I'm not in the balance team.
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.
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.
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.
So it's the 2nd option then, alright.
And if you want more justification about the alienation of the playerbase you should be more than free to go onto the official and Steam forums as well to see what people think about the recent changes, and while yes most of them are trolls, there are some that do provide some valid points as well but as with everything you just need to filter out to actually find them which is something I think hasn't been done properly.
I also love how people say that I am a very confused person and perhaps even a cynical individual, next I'll be slandered as an 80 year old pensioner as well.
And I doubt that there's a "lack of high level 1v1 representation in the balance team" when top ranking 1v1 replays are being used as excuses for a out of the blue last minute balance changes but okay.
As far as who is the community, of course it's impossible to get feedback from everybody when you take into account that again, there are almost 10,000 people playing each day and only a few of them bother to even give feedback, opinions and suggestions about the balance and direction of the game, and even less % of that being actually serious non-trollish or biased arguments.
But if no proper attempt is made to filter out the trash from the actually good suggestions, feedback and ideas and then those are not even tried to be tested then what is the point of any of this?
It's just reduced to an echo chamber of "X unit needs a nerf, Y unit needs a buff" with the balance team using that as an excuse to just disregard everything do whatever they think is right.
Lastly, they're not just my suggestions but things from the community. The USF base redesign has been in circulation for a very long time now, anybody with even some general knowledge of history and especially when it comes to tanks/vehicles and specifically German such would know that the Sturmtiger was not used as some short ranged assault gun/siege type weapon but as a long ranged heavy mortar, also implied in it's German name "Sturmmörserwagen 606/4 mit 38 cm RW 61", as in literally Storm/Assault mortar, mortar being an indirect fire weapon, not a direct fire one.
The same thing could be said about the 25 pounder emplacement idea, it was mentioned before even in the British commander feedback topic, I just repeated it later which you can also see for yourself and I decided to use it as an example off the top of my head. It's very hard to attribute an idea to a person like some people I see claim that an idea is "theirs" while in reality it could have been mentioned elsewhere before them or it just generally makes logical sense, like for example the OKW HQ trucks being able to pack up and redeploy like the British HQ trucks from the first game.
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.
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.
And no reason was given for either of those ideas. I also wonder why for example no feedback was gathered for the Grenadier camo change before the official patch release if you claim that "a ton of community feedback and suggestions" had made it in this and past updates.
Oh so the blame is being shifted over to Relic now who wanted a crashing update be released to the public instead of the internal test version being released instead to see if the issue was fixed or not and then being forced to do a roll back in the live one.
I see, all makes sense now.
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