Profile of Hannibal

I thought most people here care about multiplayer? That part cannot be reviewed yet.
Many 'professional' games media are okay, but people care too much about scores and too little about the text and then are wondering why the games are not as expected...

I didn't notice you saying he was wrong though

Some things go without saying.

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The more recent event seems to be another screenshot that was taken on a separate server, yet still a private one, and appears to be an edgy joke that I made that was taken, again, out of context and sent as a complaint.

It goes without saying that this whole thing stinks, I should be able to make jokes or say what I want in a private setting without the anxiety of knowing that anything I say can be used against me and hurt me. It's also quite concerning how Relic didn't even bother to verify the claims, if they did they would have known the screenshot in question was deliberately taken out of context. It's even more concerning to know that anybody that uses my profile picture and my name on Discord will automatically be considered me. Meaning that literally anyone can falsify screenshots and Relic will simply not verify.
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Depending on what you said/wrote, I think it is okay if Relic can decide to end your contract depending on the severity of the case and potential damage to them. I personally also would not automatically call any chat private because all the users were invited. If it was one of the 200+ users discord servers where you don't even know everyone, it is kind of public as well. If it was a private chat with 2-3 friends its a different case obviously, because the damage to Relic severely decreases the less people there are and also the "more private" the chat is.

I fully agree that Relic should have done more verification checks. It is a business agreement after all, also for Relic, and they should handle it seriously. Obviously they have the WAY larger leverage so they can act like this in the sense that they don't need to care neither from a reputation point nor sales, income, publicity or whatever. They're just the bigger shot. Nevertheless it shows shitty behaviour and code of conduct from their side. If they don't want to invest that work, they should not offer the contract to streamers that are "too small".
I can tell from my own experience here as a mod that it is sometimes very difficult to judge if something crosses a red line or not. Due to time, context etc constraints you just have to make your best guess based on what you can see. Sometimes you'll just get it wrong, no doubt about that. But this ties in to the point above: I am doing this for free in my spare time, and while I still try to make a fair decision, there's naturally restrictions to how much time I can invest. Relic did a business agreement, and they should take it way more seriously. It sounds pretty believable that they did not invest much time into verification of users and the overall claim. If I were you, I'd write John about it, but probably there's not a high chance of response and more in-depth review due to the release of CoH3 in a few days.

Typically Unions tend to kill the industry/job you are attempting to unionize so it shouldn't be taken lightly.

However, wouldn't this thread be better served in another, thread?

American spotted!



On topic though:
It is difficult to judge without knowing what the deal exactly included or what was policed exactly. It is a business deal and AceHiro should be aware of it. If he said something that hurts the trust between both parties or that AceHiro only adhered superficially to the deal but otherwise tries to circumvent it (e.g. breaking an NDA is also not okay in private chats), it is his fault. If Relic generally polices private chats and bad talking about CoH3 or any CoH game in general, they are overstretching their competence. I slightly doubt that this is the case though, due to AE regularly trash talking bugs in the game. On the other hand AE has also more influence than probably any other streamer, so maybe he can dare to say more because dropping him would actually anger the more active part of the community due to his tournaments and range.

I get the impression though that AceHiro is disappointed that the codevelopment is nothing more than a marketing stunt and free game testing for Relic. I find that quite naive. It can serve well for the community and the game, too, but primarily it is a marketing stunt. Obviously Relic will present it differently, and it is good that AceHiro calls them out on it. We've seen their shoddy community and ocmmunication handling multiple times in CoH3: First, promising weekly dev diaries that were good for the first few weeks, then became a meaningless wall of text and finally abandoned quickly, and then revived after months of nothing but only for very few entries. Relic and IGN starting their video campaign before initial launch, only to embarrassingly move the launch date 1 month before when all videos were published.
That's not to say that they completely ignored the feedback at all, they did address some problems that were pointed out during their tests. But as usual, if you promise full transparency and top notch communication with a large community, putting one single person on the job is not going to cut it.

Overall, this reads as AceHiro being too naive to really think that a big studio will not try to control the information flow of their main product. And Relic on the other hand being incompetent or at the very best overpromising due to marketing and then obviously underdelivering.

Hard to say really. There are signs of them, but they are very vague. We for sure know that there are at least 2 units missing from the game being Noshorn and Archer TDs.

We also know that having more then 3 battlegroups are also planned, since there were signs of battlegroup loadouts. On top of that, dispute a lot of concepts of battlegroups, have changed since previous tests. Most of the abilities were still in use in tech tests.

Meaning that we are still missing multiple units\weapons\abilities in battlegroups tech test had (and relic pretty much said that on release there will be only 3 battlegroups). Not to mention that WM and US had 4 commanders in the files.

So its safe to assume, that relic will release new battlegroups.

My personal opinion is that they are most likely then not, will be locked behind both in-game and real money, since Relic got a lot of hate before about commanders being unobtainable without real life money.

As for gameplay content. Pretty much mini-gamemodes similar to the ones in vCoH ToW, will be returning to some extend, there were a lot of signs of them.

So basically the same things as in CoH2: Mini-expansions/DLCs, commanders, skins.

I would speculate that they will release pure single player campaigns as well. This will be a big fraction of the player base, and once they have set up the basic systems for the release version, there is no reason why they should not create a campaign e.g. North Africa, France, Poland, Greece/Crete etc. especially a German POV Crete campaign would lend itself well. Or maybe the more obvious choice: US POV campaign in the Pacific. They would work well for their designed gameplay of integrating navy, air and land forces on the strategy map. Maybe they'll even bring back Soviets at some point.

They literally said they will be releasing new battlegroups during one of the deep dives and UI is dead giveaway for it. Doctrines were monetized and sold well, so no reason to believe they wouldn't do the same with battlegroups.

Not really sure what you're debating here.

The debate is not only about battlegroups. If you couldn't find hints for monetization of basically confirmed battlegroups in the game files, you won't find anything else as well. If you however find them, whatever else Gachi claims to have found in the game files has more credibility as well.

2x speed bonus on reversing.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. But cool to see to also get different minor factions via battlegroups.