No wonder the game could never succeed long term, they never even took care to build it right. The ol’ 10 year problem with no end in sight. Such a shame for all the work that went into it and how fun it was, outside of the predictable buffs to make that week’s flavor.
I don’t know if this is clipped out of a larger video if it’s lacking context, but saying this is the biggest problem is absurd.
Map Hacks in a game where you can’t build counter units, where you basically have vision on at least 1/3 of the map at any given time, especially at the start, and you have literal minions that spawn and give you more vision as they go in one direction where the enemy will almost always be, and objectives spawn with advance warning telling you where everyone should go, isn’t really that big an advantage.
If I don’t scout all the possible spawn locations in SC2, I could get Zerg rushed and then I literally won’t have built enough units if I pumped too much in worker production to macro harder, which will just lose me the game in 3-4 minutes. In HOTS, the enemy might decide to “rush” bot tower if you have a Sylv and you might lose a tower, and the game continues on.
In HOTS, you come prespawned with your one hero, and buildings, WITH defenses, you know exactly where most everything is. The most you ever really ever have to worry about are bushes.
And that’s with the presumption that map hacks are a common problem and everyone is using them. They aren’t.
I could name a dozen things in the game that are bigger problems than map hack.
https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/1d2fmcx/piratesoftware_explains_hots_maphacks/
Have some top comments from somewhere else that already put in more effort to debunk lazy tripe like this than I’m willing to do myself.
Thor was asked about HOTS with Microsoft and he answers with one of the biggest problems with HOTS which is why he thinks he HOTS won’t be revived with Microsoft, since they would need to re-architecture the game.
i just wanna point out that this guy has been kinda known to make stuff up/exaggerate things or omit others for views and clicks (since he’s all about gaming the algorithms)
title is a bit misleading. He basically explains that it is a thing not what it actually is about. “all clients in a P2P network have the complete dataset” … yeah that’s how P2P works. Love when he says he pointed it out and they did nothing. My dude, they already knew this when they picked the engine.
Yeah, they refused to rewrite their game engine’s underlying architecture several years after it was built. Believe me, the software engineers are not unaware that the client calculates the fog of war. It’s very intentional. It’s far more performant using far less managed resources and enables things like replay files to work easily.
It’s almost like HotS was some sort of starcraft map 14 years ago or something…
Not only that but a bronze player is still going to play like a bronze player even with map hacks. Additionally, the average player struggles with the mini map.
I doubt any average player and below is taking full advantage of the map hack. I emphasize average and below because good players wouldn’t need it to play well so they would not feel incentivized to use one.
I agree that this isn’t the main reason the game isn’t popular, but I didn’t expect PLAYERS play down the thing.
These players deserve RMAH, honnorbuddy, goldsellers/GDKP and any other “isn’t a big deal” thing that came.
Yeah, I heard the same stuff about auto kick scripts in s14.
Ah ok, if they aren’t using it at full potential then no problem. Gonna love the relative moral aplication to cheating behaviour in videogames.
Nah, this is even better, the honor system aproach; let’s balance videogames around that please.
Again, I don’t think fog of war cheat is the main or even top reason for the game not being more popular, but I don’t expect player base increase with this mindset about exploit/cheats that’s for sure. This translates to other areas that have been mentioned on the forums too.
“But we can’t afford to punish players!”
Not even close. People are just used to playing the Dota/LOL format while Hots tried to go its own path but in vein. People just been too used to play a game that allows them to carry and surrender out when its no longer meeningfull to continue.
Hots tried to build its own rules but sadly it dont teach you enough on how to play the game and most hero guides are fanmade.
I once played Smite and in that game you could reward players who did good or did good plays. But it was also full of toxic players because of the last hit thing that Hots dont have aswell. People getting angry over you stealing kills or are in the wrong lane.
But game still more popular then Hots and even have its own tournement. Mostly becasue just like the other Dota copies they give the players the power to carry and show thier skills in the lanes.
Most bad teams would still be below lvl 14 when the good team reach max lvl with maxed out items.
You seem to be incredibly confused. I never said that it is ok and should not be addressed.
To spell it out for you, what I said was that only players that suck at the game would feel the need to utilize a map hack to change the outcomes of their games. And then, even with that map hack, they still get dumpstered because they still suck at the game.
That means that while you wait to see if blizzard will fix this issue, the bright side is that they still get dunked on in the majority of their games.
When I drive on the road, the majority of people don’t hit by car, key the paint, or slash my tires.
When I eat out, people don’t rush in and steal my food.
When I go to a theatre, I don’t encounter hecklers, spoilers, or vandals that sabotage the show.
Despite a plethora of communities that openly exchange exploits, mods, cheats, and so forth, most game experiences aren’t mired by that. Despite som 300 hours in Dark Souls, I only had a brief and temporary encounter with a cheater (high mobility, heaviest armor/weapon) and it was only a issue due to how new I was to the game at the time.
A select amount of cooperation is demand on many experiences in select portions of the world, and then generally applies to recreation. Experiences like a ‘moba’ that are largely self-rewarded by the player belies a sort of ‘code’ for the game to be worth playing, otherwise they may as well go ‘cheat’ as something faster, better, whatever.
A person revealing they’re hacking/cheating (to get cooperation from teammates) may expose them to reports that get them banned so that they’re further inconvenienced from a ‘win’ they might think they ‘deserve’.
That’s part of why developers have meetings regarding the weight of pros and cons of their design choices: some of the select concerns of using a ‘mod’ of starcraft means it is vulnerable to select issues, and they will weigh the concerns of trying to ‘fix’ it compared to spending their time working on something else with their limited resources.
Select people know and understand that much, so they don’t have to bother worrying about select cheats, exploits, or hacks for ‘most’ of their gameplay experience provided the playerbase is as a sufficient capacity to routinely cycle the content. Depending on legacy code/hardware addressing the concern could take a significant amount of time and/or effort and may not fix that issue, or, possible even create a more exploitative concern.
Some of the downplay concern isn’t just a matter of acceptable loss/risk, but also a desensitizing to "boy cry wolf’. Lower skilled, impatient and inexperienced players constantly cry about potential hacks and cheats that further cements how far they are lacking in their gameplay. So it generally falls that the inexperiences, ignorant, and disingenuous try to assert that a specific cheat/exploit “ruined” the game without them knowing a thing about the actual effort put into the game, the consideration for it’s design, or things far more worse and impactful largely because they’re just a frog in the well thinking they’re bigger than the moon.
Ok, I think we can agree that map hacks and using the SC2 engine was not the cause of the downfall of this game.
Also worth noting, this game was quite successful for a while and probably still could be if not for internal problems with the company.
Any context for who this guy is? Even in this short clip sometimes he infers that was part of the HoTs team (that very well be the case), then in the next he it’s like he could be a programmer that worked with blizzard on another project or not at all. It’s just confusing and the fact that map hacks are rare just makes me wonder what his deal is.
EDIT: so this guy does claim to have worked for Blizzard, in what capacity I still don’t know and the fact that he says he personally warned blizzard that map hacks would be their undoing is questionable. He also does a lot of promotion for his game company and brags about being a hacker so, results inconclusive.
Didn’t know anything about him till a passing reference was made during a “Cold Take” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCUvVfOfXDc mentioned him regarding Hell Divers 2 as some sort of know content creator, dev, and hacker.
https://wikitia.com/wiki/Jason_%22Thor%22_Hall
his father, Joey Ray Hall’s work on Blizzard’s World of Warcraft inspired his journey as a game developer. Hall’s first job in the technology industry was as a freelance security researcher and developer. After 7 years of freelance, he joined Blizzard Entertainment as a Quality Assurance Analyst in 2009. Over the course of 6 years he climbed the corporate ladder at Blizzard, eventually becoming a senior specialist on Blizzard’s Red Team, which handles penetration testing and security analysis. After leaving Blizzard entertainment in February of 2016, Hall formed pirate software with his colleagues Bradie Shaye Rehmel and Stijn Van Wakeren.
Also has their own wiki https://piratesoftware.wiki/wiki/Thor
It didn’t succeed because Blizzard. A shadow of its former self that only copies other games years after they were already popular and then ruin them by dumbing them down and catering to the casual players.
This. Vision (including vision talents) is useless in HotS if you don’t know how to properly utilize that information to kill enemy heroes, destroy enemy structures or end the enemy core.
Simply seeing enemy players is worthless for at least 30% of the population playing the game even if they were able to reveal the full map at all times.
Exactly. Fanboys absolutely can’t stand how simple the truth is, lol
While I don’t completely disagree with your sentiment, the overwhelming popularity of ARAM, suggests that perhaps, Blizzard didn’t dumb Hots down enough to be popular with a wide audience. Ranked was never as popular as QM, and remember, a Dev said VS AI was the most played mode. Had Blizzard embraced the idea of a “Hero Brawler/Casual MOBA”, it might have differentiated them from LoL and Dota, established titles that attract a more competitive player base.
I often wonder had ARAM as we know it today, been available at launch, would Hots had been more popular? Catering to casual players, as you put it, is really just trying to market a product to appeal to the widest audience. The HGC had a lot of support, but relatively few viewers considering the money thrown at it. For whatever reason, it would seem casual players make up the majority of Hots player base, I could make the opposite argument, that maybe they weren’t catered to enough.
If people enjoy playing Hots then it should be the most important. If people dont want to be part of the games Blizzard are making then there are plenty of other games to play. Not a hard decition to make instead of making thread nr 146 of why Blizzard failed. I dont really think people care about that anymore. People will choose either path.
People that need to remind us why Blizzard failed really need to move on themself. Repeating the same thing just makes you more boring to listen to.
If it was only a brawler from the start as it was originally intended, it would probably still be in development or even monetized as a cross platform mobile game.
They had their chance with competitive ranked. That era between 2014-2019 was unique because it was the peak of competitive MOBA’s.
They failed, for a myriad of reasons. If I had to pinpoint Blizzard’s largest flaw in why such a huge investment was ruined:
Besides HGC on Twitch, they didn’t advertise this game. At all. Like 99% of the problems in HotS from matchmaking quality to queue times and rainbow games are a direct result of not enough players.
Meanwhile the entire internet in 2014-2019 including social media and YouTube was filled with Riot’s paid ads for League of Legends.
They had heavier advertising than Temu does today.
The irony is: Game was marketed as fun hero brawler but Blizzard at the same time tried to position it as pro esports title. Blizzard is so disconnected from their players since years. This company failed on so many levels. If they would have made a real hero brawler and focussed on ARAM and those arena game types then this game could have become a hit. But instead they tried to make it a MOBA, one of the most toxic game genres and then basically build a North Korean suspension technology into this game and made the causal players the main target group. It just doesn’t work that way. It is like building a Ferrari and then making single moms with a half time job your main target group.
Did you bother to read through your tin-foil theories before you posted them?
Cuz you’re creating contradictions, and then trying to blame it on someone else. Your ability to fool yourself with ignorance doesn’t magically become true because you used allcaps.
Pro tip: Comment less on this forum because you are just posting crap no one cares about and you have an opinion on anything and blowing the “Blizzard is so great, this game is so great and everyone that says otherwise is just bad” horn. All you comments can be safely skipped because you are like the senile uncle at the family table that has to comment on everything but ultimately has nothing to say. 5k+ posts says all. 5k+ posts full of hot air.
if your statement were true, then you shouldn’t bother posting here at all. Hypocrisy doesn’t make for useful discussion, and your demonstrable lies demean yourself more than they do me.
None of my posts indicate “blizzard is great,” but time and time again effectually illiterate people like yourself convince yourself that you shouldn’t read, and that you’re somehow better off reveling in ignorance. Your capacity to believe your own lies demeans yourself more than me.
Meanwhile, I post jokes, share tips, and attempt to inform people that should care about improving their perspective as life is all about trying to improve.
It takes a special amount of effort for people to intentionally delude yourself, and that’s time you could be doing something else instead of ‘wasting’ it pretending that you can ‘safely’ skip things that you really shouldn’t. Reading is your friend if you’d bother to do it.
Otherwise, you’d just overcompensating and throwing a childish tantrum.