Profile of Inverse

open router ports
update modem firmware

This won't do a thing.

Servers are likely overloaded.

On a side note, battle servers were never meant to improve general latency. They were meant to prevent a single bad connection from increasing the latency of everyone. Before, when connections were purely peer-to-peer, every player had to play at the latency of the player with the worst connection, because every player had to wait for the game information from every other player to be sent and received before they could continue.

What the battle servers do is act as a relay. You send your information to the server, the server sends it to everyone else. This means if one player has a particularly terrible connection, the server can still relay the commands of everyone else without having to wait for that one player. That is good for the other players, but it can be very bad for the player lagging, because I'm assuming (haven't been able to play to test) that the lagging player will experience rubber-banding not unlike what happens when you have a bad connection to an FPS server. When everyone has to wait for your bad connection, you never miss any information; it just gets to you a lot slower. If the system stops waiting, the lagging player is going to miss a lot of ticks where his units won't be accepting commands, and therefore won't be moving or will be following the last command that the server received.

As for its effect on latency, it's silly to think battle servers means generally better latency overall. Instead, you're likely to experience more consistent latency, because instead of sending commands directly to your opponents you're sending them to a server, and the location of that server is not likely to change. So if I used to play against my roommate all the time, for example, battle servers are going to introduce more latency for us, because instead of connecting to a machine five feet away from me, I'm connecting to one potentially hundreds of miles away. On the other hand, if I play with someone from Korea all the time, my latency will likely improve, because my point of entry into the network is so much closer.

Battle servers aren't a magical solution to all of CoH2's network problems. It's just a means of normalizing things and giving Relic more control over their own game, instead of relying on Steam.

Not yet, but even if it was it would be biased, seeing as anybody visiting a site like this is very likely interested in multiplayer.

Sounds like the ability to queue for multiple modes at once (1v1 and 2v2 at the same time for example).

Well, there was nothing technically stopping them from implementing it on the old servers, it just would've meant if the observer lagged everyone else in the game would lag too. But we were told it wouldn't get added until after the move to the new servers, so at least that is out of the way. Same with in-game leaderboards.

But without word from Relic, I wouldn't get your hopes up.

Company of Heroes is indeed a simple game strategically, yet it's still more complex than CoH2. If you look at it from a pure numbers perspective, there are the same number of base units available in both games (4 per tier, there's actually one more in CoH2 I believe because of Conscripts in T0, but there's also one more tech building for Americans in vCoH, so it essentially evens out). Yet there are only 3 fuel-based upgrades in CoH2 (the 3 Conscript upgrades for Soviets, none for Ostheer aside from tier upgrades, which I'm not counting because Wehrmacht has them as well). There are only 3 in the entire base game! In comparison, there are 20 fuel-based upgrades in vCoH (8 for Americans, 12 for Wehrmacht). That's just objectively more options for a strategic player.

CoH2 narrows the gap when you include commanders, but you're still limited to three a game (just like in vCoH) and you still have the problem of players having to pay extra money just for access to all of the strategic options. Ultimately, vCoH just gives a player more options. In a strategy game, more options is rarely a bad thing.

The argument that CoH2 is new and immature and will grow is obviously valid. New strategies will emerge, the metagame will shift, everything that happens to all RTS games will happen to CoH2. But the shifts are going to be smaller, because there are simply less options. You're not going to see the huge shifts from tech rushes with no upgrades (vCoH 1.7) to low-tech high-upgrade gameplay (2.301 T2 Terror, Piospam, rifle upgrade spam) and everything in between (T1-T2-T3, fast vet 2 into T3, etc.). In order for that to happen, the base game needs to be able to facilitate it, and right now it does not. Instead, you're going to see shifts in unit compositions, and which units are built more than others. That provides variety, of course, but on a much smaller scale.

I've said this before and I'll say it again. I have an open mind, I want CoH2 to be great. That's why I post my opinions, and that's why I'm critical of the game. Because I think it has great potential, but it also has a lot of issues that are holding it back. I don't understand the hate against people who are simply pointing this out. The game needs improvements above and beyond balance; pretending it doesn't is counter-productive.

It's strange that the people defending the game are so much angrier than those stating their issues with it :/