Thread: RNG10 Oct 2014, 11:26 AM
In my opinion having a game go from the utmost quality to extremely low quality is a cause for concern so I do write posts about the physics engine and other things that ruin the game.
I cant agree with you on this point, because i actually like the second game more than the first. I think it is about taste and preferences. The more fast-paced gamestyle of Coh2 suits me more
Your post refers to things back in COH , these "elements" you speak about with competent players - go watch a single cast from COH 1 from pro players and they actually use movement, cover, range and armour ( through vetting) to get a one up on their opponent.
Im yet to see a convincing example of this in coh2. I have played the first game for hundreds of hours and put in a lto of time in COH2, im not the best but im not some complete noob that knows nothing about the game.
I like watching Siberian, and he uses it a lot, even uses barbed wire to block the enemy from using green cover, and i think every other good player uses cover a lot. I know i do, and i am not considered good!
TO me clicking on mg upgrade to win any fight is not a skill, not is completely spamming nades, or molotovs to get ridiculous random kills even when the enemy moves out of the way. Nades in the first game were a risk, you had to spend a lot of fuel on something that might never pay off, in this game they are no risk as they come without upgraded for soviet, and most players float so much resource that spamming them is no issue, and you get so much muni income that you never feel short changed.
Soooo, upgrading your grens with LMGs is not skill, and just ruining the game? What about Bars for americans in vCoH, or the upgrades they have now in CoH2? it is a big part of the game. The upgrade is meant so the grens can be used lategame, cause the americans, and russians will bring out tougher units, which the Ostheer doesnt have a real counter for without the lmg upgrade. Removing that will just take away any lategame inf for them. Also, the Riflemen already start as the unit with most dps, giving them bars, and letting the grens just stay where they were would be gamebreaking and ruin the whole faction!
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If you don't want to make your F2P game Pay-to-win. You must monetize things that aren't gamebreaking.
-skins and Audios
-Personal tags
-New Commanders (according they aren't OP when release)
-Virtual Money to use/recharge some abilities. This money can also be earn from playing.
The main issue with Coh2 in particular is the asymmetrical balance and factions locked.
It is way easier to balance a game if you have a perfect symmetrical balance and all factions can fight each others.
Let's imagine you replace AMMO with that money. In the current meta, factions using a lot AMMO to fight would be disadvantaged with other, like USF strongly disadvantaged and Soviet strongly advantaged.
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  |
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I agree on almost everything that has been stated, but what we can see from all this is that we need some way to attract new players, and games like Dota and LoL have proven that this is easiest to do when you give them something free, not a lot, just something that gets them excited. This is even more important if we want the game to survive in the E-Sports world!
Making the Automatch F2P is a good idea, since the sales probably wont go very much up anymore, and we can get new players, and more money in for Relic! This is practically win-win, both for Relic and the Playerbase ATM!
Of course, if it fails, then we are screwed xD |
While I agree the future of the series probably is F2P content, I think Relic may struggle with introducing it heavily to the current CoH2 title, especially this far down the line. Also it's nota "quick fix" to the current title. It's a strategy that requires a lot of thought and a long term vision.
For it to work properly and from a fan of the series, I'd say it's probably a more viable option to have completely new title that is basically a heavily expanded version of vCoH, featuring all the factions from vCoH & CoH2 and players getting the option of just 2 basic factions for free and having to pay for every other faction (as well as other content such as commanders/units/bulletins/skins/clan features/face plates and much much more).
It is worth bearing in mind that Relic have previously experimented with an F2P business model with the ill-fated CoHo - while the game was awesome and had a lot of potential, their business model, which is probably what the CoH2 model was based around, just doesn't make it viable and they instead opted to release the retail CoH2 instead.
But for arguments sake, the first major obstacle of incorporating F2P to COH2 is balance - CoH2 is already quite unbalanced, particularly in larger games, which would have to be a major focus for a serious competitive F2P "e-sport". Their bread and butter would be competitive gaming and large clans and teams would be relied heavily on to keep supporting the game with micro-transitions that enabled them to be more competitive. That's not to mention the fact that the much needed additional content making F2P viable, would also need to be balanced and in it's current state it would mean it's more likely to be game breaking content!
Also there's the factor that there's a lot of gamers who have already paid for most or all the content by now, basically anyone who was or is capable of playing, or is likely to enjoy the game has probably already has bought it by now as it's been well over a year since it's retail release and seen countless Steam/key sales during that time. So this means Relic's potential market isn't likely to expand substantially.
For it to do so would mean us, the retail owning community reaching into our pockets for content that we don't already own. For this to happen there would need to be a massive increase in quality non-game breaking, micro-transition available content added. At the same time Relic would need to remain concious of the fact that they need to maintain a balance of free and DLC/Micro-transaction content to prevent those exposed to the F2P content simply just paying the £6 it costs on sale to get the majority of the game content immediate, rather than following the required longer term nickle-and-diming approach of buying the game one commander/unit at a time to provide that steady contribution. This of course is what F2P business models heavily rely on.
The next major obstacle I could see would be the retail-favoured current community. F2P ISNT FREE. F2P means at some point, somewhere down the line, for the game to be successful it relies on large amounts of people regularly putting small contributions into the game. I'm willing to bet there's a massive amount of people playing CoH2 who are probably quite anti-F2P. The fact they bought a retail RTS over the countless F2P ones that are more competitive and obviously FREE would suggest that. Ok yea, it's a specialist game title with a fairly unique WW2 content, but even then I don't believe this is the real reason the majority of people who play Coh2 bought it. At some level I'd say there's a good number of players who bought it to get the game outright. You only have to see how unpopular some of the DLC suggestions made on this forum are to get evidence of this.
Even those who aren't fiercely opposed to F2P/Micro-transaction purchases would probably take exception to a realistic change of direction to F2P as soon as they realised they don't get the new content for free or some sort of "compensations" after buying what they believe to be a full game last year. Or indeed complaining that all these F2P players are getting their game for free when they had to pay for it.
The next issue is, as I touched on earlier in this essay of a post is content it's self. With CoHO (Relic's previous toe-in-the-F2P-Water for the COH series), in order to get people playing the new free title and persuade existing vCoH players to make the switch, Relic were quite generous with what they provided for free. Everything you could buy was also available for free with the war spoils system (or whatever it used to be called) so there wasn't enough to encourage people to buy stuff, and that was with much better content - hero units/bulletins that really had a game changing impact!
How on earth would they expect F2P players to (the same people now who won't pay the £6-£8 for the full game now) to buy the very limited and largely useless commanders and pointless bulletins that are available presently?
As I stated at the start of the post, they would need at least a couple more factions (and then THEY would all need to be balanced too!) as well as a much expanded micros-transaction content such as commanders, bulletins, units. They would have to provide a lot better custom content too, especially for the clans where they could capitalise on their willingness to spend money on clan logos, roster slots, clan matching ladders etc. They may possibly even have to look at ways of limiting competitive game play for free gamers too - e.g. a limit to the amount of auto-matches that can be played daily/weekly or having priority passes for auto matching available - again all things that people don't like to have to buy and I could see going down like a Sh!t sandwich within the existing CoH community!
Even then though, because so many of us have already bought the full retail CoH2 package, they probably wouldn't be able to make it financially viable, not when you consider the costs it would incur to implement a F2P system to the existing game. Expanding servers, adding new content, balancing content, implementing community resources, additional staffing, promotions, events - and that's just the tip of the iceberg!
While it's plausible (and probably the best way for the series to progress for future releases) for Relic to have a CoH F2P game out, I genuinely don't think it could be part of the existing games now, they are just too heavily committed to a full on retail release now ans seem to have a pipe dream of expanding the current game with various DLC mission packs. A F2P game would have had to have been factored in from the start and there's too much evidence to the contrary to believe it has been, any major shit to it now would be a knee jerk reaction or an after thought that would only further disjoint the game.
What else is there to say? 
That was an amazing "Essay of a Post" 
The only thing i have to add is that you say everyone who would use money on it already has bought it. A lot of people dont want to buy a game, unless they know what its about, even if its only a few Euros. I have experienced that in my group of friends as well.
The F2P will bring new players, who will get hooked on the Automatch, like we all are, and then spent money to make the game easier for them. This is the new playerbase we should be interested in! |
Just saying I don't agree with their design vision, I would like it to function like motorcycle or jeep did, because an mg that can race up the map is a bit silly, it would like if Maxims came in base building, and could jump in a car race to a point jump out and set up pinning any unit that try's to cap.
I like the idea of the Unit. Remember it only has 1 "life", it cant retreat and against an mg it gets pulverized, which again comes to the point you already have made, the weakness of the US
The Okw just needs a Heavy Mg unit. Maybe giving volksgrenadiers the possibility of an Lmg which can supress like the Us M1919. But then again, that may make them even more powerfull. |
I know it was useless, but really a highly mobile mg? It was asking for trouble, it tries to be a reconnaissance vehicle and suppression platform at the same time, I would love it to be like PE starter unit. Allow it to cap points, then upgrade to MG that doesn't suppress but can hunter snipers and damage infantry.
The kubel is build so the OKW has a non-doctrinal heavy mg unit, and taking that away will undoubtly weaken them. The problem is not the unit, it has a build up time which makes it weak against flanking, and the angle and range is okay. Problem is more its health, but we dont want to go back to the cardbordkubel, do we?
I see the Mgs as the problem. Right before the "kubel is waaaay to op, i am losing against all those kubels" spam, it was "OMG maxims need a huge nerf, 4 man squads, that unit is ruining the whole game". Nerfing it down to 4 man would not have been a good idea, as the game is now, would it? Now the maxim suddenly is "ok".
The devs handle this every day, it got a little tweak in a quick patch, but wait for the next patch, they will figure it out, and until then, try to learn some new tactics. Often the balancing makes the game kinda fun, doesnt it?!  Forces us to find new strategies |
To me Kubelwagon was a dumb idea, it was as if one guy in Relic said, "This sounds like a good idea!" And they just went with never asking if it could be abused or balanced right.
I love how now the Unit is overpowered since birth Does nobody remember the time where it was a driving cart made out of cardbox? That thing was useless not that long ago, so stop whining and wait for it to get balanced right. That is a job that takes some finetuning and cant be done over night |
Could make it free-to-play with the ability to unlock the ToV units. But I don't think they really want to encourage people to keep playing vCoH when their entire CoH2 business model revolves around microtransactions.
Fuck, wrong room. This is meant for the CoH 2 room, not the first one Can someone move it? I am very sorry! |
+ making it f2p would be not fair against thoose who paid for game.
But couldnt they compensate people for it? :/ like giving them some free stuff? After all, the people who already have bought it dont loose anything...
But yeah, i guess a lot of people would bitch about it! |
I was just peeing and i became the idea after reading a lot of the hatethreads here, why not make the Autonmatch f2p?
I know, i know, but hear me out.
People want a bigger playerbase, and the way the game has gone it takes a lot of ideas from games like League of Legends or Dota ( exp, the commander rotation, which has been taken out again ).
Thing is, i doubt anybody would be sad if they made the Automatch system F2P, and implemented the commander rotation again, and then let the players come. If they want special commanders, they can buy it, and all the other singleplayerstuff can also be sold.
This way Relic would make more money than they are doing currently, with sales which are slowing down, and we gamers will have a bigger playerbase.
This is just a quick brainstorm, and i really like to hear your opinion in this matter
Best regards
Winterfeld |
Relic Entertainment
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