Profile of Noun

I have several issues with what's said here. Firstly, blaming the community for 'toxicity'. Perhaps if Relic's approach to community management had been more of this new 'spread the love' message and less of the 'divide and conquer' which has been prevalent to date, it would have bred lest animosity.

I'm sorry you feel that way. That wasn't our intention, but you feel that way so there's probably been misteps on our part. I'm sorry for that.

It's important that we at Relic iterate. We look at what we did, and decide what worked and what didn't. You feel like something isn't working and we're trying something new now.

If you don't feel like being a part of this iteration then that's totally fair.

Sorry if you felt we don't care, we do. Hopefully we show it better with this new approach.

The Vancouver trip which was only open to a select few (myself included), the payment Ami received for SNF (which doesn't bother me personally, I knew he was going for it since months ago, I say more power to him for managing to secure it, something I thought impossible in the context of things), the increased level of exposure for certain streamers/casters over others; favoritism has been shown time and again.

Again with the Vancouver trip, we'll do it differently next time. That specifically was designed as a trip where we were going to bring in top level LoL and SC2 casters. Both Lynx and I pushed back on that and said that trying to convince people who don't love CoH to play the game wasn't the way to go about it, and so at the last minute we reformatted it as a community trip.

I wasn't involved in drawing up the list of names of who got to go, but it was always going to be a select list. It's expensive to fly people to Vancouver. Feed them. Put them up in a decent hotel in downtown Vancouver. We don't have the money to bring in 100 people, so there were people that 100% deserved to be there that didn't get to go.

There's always going to be.

That sucks.

I'm not going to talk about who should or shouldn't have gone, but Rogers has told me privately about an issue you in particular had and if you want to discuss that in private I'm up for it.

All I can say is that the process was a bad one. We were trying to build ourselves back up from losing our publisher and we're still doing that now a year later. Moving marketing and community back into the studio will help that.

As for favoritism for casters, again I'm sorry about that if that's how you feel. I don't regret promoting anyone or anything we've promoted.

If someone got promoted more then it's usually because they were good about asking to be promoted. I'm way too busy, and that sucks on all levels. I don't get a chance to watch all the great shows, and so sometimes it takes someone constantly pointing them out to me to do it.

Take yesterday's tutorial stream. 3 people told me about it on the day, and two different people were telling me about last week. So I knew it was going on, and I knew to promote it.

And again, it's something we're hoping to improve as we hire more in studio community staff, so that we have time to refocus on things like that.

This irks me. I know that game development is not your remit Noun, but please don't tell me to 'give it a shot' when Fatal and I have spent thousands of hours creating content for this game, breaking new ground, literally adding features to the game which by all accounts should have been there in the first place- observer mode, picture-in-picture, dual resources, dual unit counters, tac map overviews, custom intros, custom outros, hosting tournaments, livecasting events, and more. To have it implied that we somehow haven't tried hard enough....well, it's pretty difficult not to interpret this as a massive slap in the face. Should mention too, that it's not just us. I'm sure I speak for anyone who has put hours into promoting this game that to be told now, 8 months after release that we should just 'give it a shot' (because clearly, we haven't been working hard enough), sends the message that everything we've done as a community up until now has been irrelevant.

Absolutely understandable.

I'm done with CoH as a franchise, but here's the 6 step program that might have made CoH2 more successful from the start instead of the bombing mess that it is today;
1. Make the FB/Twitter feeds an outlet for community exposure, not questions asking what people's favourite tank is.
2. Remove pay2win DLC from automatch.
3. Make basic match a thing so you have a place for people to go for those that prefer it so automatch actually contains competitive players, and isn't just everyone lumped in together.
4. Sell DLC maps, single player missions, comp stomp co-op missions instead of units. Repackage every 3v3 and 4v4 map from vCoH into a single 'regression session' package and sell it for 10 bucks. Minimal effort for maximum profit.
5. Use your power as a developer/SEGA as a publisher to promote CoH2 streams via Twitch, Youtube, MLG, whatever.
6. Give us the tools to make content. Remove the prevention on modding, put in basic features like observer mode (at its most basic you could literally just make 1v1 maps with 2 extra 'hidden' slots, thats how modders did it for CoH1)

All good points worth considering. And we have and will. A few I'll address.

1. Facebook Edgerank is a factor in why we do posts like "What's your favourite tank?" Those posts help ensure that posts promoting the game and casts get seen. An explanation on EdgeRank: http://www.whatisedgerank.com/

3. I agree we need to look for a way for players who want to play other game modes. It's something we're looking at but haven't found a solution to yet.

5. Absolutely agree. We're working on getting a contract with Twitch that will allow us to better promote our own stream. When we do we'll look at how we can promote other streams. However Twitch is always going to promote bigger content first. So they will prioritize a large SC2 tournament before any CoH2 content because SC2 has a bigger audience. But we can work on this.

6. 100% agree. I'd agree more but it's mathematically impossible. Modding is a goal, and it sucks so much that it's been negatively affected. We didn't mean to, but it's a trade off between security for the gaming experience and allowing mods. It's a long term thing, so it's not going to happen this week or next month or the month after that, but returning the power to mod the game is a goal.

If you look at Rome 2 we want that. We want a vibrant modding community who are able to quickly and easily distribute their mods via something like Steam Workshop. It's a long way off. But it's a destination.

There have been several points in the past where this initiative might have been gratefully received. But now? It's too little, too late, and the kind of community you want to engineer is clearly far removed from what we want to create. That's fine, it's your choice. I just wish you would've been clearer, earlier, and saved us all a lot of time.

Sorry to hear it's too late for you guys. I understand.

Take League of Legends as an example. I'm sure they use quick clips and highlight reels to attract new players, but they equally promote their substantial content, and it's the substantial content that gets them the majority of their exposure.

Yup, that's all I'm saying. You seem to be arguing with a point I didn't make.

I'm not saying stop making long content. In fact I say specifically make what content you want.

But if getting new people to watch your content is a goal, then consider short content at least part of the time. I'm not saying all short content, just like you're not saying all long content.

We're saying the same thing, I just feel like you're arguing because it's me who said it.

To be honest, I've never seen this "toxicity" between COH shoutcasters/content Be cool to each other people. All of the casters stepping down is a symptom of them not enjoying COH2 and apparently less viewers enjoy it too because viewer numbers are horrible. Soooo, less viewers, less enjoyment/entertainment, people leave and do other things.

It's been there. I think it's better now than it has been and I'm thankful to it.

Again I'd rather not talk about specific incidents here but I'm sure someone on the receiving end of it could message you offline rather than opening old wounds.

And I'm not suggesting that had anything to do with recent departures. As you say those seem to be largely based on those people not enjoying the game.

I am not sure if you're worried that those of us that simply stream don't have bigger plans but believe me when I say that I am pretty sure everyone has ideas to improve.

That's not my concern at all. Some people who do shows have expressed the frustration that they're hitting an upper limit on audience size, and this was to help with that. They were all casters as far as I remember.

Hey look if someone suddenly turned into Day[9] here and was showing off CoH to a million+ people I wouldn't complain. But if you're happy with what you're doing, that's super cool with us.

Again set your own goals, whether you're a caster or a streamer.

Obviously Noun's post was inspired by #AmiGate . I hope something good comes out of this. I like Wuff's idea about maps.

This would have been the same regardless. We've been looking at how we're dealing with content creators as we focus more on making cool stuff ourselves. We put a lot of focus into SNF, though obviously the team here on COH2.ORG and on SNF did the bulk of the work.

But as Season 5 came to an end, we've been thinking about how we move forward and redistribute some of the attention and focus.

I should be clear, that overall Relic are happy with SNF Season 5. We were glad to take part, glad to be a sponsor and glad to do what we could to promote it.

I'd love to see Relic introduce maps of month, we're 2 community maps are introduced into the auto match pool, allow players to vote after each match or check the veto's and at the end of the month Relic decide whether to keep it in the pool.

Map of the Month seems like a phrase I've used in conversation with someone at the office recently. Hmmm...

That would be a good way to highlight the pretty awesome work being done by the map makers.