No it was not designed as a casual brawler. The game is very intricate and makes a fun game for serious players… in fact draws them. Yes casuals can still play it but doesn’t mean their presence defines what this game is. The fact that elements of it don’t support more serious players is where it failed. Had they paid attention to that more this game would be tons more successful.
Love how casuals think they rule everything and anyone who says otherwise is some measly 1% or .000000001. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Casuals have their place and a good developer knows how to balance a game out to accommodate (if they need to for the $$$$). Old Blizzard knew how to do these things.
Dude been playing this game since early beta. You might want to look through your rose colored goggles and pretend its a game designed for retards and special bus people but it isnt. Shorter on time yes? Designed solely for low in skill and even lower IQ?? No
The game needed to balance the needs of certain people. Some casuals are skilled yes, but the majority of them … not. Why? short on time… means short on learning/research… short on catching up to game changes. Short on attention span. Short on game presence… (“hold the fort I gotta get a cup of coffee or change my baby’s diaper”). Yea thats vs. AI stuff. Short on brain cells (“Hi guise I’m drunk!!!”).
Had the game actually managed these players better then everyone else would have better games.
They didn’t advertise this game as a total circus. They didn’t say … come play this game with the people who are AFK and will feed every chance they get cause they “wanna have fun.” No they didn’t.
Point is they let all those groups dominate the game and that was their biggest reason for failure.
clearly blizz thinks its a failure. the yearly championship is worth less than a random LoL or DOTA2 weekend tourney. The best teams quit over a year ago. Games basically dead as far as competitive is concerned.
I know it’s tiring to see the same age-old threads about unbalanced qm/rank matchmaking, game failure, rank division problems, automated report system, uninstall stories etc. but let’s try to look at it based on their perspective.
Aside from the trolls posting dog poop, there’s actually players who give constructive feedback about what could or should have been done, what changes to be made in order to make matchmaking better both for QM and Ranked play, what talent/rework changes could make a Hero better etc. This is because they actually care about the game and want to help the devs out by constantly giving feedback about the current state of the game. They want to see it grow. They want it to be more fun as it is now.
You may see it as them really hellbent on convincing players to quit like some did, but sometimes it’s not because admittedly, it’s true that the game has fell off a bit in terms of balance and ‘fun factor’. Everyone likes quality comps both in QM and Ranked play, right? Of course, we all do!
No game community escapes the lethal hold of toxicity. And to me, the community isn’t really that toxic.
Honestly, you can’t enjoy something that doesn’t even give what it’s supposed to give you. You have to at least voice out your concerns for once.
HOTS was a massive success to me because it made me actually care about MOBAs. It could be better in a lot of ways, but I’m beyond level 1,100 and there’s no way I would’ve sunk this much time into it if it wasn’t a good game on some level.
You should reconsider your definition of casual.
I consider myself casual. I read about all heroes in game, read/watch guides about map strategies. How to make most of your hero, a won objective or a lost objective etc. How to play when you’re ahead or behind. How to form a team while drafting and how to counter certain heroes.
If your definition of casual is AFKing, feeding not giving a damn about enemy abilities and strengths, ignoring everything that’s going on map and trying to push a lane forever. You’re in the wrong place my dear.
Even if this video was genuine, I wouldn’t give a single screw.
I work in a rather big company and what the average lowbob employee routinely calls a failure is usually a huge success globally. You can’t give any weight to those opinions.
Mate THIS is MOBA.No moba is good for casual players. Actually we have a mode for ppl like this. We have vs AI. That is the MOBA equivalent of farming bottles and herbs.
The point of moba is to compete for the win. Aka-use every means necessary to steal the enemy fun for yourself.Its only that when both teams are doing the same thing at the same time both sides are hawing fun.
All mobas are for more competitive hardcore playerbase.
It probably means that it’s gonna gave a smaller team working on it that a not failed game would. Activision higher ups have weird view on game success. Seems like they look at Fortnite and think “wait a minute, fortnite and hots are both a game so if hots makes less money it’s a fail” or something like that. Instad of trying to switch their target audience Blizzard should just make a new game targeted at 8 year-olds and also keep their existing fans with their existing games. That would give them the most influence too among different types of gamers. It really looks like they are just trying to get rid of their existing fans instead and it’s definitely Activisions doing.
YOU think it’s really fun. Most people don’t, and they don’t play the game. Most people who are into MOBAs want a more complex experience and they play Dota or LoL. That’s how it’s been since HotS’s release and it won’t change.
lot more balanced than Dota2 or LOL.
Have you ever played Dota2 in your life? Dota is the most balance game. It have pick/ban rate of 98% on the lost international. The game have so many diverse meta. Even LoL is now more balance and more diverse than HotS.
The thing HotS had the advantage over its competition was the Blizzard IPs/characters/heroes. And what did Blizzard do to exploit that hard advantage? They made it clear they wouldn’t do it. That’s when I facepalmed.
Blizzard had the chance to one-up what their competition was doing by sexualizing their heroes. It didn’t have to be over the top, but just enough to satisfy what this game should’ve been made for casuals – fan service. Combine that with nostalgia and they’d at least have something worthwhile to sell if they didn’t want to prioritize improving the game.
Still can’t believe they’re limiting themselves like this. Blizzard North sure as hell wouldn’t disgrace themselves like that.
Personally i think “HOTS failed” in the contest of challenging DOTA 2’s and LOL’s position in the market. If the game was a financial failure it would have been shutdown long ago.
What HOTS truly failed to do is to garner the same popularity as the current titans of the genre and let’s be realistic it never had the chance. The market was already taken by the time HOTS arrived. In fact HOTS did pretty well given the uphill battle the game faced, it became a well to do niche game for niche audience and generated enough profit to keep it going so far.
And yet for a publisher like Activision niche game is indeed a failure. Pretty certain HOTS was intended to have it’s own international at some point. But it was a fantasy from the start, just like most MMORPG’s created to challenge WoW have failed in the past so did HOTS crash against the wall. It did much better than i personally expected it to do way back in 2015, but not good enough for the execs, that’s for certain.
They could have simular playerbase numbers as Dota2.
I got a friend that when Blizz announced HotS he was beyond excited because he was a big fan of Dota 2 but also a big blizzard fan (Starcraft and Diablo at the time, and WoW since then). Having both at once was so promising for him. But instead of making a great MOBA they went out of their way to reinvent something that wasn’t broken. What we got was a shell of a MOBA (I’m talking about Alpha right now). The game was so uninspired and bland.
Over time they’ve made something decent that stands on its own, fair enough for him. But a true Blizzard MOBA with would’ve been insanely good. Now we got baby’s first MOBA and he have been bitter about it for years. It’s just not on the level of Dota or even LoL, it’s too steamlined. I get that was their intention but they overdid it, period.
I stopped spending money on hots when 2.0 came out and it became a gambling system instead of buy what you want.
I dont want to go buy a new car, spend the money I have for a car on some tickets and leave with some google images instead.
Then OW got added and killed the games grove. So to make up for it they added anti mobility characters which hurt the real characters more and buffed ow characters again.
So now you have 3 genres of characters in a game that doesn’t jyve together at all.
![:joy:](https://d3rakab8gpdsa3.cloudfront.net/en/heroes/images/emoji/twitter/joy.png?v=6" ":joy:")
You have never seen old Yeller have you??