Profile of MilkaCow

This is exactly the reason why I gave up. For months whenever complaints were voiced the reply was "We will improve and we are excited about the future", yet not much improvement was visible from my end. It might have improved internally, it might have not, I can't say for I do not know. From what's publicly visible I can't see an improvement.
Yes, there were more patches in the recent time, BUT these were also more direly needed than ever. With most patches breaking the game in a part and then the hotfixes trying to fix it, of course breaking it in another spot.

Updates for July 22nd, 2014 was the major patch.
=> Updates for July 25th, 2014 was the fix for the Call-In costs
=> Updates for July 31st, 2014 was the fix for the Katyusha
=> Updates for August 14th, 2014 was the fix for the Luftwaffe crates

3 out of 3 patches to fix what the subsequent ones broke.

Update September 9th, 2014 was the major patch.
=> Updates for September 10th, 2014 was the fix for a few minor errors / bugs in the previous patch
=> Updates for September 15th, 2014 was the fix for the Assault Engineers
=> Update for September 24th, 2014 was the fix for the Kubelwagen, but also a change to OKW economy

2.5 out of 3 subsequent patches to fix what the subsequent ones broke.

So on that end, I cannot say I saw an improvement. If I look at the community interaction? Yes, there have been minor improvements, but once again nothing groundbreaking. With Cynthia added to the team there was more moderation on the official forum and more interaction on both ones. Yet once again, the interaction was mostly limited to damage control. When War Spoils was released nothing was noted for ages until it became a huge issue.

Bug wise / stability wise there was a massive decline. There was a massive spike of bugs introduced in the WFA release and quite a few still aren't fixed. The fixes to some introduced new ones (see Point 1). The stability was really bad upon WFA release, lots of people had freezes / drops. This improved slightly (drops turned to freezes, which I guess is an improvement). Performance wise it got quite a bit worse for WFA release and subsequent patches increased this downward spiral.


I guess Relic is improving internally so the communities criticism that they aren't sounds extra harsh. Yet vice versa, from the community viewpoint it is not getting better. Relic might improve, but with all those new projects they seem to also increase their internal pressure and the stakes overall, so this probably overshadows all improvements.

I know a few people at Relic are doing a great job (not meaning the rest isn't, but I don't know for the rest ), but it seems Relic seems to have bit off far more than they could chew. Instead of going for improvements and once that's settled go for new projects they seem to be trying to do all at once. I don't know if they need to do that due to financial incentives (need additional income from SP), so if they ever wanted to improve they would have to do it with all the other things right now. I just do not know that.

From my point of view they basically fail and fail and fail again, while at the same time saying they improve. You get your hopes up the first few times, but after a while you just start to turn cynical and sour. Since I recently noticed I thought more and more in a negative / cynical view about it, I just didn't want to bother with it anymore. I wish Braden / Matt / Peter / Noun / Jason / Greg the best for the future, but I just can't believe in Relic improving anymore.

Nothing ever changes. Relic was approached with the NDA issue prior to the public Alpha for WFA. Relic was then approached again towards the end of the WFA Alpha. Both times it was in order to allow some hype, allow at least a few peaks and teases. After the release Relic got approached a third time to improve it for the future. Before we left the Alpha we tried one last time to make an impact and wrote a letter to Relic detailing several issues we had observed, the NDA being one of them. Relic lacks the manpower to discuss balance changes and what they are looking at publicly, but due to the NDA this is forbidden for the testers. Often it takes 2 to 3 months from an issue being noticed to being fixed, not knowing if it gets tackled at all causes unrest.

A NDA works for big companies who have a good marketing team and good post launch support. I feel the only god thing Relic has is a Design team - their game ideas are usually pretty innovative. Due to that the games are somewhat unique, which works well to cover their flaws.

Communication is now over the Battle Server.
If you lag, only you lag. Previously you would cause the game to slow down for all others and therefore not really notice your own lag. That's why people might not have noticed it prior to the switch to battle servers.

When I put my settings too high and actually have lag due performance power (FPS drop / freeze) I cannot move my camera. When I deliberately cause packet drops or connection timeouts the ingame action of the units stops, but I can still move the camera around. Afterwards it speeds up to catch up to the current action as Inverse said. Yet if you cannot move the camera, that seems to be an issue with your performance, not the connection. Feel free to do the same to verify if you do not believe me

AFAIK that the gun is uncrewed is a bug.

You did not give any example of balance changes done in 4vs4 that would that would not be balanced in 1vs1, sorry.But all the changes you see would rather not have much impact in 1vs1.

Thanks would be a great start.

That's because there are almost no balance changes done for 4v4 as the focus seems to be 1v1. This makes it rather hard to list any

All that comes to my mind right now was in WFA Alpha as USF and OKW especially have scaling problems. OKW gets better the bigger the game size, while USF gets weaker simply due to their faction and unit design.

What are the units you think are unbalanced in 4v4 right now and would you buff or nerf them?

very good point. may be axis units' popcap can be slightly larger for many units in 3v3+? and maybe relic will put some manpower on it if so many of these "dont give a shit about 4v4" people stop spewing out "4v4 will never be balanced" etc etc.

also, yes, making current big team games maps perfect will take a lot of time. but some of the maps have glaring issues that alone make the maps exponentially awful. these can be fixed literally in 5 minute, from my experience with the worldbuilder.

I don't think more popcap would be so easy to do since AFAIK Relic has any 'modifiers' for specific gamemodes. That means they would have to clone all the different units for each gamemode as well as the whole underlying structure. That in turn would make it far more complicated to track changes to a unit, as you'd have to change the version for each size and in general greatly increase the complexity for just a little gain.

If you already put that work in, I'd rather have them focus on the roots of the problems instead of trying to fight the symptoms. We talked to Relic about it in the past, but like I said, I think they lack the manpower. The community is requesting a ton from them, which they literally can't do. That's why for most "petitions" where people ask for something I say no. Tons of people here tend to live in a dream world and say I want this, I want that, I want everything. "Yes, new units", "Yes, Soviet redesign!", "Yes, Obs mode!", "Yes, improved War Spoils mode (Trading or crafting)", "Yes, ingame Twitch showcase", "Yes, performance improvements", "Yes, better balance", "Yes, new maps", "Yes, more community interaction / replying to posts in the forums", "Yes, new factions", "Yes, new commanders", ...

Just imagine out of all, you could only choose 2 or at max 3 things. Now you might understand Relic a bit better. They simply do not have the capabilities to do everything and by requesting some luxury features and pressuring them into adding them by directly sending messages to their higher-ups you sacrifice other improvements. Is it really worth it? Personally I think the 3 things that should be priorities right now are performance, bugfixing and obs mode. Yes I know that sounds FUBAR as 4v4 has been a problem since start and is still not fixed, but Relic committed to ESL event and a failure of that would hurt the company as a whole. The first two points still benefit all of the community, only the third one is mostly for 1v1 and 2v2 players. After that's done, go redo the maps and the scaling.

Just some examples from the recent days (Last 8 pages of the CoH2 subforum)

http://www.coh2.org/topic/24518/noun-relic-sega-huge-appeal--epic
http://www.coh2.org/topic/24503/nighttime-versions-of-maps
http://www.coh2.org/topic/24424/let-s-talk-soviet-faction.
http://www.coh2.org/topic/24337/most-requested-unit-in-coh2-history...
http://www.coh2.org/topic/24468/next-possible-changes-for-soviet-fraction.
http://www.coh2.org/topic/22168/war-spoils-%E2%80%93-a-quick-update-by-relic (Replies, not OP)
http://www.coh2.org/topic/20460/soviets--a-core-faction-discussion
http://www.coh2.org/topic/24440/opponent-faction-filter
http://www.coh2.org/topic/24065/a-simple-solution-to-have-a-more-people-playing-allies
http://www.coh2.org/topic/24409/we-need-allied-war-machine-back
http://www.coh2.org/topic/24305/option-to-ditch-the-mgmortar
http://www.coh2.org/topic/24278/coho-bulletin-crafting-profitability
http://www.coh2.org/topic/24255/alternate-ui--eh