Unfortunately, I won't have time for a longer reply for until later but @Tuco this might help in your conversation with @Sharp
Sharp is a smart guy and is pretty good at rhetoric. I'd guess he's even had classes on rhetoric -- he is alternating between an appeal to the people and an appeal to authority. The trap he is laying -- and one you seem to believe I walked into -- is get you to declared an expert and then be tarred with unpleasant aspects of expertise. Snobbishness, elitist attitudes and the like.
Google snob appeal / mob appeal / Ad Populum
His larger point is that the forum is a type of irrelevant expertise and that game developers have the relevant expertise. So to argue for expertise an abstract sense actually bolsters his point -- for him we are like patients and the devs the doctors. Our feedback is valuable when we are describing our symptoms but not when we are offering solutions.
The flaw in the argument is inherent denigration of the opinions of the forum: that if devs listened to our proposed solutions then we would produce a game that only appealed to a small niche. In this vision we become the Homer Simpson who tells the car maker how to make something that only Homer would want to drive. (if anyone remembers that ancient episode)
But the argument is counterfactual -- BG was a D&D nerds game. It adhered to 2nd ed ruleset closer than any other video game. In BG2 they dove even deeper into the rules implementing optional rules like class "kits" (always hated that term). So BG2 was actually a Homer car that was wildly successful.
And @Elenhard nailed it --
Quote
Maybe it's just me, but I'd say BG 1 and 2 actually were good enough to instill the desire in the player. To become experts, to understand "how it all works".
Exactly. I really think BG3 will become a better a game if our solutions are listened to -- the forums have the relevant expertise and the devs can and should learn from us. As Bioware did when it was good company.
@Sharp, thanks for the detailed reply -- more later
