Hire outside developers to work from home

General Discussion
1

I understand the frustration with hots players. It kinda sucks knowing we are not getting new material anytime in the near future, or foreseeable future.

However.

Why not just hire a team of 10 people for say, 20-30k a year / person.
Allow them to work from home, update fixes, create new content.
There are more than capable fans out there with coding experience, amongst other things.

Maybe I’m just too new to the coding scene, but it seems this could solve some problems. Who knows, maybe it’ll spark newer ideas that actually work. If you don’t care about Heroes of the storm anymore, why not let the fans have a crack at reworking it and improving it? Sigh.

2

Big companies usually want to earn a ton so they can stay big. Sponsors and shareholders want to earn more and more, and the company “needs” to satisfy them so they get their money.
This leads to budgets, that they “can” use for devs for example.
From what I get, they use this budget technically to its fullest, and then they organise their devs to the bigger or more promising projects (hence why HotS devs ended up on Diablo IV).
So while everyone wants devs for HotS, and the company on paper could provide it, it’s not willing to and not because they’re unaware of the options.
We can only hope that MS might treat this game better (tho that’s wishful thinking).

3

At first it feels like there is a gap between what you two say.

What Positiv3 suggests is creating a scenario where they maintain the net present value by allowing someone to take care of it. Share the income, stuff like that. Keeping the game online suggests there is some value in it.

On the other hand, as soon as Blizzard hires someone, they want to make the most of this person and assign them to a project with the highest return on investment.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive. Let’s assume I offer to maintain Heroes, but I refuse to join the company. People are complicated like that.

Realistically I’m afraid that the codebase behind Heroes isn’t entirely stellar and they don’t really find anyone willing to work on it, or succeed doing so. Not that modern developers are particularly stellar at anything but perfecting a screw and then testing it for 6 months.

There is a lot of potential, Heroes does have a very minimalistic DotA+ (nice job, you captured 8 camps, more than 4.7 on average) and loyalty systems (boost, conditional quests, rewards) which could be combined and bring in steady revenue, however small. Sites like Heroes Profile also attest that there is a market demand.

One problem is it’s Blizzard, they’re biased looking at their long-term MMO, both in terms of ROI and collection decisions, e.g. you must farm heroes but you can also farm cosmetics. I’m fairly sure it’s a wrong system.

Imagine you can only play female blue hair night elf BM hunter in classic WoW until you reach max level. Then you can pick one other class-spec, say fury warrior as a ginger dwarf male with a nice beard, and max out. About every two months you unlock a random class/spec. Could be frost mage, or could be a hyper drak’thyr. While at it, your first reward is a bikini plate set. For a holy paladin. Available in the shop for 10€. It would be cringe. It is cringe.

4

Remove Bubby first then it might happen.

1 Like
5

I doubt the entirety of the HotS maintenance team gets 20k a year for this game.

The server upkeep is a few grand, there is no staff, no updates and bugs get fixed only when they threaten the integrity or stability of the game.

The parent company is not going to invest 300k a year into a game which is no longer actively developed. That’s almost as much as the HGC prize pool.

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6

In a previous investor report, acti/blizz said they had issues hiring people (per expected since buyouy and lawsuits). While offering positions to those outside california makes it possible to have a significantly lower budget (cheaper cost of living elsewhere) I think there’s a lack of leadership, or rather, people willing to rock the boat until the acquisition goes through. Current projects that blizz/act deems profitable don’t have enough staff and blizz outright bought out another studio just to try to curb their staffing issues.

While a low budget group might make nominal changes, I think the prevailing issues of the game* would indicate it’d be better to invest in a dynamic shift than just maintain the current flow and since the present leadership have show a “Wonderful” demonstration in their revenue priorities to appease shareholders (ie, not wonderful) that’s just more reason for people to wait out the passing of the current leadership in the hopes the work regulation, leadership, investments, etc etc will have the potential to improve come 2023.

Also, I think the sort of people capable of working in this would want more than 30k

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7

On Reddit there was a post made a couple of weeks ago about one of the Blizzard management who was doing a live AMA stream. Apparently there were a disproportionate number of questions about Hots and if there were any plans to revive it.

He avoided those questions saying the usual “passionate community” and told people to look to the “full maintence mode” statement that was released this year.

It’s very clear anyone with power to revive Hots, has no intention of doing so. If anything happens to Hots it will be when Microsoft takes over, but there is no guarantee the action they take will be beneficial to reviving Hots, they could just retire it completely.

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8

At least from home they won’t endure any sexual misconduct.

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9

Yea its like they just gave up on it like they gave up on Starcraft and Warcraft. Its easy to see with the Dragonflight x-pack coming soon they have thrown all the eggs in one basked in hope of bringing more people back to thier flagship game while leaving all other games on the button of the ocean.

Its like Blizzard is playing Battleship againts thier opponent but Bubby gave all the cordinated to all his ships apart from his flagship and had them all sunk.

One thing is for sure and that is after new year all game but Diablo Immortal will be taken out of Asia because Blizzard refused to make a new deal with Netease.

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10

What’s that? Honestly I do my very best to suppress any knowledge that game exists.

11

It’s a new skin for Battlefield of Eternity for those with account level over 9000 where the immortals are turned into Diablo and Tyrael. You can also enable the skin by purchasing Heroes+, available to a select few.

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12

They should look for more Devs to help out. I mean with the recent walk out of execs and Devs, a fair bit of Blizzard lost some of its heart. There’s only a number of original Devs that I know of that are working hard at the company.

13

So you mean any Devs? A Dev? Because right now there are no dedicated Dev(s) for Hots, sadly. You made me cry now. :crying_cat_face:

3 Likes
14

Loved reading through all these comments. Thanks for replies.