The very first "I wonder if I can do this" thought I had was to use the rope to climb in and out of the hole at the temple near the start of Act 1, only to find I could not. So then I thought "Well, I guess that they can't account for everything, but I'll keep some ropes on me because this is the kind of shit that will be invaluable."
It never even occurred to me, or others I have spoken to for that matter, that the rope would just... do nothing. You find them so early on, I thought it was an intentional design choice to help the player experiment by traversing up and down places where a jump wouldn't work.
I can't tell if I expected too much based on the way people wouldn't shut up about the freedom in the game before I got to play it, or if it's really just a massive oversight.
The number of times "Why doesn't rope do anything" has come up in discussions about this game with friends and so on, surely someone during EA thought about this, or someone at Larian has had this discussion at some point during the last x years of development.
