the scope was definitely unfortunate, but it's important to have realistic short terms goals as well as long term goals.
even without the scope in place it's important to pace changes to the game so each patch is a "stable" point. Was it really that important to change anything and everything in scope? It feels like a lot of the change implemented were waiting for a future enlargement of scope that never become truly fulfilled.
or recognize that a change might not fit the "vision", but it fit the reality and need. If a change to a in scope unit require a complimentary changes to an out of scope unit, the safer option would have been to shelve it or implement something different.
For neither WBP nor GCS were we able to set the scope ourselves. We were just given a list of things to change. It's only FBP patch that we were able to set the scope ourselves; we gave Relic a list of 11 high-priority items, and we were allowed to fix the top 5 of them, kind of.
For WBP, the scope was a bit more abstract (aka Light Vehicles and Infantry scaling). Despite repeated pleadings throughout the entire process we never managed to convince Relic to include call-in changes and OKW infantry; therefore the patch was already rigged to fail from the get-go. Nevertheless, at the end of WBP, Soviets had Maxim cheese and UKF had Cromwell/Comet cheese, so it's not like Vet5 would make a dent to either faction.
Then, GCS came and we were given a very restrictive list of units we were supposed to fix. Everybody had already seen Cromwell/Comet nerfs a mile away and we were waiting for it. However, by the time we had finished WBP, we were considering it would be completely absurd to ask the team to touch maxims without doing
anything at all about Conscripts or Volksgrenadiers (let alone the entire OKW infantry line-up). So, yet again, the patch was rigged to fail.
A lot of mistakes were made in the process. e.g.,:
- The unfortunate handheld AT bug
- Being unable to convince more people to try out Penals (top player kept assuring us they never saw the point of going Penals anymore... when they could go for Maxims instead)
- Failing to adjust Luchs moving scatter and accuracy vs vehicles in time (though this one was overshadowed by posts crying out that PTRS Penals would make Luchs irrelevant; lol)
- Setting PIAT range too low (though that was before Cromwell nerfs, and amidst pagefuls of terrible off-the-mark feedback about enabling PIAT blobs)
- Failing to realise we could have reverted some Guards nerfs to keep them relevant after GCS patch (WBP guards were balanced according to OP maxims)
- Not pressing hard enough to completely lock M4C Sherman and Command Panther behind tech (the only two call-in vehicles in GCS patch scope..)
- Failing to realise, in time, that the only people that bothered to test GCS Maxims were doing so with bulletins stacked (which may be bugged).
However, given the restrictions of the scope, and bar those mistakes that are now easy to spot in hindsight, I don't think it was possible to do something more decent than this; we could have done a different kind of bad, however.