Active spectator mode coh2?

Agreed with what Tycho said, but I'd argue that spectator mode is something casuals would want too. It's a feature that is just plain nice to have regardless of if you're casual or hardcore player.

but I'd argue that spectator mode is something casuals would want too. It's a feature that is just plain nice to have regardless of if you're casual or hardcore player.

agreed hopefully relic hears us and atleast looks into for the near future. as i think it will help this game out alot.

also another cool feature i just thought of that would be really fun. the ability to watch a replay with a group of friends. so like one could make a game lobby and watch a replay together come to think of it that would make snf so much easier.

Too much to quote

tycho, i agree with you 95%, but:
in a 1v1, reconnect does not make a whole lot of sense, no matter how you look at it. all games that allow reconnect are not 1v1 games. starcraft does not allow reconnect. if your computer crashes, your fault. if your internet fails, your fault. if theres a power outage in your neighborhood, your fault. tournament officials (and/or the other player) might have mercy and give you a rematch, if not, it probably isn't a BO1, so yeah still have plenty of chances to take the other games.

about relic catering to the scheldt players... what relic fails to realise is that coh has so many scheldt layers and comp stompers because all the other, more competetive players (apart from us hardcore die hard coh fans) are playing other, more competetive games... and there's a LOT more competetive players than there is comp stompers/scheldters. the potential for a game like coh is limitless, if it was more competetive, if it was more balanced, if it had better "community" tools... there'd be a lot more players playing coh. and the icing is: the compstompers would still be there, not caring about anything but their bridge maps. so relic is actually hurting themselves by not caring about our needs. imagine what coh would be without SNF, without coh2.org, without GR.org.

i also trust relic enough that it's not gonna be pay2win.

Okay but what if that player is you and you don't want to lose the match ? Wouldn't you like to reconnect back into the fight ? And I was referring to competitive play specifically because you will lose money and the tournament because of a power shortage or packet loss.

Also, pause system can be simple; 3 pauses of 1 minute for each player. Your enemy can unpause after 1 minute. I see no abuse here.

if that player happens to be me... then it sucks to be me at that point in time. and if i don't want to lose the match, i make sure beforehand that everything will go smooth as can be. everything as mentioned above.

your pause system could be abused to the max: imagine, game is close to being over... loser pauses, winner can't unpause until 1 minute passes. even if he immediately unpauses, guess whats gonna happen next and guess how often he is going to do it...

unless it's a trust based, sc2 liked pause system (3 pauses per player per game, everyone can unpause immediately), it's probably gonna suck.

Pause works great and is vital in LoL. It's not working on rank or custom because it doesn't matter and would be very anoying. But it's very important and used often for issues during tourney games.

yeah, a trust based system can work... but still, look how often it gets used (can't really say for LoL, but i know in starcraft it's an afterthought and probably only gets used at all because of lag issues on LANs...

about relic catering to the scheldt players... what relic fails to realise is that coh has so many scheldt layers and comp stompers because all the other, more competetive players (apart from us hardcore die hard coh fans) are playing other, more competetive games... and there's a LOT more competetive players than there is comp stompers/scheldters. the potential for a game like coh is limitless, if it was more competetive, if it was more balanced, if it had better "community" tools... there'd be a lot more players playing coh. and the icing is: the compstompers would still be there, not caring about anything but their bridge maps. so relic is actually hurting themselves by not caring about our needs. imagine what coh would be without SNF, without coh2.org, without GR.org.

Really? More competitive players than compstompers? I don't have the numbers, although I remember reading that the majority of CoH owners never even played online, let alone played competitive matches. My impression of most people in RTS games is that they don't like the pressure of 1v1 - they prefer to compstomp or play larger team games on maps like The Scheldt where they can sit back, chill out, and spam artillery. Big Game Hunters in Starcraft is the same idea. You might be right, and I don't really know, but just from talking to people/looking at what kind of games people host/etc. it seems like 1v1 players (and multiplayer people in general) are in the minority.

i also trust relic enough that it's not gonna be pay2win.

How you can trust Relic after OF and especially ToV is beyond me T-17 spam and Kangaroo Carriers are basically pay to win already, and that was only when they added like 6 units. Now imagine Relic trying to balance all the stuff you can pay for and I can pretty much guarantee that something is going to be OP, and if that something costs money...

Like the special commander you get for preordering the deluxe edition. Is that dude OP? If he's OP that's straight up pay to win.

All the stuff about pause is missing the point, again - I'm not talking about automatch, I'm talking about when COH2.org runs tournaments or something and 12azor's cat knocks his router and disconnects him when he has a 200 VP lead in the final match of the tournament. Sure, we can just give the loss to whoever disconnects and say "tough shit" but that's not better than just pausing for 3 minutes while he reconnects.

It's very disappointing to hear that observer mode won't be in the game at launch, however I hope that it will be available soon after.

In the interim all we can do is put on some awesome shows.

well obs mode coming probably little late after release is not the major concern we should be having about COH2 release imo. Anyway replays will be there to allow game analyses and it seems that many people like (and are able) to stream while playing which will give the game some visibility among the rts commnunity in general. Ofc it would be better to have obs mode for tourneys straight away but things like server stability, automatch/ranking system come first for the majority of the players.

We are talking of server side features that cost A LOT to be not only implemented but to stay in the game each month.

It is understandable that a little company like Relic with a 'little' game like COH2 cannot seriously develop features like those you're asking if they are not 1000% sure about "better than expected" results on launch. Blizzard is huge, Riot now is huge. Relic, even after years is still small, and THQ has still its problems, besides the fact it's going better now.

And it is in all honesty understandable also that they are trying to go "the safe way" to ensure COH2 sells well, they cannot accept, at this point in their history, a fail game that doesn't sell well. Also when you develop a game you think at finding a compromize between all the customers who could potentially buy the game, you cannot honestly make it only for pros or only for people who want to play it for fun.

Think at this please before criticizing a company for what they've done/they are doing. When I talked to Quinn he was CLEARLY aware of our requests and he would have loved to realize them all...if it was in his and Relic possibilities.

And he was sad, really sad, that we could have been disappointed if the observer mode would have not been released at launch. Give these guys a break, they are people like us afterall.

Why do you think they moved from a studio to another in Vancouver? Apart from our dreams and our requests there's the real life and the money. Let's work hard to help them getting a better game which sells well and I'm sure that then we'll get what we ask.

And again, we have no clue (unless you are IT Engineers or analysts) how much our requested features cost and how hard it would be to implement them on a server and let them run every month for years, nor we are analysts who can predict if the expenses are worth the effort.

Budwise and Seb, how much do they cost? Am I wrong or Budwise is specialized in this matter?! xD

I would tend to agree with Tycho, but Marcus makes some good points too.

IMHO it's a very simple feature; have spectator slots when hosting a basic game, no change to the networking code, have spectators on their own team and disable all-chat for them.

There are of course some unknown details, but it seems simple..

it's not AS simple, but it's no magic either... but enabling the game to continue when 1 player (out of 2) drops... i don't think any game supports that (apart from games that have multiplayer savegames and/or are turn based). even in LoL games stop when one team does not have any human members left, iirc.
on top of that, i'm gonna ask again, how often does this even happen? it happens like, never.

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I agree with you. Yet small companies like S2 games, has such feature running on a server side. But of course if the game is played peer to peer, it would load the "host", if live spectating is implemented. (I guess this is how it works, someone correct me if I'm wrong).

Aside from that Lynx did mention in his post, that it's on the list of things to come. Just not included in launch. Even though I'm a casual player of the first coh, I would love to see coh2 (and coh) being balanced after pros and high tier player input.


In responds to crawler. Do they have pauses in LoL? I know there's a pause system in HoN and those games are somewhat similar.

idk if they have it on LANs/live events... but honestly i don't think LoL has a pause mode... SC2 has it though

LoL and Dota 2 have pause mode implemented

haven't played LoL in like a year or so :-P did it have pause too back then? can't remember having ever seen it...

haven't played LoL in like a year or so :-P did it have pause too back then? can't remember having ever seen it...

Pause is vital to games like LoL; they occur in about 90% of my games in HoN. It's such a simple thing to add and there's a very small amount of abuse that can come from it if done right. Not a big deal for 1v1 auto, but for 2v2s and basic games (tournies) I'm sure it would prove very beneficial.

We are talking of server side features that cost A LOT to be not only implemented but to stay in the game each month.

What? Why would it cost more to have a 1v1 with 2 spectators than it would to have a 2v2? I don't understand it at all. The real cost for spectator mode is coding it into the game, adding buttons and menus and stuff to the UI to support it, implementing a system so that spectators can join specific games, and so on. These are one time costs but since game development is so rushed and frenzied, any time you have your coders and artists make spectator mode, that's time spent doing that which they can't spend on something else.

Relic wants to have their coders and artist spend time on XP unlocks for their microtransactions, on implementing a bunch of fancy ribbons and medals to win to unlock new intelligence bulletins, and on customizable commander trees so that they can sell bonus commanders with the preorder deluxe edition. These are things they do to appeal to the masses, who love earning +10 XP and ticking towards the higher rank, but they're things that people who play competitively and care about the game competitively don't care about (or even actively dislike because they have to unlock all this crap or just buy it before they have all their options ready to go).

So like I said, Relic is catering to the masses rather than to the minority that cares about things like spectating. If Relic really wanted to save on server features but also cared about competitive players, they would just cut 4v4 and 3v3 because those modes are basically a joke, but of course Relic would never cut those because casual players love the no-pressure, 2 hour artillery spamfests that those games turn into.

All this "boo hoo Relic loves us and I just KNOW that they want to put in spectator SO BAD but they can't because if the game fails then they all go bankrupt and will have to be homeless in Canada" stuff is beside the point. OF COURSE Relic wants to add everything we want into CoH2. Do you really think that you'd ever talk to Quinn and he'd be like "uh no fuck you guys, we don't care about half the shit you want." No way! He wants CoH 2 to be the best game in the entire world, and every time you ask him "do you want to add X" of course he'll say "if we had time/money."

But game development is all about making choices, and Relic has made lots of choices to appeal to the masses in terms of gameplay features and as far as I can tell they've made zero choices to improve CoH 2 competitively compared to CoH aside from mirror matches (which half of this forum seems to hate anyways). I'm not saying that's the right decision or the wrong decision in terms of making money, but I suspect it's the wrong decision in terms of making the game better, because I think casual players are going to enjoy CoH 2 about as much as they enjoy CoH whether or not it has all these stupid little unlock things that unbalance the game, but I know FOR SURE that competitive players and the community that springs up around them are going to like CoH 2 less because it has no spectator mode, and competitive players and the tournaments and shoutcasts and streams that they lead to make the game more fun for EVERYONE. They turn it into a spectator sport, they make it easy to advertise to people who have never heard of it or who think the trailers don't make it look exciting (and by the way, the trailers DON'T make it look exciting unless you're already a hardcore fan), and they keep CoH 2 alive for a lot longer.

I know that the reason I bought CoH was because Tales of Heroes made it look so exciting. Before that, it was just another one of the crapload of WW2 RTS games that come out every year. Live tournaments are even more exciting, but without spectator mode we won't be able to run them.

And as for people like LeMazarin saying "well at least we'll get it after launch," well, I wish I could share your optimism. It's not impossible, and maybe it's on the list of things to add, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Relic has done some crazy post-launch stuff before (they entirely rebalanced DoW II) but I just can't imagine some producer at THQ sitting down after CoH 2 had launched and saying to themselves "I think I should give Relic a big bundle of cash to pay a programmer and an artist enough to implement spectator features." Hell, THQ is probably going to just abandon every aspect of CoH 2 that can't be turned into a new microtransaction, because THQ needs the money baaaaad.

I think you are making a lot of assumptions without having any concrete proof of what you are saying.

I was going to explain in details why I disagree with you, but then I understood I would have talked about stuff and people I got asked not to talk about.

So well, let's say only the future (and Relic) knows the answer to your concerns

Well... I guess that's good... it would be nice if they would like, say whatever this good news is instead of keeping it secret but whatever.

It only bothers me because DoW 2 had a well built spectator system IMO, or at least one were you could view the game live with some small option. Therefore CoH 2 not having it feel like regressing. Not gonna pitchfork them for it though, I love their games. Still hard to hide the disappointment I feel. (and trust me, I don't put it all on Relic. Sometimes, life and economy just sucks.)

Marcus, just out of curiosity: Do you know for a fact that spectator mode has to be server based or are you merely assuming it?

This is pure speculation on my part, but if it's a fact it may indicate that Relic has implemented features (perhaps as part of the true sight system) to prevent maphacking (spectator mode is basically a maphack), which in my view makes it well worth it to sacrifice spectator mode.