Can you find a way that the community would have more influence in the game?

General Discussion
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I see a lot of Hots lovers, when I say lover I really mean it. Just to make my point, I see lack of communication from Blizzard about the game, I see no support on the competitive scene and so on. And still, we are here playing this game because we love blizzard as a company. We are engaged with blizzard products and we love blizzard lore (WoW, Starcraft and Diablo). To add to that, we still playing a game with almost no developers working on it.

Maybe Blizzard, you could make our voices count. For example, I think we could have pool in order to choose the next hero to enter the Nexus. or have an fan art work skin that we could buy only with money to support the game.

Well, I bet many others have better ideas than my ideas. I just feel like we can save the game… its way better than the competition, we just came late to the party.

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I don’t know balancewise or even forcing heroes but i would like the fanart side to be more exploited yes.

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That whole fanart skin thing has been done before (minus the money-only thing) and I wouldn’t mind seeing more of it.

Wouldn’t mind seeing more of it. Skins are fine. Other cosmetics are fine.

But as far as balance or heroes go, keep the playerbase as far away from actually making decisions as possible.

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They communicate with the player base almost daily and respond to user posts hourly. They also respond to community ideas, skin concepts or hero ideas.

It just doesn’t happen on the forum - for all intents and purposes the HotS Reddit has been the official channel between HotS users and developers since 2014.

Dev posts on Reddit also document HotS features or inside information completely unavailable on any official Blizzard page, forum or wiki.

Your odds of getting a blue response are about 5,000x higher on Reddit.

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For the Balance part i agree. for choosing the next hero, that could be done. Like Blizz Dev team chooses amount of hero names (ie. 5 or 10 heroes). And the players could vote who they would like to see from the mentined one.

This way Devs would still have control on what hero they want to release and they don’t have to sort of the million player suggested ones :slight_smile:

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For voting there would have to be a month of polling round 1, then the four highest out of 10, then final two. So three months, which is okayish. Plucking the winner from the top 10 is dangerous as players may split the vote between two favorites while the third most favorite actually ends up winning. Or the 7th most favorite if every other hero is split between the votes

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No need for Rounds of voting. Simply put 5 names in, let ppl vote for 2-3 weeks, cause i think thats plenty enough. And the hero who got most of the votes gets to be the next one :slight_smile: They don’t even need to pre announce the winner, let it be a surprise on release :smiley:

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There’s a couple issues with that.

The first is preferences.
Most people play dps characters. I don’t know how large a sentiment it is, but there is a group of people who don’t want to see OW heroes. Characters the majority wants to see will always be picked and those the majority doesn’t like will never be picked. This is not necessarily healthy for the game or fair.

Second is player participation. There’s no point in polling if a small portion participate. I don’t think player participation would be as high if no one cared about the choices. Another problem with this is duplicate accounts to get more votes. This is a free game after all. You could require some sort of minimum spending to get a vote, but that’d alienate a large portion of the playerbase.

Third issue with this is the generation time. A hero takes about a year to make. That’s a long wait time to see something tangible as a result of your participation. Most people would stop caring or get pissed at the devs because they’re “being ignored”. Also related to that is problems in the pipeline. If it’s taking longer than expected to make a hero’s kit or there’s technical problems or whatever else, the devs either have to release the hero in the incomplete/poor state its in or shelve it for now. Neither will sit too well with people.

I think choosing the order of hero releases would be way more viable, especially if the results were kept a secret.

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The problem still exists that I wrote:
5 choices. 2 of the choices are the “true” favorites, but they lead to a split vote between those 2 choices. A third weaker choice comes along and ends up beating those 2 “true” favorites because of their split vote. The not “true” winner won.

In a head to head, one of the two favorite heroes beats the third weaker hero choice, but not when two of them are together in the same poll with the third weaker hero

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This is why i mentioned the 5 or 10 hero way. There are 5 Ips in Hots. So each ip would get 1 or 2 hero in the voting process.

  • Warcraft
  • Starcraft
  • Diablo
  • Overwatch
  • Nexus
    To fix the problem with the “I play [x] class only, and i don’t give a :poop: of anything else” there is 2 way. Mention what Class the hero will be, or just keep it a secret till it is done and released.
    Reason:
  • Mentioning it will exclude ppl who don’t care of the class.
  • Not mentioning it would keep everyone “blind” and ppl would focus on the hero and not the class.

I actually seen a game that allowed multi accounting but with the restriction of binding accounts to each other officially. Like your Main account is and your sub account(s) are [y] and [z]. And only your main account was allowed to paticipate in community events. Something like this would be nice to have i agree.

That sounds a bit too much imo :slight_smile: 3-4 month i could agree. The only ones who know this is the Devs them selves :slight_smile:

Agree with that. :+1:

Ez fix from Devs POV…2 split winners? Flip a coin, winner comes first, 2nd comes next :grin:
After all, they can keep the results a secret :grin:

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They’re split, but they lose to the third weaker pick, not tied for the win

Pretend a 40-30-30 split among three choices. If one of those 30% option was removed, the 40% option would lose to the 60% new single option

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That sounds lovely and all but… (even outside of the problems @Xoxin listed) there are issues with it.
It forces the devs into a corner.
They work on multiple Heroes at a time (progressing at different speed) and they try to fix “holes” with them (missing niche, metashifter, lacking role), so if they gave problems with a Hero they can’t release another and that voted Hero might be something “we already have”.
It removes too much flexibility and freedom from the devs.

This could work.

Imo, the game needs advertising.

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In the mentioned 40-30-30 spilt, the 40 votes won. I don’t see a problem :slight_smile:
Also if one of the 30-30 were removed, that doesn’t mean ppl who voted for the removed one, would vote for the other one (for obvious reasons imo).
And if they were just add the removed ones votes to the 2nd and creating 40 v 60…thats called RIGGING.

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I’m saying multiple rounds would allow the greater chance of the “true” winner coming through. Not everyone in the removed 30% may vote for the other 30%, but there’s always a chance that the other 30% would beat the 40% option in a head to head instead of three way vote. Under your answer you’re fine with going with a semi-popular poll choice over the potential most popular

An example would be hero 1, 2, 3. I want hero 1 in, but 3 is in the lead at 40%, 2 is tied with 1 at 30% each. Under your rules, hero 3 wins when maybe after 1 is eliminated, I’d have voted for hero 2 over 3 if it was strictly head to head, not a three way vote where hero 1 was still an option. This is why I want multiple continuous polls that slowly narrow the playing field to see who is wanted and who just happens to fare well with a ton of other popular split votes.

In politics this is a problem where under your rules, the 40% wins when perhaps in a 1 to 1 vote the 40% would lose. Unless you have ranked voting where players can name their favorites in order of preference, you’re going to have this problem of the “best” candidate may not win.

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My point still stands there. Even if it were even in terms of universe, people would vote for the one they like the most, assuming the possible choices are all of the same caliber. Consider the popularity of the universes too; warcraft presumably has the largest fanbase here based of WoW’s success.

You have a point with mentioning the classes

Not mentioning it wouldn’t necessarily keep people blind since some characters will have an affinity towards a certain role. e.g., Gul’dan would very likely be a mage, genji an assassin, ect.

I don’t see how this’d work in heroes. Unless you have to link accounts to a credit card or something and it’s mandatory. Could work if you’ve dropped money on a blizz game, but we don’t know how many have done this.

I said that based off this post and how long it’s been since Tass has been reworked (about a year)

For clarification, Tass didn’t “take the place” of a new hero, rather his workload and time commitment was similar to what a new hero would be. His design was also changed drastically enough that he should be considered a new hero game-play wise.

https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/gbit6j/anyone_else_disappointed_after_the_ama/fp6uwia/

For the duration (Post made in March 2019):
https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/axoc9m/heroes_developer_ama_ranked_play_balance_and/ehuwe0v/

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As others have said, I don’t think making polls / votes for deciding which hero to add next would work; more than anything else, because of the time it takes to create them.

Already addressed, but we do have an idea of how long it takes devs to make new heroes, 'cause they’ve mentioned it in AMA’s and whatnot.
IIRC, in the AMA before 2.0 launch they said something along the lines of “it takes 8 to 10 months, Genji was 9 months”.

It’s not impossible that they’ve optimized their pipeline since then, but it’s also true that the dev team has lower resources now, so if anything, I’d speculate development time is longer.
About a year sound right.

And so, the only way I could see something like a poll working is if they had several heroes very close to finished, and they let us vote for which one gets released first (kinda like Hearthstone has done for the Legendary cards in some expansions).

However, I doubt that would be a good idea from the devs’ point of view.
Sure, for the players it’s nice if they ask your opinion, but then there’s also the problem that you know the other options (that didn’t win the vote) are probably gonna be the next few to come out anyway, and that kills the hype for many.

I remember in 2015 and 2016, they revealed heroes in groups (but released them one at a time): first with Lt. Morales, Artanis, and Rexxar; and later with Cho’Gall, Lunara, and Greymane.
Both times, I saw threads saying “there’s nothing new announced for months! ded gaem!!”. One of those threads was literally hours after Greymane went live!

Sure, that kind of post is probably not representative of the community’s general opinion, but I would still prefer it if they released the heroes one at a time, with a teaser a few days prior to get us speculating. :slight_smile:

… Not to mention, at this time they probably aren’t in a situation where they could have several heroes close enough to release-able state to have us vote (we know there’s at least one who we’ll “have to wait a little longer” for).

As for the skins, they’ve done it a couple of times (Azmodunk and Janitor Leoric are the ones I know for sure, and Templar Li Ming is remarkably similar to a fanart I saw before her release).
But I do think they could emphazise more when a released skin comes from the community’s ideas.

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Well, i learnt something new today of Hero creation time :slight_smile:

Also. I give up. Voting use to be easy as a stick.
This "complicate everithing to oblivion for reason [x] " weird for me.

After seeing this, i agree. The players should be left out what hero should be relesed next. Let the dev team release something…that noone wants to see…and everyone can hate…and everyone can cry for not releseing their fav hero, it’s not the class they play, or it’s from a IP they hate :slight_smile: