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The thing is, in the case of SC2 and Dota 2, those communities never shrunk. The rate at which they grew is of course going to be related in some way to the rate at which the games themselves grew, but the competitive communities never shrank. CSGO's community, on the other hand, was tiny until Valve took it over and finally fixed some of its major design problems.
CoH2 is taking the CSGO trajectory much more so than the SC2 or Dota 2 trajectories, except Relic hasn't shown any willingness to reconsider problematic core design decisions like Valve did when they took over CSGO. Without Valve's intervention, that game would've died a long time ago.
As for comparisons to CoH1, I feel it's totally fair because failing to retain your most dedicated player base in your sequel is a major failure for a multiplayer game. If CoH2 were at least as compelling competitively as CoH1 was, there is absolutely zero reason that the game could not have at the very least maintained its numbers. But that didn't happen, and now the competitive CoH1 and competitive CoH2 communities are almost entirely segregated in terms of who has played which game at a high level. In SC2, Dota 2, and to a lesser extent CSGO there's a large amount of overlap between the different versions of the games; in CoH2 there's almost zero. |
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Sure, that's a possibility. But when we look at sequels to games that resulted in larger and healthier competitive communities than their predecessors (see SC2, Dota 2, CSGO), the growth of those games corresponded with major growth in the forum hubs of their competitive scenes (TeamLiquid, HLTV.org, Dota's various communities and the new ones that popped up after its success). Those forums grew exponentially alongside the growth of their respective games. The fact that it happened not once, not twice, but three times with three separate games is pretty compelling evidence that people aren't simply replacing forum usage with other mediums.
Compare that growth to the community situation for CoH2. The GR CoH2 portal is essentially nonexistent. The daily active membership on COH2.ORG is a fraction of what the GR CoH1 portal enjoyed. There were regularly 800-900 concurrent users browsing the GR CoH1 portal before CoH2's release; the most concurrent users ever on COH2.ORG is 775.
These other games have more popular streamers with more viewers, better observer functions, and more penetration of services like YouTube. Yet in each and every instance, rather than shrinking like your hypothesis would suggest, growth of these games' competitive scenes correlated with growth of their main forum hubs for competitive play. Looking at forum activity and member numbers, CoH's forum hub for competitive play has shrunk since CoH2's release. It doesn't instill much confidence in the strength of CoH2's competitive scene. |
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I mean something like that on the scale of an SNF season, not just a simple weekend tournament.
And yeah, by itself it doesn't really say anything. It's just a combination of a lot of different factors, that being one of them. There is, in general, less discussion about how to play well, less drive to produce content geared toward competitive play, etc. Based on your numbers there are more people playing and watching CoH now than in the past, yet there are less people participating in the game's competitive community. There are far less people active here than were active on GR. There's less proper discussion and more balance bitching. There are 16x more strategy threads on GR's CoH1 forums but only 2x more balance threads.
There might be more eyes, but there's dramatically less actual activity. |
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It depends on what you mean by "future". People will play it as long as the servers stay up, but it won't grow, and there won't be a proper competitive scene. |
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That's pretty good. Has there been a proper tournament since then? I'm curious if that level of interest can be maintained. |
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Sure, comparing number of threads posted is a bit of a stretch, but even if you break it down into threads per year the amount of CoH1-related strategy discussion is exponentially larger than similar CoH2-related talk. When you also consider the relative lack of replay activity and participation in competition-focused communities like this one, it goes a long way to suggest that fewer people are actively invested in the competitive scene. There was RelicNews and the official forums back in CoH1 too, but the people who were interested in competitive play went to GR, just like they go to COH2.ORG for CoH2. The difference in size between GR's CoH1 section and COH2.ORG in terms of raw user numbers is striking.
You're correct about CoH2 having more money in tournaments, but I'd argue that it's a bad sign that the community with less money in it appeared to be more engaged than the community with greater financial incentives. As for viewer numbers, the only hard figures I've personally seen compared SNF seasons 4 and 5, and showed season 4 (the last CoH1 season) as having both more viewers and more consistent viewer numbers. If you have hard numbers on more recent tournaments, I would be interested in seeing them.
There's no hate here, I don't care what people spend their time on or what they enjoy. I was simply presenting a potential line of reasoning for why former CoH1 competitive players lack interest in competitive CoH2, based on my personal opinion of the matter. |
I gave evidence to support my opinion. If you disagree with any of that evidence, please, feel free to say so, and to provide supporting evidence of your own  |
Nah, just calling out ignorance when I see it |
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Except it's ignorant of the truth of the situation, which is that 99% of those players aren't "struggling down the ladders"; they aren't playing, period, because they don't like the game. |
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Comparing CoH1 2 years in to CoH2 2 years in doesn't make sense because CoH1 wasn't a sequel. Having an active, involved competitive community and then losing that community in your sequel is a major failing for any company, and it should be considered as such. If CoH2 were as good as or better than CoH1 from a competitive perspective, then the competitive community would have only grown. But the competitive community shrunk. I think that tells you something.
As for raw player numbers, the two are comparable. I'd say CoH2's player numbers right now are right around what CoH1's player numbers were before CoH2 came out, if not higher. |
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