Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General How should a series of community polls be structured for the purpose of gauging community feedback?

So the events over at the BG3 subreddit last week were rather interesting, and some of the discussions in the locked thread we had over here about it did have a point in that we should be trying a bit harder to figure out how the overall community at large really feels about this game in places beyond these forums. Because let's face it, all of the communities are pretty echo-y right now, and nothing short of the devs holding their own comprehensive community polling will make things clear on what the community considers good or needs improvement from a gameplay sense. But that doesn't mean we can't try. A part of the motivation behind what I'm about to propose is that I wonder if those Reddit threads only gained as much attention as they did from everyone, precisely because they were the only real gameplay discussion threads in a sea of fluff and fanart in quite some time. And even that faded into obscurity after 2 days due to how Reddit is structured, with no possibility of bringing that discussion back up short of starting a new thread.

In the interests of trying to get some actual data on the feedback, I wonder if someone should try to get in touch with the BG3 subreddit moderators to hold some kind of comprehensive polling within the community there, while everyone waits for the next patch. We could try doing it here, but the forum's population is a mere fraction of the BG3 subreddit, this forum doesn't even have a proper tool for polling, and it wouldn't tell us anything useful because we all know what the situation is like over here already. If we wait too long on this, more parts of the system that the community feels that need adjustments are likely to be finalized already.

That said, it's probably more important to figure out the formatting too, because everyone has different feelings on different aspects of the gameplay. For example, I personally don't give a damn about loaded dice because it's completely optional and not a core feature of the game, while others probably feel very strongly about it from the standpoint of the devs having invested time into creating the system in the first place.

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Right now, my tentative proposal consists of the following.

1) The polling will be entirely gameplay-focused. One could try to poll the community on the cinematics, story, and writing, but there's zero point because the general sentiment is that they're unanimously in a great state already, so polling on these subjects is an overall waste of time. The actual poll options can only really come off as being either vague and/or insulting too.

2) The polling should focus on a specific aspect of the gameplay, because once again, people have different opinions on different subjects. The complicated part is determining exactly what aspects of the gameplay deserve their own polling, and how. The questions should avoid any kind of generalization or vagueness.

3) The poll options should be a lot more varied than 'good/bad' options, and completely avoid making any comparisons to previous Larian games or 5E rules because that's realistically just going to de-rail the shit out of everything, instead of focusing the discussion towards whether the systems are good or bad on their own merits. Each question should have 3-4 options. The first option would stress a need for an immediate overhaul, the middle options would indicate that Larian is on the right track and that specific parts of the system just need to be adjusted (either toned town or in higher frequency), and the final option would state that everything about the systems are fine as is. I order the options like this due to knowing how communities in general tend to gravitate towards picking the status quo option as soon as they see it, and this is to steer everyone towards reading all of them first before picking one.

How people interpret the end results is up to them, but I would personally frame a heavier lean towards the first and middle options to mean that the system in question has pressing issues that should absolutely be addressed at some point during the EA, and a lean towards the middle and last options to mean that the systems are fine with some improvements (but implementing said improvements may not be higher priority among the community at large).

4) Each question should have 3 days of polling and discussion dedicated to it. The thread for the dedicated question should start out as a regular thread, then stickied by the subreddit moderators once it naturally falls off the front page (if it falls off during the allotted 3 days of polling), because everyone knows that people are far more inclined to completely ignore a thread that is stickied to begin with.

Of course, a lot of this hinges on the BG3 subreddit moderators even allowing such polling to be held to begin with. The way things are, there's perhaps only one real shot to do something like this, so it has to be done properly.

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So I think the first order of business is... What should be polled to begin with, and what should the options even look like? The actual order of the questions matters, because I suspect what will happen is that each subsequent question may naturally see a small number of participants dropping out, though each question being given 3 days of polling dedicated to them will hopefully minimize that effect.

Right now, I assume the most pressing issue is actually party/movement controls. A poll surrounding that topic could probably be specified towards the Chaining system in particular. So a sample poll about that can probably look like the below?

How do you feel about the current state of the party movement/chaining system?

1) Chaining is cumbersome to work with, and an entirely new system should be considered.

2) Chaining works fine, but there should be improvements made for ease of use (specify in the comments below)

3) Chaining is perfectly good as is.

(I would personally add that I could see adding a hotkey to immediately break the chains across party members/immediately re-chaining them solving a lot of grievances with the system, but I would not add that suggestion in option 2 itself, to prevent introducing any kind of personal bias to the polling.)

I imagine the second most pressing question would revolve around either backstab advantage or height advantage/disadvantage. I would propose a sample question on the latter as it could easily have 4 or even 5 options in the polling.

How do you feel about the high ground advantage/low ground disadvantage system?

1) Get rid of height-related modifiers entirely.

2) A bonus to being on high ground and a penalty to being on low ground is fine, but the exact bonus/penalty should be reduced from advantage/disadvantage into something else.

3) Gaining advantage (or a reduced bonus) for being on high ground is fine, but the disadvantage (or a reduced penalty) for being on low ground should be removed completely.

4) Gaining disadvantage (or a reduced penalty) for being on low ground is fine, but the advantage (or a reduced bonus) for being on high ground should be removed completely.

5) The system is perfectly fine as is.

Any thoughts?

My opinion is if you want to make a poll on Reddit, just make a normal post with a poll as anyone else would. People usually like polls, so you would likely get a lot of responses. Not sure why it would be stickied when other people's polls aren't, though.

Again, it would be for visibility purposes, and all of the polls would be for the larger purpose of gauging very specific feedback on a wide range of topics that a single poll cannot convey. The sticking would only happen if a specific poll question falls off the front page before the allotted 3 days for the poll are up, so that the visibility would at least remain as consistent as possible. Or perhaps I should just shorten the allotted time to 2 days.

If you do make polls on reddit, could you post a link here? I'd love to participate!

You also might be interested in these results from a gameplay poll that someone made back in Oct: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VWtKnvaXpC0y0j0h7syEGXSC2H92MmKt/view

It depends, do we want questions where the user is uninformed on the impacts to the game? I think it'd be interesting to see responses with no information and others that have a write up on how the changes would impact the game. Would we see a difference?

Since I don't use Reddit ever, I completely missed out on this. Thank you for sharing, that was very interesting.

@OP - I have been wondering why Larian does not seem to engage in poll-systems. However, polls restricted to a certain platform will always only represent a minority of the community. I'd like to see them making an actual poll on their own that they announce within their game and their own social media - that would be the only way to reach as many people as possible.

However, I'd assume there is a reason Larian don't do this. I know they are collecting *a lot* of player data through EA so perhaps it is not even needed. I do not know. I do however approve of more polls. :]

Yeah, I know of this poll. That said, it was created back in October, back when everyone's perception of the game would be a bit more reactionary due to everything being new. Six months later, everyone would have the experience to understand how everything works now, which is why I think the polling needs to be re-visited.

First of all: I am not on Reddit.

The only relevant thing would be a poll from Larian itself.
As being said, no poll in one place will reach a sample of people that is representative for most players. Different groups meet in different places and different groups are also more or less likely to answer to polls than other groups.

For example Owlcat send several polls to all alpha and beta players, usually some time after they made big changes to the game. The polls were quite large and sometimes you could write what you liked or disliked or what could be done better. This was very good.

My suggestion to Larian:
When players finish the beta there is a question if they want to fill out a poll.
If they click yes there will be several questions what they liked, disliked or what can be done better.
When they finish the game, it means that the people who did the poll have actually played the game.
Each account ( from steam or gog ) can fill out the poll only once.
There may be a new poll after a big update.

Polls of any kind, whether official Larian polls or not, would be very valuable I think.

It does, it's just not enabled; which I've now remembered I was supposed to be looking into, so I should get on with that. Can't help with the number of active members, though...

If Larian could setup a survey through the launcher somehow then it would be available to every single player of EA, regardless of platform. Players wouldn't have to be active in any online community, and they could ensure that everyone (who wants to) only completes it only once. It would really need to be open for at least a couple of weeks to ensure everyone had enough time to participate, and they could announce it on Steam and other active communities to ensure enough people are aware.

Yeah I like the idea of structuring it that way. But I get the feeling they won't volunteer certain questions to the community unless we clamor enough for them.

Great idea. I think that this would be a good start for a poll. I would like to see it extend to things like reactions / ready action / HP ect but nice job on setting up questions.

Part of the thread is about trying to figure out exactly which questions to ask and what the options should be. Those two I would ask, but they’re also examples.

Also I am aware Larian doing the survey themselves is the best option, but they’re not at the moment and some questions they’ll probably never ask. At least not to any useful specifics.

You would probably be best posting polls on as many sites as possible. Not sure you would get many responses on Reddit since your poll would be about things that are actually important, and people probably won't even be able to find it after a couple of hours because it isn't about romance....

I have said that for a while now. If they did a poll, it should be advertised in the game launcher. That is really the only way to accurately gauge the opinions of players rather than a forum poll, which represents only a very small percentage of overall players.

If this is possible, I think this forum would be the best place.

This is the official forum and obviously, the link of these threads could be shared on reddit, Larian's Discord, steam or any other forum/social media.
Everyone who's interrested to give his opinion could vote no matter where he comes from.

This is the only valuable place to gather people arround Larian and the game and you won't be able to give details in a constructive way elsewhere.

It was a long time ago and there were way more people overhyped at release but the poll realized by Sludge Khalid were very valuable.
A sample of 1000 is something used for a lot of official statistics and polls. It would be very cool to have other polls to see if players opinions have changed or not after hours of BG3... But I'm not sure you'll have 1000 answers now.

If nothing comes up in the meantime, I'll enable forum polls on a trial basis tomorrow morning. Mainly as it's now past 11pm here, probably not the best time of day for me to start changing stuff!

Bonsoir Madame qui aime le fromage

I would be happy the beta test the new "poll" function, whenever you feel ready !

xx
- S