NDA withstanding, all I'll say is that I'm psyched for this game, very psyched. So much so that I don't give a fuck what the majority of naysayers such as Inverse harp on about in this thread, and haven't read 90% of it. CoH1 had no depth to its meta game at a similar stage in its life cycle but it slowly revealed itself much in the same way CoH2 is now, and it's stupid to me that a vocal minority are being absolutists incapable of giving it the time it needs to mature.
You might be correct if you call these players that are complaining a vocal minority, but it is probably 90% of the old CoH1 vets that are not pleased with the game. The game had a lot of time already to mature. Just that it didn't. The process of maturing includes actually learning from mistakes. And damn they did a lot of mistakes, starting off with Opposing Fronts, continuing with ToV and to some extend CoH
and eventually finishing with a lot design decisions in CoH2. However, the content they created just got worse over the years, if you ask me.
If you care about the competitive side of this game you cannot be pleased, because after all this side is being ignored mostly. Relic is not changing things that help CoH2s competitiveness, they are lying to us about what will happen (and what not) and they are appearantly not even trying to get a healthy discussion about this, either.
Relic are a small but dedicated dev team, you should give more time to a company that nearly got liquidated last year. They're doing wonders with patching CoH2, turning it from a sloppy mess into a blossoming competitive RTS. As incredibly varied and entertaining play in the recent Reddit 1v1 tournament has shown. The meta game is constantly changing even within the current patch, and there's a hell of a lot of change coming, as leaked patch notes have shown.
I am sure they want to improve their game, but the fact taht we are waiting for major changes for quite a long time already makes me want to abandon all hope. With major changes I don't mean balance changes, because balancing a game that has bad core mechanics and sees a ton of new (unnecessary) content every 2 or so months is really hard and not helpful. What Relic needs to do is finally get a firm goal. Do they really want to "create" a competitive game? Then they should finally show us. What happened to all the promises? Observer mode? Limited commanders or commanders that
don't influence competitve matches? Fix of the input lag? Improvement on replay function?
All this alone shows me that, so far, nothing really happened outside of promises and balance changes (that to be fair were well-done, no question. It's just not what we need most now)
A fun game is slowly becoming a great game, and a worthy sequel. The great thing is the vocal portion of the CoH1 community that haven't given CoH2 enough of a chance are going to be rusty, and their premature opinions on its failure in its first year of release, will become a lot less relevant when they're revealed to be thoroughly mediocre CoH2 players. Then hopefully they'll spend less time whining about its short-comings, and more time playing.
It would be rather sad if CoH1 players that don't even play this game could come back and start winning everything in a matter of 1 or 2 months, while there are some players playing this game for a year or more now.
To close this out, I would like to remind you of how much effort people spend on telling Relic what needs to be done to create a good competitive game. We did a lot of work to promote this game, created a lot of content for the game and gave a lot of feedback. After all we got ignored for the most part (at least when I look and the feedback of old CoH1 vets and my own). So after going through this for quite a while now, people simply start getting frustrated. So yeah, the constructive feedback might have turned into whining by now, but there is a reason to it.