I think it's much better than what it was, and I think player requests were perfectly reasonable. That said, I think this is one of the areas where Larian just plain goofed. NPCs shouting the same lines ad infinitum doesn't make a city seem more lively, it makes it seem more artificial. Games like Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights did it much better, in my eyes, with a constant but nondescript background murmur.
Background chatter sound effects do happen, in addition to the voiced text. It works well for the marketplace. Vendors attempting to sell their wares in a marketplace are bound to cycle through the same speech repeatedly - only so many different ways to try and sell your cheeses or potions. I think the cheese vendor cycles through four different statements, repeating the same one only once per minute - which isn't bad at all.
I find it odd that you label it as artificial as it is *exactly* the type of behavior one sees in an online (MMO) trade chat channel, and those are players doing it.
