This is something that has been bugging me for some time and a reason I have SOME hope that Blizzard dropping HGC is a significant move towards building a better game.
Right from the onset, Dustin Browder talked more about being concerned about what the pro players wanted / needed going to far as to prioritize creating half baked temporary measures to show the highest echelon of players. Worse yet, players from Alpha who took those measures extremely seriously and made the first couple of monthly lists were quickly pushed off of it when Blizzard brought in the “pro gamers”.
Starcraft 2 and Heroes as well as possibly Overwatch (I’m not terribly close to that community so its hard to comment there) have made more overtures to pro gamers then they ever have to the community of gamers.
Starcraft 1 became a great eSport because Blizzard focused on making a great game first. The COMMUNITY turned it into an eSport because of how good the game was.
TBH — I fear that Blizzard is lost in its way as far back as Starcraft 2. They’ve violated the very first core principle many times over. Their first core principle is:
GAMEPLAY FIRST
Catering towards the 0.5% of gamers and the investment community has made Blizzard spit out one game after another where the game play isn’t there.
Starcraft 2 was destroyed by Pro Gamers pushing to just have an updated Starcraft. Almost none of the new or novel features made it into the game.
Diablo 3 was destroyed by the investment community literally turning the auction hall into a jellinek curve to force people to pay to win.
Hearthstone continues to be a cash cow often charging more for their products then physical equivalents charge.
Heroes of the Storm remains buggy and problematic but its ok since the proplayers have their own version of the game.
(Again, I won’t touch on Overwatch because I haven’t played it remotely enough).
While this might be an overly succinct breakdown ignoring many nuances and acknowledgments that much of the overly zealous fantstic art direction remains at Blizzard — the sheer pandering for that eSports dollar has hurt the company.
While I will say I think Morhaime did a fantastic job trying to keep the corporate monsters away from Blizzard for as long as he could, he was one of the biggest investors of the ideas of eSports.
I hope that the departure of Morhaime actively lowers Blizzard’s eSport drive so that they can focus on making better games for the community.
I feel for the HGC guys who lost their jobs unexpectedly, but I hope this is will make for the opportunity to have a better game.
I hear what youre saying and look forward to the changes, but there are negative side effects to that too.
Samuro and chogall were rare in the pro scene but also entertaining to watch when they did get picked. They had abnormally high win rates because a select few practiced hard with them and thus rewarded for mastering challenging characters.
Now that the pro scene is gone, any encouragement to entice a pro player to risk pickibg them is gone. As a result, those characters got guttered because they are “frustrating to play against someone who is good at them”
Tinfoil hat theory there, but i dont doubt that decision making with tuning will be effected as a result of no pro scene.
I would repeat and repeat again, there are too much choice talent skills and ultimates to be in comon sense with our teamates. Most of the time … someone took wrong talent and because that talent , the game is lost. Not about playing skill… it s about character skill complexity synergy with teamates. One of the main reason why i never respect Hots in Pro Scene without talking about 5 players + 1 coach, … HOTS is 5 vs 5 … not 6 VS 6 but anyway i don t want to argue with brainded HGC Fans.
Gonna stop you right here immediately. High skill players and the “investment community” are really not as related as you think, especially since you’re confusing bad business (such as making Diablo immortal and announcing it at BLizzcon) with actual investment in the form of shareholders or sponsors (aka the people who help sponsor esports events).
This is unrelated to esports or pro play. Diablo 3 has been criticized for a lot of design flaws and bad business on the part of Blizzard and I cannot find anything related to esports or pro play.
now you’re on an unrelated tangent and just begging for people to ignore your whole post.
Proof? evidence? anything? Do you think the HOTS pro players demanded the dev team not fix bugs and game issues or something? there is no benefit to be had for pro players by refusing to use their influence to improve the game.
Based on what? the laning and xp changes make HOTS more like league of legends by dragging out laning times. A lot of big changes to HOTS have been attempts to get hyper casuals interested in HOTS. Do you think pro HOTS players enjoy having to lane MORE, having less viable characters to play, needing to deal with constant nerfs to good heroes, etc?
The problem is that you don’t understand how bad the average community member is at the game. We get threads here daily about how the devs should nerf insert weak hero here because said hero destroyed that person in AI games or some silly nonsense. Bowing down to them will make the game WORSE, not better.
Do you know why some competitive games are popular for like a month and then just die? Because devs focus too much on casuals and not enough on high skill players (aka the ones who will be your long time customers, get others interested in playing, help develop the meta and flow of your game, etc).
it 100% won’t. Devs are already being moved AWAY from HOTS and with no pro players to pull important data from, the remaining devs will likely continue to balance around terrible players who have no business putting their hands on anything balance related.
i always hated how you just knew esports is the reason they hated specialists and healers. neither of them make omg mlg playz for the crowd and were deemed dull so nerfed constantly. youtube/twitch in general are horrible for actual gaming.
Jeez these esports basher are some seriously clueless people. First off having a pro scene HELPS with balance, they help finding out what is too strong while also helping the skill level of the game evolve. As someone who has played with pros many many times it was by far my most fun games when you’re looking for quality games. No pro scene affects masters aswell as likely high diamond which is far more than 0.5% of the playerbase. You’re asking for a game balanced around what exactly? Casual plebs random complaints? We will NEVER have balance this way. There was NOTHING negative about having a pro scene, only blizzard doing a poor job even balancing around that level.
e-sport must be. However, HGC has made HOTS a hermetic game.
Smaller tournaments organized by the community or other organizations had to compete with HGC. It was a mistake, it made HOTS other than other Blizzard games very recognizable and unattractive. I hope that there will be someone who will see the potential of HOTS and invest by doing e-sport on its own terms.
The MOBA game without e-sport can not exist, we have many examples.
eSports players play the game at such a different level then people in Diamond or Platinum that changes made to the character to balance it at pro level that it destroys it at the casual, active and even hardcore players.
shared exp has made hots different and unpopular. As much as they talk about being different Hots is to similar too the other two games. From the start they were really trying to compete with DoTa with a dota style game.
I dont think the problem was HGC. I think the problem with this game is that blizzard tried to do everything, but they mismanaged everything really hard. They never really fixed the game for casuals with better matchmaking, tutorials on how to play the game and many other things; and they also didn’t do a good job for pros/HGC.
This game would be far more successful if they did things that the community (both casuals and pros) are asking since the begining. Sometimes I wonder if the game was released too “early”, because we could have had so many good features…
There was millions pumped into esports, tournaments, teams, casters, commentators, prize money.
There used to be a 30 min playable tutorial to teach players the basics of the game, thats gone. There were plans to make guilds/clans for the community, what happened to that? The player profiles are still barebones and no visible MMR after 4 years. Most of the game mechanics have changed so now when you defeat a fort you get a catapult every 3rd wave but no XP for the fort? How is that intuitive? Where’s a nice wardrobe/poser mode for our characters and animations? Why is the game split into 5 different modes?
Everything Blizzard devs have done with HotS has told me that from near launch, someone told them “forget about the players playing, we want you to make it so esports people watch the game, we want flashier kills, bigger explosions, 5 on 5 team fights all the time”
Or how about games like WoW and FFXIV requiring people to watch the video before doing a dungeon or it’s an insta kick? Real fun, lots of roleplaying adventure to be had thanks to video guides.
I think you would need to provide examples of game being ruined by catering to the pros. The question is … who do you design it for then? The casuals? The lowest denominator? I am not a game designer, but an engineer and I can say that in real life designing to that is never good. As I just said in another thread - we don’t design our cars to be topped at 15mph just because there are some senior citizens and pure idiots out there driving (and by the way, those are a LOT more harmful, you can see it from statistics of deaths and injuries), but catering to the lowest denominator hurts the functionality for everyone.
I’d say there are two things that really hurt HOTS: matchmaking and reporting system. MM is obvious (although it affects things a lot less for casuals, since vs AI is just that … vs AI, and QM is a clownfiesta anyways due to the nature of the mod). Reporting system you can clearly see by looking at voice feature - was heavily requested, took time/effort to design and then they started silencing people … results? Nobody uses voice outside of premade groups (but they used voice before, just got on discord/skype/whatever). So basically the whole effort of implementing voice was for nothing because some snowflakes complained. Same way a lot of people decided - it’s not worth spending money when you account can be banned at any time because someone was in a bad mood.
Blizzard was never the same after Activision. If you see the clear thread of mistakes leading back from that, it becomes clear. I won’t give Blizzard another damn cent of my money until they bring back support for this game. YOU THINK WE DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED BLIZZARD?! You introduced Diablo Mobile - which anyone could have told you was a dumb idea - and now you’re cutting HOTS funding because your stock tanked because of a result of that announcement? NAH, I’m done #notmyblizzard
#notmyblizzard either. The casualization of every aspect of this game was its end. The game needed to be way more competitive for real gamers. Instead it was just allowed to be a feeder/SJW paradise that didn’t belong here.
Well, I do. And it’s the exact, same crap over there. Matter of fact, I’ve said at the OW forums for two years now that you could basically cut-and-paste a majority of the HoTS complaints directly to the OW forums with minimal editing.
(Edit: 1 post count? Oh, that’s right, they changed forums over here. Damnit.)