If something is a placeholder in EA though, that should at least he communicated with the people playtesting the game (As that is what EA is for really). If people keep giving feedback on a feature that is a placeholder anyway, that is kind of wasting those people's time for no reason.
If it is made known something is a placeholder, then feedback could be focussed on other things.
Exactly. I don't see the point in dropping a EA game on the players just to go more or less radio silent. If they want relevant feedback from the players they really need to learn to communicate more with the community.
I think this is a situation where Larian is trying to have their cake and eat it too.
They are basically an AAA company now, but are still trying to do the whole EA process which typically works far better for smaller indie-developers.
EA processes works better for smaller studio simply because of scale.
Your audience is smaller, so the amount of feedback to parse through is far smaller and easier to digest
Your audience is also focused and niched, so you are less likely to have feedback pulling the game in multiple directions (i.e. in BG3 - see the DOS vet vs. BG vets. vs 5E purist camps)
Smaller Studios benefit more from EA because they lack the resources to do market research - it's a cheap and easy way for them to get a better understand their market
Updates and feedback happen far faster in smaller studios because you don't have to go through the bureaucracy of dealing with 20 stakeholders for every change. Getting alignment with the guy that "sits next to you" is much easier than multi-interdepartmental conference calls with layers of internal approval each
And because it takes forever for the departments to agree on anything, the PR team also can't communicate anything because they can't pre-commit
All these factors effectively slow down the iteration process in the EA on every level. Every step in the "Update > Receive/Parse Feedback > Decide/Apply Feedback > New Update" cycle is slowed down when you operate like a proper AAA company with a large audience.
