The guy who gave a negative review to Battlezone 98 Redux after playing 8k hours

At 8000 hours, most players have lost any connection to the design intent of "game" they're "playing" -- they've lost any intentional sense of pacing, any intentional sense of discovery, and have almost by definition disregarded any intentional sense of conclusion or completeness.

They're engaging in their own idiosyncratic experience with software that doesn't work exactly the way they now dream, but is apparently closer to what they want than anyrhing else.

In the general case, their insights are going to be a curiosity and might sometimes happen to coincide with a more broadly experienced flaw in the design. And of course they may be right on target for whatever few other "8000 hour" players.

Playing a game or using software a lot can give you some deep insights into it. But there is a crossover point where you spend so much time with it that your relationship with it isn't very related to anyone else's anymore, and your insights likewise become less relatable.

This is exactly why the biggest thing in gamedev, and all software dev to an extent, is getting your software in front of users as soon as possible. As a developer it isn't just that you know how it works, but you'll also have played the game or used the front end of the experience for thousands of hours.

New eyes will see fresh flaws. The user might not be right about how to fix the flaw, but they are absolutely right about where the flaws are.

It's an online multiplayer PvP game. There is no pacing, conclusion or completeness like a single-player "estimated 40 hour playthrough" game, discovery is a metagame, and a review veering into historiography can add relevant and useful information for prospective players because of it, not in spite of it.

Uh, it can be multi-player. But the single player campaigns were the business, IMO.

The 8000 hour players might not even know what they themselves want anymore. Usually when they get to that point and they're submitting feedback requesting rather large changes, it's unlikely that they'll find much joy even if their requests are implemented exactly. They are burnt out with the game and that's not something that is fixed by making their grinds easier, adding a load more maps/weapons, or overhauling a system within the game.

When they've fallen out of love with the game, the best solution is to take a long break or just fully move on.

Online PvP games absolutely have pacing. Back then it was just about the skill ceiling and learning curve. In today's gaming era it's also matchmaking ranks and rewards and battlepass content. I do miss the days when you could buy a big budget multiplayer game and always jump in with all the tools pro players had. But it sounds like he had several complaints with the game dumbing down the skill ceiling (e.g. sniper bunny hopping) and bugs that let a novice player wipe the enemy team. A well paced multiplayer game has techniques that seem feasible to master but require a good amount of practice. A bad one only lets the top 1% of players achieve those skills after thousands of hours, or doesn't have such techniques at all.

If you’ve done something 8,000 hours without being forced or paid and your net review is negative, that relationship is something in the family of compulsion or addiction. Man drinks 1,000 bottles of Jim Beam, gives it a thumbs down.

There’s still some information there, about how the game roped this guy in and where it left him. But like someone who’s just looking to try a bourbon, his review probably isn’t that helpful to you.

Come on, you could probably come up with a decent review of hacker news. You could probably give insights into its user interface, the good and bad points of posting and reading. You could talk about how things go wrong, how things go right. and lots more.

Don't you think you could do it without being too out-of-touch?

It has a single player which is quite good!

I think you're broadly correct, although it's perhaps less applicable to games designed to hook you indefinitely.

I often think about film reviewers, and how the sheer volume of film they've watched means that their experiences are likely further removed from an average person's potential experience, than basically anyone else.

Much like how if you're an average person who doesn't really go to magic shows, the opinion of another random person on a magic show is probably going to be more appropriate for you than that of Penn and Teller, who've seen it all before.

I think that really depends on the type of game. If you've been playing World of Warcraft, odds are good you've been playing it for a decade and have invested thousands of hours in it. There are probably a million other players like you. And while they didn't 20 years ago when the game launched, the designers very clearly have that type of player, the permanent subscriber, in mind these days.

Battlezone is an online PvP game so the intended experience may be similar, I imagine it's intended to be an infinite time sink.

It took longer than I would like to admit to realize it was time to leave WoW for good. A few increasingly long breaks, followed by brief periods of trying to “fall back in love” with it.

It wasn’t so much that I got burned out on the game. It just didn’t fit into my life the way it once had, but not for lack of time. A person’s relationship with a video game can be weirdly complex.

Online RPG often have ceilings so high non hardcore players could play for years without actually experiencing all content especially with the infinite side-track available via socialization and helping others complete content.

There have been 20,000 hour players.

Except for Factorio of course. 8,000 hours there means you've just about got the hang of it and are ready to finally get your factory set up right.

(Quip aside, you're absolutely right.)

You start as a player of games and the f#ctorio turns you into a functional programmer by the end

The fact that it is "of course right on target for other 8000 hour players" contradicts the notion that its just "their own idiosyncratic experience". There must in fact something deeper which leads to convergence on the same idiosyncratic views, not just a long tail bell curve leading to completely random idiosyncratic individuals. Something sucks them in, even if that thing wasn't an original consideration in the design.

nice.

How would the devs fit into this idiosyncratic experience of the player (within the context of your thought train), regarding all that they did & communicated in those 8000 hours?

I agree with your position, but at the same time LeBron, Messi or Hamilton have way more than 8000 hours of play in their respective "game", and yet I wouldn't underestimate their experience, quite the opposite: If I were an amateur player/racing driver I'm pretty sure I'd gain something by following their advices.

I'm pretty sure there's some differentiating factors between the two conditions, but I can't really pinpoint where.

This is an excellent point! I've wasted an ungodly amount of time playing Cookie Clicker and Pikmin Bloom, but both are—for different reasons—very bad games.

Eh, partially right. There are of course exceptions, which is "creative" games, that allow to build and craft something- participate constructive in a creation - by either contributing to that creation - or just exploring something infinite like a procedurally generated world. Games can be infinite - similar to LEGO. A good product, takes a chunk of audience out of the market forever. For the artificial limitations of a company created "experience" you are of course correct.

I think that has no bearing on the boredom factor.

I love creative games, but each one will make me bored and burned out after a while. Then i take a break and do something else for a while and maybe the itch comes back later and i'll give it another go.

Even the procedurally generated stuff today is so limited in the variety of it. Yeah, there might be a billion planets in something like No Mans Sky or Elite Dangerous, but they're not very interesting to visit and mostly rather similar.

I'm sure this will improve, but it's very hard to make something believable and interesting on a small detailed scale.

The problem seems to be that generating procedural generated complexity (history of a planet), civilizations etc. is not even attempted at the moment.

I was going to say I have 10k plus hours on steam adventure capitalist but I'm not actively playing all the time. Most of it is an autoclicker over the night or the weekend.

All of you are right except... for multiplayer and competitive games. If cheaters ruin the game, or if patches killed the competition, many serious players will be impacted

I don’t know about LeBron, but Hamilton seems miserable and Messi misses quite a few games. I wonder how much they enjoy the sport. They do not need to play for satisfaction, they earn $10s of millions per year, it’s a job.

To be fair Jim Beam is one of the shittiest bourbons on the market.

You're right, it could change over time. Thumbs up previously, thumbs down now.

1 in 1,000,000 (or something) folk can't get past typing CLI commands in haiku form.

That doesn't mean there's any sense in adapting terminals for haiku usage.

Absolutely a tongue-in-cheek example, but "there's something for everyone" doesn't mean that something is something everyone should implement.

You may be right but I would also trust that person’s assessment of Jim Beam as a whiskey to some extent as well.

You say “back then” but there was a solid 15 years or so where skill based matchmaking didn’t exist, so whether or not you hit a skill ceiling varied from match to match and even from player to player you faced within a match.

I remember playing unreal tournament, counterstrike, etc. It’s not like servers were honest about skill level even 20% of the time lol