Profile of MajorBloodnok

COH3 is missing QoL features you expecting
COH3 is not using new powerful processors to implement new mechanics.

It just feels dated and it is all Relic fault

The COH franchise is a niche game. TBH, there is a finite amount of tanks, trucks, and arty you can simulate. It is the disadvantage to playing an historical game which tries to encourage a degree of immersion, when that franchise extends over 3 iterations in a 17-year period. I am not one of those who believes in change for change's sake. To that extent, the franchise will always feel dated, since there are certain aspects best preserved rather than changed.

As to mechanics, I fear you may be howling to the moon. If anything, mechanics have gone backwards in this iteration and so Crush has gone; arty is mostly unimpressive; DevM has done heroic things to reign in the skillz planes; replays may emerge; spectator mode is silent, Surrender button seems lost in space and the UI is all over the shop.


Audio is now in recovery after being on life-support. Who in the name of Hades thought it sensible to have Machine Guns sound tinny?

I could see the reason for limiting modding if the Shop was selling good, saleable skins and other paraphernalia, but the Shop is off and the modders cannot understand why they are blocked. After all, if a Modder produces a really interesting set of skins, they still could not be used in automatch unless Relic became attracted and wanted to snap up the idea.

Similarly with maps, there is a complete dearth of good maps. Relic should be encouraging the community to make maps, since the evidence over the first two iterations of the franchise is that dedicated mappers and modders can produce results as good as the official Relic devs. And this is where the problem lies, I suspect.


In a nutshell, the current Relic devs must accept that they have their equals in the community: Relic Devs should be supervisors now as much as they should be creators. 4 current Relic Devs come from the community and at least one in the past. That is not an accident: the community is the seedcorn for this game.

Relic subcontractors from the community who never joined their staff included the artist, Rita (B)rush, while some non-Dev mappers had their creations formally acknowledged including WhiteFlash and Onkel Sam, and many other mappers had their creations enter automatch, at least for a while. Then there were the various unofficial balancers including Sturmpanther, who at least understood that in 3s and 4s, asymmetric balancing was antipathetic to those modes, whereas balancing in 1v1 and probably 2v2 is a different matter. But still Relic persists in one size fits all, whereas it is patently obvious that revving up in a 4s, for example, you can't wait for fuel to flood through and build the heavies that 1v1 deprives you mostly. Using the Tiger in 4s is a different concept from using the rare Tiger in 1v1. 4s forces the use of ATGs and arty. 1v1 can't do it all.

Why can't 3s and 4s be balanced separately with some similar units but different values? Cut down on light vehicle play for those modes. That was the big miss for COH3.


And last, as Steel Pact showed, there is a lot more that Relic could have done with inclusion of minor armies including Poles, Free French, Canadians, and sub-units of the German army including the Scandinavians and Dutch - Wiking from memory, although Imperial Dane will no doubt correct me if I am wrong. Partisans could have easily been adopted.

what music is this sung to?

Champion the Wonderhorse.

https://community.companyofheroes.com/coh-franchise-home/company-of-heroes-3/blogs/62-wire-report-june-23-2023?page=1

watching the replay livestream QA.

relic team today still seem lost at what to do. a lot of words but no substance, no clear idea who is leading them.

And we have the stereotypical purple colored hair diversity hire chatting with john_re. she sounded rather chilled with the state of the game, offering no confidence they know what to do next.

That was a vid they would have done well not publish. It offered Sweet FA. The COH audience is (with some exceptions) highly intelligent across the nations and trying to flannel them is not clever.

@ dasheepeh & OKSpitfire: you would undoubtedly assist your cause if you stated which parts of the game particularly concerned you. i.e. 1v1 or team games.

@Esxile: there is much in what you write, but Relic should have catered for team games as well, since after all, that is where COH2 predominated.

Were I in Relic's shoes, I would be setting up a Mapmaking competition with prizes. It costs them little, but would save their team hours of work. Same goes for Modding and skins. And why did they not use the non-staff Artist who designed so much for them in COH2?

@Vermillion_Hawk:

capture points have returned to a Company of Heroes 1 standard

This is flat-out wrong and degrades your argument.

• There were no capture circles in COH1. You either hit or missed the flagpost.
  
• If you were e.g. 75& up in your capture of a point, you would automatically go down to zero if your enemy touched the flagpost and you were not holding it. e.g. Ketten push

Purchased veterancy for Wehrmacht in COH1 was part of the asymmetric design.

Relic's love for the Nazis is defamatory. There are no Nazi symbols in the game - German standards alone demand that.

rip parts from Company of Heroes 1 visibly for nostalgia factor at the expense of a coherent vision for how the game should play

Here we can agree. It confounds me that Relic seem not to take account of age. The 18-year-old in 2006 is now aged 35; the 18-year-old in 2012 is now aged 29. i.e. they are most probably moving into building families in RL and have little time to devote to PC games. There is no Lost Legion of COH1 players stuck in Scotland among the Picts, waiting to troop South to fight again under the execrable loading screen of COH3. They have vanished. And the same applies to a lesser extent for COH2.

Unlike you, I believe that COH3 will be cleaned down and improved, especially for teamgames. But I am sure we would both like an answer as to how it came to this, especially when there were a team of testers/posters, mostly from this site, who went along with it all.

My final word of caution would be this: don't jump in and buy the next Battle Group Commander on issue, unless you feel it is balanced. Based on COH2 performances, you could buy an OTT commander which is nerfed a month later, when sales start to fall away.

Anybody who thinks I am crazy should consider the emergence of the Britz in 2015 in COH2:

• a Vickers team in Semois church which could successfully spray and suppress a base HMG unit in North Semois
  
• A Vickers team in Semois church which had complete vision of North Semois, even through the Fog of War
  
• The Centaur AA tank which had the remarkable ability to one-shot a squad of Grenadiers in a building - "now you see it, now you don't"

And not forgetting everybody's favourite (sic) : the 'splendid' Tiger Ace.

What rubs me the wrong way about this is:

Relic did abandon .org a long time ago because a former community manager was harrassed from people here (correct me if im wrong).

Yet they get out of their way to give direction who to ban on here. Weird silent big-brother vibes, further alienating their customers and people who give a shit.

In the interests of accuracy, Relic abandoned .org as an unofficial partner in circa mid-2014. I am not aware of harassment of a former community manager, but I am aware of the drunk stream which ended with a Senior Admin and his Caster friend playing some online gambling game and discussing the demerits of COH2...which was the final nail in the coffin, after other ranked individuals had previously (out of public gaze), given the Devs something of a good kicking.

Relic are as entitled to make complaints about adverse posts on this board, as any poster is.