DBMM Report Card Results – Part 4

Introduction
This is the fourth, and final, part of of my look at the results from a recent online survey into player’s attitudes to DBMM.

• Part 1 – Basic findings
• Part 2 – The rule book
• Part 3 – Playing the game
• Explanation of results format

Issues & Wishes
Two questions in the survey were designed to assess which internet resources players used to resolve their issues:

• Internet resources used – 38% of players used the Yahoo! DBMMlist whilst 22% used the DBMM forum and 19% used this blog.
• Quality of resources  - The DBMMlist was rated as either good or excellent by 62% of respondents.  This blog’s rating was 43% whilst the DBMM forum’s rating was 40%.

Surprisingly, the DBMM wiki was only used by 8% of players with 16% rating is as either good or excellent.  I wonder if this is because it is the least well publicised of the internet resources available.

The popularity of the Yahoo! DBMMlist doubtless stems from the active presence of Phil Barker  who uses it to tackle his issues and release new ideas and concepts.

The final question of the survey simply asked “I wish …”.  As a free text question any analysis runs the risk of being subjective.  So I was careful in my approach. To give an overall flavour I read all 92 responses with wishes, of one sort or another, noting common themes. I then read them a second time tagging entries by theme and noting any themes I’d missed on the first read through.  I repeated the process until no new themes were found.  In this way I categorised 68 of the responses into 9 themes:

Rule book wishes
User friendly / plain English	27
Better layout & presentation	21
Tables, Charts, Index, QRS	5
More diagrams	10
Rules wishes
Faster rule clarifications	4
Clarity	21
Simplicity	20
Fewer bound specific effects	11
Other wishes
More local opponents	6

As respondents had to make and effort and type their wishes should always be given weight.  Personally, I felt a great deal of sympathy with those who wrote “I wish I had someone (or more people) to play with”.

There were a few very specific wishes for things like Blades vs. Warband etc but never more than 1 or 2.  I did spot Baggage as a possible sub-theme perhaps because it should have its own section in the rules.

Summary & Conclusions

• The Yahoo! DBMMlist is by far the  most popular and highly rated internet resource.
• The analysis of the “free text” wishes tends to reflect the findings from the rest of the survey: a better organised and more user friendly rule book was mentioned most often.
• Interestingly, there’s a strong theme of simplicity in the rules apart from the way they are written and presented.

There were two wishes that really struck a chord with me:

“[I wish] the forums had a method of getting an official ruling as too often they are left to  ‘I think the outcome is …’ – where is the ruling body?”
“[I wish] Phil [Barker] would address people’s questions after a divided interpretation surfaces on the [Yahoo! DBMM]list - at the very least!”

I’ve raised this issue before but in the light of the survey results I think it deserves raising again in the hope that it will be dealt with: how do you raise a rules issue and get a definitive, or official, response in a form that avoids repetition?

Finally, I’d like to thank the respondent who wished for the following:

“Two weeks [on a] secluded tropical island with Girls Aloud in heat  [, a]  bottle of [little blue pills] just in case, [and]  bottles of tequila [,]  rum and champagne – that’ll do for starters.”

It made me smile not least because of the fevered nature of the spelling, grammar and punctuation.  The author clearly had something other than typing on his mind.