Kore

I'm not generally a fan of time limits or bottlenecks that force me to do a certain quest line without my concent. Things like chateaux irenicus, the underdark mind flayed lair and even the underdark itself annoy me because it either curbs my exploration or forces me to stop what I'm doing. I'm not particularly worried about some time limits not making sense either, but I can understand why some would. Some time limits I don't mind though. Ones where you agree to a time limit before you start and you can delay it if you wish are fine. The recruitment of Minsc in bg1 is a good example.

But 5 threads isn't enough to warrant a complete category. It would be better to remove the thread limit.

Well obviously that goes without saying. Anyone with Lord Flashheart as their avatar obviously know's their business!

People like me do not have enough self control. I will go into a game with the purest intentions, but if I have shadowkeeper installed then I will end up cheating. I need rules to be mechanically enforced for me when I attempt to do ironman modes and the like. I think we're all just a bit skeptical because of the frequency that it would happen in IE games. It does happen in newer games though I admit. One limitation of the proposed Trial of Iron mode is that if you die you die. That is it, gone forever. I'd like a "Trial of Bronze" mode or something similar that would be exactly the same, but if I died I would reload from the last autosave. This would be enough for me to not constantly reload if an encounter didn't go favourably, but it would save me from the inevitable immense frustration when I do die.

I have to ask, but which BG game were you playing? It sounds to me like you're describing the console games which are entirely different games in everything but the setting and background lore to the games that Obsidian are drawing their inspiration from.

I'm of no doubt that this forum is full of bright people and I'm sure that their intentions are as you've described, but my point is that since they are motivated differently, despite their shared goals, that they should not be managed in the same way for the sake of the community itself. It needs more active care. Also, don't forget about less passionate members. Typically a forum will only be 1% active users and 9% occasional contributors. The rest are generally inactive. If you work assuming that the community is entirely populated by the most active of the 1% then you are not providing enough stimulatution to properly engage the rest of the users and so the community and the quality of feedback that you get out of it suffer as a result. This paragraph is just making my point that appropriate community management is important here, I'm not disagreeing with anything specific and actually I think we're in agreement here really Moving on, I understand your point about there being a large number of topics that have been discussed already on the forum. If it's anything like the BGEE forums I'm sure they're absolutely heaving with feedback. However you cannot treat a forum like a filing cabinet. The main purpose of a forum is to get a community to discuss things. To get the community to discuss things you need to make it as easy as possible to do so, as I said earlier not everyone is passionate and you need to engage those that aren't as well as those who are. When people come to a forum they do not expect to have to look through double digits of forum names and then to click through various folders to get to the discussion area (I know that it's an extreme example but bear with me) that is relevant to the topic to them. If you do not make it instantly clear where someone should post then they are much more likely to become disinterested. In addition to this, having too many sub forums limits activity in each section (as I said in my earlier post) and it limits browsing. If each subforum only has a small number of active threads in it then members browsing that forum will only see those threads thus reducing their potential engagement. If you take a large sample size this shows a very pronounced effect. As far as I am concerned a community is about discussion, so repeating discussions that happened a while ago isn't necessarily a bad thing. There is also always the search function and the tagging system to find topics of interest. If the purpose of the community is to provide feedback to the devs then a more formalised system should be used. It takes a level of commitment, but I know of communities that make great use out of ideation and feedback boards that are specifically tailored for communication between staff and community.

The mission in ToB where you subcontract three hapless adventurers to fetch the Bronze Pantalets for you. That was priceless. On that note, the three game long pantaloons quest was pure genius!

I am a professional community manager. I run forums for a living and while communication is undoubtedly a major factor to success the way a community interacts with itself and the business behind it can't be compared to chains of communication in a business. The most important factor to remember is that community members are generally in it for the intrinsic enjoyment of using a community whereas in a business the incentivisations are much different and are often extrinsic. In general terms community members like communicating for the sake of it and if it becomes boring then they will leave; employees are required by contract to communicate so they react very differently to situations. I agree that community <-> developer communication is important though, I agree there.

It's worth remembering that the reward for killing your party is substantially higher than mugging any other citizen either through a bounty as in BG1 or the sheer amount of gold you carry in BG2. How many commoners or even nobles in BG2 would have considered wandering about with 100000gp in their back pocket, not to mention the wealth of magical items. I'm fine with the random encounters, running back and forth gets and a bit of combat is nice respite from a courier mission, but I agree that if they're too many or it just doesn't make sense then it's stupid.

One fight should not be similar to another fight, I got bored of Dragon Age quickly because each fight merged into the next. In DA every group of baddies was of equal power to the other and used similar tactics. In Baldur's Gate you might be fighting a level 7 mad cleric one minute and then a horde of gibberlings the next. If I wanted to grind endlessly similar mobs I would play WoW. I really hope that PE goes more along the route of BG than DA,, though judging by their pledge for no level scaling and tactical gameplay they seem to already know this. Just my 2 gp.

Too many subforums are a mistake made too often in communities. Even in communities of a million + members you do not need to have exponentially high numbers of subforums. In this forum there is not nearly enough activity to warrant splitting up the forum. If you split it up further then you'll end up with several dead forums instead of one active forum and overall activity will be lower than if you had split it up. There is no merit to calving off romance discussion from all other discussion if there isn't enough romance discussion to populate a sub forum of it's own. You are just needlessly segregating it from other discussion so it gets fewer and fewer views which is detrimental to romance discussion rather than beneficial.

No thanks, I'm bored to tears of zombie apocalypse films that invariably end in everyone dying. I like closure on my storylines, not "oh and now everyone is dead. Sorry." I need satisfaction at the end of something that I have worked hard on. I do not want a cliffhanger. I do not want an anti climax. I would very much be in favour of a dynamic ending that is determined by player actions though.