Profile of Inverse

Any pay-to-play commander that is even marginally usefull WILL give an advantage to a player who purchases it simply by virtue of giving that player more options, thereby making that player less predictable and more difficult to prepare for.

The real question is whether that advantage is a substantial one. At a tournament level, I personally think the advantage it gives is substantial enough to be notable, but Relic has been good about giving players access to everything for tournaments so it's less of an issue, even though preparation with/against those commanders is still problematic because you need to buy them before tournaments if you want to practice them.

But in ladder games? Assuming proper balance, the extra options don't really give a ladder player that great an advantage. There are a million factors that matter more in a ladder game.

Basic match ranks say literally nothing about skill. It's a simple measure of time played, and you can see that by looking at a player's steam profile.

They're not OP; I'd say they're the hardest faction to win with 1v1. You really have to use Stags to even stand a chance, and even then you don't have a reliable means of dealing with Grenspam against a good player.

People dislike Brits because they're poorly designed and boring to play against. I personally don't mind playing against them because it's fun microing snipers against a faction that has no reliable counter for them, but aside from that the matchup is ridiculously boring. Just spam Grens with schreks, get KT, win game.

Good Brit players who know how to use vehicles well are extremely fun to watch and play against, however. The thing is, you can have a decent amount of success at lower levels with Brits by just massing infantry and building a few emplacements. That's easy for good Wehr players to beat, but it's fucking boring, and it takes a long time.

If a patch doesn't change any stats files, all you have to do is edit the replay with a hex editor and change the game version to the current patch version and the game will recognize and run it fine. It's simple really, the game version is stored in the first 4 bytes of the replay.

CoH2's engine is just an overhauled version of vCoH's engine. It would take a whole lot of major code changes in order to allow replays from previous versions to be played after patches. It likely wouldn't be worth it for Relic to add a feature like that.

You guys realize disconnecting and drophacking are two entirely different things right? If I'm playing against you and I ragequit and pull the plug, or ALT-F4 and leave the game without properly surrendering, it's going to show as a disconnection to you. But you're going to get the win, and I'm going to get the loss, 100% of the time. No exceptions. You probably won't even get a dispute, because the server knows I disconnected, and it knows you're still connected, and it's going to award the win to the player who's still connected to the server. Pulling the plug hasn't been a drophack since early in vCoH; hell, even later in vCoH it's pretty obvious that Relic had implemented more robust connection checking for disconnections. Anecdotal evidence, of course, but I had thousands of games and an insanely high trust rating, but if I was the cause of a disconnection (internet outage, computer crash, etc.), I got the loss every single time.

This is how CoH2's multiplayer is structured. Disclaimer that all of this is pure speculation based on the limited information Relic has released, but I do this sort of thing for a living and I have a decent understanding of what is possible in Relic's server architecture. It would be great if someone from Relic could clarify matters, but I think that is unlikely; they aren't going to admit if their system has a vulnerability or is exploitable in some way, so I'm probably the best you'll get.

Anyways, vCoH's connection model was pure peer-to-peer. The server facilitated matchmaking and stat tracking, but once you were in the game you didn't interact with the server in any meaningful way. This is why you could get a "Disconnected from Relic Online" message in the middle of a match and continue playing, even though stats wouldn't be counted at the end. It also meant Relic had no record of the state of games in progress, so they had to rely on game clients reporting the game outcome after the match had completed.

CoH2, on the other hand, uses a pseudo client-server model. All players are connected to a central node and send their commands to that central node, which in turn relays the commands to all players in the game. This is distinct from vCoH's system which had players communicating directly with one another and sending commands directly without a relay server. The downside to this model is if the server crashes, the game ends. Also, because you're connected to a remote server instead of directly to your opponent, you may experience higher ping in some situations. But it comes with a huge benefit: Relic knows a hell of a lot about every game that's played.

We already know Relic is leveraging this structure for anti-cheating purposes. Another nice bonus is how much easier it makes handling disconnections. Every time you play a game of CoH2, you and your opponent connect to a common central node. If I disconnect from the game, the central node knows this. It also knows that my opponent is still connected. It's going to show on your screen as a disconnection, but the server already knows how it's going to score the game. The player who remains connected is obviously going to receive the win.

Alternatively, something catastrophic could occur. The server could crash, or the server's internet connection could be terminated, or the routing to the server could be disrupted, or the server could simply be overloaded with requests and fail to respond in a timely manner. In all of these situations, the server lacks the information required to make a definitive judgement. That's when it resorts to the trust system, and that's when you might get losses that you feel you don't deserve.

It's also the only way you can "drophack". Simply pulling the plug does nothing, because it's just going to give the other player the win. Instead, you have to trick the server into one of those catastrophic states I mentioned above. That means compromising the security of the server itself, or exploiting a vulnerability in the server software that allows you to manipulate it in some way, or forcing you off your connection by spamming your IP with junk packets. These are all, to put it lightly, extremely difficult to do. Compromising the security of a machine is no simple feat, obtaining your opponent's IP address is not possible through the game client, and there likely aren't any known security vulnerabilities yet. If one did exist, someone would have to write a stand-alone application to exploit it; search around and you won't be able to find one.

So please, please stop complaining about drophacking. It's not what you think it is, and it has likely never happened to you. Sync hacking is a much bigger problem, since it's nearly impossible to prevent and more difficult to detect server-side. But even then, given the changes to server architecture Relic has implemented, I'm sure there's a record of every single sync hack game in a database somewhere in Vancouver.