I would also like to say that I've been monitoring a bunch of other websites like Reddit, the Steam forums, ResetERA, RPGCodex, the cesspool that happens to be 4Chan, Kotaku, and a couple other places, and a fair amount of people pretty much share similar concerns in those circles when they actually do talk about it. The primary difference is that nobody can agree on which issues are the most pressing, but a common thread is that they universally center on the combat design in general and the chaining/party movement system.
And it's not the same people across all those sites either. Of all those communities, the Reddit community is really the only place that could be described as being fiercely defensive about the current systems, at least by way of naturally drowning it out with discussion of the story which nobody really has an issue with. Larian says they collect data about how people engage with their game, but they can't collect data on concepts that don't exist yet, we don't know exactly what kind of data they're receiving other than a heat map of character deaths, and what they are even doing with it. Data is only useful if it doesn't get ignored by the end of the day - after all, we now live in an era where perception is now proven to be more powerful than facts.
The only place that I haven't really checked are places like Twitter and Tumblr, but those places by their very nature are not conducive to any kind of discussion anyway. It's likely that the only places that Larian actually actively monitors are this forum, Reddit, and the Steam forums, because the communities interested in even talking about the deeper mechanics of the game don't really exist much of anywhere else and they aren't an omnipresent entity that's able to see everything at once. And maybe their stream chat, but let's be real, those are positive by default and trying to have a conversation there is a futile effort.
(I've never actually seen a developer claiming to collect data actually release those statistics to the public, besides the Genshin Impact developers bringing up a few oddities in their newsletters from time to time, like how they noticed one specific player dying from drowning like 10,000 times. It would be interesting to see a full list of that data for once.)
I should also bring up that compared to most people here, I am actually a relatively newer arrival to the forums. I may have registered in December, but I didn't start actively posting until February. One could argue that more casual players or newer players probably don't see an issue with the existing systems... But there's no way to definitively prove that and one can argue that a portion of that community DOES have the same issues too, and it's very anecdotal at best. So all anyone can do is act based on what they see, and Larian would have to be willfully blind to see that the current status quo is simply not favorable at all right now.
What happened on Reddit over the past two days was a big thing precisely because it was a spontaneous discussion out of nowhere, with hundreds of participants in a community that historically dismisses those concerns, and THAT cannot be explained away as any kind of 'echo chamber' effect.
Still, we are in a lull between patches. But the general vibe I get around these communities is that the next patch will probably be the defining update for a lot of people in terms of determining the course of the game's development and whether Larian is actually able/willing to do anything at all about these issues that have apparently persisted since launch - at that point, it will have been 7+ months since then.
Last edited by Saito Hikari; 09/04/21 08:27 PM.
