I’ve been thinking in doing a topic like this for a long time now, i gave this feedback in another thread some time ago but i think this deserves its own thread
The starting experience is the most important thing for a game to grown its player base, Hots is very hostile to new players.
As an example my brother in law and his gf couldn’t keep up after losing 20+ games in a row, with horrible team comps , very unbalanced player levels and the fact they tried the game when Deathwing was released didn’t help much either
I think the way to make easier for newcomers should go like this:
Make unranked the dominant mode
Let’s face it QM is cancer. I play it almost exclusively, I enjoy it very much especially because it let me pay who I want, but it is cancer
It offers a very hostile environment for a newcomer, it’s hard to get a decent comp, hard to grasp the map objectives, and hard to get a balanced team
In unranked it is guaranteed that you will get a tank and a healer in most of your games, this alone will give newcomer a vastly superior experience in terms of comps if nothing else
Make unranked acessible
So in order to make unranked the prevalent mode it needs to be acessible. The easy solution in my view it’s simple : newcomers without the minimum number of heros owned would play an unranked mode with no hero bans. These people would play with themselves and once they get to the minimum requirement for normal unranked they would start to play with everyone else with normal rules
If that isn’t possible (low population high queue times etc)
Bring back a starting set with the required number of heros and be done with it
Either way make it acessible
Change QM position on the UI
If unranked needs to be the most used mode it should be where quickmatch is now
Make it be :
Vs AI
Unranked
Ranked
Quick match
Braw
And I think that’s it
This is my feedback
I think with an healthier starting experience hots would gain a LOT of new players
Also my suggestions are no restrictive so a newcomer would feel compelled to play something he doesn’t want to
That’s my 2 cents, what you would like to see changed for HOTS starting experience? How would you improve it?
While draft modes can be seen as the ideal way to play the game, QM is more popular because of 2 things.
its quick
you can play whatever hero you want without worry of bans or someone picking your hero.
Unranked isn’t a bad mode, its just not as popular as QM. The only way for UR to become the dominant mode is for people to choose to play it over QM. The devs can try to shift everything to UR, but I do not think they should try to change what people want to play.
It’ll come down to what the player base wants to play, not the devs.
Another problem is there is practically no new player queue anymore, because there is a lack of new players.
It is not uncommon for someone who just joined HotS to be thrown into a QM with level 500+ people who played for years. That is not a good matchup for someone who just installed.
Many level 1-50 opponents they will face are also very experienced smurfs. Not real new players.
The system should wait until it can find other players lv1-10 and make them practice on Cursed Hollow. But I understand why they want to just put that newbie into a match fast: So they don’t get bored and log out.
Never said QM should be removed, it’s the mode I play the most, my sugestions are to make UR more predominantly played among newcomers because it will lead to more quality matches
Ah sorry about that. Had to write it pretty quickly because I’m at work. I’ll make changes to what I wanted to say. Re-read it in a little bit if you want.
While I do think that UR is a great mode and your reasoning isn’t bad, I just don’t think it is something they can do right now.
First off, the game lacks a legitimate tutorial that can also focus on how draft modes work.
Second, most players don’t want to have to worry about their hero not being available to play.
Third, usually beginner players want to just jump in and learn the ropes. While I strongly believe that vs AI can be a great start for a new player, QM is a better representation of how playing against humans would be. UR might be a little bit much for a brand new player because they’re still learning different heroes and their counters and such.
Fourth, most beginner players don’t have a lot of heroes available besides the free to play heroes and that can make their available heroes to draft really scarce. On top of that, they most likely aren’t good with the heroes that are free to play because they lack the necessary knowledge of how to play heroes they don’t have. I highly doubt a brand new player can grasp enough understanding of the game to be able to be acceptable in draft modes. If the one hero they do know gets banned or picked by someone else, they’re screwed.
Like you, I wish unranked was a viable game mode, but because people like QM for QM reasons and everyone else hangs out in ranked to try to climb, UR kinda took a hit when the player base dropped. Maybe if the game gets more popular again it could revive UR. For now, I just don’t see it happening. Good thread though, UR should be more popular than it currently is. I just think its out of the devs hands, they’re limited as is so focusing on a game mode that not very many people play isn’t resource efficient.
I hope I didn’t bore you with this wall of text, and more, I hope you got something out of it.
Nah, it was a very nice read and I agree with everything you said about quick match, its exactly why I play it in the first place. Thats why my suggestions go around shifting the attention to UR and make it more viable so new players wound gravitate more towards it. By the time they see the quick match tab they are already rooked by the game and can do a informed decision of fast matches vs quality matches
Problem is, new players have no idea how to draft. So they would probably not enjoy the experience (And getting yelled at for their “bad picks”). It takes a while to figure out how to draft properly.
This would worsen one of the earlier problems you mentioned earlier though. Matchmaking. You would essentially split the player base. At the same time, they would have to re-learn the mode again when they play an actual draft mode. As this mode means picks are almost guaranteed, and the first pick team would always have the OP hero of the moment.
Plus, even new players have heroes they don’t like playing against, and they might shun this mode precisely because they can’t ban them.
To me, the solution would be to actually teach new players something, instead of throwing them into the game and basically tell them “you figure it out, bye”
However, an even more imoprtant issue is, they should actually promote this game so people know about it.
New players are playing with themselves, if no one knows how to properly darft this is a non issue, before I got an invite to HOTS on alpha i was playing League of legends, and draft is the first mode you play over there and this is not a problem, because everyone is learning,
Disagree, because right now new players simply cant play Unranked, what i am suggesting is to give then the option if they choose to do so, to play something other then quick match. This split allready exist because these new players are not allowed to play unranked, so it would change nothing for those who can.
And since they are new players they are using the free week heroes, they dont have heroes yet or they wound be playing normal unranked like evrybody else.
I also disagree that you wound have to relearn anything just because now you can ban heroes, its just an additional layer on a game you already know. We all went through it when hero bans was first introduced just fine.
Again my suggestion is to give new players a option that today they do not posses, to play unranked instead of QM
As a whole, the “dota-like” genre suffers from a massive amount of esoteric knowledge needed in the game. (what each hero does, so you can act and react accordingly) If I didn’t have friends already into the genre that then went hand-over-foot to teach it to me wayback when, I doubt I’d have gotten into it from ‘newbie experiences’ alone.
I’m not sure how that works for other games since I was no longer a ‘newbie’ to the genre and could get my feet wet and test the waters myself once I was broken against the initial hurdle ages ago, but a big piece has to come from hype driven by the competitive scene (giving players a goal of something to imitate and aspite toward)
Fighting games have a similar issue, but matches are smaller, so there’s less variation people can encounter at a time. Some fighting games have changed their tutorials to not just having a move list, but including AI replays (to see it done right) and also featuring some combos so players can see how the moves interact together.
Functionally, what HotS needs are skirshing modes that have fewer heroes per match, but some sort of guide or quest system to help them learn a couple of pieces at a time. Having ai and quest actions to teach players how to correctly scout bushes, save allies, steal camps, and do more than just brawl mid would go a long way to helping newer players not only learn the game, but adapt to what is different about it compared to its competitors.
Esp when it comes to roles llke Tanking or Healing; there aren’t good metrics for indicating good tank/healing, so players don’t know how to feel rewarded for what they do, and instead it just becomes a stressful chore to fill for an ‘essential’ role.
It’s an issue because new players are not matched only with new players.
LoL doesn’t have different maps, with different objectives, and different characters having map synergy or being bad on certain maps. It’s not the same thing.
HotS is not a game where any characters works equally well on any map.
I stayed away from draft modes for a while because I had no idea what I was doing, and I wanted information on it (Which you will not find in-game)
This is whats so sad about the situation. I’m sure loads of ppl would find it fun, if it reaches the right hands. Hots isnt like other mobas its more of a niche moba. They need to do a bit better in catching players who prefer it.
Not in my sugestion, they wound be matched with other players that dont fulfill the requirements to play in normal draft (i.e dont have the required number of heroes ) witch are new players and smurfs (and you cant do anything about smurfs anyway).
Also heroes synergies on maps is a non issue because we are talking about people who have access mostly to the free rotation.
Again if you dont want to play draft its your choice and nothing stop you from just going on QM. What I am advocating is to give new players the choice to play in draft mode if they want to do so
That’s not possible. There aren’t enough of them. That’s why they’re currently being matched with Veterans. The game already tries to match them together, but it can’t.
It is never a non issue. There is no point sending people into a draft mode if they don’t have enough heroes to properly draft. Even more if it’s going to teach them bad habits that their team mates will have to deal with later.
I don’t see a problem with people sucking hard in hots but then gradually improving. There are no internal guides that are good but if the player wants to get better, I hope he/she is smart enough to literally google a guide. And now the forum will argue what constitutes a good guide and I’m like “ehhhh”. As long as the guide person gives some helpful advice and/or is a high rank every bit helps
Totally agree with Phase. Reflecting back on when i first started playing, there was a lot for a new player to take in.
Im not just talking about learning new maps, reading the talents and figuring out what each hero does? Im talking about how the game is supposed to feel as a whole.
I loved muradin, and as a new player i thought the speed of his waveclear was considered “normal”. Everone says wave clear was important so I’d do it. I’d also take camps as mura thinking camp clear was supposed to be this challenging.
A few weeks later when jaina came onto the free rotation i was blown away by the stark difference in how amazing her wave clear was compared to my boi.
With so much to learn, draft adds an additional wave of complexity which to be honest is a little overwhelming.
Can you imagine noob me in draft mode? The team needs a tank so i pick mura. This means that technically, our team comp is in a good place. However, I would run off to wave clear and take camps when the team would need me to actually tank.
And you gradually learned on your own what worked. Tbh if your team expects the tank to soak (even as Johanna), it’s not your fault as the tank you lose because of a lack of waveclear
People on the forum also love weird team comps and say comps don’t matter much until high elo anyway
Draft mode in LoL is instant game. LoL DOES NOT try hard to make you buy skins by displaying models for 5 seconds after selecting your pick with other fancy animations. The drafting also can take some time to start up to 60 seconds. The drafting phase start is influenced by other people lagging! You wont see this case on streamers, as the higher ranked players are usually people with 900GT"X"(notice I marked the X for a reason) or above series.
This is the reason why HotS drafting will NEVER be prefer to the instant QM selection.
And the devs know the alternatives because over the years they were given many different ways draft could go. Like my different % damage ideas, I suspect the devs don’t really want or care about how to change draft mode. Tbh at this point in the game’s life I’d only want hero production to be the sole focus. We don’t need new maps when there’s little playerbase. Reworks? No. Draft could change but at this point we need to get more players playing the game and more heroes will allow even non draft players (majority of players) to have fun
