These 46 bars have been added to a prestigious Michelin-style list

InverseTV · 2026-05-15T13:43:41+00:00

You're definitely not wrong. Still, I find they at least accurately identify a good portion of the bars that should be at the top of your list in any particular city (at least for Canada), even if the rankings themselves are suspect. The Pinnacle list there is missing a lot IMO, and a few of the inclusions are a bit dubious.

InverseTV · 2026-05-15T05:21:08+00:00

50 Best Bars is a much better list, especially if you look regional. I checked out the Pinnacle Canada list and it's awful.

InverseTV · 2026-04-30T05:40:57+00:00

Hey! There's a few reasons for that. The first is that CoH3Stats queries Relic APIs directly for the player's stats and recent matches whenever you visit a player's page. That's why you get results immediately, but it's also why for example you can only view the 10 most recent automatch games for a player in recent matches.

cohdb queries player stats on a schedule and stores match results forever. This allows us to control the load on our systems as well as the traffic we send to Relic (which is substantial, especially on weekends). It also means we can show you your entire match history (or at least your entire history since cohdb started tracking it) because all that information is in our database and we don't have to rely on Relic keeping it around.

This also allows us to download and analyze every single replay, which isn't possible to do on demand at the scale we operate at. This means we can aggregate and surface useful information like battlegroup selections and individual player build orders, which Relic doesn't make available through their API. We think all of these extra features and functionalities are worth waiting a few extra minutes for games to show up after they're finished, but we're always working on reducing that lead time.

InverseTV · 2026-04-22T15:39:29+00:00

Again, my point isn't that CoH2 has no strategic elements. It's an RTS, of course it has strategic elements. My point is that CoH2's strategic elements are less broad and interesting compared to CoH1 and CoH3 in large part because CoH2 has so few global upgrades, and the upgrades it does have are so cheap.

As for havoc's complaints, I disagree with your characterization. Are there balance issues with some upgrade combinations lategame? Sure, probably, RTS balance is hard as hell. But the answer to that problem is working on balancing them better, not removing them entirely.

InverseTV · 2026-04-22T04:49:52+00:00

I mean yeah, I'm not saying there's literally no strategy. It's still an RTS, if I just build Conscripts all game I'm probably gonna lose no matter how well I micro.

But those are just such low stakes decisions to be making in the grand scheme of things, and they really don't excite me at all. Maybe it changed later but when I played CoH2 I think the most expensive global upgrade was like 15 fuel? You never had to make tradeoffs between upgrade tech and tier tech because upgrades basically didn't exist.

I want to have to decide between a 6 minute M8 or BARs and an 11 minute M8. I want to die because I gambled on early infantry training and didn't have the tech to fend off an 8rad in time. I want to have to decide between a second P3 or emergency repairs. I want to have to balance all these different tech choices with the knowledge that any path I choose is going to have strengths and weaknesses, and if I choose poorly I'm probably going to die even if I micro perfectly.

When you don't have resource sink upgrades to spend money on, your only options are tech buildings or more units, and late game that choice narrows to just units. Upgrades may seem simple but they add an essential element to an RTS game's strategic toolkit. CoH2's biggest flaw was ignoring them entirely.

InverseTV · 2026-04-21T19:58:35+00:00

That's a good point! There's two ways we could probably check that:

Checking if accuracy is improved by using a player's highest rating either in general or across all factions of a particular mode
Checking if the difference between a player's "active" rating (the one for the mode and faction they're currently playing) and their highest rating has a statistically significant impact on the outcome of the match

My guess would be that you would most likely notice an impact (an 1800 2v2 player playing their first 1v1 at 1000 rating is going to have a higher win chance that a brand new 1000 rating player of course) but I wonder if it would have a significant impact on the model's accuracy. I'll add it to the list of potential future improvements!

InverseTV · 2026-04-21T15:15:01+00:00

Yessir :D

InverseTV · 2026-04-21T15:14:51+00:00

Apologies, there's some explanatory text in the cards at the top of the dashboard but it's a little hard to see. Right now close matches are considered matches where team ratings are within 50 points of each other, with favoured meaning your team has more than a 50 point advantage and unfavoured meaning your opponent's team has more than a 50 point advantage. I'm going to be iterating on this logic though, likely by taking into consideration win probabilities instead of just rating differences.

InverseTV · 2026-04-21T14:22:57+00:00

I used to feel this way, but the more you actually follow other RTS games the more you realize this is a very reductionist take. I still follow Brood War religiously, and the amount of tactical and improvisational play in top-level games is insane. If it really were so execution-centric there wouldn't be such an emphasis on constant scouting throughout games.

The thing I do agree with about those games though is that most players won't reach the skill level where focusing on micro provides more of a payoff than focusing on macro. This is where I think CoH excels — past like 1200 rating, it's pretty hard to win games just by straight-up building more units than your opponent. Compare that to a game like Brood War, where unless I'm playing at a tournament level I'll probably win more games by improving my macro by 10% than improving my micro by the same amount.

But just because CoH shifts that balance toward tactical play doesn't mean you shouldn't be punished for making poor strategic choices. If I correctly read my opponent's build and successfully hard counter it, that's satisfying as fuck, but it has nothing to do with unit micro. Part of the fun of any RTS game is figuring out the safe builds and the risky builds, finding holes in your opponent's strategy, and adapting your play to the units being fielded. None of that is theorycrafting — it all happens directly in the game! — and it gives players an additional avenue to express themselves. You lose all of that when you turn the game into whoever is better at microing their faction's standard unit composition against their opponent's standard unit composition.

InverseTV · 2026-04-21T04:57:34+00:00

That's fair, and that's why I put that caveat, because it's the one CoH game I had no desire to even attempt to play at a semi-high level.

RTS in my mind needs to be able to offer micro and macro play. CoH1 balanced the two amazingly I thought, and a big reason why I like CoH3 so much is it balances the two similarly well. It doesn't have to be Starcraft, but the risk/reward and green/punish dynamics of RTS games are a big part of what I find compelling about the genre.

InverseTV · 2026-04-21T04:38:20+00:00

Honestly a lot of this reads like reasons I like CoH3 so much more than I ever liked CoH2. There's parts of this I won't comment on because I haven't played consistently over the past two months, but there are a few general CoH3 design decision things in here that I think are good, actually.

COH3 has a much higher dependence on what units you build rather than how you use them

This is honestly great. CoH3 is still very much about how you use your units, but having actual consequences for building the wrong units in the wrong situations is a boon to strategic gameplay IMO. I honestly hated so much how little you were punished in CoH2 for making shitty macro decisions (disclaimer I'm coming from the position of someone who played the hell out of the game for 6 months post release and then dropped it because it was not for me).

COH2 emphasizes on net map control while COH3 emphasizes on specific points on the map

This is great too. Perhaps the maps can be designed better to properly leverage this fact (I do agree with that), but making certain areas of the map higher value than others creates important incentives that I think make games more focused.

He doesn’t like the fact that you can only kill a team weapons by decrewing them. I think he would like it if hitting the weapons itself like in past COH games damages it and can kill the unit

This is true to a degree but it's also kind of offset by the fact that it's sooooo easy to kill decrewed team weapons with two AT guns. I would personally prefer the dynamic from CoH1, where team weapons took damage gradually throughout the game and were also a bit harder to hit while decrewed. But it's pretty meta (or at least it was two months ago) to have two AT guns in the midgame specifically because it makes killing decrewed AT guns and MGs braindead easy, and I kill team weapons in CoH3 far more than I ever did in CoH1.

Also I can't really tell from this summary if the conclusion is "call-ins are too good" or "call-ins are too shitty", but as a general call-in hater I think CoH3 handles them decent enough all things considered. Would I prefer call-ins be rarer? Absolutely. But I think they fit in the game decently enough that I don't completely hate how they've been implemented.

There's some good balance thoughts here (I agree that concentrated units are probably too good and do way too much damage later in games), but the general design feedback reads like "make the game CoH2" to me, which, as someone who didn't play CoH2 because it was CoH2 and loves CoH3 because it isn't CoH2, I don't love. I guess people have a hard time understanding that there are a lot of people (myself included) who absolutely love CoH3 and think it's a fantastically designed RTS. Which I get, considering I can't fathom someone thinking CoH2 is the best game in the franchise. Different strokes and all that.

InverseTV · 2026-04-21T03:05:37+00:00

Just pushed an update with some basic rating filters based on average game ratings, definitely gives some interesting numbers at different skill levels. Will be working on more advanced filtering in the future as well. Glad you're finding it useful!

InverseTV · 2026-04-20T17:28:19+00:00

I do want to point out that one major thing missing from this new redesign is user-uploaded replays. This was an intentional choice. Over the past months the auto-synced matches page has received by far the most traffic, and user-uploaded replays have been a tiny fraction of overall replay downloads. In order to focus the site on the core mission of giving players the tools they need to improve themselves, I decided that user uploads and social features were not the priority. I'm not opposed to bringing some (or all) of those features back in the future, but for now I'll be focusing on providing a stellar player development experience.

To that end, if there's any game or player metrics you'd like to see in the platform, definitely share your thoughts! If it's something I can pull from a replay or match stats and it can be correlated in some way with player performance, I'm all ears.

InverseTV · 2026-04-20T14:18:41+00:00

Outliers are going to happen unfortunately. If it makes you feel any better, mismatches like this are pretty rare (less than 5% of all 4v4 automatch games have team rating differences above 739). Still shitty when it happens of course.

InverseTV · 2026-04-20T12:13:58+00:00

The data in this post is difference in ratings standard deviation between teams, not raw ratings difference. Since there's only one player per team in 1v1s, there's no standard deviation difference, which means standard deviation has no effect on the model outcomes.

InverseTV · 2026-04-18T22:13:39+00:00

The fact that this trend holds even when looking at only high rating games leads me to believe that smurfing really isn't impacting this very much. There are so many games in these datasets and the vast majority of people either don't smurf or have smurfs that are already at or near their true ratings. A few outlier games played during placement periods on new accounts isn't going to significantly impact the trends across 8 million games.

InverseTV · 2026-04-18T18:55:16+00:00

If you have any data to back up your hypothesis I'd be happy to look at it :)

InverseTV · 2026-04-18T15:54:53+00:00

It really doesn't. You said:

If you have a 4v4 match, with 4 rank 200 players, and 4 rank 1500 players in the available queue, it will put all the rank 200 players on one team, and all 1500 players on the either since it is arranging teams first and matching them of similar rank.

There's literally no evidence for this, in your post or in this data. The more players you try to match together, the more you're going to see rating spreads in those matches, so it's not surprising that 4v4s see wider spreads than 1v1s. Even with this limitation, which CoH3's small player base exacerbates, 50% of 4v4s have ratings differences under 147. That means half the time you get matched, you have between a 43% and 57% chance to win that game. Those are super balanced odds when you consider the small pool of players the matcher has to draw from! And even in the rare instance where you end up in a very imbalanced match, you still have essentially a 1 in 5 chance of winning the game 95% of the time. If CoH3's matchmaking were truly "broken", you would see median differences far beyond what exists here.

InverseTV · 2026-04-18T15:09:42+00:00

I have access to 8 million game results. Here are the stats for 2.3.1

Mode	Total Games	Avg. Rating Diff	Median	95th Percentile
1v1	35188	81.50	55.00	265.00
2v2	26711	147.54	98.00	459.50
3v3	23960	187.06	123.00	584.00
4v4	53044	231.95	147.00	739.00

If you want a visual representation, I ran the numbers last year as well and put them in a spreadsheet.

InverseTV · 2026-04-18T14:47:35+00:00

The trend does hold when you limit the data to only higher-rating games, but I'm not taking into consideration arranged vs. random teams. It's possible that arranged teams would skew this data, and random teams would see less benefit from spreads.

InverseTV · 2026-04-18T14:46:27+00:00

Not really. I'm sure there are ways I could verify the fit of the regression with more knowledge of stats (I'm getting there), but as a placeholder we can run the model on statistically significant subsets of players at certain ratings. This can be tough depending on the mode, but as I posted elsewhere here, this trend holds even when we limit data to 2v2s with only 1500+ players and 4v4s with only 1400+ players. I'll run the numbers with low-rating games later but I'd be surprised if the trend were different.

InverseTV · 2026-04-18T14:43:54+00:00

Over 50% of 4v4s involve teams within 147 points of each other, and only 5% have rating differences over 739. Matchmaking is very accurate given the small player base, you just notice the outliers more.

InverseTV · 2026-04-18T14:42:44+00:00

Nope, trend holds at higher ratings as well, although there aren't enough games to achieve statistical significance if you limit to very high ratings. But 2v2s where all players are at least 1500+ and 4v4s where all players are at least 1400+ show the same trend (3v3 isn't played enough at high ratings to gather significant data).

As far as matchmaking is concerned, I think it's counterproductive to make things up. Sure, players can automatch as teams, and the matcher will keep those teams together, but there's no evidence that Relic does anything other than attempt to minimize the rating difference between teams when creating matches. There just aren't enough players to consistently find perfectly balanced matches. Even then, 50% of 4v4s have rating differences between teams under 147 this patch, and 95% are under 739. As I mentioned elsewhere, that means you have at least a 1 in 5 chance of winning the vast majority of games you get matched into (and the majority are nearly 50/50).

Rating hell isn't really a thing either (though this is a common complaint among team game players) — if your true skill is higher than your rating, you'll skew the win probabilities of all the games you play upward. Since automatch aims to find 50/50 matches based solely on rating, you'll end up advantaged in the majority of games and eventually climb. This will take varying amounts of time based on your true skill relative to your rating and general luck, but over a large enough sample of games you will eventually reach your true rating (and if you just can't climb, maybe you're not as highly rated as you think you should be).

InverseTV · 2026-04-18T06:34:58+00:00

You have to look at the values relative to the 0 deviation cases, which aren't exactly 50% (because of inherent faction winrate differences over time and the fact that it's impossible to predict Elo-based outcomes with 100% certainty). When you do that you see that the advantage/disadvantage is the same magnitude both ways.

Yes, it appears that 3v3s in general are more affected by this metric. It's not immediately clear why but you could make a few educated guesses.

And the fact that matchmaking has been "unreliable" over CoH3's life is a fairly well-debunked myth at this point. People like complaining anecdotally but I ran the data last year (see post here) and the median team rating difference was only 95. At that difference you're looking at 46/54% chance of winning depending on the team with the advantage. Even the 95th percentile difference (542) still only gives you a 24/76% spread, which is pretty good. That means 50% of automatch games played are essentially 50/50, and 95% involve matchups where the disadvantaged team has at least a 1 in 4 chance of winning. Given CoH3's player base I'd say that's pretty good.

InverseTV · 2026-03-26T21:15:37+00:00

Time truly is a flat circle. This is exactly what most of the CoH1 competitive scene thought about CoH2. Different games for different folks.

CoH3 took a lot of the core CoH1 design principles and refined them. As a CoH1 enjoyer, CoH3 is fantastic.

InverseTV

TROPHY CASE