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

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.

I sitll think a well designed game would succeed. COH2 has no one huge flaw, but there are many little ones that add up to a bad feel for both casual players, historical players, competitive players, players looking for a fair fight.. etc.

I think the original campaign didn't help them either. The original COH campaign was really good, especially for its time. Playing a mission or two as a demo made someone thing "this is SOO cool! I have to get it". That draws in the players, and if the game is good it draws them into multiplayer in the search for more content. The active player base meant you find other noobs with whom to get your feet wet either in 1v1 or in lobbies. Smurfs were a problem for noobs, but luckily they ranked up past you pretty quickly.

For COH2 Relic chose a faction that was not particularly popular (Soviets) and brutalized the history. That can knock a good # of people out of their "suspension of disbelief" which is a big no-no in games as well as movies.

Agreed, it definitely could succeed. CoH1 was released near the height of the WWII gaming obsession and it grew, albeit slowly and over a long period of time. Like a lot of people here have said, it's just a whole lot of little things that detract from CoH2 as a competitive title.

I sitll think a well designed game would succeed. COH2 has no one huge flaw, but there are many little ones that add up to a bad feel for both casual players, historical players, competitive players, players looking for a fair fight.. etc.

Design and quality might fix some problems but not all.

Think about it, name one (1) successful, competitive strategy game released in the past year. What about in the past 2 years?

There's Heartstone, but that's stretching the genre a bit.

SC2, obviously.

Street Fighter 4, Marvel vs Capcom 3, King of Fighters XIII, Killer Instinct, Injustice, Mortal Kombat 9, Blaz Blue, Persona 4 Arena, Tekken Tag Tournament 2.

Yes they are strategy games, yes they are ALL successful.

Street Fighter 4, Marvel vs Capcom 3, King of Fighters XIII, Killer Instinct, Injustice, Mortal Kombat 9, Blaz Blue, Persona 4 Arena, Tekken Tag Tournament 2.

Yes they are strategy games, yes they are ALL successful.

Classing Fighting Games as Strategy games is a long bow to draw, I can see where you are coming from, but to the general consumer there is a world of difference between Fighters and Real Time Strategy/Tactics.
(You forgot Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown )

RTS and fighting games are extremely different. Grouping them together doesn't really make sense.

VF5:FS is actually super old, older than SF4 but it still counts and they are basically strategy games once you get past the execution barrier.

They share very similar skill sets such as:

Spacing, adaptation to your enemy, match up knowledge, resource management, making decisions quickly etc.

I mean by that logic CSGO is a strategy game too, because it boils down to two teams using strategy to compete.

A few design issues that can't really be changed now have irked me from the beginning, but I can overlook them and back before WFA I played 1's regularly enough, around top 30ish level with both original factions. I could give the top players a decent game occasionally, i'd be on the end of a thrashing from them more often, but I was improving steadily.

You play often enough, you'd get to know the 1's community because it was sadly small enough (and still is I imagine). Often in ladder, it was difficult to get consistent good level games outside of maybe weekends. Too many dud games where you gain feck all. But it was workable.

Since WFA, I have had performance issues (...my computer!) and between that, and the bugs, I have not really played 1's competitively since. In a good competitive game, the margins are often small in Coh2 between a good engagement and a bad one, you can't be fighting your opponent and the game itself as well.

So now I dabble in 1's occasionally and play team games for the craic.

To a degree yes but trust me pick up any fighter, learn to play it, watch pro level matches. You will see there are massive overlaps between RTS and Fighters.

To a degree yes but trust me pick up any fighter, learn to play it, watch pro level matches. You will see there are massive overlaps between RTS and Fighters.

but I thought coh1 rts skills didnt translate over!!?!?!?!?!??!

I agree 100%. It may be mental, but seeing my rank go from the thousands to hundreds to top 100 was a huge motivating factor in my playing. I could tell I was facing better players, but I didn't realize how much I was actually improving until I could see my rank against other players. I think it would encourage a lot of people to play and learn more.

This guy is my hero!

SC2, obviously.

I tried to look for SC2's DAU data but couldn't find anything so it's kind of hard to measure its success. And by success I mean its ability to retain a healthy population size compared to the more popular games today. I know it sold well, but that doesn't mean people still play it in droves.

Besides SC2 is more than 2 years old. My question was if you could think of a successful competitive strategy game within the last 2 years. If game quality alone was an issue, then at least some of them should be successful.

My point is that quality and balance don't fully explain the OP's question. No matter how well designed CoH2 could have been there just isn't the demand for it to be able to rise to the level of popularity we would like it to have. It's a known phenomenon in the gaming industry that competitive strategy games don't sell.

Singleplayer, story driven, open world, even survival strategy, sells. Not competitive strategy.

I think Relic knew this which is why they catered so much towards the skirmish and singleplayer crowd.

There hasn't been a competitive RTS game released since SC2 (aside from HotS), so you can't really say competitive strategy games don't sell well, especially since SC2 has sold pretty well over its life, even if its player base has been shrinking lately.

The big test will be when Artillery's new RTS comes out. It's being developed specifically for competitive play, and I'm really interested to see how well it does, and how fun the game itself actually is.

I'm not sure this is an issue unique to CoH2 - I've got friends who play SC2 who make similar complaints. I think that with the rise of huge MOBAs such as LoL and DotA 2, the community for most 'core' RTS games is pretty small. This results in a worse matchmaking experience because for the top players, the system has to match them against relatively low-skill players to avoid obscene queue times.

That happens with all games, regardless of player numbers honestly. Pro Dota players have to wait 10+ minutes for matches, and then get matched with players like me. It just takes longer to get to that point when you have a lot of people playing your game.

But you're right, less players means the point at which you have to wait long for games and get bad matches comes a lot sooner.

As people have mentioned, I think the real culprit for the demise of more traditional strategy is stuff like LOL and DotA really taking off and being huge. Being Free to Play really helps them gain a foothold and big playerbase as well I imagine.

I would like to see someone make a free to play traditional RTS game at some point. The issue would be making it profitable without making it Pay to Win or full of crazy nonsense.

It is where we come back to COHO, the community was largest for a 5 years old graphiq game but perfect to develop a kind of free to play RTS.
The major failure for Relic is probably to not have take the experience from COHO and develop something new from that direction. They prefered to play safety including minor ideas like bulletins and many DLC commanders. The problem is DLC don't forge a community and today what bring money is a proper community.

What makes Blizzard games success: A community same if Diablo3 was a shit when release, Blizzard kept his community through his portal.
What makes Dota2 and LOL competitive: A proper community leaded by pro-players.

What makes Relic fail everything around: They do not take care of their community - I would say they don't give a shit about us. Just look at their own website, its look like 5 years back mentality. They are completely lost in trying to develop a single campaign that will be played over 1 week or 2 and that's it, people buying it will most likely going to another game. Its take a lot of resource to develop this kind of DLC for what? a direct cash entry and nothing behind.
Now look back a Valve with Dota2, the last compendium, they had to add new steps to the cash pool, people were giving their money just to have a 4 items and premium access to watch in live the tournament...

Stopping COHO was probably a good decision with the cash model wasn't good enough. Not trying to comeback to this model with new ideas was the worst.

Yea but in CoHo it was even more annoying having team mates drop instantly upon starting games because they got a look at the opponents ranks in the load screen and bottled it.

Simple solution: don't expect anything from random team mates. Get a friend on the mic and play arranged games.