Profile of Diogenes5

Who gives a shit. Relic loves to sh*t on the community with unannounced changes they don't revert back.

Combo'ed with the sh*t unit response times, continuing bugs like ghosted sandbags and wire, a moron lead game designer who puts in broken gameplay like bofors and Advanced cancer, and a code base that is so god-awful they had to revert a pathfinding "fix," and broken starting positions that can increase travel time by 15 seconds depending on where your homebase is situated (it's random for some dumbf*ck reason); and no ... this game is pure sh*t and always will be.

The problem is that Relic seems to take 2 steps backwards for every 1 step forward. In mid-January they said they were happy with balance and the game and they were right, it was pretty good. That was right after they had reverted the awful pathfinding bug they introduced a few months before.

Then they go and muck it all up first with one-shotting AEC then Advanced Cancer commander.

And they left the game this way for months.

Finally they give us a bone and actually have a live beta as a kind of sorry letter to the community. The beta goes well and there are positive changes. Then for some reason they give the USF heat-seeking one-shotting mortar teams and don't change it for a month.

Always, it seems like 2 steps backwards for every step forward.

Compare to 3 years ago the game is better. RNG is much, much less prevalent. Squads were one-shotted left and right on launch by random stuff like bazooka shots. Vehicles were decrewed way too much. Deep snow is mostly gone (but still enough there for me to veto all snow maps and for snow maps to see zero play in tournaments). Mines no longer one shot units exiting buildings.

The game isn't perfect still. There's still an annoying amount of built-in input lag built into the game. The engine is horribly optimized such that even the highest end computer chugs when there is an explosion on the map. The pathfinding is mediocre. For some reason you can't mute the other player. For some reason, you can't rebind keys.

Granted, these are things so hardwired into the code, the new programmer or programmers they have working on the game probably don't find it worthwhile to fix. That's understandable, but stuff like ghosting sandbags is still in the game.

I just wish they would give one patch where they say, "Ok, let's just optimize and remove all the nonsense. And then we can mostly leave the game as is."

It's laudable that they've kept supporting the game in a way but again, every step forward seems to be combined with 2 steps backward which is why the community is always aggravated.

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Balance changes (to make, rather than to make right) are the easy things. Fiddle with some numbers.

Bug fixes are the hard ones. One, you have to find out where in the code the bug is, and then hope the fixes you try don't break something else.

But sometimes the fixes are ones they choose not to make. In COH1 there was a bug in the m10 graphics that caused it to "misfire" (fires, but no round, losing a cycle). Modders fixed it early on and simply by disabling some of the open-top crew graphics. This could have been easily pushed out to everyone but it was never done. Perhaps because of a preference for the look?

I wonder if they get charged for patches by Steam, and that is why they prefer fewer but larger ones and ignore minor but easily fixed ones.

Back then Relic had an excuse for sucking since THQ was in such dire straits. Once SEGA bought them, they were under the gun to release something and the spaghetti code that we call COH2 was released. The pathfinding is horrendous and the particle effects are so badly optimized even high end systems chug when something blows up. And there's a 200-300ms built-in input lag in the game.

I don't know why they had to change the vCOH engine that much. vCOH still stands up very well today graphics-wise and the GUI was 1000x better.

But Relic just tries to make money above all else; they couldn't less about making a balanced, bug-free game which is why they released Advanced Cancer for Brits and other pay2win commanders while ignoring longstanding bugs.

There's a lot of built-in input lag into the game. It was a conscious design decision which compounds any and all technical issues you hit into because the game goes from 300 ms input lag to something even worse. I wish micro mattered but in this game it barely does unlike vCOH and every other eSports game out there.

By Kyle, about Noggano;
http://www.companyofheroes.com/blog/2016/09/10/wpc-grand-finals-update

includes:
"...in the near future where relatively equivalent prizing will also be on the line."

Future tourney confirmed?

No it's doublespeak. Relic will more likely than not drop support for the game. I don't see how their grand esport experiment which took them like over a year to start after being announced is profitable. They barely get 1k viewers if that anymore.

The community is tiny even considering the size of the playerbase which is decently large thanks to all the Steam sales.

Relic should do a few more patches to fix OKW, bring other factions into line, and then leave the *#%*%$ game alone. Yes, it's a poorly optimized input-lag fest with bad pathfinding but apparently that's better than anything they've been able to do to improve the game in the last 2 years.

They should redo their essence engine or license unity when they release DOW III because after having made a good engine in vCOH, they somehow made it awful in COH2.