> The person best equipped to criticise a game or work is probably often someone who's experienced it for the longest.
It's funny, you'd probably not default to looking at the fattest glutton, world record cake eater in the world for their opinion on their favorite cake. You recognize that the fact that they ate a lot of that cake is a problem they have, not something that particularly elevates their opinion on what makes it good or bad. A healthy person's negative experience with a cake might boil down to something like the base being too dry or the coating being too sweet, while the gluttonous cake monster's negative experience with it might be that they felt nauseous after three entire cakes due to their nutmeg content.
So if you don't intend to eat three whole cakes in one sitting, their reflection on their negative experience is absolutely useless to you. Similarly, something like 9000 hours reflects an entirely different, unlikely and probably unique point of view, not a 100-1000x more refined version of the 8-80 hours most players will experience.
In this specific case however, the reviewer makes it clear that they feel like they've hade the rug pulled out under them by an update to the game, and can clearly state several concrete reasons why they think it's inferior to an earlier versions that don't just boil down to hating everything new. Whatever your experience is or whether you'll play the game for 9000 hours yourself, the points are mostly made such that their content makes sense to anyone. But I think their review seems reasonable despite their hours spent, not in the slightest because of them. Those are observations any player could have made after 10 or 100 hours.
It's funny, you'd probably not default to looking at the fattest glutton, world record cake eater in the world for their opinion on their favorite cake. You recognize that the fact that they ate a lot of that cake is a problem they have, not something that particularly elevates their opinion on what makes it good or bad. A healthy person's negative experience with a cake might boil down to something like the base being too dry or the coating being too sweet, while the gluttonous cake monster's negative experience with it might be that they felt nauseous after three entire cakes due to their nutmeg content.
So if you don't intend to eat three whole cakes in one sitting, their reflection on their negative experience is absolutely useless to you. Similarly, something like 9000 hours reflects an entirely different, unlikely and probably unique point of view, not a 100-1000x more refined version of the 8-80 hours most players will experience.
In this specific case however, the reviewer makes it clear that they feel like they've hade the rug pulled out under them by an update to the game, and can clearly state several concrete reasons why they think it's inferior to an earlier versions that don't just boil down to hating everything new. Whatever your experience is or whether you'll play the game for 9000 hours yourself, the points are mostly made such that their content makes sense to anyone. But I think their review seems reasonable despite their hours spent, not in the slightest because of them. Those are observations any player could have made after 10 or 100 hours.