I think the only time it can affect others is if the devs change the DC due to save scumming stats. They did that with Arabella. Her initial DC was so high that even with high CHA it was a strong likelihood she would die.
I think the current DC is more appropriate and as a result, it affects all players.
I think it’s appropriate because you only get one shot at it and it’s a major change in outcome. But in the case of Shadowheart and her secret, I think it’s fine to keep the DC high since you get more chances to reveal it. And of course the DC should drop accordingly as your approval rating goes up during your travels.
As long as they don't do this every time people have some kind of emotional issue with something.
The reason why save scumming is a problem is that
given the opportunity players will optimise the fun right out of a game. There's no point putting points into conversation skills if players never fail a conversation check because success is just a quick press of F9 away. It's not really a minority most people will end up acting this way when you make reloading to avoid ever suffering consequences too easy.
But how does it affect your single player game if someone else does this in their single player game? Some people do it way too much but they do not make us do it as well.
So not this. I would argue save-scumming is BAD, for both story and gameplay reasons. When a game facilitates easy save-scumming, it oftentimes becomes a compulsion, a kind of roleplaying straightjacket. It incentivizes the player to control every outcome to reach the ideal goal, rather than play freely how you like and accept the outcome. Perfection(ism) is the enemy of good. By allowing "cheap" perfection, imperfection becomes unacceptable even though the path towards that ideal outcome is tedious, unimmersive and downright anti-roleplaying. Your "gazillion of reloads" make even finishing a single playthrough that much less likely. You burn yourself out - not only reloading constantly, but even restarting the game repeatedly. Most gamers don't even finish a game once for such (and other) reasons.
Cyberpunk 2077 has a loot system that incentivizes save-scumming. The loot is somewhat randomized and the power level variation is significant. This leads to hundreds, if not thousands of reloads trying to optimize the loot throughout the course of the game. You feel compelled to do it because of the satisfaction of getting the best version of an item...even though it saps enjoyment from gameplay in general. Both by doing a boring repetitive act that breaks immersion, and by contributing to becoming overpowered in such a way you trivialize combat. In this way instant gratification wins out nearly every time.
If it takes the fun out of it then don't do it. I am not understanding why people feel compelled to do something they don't like. I would get burnout if I did it as much as you are describing so I don't do it. :P Also, loot is only pixels and they are not worth a negative mental state.
I general I agree save scumming is not ideal, it is something I try to avoid as it more or less ruins the experience for me personally. Though I have resorted to save scumming from time to time as there are the occasional outcome that is just plain bad if you fail the speech roll (intimidation/persuasion/etc..) The Kagha scene being a prime example. (another example where I resorted to save scumming is when I wanted to visit the zhentarim hideout.) Although, I think that last one might be a bug. =/ Even though I saved that Zhentarim dude and he gave me the password I still had to beat two rolls in order to enter the hideout without the choice of giving the password. Save scumming was required because if I failed the check I was deaded by the exploding barrels...
With that little tangent out of the way. My personal opinion is that they don't really need to do much except to doing what they are doing (I.E. adjusting the difficulty of roles where save-scumming is abnormally high.) There are few choices so far in this game I feel the need to win the roll on but there are situations where it happens.
They need to think carefully when they do this though, too much adjusting will lead to watered down and boring content. Easy mode should be where rolls are hard to fail.
I only do it where I would find it immersion breaking otherwise since there is not a DM you can explain things to (for example, 4 heavily armed individuals with hands on weapons surrounding a civilian and asking them a simple question will 99.9% of the time get an answer out of them unless said civilian is inebriated, but here there is only an intimidation check that may fail.) The Kagha scene was not an issue for me, failing it just showed me what type of person she was and I acted accordingly. I expect a lot of people weren't used to having something like that in their games which is where the complaints came from. If it was something that would have made people quit the game and get refunds then I can see why they changed it, although I do not understand why people had that reaction.
