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#Steam AliasWL%Streak
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Posts: 3111 | Subs: 2
Thread: Some QoL Suggestions (Part II)15 Mar 2023, 08:48 AM
It is so mind bogglingly dumb. Hire a student for a couple of hours and have a real developer check them in the end. They'd be happy for a couple of dollars and Relic has one thing less that just screams 'the game is unfinished'. In: COH3 Central |
Thread: Skillplanes need an IMMEDIATE hotfix14 Mar 2023, 15:50 PM
Probably a slightly crazy take but I actually think the loiters can stay exactly as powerful & impactful as they are right now IF all factions get an AA unit that is exactly as effective vs loiters as the USF M16 Quad. You should be able to dodge heavy offmap damage. Keeping it just leads to everyone being forced to build AA. That's exactly the opposite of varied builds and gameplay. In: COH3 Central |
Thread: The negative user reviews are infuriating14 Mar 2023, 09:52 AM
Yeah I'm sure the player numbers will stay at a solid 4-digit number. But if I check out the first couple of pages of all CoH2 ladders on all factions & modes, I see a lot of "Last match 3+ weeks ago". Which looks pretty decapitated to me in terms of trying to find competitive matches now. The only thing I can say is that I did not have any issues finding games in CoH2. The "filthy casual" tier of players seems to be doing fine. The player numbers are now on the lower end of what CoH2 had over the last years, which means its fully playable. Relic also seems to have solved their issues regarding crashes and drops in CoH2 that occurred directly after the launch of CoH3. They probably allocated too many servers to CoH3 to not enrage even more players with bad server stability if the game already has many other issues, but relocated more server capacity back to CoH2 afterwards.
Aera was talking about CoH2, not CoH3. We'll see what happens long term for Coh3. AoE4 also had low player numbers mid-term but started doing okay after about a year. Is an "okay" game enough to make Relic financially viable long term? I can't tell, but probably enough to support the game for a while. It might lead to more aggressive monetization via MTX and expansions. In: COH3 Central |
Thread: The negative user reviews are infuriating13 Mar 2023, 09:14 AM
Steam has grown a lot, I am looking a the headlines "Steam Tops 7 million users online" in 2013, and today it is 33m online. Yes, this is definitely a good point. But you also cannot expect linear growth. Both Steam and the gaming market have changed drastically since then. In 2013 Steam had roughly 2500 games on the store. Last year alone they released almost 11000 (mostly trash games I guess) spreading the overall players over more games, and strategy games have generally fallen behind in public favor. It's hard to conclude that a game has failed in some way because it only surpassed its predecessor by X%. CoH3 surely does not have the impact on the gaming market that the first two games had. It also does not have to to be financially viable. If we take AoE4 as a rough benchmark (highly advertised, and despite not much novelty it got favourable reviews both by critics as well as on steam and metacritic), CoH3 seems to be roughly half of that. Probably not great, but not bad either for competing with what is probably the largest strategy franchise. CoH2's numbers are surpassed a lot. If Relic managed to financially survive on CoH2, they might manage to survive on CoH3 as well unless they heavily increased their spending (which I do not have any insight about).
What you fail to show is that this is an all in all pretty normal chart. Almost every game has most players at release and retains only a quarter or a third within 1-2 months. Steamdb is down for me and steamcharts does not have the resolution at the respective releases. But from what I remember, CoH2 was down to about a third of the players at release after a good month or so, AoE4 as well iirc. Look at all the Total war games, that are much more focused on replayability and SP campaigns. They all drop the same. If you compare the peaks of CoH3 from a day to day basis, there's not a huge efflux anymore. Numbers still go down, but not that I'd expect the game to be dead soon. We'll see what happens after this weekend, usually people play a lot on the weekend and then drop a game because they start finding it boring or move on, so let's see what happens for the next two or three days. In: COH3 Central |
Thread: The negative user reviews are infuriating12 Mar 2023, 20:20 PM
What I meant to say is that the overall scope of SP has increased vastly. Of the current numbers, more players will hang around in SP than in MP compared to current CoH2 numbers. I also read reviews that said they find it boring, but also ones that found them decent enough (given the omnipresent bugs) to keep playing. I also have not found a proper argumentation why the DAK campaign should be worse than CoH2's Soviet campaign. They will stay a pull factor, especially in the beginning. ... Why would you say the player numbers were low? I don't know about Relic's financials, but they compare very well to CoH2's release and still decently to AoE4's release, which got much more advertisement from what I can tell. And as I've shown before, the player drop is nothing extraordinary, it does not hint at players leaving the game on mass due to completely broken stuff. I guess the next 2-3 weeks will tell if the shine of a "new" game wears off and the semi-casual players will leave or not, but from the current trend, the game is not losing that many players anymore. The majority who did not like it has already left, at least that's what it looks like. In: COH3 Central |
Thread: The negative user reviews are infuriating12 Mar 2023, 16:35 PM
I don't get the talk about player numbers at the moment. CoH3 is doing fine in that regard. Player numbers at release almost doubled compared to CoH2, and the community is rather one that sticks around and revisits the game, especially since there is not much competition in the CoH niche. Losing most of the players in the first month is normal. CoH3's player loss is nothing exceptional. CoH2 went down to a third within a month and that level kept lingering for the next 10 years. It is quite interesting that CoH3 does not seem to have taken many players from CoH2. Relic seems to have achieved their goal of opening up to a larger audience rather than only catering to the current one. One thing that is interesting, but will be impossible to find out is how the players distribute between SP and MP. CoH3's SP is vastly improved, so a higher proportion will play SP only. I guess we therefore can't fully compare CoH2's current player count with CoH3's current player count and make a solid conclusion of the healthiness of the MP. I also don't see anymore that CoH2 will die. Player numbers here have taken only a minor dent. Yes, players will transition if CoH3 improves over the next months, but I don't see CoH2 being a dead game anytime soon. It will keep its own base, probably even a larger one than CoH1. In: COH3 Central |
Thread: The negative user reviews are infuriating10 Mar 2023, 17:06 PM
Seriously? You want a positive review bomb? Players should not publish negative reviews because they are 'fans of the franchise' and because it does not help dragging in new players? This robs them of their right to phrasing their opinion how? What is the point of reviewing at all then if all you're supposed to do is to pad Relic on the back and congratulating them for the dump they've taken? There's both unsubstantiated negative and positive reviews, you're only complaining about the negative ones though. You don't want players to give their honest opinion, at least not if they don't agree with you. If the review is positive, it's alright, if it's negative, it suddenly is low effort, review bombing, nonsensical. And because of that, it allegedly is the fault of the bad reviewers that CoH3 has too little players. You're shifting the blame, nothing else. Relic should fix their game before release, Relic is the only one at fault. At first I really thought this is just a rant of a player that loves CoH3 and disagrees with most reviews, but since you're not only doubling down but even using more crude arguments, you're giving me a hard time of not viewing this as fanboyism. Which really surprises me because I remember your previous posts always as well founded, even if I did not agree with them. In: COH3 Central |
Thread: The negative user reviews are infuriating9 Mar 2023, 17:13 PM
I'll break it down point by point. Bear in mind, if I'll mention steam reviews I don't mean the ones that just consist of "it's good/bad lol", but at least mention a couple of points why they gave a thumps up or down. 1. Why on earth do people constantly harp on about minor unfinished/sloppy elements of the game like icons, weapon symbols and faction flags. I saw someone on reddit declare that usage of old icons to be "UNACCEPTABLE" and the primary reason he gave a negative review. In one of the youtube reviews the guy demonstrates how he can recreate the faction symbols in 5 minutes in photoshop. He literally spends more time on this tangent than he does talking about gameplay. How dense do you have to be to completely ignore the actual GAME. You know ... the part that matters. If you dislike the gameplay we can agree to disagree. But to just brush over it and complain about the menu art instead is just infuriating. They do, because the game is not finished to a an extend that you should expect from a release. Since it overall works as a game, but has just so many smaller rough edges, you'll have to list those rough edges. I it is not only the icons, but the sum of all the issues. And the icons are one where it is just strikingly obvious that Relic cheaped out or misplanned or whatever, especially because they are rather quick and easy to do. Yet, Relic did not fix them. 2. Why do people who are guaranteed to play the game for thousands of hours and basically have CoH as a mainstay hobby give negative reviews? Steam reviews primarily communicate to the general public. If someone unfamiliar with CoH comes across the newest iteration and sees shit reviews they will likely never get into the series. I have a hardcore CoH2 1v1 player in my friendlist that has like 4000 hours in the game and still has a negative review complaining about balance issues. Why? How does that make sense? So many people don't even know CoH or are only vaguely familiar with it. And in my experience almost everybody you show and explain the game to ends up liking it. So why scare off that crowd just because of your own agenda? For your example regarding your friend, I fully agree with you. For CoH3, no one is guaranteed to play thousands of hours. They played maybe 10, 20, 30 hours, they're free to give a negative review. 3. Why do people completely neglect the strong aspects of CoH3? Doesn't the fact that we have 4 factions and amazing performance make up for some of the shortcomings? Isn't having 4 factions upon release preferable over having a super polished game in terms of interface and multiplayer functionality? Maybe not, but then it would be more of a case of relic being overly ambitious in their desire to provide a lot of bang for your buck. No one would have complained if it was just two factions at release, but they went the extra mile and maybe that cost us polish. A steam review is not a journalistic piece, but from your points I get the feeling that you kind of expect everyone to list pros and cons. That would obviously be desirable, but the casual nature of steam reviews lends itself to players either giving a positive or negative review and then just writing why they chose what they chose. This goes both ways, you'll also find many positive reviews just writing positive things. Overall, I don't see your point here. It's ordinary steam reviews, nothing special. 4. A bigger playerbase would be so cool, but people actively prevent this from happening by shitting on the game. And I absolutely loathe the high and mighty do-gooder argument that this needs to be done because the gaming industry deserves a lesson about early releases. This is after relic already delayed the game and it is obvious that they ran out of options. Of course the same people would also agree that working conditions in the gaming industry are horrible and that pre release crunch should be avoided. With the amount of stuff missing and place holders in the game, Relic heavily misplanned. That's an error of the management, nothing else. The original release date of November is a testimony to this. They should have either opted for a smaller game or delayed for longer. They might have been under financial pressure. But then again, their business decisions are none of my business, and I can't know either. I can only judge their product, which they put out to the public and labelled as "finished" for their release. Seeing CoH3 as an unfinished product that should have gotten more polishing before release is fair critique. Blaming the critics for the small player base is unfairly shifting the blame. It's Relic's responsibility to fix their own product and ensure longevity, not the customer's responsibility to neglect problems so that more people buy the product. 5. Anyone german who gave a negative review because there is no german voice acting needs to seriously ask themselves if they would actually NOT RECOMMEND CoH to someone new for that reason. Is that really sufficient to make CoH3 a bad game? REALLY? The average German's english is light years behind the Dutch or Scandinavians so maybe it's time that we stop putting our own voice acting over everything? I personally find these types of critique petty as well. German however has quite a large base of native speakers that are also used to audio synchronization. Many other games provide that service, CoH3 doesn't. It might tie in to all the other aspects showing that CoH3 has been rushed. It's stupid to base your whole review on it. But then again, there's also a lot of positive reviews with no substance, and I don't see you complaining about those. Overall, your thread mostly reads like your new favourite game is being criticized partially unfairly and you want to rant about it. You can do this for sure, but if you want higher quality reviews, then maybe don't read the ones on steam. In steam's system, you're expected to read multiple reviews and distill out the essence yourself, otherwise it does not work at all. You're trying to shoot the messenger, not the one responsible for the message. In: COH3 Central |
Thread: Unequal resource income8 Mar 2023, 22:38 PM
Neither are good examples for CoH. Steel division still has a balanced economy over all phases and does not allow you to modify your economy as far as I am aware. Imbalances are meant to create attack and defense phases. AoE is exactly the opposite: you're responsible for your own eco, which makes it easier to balance strong eco vs strong combat factions. CoH has a pretty much fixed income. If you boost the eco, worse combat performance is mandatory, which is a problem in a game with fixed and rather low unit cap and focus on unit preservation. In: COH3 Central |
Thread: Aftermath's Feedback/Wishlist8 Mar 2023, 18:42 PM
There's a lot of aspects - some already implemented - that go either way. I don't share your comparison to the tac map or auto reinforcing. The 'mechanics' and impact are just too different. The mini map does not show you new info, it is just an overview of what is going on. It reduces the micro of needing to skip to three different positions on the battlefield to get all the info and lets you focus on overall unit movement. The auto reinforcement reduces mindless clicking. In short, they both reduce things that I would not call a core feature of RTS games and free up time for the core loop itself. Marking and tracking units however is different. I see this as a core mental part of RTS: Being able to estimate the enemy's strength in a position, weak points, how far you can push etc. Because this info directly influences your decisions, movement and positioning. Auto reinforcement and having a mini map do not change the core gameplay, they remove tedious tasks. There is a point however that I think is much closer: Being able to see which player controls each unit, as well as stats like the aforementioned veterancy status. These also allow you some form of unit tracking. However, e.g. being able to see the enemy's vet vastly reduces frustration and imprpves readability, because the vet provides an explanation how the fight plays out. You could argue that you should not be able to see who the unit belongs to, since you'd then need to figure out yourself by sheer unit presence if you're beingteamed up on or not. Technically, it would be good for gameplay, but not fair for mixed teams, since teaming up on one single player would be obvious by the units you see. That would be closer to ypur original point. However, just like for yout would not be a major point of discontent for me, but I weight the downsides heavier than the advantages. In: COH3 Central |
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