Cross-posted from EU forum (can delete if it’s spam), because that forum is, frankly, dead(er) than this
I will preface this by answering the why-s: ‘why not just leave the game silently and let others enjoy the game?’, ‘why not accept the state of the game since there’s no funding and enjoy it for what it is?’ etc.
Simply because the community seems so deluded that I feel compelled to write my point of view somewhere (even though it is very unlikely to change anything). Another reason is that the arguments I will present have been scattered all over this forum and reddit, but have always gotten drowned by nonsense or dismissed individually, because other excuses were more pleasant than them. While the community and blizzard are probably high on the copium and likely won’t even read this, maybe in a further away future someone reads this and learns what not to do with a game (even if it’s not a MOBA).
- The matchmaking is terrible. If you go along the posts about this game on forums, you’ll see this was brought up since long ago. Some 8 years ago, when the pro scene was alive, the community reaction to this problem was ‘hehe, skill issue’. Years passed, the pros shrinked to a few youtubers playing this, often among other games (hots was no longer viable for youtubers, or at least not viable enough), and concerns about matchmaking being terrible increased. Now (read: for at least the past 5 years), the ‘cause’ shifted completely: “the matchmaking is bad because HOTS just doesn’t have enough players”. Mind you, even now, if you ask on reddit (probably the most alive forum about hots), the consensus is ‘you can find a game in under 2 minutes, the game is pretty much alive on EU and US’. For those who have tried other MOBAs, you are probably aware that the waiting times on DOTA2 and LoL for the most popular modes (their ‘QM’ equivalents) are longer, dota going up to 10-15 minutes. HOTS matchmaking has put quantity above quality for a long, long time.
Could things have been done a lot better? I am 100% sure yes. Would creating a better algorithm cost a fortune? I suspect not. We are currently having a matchmaker that can take 10 randoms and create 2 teams that:
- don’t have same average winrate in qm, or closest possible;
- don’t have same average level on the heroes they picked, or closest possible;
- don’t have same average mmr, or closest possible (I remember being able to check in hotslogs, for an approximate value, but in heroes profile it looks like too much effort to check each player);
- don’t have similar waveclear capabilities;
- don’t have similar crowd control capabilities;
- are wildly imbalanced in skill between players on 2 different roles, that aren’t part of premades, and could be switched very easily between them to create a much better experience (one team gets 2 or 3 people that have the sole goal to fight - feed - respawn - fight, or soak - feed -respawn -soak, until it’s either blue screen or red screen, the other team gets to soak 4 lanes in a 3 lane game);
What does happen? We get a half-baked attempt to create ‘similar frontline’, which, from my thousands of games played, translates to ‘thrall on a team is 1 melee hero, so the other team gets uther who’s also a melee hero’, or even better: valeera vs abathur (you can just z anywhere, so you’re basically better-dehaka, amirite?). 4 or 5 premades get matched vs 5 randoms with only 2 regards: both teams having / not having tank and/or healer (the classic alarak imperius kerrigan +ranged+ healer vs 4 rangeds + healer, with not a single care about winrate difference or comp). Worse yet: using heroes profile, you can see that 5 premades play between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 games vs 4 & 5 premades, have a winrate of ~60% vs 4 premades, and between ~63% (vs 2 + 2 + 1) and ~88% vs 5 randoms. They’re also matched about half of all matches vs 2 premade + 3 randoms, with a whooping 72% winrate. (QM data).
https://www.heroesprofile.com/Global/Party?timeframe_type=minor&timeframe=2.55.9.93613,2.55.9.93565,2.55.8.93382,2.55.8.93357,2.55.7.93151,2.55.7.93054&game_type=qm
What was the community opinion on this? Again, the reddit and forum have been clear for years that waiting even 30 seconds more for a match would absolutely ruin the experience for them, and waiting 5 minutes for a 15 minute game was totally unacceptable. The (in)famous 80%+ winrate 5 premades also created waves; the online forums though apparently shifted their views, from ‘just find 4 friends to play with, lmao’ to ‘maybe it’s not very fun to play vs 5 people that get levels just by roaming and killing?’
- The balancing is terrible. Now, I’ve tried Overwatch 2 since start, and for quite a few months, and this seems to be an activision-blizzard ‘feature’:
- a hero is unpopular as a mixture of unfun mechanics, linear playstyle and too high effort for the results = there’s better heroes to play;
- That hero then gets buffed to be noticeably-better than most popular hero of same role, both in stats and simplicity to use;
- Subsequently, the hero gets slightly nerfed, but the powercreep stays. With next patch, it’s another hero’s turn to get dVmbed down and busted (see now: valla being S tier since rework, months already; dehaka S tier since rework…)
- Another hero becomes least popular. We reiterate and create the fake ‘freshness’ that you see today, when you play 10 games and there’s at least 8 nazeebos, since he’s one of the last reworked.
Could this be done better? I mean, LoL does it’s balancing with open books; they strive for 50% wr on all heroes, while taking into consideration popular heroes (they can have slightly under 50%) and very unpopular ones (the ‘OTP’ heroes, that might have a little above 50%). Did activision-blizzard not know this? Doubtful. They’d rather ‘keep it fresh’ by stirring the pot every time something seems to go under (and even this was done too infrequently). I suspect the HOTS team got moved to OW2, at least partially, so they might happily sink quite a few ships before the whole shipyard (now, Microsoft) either goes under (unlikely) or helps them find better careers for their skillsets (I hear IP destroyers are quite in demand nowadays).
- The game design is terrible (this might be more controversial to some readers). Sadly, I didn’t get to play during the tower ammo era. I did get to play during the anti armour tower and gate rework, which later got nerfed. The 1 redeeming quality of this game, maybe (imo) the single thing that kept it alive this long (besides servers not shutting down): the arcade-y nature (the fast games). Blizzard guessed the demand for quicker and quicker games (see, mobile games) and created a thing that survived on quick game loop (dopamine addiction) and some popular IPs. Now, why is the game design terrible? 2 words describe it perfectly: ‘Shared Experience’. Argued by the vocal community to be ‘a fundamental feature of the game’, it has a dramatically bad effect. Framed as ‘mistakes are less punishing, creating a fun, casual experience’, the reality is that the 0 8 player has a bit more hitpoints to survive a few more seconds on their next feeding trip, maybe even getting to land 1 more auto attack, while the player who soaked all game, participated in camps and teamfights, has the pleasure of still being behind in talents, hitpoints and damage, because, after all, ‘it’s a team game’. The effect of this is that the bad players never have to learn (check the amount of trolls you get in games, that think they carried because you got the victory screen in the end) and the upper parts of the playerbase get systemically eroded out of frustration, leaving you with a game that gets older, updates get rarer, yet ‘people get worse at the game’ (actually, more and more of the better players leave).
Did I mention Activision-Blizzard was so eager to stand by its lowest common denominator, that it took a proactive approach in the departure of the better players? No, I don’t mean the common misconception “HOTS died because activision was greedy and pulled the $ support from the pro scene”. I am talking about the ‘troll me forever, shame on me, say mean words once, shame on you’ policy: it’s perfectly normal to strive for a 0% winrate by engaging in the casual MOBA fun loop: (re)spawn - go solo lane - die (to ganks, enemy gate, minions, so many opportunities) - wait to respawn - repeat first step. But to say such a player is a feeder? You can’t just force people to play how you want (you’re unlikely to be a grandmaster, so what do you even know? the 0 10 powerspike might be a thing in HOTS too). Caveat: I’ve never gotten silenced (or worse) despite calling some of these ‘specimens’ gracefully showing the community that the line between a bot and a player is invisible some words that I wouldn’t call some of the other soloq people (cheers to them, modern sisyphus) that wouldn’t play better if blindfolded. Yet I still understand the frustration of playing with them (and I pity the few ones that might not be AI, given that, as I said, they usually get matched together, sealing their fate to go 0 kills vs 30 kills).
Remember, I said the fast matches are what kept the game alive. But, is it possible to become too arcade-y? Can the ‘quality of life’ changes actually worsen the experience for everyone? I’d say yes;
- reworking gazlowe into a(nother) pseudo-mage, and making sure to remove the little skill expression involved in early-castable laser (and the big laser talent) was honestly not necessary;
- reworking probius’s whole kit into being a(nother) slop spam hero: cannon no longer needs power field, w explodes by itself after some seconds, cannon detection moved from quest to base kit, pylons invincible during ult. Did it need all the skill drained out of it? The experts apparently thought so;
- creating xp globes as a reaction to the majority’s unwillingness to go lane, which had the side effect that the majority still doesn’t get xp, but at least the pubstomp 5 premade gets some pve xp (blobs) after farming more pvp xp (kills).
- virtually all mana-problems seem either gone base-kit (I vividly remember zagara being oom after 2-3 full spell rotations, 5+ years ago when I started playing), or there’s a talent before level 10 that gives a generous amount of mana, sometimes to the point you can just spam everything on cd: kael lvl 1 globe quest, lucio lvl 1 quest, malfurion lvl 1 quest.
What could be done? Right now, I am not sure what would work (if anything), but I can say the game has been (for the most part) going away from success, not towards it. Here’s some things though, that would improve the game:
i) Move towards a more ‘hybrid’ experience sharing. What if a small step was made towards actually rewarding the better players, instead of the worst? What if 1 (or more) of these was implemented:
- kills only gave experience to the people participating. It doesn’t have to be a ‘last hit’ mechanic (the killer and assistants could all get same xp, but the person not participating wouldn’t get anything);
- towers destroyed only gave the instant experience to the people participating (the passive amount after remains shared);
- feeders awarded less and less experience the more they died (crazy idea, League of Legends already implemented this, and I think it would also support the HOTS design mantra of being forgiving to the weakest link);
- the more you fed, the less xp you passively got. You’d get 20% (out of total xp), but once you start feeding, a part of your ‘cut’ gets redirected (equally) towards your other teammates. How to automatically know who’s feeding? I’d say a formula could easily be produced (even multiple ones, since, for most part, I think we can all agree the 0 8 player with almost no stats didn’t quite give much to the table). Maybe if deaths > kills + assists +4, the resources could start being redirected (let’s say, that player starts getting 19% xp out of total), and it would go down to 10%, or maybe even 5%, as they progress to a different stage (let’s suppose deaths > kills + assists + 8 is obviously telling it’s late game and the player hasn’t done much for 10 minutes). The siege damage, hero damage, xp, healing, could all be factored (again, I am not a developer, these numbers can be adapted, the system can be monthly, or yearly adapted, for a better experience). This isn’t to say the 20k healing uther being outhealed by 30k healing anduin is a huge skill gap and uther deserves to be stuck at level 5. Potential could very well be considered (maybe the 30k ana vs 120k anduin might be suggesting someone won’t provide too much value even after getting lvl 20, so might as well reassign resources, though).
And the best part? All these ideas would still allow you to play, with minimal changes, your abathur, TLV, murky, and cho’gall (you know, one of the excuses for why you cannot do away with shared xp). You could still have your nova or valeera roleplay (talking about those that play on 1 apm, waiting for the right time to pounce and last hit a kill, because we all know if you have more damage than the healer, you’re doing something wrong). And for you, ‘healer’ enjoyers, your favourite pastime (solo laning for a quarter of a level while teammates die and give away half a level+) remains just as valid a playstyle! You might get slightly less xp for snoozing in bushes once too many times, but hey, ‘it’s a team game’, remember? It’s a small sacrifice for the fun of the other 4 people (and as we all know, even 4 people ‘forcing’ a team to surrender, through a surrender button, would be immoral, so why wouldn’t 1 player forcing the other 4 to lose be any less evil?).
ii) You have individual talents for each hero. You’re not having 100+ heroes and dozens of items that can be picked by each and every hero and need to somehow balance it all. So why is there:
- a lack of talent creativity;
- 1-2 viable builds for most heroes, out of all possible combinations;
- builds that are terrible: high effort low reward (thinking, gall e build being worse than w build as just 1 example), or outright underwhelming compared to other talents on same level (anduin self-healing after taking a certain amount of damage, level 7, for those who want to minimize their winning chances).
iii) Maybe ban feeders, trolls and, frankly, bots, once in a while? I am afraid accounts playing like the pre-rework bots (the ones that would go on a random lane, feed, then pick another lane to go on, to ‘soak xp’ -and give more to other team in process) aren’t too fun to be around, even in the sad case it’s a person that’s playing peekaboo-feeding with the other team, by picking a random lane on every respawn to feed on.
Closing remarks:
Could the professional players, at the top of HOTS’ popularity, that had a spreadsheet for every map, planning when it’s optimal to lane, take camps, fight and so on, play in harmony with the people that can’t be bothered to take regen globes, or go to lane, but instead die under enemy gate in first minute? (with or without the enemies having a garrosh, or other means to pull them there, that is) Turns out, the answer is yes: for the small price of (over) 1 million $ a year. Apparently, to some people’s surprise, if you pay people to play a game… they’ll play the game. And if you don’t, they will go to other games (if they want to make a living out of gaming). Do all MOBAs die after the devs stop paying people to play their game? Maybe. But they definitely don’t put all of the prize money (DOTA seems to do crowdfunding, league has sponsors). If we extend the window of comparison to other genres of competitive games though, the image is clear; some games are fun, and people try to ‘resurrect’ them after server shutdowns; other games are not fun, and crumble into dust the moment the hand-holding stops.
PS: If you have read all the way here, and are part of the HOTS community, you might get defensive, as I ‘try to change a beloved game’, when I could just ‘move to LoL or DOTA, if they’re so good’. The reality is, a lot of the ‘fans’ have been loudly defending the game, and silently leaving. I can only describe it as ‘the sensitive anti-toxicity part of the community has been bullying the rest of the community to its death’. Truth be told, despite everyone spamming how they love the game and how its a masterpiece, all the people playing the game after a long day of work to wind down (aka ‘having fun’ feeding), or play with old friends (aka ‘playing the MOBA that is quick, doesn’t ban players for doing badly -even if intentional-, and gives them nostalgia), proves the (actual) game might have little to do with their ‘fun’ in it. (I have a hunch that some members of the community might not even mind if all the heroes besides abathur were removed, the hat and mines were removed too, and every mode was just slapathur fiesta). In the case of this game, I think avoiding change did, in fact, not keep players from leaving; it attempted to keep the only players that would never leave (unless you banned them for creating an unpleasant environment from everyone else), at the expense of everyone else.
Let’s address the elephant in the room:
- ‘not having to last hit’ is ‘the fundamental feature of HOTS’;
- ‘not having to buy / know items’ is ‘the fundamental feature of HOTS’;
- ‘sharing xp’ is ‘the fundamental feature of HOTS’;
- ‘putting more focus into teamplay’ is ‘the fundamental feature of HOTS’;
BUT:
- ‘picking waveclear if team doesn’t have enough’ isn’t ‘the fundamental feature of HOTS’;
- ‘going to lane so team doesn’t fall behind in xp’ isn’t ‘the fundamental feature of HOTS’;
- ‘going to objective so team doesn’t die for nothing in a 4 vs 5’ isn’t ‘the fundamental feature of HOTS’;
- ‘picking what the team needs’ (going taunt instead of TB as varian if you’re the only frontline and enemies have a tank, picking anti immortal damage on BoE, picking healer if team needs a healer, picking tank if team needs a tank) isn’t ‘‘the fundamental feature of HOTS’;
- ‘communicating with the team, playing together’ isn’t ‘the fundamental feature of HOTS’.
Notice a pattern? The loud minority of the game has been selling every bad feature as ‘the most important feature of HOTS’ (source: reddit & forum), as long as it would involve less thinking and more collective blame, but the concept of ‘duty’ (to the team) is not part of their vocabulary and any idea that would give the individual player more leverage on the outcome of the game has been labelled an attack on the game’s identity (interestingly, the very bottom ranks in LoL, silver and under, exhibit a similar behaviour: they’d rather lose the match than see a teammate carry while they do badly).
TL DR: ‘What went wrong?’ Blizzard gambled by trying to invent a ‘casual MOBA’. The gaming community, by and large, would rather play a game where people are mean to you for being bad (‘toxic!’), rather than a game where no one minds if you started the game to troll 4 other people (purposefully, or not). They pumped increasing amounts of money (up to 1 million $ in 2016, 2017, 2018 HGC, apparently) to breath life into the game, and noticed a decreasing interest in the game (easily available data, HGC 2016 had more followers than 2017, and 2017 than 2018), and this is without knowing the internal player count decline, which is likely worse. They knew they’d need to completely change the game (attracting criticism from the ‘fans’ of that time) and then remarket it, to ever have a chance. The current iteration was just not viable (paying over 1 million $ yearly to slow down the fall wasn’t worth it) so they stopped artificially increasing the player count with all this aggressive, unsustainable marketing. Whether they listened to the loud minority telling them the game is fine, or they just did what they knew better, the crucial mistake made by the devs happened when they started marketing this game, with millions of $, instead of reworking some of the core faults I presented before. Once the game was ‘estabilished’ (2016, maybe earlier), they were in a lose-lose situation, either gamble more money (a lot more than before, since they’d have to go back to making the game then remarket), or cut the losses.
No, they did not ‘kill the game because they were greedy and wanted another LoL or DOTA’. They did not ‘start too late, when everyone was playing LoL or DOTA’. They likely spent an amount competitive to LoL and DOTA (at the time), and the product ended up closer to SMITE, a game likely unpopular due to the weird visual perspective (at least I couldn’t bring myself to give them a chance), than LoL or DOTA. While Activision-Blizzard doesn’t publish any numbers regarding player counts, I’d say it’s safe to assume they spent more than SMITE devs, launched after SMITE, had a higher peak than SMITE (likely by a long shot), and still, when all was said and done, ended up in roughly the same place. Writing this, I noticed SMITE 2 was launched (maybe recently?) and it’s likely more popular than hots (while still probably looking weird for a MOBA, and likely having higher system requirements).
TL ‘TL DR’ DR: Terrible matches (stomps) are far more frequent than good matches. IMO, despite being far shorter games than in LoL/DOTA, the worst matches feel far worse, because it’s not just 5 or 10 heroes (champions) being snowball-y when fed, it’s 1 or more issues of the game you can do nothing about (besides joining a sweaty 5 premade of qm/ranked abusers, and helping kill the game quicker).
