If relic were to employ a fan, who would be the best pick?

I'm pretty sure it would make no difference. It would just be another employee following whatever system they have in place and whatever goal the higher up are setting. I'm confident they have great people at Relic already, but I feel from the outside that their whole process is not ideal, and their priorities aren't either.

That assessment is very accurate. Relic have great individuals working there. However as an organisation the gears don't seem to mesh properly. When I was involved in the alpha process they had a massive issue where old builds were overwriting new builds internally causing release builds to have some really embarrassing bugs.

If you dont have a target youll never hit it. Relic has always needed goals, never really had any.

I'm pretty sure it would make no difference. It would just be another employee following whatever system they have in place and whatever goal the higher up are setting. I'm confident they have great people at Relic already, but I feel from the outside that their whole process is not ideal, and their priorities aren't either.

+1

I don't think it could be said any better.

I cant speak for the other departments but you can blame me for that as well.. but for balance I consult Luvnest, Ciez, Lemon, Dusty and many more other community figures to do feedback and balance testing on. Mirage_FLA has been a person that has been mentioned and we will be reaching out to him shortly to join our Illuminati organization.

Again if anyone of you wishes to work at Relic and are qualified for any of these postions visit: http://www.relic.com/#careers

Hell i'll even refer you.

Give me 1 month. Total map freedom. 1 person to do grunt work. and the ability to patch daily and your on.

Give me 1 month. Total map freedom. 1 person to do grunt work. and the ability to patch daily and your on.

patch daily lmao

The illuminati has been revealed

I am not allowed to talk back at my own projects forums, but GOD I would give up my months worth of salary to punch to the face an idiot why screams how "easy and fast" stuff is to make and flames when stuff is not fixed enough.

But some of the stuff really IS easy to fix; modders have done it. Or its just ignored for an indefinite amount of time. Look at something easy to fix: the Automatch map list. What is this thing sorted by? It's not by size, it's not alphabetical, it's not by anything. Pretty much anyone with even a basic level of programming experience could write a very basic do-while loop to sort first by map size (i.e. all 2's, then 2-4's, then 4's, etc.), then by alphabetical order (i.e. 2's in alphabetical order, followed by 2-4's in alphabetical order). It would only need to be done once, since it would just read the map list on startup (or on Relic's end during patch deploy). Is it very important? No. Would it be a nice QoL change that would take very, very little time to implement? Yes.

Same can be said for the recent patch; the vast majority of the problems could have easily been spotted via a public beta (CoH2 -> Properties -> Betas -> "Beta patch".... if only). To be honest, the recent patch really confuses me, since the problems were so evident. Getting RE's to Vet 3 isn't that hard, nor is reinforcing any squad that has weapon upgrades (that dupe bug) - yet somehow these went live. I can understand the super obscure bugs, like vehicle vet stacking back in the day, or even that Brit MG range-stack, since both required very strange player behavior, but the bugs in the most recent patch were encountered by pretty much everyone who played.

I'm pretty sure it would make no difference. It would just be another employee following whatever system they have in place and whatever goal the higher up are setting. I'm confident they have great people at Relic already, but I feel from the outside that their whole process is not ideal, and their priorities aren't either.

Unfortunately; this. The process right now really isn't ideal, so bringing on fans/pros to balance the game wouldn't fix it in the current development structure. IF relic brought them on and said "Ok, you've got 2 months, do whatever", and they were given complete control over unit stats/balance and patch deployment, then they could do a lot of good. However, that just isn't going to happen.

Regardless, as for OP, no single person could do the job. When one person balances the game, it'll be inherently biased around their style of play. You'd need a mix of people who play 'core' play styles, as well as people who do creative and gimmicky stuff. Then you'd also need someone who focused on exploits, to make sure the fixes for the former 2 people don't result in unintended behavior.

patch daily lmao

To elaborate, I'm pretty certain patching has to be cleared up with individuals outside of one's own game company to ensure it'll be definitely slower than that.

Yea...i cant read that and not adress it. Im not about to make myself look like a rockstar, im not my gf will tell you im a moron half the time hah. I just want to contrast what "being a designer" and designing a system is like and shed some light on the idea that its just SO DIFFICULT to get this game right.

So i work as an aerospace engineer putting stuff up to the space station in RL. Its very hard. The engineering is hard, the design is hard, the entire process is a bitch. But its very doable if you think through your designs from start to finish, have defined goals, use insightful engineering judgment and rely on empirical evidence and talk to experts in the field to come to conclusions, then move forward with choices that you make to complete the mission. This typically takes under a year to do for a given mission.

Now I come to Relic, a company that has been making seriously kickass RTS games since the 90's and has been working with COH games for a decade now. There is no excuse to have a game like company of heroes 2 with a map pool list that is jumbled (wait for a ladder match look at the map pool list on the right, jesus christ it looks like JUMBLED UNORGANIZED crap). There is no excuse to have the level of glitches in the game that we experienced recently when a patch comes out (quality control??). There is no excuse to have a map pool that STILL isnt up to par for an Esports level competition (1v1 2v2), and there is no excuse for some of the choices that have been made in the past with regards to system design. I will reference this for the 1000th time. https://www.coh2.org/topic/11064/commander-overlap-a-serious-problem

COH is an inherently complex game, which is one reason its great, and yes it is hard to get balance JUST right, that should be ongoing (it must be Esportsable)...but there are times when issues are so glaring and obviously hindering the experience of COH that i wonder where the quality control is, when a balance decision is made, and i wonder if they even have a dedicated mapper at Relic to get the maps where they should be (a critical component to multiplayer COH that always gets overlooked, imagine if all the maps sucked even if balance was perfect how awful would COH2 be). And i understand Relic is working on things, i have no doubt. But to suggest that its SO HARD that these things just cant be done in THREE YEARS, to me, is an absurd claim.

I wonder if serious effort is put in to polishing the menu interface, supporting Esports and taking EDUCATED feedback from groups of experts in different fields of COH (mapping modding balance) because taking feedback from random people is a waste of time money and effort on Relics part. If I, an aerospace engineer, took feedback on how to design something from some jackass on the street who doesnt know anything about engineering, WHY would Relic, a game design company, take advice from a non-expert on ANY aspect of coh when it comes to something like balance or mapping....THEY SHOULDENT. Taking public advice on features and things makes sense. In the cases im talking about, it makes no sense. And hurts the entire community.

In conclusion it is NOT this task that is so hard that its acceptable to see the game where it is.

Between HOMEWORLD and COH ive spent thousands of hours on them mapping and playing. But this is my PLEE to get yourself together. COH2 could beat the shit out of games like SC2 if the right direction was taken. DO IT!

-Love WhiteFlashReborn

I agree with you about the map pool, I raised the issue several times in the former private alpha but met with mostly silence, I have often suspected that they have artists creating maps, not designers.

There is large quality disparity from the older maps to the newer ones, and the slow iteration times to adjust the maps to gameplay changes and new content could be better.

I would rather have 5 great maps than 10 mediocre maps.

The GUI is slow, old fashioned and resource heavy, god I wish they could overhaul it but building a new GUI isn't quick and one of the hardest things is finding a GUI artist and programmer, they're actually kinda rare. And now the scaleform is on the way out it might not be worth it.

Like any large scale complex development project there are so many variables that can affect so many aspects of development and cause issues which can last for a long, long time, but the general public do not ever see or hear about that.

It is hard to say what the exact issue is but from what I've heard and seen it appears there could be a general problem with source control.

I know they use perforce but how they've got their branches setup? What merge policies they use?

Bugs re merging is a common symptom of a dev working on a older branch and merging their content over to the live branch, and thus bringing over the previously fixed bug with the merged content.

The ideal pipeline (imo) scenario is to have two branches with a QA process in the middle.

Branches

- live
- QA
- offline

The offline branch is originally created from the live branch (highist CL), all devs work on the offline branch. The offline branch is played daily by internal QA / devs. Bugs are flagged, prioritised and fixed where possible. When it comes for a patch all merge requests go to QA and are held until verifed by QA.

Once verified and signed off by QA the live build is kicked off and finally uploaded to the steam servers for the users.


btw, love your maps (crossroads )

Luvnest, Ciez, Lemon, Dusty

We should direct our balance gripes to RtN.

So this is why Luvnest was so happy about commander with land mattress . P2W

But some of the stuff really IS easy to fix; modders have done it. Or its just ignored for an indefinite amount of time. Look at something easy to fix: the Automatch map list. What is this thing sorted by? It's not by size, it's not alphabetical, it's not by anything. Pretty much anyone with even a basic level of programming experience could write a very basic do-while loop to sort first by map size (i.e. all 2's, then 2-4's, then 4's, etc.), then by alphabetical order (i.e. 2's in alphabetical order, followed by 2-4's in alphabetical order). It would only need to be done once, since it would just read the map list on startup (or on Relic's end during patch deploy). Is it very important? No. Would it be a nice QoL change that would take very, very little time to implement? Yes.

I was talking in general.
While it may see that I contradict myself somehow now, I also believe relic have no excuse for stalling long on fixes that modders repaired in no time.

I cant speak for the other departments but you can blame me for that as well.. but for balance I consult Luvnest, Ciez, Lemon, Dusty and many more other community figures to do feedback and balance testing on. Mirage_FLA has been a person that has been mentioned and we will be reaching out to him shortly to join our Illuminati organization.

Again if anyone of you wishes to work at Relic and are qualified for any of these postions visit: http://www.relic.com/#careers

Hell i'll even refer you.

I would drop Ciez and dusty from that list since they are biased and have quite unstable views.


Mirage has great acknowledge of the mechanics but his balance views are biased as it is manifested in his mod.


It is odd that you haven't mentioned Cruzz.

I would drop Ciez and dusty from that list since they are biased and have quite unstable views.


Mirage has great acknowledge of the mechanics but his balance views are biased as it is manifested in his mod.


It is odd that you haven't mentioned Cruzz.

Mfw some random nerd thinks I'm biased

Mfw some random nerd thinks I'm biased

Nerd? wtf? "Biased" is not an insult you know.

I was just advising him to be more careful when looking for 'pro' advises etc. No offense bro.

Mfw some random nerd thinks I'm biased

As more of a forum lurker than poster, I do agree with Penile here... You and Lemon are very vocal posters on coh2.org and sometimes that's a positive thing against trolls and people who are unaware of relic announcements/news. However, recently I've seen you (and Lemon) defend relic with their latest patch on your streams and telling everyone to just relax when people start criticising Relic for they're shoddy updates or behaviour which does show a bias on your side. At this point I feel Relic should be heavily criticised as I can't even remember the last time they introduced a patch which didn't have a bug or balance problem. Personally, I've taken a break from CoH 2 after the Feb patch broke all infantry vet as I was sick and tired of the incompetence coming out of the devs (good timing too as I just started university). Even though Penile can sometimes be extreme in his views, some of which I don't agree with, I don't think you should completely disregard his opinions if he's trying to be constructive or making valid points.

In the end, I do respect you and I do enjoy watching you play as you're quite a good player. I can have a good laugh when I'm watching your streams but when I see you defending Relic at this point of the game, I get the impression that there's a bit of 'white knighting' going on.

P.S I do understand why you wouldn't want to be too critical of Relic though since you're close to the devs and don't want to ruin your relationship with them.

Edit: I know Penile was criticising Ciez originally, but personally I see more of Lemon defending Relic. You can see his post when replying to Whiteflash's comment in this thread which isn't constructive at all imo.

Cruzz, because then the game would be balanced and the bugs would be fixed.

As a player it's not worth defending Relic. They'll just as quickly knife you in the back all the while being faux pally pally with you.

As a player it's not worth defending Relic. They'll just as quickly knife you in the back all the while being faux pally pally with you.

I just think that anyone defending them at this point is obviously biased towards them. They've just screwed up way too many times with patches and DLC releases and never seem to learn anything from it. A professional, efficient and competent dev team (or any team in any industry) would never release products/patches the way Relic do. I assume Sega isn't doing them any favours as well.

I will add though, they have somewhat improved their community interaction which is a small compliment i'll give them. However, they even mess up when talking to the fans; as you can see by Kyle's latest blog post. According to the dev Cuddletronic, the vet bug has not been in the game since launch but according to Kyle (or whoever gave him the draft for the blog) it has... Furthermore, patch notes are always lackluster in details, (sometimes even containing glaring typos) usually not explaining how they are changing the unit/ability making the players do a lot of guesswork.