Must agree, while I understand they needed to consolidate the modes into one, but the way they went about it hurt the ladder and for many the competitive experience.
Many of my friends used to primarily play ranked at high levels, when those that were masters couldn’t queue they either quit or just play the minimum to offset rank decay. Others quit ranked and just mess around now in QM and sometimes do the clown stuff that drives everyone crazy. It’s the casual mode so it’s rare for them to take it seriously, especially after years of playing HL.
And the latest fiasco with the rewards just added a further salty taste to ranked, with people who actually enjoyed trying to get the mounts only to be met with meager rewards last season. That was definitely not one of the better PR moves on their end.
The death of HGC for me it is obvious it had a lot of negative effects with regard to the resources spent to develop this game but it was a good turning point with regard trust in Blizzard in general. From that point on it has been one bad press after another that they just aren’t recovering from, and from there I’m not surprised if it just further diminished playerbase interest as it is the perception that Blizzard is a sinking ship as it is a shell of its former self. And honestly with the W3 Reforged fiasco just further cements that.
To be fair, this community is no different than any other MOBA community out there. They are all toxic and any suggestion made is taken as a high offense.
the biggest issue is that the lack of positive changes to matchmaking, MMR calculation, MMR matching, etc combined with more and more good players leaving HOTS has left us with a largely busted matchmaking system. Even at the highest end non-pro play, it’s common to see Grandmasters matched with diamonds and plats.
It doesn’t help that the punishment system largely favors arbitrary suspensions and silences for “abusive chat” while allowing people to afk, feed, etc.
It did increase queues for the most popular heroes and roles.
Current support heroes had longer queues but were more enjoyable to play with standard comps.
Tanks had 30 sec queues.
Healers could suprisingly to me have to wait some time.
Game has been steadily going downhill since 2.0 introduced free rewards that didn’t depend on winning. But the first part of 2.0 wasn’t bad. It was when they start fiddling with xp when good players started leaving. The xp tickles patch saw a great exodus of good players, and xp globes was the final nail in the coffin for me.
The cancellation of HGC was just another nail in said coffin. Automatic bans didn’t help either. They in fact killed all communications. Several episodes of MMR skewing destroyed ranked forever.
I don’t think the game will ever recover. They don’t think it will either.
I don’t think you played this game much. Unranked draft is essentially QM with bans and knowing the map beforehand. Ranked is a joke with MMR skewing, randoms and teams combined. The clowns are everywhere. The masters of today are essentially the silver players of 3 years ago.
I won’t comment on anything about that, but if you’re suggesting that the 2.0 model resulted in people spending less real money, I think it’s on the money. I can’t back this up, but I know I stopped then and I was a bit of a whale before 2.0. Why spend when I can get all I paid for free? I also suspected the few hero skins locked behind the paywall would be free someday and there were.
Many of my uber competitive friends got silences, it really didn’t help the game banning for asking someone to soak a lane.
Ranked was hurt first by PBMM, then by merging TL and HL into some weird mix of both.
The business model of 2.0 is not one of the major reason for the downfall of HotS. The most pressing issue that had driven away lots of players are more tied to in-game flaws: a never really fixed MMS, some design decisions that were very contested, the merging of Solo Queue and Team Queue into Storm League and the cancelation of HGC (that was the only advertisment the game had).
I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t produce the same revenue stream the old model did considering how fast they abandoned it. If a FTP game isn’t pulling in any extra cash, it pretty much doomed.
I don’t disagree there were fundamental problems elsewhere, but 2.0. sure didn’t help matters.
If the game had been succesfull the 2.0 model would have sustained itself thanks to the higher number of players.
I totally agree that it didn’t help per se, but it was just another issue made big by the downfall caused mainly by structual problems that were never or poorly addressed.
The sudden shrink of the player base highlighted even more issues that since than had remain unnoticed thanks to the major flow of players around.
I’m going to intentionally ignore the ongoing discussion and blatantly point out how excruciatingly horrible this Diablo is playing. Plays like a beginner bot by charging randomly, never flipping the victim, pauses in movement while mounted, using Lightning Breath on minion waves and weird pauses in between AAs.
I might have a case of chronic uncontrollable laughter now.
Just watched the replay and i fell bad for you and dr.logan that you need to play with those players that dont even say a word in chat like every other qm game is today. The game felt like it was just 3 bots on the team doing nothing and when you try to talk to them none of them say a word cause they properly got chat turned off or had you all muted.
psst, there’s more gold & xp for winning games than losing. While that’s digital currency, so arguably not a ‘reward’ from a substantial view, the feels-good is existentially still a reward, so no matter how you slice “literally”, the game literally has a reward difference between winning & losing.
People like you, who are trying to look smart, are one of the biggest issues with this game.
Yes, you get more xp and gold if you win. So that’s all. You just need to lose 4 times to get the rewards of a win. So? Big deal. Winning requires effort, losing doesn’t. That’s the point.
yea, of course you’d take offense to people “trying” something when you bemoan a distinction of effort versus not.
In effect, you’re using bad information to justify lying to yourself – you ‘literally’ use the worst word for ‘literally’ being wrong. It doesn’t take ‘effort’ to know the difference, it takes people not being willing to delude themselves into ignorance.
You’re your own worst problem and you magically think that blaming others will fix that. That is literally the biggest issue with the game: you are the issue, you don’t have a point, and you somehow thing being ignorant and lazy is empowering.
