Come on, this community is immensely positive and supportive. Our criticisms are generally constructive. Let's not paint some twisted bitter picture here cause that's not even close to the case. People are pissed about this NDA and the real lack of marketing, and rightly so. We can't be awesome together if we're not allowed to be, now can we?
I massively disagree with this Ami. I've been playing Multiplayer games for ~15 years and this community is one of the worst ever. Before people now hate on me, please let me elaborate.
There are roughly four kinds of people in the community in my opinion:
- People who are active, like the community and try to transition the game into something better. Amongst those I count a lot of the staff on CoH2.org, balance testers, the guys providing replays with balance problems to solve problems, the ones who host tournaments, be it ESL or whatever. They are the ones who really try to improve the community.
- The ones who once were in the first group, but have grown bitter due to the lack of interaction with Relic and other issues.
- The forum warriors who care more about discussing about the game than actually playing. Their opinions are often quite biased, they call the ones arguing against them fanboys and usually base their opinions less on facts than subjective impressions. Often after a lost game they go to the forums and spam them for a long time.
- The silent majority who plays on a more or less casual level or compstomps and barely provides feedback.
While in general I can fully understand the second group, I think they are doing a massive harm to the community and it's future development. Their bad experiences are constantly re-iterated and they see everything Relic does in a negative way. On the one hand you are thankful for their earlier contributions and how they helped improve the community, but on the other hand right now they are busy destroying all their good efforts prior and guilty for that are they solely. Relic may have faulted them in the past, but they continue to keep it affecting the now. That's one of my major problems with the community. The other are the people on the forums. They tend to be only a small part of the community, but due to their extremely high activity in the forums compared to them ingame their opinion is often rather vocal. The sheer amount of such posts drowns out most useful discussions and even in the old closed balance beta that was running till january or such (where also some lateron released commanders got tested!) the amount of spam, off topic and biased posts based on nothing was immense. I assume that was also one of the reasons Relic decided not to go for such a balance beta anymore, as like in the forums the ratio of useful to useless posts is too high.
Those are pretty much my problems with the community. I've rarely ever seen a community that has so much negativity and whose general attitude towards changes is usually negative. Couple that with an ignorance to learn what values in a changelog mean, but a vocal spam about what one thinks they mean and I am very annoyed. That might be especially with me, as I put a lot of time and effort to learn the stats, mechanics and workings of CoH2.
My problems with Relic are in the recent time small. In the beginning of the launch they were massive. There was almost no communication, close the gameplay did barely improve in the patches and was rather bland. So many things there were bad and those caused a lot of people who invested a lot of effort into CoH2 from the start to become annoyed with them. A major part of why the community is this way is Relics dealing. It would have never gotten so bad had they not failed so much in the beginning. Of late I feel the patches are far better, the gameplay improved and while there definitely are still quite some issues, those are often more attributed to scaling (1v1 => 4v4) and in general rare compared to prior. The gameplay got a lot more depth with different ranges mattering more and in general I for one am incredibly happy about those changes. So balancing-wise it improved a lot. The other issues like communication have barely improved. While there are now casts/videos that showcase new patches and offer a big improvement over just changelogs forum posts from Relic are still rare. I've been incredibly happy with the German Community Coordinator Hardy who often posted on the German forums and also quite often in the international ones, but he had to retire since his working permit expired. Besides him I sometimes see the Balancers posting, but I feel especially a lack of interaction from Noun or whoever is responsible for direct interaction with the community. This feeling of not being heard / listened to is a major factor why this community is so bad. People feel ignored which annoys them and they vent their anger. Instead of directly trying to solve this problem at the root and communicating more they blame the community for being toxic. Definitely helping. If you take a look at the Q&As or Ask Me Anything on Reddit most issues are actually not answered, but 'passed on'. I honestly wonder why you do this if you can't answer the questions :\
TL;DR:
I don't like a lot of people in the forum-community, but there are also some really nice and active people. The biggest cause of the problem was the time Relic took to improve CoH2 and the lack of communication which - till this day - exists in one or another form. Fix please for a better future.
Sorry, the tone I used in my post wasn't great. It was a slow morning for me.
Relic Entertainment
cblanco ★ 
보드카 중대 
VonManteuffel 
Heartless Jäger 
