Collectors vs Casual vs Competitive

[Kaptain Badrukk]

I only collect, and don't play at all 8.70%
I play sometimes, but mostly just collect 40.22%
I play casually reasonably frequently 31.52%
I play both casually and competitively 16.30%
I go to all the tournaments I can 1.63%
What's 40K? 1.63%

Thank's DL for running this lovely opinion poll.
I've been waiting to see how this turned out, and I'd say it pretty much backs up what I've been feeling for a while now.
Lots of us play, most of us irregularly, and a small proportion are heavy tournament goers.

What this tells me is that the general feeling that GW staffers have (or had in 2011 when I left) that the majority of their customers aren't tourney heads is pretty much upheld.
Now 18%(ish) attending the odd tournament or more is a pretty big amount, but when you consider that we don't really represent the in-store demographic then you can see why from their point of view the tournament meta isn't a big deal (I doubt that there's many of the younger kids on here [correct me if I'm wrong]).
72%(ish) Do play, but well over half of them are primarily collectors and the rest define themselves as casual and without conjecture we can't decide what they feel about the tournament meta, although it'd be fair to speculate that our 40.22% aren't hugely bothered.

What we do know is easily boiled down into ten points;
1: Bloggers and the like write "what generates hits" not "what proportionally represents the opinion of the majority".
2: The unhappy are the most vocal.
3: The happy are the least vocal.
4: GW are AWFUL at addressing the imbalance of their games.
5: Their opinion that the majority of their customers can still enjoy their products without them being bothered is probably born out by the results of this survey.
6: That it really wouldn't hurt them to, and they'd get NO complaints from 100% of their customers.
7: That this punishing release schedule and the constant reformation of what one can and can't put in a GW legal army is only going to make things worse for the vocal minority.
8: That by the ned of next week another one of the BOLS big-names will come on the front-page with an article that bemoans the meta/design of GW's products.
9: That GW DO need to react to the fact that they're no longer the only player in town, but the way to do it is unlikely to be shoring up their rule-set for the benefit of the tourney-meta minority.
10: That this hobby is what WE choose to make of it, I could get my models and play a game of 2nd edition right now(provided I could find an opponent) and GW could do diddly to stop me after all.

I guess what this rambling wall of text from old Kap really sums up to is this, we make the game. We do, honestly.
We tournement players [I'm in the 16%] determine how WAAC the tourneys are, and how the meta is therefore affected. TOs and GW can tighten the rules, we'll still find every last thing to give ourselves an edge.
Warmahordes and Dystopian Wars teach me this, that even with a tight rule-set and decent army list balance there's still room for list building and army selection to help you win (there are some clear winners and losers in the pile even if the spread is WAY tighter than GW's).
We collectors let GW know it's ok to up their prices in silly ways (hardback army books) or stagnate the setting (ret-con inserted Marine units ahoy!) because we buy it anyway. The message this send sis that they can keep doing it.
WE The internet peoples, then shape the opinions of the next, impressionable generation of players with our "truth" of how things are and surely as GW shapes with theirs. As a staffer we could tell which kids would end up being "that guys" or "the customer who talks about stuff from the internet all the time" pretty quickly based on what warhammer site the kid started frequenting first, we we're pretty damn accurate too.

Ok I've had my vent for the day. Ignore me, disagree with me, agree with me, feel free to internet as you will. Me I'm headed off upstairs, I've got 5 heavily converted Tau Battlesuits sat waiting for me to paint and the first season of Grimm on DVD to keep me company while I paint.

[DarkLink]

I would be cautious about a couple of your points. This was an observational study with a small, biased sample. In particular, I noticed that a lot of the collectors mentioned that they would like to play, but didn't have anyone to play with simply due to geological location. I also think I worded the casual vs. competitive answers poorly, as the line between the two is very blurry. A lot of "casual" players may attend tournaments as a means of getting in games, but consider themselves casual rather than competitive because they're not playing specifically to win all the prizes even though they do play in tournaments. After seeing the initial responses, I immediately had a couple of follow-up questions that I might open a poll on at a later date.Also, quite contrary to the idea that GW should ignore what you refer to as the vocal minority, what I saw was that about 50% of players are just that: players. Since GW produces rules and makes quite a bit of profit off of them, and since a significant portion of their customer base makes regular use of those rules, there's a clear reason to utilize those rules to expand their market to people they either don't engage, or don't fully engage, with their current "we're just a model company strategy".

[Wolfshade]

I would echo DL's caution adding that self reported studies are inherently unreliable

[Psychosplodge]

We could just go with

Are you competitive?

Are you casual?

[Eldar_Atog]

We could just go with

Are you competitive?

Are you casual?

The second question would have to be expanded. Casual is everything except for the heavy tournament player. The beer and nuts crew, the story driven players, the painter that likes to show his/her work off, the rules lawyer that hates tournie play... they all fall under the casual label.

[Psychosplodge]

But we are comparing the two, what kind of casual is largely irrelevant unless that was the original question, we could then have a further breakdown as you say so we get to have even more polls...

[Eldar_Atog]

But we are comparing the two, what kind of casual is largely irrelevant unless that was the original question, we could then have a further breakdown as you say so we get to have even more polls...

To truly compare the 2, you'd need a strict definition of what casual means. I've seen people say that casual is only the beer and nuts crew while others (myself included) say it everything outside of tournie play. You can build a poll with just these 2 questions but it's not going to be very accurate. A small sample size plus loose definitions will heavily skew your results.

[Psychosplodge]

It's a poll on the internet, it requires you to find the site, and then be arsed to participate. Accuracy is non existent

[Eldar_Atog]

Lol, true.. I just don't want to have read about how one group or another is wrong because of the poll. It would give me a headache

[DarkLink]

We could just go withAre you competitive?Are you casual?

But how do you define the two? Most tournament players, the 'competitive' crew, also plays casually extensively. I would suspect a very large percentage of players who do play competitively at tournaments would overall self-identify as casual.