Not to put too fine a point on it, but in addition to the money, their EA community has provided Larian with 50,000+ posts, in 5000+ threads across 250+ pages just in this Feedback forum alone. And this section has only existed since Oct 2020 lol
I'd wager that there is an inverse relationship between how much time and energy one has dedicated to these boards, and the general sense of satisfaction one might have with Larian's level of community engagement here during EA.
The major frustrations probably have more to do with redunancy, just owing to a lack of structure and active cultivation, and the literal flood of topics we saw at launch (and every time a new patch drops.) You know where its basically like waving at someone on a bus speeding by you at 70mph hehe. Discord is even crazier in that regard, and the steam forums beyond hopeless. So that leaves the home boards, which from the look of it didn't receive much love in anticipation of the EA dropping.
I get the strong impression that they see these forums as antiquated and not worth investing in beyond the bare minimum. I'm not sure these forums would even exist if it wasn't serving as the archive of all their previous games too. Sort of like "Well, we're already paying to keep the server afloat for those, so lets tack on a half dozen BG3 sections and add a banner, so we can say we gave it the old college try!" Hehe
Just feels like an afterthought. Had it been more a bit more currated with bit more integration, they probably could have handled 5000 thread topics with just 500 thread topics. But this what happens when it goes all wild west like this. It's just a mini version of reddit or steam now, cause they took the hands way off approach.
I think they should have migrated their BG3 forums before going into EA, since doing it now would be near impossible. There's just too much material. I suppose there is a chance they could provide an EA beta period and migrate at that point, where only people who actually dropped the dime on BG3 EA are able to contribute. That would probably trim the fluff by half, and might give them a shot at actually making such a place useful. Right now it would be a herculean task for an individual to read all this feedback, let alone synthesize it in a manner that would be practical as a development tool. I don't know what they do now, but it certainly feels like they could have done more to support the effort through engagement. What we have now is what we get I guess, when non engagement is the rule, and it's left to the community to provide the organization ad hoc.
