Profile of Blovski

Well I'm not playing it at the moment.

Frankly unless they fix their release model I'm just not interested in going back to it.

This really great and really reassuring for me. This is exactly the kind of business model I have been waiting for in an RTS and is exactly the reason why I will continue to support this game and buy the great commanders you are realeasing. It's not 'pay to win' its 'pay to increase strategic possibilities and enjoyment of the game'.

If you make a great game, don't ruin it by changing it completely and releasing an expansion. Work to improve upon it and provide small DLC updates where players can decided exactly what they value and exactly what they are willing to pay for. Which will help you guys understand what the player values and continue to work towards releasing the stuff we want and enjoy.

You will get resistance. New and innovative ideas often do. But once people get used to it, and those shills who will hate it no matter what leave, what we will have is a strong community of players and developers working together to continually make a great game better. It is good to hear this way of game development is here to stay

As far as the model works for the consumer: it's a good business model for single-player content, and for cosmetic multiplayer content. It is an appalling business for a multiplayer RTS because what anyone I face in Automatch has in this game dictates my experience of the multiplayer.

The expansion model allows people to play the base game against other people with the same in a balanced state in terms of options available if they prefer to, while this one does not. Also, compare the value for money you get with The Conquerors or The Titans to what you get for these commanders... it's not even close.

The part of your post I have bolded (Relic's official line) is currently not true of the paid commanders in the state they've been released in. The bugged FHQ bug, Assault grens, Ostruppen and Soviet industry were all so radically overpowered at release that it's basically professionally embarrassing.

Assault Grens and Ostruppen are still not uncontroversial in the community in terms of balance. If Relic want to work with this controversial business model, they have to do a much much better job of playtesting and balancing their content, as well as employing a responsible release and patching schedule driven by integrating it into the rest of the game. I have yet to see them do this.

If some people value commanders that are blatantly above the power curve, should Relic make more overpowered commanders because they probably sell better? I suppose you might also add that what a player values may actually not be what a player wants to be in the game, if you consider people buying one commander to counter another.

Tl/dr: I have already paid for a game. Allowing other people to pay to make my game less fun makes me unable to recommend it to friends, uninterested in playing the game I've paid for and unwilling to purchase any future offerings from Relic. The business model is bad. I would be willing to tolerate it if the developers were implementing it competently. I am waiting to see if something changes in this regard.

If Relic sees the game as a 'service', why didn't they advertise it as a service, or implement the payment model of a service rather than a conventional upfront £30 purchase which is completely inappropriate for this DLC model and borderline misleading for people who pre-ordered it?

C), and unless something RELIC makes the Tiger Ace, or soviet receive a similar weapon

I'd rather not call for things to be 'balanced' by adding more ridiculous OP paid nonsense on the other side. Tiger Ace seems like a genuinely interesting trade-off to me on paper. If I saw one I'd probably focus on killing all the support units. I'm not really interested in playing til a few things get patched so I don't know how it feels in practise.

No sorry, haven't watch it, if I understand you correctly one of them used Osttruppen Commander and the other Mechanized assault? Well okay a combination of both might be problematic, although what I've read people have found ways to counter them and no longer think they're OP.

I haven't included every aspect of the game in the analogy (which we can drop now, even I think it went a bit too far ), only the system of free and paid DLCs. Nevertheless I disagree with your statement, I don't think we're this far.

Yes I've acknowledged they're possibly unbalanced when released, but things always get fixed, as you've noticed with this patch like flame halftrack's gotten nerfed, Blitz is now disabled with a damaged engine, 120mm was nerfed a bit, which I all think are nice. And YES some of the changes could have come earlier... As I see things now, Devs are trying to fix stuff as soon as possible and the new commanders were tested in the beta, perhaps they should be tested for a bit longer next time, so we can avoid situations such as these.. All in all I think things are going in the right direction, just a bit more testing before the new releasing. I don't think that situation is so bad that we need tens of topics of pure rant, thank you

Basically, VonIvan went with Ostruppen spam, Sib with Assault Grens and sometimes just Grens. They absolutely kerbstomped AndyIsRipping and IronRoman three times in a row with it - not even a competition. Think they did the same to Hans and Luckystrike. I think we'll see with Ostruppen - personally I don't see how a lot of the strats that were ridiculous with them after the damage hotfix are more balanced now, whether that's the Ginnungagap/Hans spam, FHT and trenchspam, the Semois/Kharkov building rush. At high level play I think there are still a lot of reservations about how balanced Assault Grens are, though I think they just need a bigger call-in cooldown and they'll be fine. The balance considerations for those are only half the story - they also kind of mess up a lot of the core principles of the (early) game in a manner which is basically un-fixable and which affects every player who has to play against them.

I think the issue is the speed/timing of release for all these new commanders and the state in which most of the paid commanders so far have been released. If the same release schedule and standards are kept up, the game is just going to drift from one imbalanced new commander to the next.

Even if they were released in a basically sane and tested state (as Soviet Industry, the FHQ doctrine, Ostruppen and Assault Grens all weren't), they would probably require a month or two in the game before they could be effectively balanced. The poor state of release has further problems in that, when people are paying for them, you can't later remove an ability from a commander to balance it, and a lot of the new commanders seem to have a combination of several useful new abilities plus two of the best of the old ones, whereas the earlier commanders had more of a mixed bag.

The fact that Relic are sugarcoating them by releasing Tales of War commanders for free at the same time only exacerbates the problem of not having any time to balance new commanders properly against the existing game.

All of the balance adjustments you mention I wholeheartedly support (though I think the 120mm didn't need to be pricier - and did they actually remove the blitz with a damaged engine yet?) but none of those were imbalances that made me not want to play. The presence of Soviet Industry, or the Dushka + Mine doctrine or the cheapish insta-vet 3 grens have more or less put me off trying the new patch until I see a fix for them. The topics of pure rant are pretty understandable. I don't think the game is doomed but I do think Relic need to seriously reassess their release schedule and balancing process for new multiplayer content so they can actually reap the benefits of the other balancing work and game improvements they do.

I also think it's a bad move. Especially doing this right after such a big and controversial balance update. The balance was delicate enough pre-Turning Point, now it's in shambles as far as new commanders are concerned, but this could potentially manhandle it to the point Dawn of War looks balanced in comparison.

Not to mention that, as CieZ said, it benefits Soviet industry too much, and that doctrine is stupid enough as it is.

Man, if this keeps up, I'm going to have to stop playing until they get their shit together. That expansion for X-Com is starting to look more tempting by the day...

Mine's unlocking at midnight. Genuinely so excited.