Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Shove Poll

There's such thing as the best thing in a bad neighborhood (or no neighborhood).
How would anyone go about collecting data on how well-received a mechanic is in a game? The only options:

-Have a question/survey in the game itself (not available for BG3).
-Look at statistics on how many players use said mechanic (not indicative of actually LIKING the mechanic)
-Ask random people online (no guarantee they've played the game)
-Put a poll on a forum (The forum posters might skew towards the idea of generic "change")

Last I checked, this is a forum for suggestions and feedback. There's been numerous arguments all over the forum in favor of changing shove. The poll was intended to see how many people (as a proportion of people passionate enough to give feedback about BG3) liked or disliked Shove as implemented. That's suggestion and feedback, and it's one of the only two forms of data Larian would have about how much people like the mechanic (the other being player-use statistics which they have).

For this to be a joke, we would actually need more information. How many people are playing the game? How many people are reading the forums? How many people are active in the forums?

For this forum (where there is a relatively small group discussing whith new people coming and going) I think 83 is a lot. Let's say the core amount of ppl here is 100. The poll shows 83% for a change of shove according to the 5e rules. 3% against a change and 14% not participating in the poll.

That is a clear result, better than most polls you have nowadays and far from beeing a joke. If there were 1000 ppl active in this forum i would agree to your opinion about it beeing a joke.

The other thing is that there are probably a lot more ppl who play than are active in the forum. I can't really guess how many people are playing the EA...1000? 5000? 10000? Compared to those numbers our little poll is not even noteworthy.

But that is still just numbers. I think most players just play the game and take it at face value...it is what it is with no real reason to enter a forum and complain about a certain part of it.

We here are people who have a special interest in the game (for what reason whatsoever) and because of that we are here, trying to change things for the better (in our opinion) or in hope to make larian think twice about changes to 5e rules. There are probably more reasons.

A lot of people here have a lot of experience with either videogames or D&D rules and how certain things might affect gameplay. (shove beeing a good example). Those opinions should be not be ignored.


This is why i think opinions, polls and everything else in this forum should be considered valuable by larian and not be looked at as plain statistical numbers, because then we could just close this. Statistically most of this forum is probably worthless because it is too minor compared to all players.

80 people is a perfectly fine sample size for a total population of 1000. It gives a not-amazing ~10% margin-of-error, but that still means anywhere from 76-96% favor changing shove = a strong (super)majority.

There are of course asterisks involving selection bias, etc, but given that we don't know those biases, we have to use what we have. Maybe double our uncertainty range.

To echo Mrfuji and UnknownEvil:

I never said this poll was representative of all BG3 players. Assuming a player population of 1M, I would want a sample of 100,000. But we would never get that, so I would settle for 10,000... but we will still never get that.

The next best thing is to ask forum-goers. Of course there is going to be selection bias because the kind of people who frequent the BG3 forums are not the people who take the game at face value. But there is nothing in this selection that *necessarily* means the people are going to dislike shove in particular. I think Unknown and Fuji have really nailed why this poll is significant for SOMETHING, though certainly not everything.

I think if the selection is those players who are opinionated enough to want to change BG3, then it's not a perfect sample, but it is definitely sufficient to make judgments about whether or not shove is a problem to the set of players who have *anything* to say about the game.

One more thing i want to add (again, because i have said it before):

From my point of view it is not simple dislike. The shove as it is now is a fundamental change to how combat is handled. Devaluation of spells and other skills has been mentioned too.

What would happen to chess is pawn can suddenly move 3 or 4 tiles? Or move diagonally? It would change the way the whole game is played.

That is also something you only get in forums like this. Thinking about the consequences certain changes have and the impact it might have on the gameplay. You need this small forum "minority" for things like this.

Thats what i think at least.

Main issue I had with Shove is how it impacts certain boss fights(top of the tower in the underdark + auntie ethel before they made her immune to it lol).

In a lot of fights here and there shove would make the combat trivial and forcing yourself to not use it is fine most of the time but what if I avoid using it and the enemy does everyhting in it's power to setup a shove? And I had instances like this.

With how the maps are built it gives you a choice to use your spells /abilities/potion or just ignore all of that and get a 60% chance to almost one shot most of the enemies.In some fights you have to use it otherwise then enemy will do it to you.
It makes complete sense to have it , the implementation is kinda flawless ( from a purely technical standpoint, didn't encounter any bugs with it) but changing it to a bonus action trivializes combat in too many places in my opinion. Made me feel I was fighting with myself and not with the game. Shame ^^

Voted to make weaker. Though I can live with it being a bonus action - my wish is that big shove distance is reserve really for characters of high STR.

I mean, it's nice to know what the remaining forum members here think, but there's definitely huge sampling bias/errors in this poll if we're to extrapolate it to the larger BG3 audience.

Early Access players are already a biased sampled (people willing to shell out $60 USD for an unfinished game), never mind EA players that visits the official forums (a much older form of online community), in 2023, after the game has been in EA for 2 years and when a huge chunk of the online population has moved onto different platforms (DIscord, Reddit, etc). Even within the EA community, a lot of players have stopped actively engaging with the EA demo and are just waiting for the 1.0 to release.

Yeah shove should be full action BUT also give option of making enemies prone. Shield master feat gives same options as bonus action.

Fuck, if Larian doesn't want to get rid of too many bonus action options, you could just have two/three shoves:
-Weak shove (Bonus action, but disadvantage)
-Strong shove (Main action, no disadvantage)
-Shield Master (All shoves are strong shoves, even bonus action ones, and main action shoves have advantage)

just a reminder that characters usually do not even have a bonus action by default, according to 5e rules.