Profile of Inverse

What a silly blogpost. It's the community-bashing shoutcasting thread all over again.

If your in-game economy is so fucked up that you have to resort to some of these measures, you should probably fix that instead of going after the people who are actually adding content and value (free of charge) to your game.

Also the free-of-bugs thing is fucking hilarious, not just because of Relic's track record but because this is fucking software development we're talking about, there's no such thing as bug-free code. Bugs that "materially affect CoH2" is such broad wording, it's silly.

The best technique I've found is to maintain a constant APM throughout the entire game, even when it's not necessary. It's much easier to react quickly to unexpected situations when playing quickly is natural and not just something you do occasionally.

I wouldn't be surprised if something similar comes with the next patch. There are already strings that heavily suggest a system like that for decals, where community members can submit designs to the workshop and get them included in the game by Relic (called "curated" in the strings). It makes sense to include a similar system for maps.

That said, Relic has been notoriously slow at adding community maps to the game. Whenever we pushed them to do it in CoH1 they always came back telling us about the time they'd need to spend on art and QA, and we were only ever able to get a few in. CoH2 seems to have more resources though, so it could be different.

It's not a problem with the players though, it's a problem with human psychology, and as a game developer you're a slave to human psychology. You can't change human nature just because you don't like it.

Ignoring your silly and pathetic attempt to denigrate people who play to win, the simple fact of competition is it's all about winning. Sure, the act of participating in the competition is inherently enjoyable, but I haven't yet met a single person who enjoys losing to winning. When you're playing in a competitive environment (and automatch is a competitive environment) it's illogical to assume people will do anything but play to win.

If "participating and having fun", as you say, were all anyone cared about, sports wouldn't have championships, and amateurs wouldn't compete and practice. Your utopian worldview contradicts human nature completely.

The only practical way to add variety to a competition is to make that variety competitively attractive. In an RTS, that means giving players a variety of competitively viable strategies to choose from. When a single style exists that has been proven to be the best by a large margin, that's the style people are going to use a vast majority of the time. It's the game's fault for not providing players with more options, not the player's fault for discovering a single strategy that happens to be ideal in all possible situations.

But every time you play against another person, you're competing against them. It doesn't matter if you're taking the game seriously or not, when you play against someone and try to win, you're competing. You don't have to be a tournament player to want to win. If you're playing a multiplayer game, you have to accept the fact that the vast majority of players are playing to win. For most people, winning in a boring way is a whole lot more fun than losing in a unique way. Nobody goes into a game of CoH2 and says "I'm going to try to lose". You're playing to win against an opponent who's also playing to win; that's the very definition of a competition.

Of course the meta can change without patches, but that requires a game that encourages variety. Unfortunately, CoH2 lacks a lot of the traditional RTS elements that encourage variety in other games. It's all about finding the optimal unit composition, which is a tough thing to do with so many units in the game, but once it's been found there's little incentive to introduce variety on the player's part because unit composition is really the only strategic outlet players have.