Profile of SturmtigerCobra

[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.
Sometimes video games communities do awesome things. Their passion for the games they love underlined by their ability to galvanise their peers into doing something really rather cool. Company of Heroes 2 community stalwart, Matt Dunn, aka ‘A_E’, and a handful of likeminded friends did just that. They took it upon themselves to crowdfund a Grand Championship Series via Kickstarter. Not only did they achieve four times more than their £1400 goal, they earned investment from Relic and the interest of UK based eSports outfit, ESL, to help promote the event.

The Grand Championship Finals will take place in front of a live audience at ESL’s studio in Leicester, UK at 2pm BST on Saturday, 1 st July and will be streamed live on Twitch on COH2 caster Stormless’ channel where he’ll be joined by ‘A_E’ to host the event. The contestants in the final are two of the world’s best COH2 players, ‘DevM’ and ‘Luvnest’, with the winner set to land £1400. While that might seem like a small amount in comparison to top eSports tournaments, the money was raised almost entirely by the community.

The finalists have been preparing for the final with some respectful, yet serious fighting talk:

DevM: “ Fighting Luvnest will be the ultimate challenge of my career in COH2 since he is a very skilled and flexible player. To beat him I will have to make him pay for his mistakes and that is exactly what I plan to do. I won’t stop until I’ve proven 100% that I am the undisputed best player in the game and the only thing standing in my way of that title is Luvnest.”

Luvnest: “ I'm looking forward to playing DevM in the final. I've come a long way, playing the best players this game has to offer, there is no way that I will be stopped now. The GCS trophy won't be going to Portugal I'm afraid.”

32 of the world’s best Company of Heroes 2 players competed over a six-week period to reach this stage. You can recap on all the matches so far by visiting ‘A_E’’s YouTube page or watch the highlights here.

For more information about the how the tournament came to be, please see the attached one-pager written by Matt Dunn. For more information about COH2, log on to www.companyofheroes.com or follow it on Twitter and Facebook.

In April this year, 161 backers pledged £6,305 on Kickstarter to fund a Company of Heroes 2 Grand Championship tournament. Tomorrow, July 1, the finals take place.

Is Company of Heroes 2 on our list of the best strategy games? Take a look and find out!

Company of Heroes 2 community member Matt Dunn, aka ‘A_E’, and a few friends took to Kickstarter to fund the tournament. They not only smashed their goal of £1,400 they gained the support of developer Relic, publisher SEGA, and the UK’s ESL eSports outfit too.

32 of the world’s best CoH2 players competed over six weeks. The remaining two players, ‘DevM’ and ‘Luvnest’, will be squaring off in the finals tomorrow July 1 at 06:00 PDT / 09:00 ET / 14:00 BST / 15:00 CEST / AET 23:00. The prize is £1,400 and the title of Best Company of Heroes 2 Player In The Universe, presumably.

There’s even a little smack talk going on. “Fighting Luvnest will be the ultimate challenge of my career in COH2 since he is a very skilled and flexible player. To beat him I will have to make him pay for his mistakes and that is exactly what I plan to do. I won’t stop until I’ve proven 100% that I am the undisputed best player in the game and the only thing standing in my way of that title is Luvnest,” says player DevM.

Luvnest replies, “I'm looking forward to playing DevM in the final. I've come a long way, playing the best players this game has to offer, there is no way that I will be stopped now. The GCS trophy won't be going to Portugal I'm afraid.”

The finals are being hosted by the ESL studios in Leicester. The event will be streamed live on the Twitch channel of popular CoH2 player Stormless, who will be joined by Matt Dunn.

Jump back to quoted post20 Jun 2017, 13:03 PMBartonPL

and i've been for long time in top 10 as axis or allies in 2v2 and still devm was picked who like never plays 2's

Jump back to quoted post28 May 2017, 00:01 AMDanielD

I think you're right tbh, I share the same view pretty much. When faced with a problem, people don't say "how can I fix this", but instead "how could this happen to me".

Jump back to quoted post18 May 2017, 10:20 AMEsxile

Have you seen the moving BIG with Tom Hanks, when a boy turn into an adult by magic. He is recruted on a big toy store in NY and start looking into toys in dev and start playing with the toys instead of looking at the market share graphics. He asks himself the true question a lead designer should ask himself at every stage of the game conception, is it funny to play with? Are the customers going to enjoy playing with it? Does this dev make sense in that way?.

I always have this scene in mind when seeing this kind of failure

*SNIP*Five months after taking over, on February 12, 2014, Wilson gathered 146 of the company's top leaders at EA's headquarters. Together with Gabrielle Toledano, EA's chief talent officer, Wilson hatched a plan to help them understand why so many customers were unhappy.

The group was led to the basketball court, which had been temporarily remade into a conference space with stations of computers and telephone lines. For hours, executives went through the steps of installing, troubleshooting and playing the company's games. They also listened in on customer service calls so they could hear firsthand players' frustrations.

"Back at EA, I used to get lectured by business development people about how we have to have a portfolio strategy of games, because we have no idea what's going to do well. I said, 'You have no idea what's going to do well because you're not a gamer and you don't care about games. You have no confidence in your ability to make good games.' How did we let our industry get taken over by the BD people? I was a BD person at the time, but at least I played games," he remarked.

Mahoney believes the problem escalated back in 2007, when you "had a false dichotomy in the business" between the big AAA publishers (who doubled down on graphics fidelity) and the emergence of Facebook and mobile gaming on the other side. While the AAA publishers had a hard time learning how to adjust for an increasingly online world, the other side "were on record as not giving a damn about gameplay and game quality," Mahoney said. "The founders of these companies were not game players themselves. We all know who those were."

"They thought that they could reskin the same gameplay into five different games. They thought they could copy someone else's game and bring a large audience to it. They found that their revenues skyrocketed, but they were hitting the afterburner the whole time. They fell to earth when people got sick of dumbed-down games," he continued.

While Mahoney sees the "light at the end of the tunnel" and the industry finally emerging from this mess, the unfortunate effect is that many consumers were caught in the middle between the two camps, and creativity in the industry suffered.

"The core of our business is a creative business. We make our money by making art. You have to ask yourself, in this industry, are you making good art? When I say five bad years, I think there was precious little good art coming out of the industry. Not across the board. There was some awesome stuff. But that's not where the majority of the people you would see in these halls were focusing their time and attention," Mahoney said, referencing E3.