Profile of Esxile

I tend to agree, though I don’t think you’re that far behind in units vs Ostheer as RE + 3 rifles vs Pio 3 Grens means the 4th Gren only hits the field 10-20 seconds before LT and I think LT is the bigger powerspike. Midgame though Ostheer’s tools are so good at bleeding USF, especially with the LMGs and 222 timing.

I think vs OKW you have more of a leash as WC51 and cav rifles can tilt the early game in your favour. Depends on builds I suppose, but there’s a reason Skeletron despite being rank 80 in skill has managed to cheese his way to top 10 USF for months.

Let's recall something important here, something you've seem to forget. Lt or Capt are supposed to be extra. In the current iteration of the game, they are just a regular squad in your BO with a bit of punch. They fill a gap (10-20 second late) when they should be a powerspike, an aditional unit helping you to overwhelm your opponent.
With how the game is today, they should be your 5th squad on the field. 1xRE, 4xRM matching Ostheer 1xPI 1xHMG and 3xGR and then Cpt or Ltn as a bonus. The same way in return Ostheer get LMG as a bonus when teching BP1.
Same goes vs OKW with SP, Kubel and Volks outmaching RE and riflemen. This could be fine if the lt or capt were reaching the field much faster bringing superiority. That's not the case since they are just regular units in your BO.

You can't build 4xRM, that doesn't work in any way. The modding team through their various changes made Ostheer standard build order going from 1xPI + 1xHMG + 2xGR to 1xPI + 1xHMG + 3xGR with no extra cost delaying the potencial 222/Pgren coming next. OKW starting units have been buffed to heaven vs USF, SP, Kubel and Volks carefully preserved when they were already overperforming vs rifles.

If we look at the situation here, Lt or capt should be 10-20 second earlier than the 4th grenadier or OKW hmg/whatever to make sense with how USF is designed.

And you acknowledged it by yourself. You use the jeep/cav combo to make your way to top5, but look at the numbers: the jeep is cheap and don't delay that much you BO, can cap, can soak damage and let your translate into faster mid game. Cav also are better balanced than riflemen, they actually performs well according to their role and price.

Before all, let’s agree that the balance team did solve quantity of bugs and release quantity of good quality of life changes.

But they didn’t balance the game, and we can see that with the over-dominance of 2 factions during any 1vs1 tournament. At this stage I’m not even sure if one is superior to the other, which one is used to counter the other but for sure those 2 factions have beneficiated the most of the many changes the modding team applied to the game over the past years.

The modding team had one vision, making Arranged Teams balanced. But arranged team matchs isn’t the game. You see, with factions that have access to any kind of tools and factions that have per-design gaps/weaknesses in their stock roster, balance in AT is problematic because it allows team players to select their factions and coordinate their armies. So when a faction is as per design weaker in a certain aspect of the game and stronger in another to compensate, players in AT just select their faction and coordinate their effort to have one player covering for the weaknesses and the other abusing of the stronger aspect creating an unbalance situation vs factions that have it all available but nothing specially stronger.

So to re-balance this situation for AT games, the modding team just nerfed everything that could be stronger than usual from targeted factions but at the same time weren’t authorized by Relic to provide the necessary changes to fill the corresponding gaps.
Knowing Relic would disagree in filling the various gaps to compensate didn’t stop the modding team from nerfing whatever they considered too strong in their targeted factions, they just came up later on the different media to say it was all Relic's fault to not allow them to do the gap filling.
So we end up today with factions that rely even more on their last crutch units that were un-nerfed to make it for their lack of superior assets in exchange for gaps in their stock roster.

In AT games, the “balance issue” is solved because all available tools are now balanced linearly across all factions, no more superior units to cover for nonexistent/weaker stock tools, you can play any faction strength with no balance issue other than that in reality some factions are still limited in what they can do on the battlefield and only picked for some limited aspects of their gameplay.

For the rest of the player base, who don’t play AT or who simply don’t play that much competitively AT, the game isn't more balanced than before.

Before someone comes with https://coh2stats.com/ data, let’s be clear about what those data shows. They show the win/lose ratio between players but the information isn’t correlated with faction balance.
Even if a faction is stronger or weaker, we’ll all eventually reach the point where we’re only matched vs people we have around 50% chance to win/lose. In fact unless there is something completely broken that’s almost impossible to overcome as an opponent we’ll never see anything relevant from it regarding faction balance.

You saw all the graphics I posted earlier in this topic from PagePs site about soviets being the worst faction in 4v4 looking at only rank 200 games and above. I can assure it is much worse at lower ranks.

I also described why Soviets are UP in detail earlier in this topic.

https://www.coh2.org/topic/109981/addressing-the-issue-of-elo-hell/post/883742
https://www.coh2.org/topic/109981/addressing-the-issue-of-elo-hell/post/883688

Those numbers don't show anything about faction balance, Honestly I used to think they do like you but in reallity they don't.

There are so many parameters behind that like what I said: maybe the pool of soviet players is less skilled than other allied factions, maybe a top100 Soviet player = top300 UKF player in term of skill. And maybe a top100 Soviet player = Top500 OKW players. Seems silly or stupid, well prove it.

There are 0 strong correlation between average V/D ratio and skill required per faction.

Another example is USF, the faction look like balanced if we look at those numbers, but that's probably not correct otherwise with all those sweat tears about Path&Scott OP all over the place the faction should be rocketing about 80% victory rate (at least below TOP200), which isn't the case which may show that the faction is artificially running about 50%+ victory rate thanks to Path&Scott and that without it would be far away from those 50%.

lmao, how many times a month do you encounter axis players that play exactly like that

Depends on the game mode but once every 3 or 4 games vs Ostheer on average.

I don't really get what 'new mode' you want.
If you want fair games, play competitive. The MM screws up at times, but splitting the playerbase to have two populations with even less players on each is not going to improve it for sure.
If you don't care about the rank but still want a fair game, then just play it non-seriously and have fun. These players end up at the bottom anyway, where they will get matched against other low skill players and everyone can just have fun fully separated from the meta. Otherwise, go custom game.
Custom games being stompers is no argument if you can check the opponents skill level somehow. Open the lobby, kick everyone that does not fit, play with people on your level.

How is your new mode supposed to function? What makes it safe? Are high skilled players not allowed to just have fun at times and play non-competitively? Where should they go? At which point are you too good to play in the chill out ladder? 50 games? 100? Or is there still some hidden ELO calculation to determine that? How will the new lobby create matchups if there is no ELO?

The whole ELO system is 100% supposed to deliver what you want: Fair games. If this system doesn't work, there are two possibilities. Either the implementation is faulty, which is a fix on Relics part, or the playerbase is too small so the MM is forced to make bad matchups. Introducing an additional lobby won't help.

DOTA2 use it with fairly good success. You even must play a certain amount of game or having a certain playtime in non-competitive lobby before being autorized to hit the competitive button when you're new.
Bottom end of competitive ladder is still full of toxic players but new players are not mixed with them. I don't know what you don't understand with this concept.