I respect your opinion and looking forward to counter arguments. Forgive me for completely disregarding your blatant adhominemism.
I speak only with arguments. Naturally, I respond only to them.
The community cannot balance shit, because this is normally a job reserved for real professionals who have in-depth knowledge of what "balance" means in the context of the game to be made. The players should only be there to give opinion on closed environments. Something like what all good RTS companies have done since the dawn of time. AoE and AoEII had 200 ppl closed betas that met more like pals for a nice evening than gamers.
1. CoH2 designers never had a good understanding of CoH multiplayer gameplay, maybe with the exception of Peter Qumsieh. I don't think any of them would even make such a claim. Most balance team members throughout CoH2 history on the other hand had great game understanding as proven by their records as players and contributions in forums.
The community cannot balance shit, because the players want their own faction to win. As they are not designers, they don't realize the scale of balance and also the model which seeks to be adopted. Most players, myself included, act emotionally to some things. I can't even get a grip on the number of times when many people lost to a specific unit, calling it OP and demanding its nerf.
2. Most balance team members do not have faction bias. Faction bias is an idea that gets thrown around by forum warriors but doesn't really exist among top players nor most balance team members.
I guess I'm kinda nostalgic, seeing that COH 1 didn't really have that many updates (leaving aside expansion packs). It was a game. You liked it, you played it as it was. You didn't like it, you didn't play it again. It was simple. I realize it was horribly unbalanced in many departments (too USF friendly in some aspects, particularly PE vs USF)
3. There were plenty of patches throughout CoH1 history.
4. CoH1 in its final and most enduring form (2.602) is anything but US favored. There is a vast consensus that Wehrmacht is clearly overpowered both against Brits and against US. US vs PE is considered fairly balanced. PE vs Brits is considered pro brits iirc.
RTS is slowly dying, let's not kid ourselves. I hope Relic won't fuck this up. AOE4 seems decent and its numbers are healthy. I can see there still is a demand.
5. There is no indication that RTS are slowly dying other than Starcraft doing poorly, which is in large part due to Blizzards demise. AoE4 is doing well, AoE2 has been growing recently, CoH2 has had a consistent playerbase for years and even went through several periods of small growth.
What I meant in depth was that there are more ways to balance a mechanic rather than a straight up numbers game.
6. CoH2 literally consists of numbers. Any process of changing the game is a "numbers game" as you call it. You make no alternative suggestions.
Maybe if there is a new system in place. Who knows. Asymmetrical balance is not and should not be a stats game.
7. Meaningless sentence.
They took the foundation of an assymetrically balanced RTS game with excellent flavor and maybe not so great mechanics and they made it into a bland 5 faction reskin game.
8. Factions losing their flavor through redesign is not the balance team's fault. It happened at a time when relic was still in full control.
I still enjoy it because I consider myself pretty good at it
9. Proof?
Take the original game: SOV vs OST was the perfect example of the asymmetrical balance in the devs' vision. Both factions had the basic tools (MG, AT, Snares) but with very different capacities. P4s were generally more expensive but more sturdy while T34s were shit piles that cost nothing and were reliable generalists. That's what I mean.
Sure, the balancing was never good. I accept that or rather, I just grew to it.
10. The balancing of Ost vs Soviet in the vanilla game was really good pre WFA release. The gameplay on the other hand was extremely stale.
SOV vs OST was the perfect example of the asymmetrical balance in the devs' vision. Both factions had the basic tools (MG, AT, Snares) but with very different capacities.
11. That is ltierally the one balance philosophy the balance team has followed throughout all these years. And you see it as the original vision that the balance team has betrayed?
What we have today is a desperate attempt to make all factions play the same, because the only real base the COH2 game has (and I am including myself in those) are the hardcore factionists. That means that balancing has become an impartial job (I think most of balance team is axis players, correct me if I'm wrong). Normies have long given up on COH2 for exactly that reason.
12. The only axis player in the balance team was Sander. All other players played all factions.
Normies have long given up on COH2 for exactly that reason.
13. They have not. Playernumbers have not declined during the last 5 years. If anything they have gone up. So unless there is a group of "non-normies" that has joined the game while the "normies" left, which makes no sense, your statement is false.
Just look at all the build orders for COH2.
3 line inf -> T1 -> MG -> AT -> Mortar -> T3 -> Elite Inf -> T4 -> Tanks.
14. As previously said, this build order makes no sense regardless of time, gamemode or faction.
They didn't even bother to adjust the tools or the playstyle. They just straight up downplayed some stats and overplayed some others. They did that to the other factions too. That is not balancing, that is a band aid solution at best. Half the updates from the release of WFA until roughly 2017 were nerfing and upping and nerfing and upping okw units.
15. You described the process of balancing in vague terms and then say that it's not balancing. Meaningless.