Profile of SmokazCOH

It could work if they had to pay full manpower for their base stats, which it's clear that they are not doing atm, because since you do not pay munitions for the AT rifles their imaginable cost have to be factored into the manpower price.

A very soft brained comparison to grens shows the small difference in EHP - 80 x 4 x 1.5 vs 80 x 6 x 1.5... bascially one could argue that a rifles only guard squad would be paying 133% as much for their 150% of grens surviviability.

I'm not sure how the gren rifles and the guard rifles measure up. Do guarsd carry the same rifles as the conscripts, and is this rifle equal to the gren rifle? In that case they would be reasonably priced at 360 manpower for a "vanilla" guard squad. If not, it's hard to say.

I think relic's design on this unit is a bit of like the coh 1ranger, but the thompsons rangers had was a was actually a very strong AI weapon. Maybe they simply dont want the overlap of lmg only guards completely overlapping the function of shocks or conscripts or adding what would be a defensive six man soviet grenadier.

It's pretty tacky to start an argument with an insult, but whatever. I don't think anybody can really argue that DLC is a problem in and of itself. The real problem lies in execution.

Well I guess we are both tacky then. It's a nice van and I'm willing to share.

Dota 2 and LoL are two games that rely entirely on DLC and microtransactions for their revenue streams. However, everything purchasable in Dota 2 is cosmetic, and my understanding with LoL is that everything you can buy that affects gameplay can also be earned through normal play (haven't played, so someone can correct me if I'm wrong).

They also make money on tournment tickets and advertisements in streams/tournaments.

Although it's a frail technicality believe there was a point in LOL where you payed for early access to heroes - I have no idea idea if this still stands, but it was argued by people before me that this gave a competitive advantage since you got early used to the heroes etc. I'm not sure how this extended to tournaments and hero bans and whatever.

Im compelled to believe that Relic marketing decided that strong commanders and no big nerfs to them made for enticing DLC to a much higher degree than the cosmetics.
Primarily because the cosmetics are really limited. Cosmetics in dota are of much higher craftsmanshift than the cosmetics of COH2. It's a unfair comparison because obviously people would be offended/put off by the type of creativity in coh 2 cosmetics that you get in Dota. There just isn't much to make money off here, especially if they open up for user-created skins.

You make a lot of comparisons to MMOs and games in other genres, but you don't talk at all about other RTS games, which strikes me as a little odd. Even if we ignore the fact that Relic tried a similar business model with CoHO and it tanked, we just have to look at sales figures (Source) to see that three of the four best-selling RTS games ever (Starcraft, SC2, and WC3) also had thriving competitive multiplayer communities. They had/have entire industries built around them. Of course, correlation does not imply causality, but it's still an interesting thing to consider. There seems to be a pattern here.

I'm gonna just post it one more time what I actually wrote:

- competition may have a lot of fringe effects helping profit, but:
- competition without a way to tax viewers or advertise is not economically significant to a publisher


I am 100% behind you that poor balance screws competietion over. But not to the degree that it makes competetiveness unviable on its own, we have to consider the whole product and therefore the whole smiluation. I would like to mention starcraft like you do, but I think the difference in depth of the simulation makes such a comparison pretty weak. COH is defined by a little RNG, starcraft is defined by the lack of it.

Moving ahead from that, I think we can both agree that there is no big industry curently for COH2.

Furthermore, your claim that a competitive scene gives nothing to a developer is patently false. How often do you see Valve and Riot advertise Dota 2 and LoL? They don't have to, because they know they can get people to watch their games and generate exponentially more interest that way than they could traditionally. Riot believes so strongly in this that they fund 16 professional teams, pay all salaries, and hold extremely lucrative tournaments. They don't do this to be nice to the scene; they do this because they believe it will make them money. And LoL has probably been the most popular game outside WoW for the last few years.

(again)

- competition may have a lot of fringe effects helping profit, but:
- competition without a way to tax viewers or advertise is not economically significant to a publisher

I didn't speak in absolutes here.

I try to avoid advertisement in general as much as I can, but I'd like to point out the general function of this "competetive investment" is to create more revenue. It was close to paid henchmen in the light of their streaming contracts, something they had to go back on. We are hard pressed to not see it like that they wanted to control this player group as a primarily advertising group, not as competitive players. The main point follows:

Nobody is going to argue that making a competitive game in any genre equates to success. It's equally stupid, however, to claim that a thriving competitive scene gives nothing back to a developer. When you rely on post-launch microtransactions to make money, you want to attract a large and dedicated fanbase. Historically, the best way to attract such a fanbase in an RTS is by making a game that is well-received by competitive players and giving those competitive players the tools and means to promote your game as best as they can.

A competitive scene that they do not control or create a industry for is not making them any significant money.

We don't really disagree on much, in fact we see things very similarily in the last post you see. There just isn't much of a future here with the current model.

Assigning prices based on DPS alone turns out simple because platform survivability makes a huge difference, not to mention how many men you can lose before the weapon must be retreated to be kept (3 for lmg grens).

But the problem I think sov players feel is not the pricing, but the nerf to the dps. They would have prefered a strong but more expensive weapon, since their main issue is that they want to use conscripts but they fall off so fast without a weapon upgrade.

So it's kinda less important that the 10 muni are okay price for performance

The impact of op DLC spam on lost sales and it's supposed reduction in competitiveness leading to "ded gam" is just teenager conjecture. Sorry if you felt called out, greeeb, it's just so hard to read all this ideology crammed into analysis of corporate behaviour when there's really only one important factor: securing revenue.

If we look to MMORPG models a base concept there is adding on content when people are "maxed" to keep them playing. Keeping "maxed out players" advancing secures two things: a community ready to receive new players ensuring the health of new sales while also securing the continuing income from old sales.

So you see - once the vast majority of COH2 players reach level 100 - Relic will add a patch with new bulletins and a higher level cap. Or something functionally similar. It will probably be free too - but it will coincide with DLC content.

Some other stuff to think about:
- Short term profit is not independently a problem
- competition may have a lot of fringe effects helping profit, but:
- competition without a way to tax viewers or advertise is not economically significant to a publisher

As for competiveness and coh: having a big following on gamereplays and to a lesser degree here doesn't change the fact that people were competing for breadcrumbs compared to what we see in LOL and Dota 2.

DLC pays for further development, both good and bad. I think this model is here to stay, in fact, I think DLC is just the first steps. In the future we will see the following:

You buy a subscription to a game where you don't even remotely own the IP. In the long run this is inefficient, so cross-platform Steam and similar providers come up with a new idea: why not just make generalized monthtly packages that you can subscribe to?
In 2020, you buy the right to play games from a catalogue, and there are different catalogues. Newer games require newer subscriptions or "bypass" fees for singular titles. There might be a monthly fee of 100$ with small fees like 2-5$ for unlocking a title for use.

Initially you would think that this would give the customer more power. Imagine a mass exodus of customers cutting the monthly revenue, this would decidedly force a developer that wants to run a game for years to take action in accordance to community demands.

But what happens is the big corporation effect, Steam and the other providers can take blows to defend the developers and publishers to avoid this kind of democratic protest achieving too much. But there might be different providers of different size. Its not hard to imagine the Indie Game provider, with lower cost for less production value titles.

Generally the video game genre will produce a lot of crap both from big productions and small productions, much like the movie industry. If you compare you see the exact same thinking in both:

- Blockbuster titles of their genre, Compare Splinter Cell or Metal Gear solid to Jason Borne or James Bond
- A lot of genre/cliche titles that will generate some money anyway because it has a following that always buys these titles (RPG, JRPG vs Shallow anime shwos)
- The publisher demands regarding "what sells" going up against storytellers and attempts to educate or surprise the audience