Several issues on this forum are very hotly debated (Opposed Evasion springs to mind), and in some situations I honestly can't tell how many people are in favor of a given change. I've been reluctant to post my feelings about such issues on the forum because I think my feedback will get lost in the firestorm surrounding them.

I also participated in the D&D Next beta, and Wizards of the Coast had a very good system for collecting player feedback in an organized manner. Every so often, the dev team would send out a link to an online survey containing many specific questions about the game rules. Many of the questions were in multiple choice form so results could easily be tallied electronically. Each playtester was encouraged to submit their feedback this way, so the dev team could get a good feel for how the player base as a whole felt about certain rules.

FFG devs, is there a way to collect player feedback in survey form? I know certain sites like surveymonkey allow for the creation of such polls and let you distribute them via email to many people at once. This might make things easier for you guys as well -- as far as I can tell, most of your playtesting feedback comes from posts on the forums and individual emails, neither of which are well suited for gathering quantitative data.

Polls are only as good as the questions they ask and that's a science in and of itself. The early D&DN polls were terrible as an example of this. They'd ask questions like "Did you like the Fighter Y/N?" with no real way of conveying why you answered the way you did. If you had put out a poll about the original beta asking "Do you like the new direction?" the "No" answers would be split between "It's not OW" and "It's not different enough". Asking good questions is hard.

At this point it's probably too late for FFG to incorporate anything beyond small tweaks, so this kind of feedback wouldn't be all that effective. It would have been a nice thing to have a playtesting feedback form with specific questions on the new mechanics for each update, but I guess FFG figured the normal channels would suffice.

I've been reluctant to post my feelings about such issues on the forum because I think my feedback will get lost in the firestorm surrounding them.

Post what you think. Haters gonna hate.