Profile of TychoCelchuuu

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.

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.

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.

Talking about the alpha is a breach of the NDA so even those of us who are in it can't say whether we enjoy mirror matches or not.

cr4wler we are talking about reconnect for custom games, not reconnect in automatch. If you can pause a game when a player drops and let them reconnect, it lets us run tournaments that don't break down whenever one player's computer crashes.

Everyone talking about Relic catering to casual gamers who love compstomps and 4 hour long artillery slugfests on The Scheldt are 100% right. It makes the game much worse but Relic thinks it needs to make the game more fun for the majority of people rather than us, the minority, who care about things like spectator, 1v1, balance, pausing, etc. Personally, although I understand the business sense in focusing on the masses, I feel like anyone who played that way in CoH doesn't really care about the quality of the game they're playing, and more effort spent making the game better for them is basically wasted because they just want to chill out and watch the pretty explosions, but I can definitely understand the other viewpoint, which is that Relic should spend its time and money on the larger group of people rather than the smaller group of people.

I just wish they would look at things like Tales of Heroes or Rogers and Pounders' videos and realize that if you make it fun to watch competitive CoH, you'll draw in all those casual players who just want to chill out on the Scheldt, whereas if you focus on all those casual players you just wreck the game for the people who really care about the fine details and make it harder for us to run tournaments, play a balanced game, attract the finest players, make the best videos, and so on.

If you look at a game like Starcraft II for instane, they know that most players aren't crazy Korean micro masters, but they put all their effort into balancing the game for pro players because they know that casual players are never going to be good enough to know whether the game is balanced or not and it's so exciting to watch a good SC2 match that it brings in casual players to have that sort of top level competition. Sure, most players in SC2 can be creamed by a 6 pool or basically any kind of cheese, but Blizzard just doesn't care. If you're worried about that stuff you can just play team matches or custom games with funky settings.

So, again, not surprised, and I can see why Relic does what it does, but still, it sucks for us and I think overall it just sucks for CoH 2. The worst part is that even if I'm wrong, and it's better for the game, then it's better for the people playing compstomps or on The Scheldt, and not for us. We still have to put up with pay to win, no improvements on spectating/replay watching/game pausing from CoH 1, and so on.

At least there are pretty charts at the end of each match. Relic put a lot of effort into those for some reason.