It does take investing time in and I guess there has to be some underlying fascination of how the game looks and feels to stay around to learn enough. I think what it takes for them is to be convinced that there will be a grand price to collect (a great gaming experience) if only they hang around a bit. It's worth promoting the game, because it's the one of the best games around and they don't know it yet.
The tutorials ingame and campaign are actually really good for learning. It does take some time though. There's no way around that. As an avid gamer I know to give games I belive in time. When I bought Armored Core: For Answer I felt strongly I would like the game if only I knew how to play. It took 10 hours of active gameplay Before I could fire the shoulder rockets and started to understand how to play effectively and what the game was about. I loved the game from there on, so my initial guess was right.
I let a friend play on my computer because he really likes the look and feel of the game although he does not have time to learn the game. He spammed soviet engineers lol. Just built lots of them and ran them into everything, mgs and the lot. And when they died he built new. A true soviet tactic in a way haha! He played easy CPU so he won with that brilliant tactic
Also, a game like CoH2 virtually requires watching replays and visiting sites like this one to figure out what is actually going on. If you followed only what was in game you would have more wrong information than right I'd wager. It's not like unit stats are available in game. Those exist from people digging into game files and mod tools to actually learn what's going on.
That's a hell of a lot of work, and I mean work, that goes into learning how to play this game effectively. Very little about CoH2 is obvious to the player, and that turns a lot of people away.
I agree completely. We all check in regularly to read about issues and the latest patch notes. How is that normal for most other games.