Profile of Noun

@PingPing:

You make some good points. I'm mostly responding to people's nostalgic memories of the halcyon days of vCoH.

We spent a lot of time and energy on banning people from vCoH for their chatroom behavior, and it really never solved the problem.

But yes, there's a lot of stuff that's in Steam CoH that'll cut that stuff down, especially things like smurfing.

I think there's a lot of good points raised in the OP, and the subsequent comments. I just do find it a bit amusing that it seems people are remembering vCoH the way that older people talk about air travel in the 60s'.

"Oh we'd all get dressed up and wear suits / fancy dresses to fly. Flying was civilized and an occasion."

CoH had/has it's problems and a lot of them are being ignored in discussions like this.

For example the ranks. This didn't stop people from complaining when they lost a match. It didn't stop them from rage quitting and flipping out. Or running to the forums or our email and complaining that the game was unbalanced.

The difference is that right now because balance is far less refined than it was after 6 or 7 years of vCoH more people are willing to listen. Also we're doing more frequent balance updates to refine the game's balance than we were 6 years on in vCoH, so it gives people new stuff to blame for their loss on a regular basis.

Further a lot of that rage was directed into the chat channels.

Marco you may have had some great experiences in the Rome chat, but let's not kid ourselves that the chats were refined book clubs with gentlemen exchanging ideas and debating strategy like civilized people. Sure that may have happened once in awhile, or in the early days but the majority of what went on there were the same dozen or so people camping out calling each other racial slurs and just doing their best to be the trolliest troll on the internet.

The existence of multiple profiles meant that there'd be a revolving door of 1 person saying the same thing as 6+ people.

Then there was the Berlin chat which THQ kept getting threats from the German authorities about because it was often infested with neo-Nazis who spent their time talking about cleansing the country of the minorities (mostly the one that the Nazis don't like).

I do think that finding a way for people who want specific type of custom games to meet is a challenge we want to figure out. But people have already raised some issues with the lobbies. It was a hive of team killing and unfair play. Not everyone mind you, and maybe you never had that issue. But a lot of people would find themselves in 2v2 games where the 3 other people were all working together.

vCoH is a great game and those things you raised were generally great features. But they weren't without drawbacks and the community wasn't a united happy bunch who never complained or fought or accused each other of hacking or the balance of being terrible. If anything I'd say the community is better organized now, provides much better support to new players and has a lot of tools (ex Twitch) to share their passion for the game.

I like it fine, I'd simply leave if I did not. Still room for improvement though.

Thank you guys.

We're not saying that this is a perfect game, or that improvements don't need to be made. If we thought that was the case we wouldn't be posting here, or on our own forums. We wouldn't be doing regular balance patches or releasing new content.

We'd simply hop on our unicorns and fly off into the sky to celebrate our perfection and hangout with U2.

Instead we're putting the elbow grease into making the game better, improving balance and technical issues and making some new stuff for you to play with.

At least until the unicorns get here.

Edit: Which isn't to say that we don't want negative feedback. Constructive feedback helps us improve the game for everyone and we're very thankful to everyone who gives it. But being thanked is nice too!

I'll give some insight.

First I'll be clear I don't have anything to do with moderating this forum. I'm a guest here just as you are. To repeat I have NOTHING to do with how COH2.ORG operates or moderates. They let stuff go that I wouldn't and that's the way it should be.

I do however moderate our official forums and the Steam forums. So to the question of what's wrong with "unspecific" thread titles it's basically because it makes it impossible to find something.

I can't remember what yours was titled but on both the official forums we get a lot of threads titled things like:

- Relic Look At This
- Big Mistake
- Everything is the Worst!
- I like this
- Fun times

And so forth.

As someone whose job it is to go through threads to pull out the feedback you guys provide that's pretty horrible for me, and for other people.

So let's say I'm reading a thread titled "Relic Look At This" and it's about a bug in the game that I haven't seen reported before. Let's say I'm on my mobile phone reading at home, and want to remember that to report in the morning.

I go in the next day and I can't remember what the thread is called, but spend two hours looking through threads because of the title. That's 2 hours I could have been using to report other bugs, or gather more feedback.

And let's say you are reporting a bug and call the thread "Relic Look At This" so we look at it. We do and ask if anyone else has seen the issue, so we can eliminate it just being a problem with your PC. 5 other people have the same issue, but never read the thread because it's not titled anything to do with the problem they're having.

Another issue is that at a certain point if we (Relic) respond to a thread with a title like "Relic Look At This" or "Noun Look Here" then it just encourages more people to do that.

Soon all threads will be titled "Relic Read This" or some variation because people will start to believe that is the best way to get us to read something.

Again I have 0 (ZERO) say in moderation here. I'm just pointing out conventions on other CoH related forums which are common around the internet.

The majority of the balance changes were moved forward out of this patch and released earlier to better improve the play experience for you guys sooner.

The plan had been to hold them until this patch, but we wanted to get them to you as quick as possible.