Frankly I can name pretty much any minor or major forum I lurk or frequent and the outcome tends to stay pretty much the same across the board: most people don't like several of the changes Larian introduced and tend to be very vocal again it.
Sometimes so negative that I'm the one who has to play "good cop" and suggest to them to tone down their rants, pointing that "it's not all bad".
Incidentally, I'm looking at one of those right now.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/baldurs-gate-3-early-access-ot-rolling-the-dice.301235/page-37I imagine none of these people aside from Tuco are even on the Larian forums.
But here is the thing - at the end of the day it doesn't matter (to me) that Larian tweaks the rules - what matters is do they balance those tweaks by ensuring the encounters are challenging and fun. If no one was showing up on this forum saying the encounters are too difficult I would be worried. That people are showing up on the regular and doing just that makes me extremely happy.
This is a larger rant - but most game companies these days provide games with no real challenge, that feed people easy achievements and gear and in exchange they milk their little "herd" of gamers for microtransactions. This is the literal model for almost all game companies.
I feel like the game is difficult for the wrong reasons. The systems are designed in a way that I feel that combat is entirely balanced around getting to high ground/front-loaded surprise round and first round alpha strikes to do as much as you can before the enemy party gets to retaliate. There's a huge difference in difficulty from going into a fight using conventional tactics VS splitting up the entire party/one party member initiating combat while the other three sneak around avoiding sight cones and drop stuff/shove people with 100% success chance because of the whole time bubble thing going on, and the combat difficulty feels like it's balanced for the latter rather than the former. It's one thing to reload to approach a fight from a different angle, and then there's outright abusing clairvoyance.
Things like this are why you still get complaints about the RNG despite Larian doing everything in their power to mitigate it through their own systems. It has an extreme psychological effect in that anything without advantage or anything that doesn't benefit from advantage rolls (spells targeting saving throws) suddenly feels absolutely awful to use. Incidentally, damaging spells that do target saving throws tend to be useful in that later variants inflict half damage if an enemy saves against them, rather than no damage at all. Problem is, there are very few such spells in EA right now, and most classes don't start seeing them until level 5+ anyway - which we probably won't see in EA period. That and many classes getting access to extra attack at level 5 is already going to result in a wildly different balancing situation.
(When the Bard class is released, people will get to play around with one such spell that does half damage upon a successful save, one exclusive to Bards called Dissonant Whispers. It's one of the Bard's few offensive spells at low levels, and it targets enemy wisdom saves. Full damage + enemy is immediately forced to move as far away from you as they can if they fail (will probably get turned into a frightened effect in BG3), half damage if they succeed.)
Incidentally, I just noticed you joined the forums about a month after I made a massive thread outlining how all of these systems negatively impact the overall experience in the long term. It's rather telling that the thread existed for a whole week, and no one even came into the thread to directly argue against any of the points being made at any point in that time period. I've just become even more pessimistic since due to the radio silence.
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=96428&Number=757307#Post757307
