Profile of Inverse

You want to attack a guy's livelihood because you disagree with how he balances a video game? Do you have any idea how ridiculous that makes you look?

The core of the original design team is at Smoking Gun, and a few other major players have left (Josh Mosqueira and Taylor Fales come to mind), but most of the team is likely the same.

The original game had a brilliant design at its core, but the support it got post-release was absolutely terrible. A few examples for those of you who don't believe me...

They actually forked the game into two branches before they released Tales of Valor, using one branch to develop a balance patch and the other to develop the new expansion. They released the balance patch (2.400) a week before the expansion, but nobody at Relic thought to merge the balance and expansion branches together. So when the expansion came out, it had none of the balance changes that had been released a week before. They added some later, but most were never recovered, and a lot of people believed that 2.400 felt like the most-balanced patch in history.

They broke how MGs functioned in buildings inadvertently, but nobody there knew how to fix it, so they played it off as a feature and had their community manager at the time (Thunder) come out and say they were working on new UI elements to supplement this "feature". Though they polished it some in later versions, the promised UI improvements still haven't ever been released.

The only example of quality support from Relic in CoH1 was the 2.602 balance patch, which was really the work of one designer (Taylor Fales/Mora) working largely in his own time with a dozen or so top players on ironing out the game's core balance concerns. Taylor isn't at Relic anymore, and that level of community interaction hasn't been seen since Peter's involvement with top CoH1 players during the CoH2 alpha and beta. Even then, it felt like Peter never had the executive power to make balance decisions that Taylor had.

CoH1 prospered in spite of Relic's negligence, because it was a novel concept with an amazing design. CoH2 doesn't have the luxury of novelty or amazing design unfortunately.

Good read so far on this post.. I don't mean to go off track, but...

Most good Coh players always have been Euro players?? Really? Hook me up with a link to the ranking system that proves that.. If you don't mind...

It was 100% true in vCoH. Only really notable North American vCoH players I can think of off the top of my head were Marinez, nystrom, and Gosu. The rest were all Europeans and Russians, and eventually Koreans in the last few years of competitive play.

CoH1 never really had a huge problem with blobs, at least at high levels. Sure, they're easy to win with at lower levels, but every game is going to have strategies that are easier to execute than defeat at lower levels. In tournament play you never really saw blobbing in the traditional sense because every semi-competent player could defeat it. You would see infantry-heavy strategies from time to time, sure, but a player who blobbed was always a player who was extremely predictable and extremely easy to take advantage of.

The best players of every faction used a variety of units because that was just the best way to play, and the best way to ensure wins, even though it was harder to execute. If you lost to blobs in CoH1, chances are you just weren't playing properly against them.

There hasn't been a competitive RTS game released since SC2 (aside from HotS), so you can't really say competitive strategy games don't sell well, especially since SC2 has sold pretty well over its life, even if its player base has been shrinking lately.

The big test will be when Artillery's new RTS comes out. It's being developed specifically for competitive play, and I'm really interested to see how well it does, and how fun the game itself actually is.