The fans are fine with a $40 always online game with kernel level anti-cheat, a battle pass and micro-transactions. Somehow I think they will suck it up as usual and keep playing the game. Gamers are absolute pushovers and negative attention like in this case, is entirely random. If they would have enforced this from day 1, none of these people would have cared.
I found that when playing with friends in DOS2 that I could not for instance take the time to dive in deep with conversations, quests, lore etc as I would like.
This is also my experience. IMHO BG3 is also more focused on conversations than Divinity 1 and 2 or at least you can focus more on it. You can also just kill everybody of course. For now at least I feel like only a small part of my time with BG3 was in combat. Most of it was exploring and talking to people. I’m sure coop is fun, but I’d rather play is solo.
Ar yar, ahoy and avast!