Is the merge of the regions into one a sign of them trying to keep the game populated during a drop of players?
Yes, given the official reason in the patch note is âlonger wait timesâ.
I see nothing wrong with the latest merging, it makes finding matches easier instead of keeping two low population servers separate (theyâre still separate but now people from US Central can get matched with people who are in US West).
Also it wont happen if the players have super high ping differences between each other.
Edit: Link:
After looking at the causes for North American playersâ longer wait times, we are bundling matchmaking for our US regions together. This will only happen for players if they have good pings to both sites, and our simulations have shown that we can create better games faster this way.
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I donât want to see this game die D:
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Itâs very unlikely HotS will ever âdieâ. Queue times can just get really high if too many people quit the game like in the US, then you have to bundle servers together like they did in April.
I have no idea who EU would be bundled with, though.
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Honestly, Iâve been noticing a higher number of players not speaking or speaking in another language, not a problem when they are communicating with their friends they are grouping with but it definitely makes the higher number of games where people are obviously throwing more troublesome. I played a game recently where 3/5 of my teammates spent most of the game running back and forth in spawn in aram brawl. I dislike the concept of random bot accounts run out of who knows where ruining games because it becomes hard to want to wait 15 minutes to lose a game and try again when you also have to deal with the concept of being flagged as a leaver
hopefully EU and NA never get merged together that would make ping go up so high and that means more people get frustrated = unplayable for most of playerâs = quit.
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That would be the worst option; Cross continent. I already remember how bad ping was when playing on US, and a Singapore player joined the party (thus the game was played on their server).
Playing a hero like Tracer or Valla was impossible because of the 300+ ping. Itâs not an option.
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yeah thatâll be so bad. however EU has more playerâs than NA without being merged so far so hopefully it doesnât become like NA and need a merge
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it will. just like Diablo 2.
ya you can argue some ppl play it and its still supported by blizz. is it really an active game like it use to be though?
when you consider they dont put any advertising into this game really, at least not that i have ever seen, then the game is definitely going to die. its not like LoL who will hold out much longer because they have a much higher player number and they advertise.
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Iâm just trying to be positive and hope the game stays online as long as possible. But I know in reality some servers have already died out or merged because there werenât enough players left.
If things get bad enough we can always make custom games and tournaments though, even if only 1000 people remain years down the road.
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thereâs enough players that find this game fun. blizzard will keep it around. anyone talking about the HotS servers shutting down forever is just a LoL / DotA shill.
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ya, forever? i dont see it happening unless something catastrophic goes on. like i was saying with Diablo 2 its still open and you can play online. they even pushed out some bug fixes some time ago. blizzard wont just give up on their games.
its more of the if hots ever got âthatâ dead the only really viable mode would be AI if you didnt want to wait around all day. unless you had a bunch of friends you could play with.
ok, LoL / DotA shill.
Sure, its a rare example that could be the exception. But just look at TF2. 3 years after it release, players were already starting to complain about it dying (when it went f2p). 7 years later, its still well alive.
And marketing wise, there werent a lot of updates either. Far less than hots, and the major ones usualy were just new skins, rarely any new game mechanics.
If we look at the large updates in the last 10 years (i do not talk about recurring updates, or content additions from custom content, those are relatively cheap to perform updates):
- Meet your match 2016 (introduced matchmaking)
- Two cities 2013 (introduced additional MvM features like capture zones and a lot more bot features)
- Mann vs. Machine 2012 (added MvM as gamemode to the game)
- Pyromania Update (meet the pyro video release + new sd_ map type added)
- Ăber update 2011 (smaller than the MvM update, but introduced the meet the medic video)
Sure, tf2 has custom content to keep the game alive on that. But this custom content only required those updates because community servers started to die out and often gave a bad experience to players (pinion being a major abusive system).
Even balance updates were rare enough. And before you think ''christmas took months in this game"⌠tf2âs birthday was forgotten once aswel and delayed by several days. While it only would require 1 cvar being changed on each server to enable this.
This game can survive quite long if blizzard at least ensures the balance remains decent, and occasionaly alters the meta. Hero reworks can achieve this, a new hero can achieve this, and simple number tweaking also can.
And if it realy matters, they could still include this game in a cross promotion event. Even if they believe this game is going to die, it can get enough attention of its existance. As in the end, this game shouldnt become entirely forgotten.
Yes, as dev you might want this game to die ASAP, just so you can announce a fresh new version as Hots2 (without getting potential confusion with the 2.0 update). But even if this game flopped, it is still going to be a marketing tool.
There were more games where the first version flopped massively, and its 2nd version became popular. It shows a sign of learning.
But there is also the advantage of âknowing your mistakesâ that can assist a 2nd game. For this you should ensure the first game however gets the proper balance fixes applied, and show that even with low maintenance, you can keep the game good.
These anomalies are a perfect example of trying to see which problems you can solve by introducing some excessive changes you couldnt do when there was a HGC going on. And guess what, they are working quite well so far.
In the meantime, even with less and less updates, we can still have fun in this game.
Eventualy we will get bored. But thats natural aswel. I stopped tf2 years ago, but when tf3 (more like âifâ, because valve) is announced. Im probably going to play it from the start.
Games will eventualy start to become boring, or it can be a lack of a chalenge, or because you found a better game, or because all your friends stopped playing aswel. A new game version is occasionaly just needed to fresh up the environment and grant a massive engine update (which hopefull will be easy enough to maintain).
For hots the engine is generaly working against it. And thats most likely why custom content cant be made as easily. In the best case, it should barely be any effort to load in custom content. But that requires the base engine to be designed around it aswel.
And if hots2 ever gets made, i hope this is the first thing they will fix. Custom content is generaly what makes a game good, and boosts its chance to go competetive. Because then the community can solve issues if they exist, even if its just for some tournament (like blocking something OP, that in most mid level games arent an issue).
Itâs more likely to die if they DONâT merge and ppl get fed up with wait times.
Itâs dead already. Just kept in a zombie state by all those âItâs just a gameâ players, that have 3000 matches under their belts but still donât know to soak XP, not fight when the enemy has talent advantages and still donât know the heroes that they already levelled to 30+.
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90% of LoL / DotA are âjust a gameâ potatoes too. welcome to online gaming.
Welcome to online gaming in the game console and mobile era where every soccer mom plays games today. Back in the days when the nerds played online games on their computers you had people that actually cared to achieve something in games and wanted to win.
Today people play online games that donât even care that there are 4 other players on their team. They just do their own thing, living in their bubble.
Online games were better when there were players that actually had online gaming experience and cared to play as a team. Today you have a bunch of solo players playing a multiplayer game and are offended by them saying something in the chat.
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Them wanting to reduce queue times doesnât mean that this suggests a shrinking playerbase honestly. Queue times late at night in NA at the highest level of play have been pretty slow even before the lay-offs at the end of 2018 - and the new restriction changes, allowing 3+ stacks in Master+ again will only inflate queue times.
NA has actualy always felt less populated than the EU region, as the NA playerbase was always split up into two different servers.
All we have really is stat sites, because Blizzard wont openly talk about player numbers. Assume 25-50% of games get uploaded there.
Maybe even more now because of HotsAPI.
At the peak of hots (around 2016)
In 2020
The difference is pretty astonishing. You can take the #10th popular hero from 4 years ago and they were played as much as every hero today combined given a random week.
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