The negative user reviews are infuriating

Only for people with trash computers, Winter ran fine and was a good mechanic overall but needed some tweaks and adjustments.

Ok. I can accept that a lot of the issues for both 2 and 3 comes down to personal prefence and which issues you find less annoying, fair enough. But no it didn't 'run fine' for quite a significant period of time. It might have eventually become just about bearable performancewise but it was a shallow, shit mechanic that forced you to effectivey pause the match and afk next to a bonfire until it ended.

I found the blizzard idea really cool, but it just does not fit CoH. The blizzard gives you special phases of preparation and pushing. You can move your army to a prepared bonfire spot during the blizzard and don't be spotted and then attack from an unexpected direction later. It also made transports more useful.

The game overall is just too fast for these additions. Armies also became a bit smaller overall as far as I can tell. These huge preparation phases just don't work since there is not logistics, and unit positioning is non-existant if all units are hurdled across a small bonfire. There is just nothing to prepare. The CoH concept is basically to continuously throw units at the enemy and outmaneuver and outmicro him in the meantime. The resource territories and strategic points also force you to constantly attack. Not doing anything valuable for a minute or two during the blizzard can just cost you the game, especially if it happens multiple times.

Other concepts like the deep snow and mud also fell short. The maps are just not big enough to allow for that many different areas of slow movements but potentially high impact after flanking. There is just too much pressure to actually make use of the units on the front line instead.

They worked great for bot matches though. I actually liked them very much in this context.

stop

There's a trend here with your posts as it seems. I have had this in the past with you as well that you bring up something, or you throw out a statement, but when people are actually trying to start a normal discussion with you or ask a bit further about your reasoning, you seem to lack this, and want to stop it, hence my quote from you where I see you do this again, but now to OKspitfire.

I'm going to be honest with you and share you what I think - Either you are a (very committed and elaborate) troll and are keeping this up for quite some time on these forums for whatever reason you might deem worthy of your time.

Or

You lack to understand the concept of a 'discussion', hence you back out of the statements that you put out here the moment someone asks for validation, reasoning or facts/ proof of your statements. Judging by your post history and the shoutbox, it really could go either way. So please do not keep us in this excitement any longer. Tell us what your deal is. Please. Genuinely interested.

(very committed and elaborate) troll

this one

Long ago, the forums once experienced Reverb posts with proper punctuation, no misspellings, and many thoughts and ideas.

Reverb is the forum trickster now. He says funny things, but deep down you know he's speaking truth.

understand the concept of a 'discussion'

Him: Name some things other than balance that were broken on release in COH 2
Me: *names some things*
Him: Those things don't count, you lose!

I didn't expect much, its Reverb.

COH 3 as a proof that relic lacks of QC forcus.

I found the blizzard idea really cool, but it just does not fit CoH. The blizzard gives you special phases of preparation and pushing. You can move your army to a prepared bonfire spot during the blizzard and don't be spotted and then attack from an unexpected direction later. It also made transports more useful.

The game overall is just too fast for these additions. Armies also became a bit smaller overall as far as I can tell. These huge preparation phases just don't work since there is not logistics, and unit positioning is non-existant if all units are hurdled across a small bonfire. There is just nothing to prepare. The CoH concept is basically to continuously throw units at the enemy and outmaneuver and outmicro him in the meantime. The resource territories and strategic points also force you to constantly attack. Not doing anything valuable for a minute or two during the blizzard can just cost you the game, especially if it happens multiple times.

Other concepts like the deep snow and mud also fell short. The maps are just not big enough to allow for that many different areas of slow movements but potentially high impact after flanking. There is just too much pressure to actually make use of the units on the front line instead.

They worked great for bot matches though. I actually liked them very much in this context.

I like this take. It probably would fit better into the Men of War series or Gates of Hell: Ostfront.

COH 3 as a proof that relic lacks of QC forcus.

I've been repeating for last 7 years of CoH2 history that Relic does not believe in QA usefulness.
Hardly CoH3 exclusive problem.

I like this take. It probably would fit better into the Men of War series or Gates of Hell: Ostfront.

+1. It was a cool idea. Very difficult to make it work in a game like COH.

I found the blizzard idea really cool, but it just does not fit CoH. The blizzard gives you special phases of preparation and pushing. You can move your army to a prepared bonfire spot during the blizzard and don't be spotted and then attack from an unexpected direction later. It also made transports more useful.

The game overall is just too fast for these additions. Armies also became a bit smaller overall as far as I can tell. These huge preparation phases just don't work since there is not logistics, and unit positioning is non-existant if all units are hurdled across a small bonfire. There is just nothing to prepare. The CoH concept is basically to continuously throw units at the enemy and outmaneuver and outmicro him in the meantime. The resource territories and strategic points also force you to constantly attack. Not doing anything valuable for a minute or two during the blizzard can just cost you the game, especially if it happens multiple times.

Other concepts like the deep snow and mud also fell short. The maps are just not big enough to allow for that many different areas of slow movements but potentially high impact after flanking. There is just too much pressure to actually make use of the units on the front line instead.

They worked great for bot matches though. I actually liked them very much in this context.

I liked the winter mechanic but it should have been baked into the summer maps and not split off into its own separate map. So for example first 5 minutes of the game would be summer, 2 minutes of winter, then it would go back to summer and so on. Having the entire map be winter and then spreading 95% of the map with deep snow/mud making it impossible to flank any MG in the game is going to piss off alot of people. Map design was bad enough as it is. Spreading Deep/Snow and Mud across the whole map didn't help.

The Blizzard aspect with water freezing, lack of planes, vision , bonfires etc was fine and would have worked well if the maps were designed properly for it. The issue is Relic was too lazy and the community made all of the maps since they couldn't be bothered to do any real work (just like in COH3). For example during the summer plenty of Rivers would create choke points on the map, winter would come and open the map up.

The main issues of the "blizzard mechanic" was that it brought most PC of the the time to their knees causing massive lag especially in large modes...

Regarding using player numbers to judge CoH3's success (with all the caveats associated with that approach), I have to correct myself. There still is a noticeable outflow of players. One month after launch, CoH3 currently has a good quarter of the players at release left. CoH2 needed two months to reach that mark and then continued to lose another 20% from that point onward, which was the low point of CoH2.

For CoH3, when comparing yesterday to the Monday a week ago, as well as the current players right now to a week ago, there's another 2k missing that might very well translate to the next days. CoH3 might very soon reach the same state that was the low point for CoH2 (in percentage of the players at launch), but much sooner after launch and it does not look like the game has reached the bottom yet.

CoH3 does a bad job at retaining players. And this is despite many here claiming that the launch state regarding stability and performance were much better, the core gameplay being much better, more factions, even a campaign that is supposed to offer higher replayability. All this should slow the efflux down considerably, but is doesn't.

I have no idea what Relic is doing. I couldn't find any info on the forums. Just some smaller patches and hotfixes, but no big steps forward. Neither the most embarrassing smaller issues like missing descriptions and wrong icons have being fixed, nor some major progress towards design issues as far as I can tell. They had a roadmap for the postponed launch in November and further reveals. So where's the roadmap now? They even had an extra beta with feedback in between to get a better idea of what needs fixing. Where is their idea and strategy for their newest game of their biggest franchise?

At the very best, Relic is just horrible and communicating but fixing stuff under the hood. At the very worst they are bargaining already with Sega how much will be invested into CoH3 and define some mile stones for further support. It would be a very bad outlook for the game and community, but it has been almost a month after launch. There should be info out there. But there is not, or did I miss something?


EDIT:
Last part is probably a bit overly pessimistic, especially looking at DoW3's player drop. Still, CoH3 has less players than a healthy game should and so far Relic has not signalled proper support since the game launched.

I have no idea what Relic is doing. I couldn't find any info on the forums. Just some smaller patches and hotfixes, but no big steps forward.

The most recent roadmap thing i could find was from their twitter account, from March 17th:

https://twitter.com/CompanyOfHeroes/status/1636834826065162254

All a bit vague and lacking in details, though.

The most recent roadmap thing i could find was from their twitter account, from March 17th:

https://twitter.com/CompanyOfHeroes/status/1636834826065162254

All a bit vague and lacking in details, though.

Thanks for checking, I could not find this on the official forums if they posted it there.

The first block looks fine in my opinion, if this includes squashing all their left overs that should have been fixed pre-release.
The other two concern me though. One new map for each 3v3 and 4v4? No big map package? Team colors are apparently such a large update that they can't exchange them in an instant? Camera Zoom changes as well? What is this?
Block 3 is even more absurd. What is an "invite flow"? All they need is to pull the friends list from Steam, add an invite button, create a popup message with two buttons for the invited player and make him join the lobby if he pressed join. Why is this "scouting"? Thousands of games on Steam managed to this, Relic however needs to figure out how it works.
Most concerning is the expansion (which I understand as some type of paid DLC, i.e. something like the theatre of war missions, a new campaign or a new faction. Maybe they mean new battlegroups, who knows). This means two things to me:
1. Either the time horizon of the "scouting" is half a year away. That would be a normal time frame for releasing larger DLCs, but this also begs the question why all the other stuff in the first two blocks need half a year to be implemented.
2. All time frames are shorter and the expansion will be released in 2-3 months. This way, the first two blocks would be "okay"-ish. This in turn shows that Relic does not have their priorities right. They should have put all people on fixing the current game, yet they appear to already set them aside for monetizable content.

Agreed. Maps, balance and basic features should be the big priority along with everything in that beautiful list that came from dirty finisher.

I think the camera changes are likely to do with the slightly zoomed in perspective issue. If so I hope they can change it. I'm getting used to the way it is now but its still so annoying compared to the previous game. No idea why they felt the need to change it.

Agreed. Maps, balance and basic features should be the big priority along with everything in that beautiful list that came from dirty finisher.

I think the camera changes are likely to do with the slightly zoomed in perspective issue. If so I hope they can change it. I'm getting used to the way it is now but its still so annoying compared to the previous game. No idea why they felt the need to change it.

I guess it is about the zoom level and the camera bobbing when going over terrain due to height differences. However, I did not feel that the camera was much more zoomed in than in CoH2. At least not in the beta and also streams looked similar. Maybe they need to fiddle with performance in order to allow zooming out. Or they make it a "feature" with adjustable camera settings, but need to tune it in order to be more balanced or the game still to be readable.
Anyway, it looks stupid on the list to make this a separate bullet point. This should be a sidenote under QoL improvements. Especially if the end result will be a slightly different camera setting that is the same for everyone, without changes for graphics and readability in the game. That's a 1-person job.

I have to rant about a few things that annoy the shit out of me with regards to negative user reviews on steam and reddit. Wonder what your thoughts are, don't take this too seriously.

1. Why on earth do people constantly harp on about minor unfinished/sloppy elements of the game like icons, weapon symbols and faction flags. I saw someone on reddit declare that usage of old icons to be "UNACCEPTABLE" and the primary reason he gave a negative review. In one of the youtube reviews the guy demonstrates how he can recreate the faction symbols in 5 minutes in photoshop. He literally spends more time on this tangent than he does talking about gameplay. How dense do you have to be to completely ignore the actual GAME. You know ... the part that matters. If you dislike the gameplay we can agree to disagree. But to just brush over it and complain about the menu art instead is just infuriating.

2. Why do people who are guaranteed to play the game for thousands of hours and basically have CoH as a mainstay hobby give negative reviews? Steam reviews primarily communicate to the general public. If someone unfamiliar with CoH comes across the newest iteration and sees shit reviews they will likely never get into the series. I have a hardcore CoH2 1v1 player in my friendlist that has like 4000 hours in the game and still has a negative review complaining about balance issues. Why? How does that make sense? So many people don't even know CoH or are only vaguely familiar with it. And in my experience almost everybody you show and explain the game to ends up liking it. So why scare off that crowd just because of your own agenda?

3. Why do people completely neglect the strong aspects of CoH3? Doesn't the fact that we have 4 factions and amazing performance make up for some of the shortcomings? Isn't having 4 factions upon release preferable over having a super polished game in terms of interface and multiplayer functionality? Maybe not, but then it would be more of a case of relic being overly ambitious in their desire to provide a lot of bang for your buck. No one would have complained if it was just two factions at release, but they went the extra mile and maybe that cost us polish.

4. A bigger playerbase would be so cool, but people actively prevent this from happening by shitting on the game. And I absolutely loathe the high and mighty do-gooder argument that this needs to be done because the gaming industry deserves a lesson about early releases. This is after relic already delayed the game and it is obvious that they ran out of options. Of course the same people would also agree that working conditions in the gaming industry are horrible and that pre release crunch should be avoided.

5. Anyone german who gave a negative review because there is no german voice acting needs to seriously ask themselves if they would actually NOT RECOMMEND CoH to someone new for that reason. Is that really sufficient to make CoH3 a bad game? REALLY? The average German's english is light years behind the Dutch or Scandinavians so maybe it's time that we stop putting our own voice acting over everything?

I'm not saying COH3 doesn't deserve criticism, I've not played it yet, but most hardcore gamers cannot be objective, they're too invested in the product and react with their feelings, and they, at no fault of their own, do not understand the realities of game development and make a lot of assumptions which just fuels the fires.

Here is an old but interesting article about the most common misconceptions,

https://kotaku.com/10-big-myths-about-games-debunked-by-the-people-who-ma-1737839268

https://kotaku.com/10-big-myths-about-games-debunked-by-the-people-who-ma-1737839268

Classic Kotaku 'quality'. Making up "misconceptions" that only idiots seriously claim, then declaring them as common to fake some novelty to the news and supporting all of this by a shitty text.

Making both 3vs3 and 4vs4 was a mistake. There will not be a playerbase for both queues, neither the map pool. Just... unsatisfactory matchmaking and map pool.

Halfway through the production someone should have said:

"Wait, we don't have resources to build enough maps for launch, and we already had some dead queues in CoH2 modes, perhaps we shouldn't launch with all modes"

Classic Kotaku 'quality'. Making up "misconceptions" that only idiots seriously claim, then declaring them as common to fake some novelty to the news and supporting all of this by a shitty text.

All developers are rich!
Making games is easy!

This shit looks unprofessional even for the most obnoxious buzzfeed listicles.