Well its official…they are going to be putting HOTS into maintenance mode and abandoning new content for the game. 
I was hoping Microsoft would push to bring it back with all the players taking it up again but no. RIP to the best Moba on the internet 
I don’t think anyone should be surprised by this. pretty much what I expected. No one invests money in things that have been abandonned.
I’ve missed where this was decided, do you have a link? As I said in another post, all it takes, imo, is a passionate dev over there to sell Phil Spencer a vision of success for the game. Who knows, maybe Phil Spencer plays in his off time.
Tis a slim chance to be sure, but I hadn’t seen anything yet that takes it off the table completely.
I think there could be a lot of hype rolling some Microsoft heroes in, Minecraft Steve, Master Chief, something from Bethesda even.
Microsoft does not own Blizzard yet before in one more year.
The deal’s not even finalized yet bruh
Unless you have a source from Microsoft itself, then the statement you have made is one of guesswork and falsehood. Microsoft can say what their intent is if the deal were to go through. However since everything is up in the air and there is no source then all we have is guesswork.
Mergers and Acquisitions of this size are incredibly complex and take years to finalize. You will not know what Microsoft will do with HOTS for at least 3-5 years from now.
There goes the best online game I have ever played. A game where strategy, action and skill were all required to succeed. A game where you had to play smart until the last second because everything could have turned tables. Thank you for everything, but this decision is the worst. I’m in mourning.
This game had tremendous potential, but it never got there. New/current Blizz was not motivated or creative enough to evolve the game or maps.
The state of this game has been abysmal for years. I had high hopes, and really enjoyed it Alpha → 2.0. However, they didn’t play to their strengths, like more creative maps, or meme heroes, or progress the game in any way towards supporting competition.
I booted it up again recently, and this is honestly a terribly stale + boring game. A 6.5 from IGN would be insanely generous if they reviewed it today. It’s incredibly cringe that blizz still memes about the 6.5, as they should be so lucky now.
I feel like they could shut down hots servers tomorrow, and the hate from it would die fairly quick. Blizz should be ashamed for how this game turned out. Perhaps if they treated their employees better, they would not have been so creatively bankrupt, resulting in the stagnation/death of this game.
Thanks for the lizard mount though. I’ll try it out next time I forget how bad this game is now, and I reinstall.
Microsoft is still not in the picture, it’s still just Activision-Blizzard. So it’s not official. It’s not Microsoft who put the game on maintenance again. It was the same company: Activision.
Games get demoted to maintenance mode because cost/benefit analysis shows they will not be profitable enough to continue developing. Microsoft isnt going to restart development of Hots any more than blizzard will… for the same reason.
The sc2 people are all injecting each other with hopium that microsoft will restart sc2s development. Again, comapanies shut down that which isnt worth the costs. So a change in company isnt going to change a game’s status.
I had a thought, and it brought me to this thread. Call it faith? Wishful thinking?
It makes sense to shut down the game and make it dormant based on the cost analyses.
To develop new content would be a waste of resources.
The idea that crossed my mind was a potential open source, with Blizzard of course still being the gate keeper and approval process. I just assumed there are a few members in the community or just individuals who might be interested who would bring new heroes to life out of their own efforts.
Art, design, mechanics, etc. I would imagine this would be difficult, and require experience. But if outsiders were allowed to do this and then donate them to Blizzard. It would require a lot less resources (staff) to review the new characters and implement them into the game. I’m sure this comes with its own risks to the integrity of the game however.
But I am sure we would all love to experience more wonderful Blizzard characters in heroes of the storm.
An enterprise which struggles as hard as Blizzard will not take the risk to implement an open source strategy with unclear revenue perspectives. The engine of HOTS is so old basically nobody would use it for money. Implementing custom game features, e.g. a map designer will not happen in maintenance mode.
The only hope is that Microsoft will see the MOBA potential and approves the development of a new MOBA. Given that the term HOTS 2.0 was already used for a lootbox and camera angle release, lets call it HOTS 3.0
HOTS Could easily make a comeback. It connects all of blizard and now all of microsoft into moba form. With enough funding it could take out LoL overtime with the right vision and effort to making content.
Imagine having Cortana as a Announcer, Heroes from battletoads or a Age Of Empires Wololo xD
Microsoft has a track record of closing studios that it has acquired more so than improving them. Hell in the early 2000’s they bought out one of the best developers at the time for the Nintendo 64 (RareWare) and butchered them. I am not hopeful that Blizzard will be better after the acquisition is complete. The best I can hope for is that WoW subscription will be part of the Xbox game pass.
You don’t have to overtake LoL to be successful. It can just be a solid, supported game. It’s like when people clowned on Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl for not being a “Smash killer”, even though it still sold well enough to get DLC and a sequel.
Hell, HotS WAS successful. A an ex-developer stated that HotS was never in the red for its entire existence, it was just killed because Activision had unrealistic expectations.
The game’s second largest problem is its engine which might even be the reason for early retirement. Sadly they didn’t take this problem seriously enough before deciding to go with 2.0.
Borrowing from the incompetent PR of D4 developers, adding a new hero to hots might as well have made your PC explode because character selection screen was nearing capacity.
(just making fun of their claims how increasing the stash size or modifying the level of zoom on the screen might cause undesirable performance issues)
Ya Jen’s voice is superior
You may be aware but the actual argument regarding stash was that every item in the stash is considered for every single drop.
It’s a lesser issue with Diablo as there are only a few uniques (like the legendary gems), however the pacing of the game causes high loot frequency. WoW is the opposite, there are obscene amount of states per character (phases - quests, achievements, profession level, collectibles), which is mostly curbed by localized loot tables, but still.
Zoom is certainly silly, maybe they want an even field and they just want to hide behind it, or otherwise want to avoid getting too far from the design intent - Supreme Commander’s absolute zoom was great, but when applied to WoW (and it is, current maximum view distant is obscene, considering a 2nd person rpg), it gets really awkward. That said, playing HotS on a 16:10 screen already feels weird a bit.
Not sure we need a hard revival. I won’t object I think. Simply enabling the game to run (added on Steam) forever should suffice. Some work with account authentication is required, although frankly at this stage it could simply be entirely f2p, with favorite talents and skins saved locally like right now. I can still play Total Annihilation from 1998. It has been modified a wee bit to enable music and higher screen resolution (used to crash when the screen was wider than the map, and the very first career mission was 900 pixels wide).
Microsoft seems to be game with adding these games to Steam and allowing players to enjoy them, maybe get a bit of revenue. Age of Empires 2-3-4 is there.