums or haven't yet read them and another 30% checks them in a random fashion, that makes about 70% of the population not reliably reading them.

Interestingly those who answered they read the forums the most (daily) were the level 60 players, with 9 over 25 answers, or about 36% of them. Those who read the forums the least (no/never) where nearly nonexistant in the level 60 players, with only 1 saying so among them but were evenly spread among the other level ranges.

Those who hadn't yet read the forums were mostly in the level 10-29 range (7 Not yet among 38 answers). A single level 60 player hadn't yet read the forums.

What I believe this means is that most players don't go on the forums, or very rarely and those who do tend to have level 60 characters. This means that the forum posts are likely biased towards a certain viewpoint (how level 60 players see the game) and leveling players are under-represented. Note that this data doesn't take into account if they participate on the forums, as maybe many come on them but never post or create threads. The more usage of the forums, the greater the probability that they also participate on them. The more time has been spent on the server, the greater the chances that they have read the forums.

TLDR : The forums are good to communicate with level 60 players and get their feedbacks but they will likely miss the low-level players and their opinions. Other options (in-game mails? on-login messages?) should be used to communicate with them.

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