Profile of Esxile

Today I played good number of team games with fellow TAB bears, playing as USF the at guns are sufficient enough to counter all axis Armour. If more at is needed a jackson in support does wonders. USF is fine as is and can counter axis armour no problem. If your axis opponent goes heavy amounts of tanks why not counter with zooks and at guns for german tanks were built to counter tanks not inf. Please quit with the whining and complaining about Axis as op, you obviously were not here for the alpha nor the very beginnings of CoH2.

Yesterday a played a good number of 1vs1 game as USF and I face every time the situation when half of my M36 shot and ATgun shots where bouncing over Panther front armor. It isn't like I could have flank him since he was flanking me, a really good move
A+move his Infantry in front of my line and panther to flank.

His objective was my too powerful Scott, I'm waiting for the Relic nerf - this unit is to good, it can kill Obers.
Anyway.
1st M36 shot max range, on the ground. Panther come closer, 1st Panther shot - 1/3 of my m36 life away.
I try to withdraw the M36 but guess what, the panther is faster. So I managed to reposition my Atgun at the same time to shot at it.
2nd M36 shot, medium range - bounce. 2nd Panther shot = 2/3 of the M36 life away. 1st Atgun shot medium range + buff pen bounced.
3rd M36 shot, close range - 1/5 of Panther life away, 3rd Panther shot = byebye M36. 2nd Atgun shot close range + Buff pen = Bounce!!!
The panther goes behind the Atgun and chase the Scott, 2 shots the scott (it was defending the front line) dead.
The panther goes away but I manage with luck - nothing else than luck at this stage - to Atnade it and damage his engine, from the rear I finally manage to kill the Panther with my Atgun.

Second round couple of minutes later, exact same scenario but I don't have the luck of having a critical engine damage with an Atnade.
1 Jackson dead 1 Atgun dead 1 Scott dead, 3/4 of my Infantry dead, 1 Panther 3/5 life Up. GG

But why make it THAT MUCH moneydependent. The sales of Commanders alone should give a good plus if alone 10.000 new players buy 1 of them ( price is right now 3 euro ).
Locking factions is risky, look at games like dota which only lives through sells of skins, or lol, who sells the characters, but has the "rotation" system, which we could reimplement in CoH

Woot 30 000 euros for 1 shot. You'll need to sell 3 commanders per month per player at this rate to be economically viable.
Dota2 isn't the best example because that game is more visual - mechanics are always the same and all characters is independant from faction - so it is easy to tune, Thunder war is maybe the closer if we say 1 special plane = 1 commander.
So you need to monetize some game aspect, to maintain your army and use some specific abilities.
Or you need to make different version of each unit - but with the same stats. So you can sell those different skins and the painting.
But I think you need to make sure you've got a 5-7 euros investment per player. Maybe an subscription of 5-7 euros - what is called "Premium account", So you access to everthing with few limitation. And people not willing to pay have more of them.

^That's what I was thinking. I would have the factions and commanders on 'Rotation' on a weekly or monthly basis. They already did this not so long ago with the premium commanders, don't see why they couldn't do similar with F2P model.

As for what to monetize, I would think they can stick to what they currently have, commanders and factions need to be paid for to unlock to use at will rather than on rotation.

I feel like they could monetise bulletins, faceplates and skins more than currently as well, so you can 'win the lotto' by getting them in war spoils or just choose the ones you want and pay for them.

Faceplates... I don't know how people can love it. It's just so useless, not even visible in game.

If you guys could pls stop exaggerating jesus... The captain isn't useless at all. It's actually a pretty valuable unit when facing OKW Puma or Wehr Scout Car. I'm not saying Captain and Lieutenant shouldn't be buffed but if everyone keeps talking like this (EVERY USF UNIT IS USELESS BUFF BUFF BUFF) the USF will be op as hell next patch just like OKW now. Suggesting a price decrease for the captain is crazy. The teching of the new WFA armies is too fast already.

-buff bazookas
-decrease the prize of the pack howie
-slightly increase health of the Stuart so it doesn't get two shotted by Paks and make sure its abilities work as intended
-delay the Puma

and USF T2 (captain building) is gonna be fine.

You want to break the balance more than today isn't? A reduction of Capt fuel price is enough for this USF tiers. Maybe putting back zook's stats at what they were before the last patch as well.

But Reducing Capt Fuel to lieutenant will faster the Stuart build and give him more room vs the Puma and Schreks.

Honestly If I would make a change myself I would swap Atgun and M20 + Capt fuel Reduction. Relic went the complete wrong way with this specialyse tier for USF, T1 AI and T2 AT.
What USF need more than everything is at least two different build orders viable.

The problem is, people are reactionary, and most people aren't very good at the game. I'll give you an example from CoH1. When the most recent patch came out, people thought PE were overpowered against Americans. That lasted for a whole year, until Aimstrong came along and showed people how the matchup should be played. Now it's an Americans-favoured matchup, all because one guy figured out a better way to play the game.

In most cases, you can't evaluate balance changes within a week, especially not on beta servers with a limited number of players. You need to let your community have some time with the game before you can really say for sure what the state of the game is.

Now if you're Valve, and you own your distribution platform, and you have 8 million monthly players, you can make changes you know are probably extreme, because you will get a ton of information back really quickly and you can react to it in a timely manner. That's exactly what happened with the recent gold bounty changes in Dota 2. They did something that was probably extreme, and they gradually toned it down until they hit a point they were happy with.

Relic doesn't have that luxury, unfortunately. First of all, their game isn't run on servers, so they don't have access to the same quality of information that Valve does for Dota 2. Also, they have far less players, and therefore far less games being played with which they can judge their changes. Finally, they don't own their distribution platform. Patching is likely a very expensive exercise for Relic, which is why they have stuck to large releases and only hotfixed major bugs.

Honestly, I think it's hard to argue against Valve's iterative approach being better than Relic's, but at the same time, the balance team likely doesn't have much say in how frequently they get to patch their game. And without a large quantity of hard data to go off, you can't really make informed decisions in a short period of time anyways.

And what? I'm sorry but here we're not talking about bugs and balance itself but the way Relic runs debugging and balance testing.
You cannot sell a product and say "Oh I'm sorry there are bugs and it isn't balance at all but I'm too busy right now to finish it, I need more cash so I focus on a new DLC"
That mentality of selling something and not giving a shit to make it reliable. Why didn't they give Western Front for free if there are so few multiplayers? I guess people playing Solo and Skirmish aren't buying it?
why don't they tell us that it is just a fucking beta - like it is really today until they release the complete version of AA. Because of DNA? Because they wanted our money before giving us the right service they're supposed to do?
Today they fucked up their vcoh2 version with that horrible beta of DLC. there are many players who would have prefered to continue to play vcoh2 in good condition with a version that is balanced. And people really wanting WA would have wait until the final release.

They can come and say - We are busing, we are working hard - yes sure it is true because that game is on BETA. And they sold it to us with a big smile and a big pot of vaseline.

I took the wrong quote

Inverse, I love the boobs in the middle of your signature...

Anyway, are you telling us the Kubel Buff couldn't have been detected if presented in an Beta test server?

There are Sit-Keyboard Interface issues and Balance issues, we all agree on that. But majority here is also enough competent to see when it is or not a balance issue. trolls and Faction Fanboys aren't the majority on that forum (thanks to modo team).

This is also not something new and specific to Relic, there are many games requiring balance and they (developpers) use to be more present with their community.

I'm impressed by Noun when he says Relic deployed 5 patchs last month. On the same time Valve deployed 6 or 7 patches on Dota2 because they deeply changed the game meta - the first changes weren't balance and they did daily re-adjustment to make it almost perfect - or at least how they wanted to be.

Back to Relic, there nothing here that show me they do care about actual bugs and balance issue - same if it is just a feeling - someone from Relic telling people there are not issue, it works as per design.