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?
Well, you are being a little disingenuous here, aren't you?
If what you want is a list of games I've worked on, no I can't show that "body of work" to you.
If what you want is proof that I have intimate familiarity with most of the mechanics and features I'm discussing, well, I've 20+ years of forum dwelling across dozen of communities,. With especial focus on this very genre, too.
Do you want to start some extensive stalking to get the pulse of my credential, though?
Well, creepiness of that thought aside, you could start with my post history on this very forum. Point me posts where I make unreasonable suggestions without an eye to their feasibility or arguments about why they would be for the better and we can talk about something specific, rather than this vague "Can you leverage the Appeal at authority fallacy in some way?".
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.
But that's precisely the point where this whole digression started, isn't it?
If someone gains familiarity with the genre, thinks about the mechanics in depth and then "comes to this forum to give feedback" then that someone is implicitly moving out of the "casual audience" category, isn't he? Which doesn't make him automatically an "expert" yet, but let's put this aside.
Wasn't the attempted argument precisely that people who post opinions on forum don't matter, because they are just a niche and the casual audience doesn't give a shit?
These two takes seem to be at odd with each other.
