I have moved on from Coh3 and i am down for ....

@ dasheepeh & OKSpitfire: you would undoubtedly assist your cause if you stated which parts of the game particularly concerned you. i.e. 1v1 or team games.

@Esxile: there is much in what you write, but Relic should have catered for team games as well, since after all, that is where COH2 predominated.

Were I in Relic's shoes, I would be setting up a Mapmaking competition with prizes. It costs them little, but would save their team hours of work. Same goes for Modding and skins. And why did they not use the non-staff Artist who designed so much for them in COH2?

@Vermillion_Hawk:

capture points have returned to a Company of Heroes 1 standard

This is flat-out wrong and degrades your argument.

• There were no capture circles in COH1. You either hit or missed the flagpost.
  
• If you were e.g. 75& up in your capture of a point, you would automatically go down to zero if your enemy touched the flagpost and you were not holding it. e.g. Ketten push

Purchased veterancy for Wehrmacht in COH1 was part of the asymmetric design.

Relic's love for the Nazis is defamatory. There are no Nazi symbols in the game - German standards alone demand that.

rip parts from Company of Heroes 1 visibly for nostalgia factor at the expense of a coherent vision for how the game should play

Here we can agree. It confounds me that Relic seem not to take account of age. The 18-year-old in 2006 is now aged 35; the 18-year-old in 2012 is now aged 29. i.e. they are most probably moving into building families in RL and have little time to devote to PC games. There is no Lost Legion of COH1 players stuck in Scotland among the Picts, waiting to troop South to fight again under the execrable loading screen of COH3. They have vanished. And the same applies to a lesser extent for COH2.

Unlike you, I believe that COH3 will be cleaned down and improved, especially for teamgames. But I am sure we would both like an answer as to how it came to this, especially when there were a team of testers/posters, mostly from this site, who went along with it all.

My final word of caution would be this: don't jump in and buy the next Battle Group Commander on issue, unless you feel it is balanced. Based on COH2 performances, you could buy an OTT commander which is nerfed a month later, when sales start to fall away.

Anybody who thinks I am crazy should consider the emergence of the Britz in 2015 in COH2:

• a Vickers team in Semois church which could successfully spray and suppress a base HMG unit in North Semois
  
• A Vickers team in Semois church which had complete vision of North Semois, even through the Fog of War
  
• The Centaur AA tank which had the remarkable ability to one-shot a squad of Grenadiers in a building - "now you see it, now you don't"

And not forgetting everybody's favourite (sic) : the 'splendid' Tiger Ace.

The game is dreadful for team game players, gets so boring so quickly. 1v1 is the only viable mode right now, none of the team game modes have enough maps. Including 2v2

Yet, community maps is not even on the list. Wouldn't any competent manager make this #1 priority before release even? If you know you are going to be low on maps and will take time to make some, wouldn't you start making sure you can bring in outside work?

Two maps for 3v3 and 4v4? I have seen free download game demos with more content than Coh3 has.

This is the thing that sucks the life right out of me even remotely hoping Coh3 will ever be good. There is no one at the wheel with the slightest clue what is going on around them.

And the roadmaps are like "The house is completely engulfed in flame so we are going to a pull the kitchen table out and maybe next month the couch".


Zero sense of urgency at all. Even after 120 people got let go. I just dont have the words to describe this level of incompetence. Maybe someone can help.

https://community.companyofheroes.com/coh-franchise-home/company-of-heroes-3/blogs/62-wire-report-june-23-2023?page=1

watching the replay livestream QA.

relic team today still seem lost at what to do. a lot of words but no substance, no clear idea who is leading them.

And we have the stereotypical purple colored hair diversity hire chatting with john_re. she sounded rather chilled with the state of the game, offering no confidence they know what to do next.

Yet, community maps is not even on the list. Wouldn't any competent manager make this #1 priority before release even? If you know you are going to be low on maps and will take time to make some, wouldn't you start making sure you can bring in outside work?

Two maps for 3v3 and 4v4? I have seen free download game demos with more content than Coh3 has.

This is the thing that sucks the life right out of me even remotely hoping Coh3 will ever be good. There is no one at the wheel with the slightest clue what is going on around them.

And the roadmaps are like "The house is completely engulfed in flame so we are going to a pull the kitchen table out and maybe next month the couch".

You have a certain gift for underscoring the weaknesses. I don't know for how long this site lasts before some young blades finally seize the initiative and start their own site with an up-to-date board.(Discord does not count). I was sorry to see you had to leave staff, but I can see why it happened.

Zero sense of urgency at all. Even after 120 people got let go. I just dont have the words to describe this level of incompetence. Maybe someone can help.

First, it is (I think) important to remember that BC pays Relic a grant to provide employment in their province - this may well explain the original large staff numbers. Presumably, Relic now have to justify the layoffs to keep said grant? It certainly explains why HR were keen to highlight their awards on Twitter.

Second, from your own past experience, I assume you would agree with me that losing 121 staff is a massive jolt which will be a Sword of Damocles hanging over those who survived. I don't know if that brings out the best in people and encourages them to work even longer hours, or whether it simply encourages them to move on before another chop occurs.

https://community.companyofheroes.com/coh-franchise-home/company-of-heroes-3/blogs/62-wire-report-june-23-2023?page=1

watching the replay livestream QA.

relic team today still seem lost at what to do. a lot of words but no substance, no clear idea who is leading them.

And we have the stereotypical purple colored hair diversity hire chatting with john_re. she sounded rather chilled with the state of the game, offering no confidence they know what to do next.

That was a vid they would have done well not publish. It offered Sweet FA. The COH audience is (with some exceptions) highly intelligent across the nations and trying to flannel them is not clever.

You have a certain gift for underscoring the weaknesses. I don't know for how long this site lasts before some young blades finally seize the initiative and start their own site with an up-to-date board.(Discord does not count). I was sorry to see you had to leave staff, but I can see why it happened.

I appreciate the kind words. I know most people see me as toxic, but it comes from a good place. I would love nothing more than to shut the hell up and play Coh3.

And you are right, I hope people are not too beat down from layoffs.

Never pick commander for it's power level. Pick commander for how sexy the units are. This way you will always be happy. I learned it from a WW2 ship combat simulator Azur Lane.

Seriously, whenever I played with Sturmtiger/AVRE, win or lose, it was always a fun game. So I couldn't care less about which commander is the best, as long as there is some unique fun piece in their tech-tree, I would consider it to be a good game design. It is like shotguns in FPS games, or lower tier heroes in MOBA, or card combos that are absurd yet ineffective 80% of matchups.

Coh3 is solid and the 1vs1 really enjoyable once you know to play it. My guess here is many people don't know how to play it and blame it on the game, hiding their lack of skill behind bugs and game issues that are real but not so prevalent. If you don't want to learn the game and expect similitude with coh2 to carry you, you'll evidently be disappointed.

I doubt that's the casePlayers are turned off by many other things, and you can probably sum up most negative reviews with the same 5 bullet points. Relic didn't do much to address those since launch, and won't in the near future either.
But even if we assume that players were just "too dumb" to play the game: That's actually Relic's fault. Relic apparently didn't manage to design the game for their target audience. The system seems to be too dubious and not intuitive, maybe too complicated to learn. If they aimed for a dedicated niche audience that's willing to invest that time and learn it, it would be fine. They didn't. They aimed for and marketed to casual gamers. Those don't want to spend as much time as they'd need to learn 1v1 play style. Relic missed their target audience and programmed the wrong game for them. That's a bad decision from Relic, at least from a business perspective, even if the game under these aspects is good.
But this also raises the next issue: They designed their game for 1v1, but most players and most offered game modes are team games. Which also means they missed their own aims for game design.

I believe you when you say that CoH3 is solid in some aspects and for a specific player base, but it is far from what Relic expected and needed to keep the game healthy.

https://community.companyofheroes.com/coh-franchise-home/company-of-heroes-3/blogs/62-wire-report-june-23-2023?page=1

Jesus Christ... First thing on the site is a charity donation event that always leave a bad aftertaste.
I'd say their value tags are pretty made up, but since it's subjective, to each their own. I don't know how it works in Canada, but in many countries donations can be deducted from your overall tax amount. If that's the case, it works like many other corporate donation schemes: You give money to the corporation, they donate it, file for a tax refund and get their 20-30% tax back, depending on what they pay.
On the other hand, Relic is sponsoring a charity bike ride, which means they put some own money in. Still, it would be better if they'd put some clarifications up or add money on top of the donated amount, otherwise I have to assume they will file the amount for a tax refund it if gets donated from their bank account.

I skipped through parts of the live stream that interested me most. There was no concrete information, and it did not feel like anything is really urgent. John in the beginning acknowledged that Relic is having a difficult time, but then went into the "we're making great progress in setting ourselves up for success", the usual PR blabbing to say nothing. It was weird to see how often they had to say "we don't have a date for that yet". It's both a sign of potential honesty, but on the other hand they should at least put one or two features to the forefront and say: THAT is our priority, we're working on this right now, and plan to release until August. Something that is in the near future, to motivate players and keep them playing, so that they can actually see improvements. Instead we get replays "sometime in fall", which can be anything from September to November. They're working on communication, but I still don't think they've really understood the issues.

Second, from your own past experience, I assume you would agree with me that losing 121 staff is a massive jolt which will be a Sword of Damocles hanging over those who survived. I don't know if that brings out the best in people and encourages them to work even longer hours, or whether it simply encourages them to move on before another chop occurs.

It'll be mentally harsh on anyone and I don't envy their positions. However, it will also depend on how much the remaining employees actually believe into their product or trust their leadership. If they don't, they will jump ship soon, or just work the bare minimum to reap the benefits before everything goes south.

If COH3 could upgrade 10 years like COH2 or like AOE3 keep upgrade many years and give us more surprise，I could wait for this.
Also COH3 not like DOW3，COH3 has good basis，just build on it we could have classics RTS game.
But what are Relic doing？Stop delay and Strike while the iron is hot！

We need updates and content for CoH3 asap: balance patches, polishing, maps, battlegroups, even factions. It's not unsalvageable, but it needs a little bit of love to flourish. It's not even remotely close to the state that DoW was in, that was an absolute mess with no redeeming qualities.

I doubt that's the casePlayers are turned off by many other things, and you can probably sum up most negative reviews with the same 5 bullet points. Relic didn't do much to address those since launch, and won't in the near future either.
But even if we assume that players were just "too dumb" to play the game: That's actually Relic's fault. Relic apparently didn't manage to design the game for their target audience. The system seems to be too dubious and not intuitive, maybe too complicated to learn. If they aimed for a dedicated niche audience that's willing to invest that time and learn it, it would be fine. They didn't. They aimed for and marketed to casual gamers. Those don't want to spend as much time as they'd need to learn 1v1 play style. Relic missed their target audience and programmed the wrong game for them. That's a bad decision from Relic, at least from a business perspective, even if the game under these aspects is good.
But this also raises the next issue: They designed their game for 1v1, but most players and most offered game modes are team games. Which also means they missed their own aims for game design.

I believe you when you say that CoH3 is solid in some aspects and for a specific player base, but it is far from what Relic expected and needed to keep the game healthy.

Players are not too dumb to play the game but they are definitively to believe they know the game because they have xK hours on Coh1/Coh2 Franchise and post clueless negative review of it. I read many on Reddit and they're just 2/3 empty of arguments.

Only points I fully agree against Coh3 atm.
1- lack of maps.
2- Lack of multiplayer ranking assets.

The rest of it are just people surfing the negative hype to avoid saying they just suck at it. There is the usual unbalance random teamgame provides, that was in Coh1 and in Coh2 until the game got rebalanced to the point 1vs1 become boring, just to satisfy people that don't want to make a friend list to play teamgame and cry because one side get it more easily on random.

2/3 of teamgame players trashing coh3 don't have a clue on how to play the game, they say it themselve all the time, they scared to play 1vs1 to get their bump bump smashed, why? Because they don't know to play the game, they don't know 1/3 of game mechanisms and go on teamgame with the hope the people they're going to be match with will carry them enough to win. And guess what, that doesn't happen because those players represent too big portion of the player base on team game, they are match together and get smash together.

And then, they switch side, and guess what again, they only do the same shit, they spam team weapon and arty and ooooh they win, but did they learn something? no, nothing. And then they come to Reddit and say how the game is poorly design and has a poor gameplay blablabla...

Coh3 is more elitist than coh2, they are more mechanism, more abilities than in coh2 to be learnt and understood and truly the average Joe that just want to do a game after work is going to suffer a lot just to grasp enough knowledge to play the game at a correct level.

Players are not too dumb to play the game but they are definitively to believe they know the game because they have xK hours on Coh1/Coh2 Franchise and post clueless negative review of it. I read many on Reddit and they're just 2/3 empty of arguments.

You do realize that the overwhelming majority of people who don't like the game aren't posting much about it at all? You reading a few reddit posts is nonsense evidence compared to the insane total drop-off of players coh3 experienced

You don't seem to understand just how bad coh3s playerbase is. It's absolutely dreadful compared to coh2 at this time after release. Which is pretty bad because coh2 was wildly unbalanced in it's early stages

Only points I fully agree against Coh3 atm.
1- lack of maps.
2- Lack of multiplayer ranking assets.

Both of those points effect the playerbase 500% more (and that's a conservative estimate) than what you're talking about. The lack of maps in team games makes things get boring extremely quickly

And you're also oversimplifying those points too. Like community maps are over a year away? That's fucking absurd, most of the best maps in coh2 were community made. That should've been ready shortly after launch

No mention of relic adding a store when the rest of the game doesn't even look finished? I'm also confident that sent more people packing than the difficulty level... Like a lot more people. They were ready to charge money for skins before they were ready to take free work from the community and add it to their game. Gives you a great peek into their priorities

You do realize that the overwhelming majority of people who don't like the game aren't posting much about it at all? You reading a few reddit posts is nonsense evidence compared to the insane total drop-off of players coh3 experienced

You don't seem to understand just how bad coh3s playerbase is. It's absolutely dreadful compared to coh2 at this time after release. Which is pretty bad because coh2 was wildly unbalanced in it's early stages


Both of those points effect the playerbase 500% more (and that's a conservative estimate) than what you're talking about. The lack of maps in team games makes things get boring extremely quickly

And you're also oversimplifying those points too. Like community maps are over a year away? That's fucking absurd, most of the best maps in coh2 were community made. That should've been ready shortly after launch

No mention of relic adding a store when the rest of the game doesn't even look finished? I'm also confident that sent more people packing than the difficulty level... Like a lot more people. They were ready to charge money for skins before they were ready to take free work from the community and add it to their game. Gives you a great peek into their priorities

Although CoH2 at statr was wildly unbalanced at the start of the game, it was incredibly fun. My friends and I got so many tons of adrenaline from the imbalance when you play against a obviously stronger factions (and the score 0-1 was not uncommon) that I could not sleep after the games (which was at night after work), the adrenaline simply did not let me sleep. What I see in CoH3 is so boring that I can't watch the stream for more than five minutes. Because sometimes balance doesn't equal fun.

The first two or three years of the game were perhaps one of the best for me, although there was no balance, but it was incredibly bloody, interesting and adrenaline.

Players are not too dumb to play the game but they are definitively to believe they know the game because they have xK hours on Coh1/Coh2 Franchise and post clueless negative review of it. I read many on Reddit and they're just 2/3 empty of arguments.

Only points I fully agree against Coh3 atm.
1- lack of maps.
2- Lack of multiplayer ranking assets.

The rest of it are just people surfing the negative hype to avoid saying they just suck at it. There is the usual unbalance random teamgame provides, that was in Coh1 and in Coh2 until the game got rebalanced to the point 1vs1 become boring, just to satisfy people that don't want to make a friend list to play teamgame and cry because one side get it more easily on random.

2/3 of teamgame players trashing coh3 don't have a clue on how to play the game, they say it themselve all the time, they scared to play 1vs1 to get their bump bump smashed, why? Because they don't know to play the game, they don't know 1/3 of game mechanisms and go on teamgame with the hope the people they're going to be match with will carry them enough to win. And guess what, that doesn't happen because those players represent too big portion of the player base on team game, they are match together and get smash together.

And then, they switch side, and guess what again, they only do the same shit, they spam team weapon and arty and ooooh they win, but did they learn something? no, nothing. And then they come to Reddit and say how the game is poorly design and has a poor gameplay blablabla...

Coh3 is more elitist than coh2, they are more mechanism, more abilities than in coh2 to be learnt and understood and truly the average Joe that just want to do a game after work is going to suffer a lot just to grasp enough knowledge to play the game at a correct level.

It has little to do with the precise mechanics, and all to do with content/QoL features.

And you are already rewriting the history of COH3: the superblobs who dominated everything while AT/MG/Mines were all broken.

In COH2 4vs4, you get two AA units across entire team and it closed the sky. Initial loiter runs till happen, but it was basically a strafe. Did I hear that right, they buffed skilledplanes and ruined AA in CoH3? Right there, this one move ruins teamgames because of how much munition and plane-abilities players call during one match.

Recapping complains from myself, the team player:
• Two maps
• No leaver punishment
• No moderation for toxic players
• Matchmaking problems, rank problems (multiplier by no population in queues)
• Lack of battlegroups
• Lack of one-trick heavy armor units
• Multiple bugged abilities or mechanics.
• Hotfixes that 50/50 improve or ruin something
• Engagement mechanics (daily or weekly challenges) pathetic and incompatible with normal play
• Generally a sidegrade with visuals, and downgrade with audio (at least until they rework bit by bit everything)
• UI problems. Ok they fixed team colors now and some icons, 4 months later. Pings and all the other elements are still not great. Nobody wants 6/10 games anymore: either you do it right, or my time goes elsewhere.

If the game didn't suck on content/QoL section, people would adapt to those gameplay changes. Even the lack of visual/audio improvements wouldn't bite.

The bad thign about Coh3 is that its mistakes are absolutely avoidable:

1. Cheezy Aids (E8 Sherman) not being bound to tech, easily in the top 10 of the most broken things in Coh history.

2. Not enough maps.

3. No basic game content (permanent player names, replay function, ingame leaderboards and ranks or even good unlocks that keep you in the game). Even to see a units kill streak you have to balance the cursor on some wonky, hidden bar.

4. A crap campaign for the single players. These campaigns somehow aren't about the soldiers. They are about either looking at a map or listening to a lame father-daughter story the main audience does not relate to.

Number 1-3 can be easily fixed.

Lol the ez8 doesn't even reach top 25 of most broken units in the history of the game.

That said, there's a significant proportion of historical revisionists on this forum and elsewhere that like to pretend that 2 wasn't an absolute dumpster fire on release that took years to fix.

I have no idea why this argument keeps coming up more than four months after release. The release state of CoH2 has nothing to do with the release state of CoH3. Why? Because today we have 3 options if we want to play CoH:
1. Play CoH in its CURRENT STATE.
2. Play CoH2 in its CURRENT STATE.
3. Play CoH3 in its CURRENT STATE.

CoH3 can only be compared to CoH2 how it is now. And no, a bad release in the past is no justification for a bad release today.

I have no idea why this argument keeps coming up more than four months after release. The release state of CoH2 has nothing to do with the release state of CoH3. Why? Because today we have 3 options if we want to play CoH:
1. Play CoH in its CURRENT STATE.
2. Play CoH2 in its CURRENT STATE.
3. Play CoH3 in its CURRENT STATE.

CoH3 can only be compared to CoH2 how it is now. And no, a bad release in the past is no justification for a bad release today.

Er, I've never once claimed that CoH2's bad release somehow justifies the current state of the third game. The point was that though fans of the game deserve better, it isn't really all that surprising, given Relic's track record. Your reading comprehension needs work.

Lol the ez8 doesn't even reach top 25 of most broken units in the history of the game.

It twoshots Stoßtruppen and weapon teams, can almost take on Panthers and does not require tech. It is the most broken thing in the current game.

Easily in line with Kangaroo spam back in Coh1 if you ask me.