Profile of Inverse

What was his special way to dealing with PE?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSz5-ym_Qg4&list=PLXJOCXNjeJuxX76tZh2a1g2Lh4PgjUTBU&index=2

Basically relying on infantry for a lot longer than anyone thought was safe, but using infantry support upgrades and buildings to buy time for more efficient later-game tech. Pretty much a complete 180 from the standard fast M8.

There is one problem in what you describe. If a developer makes a faction or balance changes and has no idea how to deal with it in game he is throwing his customers in murky water and asking them to find their way on their own.

In a sense that is what relic did with the kubel. They over buffed it, but had no idea how to counter it. When I presented Peter with all the evidence about the kubel his position was something to the effect "people need some time to adapt". I disagree with this approach, they need to have a better idea what those changes are going to do to the game before introducing them.

A developer can have a pretty damn good idea of how a change is going to affect the game, but they're not omniscient. They're also rarely top players themselves, because it's a bit hard to find the time and motivation to play a game enough to become very good at it for anybody, let alone someone who works on said game every single day. Peter himself actually wrote a very enlightening article on this very subject...

http://pqumsieh.com/2014/01/27/balancing-multiplayer-games-part-1/

You can use math and intuition to make the best changes you possibly can, but at the end of the day you have to settle on something, and then you have to pass it on to players far better than yourself and see how they use your changes. And you need to give those players time, because people don't change instantly, especially when what they were doing before was working perfectly fine.

The original Starcraft was rarely patched, yet the metagame was constantly evolving and strategies were constantly becoming stronger and weaker. Dota 2's 6.81 patch was out for months, but if you looked at games played during its first month and games played during its last you'd think they were entirely different patches. You can't just look at a patch with major changes a week or two after release and make definitive judgements about balance. You can make guesses, sure, and you can point out areas of concern, but it doesn't make sense to change things until the metagame settles down.

SO Inverse, what are your suggestions to help fix the game. It seems like you are suggesting that this game is beyond saving

CoH2 is never going to be a game I want to play, because its core design doesn't appeal to me. I've posted a lot about why, so I won't harp on it anymore. I'm beyond being upset that the game isn't what I wanted it to be. But I'll share another article from Peter's blog, since I've been reading through it today and really enjoying his work...

http://pqumsieh.com/2014/01/08/compelling-game-design/

He asks "How does a game stimulate the player?" and goes on to provide an interesting list of design elements, taking examples from vCoH, DotA, and Street Fighter. Most of them, in my opinion, are missing from CoH2.

? That was a response to a comment that more servers wouldn't be more expensive because they would be virtual...

It's just truth though. It's true of every single game in existence. Most people who play aren't very good. I don't doubt that they care about the game and want it to improve, but games like this are extremely complicated, and it's difficult to have intelligent conversations about something as complex as balance without an intimate understanding of how the game is best played.

Ever notice that I never post about balance? Because I'm fucking awful at CoH2. I can look at a change and probably write something that sounds semi-intelligent, but at the end of the day, are you more likely to listen to me or to someone like Jesulin? The answer is obvious.

The vast majority of vCoH players didn't play multiplayer. They played campaign or skirmish. Even back a few years ago when vCoH would hit 10k-12k players consistently, only a few hundred of those were ever automatching or in ranked games, and 1000-2000 more in basic matches. The rest were all skirmish and campaign.

We don't have access to that sort of information for CoH2, but I would be surprised if it changed all that much.

Inverse, I love the boobs in the middle of your signature...

Anyway, are you telling us the Kubel Buff couldn't have been detected if presented in an Beta test server?

There are Sit-Keyboard Interface issues and Balance issues, we all agree on that. But majority here is also enough competent to see when it is or not a balance issue. trolls and Faction Fanboys aren't the majority on that forum (thanks to modo team).

This is also not something new and specific to Relic, there are many games requiring balance and they (developpers) use to be more present with their community.

I'm impressed by Noun when he says Relic deployed 5 patchs last month. On the same time Valve deployed 6 or 7 patches on Dota2 because they deeply changed the game meta - the first changes weren't balance and they did daily re-adjustment to make it almost perfect - or at least how they wanted to be.

Back to Relic, there nothing here that show me they do care about actual bugs and balance issue - same if it is just a feeling - someone from Relic telling people there are not issue, it works as per design.

The problem is, people are reactionary, and most people aren't very good at the game. I'll give you an example from CoH1. When the most recent patch came out, people thought PE were overpowered against Americans. That lasted for a whole year, until Aimstrong came along and showed people how the matchup should be played. Now it's an Americans-favoured matchup, all because one guy figured out a better way to play the game.

In most cases, you can't evaluate balance changes within a week, especially not on beta servers with a limited number of players. You need to let your community have some time with the game before you can really say for sure what the state of the game is.

Now if you're Valve, and you own your distribution platform, and you have 8 million monthly players, you can make changes you know are probably extreme, because you will get a ton of information back really quickly and you can react to it in a timely manner. That's exactly what happened with the recent gold bounty changes in Dota 2. They did something that was probably extreme, and they gradually toned it down until they hit a point they were happy with.

Relic doesn't have that luxury, unfortunately. First of all, their game isn't run on servers, so they don't have access to the same quality of information that Valve does for Dota 2. Also, they have far less players, and therefore far less games being played with which they can judge their changes. Finally, they don't own their distribution platform. Patching is likely a very expensive exercise for Relic, which is why they have stuck to large releases and only hotfixed major bugs.

Honestly, I think it's hard to argue against Valve's iterative approach being better than Relic's, but at the same time, the balance team likely doesn't have much say in how frequently they get to patch their game. And without a large quantity of hard data to go off, you can't really make informed decisions in a short period of time anyways.