Profile of ferwiner

There is no direct way to compare them, both are very good and both snipe models like crazy. There are different circumstances when you want one or the other. It depends on a map, your playstyle and obviously your commander of choice.

First of all, the playstyle part. When you form your grenblob, you will use it differently depending on the weapon of choice. With lmg blob you will attack move it, with g43 blob you will often try to close the gap or flank by issuing move commands.

Then come the maps, on open maps the attack move strategy works better so you will prefer mg42. On city maps you will go either for g43 or even for some pios or pgrens instead of gren blob. In that are somewhere in between these two, g43 blob will be perfect.

Finally, you might not wont to go for g43s just becouse your commander of choice doesn't have them. For example very popular mobile defence commander has no g43s so they are a little out of the loop now.

Additional notes:
- You can't drop g43, so if you are afraid to lose a squad and then fight against lmg conscript or penal, you might prefer this upgrade.
- Lmgs and other automatic weapons do more damage against bigger groups of soldiers than against single ones.
- Lmg takes a lot of time to rotate, that is why it is possible that it won't shoot at all in close quarters engagements.
- G43 is a plain upgrade on all ranges and on the move. Lmg is a better upgrade on long range but a downgrade on short range and on the move. So if you are not sure what to choose, g43 upgrade is a safer bet.

How is Elo determined? I seem to grasp how it is somehow related to rank, but also not related.

Disclaimer: Relic doesn't make their elo values for a player public, so it is not possible to accurately reverse engineer the way it works. That is why this post is based on the way chess elo system works and some assumptions coming from in game experience.

What is certain is that there are two phases of determining your elo and thus rank. First phase is placement matches when the system knows nothing about you and thus tries to find an initial place for you, so you don't have to climb all the way from the bottom. What it does looks similar to binary search withing the ladder. So it gives you average opponent first then, if you win a good player and so on. That is how you can find yourself almost at the top of the ladder if you win 8 to 10 of your first matches. Now the problem with this is that the algorithm still has to use matchmaker to find opponent for you. That means the points used to search the ladder can be far from ideal spots, causing the accurancy of search to drop. In ideal world, where all the right players were searching at the same time as you, such algorithm could possibly determine a placement with accurancy of 2-4 places, depending on the ladder. In reality it can go much further than that.

The other possibility here is that it starts with some middle elo number, like a median and gives you huge K for first 10 matches (as explained further). That also explains how you can end up anywhere in the ladder and how it is so inaccurate.

After your initial placement is determined, you are given an elo number found by the first phase and you will climb or fall in much slower fashion. After you find a match, the average elo of both teams is used to determine probabilty of win for both parties. Then, after you finish a match this probability is used to adjust their ranks. If you win the result is 1, if you lose the result is 0.

Then your new_rank = old_rank + K(result - probability).

For example if your probability of win was only 0.125 becouse your opponent was much better, your old elo was 1000 and K is 32, then your new elo is 1000 + 32(1 - 0.125) = 1028 if you win and 1000 + 32(0 - 0.125) = 996 if you lose. Mind that we don't know what is the actual K that relic uses. In chess it varies from 16 to 32. But in fact it doesn't really matter that much as we don't know the scores either.

Low lethality? The 88 2 shot Shermans, and Stg Panzergrens destroyed infantry up close, of course longer range battles are gonna take a longer time.

Have you ever played an early game in vcoh? Rifles and kar98 volks standing on top of each other and not able to hit. The lethality was not low. It was cringeworthy.

It's all relative. Say instead of nerfing the StuG you buffed all the other tank destroyers to the StuG's level. That'd have the same effect on the StuG. However, it'd also make all tank destroyers more effective relative to generalist tanks. That effectively nerfs all the generalists in tank battles, which wasn't something you were trying to do.

Of course, the point is though that after enough nerfs, units take ages to combat each other and don't feel powerful enough thus killing the immersion. You can argue that infantry and tanks fighting for a minute or so before conclusion give more time for micro and I would agree with that. But on the other hand, in initial design these units were aimed to be powerful beasts that would require tactical thinking before the fight to overcome. Take the old SU-85 for example. You either had to flank or build even bigger TD to counter it. Was it ballanced? In some way, but most people would say it wasn't. Was it fun and full of immersion? Yes it was. So what should have happened was to change the unit in a way that it was more ballanced without loosing its immersion, but what actually happened was nerfing the unit and then nerfing all its counters becouse everything seemed to be OP after such change. So what in fact happened, is not ballancing but taming these beasts so that they are weaker and nobody can say they are OP. Which is what makes game more and more boring in time.

There are in fact two sides of this argument. One is top of competitive community who were once interested in an immersive game but then decided to play it more seriously and the immersive features began to irritate them. On the other side are casual players who play the game for immersion only and get irritated every time some of it is taken away from them. I think I am somewhere in between as I mostly play automatch games, not to see my rank in top 10 but rather to find equal opponents, thus I think I can understand both sides and both competitive and immersive features of the game are important for me.

I can understant the point, although the examples given are terrible. Pak40 hasnt't been nerfed at all this year if I remember correctly. Mortar and stug on the other hand were in the OP condition pretty much since games launch in 2013. So there was more than enough time to play with these toys. And they are both still very viable. Definitely viable enough for any match that is not top 20 competitive, let alone a compstomp.

I guess your best bet is either to read the list linked by Lago every time there is a patch and try to alter your strategies, or just disable updates in steam and play the same version of the game till the end of time.