I imagine Larian is probably taking a lot of feedback from those comments, if only because there's *so* many of them.
And surely Larian's taking feedback from how people are actually playing the game. Kind of a passive level of feedback, right?
Which leaves this place. Sure, there's probably more depth to the feedback here, but I don't know that it's inherently more useful to Larian than other sources they have at their disposal.
I try to imagine myself in their shoes. They've got a large production team, and that certainly has its own internal discussions where people have differing opinions. They've got some stuff they've locked themselves into, unless they want to spend to reshoot a bunch of motion-capture.
Then they've got all the telemetry they're collecting, and what exactly that is and how it's interpreted, we can only speculate. Then they've got crash reports, and bugs submitted through the bug form. All that is already a lot of additional information to inform a complicated, almost certainly fluid, jumble of priorities and goals.
So where does that leave this place? I think I've said this in another thread last week, but I'll repeat myself anyway for the sake of this discussion. Let's take Swenn at his word that they read everything. They know that humans are more likely to share negative opinions than strong ones, and that forums tend to empower the minority of cranks with strong opinions strongly held that won't be happy with anything (and thank our luck that tends to be a tiny minority here). They know there will be people that will rankle at any deviation from previous BG canon. So I try to put myself in their shoes. They see which topics are recurring, and which represent minority opinions. They see the (often) unhelpful negativity one expects to certain degree, and how it's reacted to (ignored? +1'd? pushed back on?), and all that information goes into chaotic miasma of product requirements.
I think the only way to stay sane and positive about the final product is to play a mental long-game, to trust that it may take a long, long time not just to complete, but to see common frustrations addressed. If that's naïve of me because I know nothing of Larian as a shop, and little of their other games, fair enough. But having worked in (non-game) software for almost 20 years, I'm very familiar with the feeling of "our users want this, we want it too, but x, y, and z are higher priorities at the moment."
