My real problem with COH3

I have been playing COH since I have known myself. It's been a good game.

Even COH2 after all these patches still gets more things right than wrong and that's why it's quite popular in the declining RTS market.

So I have played the Alpha COH3. Nevermind the graphical glitches, the overpowered units and the unfinished art, the real problem is that the company thinks that "involving" the community more will make a better game.

And it will not. I have some arguments for this. I might be wrong of course. I'm looking for a discussion, not a pronunciamento.

• The community cannot balance shit, because this is normally a job reserved for real professionals who have in-depth knowledge of what "balance" means in the context of the game to be made. The players should only be there to give opinion on closed environments. Something like what all good RTS companies have done since the dawn of time. AoE and AoEII had 200 ppl closed betas that met more like pals for a nice evening than gamers.
  
• The community cannot balance shit, because the players want their own faction to win. As they are not designers, they don't realize the scale of balance and also the model which seeks to be adopted. Most players, myself included, act emotionally to some things. I can't even get a grip on the number of times when many people lost to a specific unit, calling it OP and demanding its nerf.
  
• I guess I'm kinda nostalgic, seeing that COH 1 didn't really have that many updates (leaving aside expansion packs). It was a game. You liked it, you played it as it was. You didn't like it, you didn't play it again. It was simple. I realize it was horribly unbalanced in many departments (too USF friendly in some aspects, particularly PE vs USF).
  

So, in a nutshell, I just really want COH3 to succeed. RTS is slowly dying, let's not kid ourselves. I hope Relic won't fuck this up. AOE4 seems decent and its numbers are healthy. I can see there still is a demand.

...

To point1:
That's basically what they are doing. There's a very closed group of people actually contributing to the game's design and balance(I assume).
The big public alphas are mostly promotional events with the added bonus of getting information on player's wishes and concerns with the survey. I highly doubt they will incorporate a 'the P4 is too strong' during an alpha. The balance of the game is not even decided as of now, it is just a showcase of the current build, with stats probably being the first (and easiest) things to change for release.

To 2:
I agree it can be an issue. However many players and also a lot of the ones in the community team play all factions, at least in previous cohs. There is no reason for them to bias towards a faction. Personal preference can always be the case, but this can even be the case for a professional developer. Even if you assume that he will do it at a reduced level due to his expertise and objectivity, there is probably additional benefit of having 30 players that are good with the game give input and let this input be filtered by two expert developers than only having those two people do all the work in the forst place.

To 3:
CoH1 released in a time where DLCs were not a big thing. However I don't get what point you wsnt to make here.

I'm pretty sure the main point of this Alpha isn't balance related (aside from maybe identifying glaringly obvious balance issues). I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure Alphas largely test overall designs and technical things which to be fair I'm sure also involves community feedback. Unless you think that the community is the reason for new features like the Battlegroup system or breech mechanic and hate the way the game is shaping up then you don't really have a reason to knock community involvement. I mean you said it yourself - COH2 has gotten more right than wrong and that was with heavy community involvement in the later years.

YES!!! 100% AGREED. I've been saying this since forever.

Also Katukov is just butthurt cuz he's also a very emotional biased balancer. He wants his faction to win he doesn't care about the experience of other players.

100% agreed. Players have their agendas, they want fun for themselves. Devs have their agendas, they want the game to succeed and be fun for as much people as possible.

You definitely said something valuable, more valuable than any balance thread.

Relic, make your game. Select a few people you want from the community for guidance and feedback, and ignore most of the whining. The community don't know what they want, let alone want other players to have fun too

I have been playing COH since I have known myself. It's been a good game.

Even COH2 after all these patches still gets more things right than wrong and that's why it's quite popular in the declining RTS market.

So I have played the Alpha COH3. Nevermind the graphical glitches, the overpowered units and the unfinished art, the real problem is that the company thinks that "involving" the community more will make a better game.

And it will not. I have some arguments for this. I might be wrong of course. I'm looking for a discussion, not a pronunciamento.

• The community cannot balance shit, because this is normally a job reserved for real professionals who have in-depth knowledge of what "balance" means in the context of the game to be made. The players should only be there to give opinion on closed environments. Something like what all good RTS companies have done since the dawn of time. AoE and AoEII had 200 ppl closed betas that met more like pals for a nice evening than gamers.
  
• The community cannot balance shit, because the players want their own faction to win. As they are not designers, they don't realize the scale of balance and also the model which seeks to be adopted. Most players, myself included, act emotionally to some things. I can't even get a grip on the number of times when many people lost to a specific unit, calling it OP and demanding its nerf.
  
• I guess I'm kinda nostalgic, seeing that COH 1 didn't really have that many updates (leaving aside expansion packs). It was a game. You liked it, you played it as it was. You didn't like it, you didn't play it again. It was simple. I realize it was horribly unbalanced in many departments (too USF friendly in some aspects, particularly PE vs USF).
  

So, in a nutshell, I just really want COH3 to succeed. RTS is slowly dying, let's not kid ourselves. I hope Relic won't fuck this up. AOE4 seems decent and its numbers are healthy. I can see there still is a demand.

+1


100% AGREED

Well put OP, agree 100%.

YES!!! 100% AGREED. I've been saying this since forever.

Also Katukov is just butthurt cuz he's also a very emotional biased balancer. He wants his faction to win he doesn't care about the experience of other players.

100% agreed. Players have their agendas, they want fun for themselves. Devs have their agendas, they want the game to succeed and be fun for as much people as possible.

You definitely said something valuable, more valuable than any balance thread.

Relic, make your game. Select a few people you want from the community for guidance and feedback, and ignore most of the whining. The community don't know what they want, let alone want other players to have fun too

Katukov might be pissed because the community balance team is pushing a breakthrough/jaeger armor x lefh meta every single god forsaken match without having a real counter to it

all he said is that "community balance sux", and while thats true, this franchise has never seen balance in it's entire lifespan, including when lelic themselves balanced the game

I have been playing COH since I have known myself. It's been a good game.

Even COH2 after all these patches still gets more things right than wrong and that's why it's quite popular in the declining RTS market.

So I have played the Alpha COH3. Nevermind the graphical glitches, the overpowered units and the unfinished art, the real problem is that the company thinks that "involving" the community more will make a better game.

And it will not. I have some arguments for this. I might be wrong of course. I'm looking for a discussion, not a pronunciamento.

• The community cannot balance shit, because this is normally a job reserved for real professionals who have in-depth knowledge of what "balance" means in the context of the game to be made. The players should only be there to give opinion on closed environments. Something like what all good RTS companies have done since the dawn of time. AoE and AoEII had 200 ppl closed betas that met more like pals for a nice evening than gamers.
  
• The community cannot balance shit, because the players want their own faction to win. As they are not designers, they don't realize the scale of balance and also the model which seeks to be adopted. Most players, myself included, act emotionally to some things. I can't even get a grip on the number of times when many people lost to a specific unit, calling it OP and demanding its nerf.
  
• I guess I'm kinda nostalgic, seeing that COH 1 didn't really have that many updates (leaving aside expansion packs). It was a game. You liked it, you played it as it was. You didn't like it, you didn't play it again. It was simple. I realize it was horribly unbalanced in many departments (too USF friendly in some aspects, particularly PE vs USF).
  

So, in a nutshell, I just really want COH3 to succeed. RTS is slowly dying, let's not kid ourselves. I hope Relic won't fuck this up. AOE4 seems decent and its numbers are healthy. I can see there still is a demand.

Hard disagree. Community balancers are keeping the game alive by suggesting changes and keeping the game fresh. Otherwise the game would be stale without changes and we wouldn't be here without the community that is staying with the game because its refreshed every now and then. They do not have faction favourtism, only that they want a 50/50 WR for 1v1s.

I do hate how they only balance for 1v1s though. 1v1 is not the majority of games played and a lot of changes for balancing 1v1 have ruined or unbalanced team games. Which is why I refuse to watch any 1v1 tournaments/game or support any 1v1 games. I guess I am slightly 'agreeing' with your second point here. Asymetrical factions means balancing for 1v1s to a 50% WR for all factions is nearly impossible because every change has a butterfly effect.

I do not know who is on the balance team. But all you have to do is ask yourself a couple questions:

1) How often do you see a Relic employee in tournaments. There is a huge difference between designing a game and being a top 1v1 player. I can design a game and adjust DPS etc but would get curb stomped in 3 minutes by Luvnest. I can make a chess board but I cant play chess.

2) Many Relic employees dont even play Coh. How many Relic streams have there been of people who barely know whats going on. Put that against community members with 6000 to 8000 hours of play time. A game as rich in possibility as coh requires 1000's of hours to be in game situations that may require adjustments or thought.


Relic would be completely nuts to not seek out what players, modders, tourney directors, etc want out of the next iteration. And the fact Relic has added some key community members to their staff proves what I am saying.

I dont keep track but I have heard rumor of:
Tarnation - Top 2v2 player
MonolithicBacon - Prestigious mapper extraordinaire
DevM - Top Coh1 and Coh2 1v1 player

I for one am very happy to see Relic reaching out to get the best version of Coh3 they can. I am very impressed. Now if they would just fix the Coh2 servers....

pathfinders OP, pls nerf

Disagree to most of the OP as most of the arguments brought forward against Community involvement are flawed IMHO.

1) I don't agree that the community is not able to balance the game. Comparing the experience 3-4 years ago to now the game feels generally more fair across all factions and less reliant on cheap and cheesy strats than ever before (at least for 1v1 and 2v2 which I play or follow actively). Unfortunately, the analytical tools we have nowadays thanks to pageP didn't exist back then, but I'd wager if we had access to historical data the trend towards more balanced games would show up clearly. That is not to say that everything is great now and there aren't any balance decisions that were not controversial, to say the least. However, seeing that there were almost always tight boundaries to what the balance team could or could not do with every patch should put things into perspective a bit.

2) Insinuating that everyone playing the game is inherently biased to such an extent that they could never balance the game properly and only want their own faction to be OP is a pretty bold statement to make. This may be true for a large proportion of the playerbase, but certainly not for everyone. There are enough people that play each faction more or less equally at a high level and, thus, have a pretty much informed and objective vantage point on the game as a whole. Coincidentally (?), these are the ones that have the most influence on the balance process. It should also go without saying that it doesn't take a University degree to balance the game you play and know better than some of the original developers. Or to quote Rosbone:

I do not know who is on the balance team. But all you have to do is ask yourself a couple questions:

1) How often do you see a Relic employee in tournaments. There is a huge difference between designing a game and being a top 1v1 player. I can design a game and adjust DPS etc but would get curb stomped in 3 minutes by Luvnest. I can make a chess board but I cant play chess.

2) Many Relic employees dont even play Coh. How many Relic streams have there been of people who barely know whats going on. Put that against community members with 6000 to 8000 hours of play time. A game as rich in possibility as coh requires 1000's of hours to be in game situations that may require adjustments or thought.


Relic would be completely nuts to not seek out what players, modders, tourney directors, etc want out of the next iteration. And the fact Relic has added some key community members to their staff proves what I am saying.

I dont keep track but I have heard rumor of:
Tarnation - Top 2v2 player
MonolithicBacon - Prestigious mapper extraordinaire
DevM - Top Coh1 and Coh2 1v1 player

I for one am very happy to see Relic reaching out to get the best version of Coh3 they can. I am very impressed. Now if they would just fix the Coh2 servers....

Relic not connecting to their future playerbase and listening to their feedback already at a very early stage of development would obviously be a huge wasted opportunity, not least considering their recent DoW III fiasco probably still cuts deep. I'm personally happy Relic chose this path for CoH3 and given the number of top level community members involved I'm also confident they have the best chances to succeed.

The MOD team has made a great job in improving the game.

Fixing so many bug, adding new abilities, improving descriptions, names of abilities, adding new symbols, adding new skin and so on was an admiral job.

Imo the only downside of community patches is reduction of unique faction design. But that should be expected when many people are working together and each of them has his vision of faction design.

Imo this model will work better with Relic and community member working together closer.

yoou shouldve seen the balance in 2014...

I have been playing COH since I have known myself. It's been a good game.

Even COH2 after all these patches still gets more things right than wrong and that's why it's quite popular in the declining RTS market.

So I have played the Alpha COH3. Nevermind the graphical glitches, the overpowered units and the unfinished art, the real problem is that the company thinks that "involving" the community more will make a better game.

And it will not. I have some arguments for this. I might be wrong of course. I'm looking for a discussion, not a pronunciamento.

• The community cannot balance shit, because this is normally a job reserved for real professionals who have in-depth knowledge of what "balance" means in the context of the game to be made. The players should only be there to give opinion on closed environments. Something like what all good RTS companies have done since the dawn of time. AoE and AoEII had 200 ppl closed betas that met more like pals for a nice evening than gamers.
  
• The community cannot balance shit, because the players want their own faction to win. As they are not designers, they don't realize the scale of balance and also the model which seeks to be adopted. Most players, myself included, act emotionally to some things. I can't even get a grip on the number of times when many people lost to a specific unit, calling it OP and demanding its nerf.
  
• I guess I'm kinda nostalgic, seeing that COH 1 didn't really have that many updates (leaving aside expansion packs). It was a game. You liked it, you played it as it was. You didn't like it, you didn't play it again. It was simple. I realize it was horribly unbalanced in many departments (too USF friendly in some aspects, particularly PE vs USF).
  

So, in a nutshell, I just really want COH3 to succeed. RTS is slowly dying, let's not kid ourselves. I hope Relic won't fuck this up. AOE4 seems decent and its numbers are healthy. I can see there still is a demand.

1) the community is not involved in the CoH3 unit balance so far, so "the overpowered units" you see have nothing to do with the community. I know that because I am in the closed coh3 group


2) Relic did not ask the community for help in CoH2 until 2016 when they realized they messed up, until then they basically had a "we know it better" approach and the balance was the worst mess ever. People who are around since 2013 unlike some 2018 CoH2 Steam Sale Andys, know exactly what I am talking about

...
2) Relic did not ask the community for help in CoH2 until 2016 when they realized they messed up, until then they basically had a "we know it better" approach and the balance was the worst mess ever. People who are around since 2013 unlike some 2018 CoH2 Steam Sale Andys, know exactly what I am talking about

This is incorrect.

Relic did work with community member from early on since they had closed alpha and beta and open ones.

The game was not in the "worst mess ever".

One of worse mess ever was probably after the first community patch when ourah penal with flamers where running around burning everything for 6 month and then calling in no tech medium tanks...

But that was to be expect since it was the first attempt to fix a number of issues.

One of worse mess ever was probably after the first community patch when ourah penal with flamers where running around burning everything for 6 month...

Riiiiiiight, that was 100% and objectively worse than:

- nondoc elefant & ISU who remove 90% of a tank's health with one shot
- 4 minute T-70 with inf crush thanks to soviet industry
- free Tiger ace with inpenetrable frontal armor and buying veterancy
- T34/76 in t3 with a whopping 10% chance to penetrate frontal armor of a P4
- "lava on the ground" pioneer flamethrowers with random flamer crits
- OKW on release with a ludicrous resource system, unit roster and broken veterancy
- Brits on release where every unit was either OP af or bugged
- .....


Shall I continue? The list of memes from 2013-2016 CoH2 patches is endless. Someone remembers the deleted YouTube video in early 2016 shortly before the ESL cups, where a patch accidentally removed veterancy from the game and added the USF combined arms bug?

Riiiiiiight, that was 100% and objectively worse than:

- nondoc elefant & ISU who remove 90% of a tank's health with one shot
- 4 minute T-70 with inf crush thanks to soviet industry
- free Tiger ace with inpenetrable frontal armor and buying veterancy
- T34/76 in t3 with a whopping 10% chance to penetrate frontal armor of a P4
- "lava on the ground" pioneer flamethrowers with random flamer crits
- OKW on release with a ludicrous resource system, unit roster and broken veterancy
- Brits on release where every unit was either OP af or bugged
- .....


Shall I continue? The list of memes from 2013-2016 CoH2 patches is endless. Someone remembers the deleted YouTube video in early 2016 shortly before the ESL cups, where a patch accidentally removed veterancy from the game and added the USF combined arms bug?

You either talking about alpha release (non doc elefant & ISU) or broken commander commander on release. On you original post you are talking up to 2016.

The game was in good spot balance why before the MOD team took over but don't take me word for it but the other of other at the the time:

...
As most other people have commented several months before, the game is balanced but ONLY STRICTLY if we talk about going meta. Options have been drastically reduced.

...

Elchino was clearly stating that you can only play the meta strategy (probably 1-2 build orders per faction, I paused CoH2 in 2016 so I don't know) and those 1-2 meta strategies were similarly powerful across factions.
He also clearly states that everything beside that is not. Which goes to show that the "game" was definitely not in a good spot balance wise.

Also non-doc Elefant etc is part of "pre 2016" and also aprt of Relics decision how they wanted the game to be. There was A LOT of bullshit around when they balanced the game, not only in pre-alpha, and not only on release commanders. And there is no reason to exclude those in the first place. They were all Relic's decisions.

Changes from when I started playing back in early 2019:

• ISU was OP af with 70 range HE - 24/7 mid VP camp machine was nerfed .
  
• Cons were decent only in 6 first minutes of the game and pretty much not worth building late game - was fixed.
  
• Calls-ins (e.g. command panther stall without Panzer HQ) - got fixed.
  
• Heavy tanks are decent now, not op, not useless, but can be actually used.
  
• 1 click counter barrage - removed.
  
• Self spotting heavy TD - fixed
  
• Multiple "swiss knife" level commanders that could counter Armor and arty - fixed.
  
• Grens and Pgrens were squishy, thus making most of OST infantry expensive to maintain late game - fixed
  
• OKW healing became more affortable
  
• OKW ober timing improved.
  
• t70 got nerfed
  
• Lots of units became useful (g43 grens, Assgrens, 120mm, KV1 come to mind), UKF has lots of variety and the list goes on. And that what came to mind.
  

Please someone read the list and tell with a straight face that balance team is worse then what relic did and is biased towards one side/faction.

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