Originally Posted by Limz
You know that survey is a piece of shit right? Take note of https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1323316

And look at the language employed by the survey without bias and see if it passes a basic test. It actually doesn't. Beyond that the sample size is fucking terrible so extrapolating data from that is kind of worthless unless we're talking very specific things.
And we aren't.

You can also look at the Steam reviews which has a larger sample size and those do not reflect the same sentiments as expressed in the survey.

I think it's very stupid to think that the forum and everyone who partakes in it is representative of anything but the type of people who visit forums which is a subset of the audience that Larian happens to capture ( as you pointed out we have no idea what audience Larian is actually looking for) - we're all pretty special. If you want to talk about the mainstream then the approval rate is 88% on Steam currently with a sample size of 26k which is far higher than any aggregate provided by the shitty survey. It also comes with some kind of standard unlike the survey.

Also, the majority of the posters here do not fucking care about the combat so much as caring for their own class, cosmetics, or narrative aligned things; go ahead, chop down, and reorganize all the threads created by people here organize the threads by user and reduce them down to one theme and you'll most likely find that the majority isn't combat related.

Do you not realize your own bias?

Is there a better survey to use? No.
I am well aware of the problems with samples sizes, question biases, etc. But the questions that ask "Have you played tabletop 5e? Have you played X game?" are prettttttty straightforward.

We are talking specific things: is the forum representative of mainstream audience, as measured by their experience with D&D. See above questions.

You compare steam reviews to forum posts. The problem with steam reviews are that most of them are just "Is the game good or bad"? A game can be good without being great, but a lot of steam reviews aren't critical because there is no discussion on steam reviews, so why bother? The Steam BG3 discussion board is more relevant to the topic at hand.
AND, the steam reviews match well with the forum response. See that survey: most people respond 7-10 for "How has the game met your expectations through EA?" and "How likely is it that you would recommend BG3 EA to a friend?" 88% approval rate on Steam is similar to responses of 7-10 for these questions.

Umm...who cares if "the majority of posters/threads created...aren't combat related?" That's besides the point. We are discussing the experience levels of people on the forum and whether the forum posts represent the mainstream audience's opinions. Opinions on narrative, classes, etc are still opinions.