We don't really mind. As long as you had fun and feel like you got your money's worth, we're more than happy. :)
Think of Hollywood movies, they take so much time and effort to make, yet you watch them in two hours.
The one single thing that I think would be the most useful for everyone involved, would be for players to understand how to give useful feedback, especially for smaller / indie games where player feedback is frankly worth its weight in gold. There's really no way to properly convey how important good feedback is for a game with e.g. a solo dev like me. Divinoids is at least 4x better thanks to fantastic ideas and constant feedback from players.
This is so important I've often considered making a thread about it, but I guess this is also a perfectly fine place to do that. I'll try to boil it down to a few bullet points instead of rambling on.
First of all,
never give false positive feedback. In the words of Rami Ismail (
relevant timestamp, altough the whole talk is amazing and every indie dev should watch it at least every few months), that's the single worst thing you can do to a developer. Honesty is hardest when you have the developer right in front of you (e.g. conventions), and if the entire game is rubbish this puts you in a very unconfortable position indeed, but praising something you actually think is bad will lead the dev down a doomed path.
Second,
be as specific as possible. It helps a lot if you have a bit of a designer's mind yourself, which doesn't mean you should literally be a game designer, just someone who thinks critically about them. You can practice this even with games that you'll never talk to the dev again. "The game is too hard" is less useful than "the bosses are too hard", which is less useful than "the swamp dragon is too hard", which in turn is less useful than "the swamp dragon's triple claw swipe is too powerful", which is itself less useful than "the second swipe in the triple claw swipe has a hitbox that's very hard to dodge on reaction". You can probably see you're kind of doing some of the dev's work for them, but it's a very small amount of work for you to think about what you find wrong and convey it, versus the exponential amount of work for the developer to test every single of these things (and exponentially likely to actually come up with a completely different idea about what needs to be changed).
The above applies to positive feedback as well: "the game is fun", while obviously great to hear (and, if true, you can also say that, of course), is less useful than "fighting normal enemies is fun", which is less useful than "this character is fun to play against regular enemies", which is in turn less useful than "I love grabbing normal enemies with this character and throwing them against flying enemies". This is a real-life example from my game than actually had me adding grabs to all other characters, instead of having it be that character's gimmick (this doubles as a teachable moment for devs: if one of your character's gimmick makes it more fun than the rest, give that mechanic to everyone else, and think of a new gimmick for them).
It's also probably obvious, but to get it out of the way: when analyzing a game and giving feedback, aim for the game to be balanced, not for your favorite character to be stronger. Think of what's good for the game, not what's good for you as a player. This is probably more of a thing with already estabilished games where people have "mains", but still.
I think that's about covers the most important stuff for feedback, but I'll be delighted to answer any other questions about either this, or any other aspect of game development.
