RELIC: how about an update_news_something

When you do nothing, a NDA is a good option to hide it

Haha this did make me chuckle, but it is simply not true.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-10-03-egx-2014-game-of-the-show

well worth going to EGX, was the game even playable? also thanks for letting us know a day before EGX that you would be attending.

"How to make sure that nobody asks questions you do not want to answer?"

Average presenter: Show awesome things, but always keep some things secret so that people want to ask questions about these. This greatly reduces the chances of off-topic / unwanted questions.

Relic Entertainment: Make sure nobody from the community has a chance to attend, and therefore prevent any and all questions!

I want to like this game, because there is no alternative, however I simply can't. The game has been bugged for quite a long time. With every update, new bugs are created and balance gets worse. Supposing relic really listened to community, bugs would have been already fixed. But yeah better work on a fucking single player content, because most of community plays single player campaign. relic is going to make this game dead, due to prioritising.

Once I considered buying WFA, but well... since that update game has started to run like shit. After seeing relic's endeavours to improve it, I regret buying this game and I am sure I won't make a mistake buying anything made by them.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-10-03-egx-2014-game-of-the-show

well worth going to EGX, was the game even playable? also thanks for letting us know a day before EGX that you would be attending.

i don't get the link you posted? coh2 nor relic are mentioned, or was that hte point?

I applaud some of the efforts at Relic. Going on a regular schedule to communicate is cool. What I don't like is streaming a single player mission. I can't see how that does anything. It would be better if you play multiplayer for an hour, noun.

I really don't understand why Relic needs to hold an NDA. If your testing something, just say your testing it, show a little preview. Yea your going to have some people upset if the design changes, but so what? If anything you'll be able to get more people excited about upcoming features and they will turn into paying customers. Peter used to go on twitch and demonstrate changes to balance before they were released in the dev build and I really appreciated that.

Even more so, it would be nice to have a balance chat with perhaps ALL members of the balance team. I know your an awesome guy Noun, no doubt about that, but we really want to talk about balance plans. Balance is always a hot topic with us because it's so awful right now. I would really like it if balance members play against some of the communities best abusers and tell us their thoughts on what just happened to them and if they care to fix it.

Your certainly right that not everyone will agree on balance and that's the problem right now. We all are pretty much in agreement that balance is really bad. The balance is so bad that it effects the time it takes us to get matched with each other. Allied players are general quickly matched and axis players have a long wait. It's not a coincidence, it's almost entirely related to the state of balance.

For dates, instead of saying soon, you can tell us more rough dates. Within 2 weeks or next week, etc. Surely Sega is giving you or making you produce deadlines for what you produce, so rough dates should be possible.

Why do I get the strange feeling that in most cases of whining about Relic balance patches themselves, their own ideas for the game would turn the game into an unplayable mess of a game.

Also, oh my, the toxicity is real. The bugs have started to pile up tho, could do a patch focusing specifically on those soonish..

I would like to see the day when Noun will make a topic "Next balance patch" where he presents already tested changes and find out what community thinks about them and then test thing that we suggest...


But that's not gonna happen. I guess it's better to implement some ridiculous changes and revert them in next patch.

Maybe there is something wrong with me and everyone else are playing SP all the time but I have over 700h of playing CoH2 yet I did not finish campaign or any other SP content... Which means I'm so excited about new SP things...

The thing is, 99% of the community has no fucking idea what good balance looks like, and it's nearly impossible to judge changes based solely on a changelog. They need to engage top players for feedback, not the community at large.

Maybe there is something wrong with me and everyone else are playing SP all the time but I have over 700h of playing CoH2 yet I did not finish campaign or any other SP content... Which means I'm so excited about new SP things...

Don't worry. I have over 1000 h for MP and spend not a single hour in SP

The thing is, 99% of the community has no fucking idea what good balance looks like, and it's nearly impossible to judge changes based solely on a changelog. They need to engage top players for feedback, not the community at large.

Agree but there are ways to deal with that.
For example, during Alpha tests we had access to special forum where no one uninvited could not enter. It's not hard to get large amount of people among us who are suitable for such thing.

And still, changelog gives you a knowledge if you know something more than "IS-2 is stroneger than Panther - or something like that". Many of us just play and gives a f**k about more specific information but there are guys who spend time looking at these all numbers.

Don't worry. I have over 1000 h for MP and spend not a single hour in SP

Ufff, I was afraid that there is something wrong with me ^^

Well, if you have a private forum and invite everyone, it's not really a private forum anymore, is it?

The reality is, the vast majority of players never lose games because of balance; they lose because they aren't good enough. At that level, the line between skill problems and balance problems is extremely blurred, and discussions suffer because of it. Every successful multiplayer game out there right now is balanced around the absolute highest level of play because of this.

The thing is, 99% of the community has no fucking idea what good balance looks like, and it's nearly impossible to judge changes based solely on a changelog. They need to engage top players for feedback, not the community at large.

The thing is not that average players dont know balance, The thing is that you just wrote a lot of bullshit. If and average player faces 3 or 4 kubels as US in every game I am pretty sure he will figure out that thats a balance-thingy. Plz stop spamming such elitistic bullshit.

Well, if you have a private forum and invite everyone, it's not really a private forum anymore, is it?

That's the key. You don't invite everyone. I can't imagine balance made by Vetlolcake xD

Inverse, I love the boobs in the middle of your signature...

Anyway, are you telling us the Kubel Buff couldn't have been detected if presented in an Beta test server?

There are Sit-Keyboard Interface issues and Balance issues, we all agree on that. But majority here is also enough competent to see when it is or not a balance issue. trolls and Faction Fanboys aren't the majority on that forum (thanks to modo team).

This is also not something new and specific to Relic, there are many games requiring balance and they (developpers) use to be more present with their community.

I'm impressed by Noun when he says Relic deployed 5 patchs last month. On the same time Valve deployed 6 or 7 patches on Dota2 because they deeply changed the game meta - the first changes weren't balance and they did daily re-adjustment to make it almost perfect - or at least how they wanted to be.

Back to Relic, there nothing here that show me they do care about actual bugs and balance issue - same if it is just a feeling - someone from Relic telling people there are not issue, it works as per design.

The thing is not that average players dont know balance, The thing is that you just wrote a lot of bullshit. If and average player faces 3 or 4 kubels as US in every game I am pretty sure he will figure out that thats a balance-thingy. Plz stop spamming such elitistic bullshit.

I agree with Inverse. As to your example, when I face against two or more Kubelwagons as US I very often have trouble early game and I almost always end up winning. It's a bad strategy versus good players.

This thread fills me with much sadness, for many reasons.

Relic really does seem to try, they try to improve, they try to communicate, they try to please and meet demands. Many of the changes to date (dlcs etc) demonstrate this. Their heart seems to be in the right place.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, they don't get it right. Either their timing is off, or their execution falls way short. There are real and present issues here, worthy of discussion and notice. It might be that they are understaffed, trapped by bad/rigid clauses in various agreements (with employees that they can't fire or reassign) they may be lacking the funding they need. More than this though, relic seems to lack flexibility and a unified vision to work towards. The most pressing issues are definitely on the organisational, staffing and priority level. A lot of this might be to do with Sega.

Another pressing issue is community. With a mindset like this community has, no amount of change or trying hard will result in the positive momentum relic needs. This is on us. Inverse has a great point regarding the general balance know how around the forums. 95% of all threads throw around unsubstantiated hyperbole. When actual figures and maths on the stats are introduced and nuances presented that contradicts the common "gripe of the month" it's ignored or drowned in a sea of stupidity. What we can do then to aid the situation is to present issues in a measured way with facts and numbers to back us up without superfluous negativity. I deeply sympathise with anyone working at relic actually giving their all to make a difference, faced with a wall of ... Us.

Inverse, I love the boobs in the middle of your signature...

Anyway, are you telling us the Kubel Buff couldn't have been detected if presented in an Beta test server?

There are Sit-Keyboard Interface issues and Balance issues, we all agree on that. But majority here is also enough competent to see when it is or not a balance issue. trolls and Faction Fanboys aren't the majority on that forum (thanks to modo team).

This is also not something new and specific to Relic, there are many games requiring balance and they (developpers) use to be more present with their community.

I'm impressed by Noun when he says Relic deployed 5 patchs last month. On the same time Valve deployed 6 or 7 patches on Dota2 because they deeply changed the game meta - the first changes weren't balance and they did daily re-adjustment to make it almost perfect - or at least how they wanted to be.

Back to Relic, there nothing here that show me they do care about actual bugs and balance issue - same if it is just a feeling - someone from Relic telling people there are not issue, it works as per design.

The problem is, people are reactionary, and most people aren't very good at the game. I'll give you an example from CoH1. When the most recent patch came out, people thought PE were overpowered against Americans. That lasted for a whole year, until Aimstrong came along and showed people how the matchup should be played. Now it's an Americans-favoured matchup, all because one guy figured out a better way to play the game.

In most cases, you can't evaluate balance changes within a week, especially not on beta servers with a limited number of players. You need to let your community have some time with the game before you can really say for sure what the state of the game is.

Now if you're Valve, and you own your distribution platform, and you have 8 million monthly players, you can make changes you know are probably extreme, because you will get a ton of information back really quickly and you can react to it in a timely manner. That's exactly what happened with the recent gold bounty changes in Dota 2. They did something that was probably extreme, and they gradually toned it down until they hit a point they were happy with.

Relic doesn't have that luxury, unfortunately. First of all, their game isn't run on servers, so they don't have access to the same quality of information that Valve does for Dota 2. Also, they have far less players, and therefore far less games being played with which they can judge their changes. Finally, they don't own their distribution platform. Patching is likely a very expensive exercise for Relic, which is why they have stuck to large releases and only hotfixed major bugs.

Honestly, I think it's hard to argue against Valve's iterative approach being better than Relic's, but at the same time, the balance team likely doesn't have much say in how frequently they get to patch their game. And without a large quantity of hard data to go off, you can't really make informed decisions in a short period of time anyways.

You guys need to tone it down some.

Noun came to the forums, he said what information he could, he read your posts. No need to get all verbally assaultive. Its not like he alone makes all decisions with the game. You shouldnt be angry with him for things you don't like or need improvements.

I just want to know how many people who spent money on Company of Heroes (Any of them) played or cared about the single player campaigns? Where did the decision to put so much energy into Single Player missions come from, and under what rationale?

I didn't play the vCoH campaign until CoHO was out and it was a free way to get a bit of xp. I didn't play CoH2's until BadComedian's video convinced me to check it out to see if it really was that way. And ultimately, the campaign made me realize how untouched multiplayer had been since (and throughout) beta.

So how much of a market is Single Player that it deserves so much focus? For that matter, how popular are those AI missions and challenges?