Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

News and announcements from the worldwide Blood Bowl players' association

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sann0638
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Re: Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

Post by sann0638 »

Survey results now available! http://www.thenaf.net/2015/10/survey-results/

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Re: Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

Post by WhatBall »

Good job all.

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Re: Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

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Survey Results - TT Organiser Edition
One of the main aspects of the NAF is promoting the hobby worldwide, and this often takes the form of tabletop tournaments. Although this is certainly not an exclusive mechanism (see the work to get tournaments onto FUMBBL as an example), it is perceived by many to be the aspect of our hobby that the NAF has the most responsibility for as few others are doing it. Because of this I wanted to see if the data could help answer 2 questions.

1. What can be done to get people who have not attended a tabletop tournament to attend one?
2. What needs to be kept doing to ensure those people attending tabletop tournaments continue to do so?

Also apologies in advance that I don't expect this post to be mobile friendly.


Data Preparation
The first thing that needs to be done with any data set is preparation. In particular there were some situations within how the survey was conducted that I felt could significantly skew the results. The survey itself was conducting almost entirely online (as far as I could see), using the talkfantasyfootball, FUMBBL, and Cyanide forums, and then later the Cyanide Blood Bowl 2 facebook page. This already creates a skew to those people who do not frequent these media, and that needs to be taken account of within the results. Due to the manner of how the survey was presented I did not see a way to identify the source channel by which the respondent found the survey, although the person who replied "FUMBBL, screw dem others" is probably an easy guess. I would suggest that future surveys should ask this question.

Despite this I wanted to take a closer look at the impact of the facebook post. Fortunately this came at a specific time that was easy for me to track (6th October, 5pm), and came late enough in the survey cycle for me to suspect that it was easy to identify. Although people undertaking the survey after this time would not necessarily be from this channel, a check of the data gave me enough confidence that most of them would be.

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The initial buzz followed by the smooth trailing off is as expected for a survey of this type. There were 2 events on the 22nd Sep and the 6th Oct. I suspect that the first corresponded to the release of BB2, but I did not feel that it was significant enough to apply any cleaning. The second event however was stark, and because of this I split the data into 'Before' and 'After' the Facebook post was made.

The next item of information I was interested in was the activity of the tournament player. There were 2 questions to help decide this, regarding the number of TT games played. One question was in total and the other in the last 12 months. I decided to focus on the total question, as I understand that life circumstances might mean a year off, and that people who had stopped playing were likely to be different from those that had never played and I did not want to group the two. This is something that I intend on revisiting, as a potential 3rd question of how to get players to come back is also relevant.

Within the number of TT games played I decided that due to the low survey size (from a statistical basis, not criticising) that I did not want to get the groups to be too small as we were already likely to verge on volatility in many areas. I decided therefore for a simple 3 groups, of "Not a TT player", "Low TT player", and "High TT player". One weakness of my analysis is that I did not spend much time on creating the boundaries for these groups, and simply attributed them as None, 1-20 and everything else (except blanks) respectively.

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Possibly as expected we see a difference between the Before and After groups (I'll do a follow up post with some more information here, but it's nothing unexpected). Two quick points to note. There were 605 "After" responses, and even if all of them were BB2 players that would still only represent a 1% response rate. If the NAF wish to reach these players then other channels may be required. Also there were more people who had not played a TT tournament in the "Before" group as the total number of "After" responses. This might be because those people (maybe FUMBBLrs?) are quite active on the forums and in the community and therefore more likely to respond to a survey, but through whatever reason are uninterested in TT tournaments. There's no evidence for this here, but I make the point to suggest that if this were the case then it will be much easier for the NAF to engage with this audience.


TT results
Firstly the "Before" group.

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As expected the respondents that had not attended a TT gave a neutral response far more often. Trophies, commemorative giveaways, and on site accommodation ranked highly in their responses, suggesting that all 3 of these should be part of any tournament seeking to attract players new to the TT scene. Two day events had the fewest VP and the second largest VN responses. Initially this may not make sense given how popular on site accommodation was, but may be indicative of people wishing to stay for the evening, which also scored quite well.

There was little to differentiate on trophies, commemorative giveaways, and on-site accommodation from players who had played in TTs before and those that had not (just less neutral responses). These were the top 3 VP, and VP + P responses for all 3 groups.

The questions that differed the most across experience groups was around the Handicap system, which ranked 7th for those who had not played a TT before, and 4th for those who played a lot.

The question that was the most divisive was around the hobby. Most of the questions were generally more positive with more experienced respondents, as the negatives remained about the same and the neutral responses were replaced with positive responses (quick note - the correct thing for me to do would be to remove all neutral responses, but I thought that leaving them in would be more accessible). The hobby question however was just a divisive issue, with both the VP+P increasing with experience (19%, 31%, 30%) and the VN+N increasing with experience (21%, 31%, 39%). Sportsmanship was similar, with VP+P (28%, 37%, 31%) and VN+N (15%, 19%, 29%) squeezing the neutrals. This suggests that a single tournament would be unable to accommodate the wishes of those responding, and that as long as you can find substitutes the larger events should avoid implementing these. However the possibility of a tournament that had these doing well by attracting those interested in these aspects does look likely.


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Those people responding after the Facebook post generally answered in the same way, but with less of a gap in most questions. The Hobby question was just as divisive, and the top 3 liked features were trophies, commemorative giveaways, and on site accommodation. Sportsmanship once again was highest in the low attending group, suggesting that they have given it a go and been put off by some of their opponents. Two day events, which were generally more popular with more experience in the Before group were now far more divisive. Alcohol on site was both a little more and a little less popular.

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Summary
I'll leave you to draw further conclusions, and if anyone has specific questions then do ask. If nothing else I hope that this has sparked a few more questions for others looking at the data to consider. For me the next natural step would be to see what differences there are across different locations to see if organisers need to adapt their tournament based on the people who would attend. But as I said please note that this was primarily an online survey, and so may be skewed by that.

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Re: Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

Post by Baduk »

Thanks for sharing. Very informative but some of those graphs are hard to read without the colours explained.

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Re: Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

Post by Shteve0 »

Good stuff Wulfryn! Entertaining analysis :)

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Re: Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

Post by mzukerman »

So in an interview of the typical Blood Bowl player: "I am a 40-yr old male living in Great Britain, having learned the game back in 3rd edition but play online on Cyanide's Chaos Edition as well in private leagues. I'm not a big tournament player but I have growing interest thanks to people posting on forums and just in casual conversation. When I do make the dive into tournaments, I'll likely travel up to a couple of hours if they've got snazzy trophies and awesome giveaways. Maybe I should join the NAF because I haven't done so yet. I'll probably play one of the 3 teams I own - but I'll proxy to get that awesome halfling experience in there.

"There aren't too many leagues that I know about (that league finder tool needs to work better!) so I haven't really played many. When I did, it was a fixed schedule league that I helped form of about 10-14 teams where we play most of our games in each others' houses. OBBLM is the bomb for tracking the league, but I've used homemade spreadsheets too.

"I'm checking out new strategies on BBTactics but I only really use the Internet for research. I stay away from Facebook and Twitter whenever possible. I've listened to Three Die Block on my phone-thingy and I've heard of this Both Down podcast too. Especially since those BD guys are big into theme like I am. I'll paint them myself (as bad as I am) so that they match the theme I've chosen.

"I'd probably play more Blood Bowl but it cuts into my other board gaming time. I will get my fix in though with Fantasy Flight's BB: Team Manager.

"I think I'm ready for the next ruleset. Maybe Khorne or Brets should be included? Heck, we might as well go for LRB7."

I'm amazed at how much I have in common with Joe Typical. I'm so pedestrian...

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Post by Shteve0 »

Brilliant! :D

I think sometimes, for all the comedy value, it's important to remember that the vast majority of people who've played Blood Bowl are not veterans of 500 tournament games, or online clawpomb minmaxers, or serial tabletop league winners with a perfect memory both of the CRP TTM sequence and the IGMOY rules (or when frenzy used to allow unlimited blocks or whatever). Not that the views of those people aren't important, by any stretch, as their insights are invaluable in mitigating environments becoming stale over time ; but nevertheless it's often useful to check back and remember that for a great many people the game is not 'solved' by any degree, and even concepts such as the relative tactical merits of, say, wrestle over block are not obvious.

Great post, really enjoyed it :)

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Re: Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

Post by SunDevil »

Just wanted to add my thanks to all the people who worked so hard to put this survey together. Sadly, I didn't fill one out (I just bought a game store so have been stupidly busy) but I will make time for the next go 'round.

Well done, sirs!

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Re: Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

Post by Wulfyn »

My club has had some recent experience of this. We were contacted by a lonfon based warhammer group consisting of exactly that Joe average player. They mentioned a third London league and by a total fluke I pkayed one of them on fumbbl. Went to meet him at the shop they run their league from and his opponent regularly goes to a fourth club that have been playing for ages as well. Pretty much none of them (50+ people) knew anything of the tournament scene, were amazed to hear there was a world cup, and had only heard of the NAF via their league portal if at all.

So basically me 18 months ago.

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sann0638
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Re: Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

Post by sann0638 »

Any top tips on contacting people like that?

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Re: Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

Post by Regash »

Well, I just typed "blood bowl" in the search box of google.

Mike, being no. 37 on the list is not good enough for the NAF!
Especially, if most of the hits are related to Cyanide.
FUMBBL is hit no. 18!
Heck, even the german forums are before the NAF at no. 34!
You definitely need some improvement here!

Let's be honest, who clicks 4 pages down on a google search?
How can people find you when they don't know you exist?
And to me, the website is not very accessible, looks rather confusing but that might just be me.

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sann0638
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Re: Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

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Anything constructive? Saying "this isn't good", isn't very helpful.

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Re: Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

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Re: Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

Post by Regash »

Do I really need to spell out "Improve your search ratings!"
I thought it was clear.

Well, dode74 did the job already anyway.

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sann0638
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Re: Great Big Blood Bowl Survey

Post by sann0638 »

I've tried to make thenaf.net as clear as possible, but constructive comments welcome.

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