Profile of CombatMuffin

Pragmatically, its our own fault for pre-ordering/purchasing before the product actually delivers its advertised description.

Legally, however, its false advertising and not delivering the promised product.

Legally? Can you quote any marketing explicitly stating leaderboards at release? Industry trends and gameplay standards are not legally binding.

If all FPS suddenly use perks and persistent levels after CoD4: MW introduced them, and your new FPS doesn't, are you legally oblgiated to refund your customers? Thats a gameplay trend. Not legally bound to follow it (unless you promise it will have them).

Lets be a little more concise: Dedicated servers. Up until the last generations of consoles introduced mainstream online play, almost every single AAA multiplayer PC game had the option of hosting dedicated servers. Now, they rarely do (for various reasons). Are you going to pursue legal action, simply because they don't have a feature you've grown used to having? You probably won't go far in court. You could stop buying the games, or work around to returning it because you didn't like it, but you were not deceived unless they explicitly promised you those dedicated servers.

Leaderboards are very useful and fun to have. They are, in the end, NOT part of the gameplay. They are not required to sell the product since they are, plain and simple, just a glorified database.

In fact, one could even go as far, depending on the game's code, to argue that there already ARE pseudo-leaderboards in the game: You have a skill rating, and they have your win/loss ratio, maybe even streaks. They are simply working to deliver that information to the end user, in a streamlined and high quality way.

The mechanics, however, should already be in there.

Personal thoughts:

T70 should have the same range as shrek, no more, no less, imho. Keeping it at less would reduce the point of a T70.

SU-76: I have no idea how to change this weapon, so far. If you make it excel at AT, then whats the SU-85 for? Make it excel against infantry, then whats the point of T70? They *could* make it some sort of support vehicle though...

Stug: No barrage. Comes too early, its too cheap. Mirroring abilities for the sake of balance is bad design, imho. I still think the StuG should do low damage, but have good penetration. It could be an early game slugger. Right now, its only moderately useful against a T34, let alone an SU-85.

T34/76: Could work increasing its AT, since T70 is for AI. I still want PIV to destroy T34's, and not by a small margin. Germans are paying for the PIV's performance.

As far as the upgun goes, I do not think the 100 munition cost is smart. Munitions upgrades are something for the German faction, not the Soviet faction. Its just the design of the factions. I am all for a global upgrade, though.

SU-85: Reduce speed is good, but I wouldn't remove or change the cone ability EXCEPT, that it should need a spotter, just like MG's and snipers do. The elephant should be penalized the same.

The reason why I state it, is actually for map balancing, more than just "fair play".

The advantage of random starting positions is that adaptability can come into play, and certain strategies become viable from that position, which otherwise wouldn't be feasable.

The disadvantage, is that certain maps can give a significant advantage to one faction or the other. Most maps rarely present this issue, but I can imagine that from a mapmaking point of view, it is A LOT easier to design and fix maps if you have at least that constant.

This is especially true when we consider that CoH maps are practically never symmetrical.

Is there a reason why they removed them back in old vCoH? If memory serves me right, originally factions always had fixed starting positions in maps and was later changed.

I can understand the philosophy of "spicing things up", but doesn't it over-complicate map balancing and design?

A lot of people in the competitive scene have voiced the need for fixed starting positions, particularly for tournament play, I was wondering how much impact simply assigning fixed positions to maps in automatch (keeping random option in custom games) would do?

From a map design perspective, you could design around the faction starting points, or is there an actually issue with this kind of change?

1. Do a functional app that grabs all the basic statistics
2. Put nice, simple explanations of those statistics for newcomers.
3. Upload statistics to a webpage (CoH2.org?)
4. Poke Relic so they put it on their site, too, or at least link to it.
5. ?????
6. Profit.

Seriously though, one of the biggest downers for CoH has been the fact that newcomers simply don't understand why their units aren't being as effective as they think they are. "Why is my Stuka Strafing Run not killing enemies", "Why are my PanzerGrenadiers losing to Shock Troopers".

The answer is that CoH has nuances that are not readily apparent for the player, and a stats page, especially one that compares your unit to an enemy unit's (shrek range against T70 range, for instance), would help enormously to improve a lot of player's understanding of the game.

So Code away, my friends. It is for a noble cause...