Profile of Hannibal

I personally could care less if it was never deployed as long as they had a prototype. My concern is the same as yours, once you let one random make believe unit in you let them all in and it is an easy way for relic to implement pay to win.

It does not necessarily have to be "pay to win", but it would just be vehicles that really only have been prototyped and then scrapped. For the Black Prince that was based on a heavily used tank, we can at least estimate how the performance maybe >could have been<. Still, it would be mostly made up, even if you have some performance data sheets. And to take the fully over the top example of the Maus tank prototype:

This thread is weird though as people want historically accurate but this game is not accurate in the slightest. Panthers should not be diving with their weak side armor, KV series should not be competing with late war tanks. Hell, right now the P4J is probably one of the best meds competing with the T3485 and E8. When it was first introduced it had horrible turret rotation to simulate german late war lack of resources. It was buffed since it sucked because balance. Similar situation with ISU152/IS2 stun mechanic, the gun wouldn't penetrate as often but the stun mechanic kept them in the fight allowing for support to come in and do their job. This game doesn't even attempt to simulate the upkeep of fielding heavy tanks, the closest was the Tiger ACE.

What people see as "acceptable" will depend on how much they are into history and therefore obviously cover a very wide range. As you said though, CoH was never accurate or realistic. Instead, it was more "authentic". At least most weapons follow somehow the behaviour you would expect, given some gamification and balance circumstances. Everyone has their personal shtick though, and that's what they will pay attention too. I find it tedious to argue about complete historical accuracy though. The tank/gun/whatever does not need to be modeled perfectly, even less it SHOULD be.
In the end what most people can agree on is that the CoH series claims to tell the story of historic events. And as such, it should stick to its time frame. Implementing units that have actually been used in WW2 and had at least some tactical significance is a decent guideline I guess.
Of course there can and should be some more crazy and fun stuff, but there is already enough to work with within the WW2 time frame.

Regarding the Black Prince, I find it baffling why Relic actually tries to push for it. Yes, it is somehow unique, but in the end investing resources into creating the Black Prince means not creating another model that could have been accurate and opened up its own strategies.

I can live with the Black Prince in the game. I don't have enough of a shtick to rage about it. And since it looks like a Churchill, I can mentally easily label it as one. But this doesn't mean it should be there, if only for the reason to prevent Relic from introducing stuff that stretches the "WW2" theme even further.

Perhaps this is necessary to attract people to the game who prefer slower gameplay. They are not very good at multiplayer or they need slow multiplayer like in World of Tanks. It is possible for them to also create a skirmish mode.

I like the Tactical Pause. RTS in general lacks a large player base. Anything Relic does to increase the number of players is fantastic.

How many new players play a single bridge map so they can setup an MG and then spam arty for that huge explosion payoff? Or make a huge tank (BP?).

TP would be great if the game had more information about units in the menu also. People could make a unit, press pause, then read about its abilities.

I do not really see a negative for adding it. Teaching bad habits/bad micro is valid, but I think people will get past that.

If they sell 10 million copies and we retain 1 out of 10, that would be 1 million new multiplayer players. Much better than the 5000 we get daily now. Of course, the servers crash at around 20k players (Aerafield) so there is that ....

Again, as I said in the OP, it is a good feature. At least as long as the game is still designed to be played without it (which it will be, since there is no pause in multiplayer).
It is good to get people into the game which find CoH otherwise too hectic or help people with disabilities to keep up with what is happening. There is no detriment to adding it. Otherwise, CoH is not the game for making highly timed movements on all fronts. Orders such as "Move up squad A, once squad A is in position to secure the flanking road, squad B on the other part of the map throws a grenade into the house so that squad C can charge into it" or something alike. The feature is for campaign and bot matches. The Bots aren't challenging/smart enough so that the average player would need to pause, and judging from the "Mission Alpha", the missions are also not designed in a way that would need this much cohesion. Being a bit out of sync matters at the top level multiplayer at best, but not for 99% of the player base and surely not for single player. On the other hand, the few occasions where quick reactions are actually needed like dodging a grenade can be completely negated.
So overall, unless the player for whatever reason (lack of RTS practice, age or health) is generally slow, there is likely no need to use the pause and might even be detrimental to the game design. The "average Joe" won't really need it, that's what I am saying.

That's where my complaint is: solely about the marketing. TP is a good feature, they should mention it so that the above mentioned players know that the game accommodates them. But it is not the huge step forward that it should be when just looking at how they sell it. That's why I wrote "Relic either misjudges the impact or doesn't have anything more interesting to show." in the end of the opening post. Other features such as even side armor on tanks will have more impact on the game for the majority of the players than TP.

Why are you against longer wait times if it means more evenly matched games?
The only reason people on AT want to play randos is to seal club.

People here assume that as soon as you separate AT from RT, suddenly every match will be somewhat fair. But that is not the case as we clearly see from the 4v4 mode, where matchmaking even with randoms only can be quite broken.
That's probably a result of both a broken matchmaking system as well as too little players that the matchmaker can actually draw from. If I quickly check the data and make some (shoddy estimates):
2v2 and 3v3 have ~30k and 50k games running per month. I'll do the calc explanation for 2v2 only:
30k games a month mean 1k per day or 42 per hour on average. Most CoH2 matches last between 15-45 minutes - let's say 30 min - plus a ~5 min queue time, meaning that ~14% of players are available for games. So basically, if you press search, the matchmaker has to draw 2 out of 12 people for the enemy team and 1 out of the other factions pool of 12 people to find a decent match. If you play during peak hours, player counts are roughly 50% up from average, so about 18 other players will be available. Those 12/18 players can be anywhere on the ladder and it is difficult to guess how they are distributed, but it is pretty safe to assume that there will be some mismatch in skill because your level is just not available at the moment.
For 3v3, the numbers will go up to drawing 3 players out of 30 (45 during peak hours) for the enemy and 2 out of 30/45 for your own team.

There's obviously more to this calculation: More experienced/better players will play the game more than the average Joe that has time for a handful of games per week at best and many others that we don't know. This is also not taking into account, that there are AT and RT in the queue.

In my experience, the current state regularly gives me matches with players that are +/- 300 ranks of me. This is in some part surely Relic having a shoddy algorithm, but probably also hints that the situation is actually worse than I estimate with the calculation. Just look at 4v4, the calculation should actually be best here due to most players, yet I somehow doubt that you'd get the most balanced games there, actual unit balancing aside.

Splitting AT from RT will roughly split 2v2 in half and and 3v3 into 20/80%. Unless CoH3 substantially grows, this will make 2v2 a dead mode overall (I assume few people are willing to wait 10-15 min to get a 30 min game that is as balanced as it is currently. That's about one third of your overall game time being waiting, at this point at least I would switch to a different game because it is just not worth it, especially if games will still be ruined by crashes and drops, meaning it will lead to an even smaller player base. In essence, 2v2 will probably be dead both for RT and AT.
3v3, as I said in the previous post, is a bit different: RT will take a hit but probably still be okay, AT will be dead as well.
4v4 RT will probably be as it is today, AT is deleted.

Overall, this suggestion will basically kill 2v2, damage 3v3 RT and delete AT from all modes. It is impossible to guess if this will net an overall plus and if so how large this will be even for randoms. Assuming their game quality improves, there will be higher random player retention at the cost of probably an overall lower player pool, since some people won't play CoH or play it less if some of their modes are missing.


The main issue is in Relic's matchmaking, therefore I'd argue to tackle that first.

Yep that is one of the issues. Large squads that do not lose much of their DPS when they lose entities.
(and vice versa see falls/pgs)

We are describing a different thing. The problem I pointed out is fairly specific to Pfusies: They are not only a large squad, but also carry mixed weapons that concentrate most of their moving DPS on three models. Other squads that focus on assault and moving DPS usually carry fairly homogeneous weapons, meaning that a dropped model strongly translates into less DPS both static and on the move. Therefore, you need to pick your assaults carefully. This is different from what I described above.

(Imo DPS on the move should also be compared in absolute values and not just as percentage.)

Depends what you want to show. The point of this comparison was, that the moving penalty is not as harsh to Pfusies as to many other squads, and this point is most clearly shown by normalizing to the respective static DPS. It obviously assumes some knowledge about the general weapon performance (an SMG retaining 100% moving DPS long range does not mean anything, while a rifle retaining 70% DPS is quite good), but I took this as given knowledge for the discussion. My posts are usually long, if I bloat them with more data, even less people will actually read them.

Here's your data. Less than 10% of the players of the game are arranged teams.

Hence, putting them in different queue will make life harder ONLY for them. Do I care that I will make 10% life harder if that means 90% will have better quality games?

Nope.

There's your reasoning.

That's also not data, that's a claim.

Anyway, I think a reasonable one. According to stats that SiphonX posted a couple of years ago, there's huge differences between modes. 2v2 features probably around 40-50% or AT, that mode would absolutely be hit hard unless player counts stably grow to at the very least double the number.

3v3 has approximately 20%-ish of AT teams, although bear in mind that his data is actually biased towards having a higher ratio of randoms, so it could be more. Nevertheless, 3v3 could probably take the hit if the game grows a little.

4v4 surely can take it, there's apparently not many ATs, although I assume there is a high ratio of 4 people just playing a couple of games before being ranked, but overall the majority will be randoms.


Since the majority of my games are AT games, obviously I am biased towards keeping AT games playable. However, claiming that just splitting the playerbase will make it better for the majority is oversimplifying quite a bit.
Most complaints at least here on the site are mostly about 3v3 and 4v4, and not necessarily about AT vs RT. This makes inherent sense, since these are the largest mode regarding player counts, but it is also a sign that the matchmaker itself is the major problem. Second, AT win rates are definitely higher, but not "unwinnably" higher. This definitely needs fixing, but can be tweaked by just artificially upweighting the ELO of ATs so that they get matches with more skilled randoms.
Next, even having only 80% of the player available in the case of 3v3 (assuming similar player counts as current CoH2, and CoH2 has never been in better shape player wise than now), will diminish the player base overall. Matchmaking in 4v4 can be very shoddy already, despite mostly randoms being around there. That's again mostly a matchmaking issue. And finally, it is doubtful if splitting the modes would overall help the player base. You'd likely get more randoms into the games since they are overall less frustrating, on the other hand many players probably would play the game less or not at all if some modes they like are basically dead. At least for me I can guarantee that I would not play CoH3 if I knew that 2v2 and 3v3 AT are functionally dead modes, I wouldn't buy the game for the random games I do.

Splitting consequences of splitting the modes is mostly speculation, but the easiest way to go about it is probably really to just upmatch ATs until their winrate matches the ones of RTs. There will still be odd issues at both ends of the ladder, but those already exist now, so no harm done.