Germany
Going off of your tone and the fact that I haven't seen you post in a while I'm assuming that you're either part of the community dev team or just want cookie points by trying to defend them.
I'm not in the balance team.
1. The fact that many people as it's obvious here as one example have disagreements about the camo changes for the Grenadiers. This came out of the blue with no discussion on regards to the community at large, only some concerns within the closed off for the public community dev team and their few "pro" players which I don't entirely see the point in when you take into account that there was a claim here that half if not most of them were 3v3 or 4v4 teamgame players but whatever I suppose.
I don't think this justifies your claim about alienating the playerbase. This forum consists of roughly 25 people posting regularly. That's not representative at all.
Regarding the pro players: You're confusing two things here: the actual balance team members roughly half of which are teamgame players (presumably because teamgame balance should be taken into account as well) and the players that give direct feedback outside this forum ("pro" players using the term VERY broadly). The critique you're talking about is levelled at the balance team members themselves. It is argued that there's a lack of high level 1v1 representation in the balance team but that's a moot point.
2. Who exactly are the elected government officials in a country supposed to listen to if not the people who elected them to serve in their best interests exactly? The community dev team are here because of the game's community and large almost 10,000 daily player base, if it's not for them then there would be no one playing the game and then no point in continuing to support it like this by developing updates.
So yes I do believe that the larger community should be taken into account as well because while not all of us are the best at playing the game or have the time to play every single day, all day long to accumulate thousands upon thousands of hours of playing it again, if it's not for these people, there would be no point in further updating the game. And if your definition is that the game should only be balanced around the top 1% of the community and the 1v1 or 2v2 scene at the most then by that logic we should all strive to be like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezoz in real life as well yet extremely rarely does one achieve that, again due to having a job, life and so forth and the inability to play every single day, all day long to ascend to "godhood" in a video game.
Also as I said I do believe they are getting a lot of undeserved hate so I'm fully aware of Relic's "scope" or at least the excuse to not fix the game entirely like for example things such as the USF base and so forth.
There's two practical problems with this:
A. WHO is the community? As I said earlier this forum certainly isn't more representative than some random private discord with 50 people. There's so many different sub communities it's impossible to discern any popular consensus. The only way to do it would be doing Votes about balance topics ingame so every player has a say. If you see that as a valid way of fixing the game we'll just have to agree to disagree. And btw at that point we both would have an equally valid claim to our sides of the argument winning the votes.
B. It is logically impossible to balance the game around non optimal skill levels. There's no consistent unit strength if players don't at least approach optimal play. Casual player A may be really good at using snipers while Casual B sucks at it. Are snipers strong or weak? You just have to assume the most optimal usage of a unit that is still realistic. How do you determine that usage? You look at the best players.
3. Yes and their "selection" process is very thoughtful, so much so that ideas like the previously mentioned USF Base redesign that would be a huge QOL change for everybody, at least the test of how a longer ranged Sturmtiger might perform to make it an actually useful unit instead of a meme since again, that's what the testing phase of an update should do, and for example a 25 pounder howitzer emplacement for the UKF to expand their doctrinal choices instead of only being limited to the Royal Artillery Regiment and mortar ones.
New content and ideas that has been tried and tested by the community for a very long time through the means of modding that could bring new life to the game that could potentially make it both more fun and balanced.
Instead almost all of them get shot down because reasons without even a test and then they go silent for at least a few weeks before the release of an update, which has happened multiple times now as I said previously, and get new versions of the patch only for internal testing which include changes not mentioned to the larger community and of course end up like a few days ago, with a rollback.
You're just mentioning some of your own suggestions here. I could make the same exact argument mentioning some of my own ideas claiming that my side of the isle has been ignored. The fact that some of the stuff exists in mods doesn't mean it's within the scope of what the balance team is actually allowed to implement. Again, if anythign relic is to blame here.
Virtually everyone has made suggestions that haven't been tested. 99% of ideas fall under the table because there just isn't enough time to test everything.
both of which have nothing to do with target tables. Brian Wood also doesn't seem to have anything to do with any of the Dawn of War titles. Are you just making shit up that sounds halfway believable?
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Relic Entertainment
