Well, yes, that's EXACTLY the claim. Expect the part about claiming I'd be the expert.
Even if, let's be honest here, I totally am.
And no, I didn't make videogames, but I am familiar with software development. I was even my path of study at some point, even I ended up quitting moving in a completely different direction in life (I manage a boxing gym, imagine that. Currently closed for lockdown because of COVID-19, too. Fuck that).
Then again back to my example most expert about motors didn't engineer one and doctors didn't genetically engineer bodies from the ground up either; in the same way most critics in most fields aren't expert practitioners on the that matter.
But that's not the point. Is it? I never claimed that my credibility (or the one of any other "game expert" on a studio or forum) should come from an authoritative resume, as much as from the reasonability and specificity of the suggestions I brought so far.
And yes, expertise (or if you actually want to be that fastidious about it, let's call it INTIMATE FAMILIARITY WITH A TOPIC) totally DOES matter.
Because if you have no clue of what it's technically feasible, nor you can mention a broad range of examples that addressed a given issue in the past, what does your suggestion matters, exactly?
Is "We should totally have mounted combat and be able to hire armies like in Mount & Blade" a pertinent suggestion, when it comes to the type of game BG3 is trying to be?
Is "Well, I don't think this is too bad. I know no games that did it better" when there are dozens THAT valuable as an opinions?
But do you have expertise though? There is a big difference between studying a topic and being an enthusiast of it. You could play BG 3 for 1,000 hours and never think much about it, you could also play it for 10 hours with a notepad and pen and write down lots of minutiae, noticing things 99.99% of players don't and be an expert on it. My point being, usually if someone is an "expert" on something, they have some body of work they can show which proves their expertise. Do you have a body of work to show this expertise to me?
Then again, "the opinion of experts matters" and "Whatever any expert suggests should be automatically held as a Gospel" are two very different things, aren't they? Especially since experts have conflicting opinions about a given topic all the times.
Saying that competent and well argued opinions should have certain weight and claiming that unless you have a life-long list of achievements in a field to have right to suggest something seem very different things to me.
And this was something I also said. "What matters far more is whether a piece of feedback is good or not, rather than who said it." If a casual player comes here and provides some good piece of feedback, does it matter that they are a casual player? No, what matters is that there feedback is good.
There is a cavaet there that, to an untrained eye, how do you know the quality of the feedback on sight. If someone came to me with 2 papers written on gene folding and one was complete garbage but the other was a legitimate paper, if the garbage 1 was sufficiently well faked, I would not be able to tell the 2 apart because I am not an expert on it. This is why you do go to and trust experts, because we don't have the time to study everything and become experts on all topics ourselves and thus we need to put some faith into someone else. When it comes to feedback about the EA however, the situation is different. There are very clearly some experts who are involved and are (hopefully) reading the topic. Those experts, are the people making the game. They can (hopefully) tell the difference between good feedback and bad feedback, using whatever criteria they have to determine what good and bad feedback is.
''Experts' are good for some things in EA, but isn't the sole game audience to be listened to. The mistake I see in this thread is: I am an expert in this genre and therefore my opinion should count more than anyone else. Games need a variety of audiences of different abilities to work well, without diluting the spirit of the experience, and in some instances non-experts can be actually better for feedback. "I'm struggling to understand this", or "why is this like this?" is often better feedback than "I don't like this because it's not how I like it", or "it's like this because it's how it's always been/should be." Games in EA need both, and both are just as valuable. And from a financial angle, it makes no sense just to cater to the hardcore. That's not how games sell.
I don't think it is bad if a game is made and advertised entirely towards a hardcore audience. There are some niche games like this and its perfectly fine for them to do so and I am sure the developers of those games are aware that their games have a much smaller appeal as a result of this, but so long as both them (and their audience) is happy with what they are getting, everything is going just fine. Roguelikes are an easy example of this. BG 3 has not marketed itself as being that game though, its trying to have broad market appeal. This means that, as you said, it needs to appeal to a variety of different player types. These player types enjoy different things and in some cases there is a conflict between these player types over what they enjoy. Magic: The Gathering has a good article on what they see as the different player types for their game
over here, I am sure, without thinking much, it becomes obvious where the different conflict between these types arises.
