CoH1 is actually fun to watch, but after the 500th game you just go "Yeah. Seen it all." 10 M10s in a 3v3 charging at Panthers like tards is funny the first 50 times, then it gets stale. But losing an IS-2 to a PGren grenade because the Soviet didn't see it coming? Oh man, the tragedy.
If this is the example you choose to reference to describe your enduring memory of CoH1, would I be right in saying that you're more of a basic match player? And I'm not being facetious, just asking.
The reason I ask is that I could easily watch a thousand games of top-level CoH on good maps and never get bored, mainly because of the incredibly tense, delicate and brutal opening minutes where the position of every single man is so important, right down to the late game hair-raising base-rapes where a well-placed V1 or off-map can bring a KO to the game right there an then.
Could I find watching as many 4v4s, or indeed 3v3s or even 2v2s as interesting? No- they lack those elements described above because more people means less important decisions, and whereas a Panther in a 1v1 is a large, targeted and specialist investment with the power to turn the tide, the same tank in a 4v4 is very much just more of the same.
CoH by its nature lives and dies by its maps- even with the best design in the world (as with CoH1), a bad map could easily ruin things. Just think of Flooded Plains, or Best, or Beach Assualt, or any number of 1v1 maps that were eventually shafted in favour of better ones. I reckon that if the original had a far greater map pool, it would have lasted a lot longer, simply because strategies are so frequently built around maps. B
ut once again, the significance of the map is inversely proportional to the size of the game. To me, all the 4v4 maps look roughly the same, and you can be near-guaranteed that by 30 minutes in, every hedge, shotblocker and building will have been razed to the ground leaving nothing but a flat billiard table- shown by the popularity of a map like Red Ball Express, which cut out the middleman and gave players a basic map that amounted to little more than a decorated field (but became one of the most played maps in the game).