Profile of Grumpy

Honestly i would prefer to see entire Armour Company as another Tech for USF with some additional arty unit.

Only chance to make m10 working again is to move them to T0 and make it accessable after teching T1 and T2.

Armor Company is probably the commander most in need of fixing.

In addition to making the M10 a call-in, after T1 & T2, I'd like to see the following changes:

1) Make it self-spotting - the open turret meant that its sight would have been as good as anything else in the game.
2) As a counter to making it self-spotting, make it suffer a main gun crit when taking damage from mortars, grenades, or any type of arty. (self-spotting would make it OP otherwise).
3) Allow a MG upgrade, which the real M10 had as an option.
4) Give it a 100 range, 35 muni barrage ability. M10's were often used as mobile arty.

Other changes:

Either give assault engineers a better base RA, or make them a 5-man squad at the same price, and standardize the reinforce cost to something like 26 mp.

Replace the 240mm arty with the old 180mm arty from Mechanized. It rarely hits, but hits too hard when it does.

Replace the elite crew upgrade with just about anything, but preferably a Pershing. If replaced with a Pershing, make the Pershing buildable from T3 and not a call-in. The Pershing would need to be reworked, as it is overpriced and badly underperforms in team games. If not a Pershing, then replace the elite crew upgrade with Easy 8's, which are currently okay for their cost.

Tactical Support Company also needs remaking. The Calliope was badly overnerfed. It doesn't do anything well. The cooldown is too long for it to work as a good area denial unit, and all three barrages don't do enough damage to make it effective versus OKW trucks.

The P47 strafe is a joke. It should be replaced with the P47 loiter, which should also have its price reduced. Along the same line, the P47 recon seems pointless, as it isn't that much different than the major's recon.

Mr Smith did an excellent job and you should all be thankful for his involvement.

So UKF is fine and we should all be happy?

He was incredibly unhealthy for the community, he presented all of his opinions as fact, backed it with bogus data and flamed anyone who disagreed with him. It wouldn't have been so bad if he didn't have the entire moderation team of CoH2.org propping him up on the forums, but it basically came down to discussions being heavily moderated to fit Mr. Smiths balance agenda, giving him and Relic this false sense of justification for all the changes made to the game within the past year or so that he was involved in the balance team. Fast forward to now and here we have arguably more broken factions (and not in a good way, but rather in a painfully obvious underwhelming kind of way). Axis now actually overperforms! (lol, something that the vocal minority has always cried about and is now actually true)

So no, I'm sorry. You can let bygones be bygones but if you actually want a balanced and enjoyable CoH2 in the future I think he is the last person to help deliver that - and I think it's important the community remembers that going forward before you bring about Mr. Smith #2.

That said, I agree with everything else you brought up to an extent. Balance should have always been about bringing the EFA more in line with the WFA using moderate unit tweaks and buffs, and not putting out these sweeping nerfs and radical redesigns. Brits had always been a problem since they released and the changes they received, while welcome, didn't come with compensation and now they severely underperform in some of the most critical areas of the game. I think an early reliable suppression tool, a non-doc snare that isn't tied to a sniper and inconsistent as hell as well as a TD (whatever you want to call the Firefly) that doesn't move and turn its turret at the speed of runny shit would help UKF a lot.

This x1000. Also, the propping up didn't just happen on COH2.ORG, it also happened in the official forums.

Making the tank hunter infantry non-doc and allowing upgrades again would go a long way towards making UKF competitive again. The logic that they were too useful is completely inane when Panzerfusiliers are allowed a snare and extended sight. Evidently it's okay to have OKW units be useful but not UKF.

The Firefly nerfs were badly overdone. The turret rotation and fire rate is so horrible that they don't kill much, and the nerf to tulips made them almost worthless.

We all make mistakes, it's only human and even if so I still blame Relic.

........

But perhaps that would show them how they were wrong in not giving full creative freedom to the community.

Making a mistake once is human, but repeating it.......

The balance team showed their bias in their first patch. Relic seemed to learn from it and the second patch was much better. Unfortunately, they let them "balance" the game again with even less oversight than the first, so they managed to kill two allied factions instead of one.

Giving them full creative freedom would probably allow them to make all three allied factions non-competitive.

I'd be fine if they balanced primarily for elite 1v1 players. I'm not one of those but I'd find a way to adapt. However, even the elite players think the last balance patch is terrible. Relic does own this, because they own the game and let the balance team "balance" by themselves.

PS - blaming scope is a joke when the basic infantry is so unbalanced.

Before you read ....
I urge people to show support for this post on this thread if they care about the ladder map pool.

Thanks for posting the data on maps and win rate. It confirmed what I thought was happening when I played certain maps, such as LaGleize (when it was in) as OKW or Karkhov and both Semoisky's as USF.

I agree that using the veto rate would be helpful but do think the map pool is better than a year ago. Also,some of the problem maps didn't seem to be problems before the last imbalance patch.