Also for the company, as feedback. Everyone please list the main reason (s) that HotS is failing.
5 Likes
Lack of Mei for sure.
24 Likes
Some heroes are useless, unplayable for long time.
Tass, Chen, TLV, Illidan, etc.
14 Likes
1. Matchmaking is terrible
If games arenāt fun, you donāt play them. Miserable games drive away players.
Stomps, unfair matches, being dragged down by trolls/afks, low quality teammates, poor game understanding, unbelievable level ranges, insanely long queue times, and horrible team comps.
Matchmaking in this game is a nightmare.
2. Abusable reporting system and false bans
Reporting system killed communication. Period. 100% Blizzardās fault. We gave them dozens of viable suggestions to fix it, but they refused to listen.
You only have a certain number of loyal players, if you squander them with false bans they donāt come back.
8 months ago you introduced your flawed āharsher penaltiesā, and the playerbase has declined constantly since.
3. HGC was a mistake
It cost way more money than it made and should never have existed. Financially unsound decision based on āpride and hopeā rather than sound logic.
You should have known just from the initial reception how unlikely HGC was to succeed. Viewership never went above a few ten thousand, it was unsustainable.
You should have been more generous with viewership rewards and streamer promotions, less focused on prize pools and salaries which average players will never see.
4. Failure to understand the importance of public relations and disrespect for your customers
For a long time Blizzard has stuck their heads in the sand and said āyou think you do, but you donātā. Arrogance always comes back to bite you eventually, a lesson Blizzard has paid for dearly the past few years.
I do see some signs of change, but itās too late and the damage has been done. Until Blizzard learns to respect the importance of public relations and perception, they will continue to unnecessarily alienate both current and potential customers.
Very likely Heroes of the Storm will never recover from this disaster. It was already barely above the critical population, and after this month it will lose thousands of the best players. Almost all of the Pro, Grandmaster, and Master players will be leaving for other games, including me. A good fraction of the remaining population will follow us.
Here are the lessons you need to learn Blizzard.
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Queue times and the perception of fairness are more important than true quality.
If you listen to nothing else Blizzard, then listen to this: Queue times are unacceptable and must be brought down. Figure out how or prepare to die.
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Shoddily designed punishment systems with false bans and rigged appeals lead to less players and more toxicity.
Stop banning players, period. Silences and AI leaver games are acceptable, but you will no longer have the playerbase to carelessly throw customers away.
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Hire a competent PR manager.
You could have avoided so many unnecessary PR disasters with one.
53 Likes
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Horrendous marketing, I didnāt even know this game existed before they did the SECOND Overwatch Promotion
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Ugly game that is an eye sore that settings that arenāt on the highest.
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The game came into a saturated market and did nothing to make themselves better than the competition other than saying
It has that guy from Warcraft and Starcraft fighting each other.
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Terrible balance that has catered to the .1% of players for a game that is mostly casual.
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Horrendous report system where you will get banned for X thing with no proof or reason on why you were banned.
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Heroes are often released on launch as OP pieces of crap where the devs have stated that they spend literal months on hero balance and this is what they thought was good?
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Match Making has and most likely always be bad.
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Favoritism of certain franchises over others. Donāt you just love it when you want X character from X franchise but Warcraft gets their 4TH HERO RELEASE this year alone out of 9 heroes. Or how about that time when they spammed out the hyper mobility Overwatch heroes that NO ONE wanted and made the game a balance nightmare?
Just to name a few reasons.
33 Likes
I think the game direction swayed too far from how it originally was. It feels like pre 2.0 the team wasnāt afraid of bending the rules of MOBAs by being creative with hero designs. Even with Tracer, she bent the rules of how the game worked.
But for about the past year, every release and rework has made heroes stale or removed them from a unique niche.
On top of that, I think the map and tower changes really started the beginning of the end for this game. HotS, for me, was always about macro play and using the objectives/minions to your advantage. It was learning timings and stuff so you could try and out-maneuver the enemy team.
On top of that, the death of the specialist class really, really cemented the downfall of the game. The last specialist like hero we got was Probius. Probius was released in March of 2017, a year and a half ago. Since then we have gotten 22 heroes, none of which really fulfill any kind of pushing or macro role. Then Azmodan and Sylvanas both got reworks to push them away from that role.
The last āMOBA rule breakingā hero we got was Dva, who also came out over a year ago.
But the worst changes had to be the ammo removal, in my opinion. That is what made this game so different to League and Dota. But sadly the devs decided that this game should grow more and more like League, so instead of playing a scuffed version of League, I just play League now.
On top of a ton of matchmaking issues that never got fixed, or took too long to get fixed. Or how difficult it was getting the skins you wanted post 2.0, or how many gem only skins there started being. The lack of over all content also made me lose faith in the game, hero spotlights used to come with little intros, heroes used to get 3 skins on release, among handful of other things. The cutting down of the dev team has gotten very, very apparent.
HotS will also do bad because there will be no community surrounding it due to pros not caring about it anymore. With no pro scene, there will be little to no community faces. Because really, this game doesnāt bring in the viewers to attract streamers. People that argue that the game doesnāt need HGC and that it costs more than it gives seem delusional to me. If a game like Smite, made by HI-Rez for God sake can have a competitive scene supported by the devs, then why canāt a game made by a titan like Blizzard? I mean hell, Iām pretty sure Heroes of Newerth still has stuff going onā¦
29 Likes
Thereās just one reason and itās being way too stubborn with development priorities. HOTS 2.0 was about a year too late and the latest matchmaking changes are 2 years too late even though they were asked for years, multiple times and on a daily basis. Currently the game is great despite itās flaws in limited balance research and development (which is understandable) causing issues in a lot of viability with heroes; and the cosmetics economy being a bit absurd. That being said we finally got the matchmaking fixes we all wanted for years, but due to the changes being those years behind the playerbase isnāt large enough to support it in a healthy way since a considerable amount of players who left the game for this reason arenāt coming back. None of my friends who left due to the matchmaking being so bad in casual environments are even willing to test the game out because they have 0 trust in the devs updating the game in a healthy consistent way in the future. There needs to be a HOTS 3.0 update with some huge changes, future plans and development transparency for that to even have a chance to happen.
3 Likes
Because of shared XP and overall failed game design which does not reward individual skill and mostly punishes you. Itās fine if you have your team, itās probably fine if youāre at the top, but at lower tiers and the bottom where 99% of the players are, itās trash, matchmaking will never be fixed because itās impossible to correctly evaluate your skill, 1 in 10 games I probably get matched with my level team and same level enemy team and matches are amazing. So these 99% see this sh.it and leave, you canāt do anything on your own, your skill isnāt evaluated correctly, most of the time you WILL get a moron on your team, which is a disaster for a game which is designed to take away individual impact. Thus the game doesnāt grow. Any idiot in 2015 could predict this game will die. It never even grew organically, all these million dollar events, paid streamers until they eventually gave up flushing money down the toilet, failing to see the real issue - communist system, lmao.
4 Likes
Iām going to say that Heroes is not failing. It just needs time to grow. Unfortunately, it wasnāt given that time. Thatās why this hurts. This is so unlike the Blizzard of oldā¦ maybe activision finally got to them.
Meh i sayā¦
4 Likes
Balance actually caters towards the casuals but everything else sounds about right.
7 Likes
Yeah, they even have a pro scene in their other game Paladins too. Blows my mind that Hi-Rez can have one for that and Smite but somehow Blizzard canāt keep HGC in some capacity.
Another thing is Smite has a clan system lol, something Blizzard said HoTS would get forever ago and it never happened.
5 Likes
For me, the breaking point was the battleground/pbmmr/stealth update that came out last December.
It was an ambitious patch, a lot of new stuff that changed the game and affected the balance of it. Mistakes were made leading to bugs.
And players were loss playing a game with differents rules suddenly. We had to play like a pro players, else we were being punish real hard early in the game, leading to many snowball and one-sided game, that arenāt fun.
Now, the problem is fixed, but it took too long.
Hots probably lost a lot of players in the months following Hanzo patch. Queue time went up not only because of the new mm rules.
1 Like
ItĀ“s e-sport part is, not the game, whereas the premise of the question is false already.
4 Likes
The AI update made a bad problem worse. Iām in a region where queues sometimes time out and stick you with 4 AI allies vs. 5 AI enemies. Iād normally be fine with this - I like playing comp stomp games. But the enemy AI seems to function better than the friendly AI. Itās still functional if youāre playing an Assassin who can carry your whole team, but Supports are completely off limits if itās no fun dragging your drooling imbeciles to victory.
If nothing else, Blizzard needs to ban Sergeant Hammer as an AI opponent if you donāt have a full team of human players; itās no fun having your AI allies feed incessantly because they have no idea how to play against her.
4 Likes
crap hero balance
20char
3 Likes
Bad marketing bad name too should be calld blizzard stars . Bad tuturials people think this is like lol or dota ,on low pc fps drops bad performance.
1 Like
I think the mistake was made at the very start of the game: Ppl were educated wrongly or not at all about how to play this game. Too many ppl nowadays think it works like āI pick the hero I want and it doesnāt matter whay my teammates or the enemy picksā.
The lack of proper tutorials and an INGAME team-coordination tool summoned HotSā failure. This game is very team based ā¦ something the QM mode was (and still is) bad for. You canāt just pick a hero you want to play (but the game mode you play 1st teaches ppl exactly that and gives you wrong impressions); you have to ajust your hero choice regarding your teammates and the picks of your enemies.
This leads to āunflexibleā teammates in drafts, that pick whatever they want, toxic chats and a underastimation of the healer / tank role (that most players donāt want to play because of that).
8 Likes
Well, thatās an other problem, yes.
I woudnāt say the problem is the shared XP there, just the rating system. Itās okay for a team game to have team-xp and also to evaluate the team performance at the end of the game, but the individual skill got fogotten. The usual win / loss rating should have been complemented with a rating system of the individual performance - at least in game modes, where you canāt choose all your teammates but have to work with what you get.
2 Likes
What the worst part of this game is very unique. Probably i would stand alone with this problem.:
Hero balancing was made by the company and not by the players. If i could use between a lot of dmg opption, i could decide wich one is the best to me. The 3 talent opption was something, but not really good. I canāt say more then 5 hero what was well balanced hero at the moment and if i liked one hero for example tyrande, then it could be reworked again, and i canāt playing with her again. For somebody the new Tyrande the godness, i can understand, but not to me.
Maps: I had 2 problem with the maps.
First: I canāt tell wich map is good for me and wich one donāt. I canāt decide wich map do i want to playing. I hate 1 one map very much. Itās the tower of doom map. I just hate it and now sometimes i get that map again, because it is in the map-pool-something.
Second: A few map wasnāt really 5vs5 mapā¦ For example the zerg map with a little changes could be an excelent 3vs3 map, but at the moment the 5. member always a problem. Itās makes less enjoyable to me the 5. member.
Hero releases: If at the twitter (or somewhere else) we could vote for the next hero, i think that would be better, because we can discuss wich one do we need the most. I think we would have alredy deathwing (one of the most common warcraft character) and a lot of other common from other games. Whitemane deffinetly won my heart as a balanced hero, but as her roleā¦ meh.
Teammate/enemy heroes banning/needed: In quick match and Ai mode i found this problem. Against a few hero very-very problematic playing, and in a certain situation a few hero not a good teammate. If i could ping those heroes as an opption, then i could playing against less problematic heroes. For example: In the past azmodon E talent lane was problematic to me. Once he catched, i died and i couldnāt run away. Bad teammate: When you are playing with Zul jin and you get lt morales as a teammate. He donāt let you dealing dmg. Your teammate is your enemy.
But mostly, i could playing with chogall too.
Thatās all what was needed. At least i think. My best suggestion to the next year: 3vs3 maps and 2vs 2 maps, because even in the middle school i havenāt seen a friendship with 5 member, but at there we was from the same age and from the same interest-circle. 4 person was the max more then 50 personā¦
extra idea: Some regular player canāt playing every day only 2-3 hour per week. For them should be possible to get stimpack bonus by some kind of weekly quest. Iām deffietly sure about, this would be a good move.
Hey mates.
1.Right idea - wrong execution.
I remember countless posts about how bad and unbalanced QM is. How ppl will gladly sacrifice 1-2 minutes of waiting time in order to get a fair match which is fun to play.
I also remember 2 updates addressing exactly this issue.
First update they tried to prioritize queues by skill lvl (mmr) the queue time was still fairly good but the team composition was usually unbalanced, leading to a 10 minutes one sided game. Community not happy.
Second update, the recent one, decided to force players into a specific role. The result - extremely long queue times and a huge gap between players mmr.
It takes me 20-40 sec. to find a game in TL and over a minute in QM even if I play as a supportā¦ Community not happy.
Now, since I had this idea for some time, in my opinion the best approach to the issue was to finally rework the roles, which was expected next year but not sure with the current situation.
Instead of messing around and forcing roles upon players they could make QM prioritize just MMR while mirroring the teams.
Basically if you got 2 mages, 1 bruiser, 1 tank and 1 sustain -> thatās exactly what the other team will have (obviously different heroes). So no matter what composition you got in QM you still get players of similar skill lvl and the base composition of the opposite team will be the same.
2. Ruining ranked again and again.
I could write a fairly big comment on this but in order to make it shorter I will just say: requirements .
Specifically a need of having at least 4 heroes at a certain lvl for each role instead of 16 whatever. Because hearing ppl say āI donāt have supports/tanks; i have only one and it was already banned/takenā while the player is in high gold/platinum is ridiculous.
Also since now you can get a lot of bonus exp would be nice to have the total amount of games as a requirement as well. Or at least 10 games played in UR so the player is more familiar with the concept.
3. Reporting system.
It just cuts off the communication because ppl donāt want to get banned because of a suggestion or advice.
Iāll be honest, I never got banned but at the same time Iām sure ppl reported me. Now, fighting toxicity is important but only if the toxicity is present in a first place.
Which means that ppl should review the reports and not just look at the amount, letting some players simply abuse the system whenever they feel like it.
Those in short would be my top 3 issues which if addressed right would bring a much more pleasant experience for players and therefore more players.
Cheers! ![:wink:](https://d3rakab8gpdsa3.cloudfront.net/en/heroes/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=6" ":wink:")
PS: If the question was also related why it fails financially I would say because of extremely poor marketing. I found out about hots accidentally from a friend. Most of my mates found it because of me or the overwatch event. Basically the game was poorly known before and it is still poorly known now.
3 Likes