Profile of BasedSecretary

The topic once again is steering out of the thought process I put it in.

I have seen what most of you have said, and I say that I agree. After all, I just want a good COH game. I'm not here to make enemies nor prove somebody wrong.

I just want COH3 to be a coherent vision. Something that COH2 basically never was due to the constant mix and match of the factions.

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.

After WFA came out, everything went to shit for a couple of reasons.

1. Relic silently started abandoning COH as a franchise, outsourcing most of its developmental tools to third parties. I doubt if there are more than 20 people of the COH2 team working on COH3 (I wish).
2. The new "community balancers" traded the vision of an RTS with potential to be very different from the norm with an homogenized bland soup.

I used to have a shitty COH2 fanpage on facebook a couple years back and I remember seeing a poster laying out the vision of the game. Basically it said that SOV and OST were more turtle like factions, while OKW, USF and UKF were destined to be somewhat more aggressive minded. I can't exactly recall what. Perhaps someone can find it and post it.

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.

Nowadays, if a unit is considered OP (notwithstanding L2P issues, which I think could solve 99.99999% of the forum's problems) it will just get its stats changed. It's retarded and boring.

It is too late for COH2, but it's not for COH3. What I am saying in all these pages is just that we need to make a better game in general. Not a more "balanced and fair" worksheet videogame. Balance is not necessarily that all ATs have the same damage and AOE. Balance is not necessarily that all factions should have T0 MGs just because the factions that do have that MG seem to shred the others.

Just look at all the build orders for COH2.
3 line inf -> T1 -> MG -> AT -> Mortar -> T3 -> Elite Inf -> T4 -> Tanks.

Ridiculous, washed down and flavorless if you ask me.

Just tried it.

Really good mate. Great job.

Also this guy:

Lmao imagine getting serious on an RTS game of all things.

Ontopic: I still stand by what I said. You cannot possibly blame the "OPness" of a Jag + Panther combo whose sole counterplay on the opponent's part is a shitty 17lber.

So my signature stands: cope harder.

Actually I disagree that the balance is something what could be done only by professionals, it imo even can be done by the amatures IF they have proper game vision and they are not biased.

On the other hand community balance team not only made patches, but they shaped the game into something different, thats why probabaly a lof of people dont like them.

Because the core concepts of the game were changed by balance team, not only unit stats\costs.

Thank you for speaking what's on my mind. Yes, that's exactly what they did.

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. Sure, one could argue that not everything is like that:
OKW still cannot build caches, alluring to its old "Last German stand in Ardennes" which I really really like but is horribly out of date.
USF and OKW don't have T0 MGs.
etc etc etc

But I still cannot shake the feeling out of me that COH2 is something really different from what it set out to be. Sure, I still enjoy it because I consider myself pretty good at it and every game is fun for me. Sure I could play COH2 for at least 3 more years without feeling the need to change anything.

However, with COH3 coming I really feel the could be some introspection in the whole debacle and the devs coming to the realization that COH2 was a lot of things COH3 should not be.

Just my feelings, whatever.

I have been playing COH since I have known myself. It's been a good game.

Even COH2 after all these patches still gets more things right than wrong and that's why it's quite popular in the declining RTS market.

So I have played the Alpha COH3. Nevermind the graphical glitches, the overpowered units and the unfinished art, the real problem is that the company thinks that "involving" the community more will make a better game.

And it will not. I have some arguments for this. I might be wrong of course. I'm looking for a discussion, not a pronunciamento.

• 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.
  
• 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.
  
• 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).
  

So, in a nutshell, I just really want COH3 to succeed. 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.