If your post takes more than a second to scroll through please shorten and/or spoiler tag it. Separately quoting every single line from long posts mainly just makes posts extremely long and disjointed to read. Quote fewer (but larger) parts of others' posts, condense your responses, or just put quotes (and/or your responses) in a spoiler tag and @ the user you're responding to so they know to read it. Thanks.
Also Niara you've done amazing work here, providing many in-depth and useful analyses of various aspects of BG3 - the game itself, Larian's communications and EA process, etc. I certainly have enjoyed reading your various posts and debating you on certain 5e rules. The forums would be worse off without you. That said, if you're mainly unhappy with the time you're spending on the forum, then you should prioritize yourself. Even if we take as truth that Larian is looking at and considering all of our feedback here, honestly they've probably already gotten 99% by now...at least until actual new content is released. Is Larian - and other posters - worth it? (But if you do take a break please come back to give a scathing detailed review of Larian's next PfH XD)
I'll second this:
Originally Posted by Niara
There are, were and continue to be a very great number of people across many platforms who are criticising their translation of the system, and generally feeling misled, deceived or lied to. They didn't all make this up as some kind of mass hallucination; it is a simple truth that for this great volume of plaintiffs, the information as presented in the news they consumed, be that interviews, news articles, live streams or any other, left them feeling like a particular thing was being delivered, and that expectation was contra to the company and the game's actual design goals. You can split the hairs as much as you like, and you can point to the logic of variable interpretation if you want, that's fine - it doesn't change the fact that there is a large volume of voices who received the information that way, and that did not happen by chance, or by mass-selective-hearing. When even media and news articles were throwing around the same phrase in their headings and descriptive openings, you cannot claim that it was just one or two people selectively hearing what they wanted. This was a problem in the advertising itself - certainly many people didn't and don't care... they would not have cared if the advertising had been handled differently as well, so the are not the relevant group to consider here.
At some point, if a large enough sample of people are confused or feeling deceived, the speaker (Swen, Larian, OR the media in this case) is at least partially to blame for any miscommunication. If I went to a high school intro physics class and gave a high-level lecture on quantum mechanics - the Schrodinger equation, probability amplitudes, and Bose-Einstein Condensates - is it my fault or the students' fault that most of them wouldn't understand? (Edit: This is obviously not the same as what happened here; it's just an example showing how the speaker can be at fault.)
