Taking a Look at the new WotC Survey

I saw the new WotC Survey that is out and I thought I would take a look at it and see what it asks and what it doesn't ask.

The survey is located at this link below and this is what  was posted with it at their Twitter account.

Dungeons & Dragons ‏ @Wizards_DnD Sep 12 More What are the things that make you play D&D? The open world, opportunities to optimize your character, to tell a shared story with friends, iconic art, or maybe all of the above! Take our survey and help shape the future of what we're working on at Wizards!

The first question asks what your favorite D&D setting is and immediately they get off on the wrong foot by not listing Blackmoor as one of the choices, so I selected other and entered (Blackmoor and my homebrew, why was Blackmoor not listed?)

Next they asked about your favorite character classes and they make two mistakes, one is that they don't let you rank your three answers in order of preference and two is they failed their inclusiveness check and didn't list the iconic Magic-User as one of the choices.

I'm not going to hit all of them, as that would be a very long post.

They ask if you have ever played D&D? If you are not answering yes to that question, you shouldn't be completing the questionnaire IMO.

Then they have a whole slew of questions designed to split the poll takers into categories. They ask

How important are the following to you when you play D&D?

And then they have multiple lists of ten questions at a time and they could have just simplified it by asking the following questions.

Are you a min-maxer? I/E are you only there for the character build and to exploit the character build process?

Are you a power-gamer? I.E are you only there to be superman and kill things?

Are you a munchkin? I.E. are you only there to be the center of attention, be superman, win every time, get all the cool stuff and do it at the expense of everyone else at the table?

If you are one of the above, the odds are high that you are all three. The odds are also high that everyone else at the table hates you.

Are you a normal role-player? I.E. are you there to have fun with your friends and explore a really cool world?

Then they ask questions designed to find out if you want to buy things like miniatures and they ask questions to find out if you like railroads where your decisions don't really matter, in other words are you going to buy their modules and pre-built settings and all of the other non-DIY things they sell.

It is telling that they don't ask any questions to find out if you would buy items that support DIY and it is telling that they have not asked you to tell them what you would like to buy. It is a very tone deaf survey designed to only tell them what they want to hear and not to find out any truly useful information.

They ask all together 80 questions in this vein.

They ask a number of questions that boil down to this, do you do weird unpredictable things, random nonsense things, things that are designed to mess with everyone else at the table and disrupt the game? In other words, they are asking are you the jerk at the table? One of these questions is 

Being disruptive and contrarian to make things more interesting.

That doesn't make things more interesting, that only messes things up for everyone else at the table. Good DM's kick these people out of the game quickly to establish that we are here to have fun and not to just mess with other people.

In many of the questions there is this assumption that people are not role-playing, there is an assumption that there is a story that must be followed and that you are not in a game that grows organically, which is true if you are using their setting and their modules. They assume that you are only playing in a game that consists of one railroad after another. Only a very few of their questions consider that you could be playing in a game where player choices matter.

Then there are many questions about when and how you got introduced to D&D.

Virtually all of their questions should have had a place for comments. For instance instead of just checking the box that it has been over a year since I bought a D&D product I could have told them, I haven't purchased anything since 1982, but if they would make something that would support DIY gaming I would again consider buying from them.

They did have a few spots for comments and I told them

I don't like rules that don't support the original paradigm of open-ended play and modules are of zero interest to me

You don't have any products that I am aware of that support DIY homebrew gaming, and there are dozens, if not hundreds of products you could sell by pdf and POD that would support DIY gaming.

A lot of the remaining questions had only to do with marketing, how much do you already spend with us and do you own this or that and will you buy this or that. But one question I found really strange,

 In a typical week, how many hours do you watch D&D-related video content?

Rather oddly, they never asked the more important questions "In a typical week, how many hours do you spend playing D&D, working on D&D stuff and discussing D&D?"

But then modern D&D is not about playing the game is it? They leave that to the old school crowd.