Profile of Inverse

Well, ladder play isn't tournament play. There were a lot of top 50 players who wouldn't last beyond the second or third round of a tournament.

4ES was strong enough that Marinez made it to the front page of the American leaderboard using it on a profile named 4ES. People knew it was coming and still couldn't beat it. He also had decent tournament success with the strategy, and it was adapted a number of times with minor changes to improve its viability. It was a difficult strategy to use, but extremely difficult to beat when used correctly.

WSC openings were rare, yes, but fast WSC follow-ups after 3 rifles were common on maps like Semois and Argentan, and late-game WSC transitions were essential in many situations. It's not all about openings you know; one of the major boons to CoH1's strategic variety was the fact that every tier was viable in a number of different situations thanks to upgrades, purchased veterancy, and the fact that the tiers were well-composed. You frequently saw players backteching to WSC after Motor Pool, or Wehrmacht T2 after a T3 rush, simply because those tiers offered units that were vital in certain situations.

Moving on, fast grenades were actually an amazingly effective opener at all levels of play; KoreanArmy's entire American strategy revolved around this opening, and he had notable tournament success. Even if you don't deal damage with the grenades, you force your opponent to reposition MGs, which negates a large amount of manpower investment, and it also lets you follow up with a triage and transition into the midgame a lot easier than BARs.

As for snipers, nobody with any clue about what they're doing has relied on countersniping to kill snipers for at least 2 years now. There are far better ways to deal with snipers than by flipping a coin and hoping for the best.

I don't care if you prefer CoH2, or think it's a better game. At the end of the day that's entirely subjective, and nobody can tell you what you do and don't like. But if you're going to spout bullshit, at least have a sliver of a clue of what you're talking about.

Regardless, you've pushed us off-topic. Let's not derail this thread any further.

Right. But the whole purpose of improving is to win more frequently. At the end of the day, that's what any competition is ultimately about.

You can argue that, as a player, using flavour-of-the-month strategies that have a high likelyhood of getting nerfed in future patches is short-sighted and will make you a worse player in the long run, but my point was it doesn't make sense to blame players for a stale meta because people will generally take the path of least resistance in competitive games.

Players naturally gravitate to the easiest way to win, that's true of every competitive game in existence. Don't blame the players, blame the game.

Likely just a bug.

As far as balancing 4v4, it's a lot easier to balance then 1v1. Most of balance issues that are breaking 1v1 balance can be overcome by team builds and strategy. 4v4 only needs to be balanced with sledgehammer to get it to decent state.
However, units need to be designed with 4v4 in mind.
Problem in COH2 is that one army has extremely strong mobile armor and lethal AT infantry while other side has gimmicky slow moving armor that either needs combined arms or be set up in ambush to be useful. Add to that non-lethal AT infantry.
Tho both designs are deadly in 1v1, it's pretty obvious which massive shortcoming, team with durable mobile armor, will exploit.
That core design can never be overcome with tweaks to balance COH2 4v4.

Good point, I never thought of it that way. That makes a lot of sense actually. It's definitely all about the design. CoH2 would need major changes on that front to work competitively in large team games, I definitely agree with that.

Almost time for me to sleep. Anyways, that's what I meant when I said "currency system"; a system that's pretty much like Dota 2's. Really, there's no patent on the economy model Valve uses for Dota 2, so why doesn't Relic just use Dota 2's model? The game has potential to earn a substantial revenue just by selling skins, unit, weapon models and etc. I've spent $80+ in Dota 2 because the content they put out I feel is worth it; Relic just needs to make quality unit models/skins, vehicle skins and etc and people will buy it, as long as it doesn't affect gameplay.

That's the problem though, the supply/durability system described here is nothing like the system used in Dota 2 and CSGO. If they straight-up copied Valve's model that would be amazing. Paying for cosmetic items is totally legit, because it doesn't give you additional gameplay options and it's totally not necessary to do if you just want to play the game competitively. What isn't legit is paying for more gameplay options (different topic though) or paying to continue using your items over time.

If it's limited to only dropped items, it turns off the large number of people who play for that carrot-and-stick incentive of getting a drop after the game. Just look at the anger over the War Spoils system, and the backlash against Valve recently for their changes to the Dota 2 drop system. That's the best-case scenario, and it's still a major negative for a large portion of the community.

Worst-case scenario, they give durability to items you've purchased from the store. That's straight-up nickle-and-diming, and it flat-out discourages store purchases because nobody wants to pay more to maintain their virtual items. Valve's system works because they don't nickle-and-dime people, and instead release a constant stream of content that compels people to keep purchasing items, instead of taxing the items they've already sold.