10 Reasons Why We Need Observer Mode Now

1. We can't have live events without it

The game on a big screen. Players in sound-proof booths. Commentators to the left of the stage with their monitors and a broadcast team behind the scenes. Fans fill the seats of the venue and multitudes more watch at home. What connects them all? What ties them all together and enables this shared social space? Observer Mode. To share amazing moments with thousands of people as they happen, to feel the crowd cheer as their favorite players triumph in front of them: this is the dream.

2. It will drastically improve how stream viewers experience the game

Gaming viewers are savvy. They want to see both army shields, both commanders abilities and cooldowns, consistent army colors that match overlays, and most importantly, more of the actual game and less of the static UI. Creating an Observer Mode and improving Replay Features are one and the same design project. Here is a quick photoshop hack of how it could look:







COH2.ORG's Senior Editor, FichtenMoped, wants to be one of those savvy viewers:

!Ever since I got my hands on Company of Heroes 2, I have fallen in love with the franchise and the genre. I have gone through everything with COH2: bad balance, technical problems and even community trouble, but I still love the community and the game as I loved it on the first day! This franchise has great potential for providing a really stable E-Sports and competitive scene. Hopefully The Western Front Armies will be the start of something great! The ESL community is rising, and Alienware hosts a tournament for COH2 players. Isn't this awesome? Please don't forget those folks who brought up the scene and the community! Remember Sunday Night Fights, which was one of the coolest tournaments I have ever seen in the RTS genre. These folks put in so much effort to make this possible and I want to thank them, because I enjoyed every cast and every game that I was able to watch thanks to the work of the SNF crew! An Observer Mode for COH2 didn't exist back then, but they still managed to put up great casts and tournaments! With an Observer Mode, events like SNF or ESL Cup would be a lot easier to cast and become accessible for more and more people. The community of Company of Heroes has gone through many troubles, but we are still here and we love our game. Together with you, we can make this whole franchise even more awesome!FichtenMoped

3. It can be used as a teaching tool by mentors and mentees

There is no better way to teach somebody to play the game than by simply watching them while they play. Got two friends that are new to the game? Throw them into a skirmish against each other, hop in some VOIP (Skype, Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Mumble etc.) and give them tips along the way. Relic are aware that learning the game has been challenging for new players and have written a nice new beginner's Game Guide, but nothing could help more than a spectator mode feature.

Here's an insane idea: make the Observer client software for live games and replays standalone, and make it free. Yes, your mind just got blown at the marketing potential.

4. Friends can play "Winner Stays On"

Three buddies are in a clan and their favorite game mode is 1v1. They like to play against each other and learn from each other. What to do on a dull Monday night? Play "Winner Stays On", just like when you were a kid at the local playground (or perhaps when you're an adult playing billiards at your local pub). The first two players fight while the third watches using a spectator slot with no Fog of War. He laughs along with them (and gives them some jabs in the ribs, of course, when they mess up) as the story of the battle is unfolded right before his eyes. "I got next!" he exclaims, eager to take on the new king of the hill. The loser gets to obs the next game, rinse and repeat.

5. Online events will be a whole new animal

Multiple casters will join games in real time during early stages of tournaments like Sunday Night Fights or the CEVO Alienware Cup. Multiple streams will exist concurrently, allowing viewers to pick which match-ups they would like to watch. Headline match-ups will be cast in multiple languages at the same time, vastly expanding the reach of the event. The shared thrill of experiencing a competition live, as it is being played and witnessed by casters and fans, has no comparison.

A message of support from COH2.ORG's Lead Strategist, Siberian:

!Speaking as an experienced player and streamer who is passionate and dedicated to the franchise, Observer Mode would help consolidate the foundation we, as a community, need in order to host events. Having casted, played and streamed many events in my "career", it has been excruciating to watch games when they have already been played. This not only imposes additional pressure on the organisers - who have to handle the replays and make sure they are delivered on time, with everyone concerned having access to them - but also takes away from the viewers the immersion of watching the game in real-time. It would be a huge boon to be able to stream my tournament games on my personal stream and have a casting stream run alongside to allow viewers to watch either my perspective or the commentated flow of the game. This is a real-time strategy game, we should not be watching top-tier players competing from a playback! Observer mode would enable myself, the community and the event organisers to run, participate and enjoy events on a whole new level. Currently, there are rigid limitations on the number of casters and streams since replay synchronisation and organisation are required, but with Observer mode the doors will be open for new opportunities of communication, entertainment and coordination.Siberian

6. Send a message to sponsors that Company of Heroes can be an E-Sport

We've approached many hardware sponsors. They want to know if Company of Heroes 2 has true E-Sports potential. The first questions they ask us are, "Can we do a live in-person event? Does it have a spectator mode yet?" Sponsors don't want to sponsor online events in remote locations. They want their product placed next to the faces of popular personalities in a social context, expressing glee as they win the big prize, hoist the trophy, drop the confetti! Having an Observer Mode would unlock not only potential hardware sponsors, but also potential venues, like Dreamhack or Intel Extreme Masters.

7. Devs can use it to balance the game

Players often make bad balancers because the heat of the battle sways their emotions, and they wind up with skewed ideas because another player just beat them with what they now see as a completely OP unit. This emotional response must be tempered entirely, and I'm sure Peter Qumsieh is very pro at doing just that. But wouldn't it be a helluva lot easier if he was the 3rd party, simply observing the play of two other evenly matched opponents? Right now, Peter has to play against somebody that he is evenly matched with, which would decrease the pool of potential testers to almost none. With observer mode, he can watch in-house devs that he knows are closely matched, or pick from a large community of alpha testers who could be of a much wider variety of skill levels, as long as they are close to each other.

8. It will empower shoutcasters, and we need more shoutcasters

COH2.ORG's Senior Caster, atr3uh, makes fantastic shoutcasts for his YouTube channel. Notice the unit shields are visible for both players! How does he do it? What magic is this?

?AmiPolizeiFunk:ATR, what does it take, in simple steps, to get one of your casts from the game to Youtube?

!The only way that I have found so far is to record the game in its entirety from the point of view of the other player. Once that is done, you have to remove all other elements from the recording except the commander and unit icons, align those icons (commander icons on top of the default ones and unit icons below the others), change the color filter for the unit icons (red for 1v1s, add yellow and pink for 2v2s) and sync up the overlay to the actual game. Now, since I've been doing this for nearly a year, I have streamlined the process to be as painless as possible. Even then we are still talking about doubling the length of recording for 1v1s and quadrupling it for 2v2s, meaning that your average 1v1 game (which is about 40 minutes long) can take nearly 2 hours to cast... you can do that math and see how long it takes for 2v2s. Personally, I like having both players' unit/commander info up at the same time during the actual cast, which is great, but because it's done through an overlay, it restricts my options during the cast: I can't pause or change the game speed. Having this information available in game would definitely make my life easier. Not only that, I believe it would give the community better tools to analyze top players' strategies in depth and create better strategy guides.atr3uh

Relic, please give ATR the power to be awesome by giving him the tools to show his viewers what they want to see. We wouldn't want him to get burned out doing all of this extra work. We wouldn't want him to leave your game entirely, as others have done.

9. Popular gaming personalities like Day9, Tobiwan, Huk, or TakeTV could be approached to do a crossover event with Company of Heroes without you getting laughed out of the room

E-sports personalities in the RTS or MOBA scenes are simply accustomed to certain features being an integral part of the gaming experience, and Observer Mode is one of them. There have often been ideas about getting a hugely popular personality from another game to host a Company of Heroes event, like Day9 (SC2 icon, 174,957 twitter followers), TobiWan (DOTA2 legend, 92,774 twitter followers, has expressed interest in COH2), Huk (SC2 pro, 42,923 twitter followers, former avid Company of Heroes player), or TakeTV (bi-lingual German multi-game presenter, 9,688 followers, has worked closely with ESL and has created his own hugely successful grassroots cups from the ground up). Any deal would be dead in the water when the first meeting goes like this:

?Event Organizer:"We've got this amazing RTS with progressive features like True Sight and Cover. We're trying to build the scene and introduce more players to the game. Would you be interested in hosting a live or online event?"

!"Sure! Invite me to a skirmish between two top players and show me the ropes."E-Sports personality

?Event Organizer:"Rrrrr uuuhhhh, wellll... we can't really do that because there is no spectator mode."

!"Then you could never do a live event. Why did you even call me?"E-Sports personality

He proceeds to slap you with a fish and then abruptly leaves the room.

10. Janne's time could be better spent working on other stuff

Janne252 has been bending over backwards to try to simulate an Observer Mode by creating custom map versions of popular tournament maps with extra invisible HQs and deeply complicated scripts to allow hacked "observers" to remove the fog of war, change who they are following, bring up production stats, or remove the UI. You've locked him out of true modding so he is trying to do impossible tasks with custom map scripts. He cannot alter the look of the UI, so he cannot provide even the simplest basic visual feature like the red unit shields of the enemy army. The man is a wizard, and it's incredible what he has done with scripts, but it's painful to watch. The whole thing reminds me of this classic line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Then, when you have found the shrubbery, you must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest... wiiiiiiith... a herring!"

BONUS: You will make more moneys

Find the key to E-Sports, and you find the key to the treasure chest. Better tools for streamers and event organizers means more events, which means more streams, which means more viewers, which means more potential customers are exposed to your game, which means more people buy your game, which, you guessed it, means more money for you. It is an advertising and marketing goldmine. It is the medium of the future. We want Company of Heroes 2, Relic Entertainment, and SEGA to succeed wildly. Give content creators this essential tool, we implore you. Enable us to take this scene to the next level, together.

If you support this initiative, please sign in the comments below!