Profile of Marcus2389

No the upkeep is way to punishing imo for the player that has the advantage. Your manpower income is so crippled you can only afford to reinforce while the player thats in "trouble" can trade units with you while reinforcing them and buying new ones and in time catch up to you. Also it always seems no matter how fuel denied you are you always have enough for your heavy tank callin and there you have your "skilled" comeback.

Add to that some bs strafing runs that totally annihilates your army even if you instantly retreat and it can create some bullshit scenarios.

Pretty much that, no more PM needed

Well for example I would like to see a better ladder system that incentivates players to play. Looking at Relic past games or looking at how other games do that (even better): giving players short term objectives and long term objectives in their ranked games will make them more motivated to play, even if they just want to have fun and not get the best in the world. (tip: it might be a good idea to investigate on how exactly the League of Legends league system works, imo it's the best you would find around)

Then, to enlarge the community and also increase the partecipation on tourneys I think it would be a good idea to start organizing tournaments based on people league (tourneys only for bronze,silver,gold,platinum..blablabla.. players) so that there would be a lot more competition and people would be more motivated to partecipate because they would feel they have a chance to win.

Another thing I would seriously look is the DLC business model: we can help Relic finding new ways to monetize the game, we want Relic to monetize the game and to succeed IF in return Relic would invest those money (or at least part of them) to improve the game. Look again at games like LOL or Starcraft, their focus on eSports gets them a lot of money: it's really all about the game YOU want to create and the direction YOU want it to take, we have very clear ideas of what we would like the game to be and the direction we would like it to take!

A healthy community grows around a healthy game with a healthy developer that shows the capacity of adapting to the challenges of the 2014 markets dominated by free to play games, even radically changing its business model. You make the game so you have that responsability at first and not the opposite (which is, on a side note, what I consider my personal biggest mistake with coh2.org, that tried to "force" Relic doing what we wanted).

Other aspects I would personally work on would be engine and graphics optimization: the most played games are so because they are pretty well optimized and they scale well with many PC configurations and they can work quite well also on laptops. We have seen no optimization patch for COH2 since the beginning and really I cannot believe that the Essence Engine 3 is just unoptimizable at all: you still didn't clear this point with anyone for now. You are closing the doors of your game to hundreds of thousands of players just for that (not to mention all those that play with Crossfire configurations who are still waiting for an official word if there will EVER be a patch to allow using multiple GPUs).

I would like to talk a bit also about the campaign, another aspect that has the potential to attract new players. First of all, I think that the RTS single player experience is one of the least profitable aspects of a game like COH. You spend millions of dollars but apart from the money you get from each sold copy there is no way to let it pay off during the lifetime (and, while not having any data here with me, I am naturally inclided to think you spend way more on the campaign that what you get in return, while you earn way more from the multiplayer aspect than what you initially invest thanks to the DLC system).

Unless...unless you are building a game like Starcraft and you create a big story that gets people more involved because the story extends among various titles: I bought SC2:HotS to know how the campaign was going to proceed, because it really involved me and got me curious. I would like to see the same on the COH franchise (it might be harder because we talk about history, but I'm sure it's not impossible and I'm sure it was totally doable creating a COH2 single player experience about Isakovich that would have continued in the next 2-3 expansions).

It also feels counter intuitive building a game that gets his money mostly from to the multiplayer aspect (that has its DLC model focused on that) but that also invests the least effort and money on the multiplayer in the development phase (I have no data again but due to the lack of pretty much every feature in the MP at launch, compared to at least a finished, variegate and complete single player campaign with many SP TOW missions, I could put my hand on fire about Relic spending more money on the SP than the MP).

Last thing (maybe it should have been placed above): you have to choose the right time to make these big changes. Now that the game is out the hype is pretty much over and even if you release the best patch ever you won't get the attention from the medias nor the chance to really get bigger. It's obviously the release of the first big expansion the moment where you should capitalize all your efforts to advertise all the cool new stuff I hope you are working on. Take advantage from the hype created by that, work on as many MP features you can and start talking about COH2 and eSports, organize big tourneys where everyone could have a chance to win, consolidate the relation with Twitch and try to get live events, keep the momentum each single week with new contests for fans that might be better at something else than just playing the game. Dedicate the biggest slice of the COH2 investment on MP and eSports because that's where I personally think the game could grow from.

Strummingbird promoted to Artist

Moved to the appropriate section

@Marcus
Thx for the information.



Let´s say the community would create a new fair play section. Would Relic support it? Supporting this project means is Relic willing to ban people if the FP sections decides they deserve a ban and is Relic capable to do ban people in matters of organisation at all since CoH is Steam based now? I am talking about CoH1, not CoH2.

I honestly don't know but it would have to be organized by some top COH1 players with the knowledge and the credibility necessary to do something like this. It is quite an hard process to identify cheaters and be close to 100% sure about them cheating (especially with maphacks).

With drophacks and synchacks you mainly collect the evidences (screenshots, multiple reports) and after you have enough of them (3-4 reports in a limited amount of time) you can actually start the process of reporting that person to Relic.