According to you, the balance of the game should be around the top players. But then again, if only the expert should be involved in such matter and the opinion of the "poor" slobs does not matter, what make you an expert on how to balance a game?
The balance should be centered around people who can play and don't make mistake every 2nd move and decision they do. For coh2 its pretty much top 200-300 players.
You know, the people who actually are capable enough to play the game in the intended way-applying correct strategies and necessary levels of micro and awareness to pull them off.
Why do you write as if you are an expert on this field? Do you work for Relic on the balance department? Have ever worked on any game on the balance department? Have you followed some sort of college course on how to balance games? Have you read some book about?
Or is it that everything you write is, just the opinion of non-expert and should be treated the same way, you want to treat the opinion on anyone bellow rank 300?
Glad you've asked this, because in fact, I am game designer(don't confuse with dev-the mistake we all make here when addressing relic, devs just code, designers do the ideas, math and data part).
Not for relic obviously, but it doesn't matter(no, its not mobile time and money grabbing craps, but proper PC games), I work with both, player feedback as well as hard data, consult my opinions and decisions with other game designers and take feedback from QA team if there is any.
I can verify player feedback with actual data and let me tell you this: about 99% of player feedback is useless player whining about stuff they don't know anything about, but that 1% is valuable input worth listening to and at times even following, just like relic does.
Relic Entertainment
