Profile of Vaz

The only thing which is unfair about ST nerf is that AVRE didnt get same CP\price nerf.

Asymetric balance

It's unlikely anyone will be able to explain this to you with proof out of the code, but experience can explain a lot.

When coh1 first came out, they promoted the destructible environments heavily. This is important because I have an opinion that I have never been able to prove true, but it describes the activity in the game.

Something deep into the way they program coh or maybe it's engine, Essence sends ordinance at certain things with more affinity. These are "accidents" as seen by players. The issue with your mines are just part of a larger phenomena you will notice if you pay attention.

Others are:

• Plane crashes
  
• engineer squad types
  

So what will happen with planes is that the game will calculate hits on the plane such that it can be placed on a trajectory with player or world objects. I know it sounds conspiracy theorist, but keep in mind that it got so bad in coh2 that we had to make plane crashes not cause damage to player objects. Of all the places planes could crash, the game likes to send planes into objects, instead of crashing the plane where there is nothing.

Why is this? It's because of what they promoted earlier in destructible environments. They want the player to have that epic experience where all kinds of stuff happened in the destructible environment. In your real life experience, you likely did not see real random events go down like this. There have been accidents in your life. You've seen someone lose control of a car, or a bike, or maybe just trip. IRL the common occurrence is that the car crashed in a ditch or maybe hit a gaurd or pole. If Essence controlled reality, most cars out of control would get sent into crowds of people, traffic, or into store fronts(full of people).

Pay attention to the plane crashes in your game. You will see most if not all crashes intersect with some object. Not just grazing or a near miss, things get nailed perfectly.

The game also likes to kill engineers. I'm not sure why this is, it's really strange, but engineer units attract extra fire. This comes in the form of missed or stray shots which just so happen to hit the squad members. You can see some proof of this bias when you play the AI. Watch how the AI behaves when in relation to your other infantry types. The AI will take risks to hunt your engineer units, but will avoid all others. This is true regardless of faction.

Coming around full circle, let's talk about mines. The game sends stray shots into mines. In order to do this, the stray shots need to be in the scatter zone. Any missed shots will prefer to nail the mine, this affinity increases if you are fighting on the mine. I've seen it time and time again, because I place a lot of heavy mines with the m20, but it also happened a lot in coh1. It happens more in Coh2 though. If you fight near a mine, the game will send the misses at the mine.

I expect most will see me as crazy, but remember the now 0 damage or 1 meter area plane crashes, because planes keep "happening" to fall on squads over and over. I've had to completely change my tactics for mine laying over time to make sure that I don't have fights near critical mines. I've had so many instances of missed panzer 4 shots getting directed at the mines, then the player escapes what otherwise would have been a lost tank.

Teammates would come to my mine fields to "help" and sit on the mine to fight. Usually with their most expensive unit. Next time I look, there is a smoking mess or a disabled tank, dead blob, w/e. If you fight directly on the mine, anything that damages your vehicle will typically cause damage to the mine too, so don't do it.






TLDR: stay the fuck away from your mines after you lay them

6 hour game ftw

None of this changes the fact that "The Cloud" isnt a magical button that fixes latency issues, and that you're not going to be able to get very low pings if you're playing in Japan vs someone in western Europe.

you are taking this way out of the intended context.

Think about this for a sec. Players expect this game to be available long term. Years. So the online system needs to be maintained, so it keeps working. How much does this cost? How does it get implemented without bankrupting Relic/Sega? Who pays for it? how much does it cost?

Originally, this game started out Peer to peer. We all complained a ton, until eventually Relic caved and introduced a dedicated server model.

How many servers are there? Where are they located? I don't think that was ever communicated to us.

We have a drop-down with some regions, but that doesn't tell you the whole story and they are broad regions.

The cost for relic to build 3 data centers around the world for this game is pretty great, don't you think? Who's gonna pay for this stuff?

This is why OP is bringing cloud into the discussion. This is a scenario that the cloud industry is extremely well suited to handle. A company like aws has many data centers all over the world with heavy processing and storing capability. They are secure. They have quick access to internet backbones.

The best part is that anyone can use them for a fraction of what it would cost to build and maintain datacenters solely used by 1 company, such as relic. In addition, a lot of the headache of managing hardware is completely gone, which is a huge expense for a company.

So the way you taunting the OP about cloud not being a magic button is very rude. It is the most sensible option for relic to create the best experience for coh2 and coh3, by leasing resources from a cloud provider which would easily allow relic to have presence around the world for their games.

Why do 2000 players in asia need to establish connections in Europe to game? As you have mentioned in your comments, cloud doesn't change the fact that these people are so far from europe. In this case, cloud is the magic button. Spin up vm of the dedicated server in Asia datacenter and now all these Asians do not need to communicate out of asia to game and their communication trips are now much lower, making a more responsive game experience. Why you feel the need to argue with a network engineer over a subject within his domain of expertise, I don't know, but it's not getting anywhere.


TLDR - stop being rude

Well you got me thinking, because I'm trying to understand how latency would manifest in this game. We all know about ghost actions in fps. I have noticed some behaviors in some games where a squad is extremely late in reacting, on the order of like 1 or 2 full seconds, which is more than enough time to get wrecked by a grenade.

I've only seen it with infantry squads though. No problems with vehicles, except for that weird thing where they will suddenly stop, instantly reverse about 3 feet, reset their max speed to 0, then begin to accelerate forward at their normal rate again. This can get you hit by 1 or 2 at gun hits depending on how cursed you are.