To Relic -- Ideas to fix DLC mess

I don't think the DLC is what is coh2's biggest problem. This reminds me of Diablo3 when everyone said D3 suck because of auctionhouse... Blizzard gave in and removed it and still diablo3 sucks, because the auctionhouse was not the root of Diablo3's problems.

I think coh2 faces a similiar problem, the DLC is the most visible problem but not the one that most needs fixing. In-game currency instead of random warspoils drop is a easy and good solution to begin with, but the biggest problem of coh2 is simply there is too little "fun" units in the game like goliath from coh1, there is no elite infantry or infantry upgrades in Tier4 which makes lategame very predictable. OKW is a horrible designed faction with durable infantry with Shreks.

Game also needs better infantry animations, and infantry kill animations. They are stale and boring with almost zero gore, that is a huge missed opportunity.

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+1 to van Voort

Current SEGA DLC/Micro-Transactions Policy:


Game of War - 2015 Super Bowl Commercial "Who I Am" ft. Kate Upt
currently 10+ million youtube views

If Relic will make a trailer featuring Kate Upton I will buy it.
No matter what it is.
Even if it is a Preorder of a new single player only DLC that comes with used underpants of German soldiers from '44 for 99Euros.
I will buy it.


BTT:

Warspoils was a step in the right direction but I would prefer an ingame currency you can get for playing games.
After a game (of at least 10 mins to prevent abus) you get 20-100 CoHPOINTS.
You can then buy your preffered commanders in an ingame shop for CoHPOINTs.
A commander would cost, Let's say about 2.000-3.000 CoHPOINTS.

Big thx for the constructive feedback, I am sure this should give Relic a few ideas to improve future games.

Well, I am not against those changes tbh, but you have to agree it´s very risky and their current dlc-system seems to work. So why take that risk instead of making money with the current system?

IMHO, as a former MMO player I don't think RTS/RTS hybrids have any big future without the MMO experience. Just look at how popular "unpolished 4vs4" are for casual players within COH2 so the potential is there for larger team based games. An MMO style "conquest map/war effort" is a good idea that some have mentioned Relic might be working on. But how Relic can manage to implement the COH/DoW franchise into MMO we can only speculate for now.
If Relic aspires to become more than just a niche genre within online PC gaming, then they have to take some pretty big risks. When we look at what Relic's sister studio Creative Assembly are doing that might give us a hint to what Relic can do.

Creative Assembly are already taking a risk with the Total War franchise;
1) Total War: Warhammer, first Total War sci-fi game and using the same IP Relic used for DoW. So far looks very promising and there is a lot of hype around it that could be used by Relic to give DoW3 a good launch.
2) Total War: Arena (free-to-play MMO RTS). A 10 vs 10 Arena on several big maps where each player can control only three battalions + 1 "hero commander". Using a similar type of DLC policy as "World of Tanks" free-to-play + in-game currency.
In Arena you can invest into a premium account (to increase grind, not P2W), in-game currencies and a research tech tree like WoT.
They also combine elements from Relic games (such as commander tree and leveling for each commander ability). Cover/terrain and true sight also play a big role in Arena which vary depending on the unit class and/or hero abilities.
Morale damage/health statistics for each battalion to resemblance suppression statistic we have in COH.

To get into the console and mobile MMO RTS market they need to scale-down the controls, so with only three battalions (Arena) this is a step in the right direction. Try imagine playing starcraft2 on a mobile touch screen, lol.
So last year they openly started experimenting with mobile Warfare on tablets/iPad. The next MMO step will likely be Arena type games for Console and/or high-end tablets.


If interested, play the Arena beta and see for yourself. I'm currently still playing the beta and the game IMHO are more polished for competitive multiplayer than COH2.
http://www.totalwar.com/arena

Should TW: Arena become a success I'm sure there will be an MMO spin-off from TW: Warhammer. But yeah, it might be too late for any big CoH2 changes but it's not for DoW3 and hopefully one day, CoH3.

Eve O was never Free2Play as you bought the PLEX from someone who actually had to spend real money for it!

Thx for your feedback. Yes, I know it's not a true free-to-play, it's more like a hybrid. I doubt a true FTP version will ever work for EVE-online, but EvE online mercenaries with DUST 514 is true FTP iirc. Perhaps this quote can explain it better:

Is the game already free to play?
This is anther important question to consider. The current model of using PLEX to pay for an account subscription may seem free to some. PLEX strikes the perfect balance between causal and hardcore allowing those with time or concentration to make in-game currency to pay their subscription dues. While others that want a boost in assets in-game can choose to purchase those through PLEX. Eve Online can be free to play depending on your valuation of time.

While I don't expect Eve to be F2P any time soon or even ever. The model of F2P will probably keep being considered as more and more F2P titles dominate player numbers.

http://evesimplified.blogspot.dk/2015/07/what-if-eve-online-went-free-to-play.html

Yep I mostly agree. COH2 is very inaccessible compared to other games. For example if you take a look at the CS:GO steam store page there is only ONE game that you can buy - CS:GO for 15$.

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Meanwhile if I was new to COH2 and interested in the game, there is just a flood of content and people don't know what to buy.

UbiSoft says hi (AKA when you need spreadsheet to sell your shit):

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Take a look at these guys.




Jim makes good points about DLCs and post-release paid content.

DLC done right:

Jim is the best. I find that Relic themselves are guilty of a lot of the scummy stuff he talks about in his videos.

I'd just like to point out that under THQ they were doing the same inept patching, inept post launch support and crazy business models and its the same under Sega, seems to me the common denominator is the studio itself!

I have found them to be a mendacious studio from the personal interactions I've had with them and have no desire to support them due to their duplicity.

Yeah let's not dump everything on Sega here, I distinctly remember the Commisar Cache preorder bonus while under THQ that gave you double XPs which sounded eerily like something World of Tanks and other free-to-play-but-pay-to-not-grind games would do.

There are two issues in this thread which I think need to be split out, because I agree with one, at least in part, and disagree with the other. I'm mainly saying this to vent, and this seems an appropriate place for it.

The issue I disagree on: All of you beating on Relic as being incompetent, or uninterested, or cynical: I think you're badly, badly wrong. IMO, while the state of the game may not be PERFECT, that's all that can be said. And perfect is pretty much an unattainable ideal. Programming is hard; 'balance' is hard. I think that having written and balanced a game as complex, as varied and as detailed as this one, Relic have every reason to be pleased with themselves, even proud.

I have a few nominal quibbles about the current state of things, but Relic have been very actively involved in the game and I have every confidence they will be addressed. Lets contrast that with some other games and studios.

Take, frex, Silent Hunter 4.This is a game in which a fundamental, basic part of play is judging the range of a target by measuring its mast height. But in the in-game data, the mast heights were just plain wrong, which meant the shot would miss. This was NEVER FIXED. You might be astonished that such a catastrophic error made it past QA; you might be aghast that it was never addressed. But this is the reality, because humans and firms are imperfect. By comparison, Relic has been a paragon of conscientious dedication.

Many of you also seize upon any tiny perfection and make sarastic comments about it being "e-sports ready". But let's look at what actually happens in esports: just a week or so ago, Riot was forced to disable 3 League of Legends heroes because of a bug, IN THE MIDST OF A TOURNAMENT. This doesn't have the same whiff of sheer cack-handed incompetence as the SH4 bug above, but it does demonstrate that nobody is immune, and that accidents of this nature are not indicative of a relentless contempt for their player base.

I could go on. So for those of you enjoying the warm glow of righteous indignation at every stick you find to beat Relic with, I say sit down, have a nice cup of tea, and worry about something more important.

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Now the bit that I agree on is with DLC, but again, not because I believe Relic is some sort of ogre, but because the INDUSTRY as a whole is moving in this direction, and while it has some value to it, it can go OTT.

I don't really think that paid DLC is incompatible with professional sports; I've never seen anyone suggest that it is wholly wrong for players of pro sports to, say, buy their own tennis rackets or football boots or whatever it might be. Now fair enough, they make a living like this, and it can be thought of as a cost of doing business, but it's still an up-front cost that entrants to the sport have to negotiate somehow. And it can be significant; IIRC in a fairly recent Olympics there was some hoopla about a new low-friction costume for swimmers. This, IMO, is a non-issue.

The question then is whether its appropriate for a small-ish game that wants to grow its playerbase. I think in this regard moving to the Warspoils system was a perfectly good decision and one of which I generally approve. People complain about "grind" but the reality is that if you are going to play the game anyway, it doesn't hurt you to be occasionally rewarded. And you are going to play the game anyway, aren't you? If you weren't, you wouldn't even be on this forum.

Where I will agree with many here is that I think the rewards, especially when it comes to commanders, are too infrequent. But this has to be set against Relic's desire to ensure the commanders have some rarity, because that's the only real value they have. This is a question that can and should be addressed soberly and constructively, rather than infused with the hostile invective seen in many posts here. If you want the game to be better, spending all your time being aggressive and dismissive of Relic is certainly not helping, regardless of how satisfying and self-congratulatory you find it.

The main quibble I have with DLC is the day zero stuff; I'm not opposed to the principle, and frankly, would be quite happy to find a way that Relic can keep producing goodies that make the game better, and for which they can charge a fair price.

Lastly, in the midst of the general hostility to Relic, I see scant recognition for the many improvements to the game that receive little attention or fanfare. Improvements to smoke and particle effects that are quite pronounced; improvements to the way that models behave, reacting to fire and kneeling for shots, which they did not do on release day.

CoH2 is a good game, even great. Its fun to play, and fun to watch. Relic are not a branch of SPECTRE or HYDRA and should not be treated as if they were. Chill the hell out.

Like V_V said part of the problem aside from poor launch/bad design of war spoils is today so many people (not all but many) want an amazing, balanced game with no pay wall, but also 24/7 support/patching and no charges after initial purchase. The entitled attitude that says I should get a game for say 50 bucks then be able to play it on free servers for 1,000+ hours without every paying another cent is just wrong. I don't like some of the stuff Relic/Sega/others do like OP DLC that almost seems deliberate but they also have to have revenue incoming to support staff salary/benefits, buildings, other overhead etc, etc

Like V_V said part of the problem aside from poor launch/bad design of war spoils is today so many people (not all but many) want an amazing, balanced game with no pay wall, but also 24/7 support/patching and no charges after initial purchase. The entitled attitude that says I should get a game for say 50 bucks then be able to play it on free servers for 1,000+ hours without every paying another cent is just wrong. I don't like some of the stuff Relic/Sega/others do like OP DLC that almost seems deliberate but they also have to have revenue incoming to support staff salary/benefits, buildings, other overhead etc, etc

And they can do all that by sticking to cosmetic dlc. Just look at Dota/LOL/CSGO.

And they can do all that by sticking to cosmetic dlc. Just look at Dota/LOL/CSGO.

To be sure they could do better I'm talking about those who want everything perpetually free. Also I think our player base is too small to get by on skin packs.

I don't think people want everything to be free. They want a finished game within a month or two after release. They want it as balanced and bug free as possible.
In terms of the size of the player base, that's all on relic. The game was (is) broken, the launch was horrible, there is a p2w aspect, if you look at the steam store it is really confusing and everything combined costs like 150 bucks, new players get stomped in matchmaking, memory leaks, you can't remap keys in 20 fucking 15, upadtes every 6 months etcetcetc.

Games like sc2 or d3 for example still make it work with only a full price sale at release and later full size expansions. But no, instead of thinking long term relic just milks the remaining player base for as long as possible. I mean really, a 40 Euro single player campagin that lasts 5 hours and doesn't even get you access to the faction in multiplayer? But hey, as long as people keep buying it, this spiral will jsut continue. Imo if they really wanted to expand the player base they need to go f2p for at least the two basic factions, or even go for full f2p like tf2 did. And that game is still alive 8 years after its release.

SNIP

It makes me sad when people think like this, think like you. What the hell has happened to us? I don't know about you, but I've been a Hardcore gamer (mostly PC) for about 20 years. Why are standards are low like this? Our standards and so fucking low.

Do you guys remember the old day? Developers an publishers used to make perfect games. Minimal amount of bugs and issues, no post-release bullshite, no need for frequent patches to fix the game (and occasionally introduce new or old bugs cuz LELIK). Maybe it's because the presence of internet which made devs lazy, I don't know. The only thing I know is that we -as gamers- have changed. They can shit on us and we are all content. "Hey guys, the game is not that bad", "remember how the game was a couple of months ago?". "Stop being so entitled".

This is not entitlement. I was born and raised in a country which never had good internet connection. Even now, I pay a fortune for a shitty 512mb internet with 200 latency. But back then, I wasn't forced to always update my games to be able to play them. I remember the days in which a AAA game would be patched once or twice, and only for minor issues. Today, we have Day0 patches are we are fucking grateful.

Every now and then, a developer (Like CD-PROJECT RED-which I respect greatly) does its job right and we lose our shit like they are doing us a favor. They are doing there job. This is not entitlement. The industry has gone to shite, developers and publisher accuse each other and we fight over who's fault is it...

Both Relic and Sega are culprits here. How you might ask. Well, I have no answer for that. Actually non of us could come up with a right answer. Only thing I know is that both parties are not doing their job as they should.

PS: Sorry for the language, just letting off some steam. Even cursing on a forum helps and eases the pain

Yep I mostly agree. COH2 is very inaccessible compared to other games. For example if you take a look at the CS:GO steam store page there is only ONE game that you can buy - CS:GO for 15$.

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Meanwhile if I was new to COH2 and interested in the game, there is just a flood of content and people don't know what to buy.

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So if you want the full multiplayer experience, you have to spend 67,97€. And on top of that, there is additional content locked away. I don't mind consmetics as microtransactions, but commanders which are an essential part of the game shouldn't be. So roughly you have to spend another ~20€ on them to stay competetive, which means you almost reach 100€! And this is just for the multiplayer. I really suggest making the base game (Soviets and Ostheer) free to play and add some kind of "Full Multiplayer Access version". While the DLC system certainly makes a lot of money, I doubt it will be worth it in the long run because of the amount of players which turned away from the coh franchise.

+1 To Luvnest and OP.

Were you a business executive in EVE? I can tell.

To any defenders of DLC, TF2 micro-transaction is miles better. Warspoil mainly exists to troll players, make no mistake about that. Core commander for each faction is meh compared to DLC.

It makes me sad when people think like this, think like you. What the hell has happened to us? I don't know about you, but I've been a Hardcore gamer (mostly PC) for about 20 years. Why are standards are low like this? Our standards and so fucking low.

Look, I don;t even disagree with you on the general case. Yes it's certainly true that it has become much more common for games to ship with significant bugs. Part of that is certainly because of the prevalence of the internet; there seems to be an assumption that they can always fix it later. Even console games are starting to be affected by this.

But I think a bigger factor is the sheer amount of money in the games industry these days. And that has mean that the creatives, for want of a better term, are increasingly on a short leash held by investors and management, and even marketing. If they arrange a delivery date, and that goes in the marketing, then by god it ships on that date, whether it's ready or not.

But there are some other factors. When I was 12, I wrote my first programme, and it went like this:

10 print "hello"
20 goto 10

But that was probably the last programme I wrote that had no bugs. All programmes have bugs; it's a virtual impossibility make sure they never happen. Even the effort to find and fix bugs can introduce new bugs. And even if you know that a bug exists, it's often terribly difficult to find exactly what is causing it.

I'm not asking you, or anyone to give Relic a free pass. I'm just asking for some perspective, and less histrionics.Relic is very far indeed from the worst producers in the industry; it is very good, by comparison to many and even most, in the effort it puts into after sales support.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be critical; I'm saying you shouldn't be hostile. That doesn't help anyone.

Snip

I like Relic, as much as you do and I for one am not saying that they are the worst developer ever. I practically grew up with WH40K DoWI. That's why I'm frustrated, LongJohn has a beautiful topic about it. The point is, they are incompetent in some aspects, and it seems like that they are not trying to fix the issues.

Every now and then, staff visit forums, answer a couple of questions, post notes and what not which acts as pain killers for the community. And we have this pain killer because we gave them a hard time. I don't wanna go into details, but you probably remember that we had visual bugs on LMG42 for months. Look at Cruzz's thread. Dude pin pointed a buttload of issues in less than a week.

That's why some of us call them incompetent. Not because they don't have the technical knowledge, but because their pride doesn't allow them to fix their product. We have a lot of people willing to help them, even without credit. And I'm not talking about balance here. Simply changing a few values will fix a lot of issues. Their out sourced QA is another matter completely. I'm no expert, but I know that their pipeline is flawed.

And keep in mind that they support their game because they don't have any other options. They probably don't have enough budget to develop another DoW game (or maybe Sega doesn't allow them to start working on it) so they have to support CoH2, specially that they have released a new faction recently. But they are acting masochistically. What they've accomplished with 4 patches could have been accomplished with only one patch.

I don't wanna go off topic, sorry for the long post(s).

That's why some of us call them incompetent. Not because they don't have the technical knowledge, but because their pride doesn't allow them to fix their product.

See, this is where we part company. You don't know that. I know you don't know that, because you're describing what's going on in someone else's head, and unless you happened to have invented and built your very own mind-reading machine, this is simply not information that is available to you.

So, seeing as you don't know that, what has happened instead its that you've made it up. You've attributed imaginary moral qualities to them, and now you feel entitled to treat them as Bad Guys. And to my mind, this is not only totally useless and un-constructive, it's also utterly fatuous.

What they've accomplished with 4 patches could have been accomplished with only one patch.

I've just pointed out to you how patching bugs is difficult and fraught with the danger of introducing new ones. So no, you can't just assume that that it could have been accomplished in one patch; you just don't know that.

As an object lesson on the difficulties of debugging, I leave you with The Story of Mel.

10 print "hello"
20 goto 10

But that was probably the last programme I wrote that had no bugs.

I'd call a looping program with no exit point bugged.

Seriously though, I agree with a lot that has been said here and I would love to have a blunt Q&A session with Relic to ask them about the DLC model and how much damage the idea of DLC Commanders is doing to the franchise.

As others (Luvnest, Ami, etc.) have said in the past, not only is the Commander system in general a worse and more limiting replacement for the doctrine system in CoH, but forcing people to pay to get exclusive commanders that in many cases are clearly unbalanced compared to the standard ones is just wrong.
Make no mistake, the War Spoils system is working exactly as intended - it is a pretence that we don't have to pay for the good Commanders because there is a very, very faint chance that they will drop on a crate, but like gambling machines the odds are stacked against you; the combination of different rarities, the amount of dilution caused by intel bulletins and the fact that you can be awarded duplicates of things you already have.

While I don't think Relic are incompetent, I suspect when it comes to the biggest issue with the game (the Commanders and their lack of balance), their hands are tied.
They have to generate new income and that means making new Commanders and DLC too appealing to pass up - hence they have to appear very powerful compared to existing ones. Balance will always play second fiddle to sales and that is why Relic can't be trusted to create balanced Commanders as DLC. Look at the British Vanguard Commander for that or the two new ones.

Personally I think the whole Commander system should be rewritten:
- Commanders should be changed so that each has 9 abilities like the old left-hand/right-hand doctrine trees (from CoH), so that even after making the strategic decision of which one to use you still have to make tactical decisions during the game of where you invest the CPs at what point.
- Each faction should have a minimum of 5 standard Commanders available upon release so that everyone has some choice of which they enter a match with.
- War Spoils should *not* allow for duplicates (any duplicates can effectively be re-rolled)
- No "premium" Commanders should have unique units available to them - only variations on abilities or different combinations of them.