What's the point of a survey if it isn't completely open and you're only asking select people to complete it?

What's the point of asking a question when you know there's only one answer? This isn't meant as a dig at you, it's often a valid tactic in politics, law, debate, philosophy, marriage, and possibly even surveys. I hope I will find out more when and if the survey people have more information for us. Beyond that, we may only speculate.Jeff ShylukSenior Staff ReviewerAVSIM

And ask rhetorical questions... :(

You aim to establish a random population that acts as a cross section of a community. Making an open survey, particularly in this field, would most likely result in useless data, as many people do the survey again and again, attempting to distort the real world picture for their own means... in an attempt to force some aspect of the development through...It certainly looked official to me, as did the questions...I hope the devs stick with FSX9/FSX for some time... that will keep me happy for a few more years...Andrew

It is indeed useless to let the entire internet take the survey without any control mechanism, such as email confirmation or even IP logging, but sending out the survey only to FS Insider subscribers, if that is indeed what happened, is not random and indeed useless at the other end of the spectrum. By open, I mean without NDA. With today's technology you can easily control who takes the survey without having to conceal its existence. Really, something like this always gets out. And don't get even me started on the legality of it all or lack thereof.First they didn't communicate, around FSX they did (although, did they really listen?! <- again with the rhetorical question), now it's back to misguided secrecy. It doesn't really matter at the end of the day though, I think Aerosoft will be able to deliver a much better sim than MS. A sim free of the shackles of MS, embracing and facilitating third party addons and not trying to control them.I too will be happy for several more years while we await a new sim.:(

I wouldn't be too hard on them. If you are possibly in a new group at MS, who's existence hasn't been publicly confirmed yet, and you want to gather some data from current users for whatever purpose, do you:a. post a message on a public blog, forum, etc announcing your not-officially-existing-yet group is conducting a surveyb. use an existing mailing list of folks who have asked to be contacted directly by MS about your survey subjectI think option b is the only way you are going to get upper management approval for the survey :-> Once the new group/product has been officially confirmed to exist, I imagine you will see some of the members of that possible group showing up online, blogging again, etc.Disclaimer - I've been going out of my way to NOT know what any possibly existing new group in MGS is doing, there are folks here on the forums who know more about what that group might be doing than I do, so anything above is purely conjecture on my part :->Tim