Orbax : thx for the insight based on experience. Always cool to hear how it might look after years of dealing with this kind of subject form the other side ^^. Limz : They sold more copies than they expected day one. Such a huge success comes in the end from the games they make. The feedback everyone hears, the one that impacts the sales is based on the majority of those who bought the game. You are right.
Now you have the fact this thread exists. Is it cool for Larian to have it on the forum? Eeeh..not really. Is it avoidable at relatively low cost? Also. Is it impossible to reach successful sales without avoiding it? Absolutely not. But over time the reputation of Larian's EA (and only EA) might be kinda " meeh". It won't be a problem on the short term but on the long run if you can avoid it why not do it?
The thing is most of the things you do to interact with your community are straight pointless when it comes to the goal you're working on. Apart from managing your community "sanity". ^^
Here's another outcome. They release a content patch that seems to address whatever shortcomings but they never say anything but a cutesy phrase. Instead they might say, "We released a bunch of new stuff and changed some stuff. We're hoping for people to play X Y Z! Did you know a bunch of people did B thing? Wow. " rather than say "We looked at the feedback, felt that it was not right and made some changes because it wasn't in our vision".
They also just release patch notes and have a content and it would be enough for many people here.
Based on how DOS2 went, I don't think they respond through words but by action.
