Relic, the Community, and the NDA

When can we expect the patch? I only have the game for 5 weeks or so, but even I am getting fairly bored by the always present soviet call in meta..

Well, you can always try to play soviets without call-ins while waiting for a patch

Funny thing, that NDA doesn't even work, there was so much leaks, that everyone, except very lazy ones, knows what is in beta, common, there was even full gameplay of beta on youtube.

Well, you can always try to play soviets without call-ins while waiting for a patch

Haha

I am most of the time playing against the soviet call-in meta haha. My favorite Soviet play is 4v4, 4 katyusha and a lot of t34-76s. Enjoyable, yet in a 1v1, the always present t34-85 or IS2 is getting old

Notice: The following text is just written for my view on this game. It may be that I am completely wrong, but it represents my thoughts about it.

The fact is that I'm just staying with this game because I really like this board very much. If there was no CoH2.org I would have said "Fuck this shit" long ago.

There is no single game I own that annoys me as much as CoH2 at the moment. I play LoL, I play Counter Strike (both games with a rather toxic community) and after a loss in these games I think "Well, the enemy team simply was better" and move on to another one.
But that's not the case in CoH2. I don't know why but I'm getting pretty salty (mainly when losing as Axis) because many minor imbalances add together and make you feel that you are simply bad at this game.

It's just that I can't accept a loss in CoH2 as easy as in other games because the balance is simply poor. In LoL or CS I know the enemy beat me with his skill because those games are pretty well balanced.

In CoH2 this is (mostly) not the case. I rarely play a game where I "accept" a loss as easy as in other games. If the enemy does good flankings and a proper use of well sorted strategies then it is a good game and I often watch the replay to see how he outplayed me. But most of the time it is not like this. CoH2 is heavily a game of gimmicks and cheese where you "abuse" illogical things and imbalances to win (e.g. Attack Ground on a flamer to shoot through walls, demo charges, Stug E, Tiger Ace, P47, etc.).

RNGs and P2W commanders strenghten this feeling. You can have a Vet 5 squad wiped out by a single mortar shot without being able to do anything against it. The small playerbase is also making the matchmaking absurd. I really am no pro player at all (Rank > 1000 in almost every faction), but I most of the time get players with ranks 300 and above. 95% of the time they stomp me (because they know how to play this game to win) and I get about 10 losses for a single victory. This frustrates me even more because I (and probably most of you) don't have the time to play more than 3 games a day.

You cannot play this game for fun. Either you play it for fun (trying new tactics/commanders and non meta units while not "abusing" the mechanics) and you lose 95% of the time unless you're top 50 OR you adapt to the meta (Guard Motor/Mechanized Assault/Rifle Company) and have all the matches go the same way.

(In addition most "meta" commanders are rare drops. That means you either have to play the hell out of the game to maybe get them as war spoils or you spend more money on it -> Pay2Win. I for myself don't own Mechanized Assault or Rifle Company. Maybe that's the reason behind my losses.)

Yes I am full of salt but I simply am frustrated with CoH2.

You are doing something wrong if you try to play Coh2 for fun-without-competitive-spirit in 1vs1 automatch.

Or you play for fun and you really don't care about the outcome, you can lose 50 games in a raw, its just for fun. And custom games are probably the best suited for you.
Or you like competition + fun and you care about the outcome of the match. And the outcome of the match has an impact on you. And so its time to wake up, there are strategies that are working and strategies that aren't working and winning or losing is only about mastering those strategies and punishing bad ones.

But sincerely, its time to stop complaining about the amount of viable strategies available in the game.
What if you play Football (not NFL), what if you play tennis, natation, basket ball etc... All those games require a level of mastery to be played at high level. Do you really believe teams and players at that level are only playing for fun and try any strategies that come in mind? No, they have one or two strategies and counters. And they practice them a lot to make sure their strategies will become the best one.
Same goes for Coh2.

Now yes the meta can evolve, and new strategies can be imagined from it, new commanders can be released etc... But at the end, only 2, max 3 strats will emerge as viable per factions.

I remember a game we had last week where you complained about squad wipe and RNG, I had 1 scott fire at your squad 4 times and didn't touch you, no damage at all, and the 5th shot wiped your squad. Of course you only remembered the last shot, not that in fact trying to kill a Scott with a pzgre shreck isn't particularly easy if the scott is microed and the fact you've been lucky during 10 seconds to not take any damage till the last one.

It's just that I can't accept a loss in CoH2 as easy as in other games because the balance is simply poor. In LoL or CS I know the enemy beat me with his skill because those games are pretty well balanced.

I don't think it's to do with the state of the balance; I know several other people who also feel that when they lose it's due to shit balance and/or factors out of their control, so it feels like they didn't "earn" the loss. Even when they're playing factions that are basically OP (e.g. the infamous march deployment when we still got our asses kicked playing Ostheer despite the community saying we were playing with a mega OP faction at the tiem). It was in CoH1 as well. When you win it feels like you were skillful usually, when you lose it feels like the game is bullshit. Even if we could get the game in a state where there was (statistically) good balance, it would still be filled with all sorts of irritating BS that infuriates players when it happens. Every game tells a (rage induced) story.

It's hard to say exactly what the root cause is, but I think it's firstly that many factions are balanced only in the sense that they all have their share of OP / unfair units at different tiers and phases of the game. In my humble opinion the Flak halftracks for both factions and the Panzer II are totally bullshit units. I hate them so much. But the factions they're in aren't necessarily OP because of other bullshit and cheese balances it out in the end.

The second factor is the prevalence of RNG and the seemingly contrary game design philosophies of unit preservation and dramatic random events (which often can cause instant or extremely fast squadwipes). There is a significant degree of 'fuziness' in most unit matchups where a moderate mathematical advantage in an engagement could always turn south due to dice rolls. Flame crits, flamer explosions, plane crashes, any AOE weapons with random scatter, unit clumping causing wipes that should be impossible etc. Every fight is an exercise in gambling. And depending on how your luck goes, you can genuinely be fucked by the RNG.

The second factor is the prevalence of RNG and the seemingly contrary game design philosophies of unit preservation and dramatic random events (which often can cause instant or extremely fast squadwipes).

That's a creative tension, really. Climbing a mountain wouldn't be a challenge were it not for the fact that gravity tries to stop you.

There is certainly room for strategy games with little or no randomness; chess, say, has none. But the reason that dice were added to tabletop wargames in the first place was to make them depict conflict, and the inherent uncertainties of battle, more authentically. As Livy put it, "The outcome corresponds less to expectations in war than in any other case whatsoever."

nicely put, I agree completely and its pretty sad to see how many people are willing to agree to the NDA then immediately break it. If you don't like it, don't agree to it.

That said I don't Coh2.org need to be enforcing it. If people decide to leak information on their forums it isn't the fault of the sites team. It should be down to relic to deal with the people responsible.

The reality is they will never deal with it because trying to maintain an NDA as prehistoric as Relic's with random invites is essentially impossible. Problem is they'll just stop involving us all together and the same people who broke the NDA will moan about the lack of player involvement.

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This pretty much reflects my view of this game, sadly

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This pretty much reflects my view of this game, sadly

Same. And I don't even own it that long..

The only thing I can say for sure about Relic is that they made a huge mistake learning all the lessons they did over the various iterations of DoW2 (IE Relic RTS's post COH1), and then deciding to ignore those lessons for CoH2.

The game itself is really fun, its just got huge amounts of RNG and poor balance.

Sure, its obviously not a perfectly balanced e-sport but not every game has to be.

I must admit I don't really get why people hyper serious competitive mode it, its the e-sport equivalent of darts.

That's a weird comparison to make if you want to emphasize the game's random elements, considering darts has essentially zero randomness.

Regardless, people who think CoH2 isn't a good competitive game because it has RNG are people who very clearly have absolutely zero experience with current popular competitive games. Every single competitive title right now has insane amounts of RNG, at least as much as CoH2 does. There are a lot of reasons why CoH2 is a poor competitive game, but RNG isn't one of them.

That's a weird comparison to make if you want to emphasize the game's random elements, considering darts has essentially zero randomness.

Regardless, people who think CoH2 isn't a good competitive game because it has RNG are people who very clearly have absolutely zero experience with current popular competitive games. Every single competitive title right now has insane amounts of RNG, at least as much as CoH2 does. There are a lot of reasons why CoH2 is a poor competitive game, but RNG isn't one of them.

Sure theres very much RNG in SC2 or in other strategy games like Age of Empires.
played a SC2 match in Platin league 5 minutes before and won it because a P47 Thunderbolt plane crushed in his Zergling blob and killed the whole swarm.

Since this happened im always going Airborne as Terran.

I wont say that this games has completely no RNG, but if we compare them with CoH2 you should recognize that this games try to minimize the RNG Actions against 0.

SC2 is very small compared to most competitive games these days.

Dota 2 is entirely RNG; the damage of every single attack is randomized in a range, many heroes have abilities that rely on RNG, a few heroes are designed entirely around RNG, many items add random chance for crits, bashes, evasion, damage block. Oh, and this year's International already has a prize pool of over $10 million with over two months before the main event.

CSGO, another extremely successful competitive game, has RNG on every shot you fire, insane RNG on shots fired while moving, and extreme inconsistencies with grenade damage.

The most successful competitive games today have insane amounts of randomness. Randomness is not the reason why CoH2 isn't a successful competitive game.

That's a weird comparison to make if you want to emphasize the game's random elements, considering darts has essentially zero randomness.

Regardless, people who think CoH2 isn't a good competitive game because it has RNG are people who very clearly have absolutely zero experience with current popular competitive games. Every single competitive title right now has insane amounts of RNG, at least as much as CoH2 does. There are a lot of reasons why CoH2 is a poor competitive game, but RNG isn't one of them.

Please enlighten us plebs with your plethora of recent competitive CoH2 experience as to why CoH2 isn't a successful esport.

Oh wait... You don't even play CoH2, never played a single competitive match of CoH2, and were terrible at the game when you did play.

RTS in general is a dead genre esport wise sadly. It's not just a CoH2 issue. CoH2 is actually doing significantly better than the majority of other RTS games, probably the only RTS that is doing better is SC2, thanks a lot to the massive funding it gets from Blizzard being such a massive studio.

SC2 is very small compared to most competitive games these days.

Dota 2 is entirely RNG; the damage of every single attack is randomized in a range, many heroes have abilities that rely on RNG, a few heroes are designed entirely around RNG, many items add random chance for crits, bashes, evasion, damage block. Oh, and this year's International already has a prize pool of over $10 million with over two months before the main event.

CSGO, another extremely successful competitive game, has RNG on every shot you fire, insane RNG on shots fired while moving, and extreme inconsistencies with grenade damage.

The most successful competitive games today have insane amounts of randomness. Randomness is not the reason why CoH2 isn't a successful competitive game.

Serously man you dont even play CoH2 and you are trying to compare Mobas and Ego shooters with this game....
if u think theres RNG in CS GO because your weapon has to much spray fire, you should change your weapon or learn to aim.
But I dont want to discuss with u about dota or CS GO i dont even play this games.
You are from canada and I play with the idea, that canadians has an other perspective of balance in Games than the rest of the world.

I'm just comparing competitive games to competitive games. The post I was responding to claimed it doesn't make sense to play CoH2 competitively because of its randomness. I think that's a silly reason, because there are competitive games with more success than CoH2 that also have as much, if not more, randomness than CoH2 does.

The presence of RNG in a game does not make it less viable as a competitive game. That was the entire point of my post. With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that I would reference competitive games in other genres to support my point.

SC2 is very small compared to most competitive games these days.

Dota 2 is entirely RNG; the damage of every single attack is randomized in a range, many heroes have abilities that rely on RNG, a few heroes are designed entirely around RNG, many items add random chance for crits, bashes, evasion, damage block. Oh, and this year's International already has a prize pool of over $10 million with over two months before the main event.

CSGO, another extremely successful competitive game, has RNG on every shot you fire, insane RNG on shots fired while moving, and extreme inconsistencies with grenade damage.

The most successful competitive games today have insane amounts of randomness. Randomness is not the reason why CoH2 isn't a successful competitive game.

You stated it, "in a range" and it makes all the difference between RNG in any other game and RNG in Coh2 where there is no range at all. Put a range and you remove definitively full health squad wiped by a single shot and at this moment RNG becomes more manageable.

That's still a range. Regardless, this element just one tiny aspect of RNG in Dota 2. There are heroes like PA that can one-shot heroes if they get lucky, or hit a hero 4 times and barely deal 1/4 of a hero's damage if they don't. You can get teamwiped by a Kunkka with Daedalus who gets a lucky crit, or he could not get the crit and you jump him a second later and blow him up. You can get first blood on an uphill hit and snowball off it, or miss the uphill attack and completely lose your advantage. You can TP beside an AM with basher and get away safely, or get bashed and have your TP cancelled, losing you the game in the process. I could go on, there's really no limit to the number of situations possible in Dota where a random event can have a gamechanging impact.

In every single one of those situations, you as the player have zero control over the outcome of a single instance of RNG that could win or lose you the game outright. Dota is random as fuck. It's also one of the largest, most successful competitive games in history.