Profile of Hannibal

What the announcement does not mention is that SEGA has made 240 employees redundant in other parts of its empire, most notably Creative Assembly. e.g. IGN Report

The industry has seen sluggish growth and rising costs. Against that background, and following approx 200 Relic redundancies last year, SEGA evidently felt that the only way forward with Relic was to sell it. My guess is that the External Investor could easily be MicroSoft, since it relies on Relic for AoE4. But I doubt if SEGA made much from this project bcs Relic subcontracted more and more of the AoE work.

An alternative External Investor to MS could be a US bank who are looking to flip Relic within, say, 12 months - this would follow the lines of what was proposed to avoid the THQ bankruptcy, but failed when shareholders forced an auction. If this were the case, it might suggest Relic had been acquired for a snip.

Either way, it looks as if the early release of the 2 free BGs etc is timed to coincide with this news. So @ Mrgame2, I don;t see COH3 stopping - rather, there will be more pressure to make it work, including presumably more saleable DLC.

After seeing nigo's post, you are likely spot on regarding DLCs. I think MS would have disclosed if they bought Relic. They need to make money fast, otherwise they're not interesting. I guess Relic released their update early to frame its "independence" to be a good thing, but I doubt it is.

Emona Capital is the winner


https://www.emonacapital.com/portfolio

Jesus. That company looks like the worst locust swarm possible.
Some gaming, some fintech stuff, some "rent an employee" company. I don't think that's the best environment for creative game development.

You really would need some advanced statistics math here, given how factions are not played equally, or facing equal match-ups.

We do have match-up specific stats as well, but elo distribution alone without normalizing faction pick difference won't do any good.

In my mind I was mostly thinking about 1v1 where at least the combinatory issue does not exist, although it technically shouldn't matter.
I am not sure how complicated the analysis would actually need to be. Maybe just looking at ELO distribution within teams should already give some info. Weak factions/team combinations would have a consistently lower ELO across the board. In case something is "easy to get into but hard to master", ELO range might be compressed more than other factions. This would not resolve factors like e.g. "double USF is good against double Wehr, but bad against double DAK". This could maybe be done by filtering for these special game setups (with all the caveats of Relic not directly introducing a ladder for that), although I yet don't know if it works out and how exactly it would look like.

Not really. At top edge, you'll get 2, 3 or even 4 times faster games as Allied. So you'll probably keep losing vs same level players but you'll always fall back on lower level players and have more games vs them (since they are more numerous) making up for your initial lose.

So at top level, I'd say winrate is even less relevant to check as a metric once the meta is settled. As Allied you have access to more games so statistically more win than Axis.
Or said otherwise the game tend to balance itself as quantity vs quality while the only metric we, as players, care about is quality.

But those Axis players at the top edge don't stop playing just because some equally skilled Allied player has downranked. They also keep playing - and winning - if their faction is OP, therefore creating a >50% win rate.

Example: Assume we're looking at a player using a weak faction that is currently being rated correctly for his skill.
1. Mid-ELO: You just lose ELO until you play against less skilled players using a stronger faction, which overall leads to similar strength -> =50% WR
2. Low-ELO: You lose ELO. However, there is no one with similar ELO to get matched with, therefore you get matched with the lowest possible ELOs on the opponent's factions. Since those factions are stronger, you will lose more often than win -> <50% WR for the weaker faction
3. High-ELO. You just lose ELO until you play against less skilled players using a stronger faction, which overall leads to similar strength -> =50% WR for YOURSELF. The opponents which play the strong faction now have no one at their ELO to get properly matched with, so they get matched with the highest possible ELOs on the other faction. Since their owm factions are stronger, they will win more often than lose -> >50% WR for the stronger faction.


The search times for Allies are not longer because of ELO issues, but because there are apparently more Axis in queue that will never find an opponent.

Long games are definitely possible even with new tickrate, as long as the match is actually balanced. I see it all the time. If a match lasts 20min, it means one side just played worse (or got cheesed by OP strats idk)




Click on the image and you can see the timer

They are possible, but much, much rarer.
Correct me if I am wrong, but logically the faster tick rate just makes comebacks harder and heavily punishes misplays once your down to let's say 50ish VPs. The game times overall are lower in CoH3 (which could also be a balance issue) and the casted games of the pro scene are shorter as well. The videos I clicked through often had games of 20-25 minutes, only a minority goes significantly longer.
This doesn't have to be bad by default, it's just the way it is - quicker and more plannable games at the price of snowballing and reduced comebacks.

I'll lock this due to lack of effort in creating a proper discussion base.