I respect your opinion and looking forward to counter arguments. Forgive me for completely disregarding your blatant adhominemism.
I speak only with arguments. Naturally, I respond only to them.
The community cannot balance shit, because this is normally a job reserved for real professionals who have in-depth knowledge of what "balance" means in the context of the game to be made. The players should only be there to give opinion on closed environments. Something like what all good RTS companies have done since the dawn of time. AoE and AoEII had 200 ppl closed betas that met more like pals for a nice evening than gamers.
1. CoH2 designers never had a good understanding of CoH multiplayer gameplay, maybe with the exception of Peter Qumsieh. I don't think any of them would even make such a claim. Most balance team members throughout CoH2 history on the other hand had great game understanding as proven by their records as players and contributions in forums.
The community cannot balance shit, because the players want their own faction to win. As they are not designers, they don't realize the scale of balance and also the model which seeks to be adopted. Most players, myself included, act emotionally to some things. I can't even get a grip on the number of times when many people lost to a specific unit, calling it OP and demanding its nerf.
2. Most balance team members do not have faction bias. Faction bias is an idea that gets thrown around by forum warriors but doesn't really exist among top players nor most balance team members.
I guess I'm kinda nostalgic, seeing that COH 1 didn't really have that many updates (leaving aside expansion packs). It was a game. You liked it, you played it as it was. You didn't like it, you didn't play it again. It was simple. I realize it was horribly unbalanced in many departments (too USF friendly in some aspects, particularly PE vs USF)
3. There were plenty of patches throughout CoH1 history.
4. CoH1 in its final and most enduring form (2.602) is anything but US favored. There is a vast consensus that Wehrmacht is clearly overpowered both against Brits and against US. US vs PE is considered fairly balanced. PE vs Brits is considered pro brits iirc.
RTS is slowly dying, let's not kid ourselves. I hope Relic won't fuck this up. AOE4 seems decent and its numbers are healthy. I can see there still is a demand.
5. There is no indication that RTS are slowly dying other than Starcraft doing poorly, which is in large part due to Blizzards demise. AoE4 is doing well, AoE2 has been growing recently, CoH2 has had a consistent playerbase for years and even went through several periods of small growth.
What I meant in depth was that there are more ways to balance a mechanic rather than a straight up numbers game.
6. CoH2 literally consists of numbers. Any process of changing the game is a "numbers game" as you call it. You make no alternative suggestions.
Maybe if there is a new system in place. Who knows. Asymmetrical balance is not and should not be a stats game.
7. Meaningless sentence.
They took the foundation of an assymetrically balanced RTS game with excellent flavor and maybe not so great mechanics and they made it into a bland 5 faction reskin game.
8. Factions losing their flavor through redesign is not the balance team's fault. It happened at a time when relic was still in full control.
I still enjoy it because I consider myself pretty good at it
9. Proof?
Take the original game: SOV vs OST was the perfect example of the asymmetrical balance in the devs' vision. Both factions had the basic tools (MG, AT, Snares) but with very different capacities. P4s were generally more expensive but more sturdy while T34s were shit piles that cost nothing and were reliable generalists. That's what I mean.
Sure, the balancing was never good. I accept that or rather, I just grew to it.
10. The balancing of Ost vs Soviet in the vanilla game was really good pre WFA release. The gameplay on the other hand was extremely stale.
SOV vs OST was the perfect example of the asymmetrical balance in the devs' vision. Both factions had the basic tools (MG, AT, Snares) but with very different capacities.
11. That is ltierally the one balance philosophy the balance team has followed throughout all these years. And you see it as the original vision that the balance team has betrayed?
What we have today is a desperate attempt to make all factions play the same, because the only real base the COH2 game has (and I am including myself in those) are the hardcore factionists. That means that balancing has become an impartial job (I think most of balance team is axis players, correct me if I'm wrong). Normies have long given up on COH2 for exactly that reason.
12. The only axis player in the balance team was Sander. All other players played all factions.
Normies have long given up on COH2 for exactly that reason.
13. They have not. Playernumbers have not declined during the last 5 years. If anything they have gone up. So unless there is a group of "non-normies" that has joined the game while the "normies" left, which makes no sense, your statement is false.
Just look at all the build orders for COH2.
3 line inf -> T1 -> MG -> AT -> Mortar -> T3 -> Elite Inf -> T4 -> Tanks.
14. As previously said, this build order makes no sense regardless of time, gamemode or faction.
They didn't even bother to adjust the tools or the playstyle. They just straight up downplayed some stats and overplayed some others. They did that to the other factions too. That is not balancing, that is a band aid solution at best. Half the updates from the release of WFA until roughly 2017 were nerfing and upping and nerfing and upping okw units.
15. You described the process of balancing in vague terms and then say that it's not balancing. Meaningless.
My good man that is what I have been saying all along.
OKW is the perfect example. A very very stylish and interesting faction on paper with a "desperate" aesthetic (literally, the perfect thing for the time period) who got absolutely devastated by the continuous nerfs of "balance team" without any real direction to them. They didn't even bother to adjust the tools or the playstyle. They just straight up downplayed some stats and overplayed some others. They did that to the other factions too. That is not balancing, that is a band aid solution at best. Half the updates from the release of WFA until roughly 2017 were nerfing and upping and nerfing and upping okw units.
They did not get all of them, and still some idiotic pieces of the original design remain. Schwere panzer (flak hq) which basically was used to lock down Fuel since the OKW originally got diminished incomes, no ability to build caches (the only faction, wow) and a few more things.
Just look at the build order of all games nowadays, it's ridiculous.
3-4 Line Inf -> Mortar/MG -> T1 -> AT -> T2 -> Elite Inf -> T3 -> Rocket Arty -> Tanks.
Not to mention that UKF and USF still need specific commanders to even be competent.
And in the end, it's ok by me. I have been playing this game for all the time it's out. I accept those things.
I just really don't want them in COH3, and I think if Relic doesn't change their dev tactics, there is a high chance of it happening again. We need more artists and designers in games, not nerds and stats-junkies who think that fair == same stats.
The funny thing about these kinds of posts is that they sound reasonable to people with only casual knoweledge of CoH2. But to someone like me they read like fiction. The things you say are just not based in reality. Take for example the build order you described as being used every game. That build order makes 0 sense for any faction at any stage in CoH2 ever.
You're basically writing BS that makes you sound like you have a good point with total disregard for the truth.
There's this thing where people complain about something because it makes them feel like they are part of a kind of grassroots movement, which is an appealing role to take. People also just like complaining, partly because it is one way of dealing with ingame losses. Because of that people start repeating what others have said without actually having even the slightest clue what they're talking about. Most of the balance team shittalk and conspiracies are a great example of this.
Edit: I would exclude people like bao and marcel who may have justified complains. Although I still think Bao falls into the pseudo revolutionary trap even while being right some of the time.
Edti 1: The amount of substanceless theorizing in this thread blows my mind. Can't you have these types of debates about a subject where rhetoric void of any substance at least earns you societal status? Like sociology or something?
Great list. Agree on most of it. One thing I don't personally feel the same way about is grenade dodging, but I've seen umtiple people mention it. To me the bar that appears is almost too obvious, although it is probably a placeholder anyways.
I don't think the choice argument works. Players are incentivized to zoom out because it gives them a gameplay advantage since they can see more and control more simultaneously. People aren't going to sacrifice their playability for improved visuals. But if the zoom is lower for everyone, then everyone can appreciate the better scale it can deliver, without anyone being punished for it.
This. The "just zoom out more" argument isn't valid. Competitive players will be forced to zoom out unless they want to sabotage themselves.
There's an issue with elevation and zoom. Elevated areas are simply closer to the camera. This makes the zoom level very inconsistent and is one reason why elevation was unpopular in past CoHs.
On face value, this post is not very helpful. For all we know Sturmpanther called Kimbos mom the Kimbo Bimbo at the start of the conversation. And if that was the case, then Kimbo would be fully in his right to say he would break sturms nose.
Actually, no. You can't just make up rights.
Also this obviously wasn't a joke. A personal threat like this is where all these "just trolling" excuses have to come to an end. I'm genuinely sad about this because as a big fan of watching coh tourneys the game loses an interesting player but this chat leaves relic no choice.
They are terrible. If you compare them to shermans, they cost 20 fuel less and deal 160 instead of 120 damage, but they have the same weapon range, no anti inf, and way less hitpoints (480 vs 800 HP)
They get two-shot by tigers atm
do you know the pen values of hellcat and sherman?
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