Profile of Naeras

@Naeras:
Regarding Bo1: Yes with mirror matches you could, but so could he and you'd still be in the exact same dreadful situation you just mentioned. Either way, mirror matches won't solve anything.

He could what?
I'm assuming you're talking about picking the faction I'm bad against now. And yes, he could. However, in this scenario he picked that faction, not the coin. Key difference.

And what you're afterwards stating just pretty much points out that a Bo1 is then silly because no matter what, someone good could get knocked out by a worse off player. Which returns us to the Bo3 and in which case. again, mirror matches won't do diddly and again, we can just focus on having a proper matchup where players can then display mastery of two armies rather than just a mimicry of that by specializing in one.

@DanielID: I'd be very curious to know what you define as skill and how you then proceed to argue that most of the top level players who master several armies are without skill.

This returns us to the point that a lot of skills you learn in one faction, especially mechanical ones, don't translate directly to another faction. Being forced to invest several hundred hours in a secondary faction means the overall level of play you see in each individual faction is lower, as opposed to having the option of playing the other faction well enough to learn its ins and outs on a high level(which you honestly should do to some degree).

As for why CoH has a lower skill level amongst its best players than what is comparable to, say, SC2, is more than anything because CoH doesn't have a professional scene, something that theoretically could change with CoH2. However, being forced to learn two factions is a drawback in terms of how far each individual faction can be evolved.

So the rest of the game has to suffer because you can't be arsed to organize a tournament properly ?

Who's saying the game has to suffer?
(yes, I get that it's a joke, but why are people so hell-bent on saying that the game will be objectively worse if mirrors are present, considering most of the people complaining haven't tried them?)

Slightly more seriously. No, i just don't see it. And if you can somehow do a BO1 with mirror matches, then you can also do one without. You're not exactly proving anything if you're just going to throw in a mirror match, then you might as well flip a coin and have it done with that way. I really don't see how mirror matches will make that somehow magically better.

I did do a bo1 in CoH once, during the tournament that was arranged during the 2.602-beta. My original opponent hadn't shown up, so I got matched with another guy(I think it was TrouserDemon), and there wasn't time for a bo3. I flipped a coin with my opponent and got axis. Now, at this point in the beta, the vCoH matchup was heavily US favored. I won, but that's mainly because I quite simply played a lot better than him. Had it been a stronger opponent, I could have been knocked out of the tournament because of a dice roll.

Even if the game is balanced, there will still be problems with this. What if you end up playing on a map where a certain player is really good with one faction and completely crap with the other one? You may be a better player than him overall and would easily have beaten him in a bo3 because you could pick factions in the final game, but because he'd narrowly beat you in one match-up you'd lose. If mirrors were present, at the very least the coin flip wouldn't be the deciding factor in a bo1, because you could freely pick any faction you wanted.

The thing is, mirror matches definitely don't ruin the authenticity of AOE 2. Civil wars were very common in that era.

I'm not referring to the civil wars, I'm referring to the fact that certain nations plainly didn't fight each others. =p

Any FPS multiplayer is completely different from any rts, and, as far as I am concerned, cannot be compared. The thing about Starcraft 2, Age of Empires 2, or warcraft 3 is that immersion and authenticity are not key components of them. They are however essential to what makes company of heroes a unique and outstanding game.

Why?

Ok, clearly being Socratic about it is not helping my case.

So, basically I would argue that a more diverse game with more match ups isn't necessarily better. A tournament with chess, xiangqi, and shogi isn't better than a tournament with just plain chess.

The point? Even if mirrors are really good, they do not make the game better in a competitive sense. Shogi and Xiangqi are pretty good board games but a tournament isn't necessarily better if you add them in.

But are they necessarily worse?

Mirror matches don't make the game better from an e-sport or competitive standpoint, so it's just about adding more match ups at the cost of authenticity. Chess gets by just fine with one match up (and it's not a mirror match), and any good chess player knows both sides.

(I'm repeating this point because I think it's important and nobody has convincingly argued that it's wrong).

It isn't necessarily wrong. It isn't necessarily correct either. It quite simply depends on how well the factions are designed around the concept of possible mirrors. Judging from what I've heard from people that played the alpha, it wasn't really an issue. Which is why I'm relatively optimistic towards mirrors.

And authenticity? I honestly don't care. Lacking authenticity never ruined Age of Empires 2 or Call of Duty 2 multiplayer for me. I get that some people actually get these kinds of games because they're somewhat historically accurate, and while that's fair, that's what the single player campaigns are for in my opinion.

Also, chess would've been mirrors if it wasn't for the fact that it's a turn-based game and thus asymmetrical by default. :V

Apparently this is what I look like when I play video games.