About the developers and the forum.

Sorry if I broke the rule now.

Are these hot discussions on the balance forum read by developers? Or they only read the forum coh2beta? I think that only two people work in the balance team.

It seems to me that the developers only look at the results of the tournaments. And after the tournaments they make patches.

My guess and what any sane person would/should do on any type of game.

-Look at tournament play and high level play. Check what is been abused at the moment.

-Ask for advice and opinion from both high skilled and knowledgeable players.

-Check general trend for the overall playerbase.

-Check what is the "general" consensus or what people are complaining about in public places.

This last 2 are for having a basic ground level notion of what the average common denominator is having problems with, even if it's biased.


The problem with the balance section is that it's a place where everyone can say what they want, without repercussion of what they say is true or not and not even needing to show who, what and how they play.
The game is not played in the same fashion in 1v1, 2v2 or 4v4. The game is not played in the same way at lv1-10, 10-15 and 15-20.


You might like it or not, but anonymous player who refuses to show his playercard (for whatever reason he might have) has less credibility than someone who doesn't have a problem to show who they are.
A single replay or post with detailed use of stats has more weight than 100 post of white noise which is the balance section.

Currently devs only supervise what is subject to balance or not, they don't change the game anymore as they susidized the community to chose now how to balance out units.
And to answer the question you can read most posts and ideas here to see 99.8% are completely clueless and biased.

When balance they pick either what is being talked or complained about the most, this is the trend and they pair that with tournament stats and see what is being abused or what is "meta".
Consider also that their paradigm is to make the game less meta as possible, as in they want the game to offer a wide variety of viable strats.
The irony is that the more it gets patched, the more "flowcharted" it becomes.

Now it's not rare to find relic devs watching streams of known competitive players they also use these to check out for their latest patch.


The devs look only at tournament because this is where it matters the most because players who qualified at the highest pool understand the game even better than the devs do, they know what can be abused and how.
See the story about order 227 commander and when they asked VonIvan to do the testing for them.

So yes, in order for them to tweak the game they use tournament stats, and because this is where experience gets real, unlike their in-house experiments.