WAR SPOILS BETA RELEASE NOTES

The Closed Alpha was intended to validate the main tenants of the system.
The primary goal of the system change was to address duplicate drops. By the time we finished the Closed Alpha 80% of players surveyed felt the system was ready for launch.

The Open Beta is intended to fine tune and find bugs and issues.
So with that in mind thought I'd give a summary of where we've come from and how we addressed some of the bigger complaints with the alpha.

Changes from Alpha to Beta

We originally had a daily loot limit in place to prevent exploitation of the system. This has been removed. Players can play as much as they like in non modded games and still acquire warspoils and supply.
You can now earn Warspoils and supply in modded games. You can still earn up to the daily limit if you are playing with mods.
We made bulletins less expensive to encourage players to try out different combinations now that the entire library is accessible.
Warspoils have been changed to only drop items for armies you own. In this Open Beta you own all the armies - so expect items from all factions.
We added a drop that contains only supply. This was done to provide more access to supply in early progression.
We're not able to address everyone's concerns. So here is some additional rationale to help understand why.

Performance Based Rewards

This was also proposed in the alpha. However any type of system that rewards only winners or skilled players also punishes players who are less skilled and this is bad for the overall health of the game. In addition, any type of performance evaluation system tends to favor the same type of play style making the game less diverse. (e.g. a great game could be a 10 minute perfectly played game or a 1 hour slugfest with 5 vps left) The team feels strongly that players should be rewarded for playing the game in the way that they want and rewards allocated without favoring a specific set of players.

Deleted Items

If you deleted items in the past we kept track of that. So you'll get a nominal amount for supply for those items that were deleted.

Failing validation

If you fail validation it's because you didn't do enough to warrant earning loot points.
It should only happen very rarely (unless you are trying something like going AFK with bots playing for you, or setting up matches in which you have to contribute relatively little)
If you think it happened unfairly then let us know and we'll check your replay to see.
Post with your steam64ID and we should be able to do the rest.

Intel Bulletins

We hear complaints about stacking bulletins. We needed to move forward with a decision on this and although not everyone agrees, we hope you can at least understand the logic. Bulletins were never designed with stacking in mind. Stacking bulletins have created imbalanced situations in MP games and this adds an additional layer of complexity we want to clean up in order to simplify the balancing process. Bulletins were meant to be a slight tweak, not a huge buff.

We've heard arguments that this "makes bulletins useless". It makes them less effective than before at creating an advantage, yes. However this is just the nature of vertical buffs. Too little and they are as perceived less useful, too much and they imbalance the game. So we are staying on the safe side and prioritizing balance.
When looking at the total population of games played only 4% actually had stacked bulletins - so the impact to the player base is small.

We understand that some players are upset because we are effectively removing a gameplay advantage earned over time. However this can be compensated by the fact you can now shop for specific bulletins at only 1000 supply. There is a large library of bulletins, and you can pretty quickly try different bulletins out and find combinations that give your favoured units a small tweak. We hope that the small group of players that do stack bulletins will adjust and try out new combinations.

In addition, the system we designed becomes complicated and hard to understand if we were to add exceptions to "duplicates are salvaged" rule.

Salvage Pricing

We wanted to eliminate the "casino effect" of getting even more value because of luck. That's why pricing for salvaging is flat. If we were to tier salvage pricing, then those randomly getting lower value content would just get less Supply. We're trying to tone down the randomness. The fact is although you get less salvage for a commander...you get more for bulletins and other content relatively speaking. There's still the excitement of getting a commander via a drop.

It's true that it can be a grind to get commanders which are the most desirable content. A lot of the rationalizing revolves around how many games to get a commander. However, please consider these factors.

There needs to be some incentive to buy our paid content. This is how we maintain support for the game, cutting this off means cutting off funds that keeps servers going and team members working on COH2. We know this is a contentious point but since we continue to work on the game we need an income stream to offset our heavily discounted entry points.

The fact that players are getting random drops along the way is often disregarded. This is the main way in which players acquire content through progression. During the time you will be grinding to get enough supply for a commander it's likely you will have acquired several commanders through random drops along with a host of other content.