Can blizz turn this game over to community development in some capacity? Allow community to make maps, play styles, mods, etc… Let the community make a balanced version driven by a core of dedicated players. Would there be any harm in this? It’s a really nice core game, shame it’s been neglected.
Functionally, the community can use starcraft 2 assets to make their own HotS. One such example is Commander’s Conflict. I don’t know the size of community, the reliability for games, I just know that’s one example of community-driven action to try to update Hots.
Yes.
With the fall out of “DotA” from blizzard to Valve, giving an IP an inch allows people to take a mile. In the proceedings for the lawsuit, each version of Dota was considered a derivative work, and not just one whole made under a single banner: functionally, neither blizzard or valve had the “rights” they thought they did for “DotA”
Turning over assets to a community could cause them a number of issues as part of the trade-off of copy right and intellectual properties is enforcing those. That’s part of why nintendo, capcom, etc etc will send C & D letters at particular types of fanprojects. Some of it is ‘greedy cooperation’ and some of it is contract obligation. It could be possible to create a limited license agreement, something akin to what Wizard’s of the Coast used to do for Dungeons and Dragons, but I don’t think Activision would let that fly cuz Dota case history.
IF that stuff were to get ironed out, there’s the issue of distribution and integrity. Warcraft 3 and Starcraft host specific maps. While maybe someone in the background could tool HotS for that, as it is with HotS, there is one version hosted, and everyone plays that by logging into battle.net There aren’t any ‘cracks’ for making private servers for HotS (to my knowledge) so who gets to be the ‘official’ balancer for new content?
Without ironing out the distribution issue, the ‘community’ could just get fractured over purists who don’t want a ‘fan’ version, disagree with changes, and end up diminishing the remaining playerbase over hacked derivatives.
If a specific group compelled activision into a specific agreement, then maybe they could do something, but otherwise having a community try to reverse-engineer HotS to make a new-server is just asking people to start over on SC2 instead, hence that link.
The community is not capable of doing that.
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Your absolutely right that its at best, extremely unlikely the reins hots development will ever be handed over to anyone. Can’t think of the word for it for whatever reason but I just don’t agree with a lot of your explanation.
In regards to activation being afraid another dota incident. They already taken steps to ensure that couldn’t happen again with the changes to sc2 and wc3s TOS which allow them to essentially take control of your work at any time. Custom content also already exists in hots, albeit in a very limited form. A custom replay UI with unique functions exist and heroes profiles replay uploader sorta counts.
Additionally people have modded their games to revive some old features like past brawls
https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/l42k4c/play_deadmans_stand_heroic_old_pve_brawl_in/
and heres someone messing around with some beta deathwing abilites and even tweaking some of their stats. (notably making their cooldowns shorter to better showcase them) https://youtu.be/kTnhN3y47UY
Its not like blizzard cant make it happen either. Theoretically they could simply curate what makes it in to the game. Valve does this with team fortress and they have a team whos just as small if not smaller then blizzards classic games team. They could also just be ok with letting people make whatever and not be associated with it. This is the stance most games with mod support take.
Im not saying I have the answer to how they could implement mod support but theres no way it would be impossible.
I’m also not quite sure what your getting at here. Isnt this already how a mod scene generally plays out? Heck, in our own ngs scene we’ve decided that certain maps suck to play on and dont see play in the main tournaments.
If there were a bunch of different balance mods (and there probably would be) the most fun one would eventually come out on top anyway. Which, isnt that what we would want? This is essentially what happened with smah bros melee’s pal vs ntsc versions. I doubt we would have any nuclear, community obliterating flame wars over someone making raynor’s Q do 10 more damage.
Im of the opinion that any game can only benefit from allowing some form of user generated content.
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My focus is to point out that ‘harm’ can exist where people tend to consider there isn’t any at all. A lot of ideas seem to have the process of neglecting any ‘cons’ so there idea should be implemented and cursed be they that don’t readily agree.
Most of my experience/reference on mod communities are single player experiences, so the requirements to actually play the game are gated just by the process of setting it up.
Part of the issue of a 5 v 5 map is needing those 10 people to commit to playing, and while community fractions exist (eg. discord groups to organize custom game lobbies instead of qm/aram/rank queues) they tend to just change ‘soft’ rules – typically by agreement.
Changes to ‘hard’ rules can deviate the experience such that people can no longer enjoy the previous experience, so then there’s that fewer a people to bring the requisite numbers for the older form of play.
So I guess I’m going with the cautionary SAO (abridged) reference to “Flowers for Algernon” having one experienced ruined by getting something ‘better’ that they no longer enjoy the previous thing.
Raynor Q changing 10 damage is more an example of the disregard for potential harm instead of looking how aram habits and qm expectations have ‘ruined’ portions of the game for the community as is, so similar type mods could have a similar ripple. Granted, ‘good’ changes could bring players back, rather than separate a small population, but the question is simple addressing the potential for ‘harm’ and not actually weighing all the pro’s and con’s.
I think again, tf2 is a good example here. You can create lobbies in such a way that there’s no set up on the users end what so ever. You can simply join a server and the game automatically adjust stats or downloads assets when necessary.
Its not even permanent, you enjoy the fancy lobby and then when you leave the lobby your seamlessly back to the base game.
Then if one thing even gets more popular then the base game, maybe they should just work with the mod developer to have it actually be part of the base game. (fun fact, this is where minecraft pistons come from, they were originally a mod).
In terms of segmenting the community, this is the one real downside I can see potentially happening but even then, in my experience with multiplayer mods, this problem tends to just fix its self over time.
People want to play with other people more then they want to play a special version of the game. If a mode starts to be difficult to even find games for, people will just move over to another more populated mode.
Again, this is what happened with melee but I suppose a more familiar example would be what happened with unranked in hots.
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Yes they are. I’ve done it already.
Lol.
Hmm, I doubt it since they hate the community. Rather we are customers first and gamers last.
Would be nice but Blizz won’t open up their code. Not even if it makes their game more successful than ever before.
Mods will only enable more bots, griefers, and cheaters to ruin the game further.
This would mean the community would have to bow down to those who have the know-how about changing the game in a balanced way and the modders would have to try their best to ignore the fools with selfish and shortsighted suggestions. Even if the community voices their ideas to changes there is no guarantee the modders will act on them.
Debatable. The game was supported for how many years? Did you want the game to be supported for eternity? I for one don’t care much for always online games.