Profile of Hogman512

One of the first thing I did was check out the new skins...

Funny story...

I had 1 Heavy skin for OKW out of the set. So 5 other skins missing as they hadn't yet dropped in war spoils (shocker).

Buying the whole pack would have cost me £4.79. However due to the discount, it cost me 0.26p for the other 5 to complete my set. 0.26p TOTAL. Bargain. Maybe even a bug? Ha.

You sure it wasnt activated before engine damage?

Yeah I am sure. I did it multiple times on my Command Panther this afternoon. I also looked more carefully, the button itself is not disabled when you get engine damage either.

Such a badly implemented system on so many levels...

And the funny thing is, that also applies to so much other stuff with CoH2 as well!

Why would they use it? Purely due to Sega?

Honestly, I don't know. They should be using every available opportunity to hype and sell the game - if you market anything well, it will sell well, even if its complete crap. Im not saying CoH2 is crap, but I'm saying, if they did better marketing then they'd sell more units, and the NDA directly inhibits this. It could be down to Sega, but I think this kind of thing has been in the companies DNA before the sega acquisition and probably comes from internal management. I can see why they would want to be a little secretive, showing something in Alpha or even Beta then getting uproar from the community when it gets removed creates another nightmare in itself. But thats down to them not sticking to their guns and being indecisive really.

In my eyes, do a private "public" beta when you have decided what units, abilities are going to be in the patch, then use the beta to test the balance etc, only remove something if it causes stability issues or was a serious mistake. This would tackle the one step forward, two steps back problem we face at the moment.

Personally, I think a lot of the problem related to balance is the fact that there isn't enough unit choice with the armies, there should be a lot more core units to entice different play styles. There shouldn't be only one counter to unit X.

What I don't get is that they keep us waiting months after months after months for small changes that they implement like once every 3-6 months. Why not wait 6 months, in the meanwhile alpha test the shit out of everything you want to implement, get feedback, tweak it, IMPLEMENT EVERYTHING AT ONCE and then use small patches every 2 to 4 weeks, according to feedback, to smoothen things out.

Because unfortunately, software/game development does not work that way. Trust me. And with my experience in dealing with software development cycles, there is never a right way. Do it all at once, half the community complain, do it in dribs and drabs and the other half complain. Its a tough call, and you can never please everyone 100%. Personally, I think the whole situation is made a little worse by the fact Relic have internal procedures (Like NDA) holding them back significantly. I am not going to go into a detailed explanation of this, as some of it would be speculation, but really, for them to improve its going to take their own management to changes their ways - which is probably not going to happen.

If the next patch will take another 3 months, you can expect another decrease in player base. Their decissions are so illogical , it makes me cringe xd

Also agreed, but we have to try and be diplomatic. As I said above, it can sometimes be a loose loose decision for the developer.