Commander Update Beta 2021 - Ostheer Feedback

Now lets create a fake scenario as an example. Take a theoretical situation where Pioneers are under performing vs Combat Engineers. People complain, balance team will go and create a 5th Squad Member upgrade, give it like 100% accuracy at all ranges, Pioneer spam then becomes meta then they get nerfed into a worse position than what they were previously. Instead of saying ok, lets give Pioneers 10% accuracy bonus vs Combat Engineers only, then tweak/modify from there until its balanced.

CoH2 is intentionally balanced without any special rules or exceptions because they learned their lesson from CoH1. CoH1 had special rules for everything, so many of them I doubt anyone knows them all or even half of 'em. In CoH1 you had things like British Infantry are extremely weak against fire but resistant to bullets or Panzer Grenadiers can stand up to Riflemen but lose to Combat Engineers but Riflemen are stronger than Combat Engineers. The overuse of Target Tables also occasionally lead to strange bugs like Tiger Tanks being unable to penetrate Allied Jeeps or M3 Half-Tracks being completely resistant to Tellermines.

CoH2 is intentionally balanced without any special rules or exceptions because they learned their lesson from CoH1. CoH1 had special rules for everything, so many of them I doubt anyone knows them all or even half of 'em. In CoH1 you had things like British Infantry are extremely weak against fire but resistant to bullets or Panzer Grenadiers can stand up to Riflemen but lose to Combat Engineers but Riflemen are stronger than Combat Engineers. The overuse of Target Tables also occasionally lead to strange bugs like Tiger Tanks being unable to penetrate Allied Jeeps or M3 Half-Tracks being completely resistant to Tellermines.

COH 2 was a rush job because THQ was going out of business and they had no time to create special rules, it had nothing to do with learning "lessons" from COH 1. At the same time Brian Wood the Lead Designer of COH 1 (and one of the reasons why previous Relic Titles were awesome like Dawn of War series) died as well so they did not have his expertise on top of the bankrupty and did a quick slapped together/makeshift job when the game launched. It took years of fixes before COH 2 was even playable, hell the game had peer to peer networking for quite some time when it launched and lagged like hell. It was Dawn of War 3 level of bad but they fixed it for the most part over time.

COH 2 was a rush job because THQ was going out of business and they had no time to create special rules, it had nothing to do with learning "lessons" from COH 1.

That makes absolutely no sense. Why would they invent an entire new system for infantry and vehicle durability and damage if they had no time, when they could've just copied over vCoH's system? CoH2's durability and damage model is a well thought out and intricate system (although it has its flaws) that was deliberately made simpler and more coherent compared to vCoH, and definitely not some hand me down version they rushed out. Creating a more coherent and simplified system was absolutely (and obviously) a lesson they learned, and they must have made it a priority in their development of CoH2 to improve upon because of how complete it is. Invisible and incoherent rules are bad for gameplay because no one except for a few diehards will be able to learn them and it creates a mess for the average player.

What good is camouflage that only works if stationary in cover and only works until someone is further than 20 meters away when vision is 30. It's really bad.

Increased accuracy on first burst? That's precisely why camo is better on LMGs than on G43.

I do feel like the balance team too often comes up with theoretical strategies like "What if Grenadiers in camouflage sit in the path of my retreating tank?" and then pre-nerfs them without such a thing ever actually being a problem. What are the odds your tank will even go that way? Why are Grenadiers hiding behind your tank? Where's your infantry support?

But what makes you say it's not a problem. It's absolutely bat shit insane when EVERY mainline infantry unit is camoed constantly. It's also not niche at all. Jäger inf is the most picked commander in 1v1 by far. I don't see how that's not obvious at first glance. And the ability maintains a lot of utility with MG camo, PG camo and nerfed mainline camo still all being very useful.

1.What are your basing your claim about alienating a lot of people on?

2. Who exactly are they supposed to listen to when creating a BALANCE patch other than good players? It's not like there is any kind of consensus among the casual player base that could be used for a patch. Now I grant you that BALANCING the game might make it less enjoyable for more casual players because certain fun elements (like the B4 for example) are taken away. But from what I understand the BALANCE team has a clear mandate to create a BALANCE patch. They never set out to make the game more fun for comp stompers or anything like that. You can critizize the mandate given by relic but you can't criticize them for fullfilling it.

3. What community ideas are you talking about? They can't realistically test every idea articulated in this forum for example. They have to select somehow. And btw from what I can tell they have picked up on ideas by people who are definitely not part of the "elite".

Going off of your tone and the fact that I haven't seen you post in a while I'm assuming that you're either part of the community dev team or just want cookie points by trying to defend them.

But anyway, I'll bite and answer your questions.

1. The fact that many people as it's obvious here as one example have disagreements about the camo changes for the Grenadiers. This came out of the blue with no discussion on regards to the community at large, only some concerns within the closed off for the public community dev team and their few "pro" players which I don't entirely see the point in when you take into account that there was a claim here that half if not most of them were 3v3 or 4v4 teamgame players but whatever I suppose.

2. Who exactly are the elected government officials in a country supposed to listen to if not the people who elected them to serve in their best interests exactly? The community dev team are here because of the game's community and large almost 10,000 daily player base, if it's not for them then there would be no one playing the game and then no point in continuing to support it like this by developing updates.

So yes I do believe that the larger community should be taken into account as well because while not all of us are the best at playing the game or have the time to play every single day, all day long to accumulate thousands upon thousands of hours of playing it again, if it's not for these people, there would be no point in further updating the game. And if your definition is that the game should only be balanced around the top 1% of the community and the 1v1 or 2v2 scene at the most then by that logic we should all strive to be like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezoz in real life as well yet extremely rarely does one achieve that, again due to having a job, life and so forth and the inability to play every single day, all day long to ascend to "godhood" in a video game.

Also as I said I do believe they are getting a lot of undeserved hate so I'm fully aware of Relic's "scope" or at least the excuse to not fix the game entirely like for example things such as the USF base and so forth.

3. Yes and their "selection" process is very thoughtful, so much so that ideas like the previously mentioned USF Base redesign that would be a huge QOL change for everybody, at least the test of how a longer ranged Sturmtiger might perform to make it an actually useful unit instead of a meme since again, that's what the testing phase of an update should do, and for example a 25 pounder howitzer emplacement for the UKF to expand their doctrinal choices instead of only being limited to the Royal Artillery Regiment and mortar ones.

New content and ideas that has been tried and tested by the community for a very long time through the means of modding that could bring new life to the game that could potentially make it both more fun and balanced.

Instead almost all of them get shot down because reasons without even a test and then they go silent for at least a few weeks before the release of an update, which has happened multiple times now as I said previously, and get new versions of the patch only for internal testing which include changes not mentioned to the larger community and of course end up like a few days ago, with a rollback.

And to end I'll post a quote relating to the last situation which I believe could have been prevented -

Invisible and incoherent rules are bad for gameplay because no one except for a few diehards will be able to learn them.

And that's why I'm against having 20m reveal radius on grens and JCS. I'm pretty sure all other camo infantry units and perhaps even vehicles have it around 4m (except 251 mobile outpost, I know that one). Replacing the faust with a shorter range at grenade would be a more coherent and visually represented change imo if camo faust is the problem.

By the way, does JCS also get stiel hand grenades, similar to grens upgraded with G43? Would make sense considering that JCS are basicly a 5 men G43 grenadier squad.

COH 2 was a rush job because THQ was going out of business and they had no time to create special rules, it had nothing to do with learning "lessons" from COH 1. At the same time Brian Wood the Lead Designer of COH 1 (and one of the reasons why previous Relic Titles were awesome like Dawn of War series) died as well so they did not have his expertise on top of the bankrupty and did a quick slapped together/makeshift job when the game launched. It took years of fixes before COH 2 was even playable, hell the game had peer to peer networking for quite some time when it launched and lagged like hell. It was Dawn of War 3 level of bad but they fixed it for the most part over time.

Brian Wood wasn't the lead designer of CoH1. He started working on the game during the development of opposing fronts (not 100% certian on this but he definitely wasn't lead designer for vCoH) and was lead designer of ToW and CoH both of which have nothing to do with target tables. Brian Wood also doesn't seem to have anything to do with any of the Dawn of War titles. Are you just making shit up that sounds halfway believable?

And that's why I'm against having 20m reveal radius on grens and JCS. I'm pretty sure all other camo infantry units and perhaps even vehicles have it around 4m

Well, then you are pretty horribly wrong here.
There is no magical golden distance for camo reveal and many units have different distances.

Well, then you are pretty horribly wrong here.
There is no magical golden distance for camo reveal and many units have different distances.

But are any of those, speaking of infantry only now, as radical as 4 to 20? That's why I mentioned around 4m, I don't know the exact values, but playing around with stealth infantry units (and I do that a lot) it feels pretty similar.

And that's why I'm against having 20m reveal radius on grens and JCS. I'm pretty sure all other camo infantry units and perhaps even vehicles have it around 4m (except 251 mobile outpost, I know that one). Replacing the faust with a shorter range at grenade would be a more coherent and visually represented change imo if camo faust is the problem.

I'm not really a fan of it either, though it was a decision made for the 1v1 crowd which I don't really get involved in (other than making sure changes won't affect teamgames too much) because I never play that mode. Although it seems to me that any solution is going to be inconsistent. Ambush camo upgrade suddenly replacing their Faust with a lower range version doesn't make much sense either and that would also be an exception because it gives nothing special to PGrens and HMGs etc. And replacing entire abilities like others have suggested seems way too harsh of a nerf for the commander.

The concerns from players here have been noted though so we're having another look at it.

I'm not really a fan of it either, though it was a decision made for the 1v1 crowd which I don't really get involved in (other than making sure changes won't affect teamgames too much) because I never play that mode. Although it seems to me that any solution is going to be inconsistent. Ambush camo upgrade suddenly replacing their Faust with a lower range version doesn't make much sense either and that would also be an exception (it gives nothing special to PGrens and HMGs etc.).

The concerns from players here have been noted though so we're having another look at it.

Thank you!

I had a more radical idea in the lines of combining the G43 upgrade with camo for grens, it would be a bigger upgrade similar to the pschreck upgrade for fusiliers which may varrant the removal of the faust on these squads. Tho I haven't fleshed out this path but I drop it anyway as part of a possible solution.

Personally I would be ok with the camo upgrade being completely removed for grens if needed for the sake of consistency, but I still think JCS, as a limited to one squad, should keep it.

I'm not really a fan of it either, though it was a decision made for the 1v1 crowd which I don't really get involved in (other than making sure changes won't affect teamgames too much) because I never play that mode. Although it seems to me that any solution is going to be inconsistent. Ambush camo upgrade suddenly replacing their Faust with a lower range version doesn't make much sense either and that would also be an exception because it gives nothing special to PGrens and HMGs etc. And replacing entire abilities like others have suggested seems way too harsh of a nerf for the commander.

The concerns from players here have been noted though so we're having another look at it.

Actually the issue with the faust is more related to the camo/sprint combo, a combo that should not be available in the first place and was actually created the MOD team.

Both camo/sprint and PPsh/hit the dirt combos should not have been created.

Going off of your tone and the fact that I haven't seen you post in a while I'm assuming that you're either part of the community dev team or just want cookie points by trying to defend them.

I'm not in the balance team.

1. The fact that many people as it's obvious here as one example have disagreements about the camo changes for the Grenadiers. This came out of the blue with no discussion on regards to the community at large, only some concerns within the closed off for the public community dev team and their few "pro" players which I don't entirely see the point in when you take into account that there was a claim here that half if not most of them were 3v3 or 4v4 teamgame players but whatever I suppose.

I don't think this justifies your claim about alienating the playerbase. This forum consists of roughly 25 people posting regularly. That's not representative at all.

Regarding the pro players: You're confusing two things here: the actual balance team members roughly half of which are teamgame players (presumably because teamgame balance should be taken into account as well) and the players that give direct feedback outside this forum ("pro" players using the term VERY broadly). The critique you're talking about is levelled at the balance team members themselves. It is argued that there's a lack of high level 1v1 representation in the balance team but that's a moot point.

2. Who exactly are the elected government officials in a country supposed to listen to if not the people who elected them to serve in their best interests exactly? The community dev team are here because of the game's community and large almost 10,000 daily player base, if it's not for them then there would be no one playing the game and then no point in continuing to support it like this by developing updates.

So yes I do believe that the larger community should be taken into account as well because while not all of us are the best at playing the game or have the time to play every single day, all day long to accumulate thousands upon thousands of hours of playing it again, if it's not for these people, there would be no point in further updating the game. And if your definition is that the game should only be balanced around the top 1% of the community and the 1v1 or 2v2 scene at the most then by that logic we should all strive to be like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezoz in real life as well yet extremely rarely does one achieve that, again due to having a job, life and so forth and the inability to play every single day, all day long to ascend to "godhood" in a video game.

Also as I said I do believe they are getting a lot of undeserved hate so I'm fully aware of Relic's "scope" or at least the excuse to not fix the game entirely like for example things such as the USF base and so forth.

There's two practical problems with this:

A. WHO is the community? As I said earlier this forum certainly isn't more representative than some random private discord with 50 people. There's so many different sub communities it's impossible to discern any popular consensus. The only way to do it would be doing Votes about balance topics ingame so every player has a say. If you see that as a valid way of fixing the game we'll just have to agree to disagree. And btw at that point we both would have an equally valid claim to our sides of the argument winning the votes.

B. It is logically impossible to balance the game around non optimal skill levels. There's no consistent unit strength if players don't at least approach optimal play. Casual player A may be really good at using snipers while Casual B sucks at it. Are snipers strong or weak? You just have to assume the most optimal usage of a unit that is still realistic. How do you determine that usage? You look at the best players.

3. Yes and their "selection" process is very thoughtful, so much so that ideas like the previously mentioned USF Base redesign that would be a huge QOL change for everybody, at least the test of how a longer ranged Sturmtiger might perform to make it an actually useful unit instead of a meme since again, that's what the testing phase of an update should do, and for example a 25 pounder howitzer emplacement for the UKF to expand their doctrinal choices instead of only being limited to the Royal Artillery Regiment and mortar ones.

New content and ideas that has been tried and tested by the community for a very long time through the means of modding that could bring new life to the game that could potentially make it both more fun and balanced.

Instead almost all of them get shot down because reasons without even a test and then they go silent for at least a few weeks before the release of an update, which has happened multiple times now as I said previously, and get new versions of the patch only for internal testing which include changes not mentioned to the larger community and of course end up like a few days ago, with a rollback.

You're just mentioning some of your own suggestions here. I could make the same exact argument mentioning some of my own ideas claiming that my side of the isle has been ignored. The fact that some of the stuff exists in mods doesn't mean it's within the scope of what the balance team is actually allowed to implement. Again, if anythign relic is to blame here.

Virtually everyone has made suggestions that haven't been tested. 99% of ideas fall under the table because there just isn't enough time to test everything.

3. Yes and their "selection" process is very thoughtful, so much so that ideas like the previously mentioned USF Base redesign that would be a huge QOL change for everybody, at least the test of how a longer ranged Sturmtiger might perform to make it an actually useful unit instead of a meme since again, that's what the testing phase of an update should do, and for example a 25 pounder howitzer emplacement for the UKF to expand their doctrinal choices instead of only being limited to the Royal Artillery Regiment and mortar ones

Funny you should mention these, because the USF base was proposed to Relic (up to two times now) but they rejected it and the 25 pounder emplacement was discussed for this patch internally but rejected. So 2 out of your 3 examples of community ideas were at least considered. But not everything can make it into the game. There is a ton of community feedback and suggestions that did make it into this patch and every patch before it.

and then they go silent for at least a few weeks before the release of an update, which has happened multiple times now as I said previously, and get new versions of the patch only for internal testing which include changes not mentioned to the larger community and of course end up like a few days ago, with a rollback.

You're projecting. It was not our choice to skip a V4 of the preview mod. The build just kept crashing at the time and Relic decided that at that point it would be more productive to stop trying to get it to work and instead focus their limited time on starting the implementation of the actual patch.

B. It is logically impossible to balance the game around non optimal skill levels. There's no consistent unit strength if players don't at least approach optimal play. Casual player A may be really good at using snipers while Casual B sucks at it. Are snipers strong or weak? You just have to assume the most optimal usage of a unit that is still realistic. How do you determine that usage? You look at the best players.

LoL developers have a different opinion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpBh9UMOvlU

LoL developers have a different opinion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpBh9UMOvlU

CoH is not LoL. We're having a small community dev team with limited resources and possiblities that creates balance patches in their free time on the good will of the actual game developer that generates minor income from this game. We don't have a fully trained dev team that tries to milk millions after millions from their game. By all means it is impossible for CoH2 to balance around all skill levels in all modes.

CoH is not LoL. We're having a small community dev team with limited resources and possiblities that creates balance patches in their free time on the good will of the actual game developer that generates minor income from this game. We don't have a fully trained dev team that tries to milk millions after millions from their game. By all means it is impossible for CoH2 to balance around all skill levels in all modes.

Saying it is "logically impossible to balance the game around non optimal skill levels" does not make sense.

One can prioritize what one wants to balance and depending on ones resources one can expand to other areas.

Self Spotting Elefant was super powerful and there was little reason for it to have been around so long. It's requires little input to have your super heavy self spot compared to all other super heavies which still need to be spotted for. Scopes on a 222 or something like that still gives the commander better spotting than other commanders but it's gonna be easier to disrupt it now.
There's a reason in 3v3 and 4v4 it's twice as included in a line up as other commanders. https://coh2stats.com/stats/week/1618790400/4v4/wermacht?statsSource=all

no it doesnt.. the jt doctrine has 50 sight range fusiliers, flares, and uhu to spot for it. Elefant doctrine now has (nerfed) scope on 222 and a recon run that instantly gets shot down past the 20 min mark. There was the sniper which was also nerfed vision wise. So im not sure whats up with these steady nerfs to things people dont even complain about.

The only reason you quoted was that its "used more", well obvisously because in 3v3+ you are up against (self spotting) su85, 200damage firefly. and the sonic jakson. The elefant could stablize a fight vs these tanks and in my humble opinion its being nerfed unnecessarily.

then we agree because that was my point.

Why did you quote GiaA then and posted a video claiming the opposite?

Why did you quote GiaA then and posted a video claiming the opposite?

misread you post, though you wrote possible.

If one wants to balance the game across all modes one simply has to balance them separately.(doubt Relic would go for it)