After all, what you want here is the % of how many consoles that brake down right?
No! It was never an attempt to pin down a percentage failure rate for any box. The idea is to get a view of problems, including between this gen and last gen. Clearly XB360 failure rate is much, much higher than other boxes. Even PS2, generally regarded as an fairly unreliable machine, is managing better overall than XB360 at the moment. This poll doesn't pin XB360's failure rate at 5% or 10% or 2% or 40%, but just shows that of the population of gamers on this board, of 107 XB360s bought, 42 customers have had their box die on them over the last 18+ months.
As to the point of liars, you can never be sure that people are telling the truth, but on the whole they do. That's the basis of fact-finding polls. You expect some bogus numbers in them, but most people who care to give an opinion give a truthful one. Do you really think there's enough liars and cheats on this board to swing the voting one way or another? Are the false records of dead XB360s one or two, or a couple of dozen? Furthermore among the false voting, you'd need them all to lie the same way. You'd need a couple of dozen people to say their XB360 died when it didn't, and yet have no fanboys voting their PS3 died when it didn't. As this is a platform neutral forum, what reason is there to think XB360 would get a vastly more negative bias than either other platform? Why have 20 peeps falsely registered XB360 failure yet there isn't 20 peeps falsely claiming PS3 and Wii failure?
Further, are we sure the pollers are voting correctly? Now, just take a look at the B3D poll, you can already tell its flat out wrong. Why? Because most people are only voting once, they vote "Yes my x360 has died". They dont vote that their current X360 is alive and well.
That's because I asked them not too, so yes, they're voting right...
"Where you have received a replacement for a dead console, do not list it as a working unit"
And 99,9% of everybody who has had a dead x360 has gotten a replacement, but if you cannot vote for both, how on earth are you going to get anything that is remotely accurate?
Of course for every failed XB360 there's a working XB360. But there are also instances of multiple failed XB360s too. And multiple working XB360's for some owners. As we can't do polls with numbers, only checkboxes, numbers were left out. The result is
not a failure rate in %age of units. It is at best, crudely, a measure that when you go into a shop and buy a box, you've such-and-such a chance of it dying over the same time period as the current platform's lifespan. And of course that doesn't cover changes to hardware between older machines and current ones. Once again it's not a failure rate, but a snapshot of the current state of play. Who's had what experiences with what machines?
Finally, I have to ask how do you actually interpret these results? Do you think that out of those 42 reported dead XB360s, 75% of those votes are bogus? Or do you think that these users have misused their equipment and driven it to an early death? It's all very well to highlight the faults and limits of polls, but unless you can present a convincing argument to discredit the entirety of data (such as identifying a poll base as biased in voting habits), the faults of polls are only going to cause a discrepency and not an outright change. Let's say 20% of votes are bunkum. That places XB360's fails at 33, and PS3's and Wii's at 2 a piece. The failure rate of XB360 still remains extraordnarily high - far higher as well than all the last gen consoles which have been out for much longer and should have more wear-and-tear induced failures.
... I hope you have extended warranty ...
