Profile of MilkaCow

I has been tested by a lot of people for 3 weeks in a public (as in everyone had a chance to apply) Alpha/Beta. Does it really matter how you call it?
Before that it was tested for ~2 months in a closed Alpha by a group of 30 to 40 CoH2 players who've been involved with balance for a long time. After the public Alpha/Beta there were also quite some balance improvements, but due to the time (bit above a week before launch) not much testing.
Before the closed Alpha it was tested internally by Relic for god knows how long.


Why would you need a dedicated 'beta' phase? It's really just a name difference, most of the time there is barely any difference between Alpha and Beta state to be honest.

Come on, this community is immensely positive and supportive. Our criticisms are generally constructive. Let's not paint some twisted bitter picture here cause that's not even close to the case. People are pissed about this NDA and the real lack of marketing, and rightly so. We can't be awesome together if we're not allowed to be, now can we?

I massively disagree with this Ami. I've been playing Multiplayer games for ~15 years and this community is one of the worst ever. Before people now hate on me, please let me elaborate.

There are roughly four kinds of people in the community in my opinion:
- People who are active, like the community and try to transition the game into something better. Amongst those I count a lot of the staff on CoH2.org, balance testers, the guys providing replays with balance problems to solve problems, the ones who host tournaments, be it ESL or whatever. They are the ones who really try to improve the community.
- The ones who once were in the first group, but have grown bitter due to the lack of interaction with Relic and other issues.
- The forum warriors who care more about discussing about the game than actually playing. Their opinions are often quite biased, they call the ones arguing against them fanboys and usually base their opinions less on facts than subjective impressions. Often after a lost game they go to the forums and spam them for a long time.
- The silent majority who plays on a more or less casual level or compstomps and barely provides feedback.

While in general I can fully understand the second group, I think they are doing a massive harm to the community and it's future development. Their bad experiences are constantly re-iterated and they see everything Relic does in a negative way. On the one hand you are thankful for their earlier contributions and how they helped improve the community, but on the other hand right now they are busy destroying all their good efforts prior and guilty for that are they solely. Relic may have faulted them in the past, but they continue to keep it affecting the now. That's one of my major problems with the community. The other are the people on the forums. They tend to be only a small part of the community, but due to their extremely high activity in the forums compared to them ingame their opinion is often rather vocal. The sheer amount of such posts drowns out most useful discussions and even in the old closed balance beta that was running till january or such (where also some lateron released commanders got tested!) the amount of spam, off topic and biased posts based on nothing was immense. I assume that was also one of the reasons Relic decided not to go for such a balance beta anymore, as like in the forums the ratio of useful to useless posts is too high.
Those are pretty much my problems with the community. I've rarely ever seen a community that has so much negativity and whose general attitude towards changes is usually negative. Couple that with an ignorance to learn what values in a changelog mean, but a vocal spam about what one thinks they mean and I am very annoyed. That might be especially with me, as I put a lot of time and effort to learn the stats, mechanics and workings of CoH2.
My problems with Relic are in the recent time small. In the beginning of the launch they were massive. There was almost no communication, close the gameplay did barely improve in the patches and was rather bland. So many things there were bad and those caused a lot of people who invested a lot of effort into CoH2 from the start to become annoyed with them. A major part of why the community is this way is Relics dealing. It would have never gotten so bad had they not failed so much in the beginning. Of late I feel the patches are far better, the gameplay improved and while there definitely are still quite some issues, those are often more attributed to scaling (1v1 => 4v4) and in general rare compared to prior. The gameplay got a lot more depth with different ranges mattering more and in general I for one am incredibly happy about those changes. So balancing-wise it improved a lot. The other issues like communication have barely improved. While there are now casts/videos that showcase new patches and offer a big improvement over just changelogs forum posts from Relic are still rare. I've been incredibly happy with the German Community Coordinator Hardy who often posted on the German forums and also quite often in the international ones, but he had to retire since his working permit expired. Besides him I sometimes see the Balancers posting, but I feel especially a lack of interaction from Noun or whoever is responsible for direct interaction with the community. This feeling of not being heard / listened to is a major factor why this community is so bad. People feel ignored which annoys them and they vent their anger. Instead of directly trying to solve this problem at the root and communicating more they blame the community for being toxic. Definitely helping. If you take a look at the Q&As or Ask Me Anything on Reddit most issues are actually not answered, but 'passed on'. I honestly wonder why you do this if you can't answer the questions :\

TL;DR:
I don't like a lot of people in the forum-community, but there are also some really nice and active people. The biggest cause of the problem was the time Relic took to improve CoH2 and the lack of communication which - till this day - exists in one or another form. Fix please for a better future.

There are 50 more enjoyable ways to spend a weekend.

Like being on a forum and posting about a game that one does not enjoy to play? D:

People tend to play videogames to have fun. The majority of tournaments and games in the ESL is without prizes or with only small ones (Premium or such), still that league is running for 15 years plus with growing numbers of participation. In the beginning most tournaments / leagues have only tournaments with fame as prize, because where should the money come from? Advertising is pretty much the only way to make money. Be it the Devs trying to push their own game, sponsorship by hardware companies or plain old ads, that's the only stream of money. Yet why would a company sponsor a game without an active e-Sports scene? Usually first there's no/small prize tournaments, these attract attention and sponsorship and then cause increased interest. Only in recent years this 'kickstarting' a scene was done by developers and companies, putting a lot of money into a game to quickly grow the scene and prevent this slow start. Look at DotA2 or Hearthstone. Yet with such a small and niche game as CoH2? The only way to grow is by having a lot of tournaments / activity.

If people do not like the scheduling, then I guess there are sufficient ways to get rid of that. Set a fixed date, but allow playing earlier if both players agree. Or give 5 playdays/times per week and every player has to select 3 of them. CoH2 simply tends to have too small scenes in every country that local tournaments are too small, but international create problems with the timezones :[ I blame the sun. Would it be shining from all sides but going brighter and darker like a dimmed light we wouldn't have that problem. #EffTheSun

Button has already received a soft nerf in recent times and I think it's a more than fine ability. Why a soft nerf? Guard DP-28 are more expensive than prior. Their role has changed to a completely long ranged squad (LMG profile, the closer they get the less dmg they deal) and tankgun lethality was increased. That means moving in to actually button a tank is more risky and uses up more resources than prior. I personally prefer to use them only defensively - they can take on inf and give me a save point to retreat tanks to, because following into button range is a huge risk. Besides that button can be countered by smoke. I am getting the impression people have not yet caught on to the huge usefulness of smoke shells on mortars. StephennJF showed on some streams great uses for them, barraging an area so he could charge in with Conscripts to LMG Grens, saving tanks with smoke barrages or even fooling his opponent by barraging a different area than the one where he was repairing his tank, so he autoattacked there.

Dropping dem stats like a bird drops.. well.. u kno

Ram still has 160 penetration.
Ramming the rear of tanks is still better than ramming the front, penetration/armor system was not changed.
Upon a ram the T34 will always get 160 dmg, immobilized and lose it's main gun.
If the ram is successful the opponent will get 160 damage and engine dmg (90%), destroyed engine (5%), immobilized (3%), main gun destroyed (2%).
If the ram is deflected the opponent will get 80 damage and a crew shock.

So ram was nerfed, that much is true, yet also the T34 itself got quite a buff meaning that you rely less on rams. As Peter stated in the changelog, it's a last ditch effort and no longer the go-to weapon to take out German heavy tanks.