Crazy headline, but it’s an idea to think about. HOTS’ culture is: A team-based game where you need to work as a team to win the game, not one person winning the game with his team. No solo carrying (unless you’re a diamond+ smurf in bronze… you’re that much better than the enemies), no hard carries, and no showboating.
That vision/culture is acceptable in a friendlier casual game, but can it still be competitive for the solo queue player? For a 5 man team as seen in HGC that culture could work, but for solo players that don’t want to find a team, that definitely doesn’t work. Being too team focused leads to less individual power and less sway in carrying the game.
I’m fine with the shared team xp, but other mechanics such as a lack of laning (liked by HOTS players), lack of game length due to less turret lines/laning, and other factors leads to a less individual impact in favor of teamplay.
If you point towards team-games found in real life, even those games have individual “carries” and individual skill in them. Those players still need to rely on their team to not be too bad (think of basketball players and they’d switch teams if they get a better offer), so it’s still a team game. It’s just a teamgame based on individual players–> (trigger word incoming!) as seen in other MOBAs (I didn’t use the word but it’s pretty close!).
If your hero had only 20% of the impact among your teammates, you won’t be able to carry as hard as if the game culture accepted individual play mattered to where you can spoonfeed your team the win as long as they weren’t absolutely terrible. Example is in LoL you can trash someone in the lane, meaning their character doesn’t soak xp, doesn’t get gold to get items, and they’re further set behind. This translates to being weaker in the teamfight if a teamfight was hypothetically fought right after everyone is up. At the very least, they’d be weaker coming back to lane. When teamfights come, your teammates may end up feeding that character you trashed, but that’s their fault and they were too bad for you to carry. It’s still a team game, just with more individual power.
In LoL if you get a bad teammate, you can try to carry the game. In HOTS, the philosophy of HOTS means you’ll be likelier to lose and you’ll have to laugh it off and accept it because it’s a teamgame and you got the worse team that match. If you lost in LoL, you most likely would have had an even harder time carrying in HOTS given equivalent terrible teammates.
In the end your whole counter-argument to my thread can be “different game, different vision. No harm in that.” That is a true statement and we can agree to disagree. That’s basing your opinion off of if the game can work, but not basing it off of could a competitive scene and/or ladder if you go one step further to work.
TLDR: The whole point I wanted to bring up though is could a casual/very team-oriented game be liked enough to make a competitive game? Going one step further, could it really keep the attention of players on the ranked ladder and not in official competitive teams?