Profile of boxman80

Cool spot!

The spray icon looks like it's some kind of player tag or avatar, hopefully it's a clan tag feature too!

Gray cover? I don't know but maybe it's some kind of terrain that allows for camouflage but not actual real cover? Not sure I'd like that though....

Rework? Just fix the useless units and they are fine Penals, SU76, TD

Penals aren't broke, they're just under used.

German units have better accuracy at distance. G43 is a verry accurate distance rifle. But none of these aren't snipers. Exageration to prove your frustrations related to some OKW units won't do.

So Axis troops are just better at distance than their USF counterparts now too ... I thought the whole point of USF (and Soviets to some exctent for that matter) was the dominance early game and flexible infantry, which is supposed to be superior to the Axis infantry at distance at the very least (as we all know Axis infantry is far superior close range generally anyway).

So now the Axis (or at least OKW) are supposed to be greater at long range too? So where exactly are any of the Allied factions supposed to excel? Late game (lol)? For me all you have done is underlined WHY USF could do with an effective sniper/marksman/distance infantry unit to at least counter the superior axis infantry at all distances.

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.

May be just me but when I think about all the things that the devs NEED to do to improve CoH2, the Panther variant skin is so far down the list it may as well not be there...

Not knowing if you're going to be playing against someone "good" or not before the match, is highly annoying

Yea but in CoHo it was even more annoying having team mates drop instantly upon starting games because they got a look at the opponents ranks in the load screen and bottled it.

But I agree with the some of the improvement suggestions on this thread, especially having more competitive in-game leagues and ladders - not just for individuals but also for clans (why wasn't this included when it was part of CoHo?). It's a great way of adding incentive and monitoring progress.

Also a great idea having some kind of statistics available in-game somewhere to help provide a user friendly/casual indicator of what to expect from units. This may help the steep learning curve the game has.