Foucs on the details, Relic, Plz

I am also displeased by the fact that Relic is not focusing on fixing bugs (like game freezing and sooo many others) but rather on creating new features in order to make the game more commercial.

Our office is comprised of several different teams. The people working to resolve bugs are not the same people that develop new features or content.

Developing new features/content does not detract from other aspects of game development, such as fixing bugs/QA team.

Sexist post invised. Please keep it clean.

We do not need to know about your sexual experiences/preferences.

You guys know nothing about eSports. SC2 was the same strat over and over for the first couple years (maybe even still) with MASS WORKER pull to allin the first and only attack that ended the game. This happened in atleast 50% of every game the first year of Code S in GSL.

The game still did well in esports, why? Well first of all starcraft is a known franchise but more importantly the commentators really made it all fun to watch, commentators such ass artosis and tasteless.

So what is my point? That for a game to succeed as eSports it HAS to be FUN to watch and EASY to understand! CoH2 does both of those really well and that its the same strat over and over won't matter to the untrained eye since RNG elements will make each game fresh and new.

Its all up to the casters to make it all entertaining and that it is skillfully advertised to a new crowd who doesn't even know what company of heroes is.

On the esports subject, i kind of agree that the game is maybe too cheesy for it to be very succesful. However, the most succesful esports games out there (Dota, lol) are rather stuck in the same metagame which changes only after balance patches come to swing the equilibrium of power towards different heroes / champions (whatever).

I do not agree that RNG will make every game "fresh and new" however, it might just confuse people, as sometimes a given squad will win an engagement, and in the same game, maybe 2 minutes later it will win. It is hard to learn parameters of a game with that kind of mechanics.

If someone gets into following a traditional sport (IE football -soccer-), and if rules are somewhat random, and 2 identical actions lead to 2 different results (goal is scored, goal is not valid), they might just question whether the sport in question is serious or not.

I do not agree that RNG will make every game "fresh and new" however, it might just confuse people, as sometimes a given squad will win an engagement, and in the same game, maybe 2 minutes later it will win. It is hard to learn parameters of a game with that kind of mechanics.

If someone gets into following a traditional sport (IE football -soccer-), and if rules are somewhat random, and 2 identical actions lead to 2 different results (goal is scored, goal is not valid), they might just question whether the sport in question is serious or not.

RNG makes every game entertaining for the exact reason you listed. Sometimes a given squad will win the engagement and sometimes it won't. This adds suspense as the outcome isn't always forgone and unpredictable outcomes can often have a dramatic impact on the momentum of the game.

To use football as an example. A corner kick can sometimes result in a header and goal or sometimes not. The rules that create a corner kick are consistent but the results can vary widely. The suspense of not knowing what is going to happen is what makes the sport entertaining. I would compare this to throwing a grenade in CoH2. Sometimes the grenade will wipe a squad but sometimes it will do next to no damage. As long as using the grenade ability always throws a grenade the rules are constant and only suspense of RNG remains.

As much as it is complained about, RNG has as much to love about it, as it does to hate.

Personally, I think its a good direction for especially RTS esport to take.
I think its a real strength CoH2 has over SC2.

Completely predictable systems are, well, predictable, and if you think about it, pretty boring actually. Probably less frustrating for players, true, but also far less intersting to wacth from a viewer perspective.

RNG allows for a certain cinematic/storyline and drama quality to a match that a predictable system just cant produce. Nobody really knows whats gonna happen, not the players, not the casters and not the viewers. Makes every single match entirely unique.

On a technical level, RNG can be tuned by simply adjusting a few numerical values, should it in some occurances be too frequent or lead to gamebreaking results.

**Disclaimer, this is a long post and also contains rants, even if understand basic stuff like "it's normal that fixing bug creates different bugs" and "we all played this for enough hours anyway"**

The problem is that you shouldn't NEED this much patches. Bugfix can be tricky, that's a fact, but again strong balance issue shouldn't pop out to the game. (The last is the Katyusha stuff, how could they missed the huge ammount of damage that thing dealt before release?! Another pretty much similar problem there was for DoW2 and the Genestealer, that they had aura multipler that stacked limitless making 3/4 squads together, immortals and prettymuch instakilled everything... fun moment as a tyranid player).

I mean, Relic, and expecially CoH2 has a strong group of people who is both really competitive and really fond to the game itself who could help avoiding this mistakes for the bigger audience. They could make some kind of closed beta for each patch..

Lastly, there is WFA. I don't know how many of you were lucky enough to enter the "Alpha", but geez, you can't make only 1 month with so little people playing (5000key delivered, i saw at best 1\200ppl on in the evening hours), for a whole expansion.

And we were lucky that some of the few people were actually there to claim bugs and balance issues, otherwise idk what kind of game we would have now.

And then we have features that they're clearly made wrong, like the War Spoils, so good in theory, so bad (mhh.. more than Bad they're troll, wich probably is worst) as they're now.

There are so many issue within the game that, even if it's decently playable and whatever, you can't simply say "programming is hard, give them a break!!"

In the whole reply i'm not talking of the unavoidable problems (such as the bugfixing that creates more bugs, that happen, expecially if you start trying to fix A LOT of bugs.. but you shouldn't end with so many bugs to the public at release.. but i will repeat myself if i continue this sentence), i'm talking of the bigger problems (balance and MAJOR bugs) that shoulded be fixed BEFORE release (so i'm not talking only at the state of the game right now).

On a final note, (please apology for the long text) being able to patch the live game SHOULD be a privilege, not the normality.

In the 90's or early 00's, you woulded have a shitload of people raging if a game came out with so many bugs at release and that game woulded stay in the shelter.

And back then the whole "customer is always right" didn't actually apply for the gaming industry.
Unhappy customers popped out pretty much together with the internet, it might be because people now can speak freely, but i don't believe that the fact that ALL the industry now rely on releasing not perfect games because "they can patch", isn't a reason of the more and more people who rants about this kind of stuff.

RNG makes every game entertaining for the exact reason you listed. Sometimes a given squad will win the engagement and sometimes it won't. This adds suspense as the outcome isn't always forgone and unpredictable outcomes can often have a dramatic impact on the momentum of the game.

To use football as an example. A corner kick can sometimes result in a header and goal or sometimes not. The rules that create a corner kick are consistent but the results can vary widely. The suspense of not knowing what is going to happen is what makes the sport entertaining. I would compare this to throwing a grenade in CoH2. Sometimes the grenade will wipe a squad but sometimes it will do next to no damage. As long as using the grenade ability always throws a grenade the rules are constant and only suspense of RNG remains.

I think we have an agreement on the fact that 2 situations can have different consequences, i'll use your example: yes of course a corner kick can end in sometimes a goal, or not. The big difference here, is that the result is driven by the players actions. It has nothing to do with RNG.

To compare with a CoH2 situation: sometimes you engage at long range a squad of conscripts with your squad of grenadiers in green cover. Statistics are on your side, your action is perfectly legit, yet a string of bad RNG can mean you lose 2 grenadiers in the first 5 seconds of the firefight, and proceed to lose the engagement from there. In another case, the exact same fight could have the probable outcome, with grenadiers winning handily the engagement.

The player has no control (contrary to football players of the example) on the outcome, he/she can just position and control his units in the best way he/she should adopt, and you have different results. This is bad (even though i like this as a gamer, it means you always a chance of doing incredible things while being on the backfoot), and might confuse spectators of the game (given they don't know the mechanics of CoH before watching a game, for us players of CoH, it wouldn't be that surprising - "what a string of bad luck", happened to all of us at some point in time).

But as already pointed earlier, this is too late to change (since it is at the core of the CoH franchise), and i think it shouldn't be. Aiming for eSports is a noble quest, but it shouldn't alter the game we already know and love as it is. I for one, would rather not have CoH2 become an eSports games, rather than have it being dull and predictable, like SC2 is (just being an economic simulator, with lots of spam and macroing involved, rather than pure tactics and unit preservation).

Our office is comprised of several different teams. The people working to resolve bugs are not the same people that develop new features or content.

Developing new features/content does not detract from other aspects of game development, such as fixing bugs/QA team.

Hey Cynthia!

I'm really happy to see you post here so often, that I kinda feel bad to speak out a bit against what you said

I love CoH2, but I also sometimes hate and and am annoyed by it. Especially in the recent time. Due to the freezes and lags I can't play anything above 2v2 anymore. Well, it is possible, but then the performance is usually so bad that I can't really enjoy playing the game, which is the exact opposite of why I am playing games The performance is a major problem, but not the only one. There is a long list of bugs that we sent to you already several months ago, barely anything on that list got fixed.

Balance wise the game is in a good state in my opinion. It's not perfect, but it's really playable. Bugfixes / performance improvements should have a far higher priority than balancing right now. There is no use for a perfectly balanced game that is so buggy that it's not fun to play.

I do think that developing new features does detract from bug fixes / performance improvements. A great part of those things are only doable by your engineers I guess. The other teams might assist or do some previous trials, but especially the bigger bugs are deep inside the code. The same engineers who could fix that are probably right now busy with with new features.

I do love the new features, Obsmode is great and also the new campaign looks awesome, but I think you should take it slower. Obsmode should only be a secondary priority right now. The release date for the campaign is fixed and that will help you guys earn some money, so this should definitely be a high priority. Fixing the game should be another. If Obsmode is not ready for the ESL, that is definitely not great, but it's acceptable. If Obsmode is ready but the game is still as buggy, then Obsmode is useless. I don't know if you have any other features in development, but if so I guess all of them are less important than the ones mentioned above.

Thank you for reading, I hope you see it as valid feedback. If you want to be nice, give Noun a hard time from me

You guys know nothing about eSports. SC2 was the same strat over and over for the first couple years (maybe even still) with MASS WORKER pull to allin the first and only attack that ended the game. This happened in atleast 50% of every game the first year of Code S in GSL.

The game still did well in esports, why? Well first of all starcraft is a known franchise but more importantly the commentators really made it all fun to watch, commentators such ass artosis and tasteless.

So what is my point? That for a game to succeed as eSports it HAS to be FUN to watch and EASY to understand! CoH2 does both of those really well and that its the same strat over and over won't matter to the untrained eye since RNG elements will make each game fresh and new.

Its all up to the casters to make it all entertaining and that it is skillfully advertised to a new crowd who doesn't even know what company of heroes is.

that's awesome to hear

TFN must come back to coh!!

Our office is comprised of several different teams. The people working to resolve bugs are not the same people that develop new features or content.

Developing new features/content does not detract from other aspects of game development, such as fixing bugs/QA team.

well, that is the problem
the guy knows how to fix the bug cant fix but move forward
the guy who does not know how to fix it have to pick up from beginning to find where the bug then fix it

Milkacow: I dunno man, I think Obsmode is crucial for the ESL big prize cup...

Milkacow: I dunno man, I think Obsmode is crucial for the ESL big prize cup...

It sure is but let's be honest : ESL tournamets will be played by an handful of players.

Bug fixing and performance issue is more important

Disrespectful post invised.

Our office is comprised of several different teams. The people working to resolve bugs are not the same people that develop new features or content.

Developing new features/content does not detract from other aspects of game development, such as fixing bugs/QA team.

This doesn't change anything. The bugs are still there and are making a very frustrating game-state right now. Add on to that the stoic silence that we have grown accustomed to.. add water and voila: frustrated fans.

I love the game but it screams for optimization. This should be a TOP priority, if not THE top priority! And bug fixing ofcurse!

Disrespectful post invised.

What point of my post is disrespectful when all I'm telling are the truth ? Oh nevermind, It's disrespectful to say the truth and how I feel as a customer anyway.