Profile of Hannibal

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Thread: Relic is in trouble - 121 employees fired 28 May 2023, 19:00 PM This discussion is truly hilarious. People act like 10 years ago, there has never ever been a blundered launch of a game and game companies lying to customers. We all know that up to the appearance of diversity criteria, the gaming company has been a happy teletubbie world where everything went right and nothing went wrong. Yes, Relic is probably partially hiring for diversity. Yes, artificially restricting your pool of potential employees will definitely lower the chances of getting the most talented one. It doesn't automatically mean you'll get the bottom of the barrel though. They'll do an 80% job instead of a 90% one. If you crash your car into a tree it's probably not because of the fly that distracted you for a split second. It's because you've been going 150 on a 80 road in heavy rain on worn out tires while ignoring the "sharp turn" signs. The fly has made it worse than it could have been, but everyone here is running around saying "it was the fly! Otherwise I would have made it!". CoH3 is lacking in so many areas, it's not the fault of a couple of diversity hires. If you think that's the main issue and a couple of people slightly underperforming run the whole project into the wall, you have apparently no idea about project management. With that amount of issues, there's larger issues at Relic, diversity hiring is only one of them. In summary: Is hiring based on diversity bad for performance? Yes. Could CoH3 have been better at launch without Relic diversity hiring? Speculatively: Yes, at least in a couple of areas. Would CoH3 have been a good game then? No, surely not. In: COH3 Central
Thread: How to save CoH3 from disaster ???26 May 2023, 10:51 AM Jump back to quoted post26 May 2023, 10:46 AMaerafield Here we are, on a CoH gaming forum discussing dog breeds and whether they're dangerous or not since 1 page already That's how you know that the latest CoH game has flopped. In: COH3 Central
Thread: Relic is in trouble - 121 employees fired 24 May 2023, 16:42 PM Jump back to quoted post24 May 2023, 15:29 PMaerafield Actually looks like the management got hit as well. Both top 2 managers got fired it seems RIP audio and animator team? Credits do NOT go to me, someone on the coh3 discord made this through information via LinkedIn and Twitter primarily. Red means people who got fired yesterday, the other colours are people who left earlier, sometimes many months ago Remember that this is not official and therefore could be wrong & inaccurate Thanks for the info. Good to see they are at least trying to downsize proportionately. Slightly weird though that the audio team is gone, they actually still had quite some work to do. Maybe they'll get new ones. Also good to see that the heads of production are gone. Littman and Mele have severely misplanned CoH3 and lying directly to our faces a lot of times. Let's see if Relic and/or CoH3 survive this release. I hope yes (at least CoH3), but my guess is on no. In: COH3 Central
Thread: Relic is in trouble - 121 employees fired 24 May 2023, 11:24 AM Jump back to quoted post24 May 2023, 10:59 AMKatitof I've seen layoffs like that first hand, 20% of company was let go(the publisher I worked at), they fucked suddenly 100 people while boasting about great financial situation just weeks earlier. Most of the people who were let go found much better jobs relatively fast, publisher itself also changed direction a bit and are doing ok now. Tho people who remained had massive workloads for quite some time. Shortly after I've decided to look for greener pastures, because it wasn't 1st layoff and I wasn't going to wait and find if they are going to go for 3rd one or not, they have proven to be irresponsible at top level. Just to add to this: Unless Relic heavily restructures to more efficient systems, either work will be cut and features not implemented, or the remaining employees overloaded (which is against Relic's pretty good job atmosphere and worker care from what I have heard). With the first option, CoH3 will take even longer to become better. The second option however risks that the people leaving will pull more employees with them if they land a decent new job. Morale at Relic will be super low at the moment, so we can't expect much output from this company in the next weeks, even if the magic turn around should be happening at some point. In: COH3 Central
Thread: Relic is in trouble - 121 employees fired 24 May 2023, 09:17 AM Jump back to quoted post24 May 2023, 05:08 AMGachiGasm Console ports are outsourced in most of the cases. Even huge companies like sony and so on, usually are outsourcing their porting. + Relic is known to use outsourcing, CoH port as an example. Gabby or John confirmed that the console port is outsourced under the guidance of Relic. I think it was either Reddit or their official forums. In: COH3 Central
Thread: Relic is in trouble - 121 employees fired 24 May 2023, 06:19 AM Jump back to quoted post24 May 2023, 01:42 AMaerafield While these news are kinda sad and definitely point to CoH3 not performing as expected, let's not pretend like this means that CoH3 is doomed for sure... not even close if you ask me. We have absolutely no clue who got fired here, they could be (and probably are) people who -as shitty as it sounds- are not deemed essential anymore for the future development of the game.. such as Campaign mission designers or certain artists.... or people who are not even in the CoH3 team to begin with. Even when putting the performance of CoH3 and this rough economic situation aside, Relic is not working on any projects right now apart from CoH3, at least not that we know of. They had over 300 employees prior to this move.... and I really doubt you need that big of a staff to support a post-launch game. So it's absolutely no surprise that they laid off employees, the total number is just a bit surprisingly high now. It's not unusual at all that the employee number of game development companies goes significantly up and down as time passes and games getting launched. No matter if it's Relic or Rockstar Games or any other studio People really need to stop jumping to worst-case scenario conclusions all the time... the future of CoH3 might as well be very positive despite this news for all we know. Relic still has around 200 employees left Yes, the studio was surely bloated. Yet, kicking out a third/quarter (whatever the number of Relic employees currently is) of your employees is never a good sign. Judging by the game's problems, features and Relic's communication, a lot is mismanagement of the studio, which means Relic would need to exchange at least leading positions in the company. This is speculation of course, but I think a somewhat founded one. But kicking out 121 people is not kicking out the management. I guess those people save their ass and it is smaller staff that has to go, so the core issues will likely stay unresolved. Relic wasn't able to get CoH3 ready for launch with their previous employees, they didn't get much done between the betas and launch, nor launch and today. Relic won't suddenly have a faster pace by downsizing significantly. The mass layoff could be expected after finishing a game. You obviously need way less people to maintain and update content than to development from scratch. But coh3 is not done and Relic knows this. Yet, they have to kick out a huge part of their staff. The most likely conclusion is that Relic was in financial trouble before, had to rush the release of CoH3 (or management ignored the state in order to cash in for their reports), the game got its deserved mixed reviews which is worse than what Relic would have needed. They then released the shop to rake in more revenue, which made the situation worse. Players were dropping and so did the economic expectations for coh3, at which point they made the odd survey and also the decision that the current size is unsustainable given the expected revenue from the game, so a huge part of the employees got fired. Since I doubt that these people are the ones responsible for all of the failures, I don't see why things will improve from here. Development will go even slower than right now. At the very very least, Relic teams will go through a huge restructuring process that will likely put output to zero for the next weeks. This coincides with the console release, and will also not help to rebuild the player base (unless the next patch is great, which I doubt given the preview). In: COH3 Central
Thread: Relic is in trouble - 121 employees fired 23 May 2023, 20:59 PM Looks like Relic de-diversified quickly. Sega has apparently decided that CoH3 has too little players to support a company of Relic's size. Which obviously means they don't deem CoH3 very profitable in the short to mid term. This is a big hit to development, if not the last nail in the coffin. In: COH3 Central
Thread: Operation Brass Leopard19 May 2023, 19:59 PM Jump back to quoted post19 May 2023, 19:03 PMGachiGasm So no-one gonna mention how new promised map is a bridge map for skirmish? I mean this fucking priorities are insane. Bot stompers already play on x10000000 shitty bridge maps from workshop, but HEY this one is official. Its probably remake of this idiotic 2v2 map, with terrain lowered making middle bridge the only available path. Sorry but I really want to smack someone who works for relic in the face. Operation BRuh ASS. I don't get this either. Some actual mappers correct me, but I guess comp stomp maps are also pretty easy to make. There's at least no need to make the map balanced and even approaches to certain points don't have to follow as strict guidelines to keep the map competitive. The map mostly has to look pretty. Unfair design could even be positive. Worse players can take the easier side and put the bots on the more difficult one. Experienced players pick the difficult spawn instead. In: COH3 Central
Thread: Operation Brass Leopard19 May 2023, 17:20 PM Jump back to quoted post19 May 2023, 14:57 PMGrumpy Wow - you're an alleged moderator and you respond to a post about statistics by attacking my personal skill level? That says a lot about you. In long games, you'll always hit the point where you don't have a choice except to keep a squad on a VP, even when you hear the sound of the rockets. There isn't a lot of dodging within that circle. Also, even if I go back all the way to the start of the last patch, the Soviet win rate is 45.5%. While that's looks a little better, it's still not even close to balanced. The number of games is 2757. As for May being balanced, it shows a 42% win rate for Soviets. If that's your idea of balanced then ok. You complained about Axis having an alleged 60 win rate, not about Soviets being bad in 4v4. I've shown that the statistics you provided are biased because you only look at a few selected months. Soviet's win rate this may doesn't matter, the whole point of the paragraph was that win rates in single months jump like crazy. The point you make with sometimes not being able to dodge is true for all Allied factions, not just Soviets. So why do we see see the assumingly worst winrate in only one faction and even the only one that has stock rocket arty on its own? No, I am not attacking you personally, but the data and conclusions you provide don't make sense. This one occasion in the game where you have to hold the circle at all cost and lose a squad because of it, therefore ticking down your last 5 VPs are not the reason why you lost the whole game. It's rather been a chain of suboptimal engagements and potentially even Soviets being too weak overall that forced you into that situation. This means that there's probably a multitude minor tweaks needed, but attributing it to only one effect that we apparently only see in 4v4 (but never in any other mode) is absurd. If not dodging rocket arty constantly costs you the game, this IS a skill issue. I am not talking about the overall loss, that might have occured regardless. Another effect could be that the player base shifted unevenly after CoH3's release and for some reason better Axis players prefer coh2 or something. Whatever the reason, win rates in 4v4 are fairly even with probably a slight advantage to Axis. I wouldn't put this on balance team though. They've asked for giving USF and UKF nondoc rocket arty but Relic said no. The other option is to nerf Axis rocket arty, but this would affect the balance in all other modes where win rate actually looked fairly even, and they openly stated that they didn't know how long Relic allows them to patch the game. Given that situation, choosing to nerf Axis arty and being forced to rebalance three others modes (given that this change fixes 4v4 in the first place) would be honestly a dumb decision. Shit would have hit the fan if that patch game out, fucked up the game and then Relic decides this would be the last patch. I don't blame them for doing that, especially since the price is a minor imbalance overall. The balance team has done some dumb decision too, and the game overall has definitely lost its 'crazy moments' and become overall more homogenized. But criticizing them based on a single stat in one of multiple modes while neglecting the complexity of the problem is just cheap. Especially if you top it off with accusing them of doing it on purpose. In: COH3 Central
Thread: Operation Brass Leopard19 May 2023, 06:58 AM Jump back to quoted post19 May 2023, 02:45 AMGrumpy COH2 4v4 is badly unbalanced now, with win rates in the 60/40 split range. Nobody listened to any feedback that they didn't want to hear. The Walking Stuka's ability to one-shot 7-man vet 3 con squads, or any other Russian infantry, makes it terrible to play against. They nerfed the Land Mattress and Calliope so that it wouldn't do that, but evidently it is okay for Ost and OKW rocket arty to do that. If you already accuse others of selective perception and biased opinions, at least fact check your own stuff. You base your pro Axis 60/40 split on coh2stats.com data for top200 games from January, March and April 2023 with a total of about 250 games. February (140 games) shows 55% winrate for Allies and May so far is balanced with 70 games. What do we learn from that? This number of games is way too little. Most imbalances occur after coh3 release and if you look to either all data or the top200 data for all of 2022, you'll see a pretty even split. If Axis arty constantly wipes your 7 men Cons, you're just bad at dodging and counterwiping. In: COH3 Central