Profile of Sander93

I didn't say that the vote on VSL was suddenly leading and that it changed our minds on changing anything about it. I just posted the results that the majority of top players that voted think the upgrade is fine at the moment.

The fact is that VSL are undeniably a poor choice and can be seen by durectly comparing it with mg42 grenadiers

We held a vote to get the opinion of the top players.
89% voted that the current version of VSL Grens is doing fine.

They are just no longer a no brainer choice.

However, one thing that would be difficult to balance is the huge performance drop small arms experience as the game progresses due to more abundant yellow cover and Vet bonuses to target size. If you increase the damage output of tank MGs by too much, they'll tear though infantry in the earlier stages of the game

Letting the MGs scale with veterancy like regular small arms would probably be enough. The DPS bonus from veterancy (+30-40% accuracy and -20-25% cooldown) is generally more than the RA bonus (-15-29% TS) and already helps compensate for the increased availability of light cover late game.

Besides reducing OHKs a tank would also become more consistent in other areas, most noticeably when firing at infantry that are behind (several) objects or elevation where right now the gun would struggle to deal any damage as it's very likely to scatter its shots into these objects or elevation, where the MGs wouldn't have this issue.

Also, USF having 11k games played in April, whereas OKW has 21k is...
Sure there are 2 axis factions and 3 allies, but it's 3v3, not 1v1. And as long as there is at least one USF player in the game, then it's added to this list. 11k Only.... really sad

Of course OKW has more played matched in these statistics. The total number of matches listed is a limited set of 39.988 and not the total amount of matches in the entire game. This is only about 8% of total matches according to the site itself. Obviously OKW and OST will have more matches than the Allied factions, because the 40k matches are split up over two rather than three factions. Because they are only a (top) slice of the statistics of all matches, these absolute numbers say nothing about their popularity.

The only thing that does is the distribution of matches between each respective side, which is about 50/50 for Axis and 30/40/30 for Allies, which can be used as an indication of faction popularity only within one side. The Allied ratio is hardly surprising because the Soviets are simply the easiest and most complete Allied faction to play, with all necessary basic tools available stock.

Any faction built around having missing tools compensated for by OP units is by definition going to be incredibly linear to play with and against. The games design is also built around each faction having a set of tools to play the game with. Asymmetry should come from how those tools are designed rather than a complete lack of them.

Absolutely. With complete artistic freedom we could fix most if not all of UKF's major issues while keeping them unique. But since we can not create any new assets, it would be impossible to significantly rework the UKF faction at this point without making them basically Ostheer or stealing even more stuff from doctrines or other factions. So we're left with band aids.

Ideally, they would get stock indirect fire (UC mortar conversion), stock heavy indirect fire (LM or other type of rocket arty to stock roster and create something new for the commander), an AI light vehicle to replace the Bofors tech (pick any armored car or the Valentine and replace that in the commander), completely rework Bolster, etc. Then most holes would be fixed while staying unique enough as a faction, but there obviously is no way to do this without a dev team or even proper mod tools to create new assets.

It's the same for other factions by the way. The homogenisation of assets/factions is not a choice. It's usually the only thing that can be done to fix units or parts of factions with the very limited access to mod tools that's available.


At least we can hope that Relic learned their lesson when designing factions in case they ever decide to create CoH3, that all factions should have all basic tools and that variety needs to come from molding those tools into unique mechanics, rather than creating factions with gaping holes that require cheesy OP stuff to compensate.