Profile of Inverse

I agree.

However the irony of this in this context considering how little coh2 you've played, is not lost on you either, I'm sure.

I've never discussed CoH2 balance. I've discussed CoH2's failings in terms of general RTS design, which I'm absolutely qualified to talk about.

You don't have to be a good player to realize that mediocre players will, in general, make less valid points about balance that top players. That's just common sense. I'm a mediocre Starcraft player and I laugh when other mediocre Starcraft players make balance demands because I know they're no better than me, and I'm clueless about balance relative to pros who have invested thousands of hours more than me.

If you're a mediocre player who thinks your balance opinions are more valid that those of other mediocre players because you're somehow "different" then you're a hypocrite, which is an entirely different issue that doesn't detract at all from my point.

No actually it is not. A balance issue remain exactly the same weather it is reported by a person ranked number 1 or person ranked number 1.000

Sure, if it's a valid issue. But a rank 1000 player is more likely to think a skill issue is a balance issue than a rank 1 player is, because the rank 1 player is going to understand the game better than the rank 1000 player 99% of the time. If the best player in the world thinks something is problematic, I'm inclined to believe him because his bona fides have been established. If a rank 1000 player thinks something is problematic, it's far more likely that the problem is simply a lack of player skill and not a true balance concern because he lacks game knowledge that could inform his opinion. That's not always the case, obviously, but in my experience it's true the vast majority of the time.

I have asked to see the stats across all levels of ability, rather than just the top 150 or 250, no response yet though.

When they publish them what level of winrate difference would you consider to be balanced Inverse?

Hypothetically say the stats were published for Brit 1v1s in the sub rank 5 and sub rank 10 categories. What level of spread specifically would you consider acceptable?

It's not about winrates or anything like that, those kinds of stats need to be aggregated across the entire playerbase because you need a huge sample to see anything useful. And winrate stats are very good at telling you a problem exists but very bad at telling you what the problem actually is, or how you would go about fixing it. For those answers you really need players who have a very deep understanding of the game.

Surely the top players would be more likely to exploit imbalance than report it?

I have no idea who the top players are but my suspicion would be that competitive players who can't quite make the top X positions would be the ones moaning and whingeing about balance.

Clearly if taking the most successful players only into consideration they rather like the game balance as it is, else they wouldn't be winning.

This is some pretty unfounded cynicism. CoH is unique in that tournaments require players to compete with multiple factions, which eliminates a lot of the faction bias you see with automatch players who just spam single faction games. Tournament players have to play both sides, so they really don't have a reason to want one faction to be stronger than all the others. Furthermore, the only reason top ladder players have ridiculous win ratios is because the playerbase is too small to consistently provide quality matches at the top. As you get higher in the ladder, the number of players at or above your skill level drastically decreases, which in turn increases the likelihood of you getting matched with someone significantly below you in terms of skill. Balance changes would do very little to change win ratios at the top of the ladder.

Your problem is you think automatch, and specifically the ladder, means something. The truth is, it really doesn't. Once you're good enough to beat most players most of the time, it turns into a game of who can grind the most matches and get enough points to climb the rankings. Tournaments are the real indicators of skill because they force top players to perform consistently against other top players with multiple factions; most of the players you see with crazy ratios on the ladder have ratios far closer to 50% in tournaments because tournaments force you to play good players consistently and automatch doesn't. Top players are tournament-focused, not ladder-focused, and only one player can win a tournament.

During the 2.602 development period, all but a small handful of people contributing to discussions and ideas were tournament champions or consistent top tournament performers. As someone who was a good ladder player at the time (top 50 or so), it blew me away how incredibly basic my game knowledge was in relation. It's something you can't really fully understand or get behind until you've experienced it first-hand.

Of course it's not constructive, but neither are the vast majority of balance complaints by the vast majority of the playerbase. The simple truth is player skill is absolutely something to be taken into consideration when determining the accuracy of balance complaints. I'm a diamond Starcraft player, but I'm not delusional enough to think that gives me the authority to demand balance changes when there are players out there who blow me away in terms of skill, time investment, and game understanding. Hell, I think I'm a pretty good CoH1 player, and I had access to the private forum on GR that was used to develop the 2.602 patch with Relic, but even then I didn't feel qualified enough to comment on all but a handful of issues because even the difference in game understanding between top ladder players and top tournament players is ridiculous.

You can develop that sort of understanding without being highly ranked, of course, but it's extremely rare; in CoH1 there were maybe a handful of people like that. Achieving competitive success is the clearest way to demonstrate game understanding, which makes it the first qualification people consider.

That's just the way things go. People are going to keep making statements about balance that they aren't qualified to make, and other people are going to keep calling them out for it. Worrying about it is like worrying about the sun rising in the morning.

Oh noes inverse is here to talk about global upgrades inb4 epic coh1 vs coh2 battle

Maybe because it's still the best solution to the problem mentioned in this thread, which is part of a broader problem that has been around since alpha? I've yet to see a solution suggested that would address this as effectively and completely as global upgrades would.

It has nothing to do with CoH1 vs. CoH2 unless you explicitly make it about that. Global upgrades aren't a CoH1 invention, they're an RTS mainstay. It just makes the most sense to compare the game to CoH1 because of their obvious similarities.