Why are there so few good players in the CoH2 playerbase.

I know what you mean GiaA.

CoH2 is simply missing the solid average skill playerbase like, for example, StarCraft II has. Either you play against someone really good in automatch, or you play against a new player. It's a lose-lose situation because new players become discouraged and players who feel more comfortable with the game lack a challenge.

Apart from that, I think most people just want to play for fun and stick to 4v4s or Compstomps. They play CoH2 because it looks nice and the enjoy large scale battles. I, on the other hand, enjoy the game for it's tactical opportunities and small skirmishes. I don't want to sound like that I judge them for that, because I don't. We all play this game because we want to have fun. I'd like to play this game in a more competitive way though, because RTS in general are a good opportunity for that and CoH2 has the potential for it and I love the game.

Because a plane landed on their squads at base

They got truck crushed and never came back

They got truck pushed and never came back

They saw Breaking Brad stream

Their MGs faced the wrong way, constantly

Their tanks were given orders the disagreed with, and disobeyed.

They enjoy winning as both factions

and.... for my final reasoning: CHEESE.

Well that's true, those things can ruin the mood. But I think the main reason is still the community itself and their attitude towards the game. I mean 1v1 is the most less played game mode (as far as I remember). They rather stick to teamgames than seeking the challenge in 1v1 automatch. As I said, 1v1s can be stressful than let's say 3v3s or 4v4s but it brings the game to a new level of tension and joy (at least for me).

But you're right, with all the bugs and performance issues added it doesn't help CoH2 either.

I have high hopes for the "E-Sports Partnership" which was announced at Gamescom. High hopes generally set me up for disappointment, and I find myself quite pessimistic about its potential.

But they are doing it wrong, just like the CEVO cup. It appeared as quickly as it disappeared afterwards. Throwing in a bunch of money doesn't mean E-Sports. It's the way you present the matches, showing it to a wider audience. It's kind of like showbusiness. Many missed opportunities in that regard if you ask me.

People may think it trivial but adding in game leagues/rank insignia to distinguish yourself from others is one of the biggest motivators for people to keep on playing. CoH1 had the 1-20 rank system, SC2/LoL/CSGO also have their own leagues/ranks that are a huge factor in driving people to play more and more.

All CoH2 has is an out of game leader board with a number that signifies how supposedly good you are, which frankly isn't a fun feature to show how much you have improved or how good you are. Relic need to give players a reason to keep on playing and to keep on improving (which will in turn bring in more "good" players), I think a proper rank system is a major factor.

It goes without saying the general balance of the game, bugs, optimisation will drive off good players as well who decide their time is better focused elsewhere.

Never thought of it that way. I like these suggestions!

As other have pointed out, its a combination of bugs, bad faction design, poor balance, cheese, and the fact it's hard to learn the game. I think ranking system would come at the end of the list.

Player base is too small so you don't have enough competition to keep better players stimulated and you don't have enough players that want to learn and get better.

Also doesn't help that the game runs like ass, it's quite weird that the game runs WORSE (losing at least 30fps and jerky camera movement) when all my settings are on low or off than when I have everything on medium or high.

The game is also being designed in a zero latency environment while the players have to deal with an average input delay of about 400ms. Hello short fuses on grenades with no time to react.

I have high hopes for the "E-Sports Partnership" which was announced at Gamescom. High hopes generally set me up for disappointment, and I find myself quite pessimistic about its potential.

My advice. Keep your hopes low.

This is a material-sport (dont know if that works in english). If you have a decent computer and good internet you have a huge advantage. This games is quite demanding and I guess there is more players than me that plays at 10 fps. Optimizing the game would lead to bigger playerbase with better players.

This is a material-sport (dont know if that works in english). If you have a decent computer and good internet you have a huge advantage. This games is quite demanding and I guess there is more players than me that plays at 10 fps. Optimizing the game would lead to bigger playerbase with better players.

Exactly. That's another important factor. That's what I meant with game performance. In order to attract a large group of players, your game has to run fluently even on older machines. StarCraft II is the best example for that. The game runs even on the crappiest PCs and still manages to look relatively well.

The game is also being designed in a zero latency environment while the players have to deal with an average input delay of about 400ms. Hello short fuses on grenades with no time to react.

This. I recently moved and my internect connection is really bad compared to the one I got used to. It's like comparing the reaction time of units in an offline skirmish game and a game set in online automatch. Huge diffrence.

-Small playerbase.
-Absolute lack of ANY advertisment anywhere to drag in new players.
-Bad balance with questionable quality and frequency of hotfixes(recent example:assault engies were nerfed within days after changes, bugfix that implemented a new, devastating for soviet AT bug persists for how long now? month? more?).
-Lack of incentive to be top player due to low skill level of overall population.
-Lack of competitive tournaments(I miss you SNF) and too much of Jesulin winning everything effortlessly.
-Bugs
-Bugs
-Bugs
-One more bugged patch with no addressing of existing multitude of bugs and we'll have a Tyranid faction introduced.

Probably few more reasons I can't think of right now.

Maybe the player base isn't great due to the nature of the game?

CoH interests me because of features like flanking, suppression, etc. Normally I play turn based games or real time games with tactical battles like the Total War series. "Micro," however, is just not something that I do well and I don't think I'll get much better with practice (though I've been trying), and CoH differs from these other games in how much micro management and multitasking it requires (esp USF). So maybe part of the issue is that CoH draws a lot of people like me who like the tactical features but suck at micro managing?

An example: I see a blob coming, I put my MG in a good position to suppress it, move supporting inf. into cover, and inflict some losses on the blob and force it to retreat ... but in some other corner of the map a squad just got wiped by a grenade or whatever because I just can't seem to pay attention to that many things at once. Stuff like that probably makes me not very challenging to place against for better players.

I think the next CoH game should try a new format centered on 8v8 games where each player controls only about 3-4 units or so. Maybe that will drawn in more people.

The game runs "ok" for me

although im running an i7 4790k at 4.4ghz

with a gtx 780

The game runs fine, except in a 4v4 environment where i pan the camera to the ground.

fps goes from like 68 to 22

Definitely a issue worth discussing.

I think there are many reasons why CoH2 lags a competitive playerbase.

> bad marketing
Well there was the regular tripel A marketing hype but everything afterwards was more or less bad. If you don´t know about a game you will never play it.


>bugs
No need to explain it i guess. Everyone hates to play a game which isn´t working as expected.


>bad performance
We dicussed this many times, IpKaiFung nailed it:

Also doesn't help that the game runs like ass, it's quite weird that the game runs WORSE (losing at least 30fps and jerky camera movement) when all my settings are on low or off than when I have everything on medium or high.

>small playerbase

General speaking CoH isn't a game suitable for the mass for several reasons. I don´t want to go into details here. Most people who buy the game play the campaing and maybe some single palyer content and move on. Compare the sale numbers with the numbers of people playing online. Many people just don´t want to play vs other people. And many of those who want prefer team games over 1v1 matches. Not to mention the people who gave the game a chance and stopped playing for what ever reason (bugs, balance, to hard to learn the game, performance issues, ...).


>community behavior
I can´t compre the situation with other games but let´s say i am a new player, read about CoH2 so i decide to check a stream and see what this game is about. And while doing so i read the chat where some people are in the middle of a troll party. Not the best impression.

More Mentoring, guides, events and tutorials would be great as well since learning CoH is not exactly easy.


>no CoH1 style in game ladder

HappyPhace is right:

People may think it trivial but adding in game leagues/rank insignia to distinguish yourself from others is one of the biggest motivators for people to keep on playing. CoH1 had the 1-20 rank system, SC2/LoL/CSGO also have their own leagues/ranks that are a huge factor in driving people to play more and more.

All CoH2 has is an out of game leader board with a number that signifies how supposedly good you are, which frankly isn't a fun feature to show how much you have improved or how good you are. Relic need to give players a reason to keep on playing and to keep on improving (which will in turn bring in more "good" players), I think a proper rank system is a major factor.

It goes without saying the general balance of the game, bugs, optimisation will drive off good players as well who decide their time is better focused elsewhere.

The current system is Call of Duty style -> boring. In CoH1 i always had a objective like reaching rank 16 and get this Star. The ladder was a pyramide with the best on the top. You achived something by playing the game. In CoH2 i reach the max level like everyone else and thats it. Ok there is a ladder but not even in the game so knowone cares.

At all it´s just not attrative to play 1v1´s. So the most people don´t do it.

CoH2 just doesn't give anything to the average competitive player who doesn't have a history with the Company of Heroes franchise. I personally think the design of the game has a lot to do with that, but that's a subject that's been talked to death here, so I won't harp on it anymore.

It's just a whole bunch of small things really. It's a WWII game, so right off the bat it's going to have a smaller audience. Because of that small audience, matchmaking struggles to create even games with acceptable latency. On top of that, the game suffers from major performance issues. A lot of competitive players play their games on bare minimum settings even if their rigs can handle higher, simply to guarantee that FPS drops don't occur during important moments. The fact that a lot of really good rigs can't guarantee acceptable framerates on minimum settings in CoH2 is hugely frustrating to competitive players.

Add on top of that the DLC commanders system, which has improved but is still problematic from a competitive perspective, not to mention the fact that when the game first was released and had the most attention on it, it was in such a horrendous state that anyone who would have been potentially interested in it was instantly turned off, and you end up with an environment that really isn't encouraging to competitive players who don't already love CoH. Toss in Relic's obvious apathy toward the competitive scene and the fact that 99% of their previous game's top players have no desire to play the sequel and you've got a game that doesn't really encourage competition and is starting from scratch in a market oversaturated with better competitive games.

It's going to be really tough for them to overcome at this point in the game's life. CoH2 will always have a competitive scene, of course, but growing it even to the size of CoH1's is going to be a challenge.

I find myself getting more distant from the game for a lot of reasons. I was never that good, but at the same time I don't feel the need to play seriously. I get the feeling this game is counter-intuitive to play and get better in a lot of ways.

The constant patching is good in some ways, bad in others. The game changes so much each patch due to their 'balancing with a sledgehammer' approach it's almost like 'Why bother learning the best tactics, there will be a new change that ruins it next week'.

Not to mention things like too much RNG (seriously, mortars in this game are like playing roullette sometimes), and I find the playerbase is starting to turn on eachother.

Half the time when I win I get an angry message from the other player about how my faction is OP or how this game is shit. Never mind that they constantly ran their tanks into my AT guns or kept trying to rush into shock troops across negative cover. I had one guy telling me Soviets were broken because they had the best and cheapest infantry, saying Cons were the best infantry in the game.

Then you go online and everyone keeps complaining about 27 Jagdtigers being the go-to strategy, while I scratch my head and then remember that 3v3 and 4v4 is STILL inherintly broken in this game and Relic just won't fix it. Leading to more patches and patches and patches meaning we have a new 'Strategy of the Week' depending on which vehicle or faction got some crazy buff.

I still play the game because I find it relaxing to play for half an hour at a time in 1v1 matches, but I don't really care if I win or lose anymore, it's just playing a fun burst. It's not like when I played Virtua Fighter or King of Fighters and was constantly wanting to improve and learn the game.

My propensity to play games of CoH2 anymore is 100% contingent on how insistent my friends are to fill out their team. They haven't been too insistent recently.

I spend more time in Worldbuilder trying to convince myself it'll improve the game for some people than playing the game itself.

Incidentally, I've been seeing a growing number of vCoH streams, and I've been enjoying it.

If someone managed to mod coh2 to be an exact mirror of vcoh. or mod vcoh with the new coh2 engine.

My life would be complete

The truth is, if CoH1 was released right now, it probably wouldn't be a very successful competitive game either. I think it would be more successful than CoH2, mainly because I think it's just a better game for that style of play, but it's still a WWII RTS by a developer with a terrible track record of encouraging competitive play in their games. And it would still be thrown into a market of already-successful competitive games that offer a whole lot more to players interested in that kind of thing.

CoH1 had the benefit of developing a competitive scene before competitive gaming really took off in the mainstream, and as a result was able to attract a lot more competitive players than it ever would have been able to if it had be released today. Just something to keep in mind when comparing the two.

If someone managed to mod coh2 to be an exact mirror of vcoh. or mod vcoh with the new coh2 engine.

My life would be complete

Other than ice tech (with frozen puddle portals), blizzards (everyone's favorite), and the one or two maps with mud on them, the only thing that CoH2 really has is it's 'trusight' mechanic. And even that is a mixed bag. (It's synonymous with shot blocking, and rarely correlates to what is visually represented by map objects.)

Quite frankly, I feel vCoH still has a better shot at being an e-sport than CoH2.

Some good reading here.

It's also no secret that competitive strategy games focusing on 1v1 combat have been losing ground in the marketplace (SC2 included). In other words, people just aren't drawn to them anymore.

As the video game market became more saturated and diverse, something happend in our collective mindset that drove us away from these types of games and into the hands of team competitive games (the likes of LoL, Dota, CS:GO, etc).

My opinion is that people are naturally attracted to team games to begin with because we're social animals at our core. If competitive strategy games were popular once, it's probably because the technology was still too restrictive (latency, cost of good internet) for games focusing on team play.

There's also the matter of avoiding blame. If you lose a 1v1 battle, there's no one to blame but yourself. Team games however, allow you to assign blame on others for a loss while retaining the conviction that you were extremely valuable during a win. It would definitely be interesting to hear the opinions of a psychologist on the matter.

CoH2 just doesn't give anything to the average competitive player who doesn't have a history with the Company of Heroes franchise. I personally think the design of the game has a lot to do with that, but that's a subject that's been talked to death here, so I won't harp on it anymore.

It's just a whole bunch of small things really. It's a WWII game, so right off the bat it's going to have a smaller audience. Because of that small audience, matchmaking struggles to create even games with acceptable latency. On top of that, the game suffers from major performance issues. A lot of competitive players play their games on bare minimum settings even if their rigs can handle higher, simply to guarantee that FPS drops don't occur during important moments. The fact that a lot of really good rigs can't guarantee acceptable framerates on minimum settings in CoH2 is hugely frustrating to competitive players.

Why will it automatically have a smaller audience because it is a WW II game?

There's also the matter of avoiding blame. If you lose a 1v1 battle, there's no one to blame but yourself. Team games however, allow you to assign blame on others for a loss while retaining the conviction that you were extremely valuable during a win. It would definitely be interesting to hear the opinions of a psychologist on the matter.

It's so interesting because I keep hearing things like this, and for me the opposite is true. I hate playing team games because I don't like to have people depending on me when I'm brand new to a game. I want to be able to learn and blame myself and improve without having to think about everyone else on my team.

More importantly, I want to get in, play a match and leave on my own terms, not have to wait to find a team, then an enemy team, then all be locked into a game until the last person is ready to surrender etc. I hate playing games that drag on for over an hour.

As you said though, there aren't many good 1v1 strategy games on the market at the moment (or maybe I'm just missing them?). I'm really hoping Grey Goo turns out to be good...

Why will it automatically have a smaller audience because it is a WW II game?

Because it's a setting that's been beaten to death by games companies. Remember 4 or 5 years ago when 95% of shooters released were set in WWII? It was a running joke in the games industry. There are just less WWII gaming nerds than sci-fi or fantasy gaming nerds.

The truth is, if CoH1 was released right now, it probably wouldn't be a very successful competitive game either. I think it would be more successful than CoH2, mainly because I think it's just a better game for that style of play, but it's still a WWII RTS by a developer with a terrible track record of encouraging competitive play in their games. And it would still be thrown into a market of already-successful competitive games that offer a whole lot more to players interested in that kind of thing.

CoH1 had the benefit of developing a competitive scene before competitive gaming really took off in the mainstream, and as a result was able to attract a lot more competitive players than it ever would have been able to if it had be released today. Just something to keep in mind when comparing the two.

Perhaps because I love history, particularly that period, I never got the "because it is a WWII" game argument though I will accept it might be the case. It wasn't always so and there were lots of WWII strategy games in the 70-90s probably because our fathers and grandfathers fought in that war. I believe it was the most popular historical period for strategy board games and later for warplane simulators.

If you are right, then vCOH also benefited from its proximity to the release of the incredibly popular "Saving Private Ryan" movie and "Band of Brothers" series. Many people saw BoB in after it left HBO, which was in the early 2000's and that probably helped vCOH sales in the beginning. The game was technically superior to so many things out there. I believe it was the first game with a destructible environment and with decent squad/vehicle control.