Hey all. I was a HUGE hots player about a year ago. Played in alpha and ever since then. I left right before deathwing came out cause I was getting frustrated in 5 min queue times only to be put in a match that had 2 people who somehow played ranked without completing the tutorial it seems…
So I went back to league. I miss hots from time to time and Im wondering how things are. Probably still the same but I worry about investing time into this game especially since blizz barely supports it anymore…which makes me sad.
Depends on the region I guess. EU and NA are alive. Maybe -20% the last year. There are no official numbers.
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Tens of thousands at least, globally. EU and NA don’t have much issues with the queues.
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In EU diamond league, the estimated time is around 250 seconds most of the day, but it usually poops one minute after you queue.
I dont have crazy internet or computer (laptop).
Regarding quality matches, in my league I find it frustrating that many players now come from gold, or low plat, with few game knowledge. They sometimes go toxic mode when I pick a niche hero such as Nova, Valeera or Medivh, until I carry the game (early for Valeera, mid-late for Nova…).
Mobas always have insane Amount of toxicity. But can be greatly reduced being polite, asking for better communication and teamplay, calls for fight/retreat… only the really annoying kiddos continue their hate if you treat your team like people instead of bots.
I’ve been playing since Lt Morales release, with some months off from time to time.
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Sounds fairly accurate. After monitoring heroesprofile and hotslogs for quite a while I’m also quite convinced it’s around 10-20k active players left. Kind of low compared to the glory years of hots, but not apocalyptic.
90% or more of those active players are in NA and EU. Leaving an extremely small population for the small regions. You can filter regions on some of these stat sites.
There’s a very, very small population playing in Australia, China and South America. Hundreds of active players at most.
Tens of Thousands is not 1-2 of that, lol.
Well, even 20k is tens of thousands. It’s an acceptable player base though low for a Moba. Even 30-50k would be low.
But as long as matches are found fairly fast on NA/EU I can’t complain.
Unfortunately not really popular. Or at least not as popular as other MOBAs like Dota 2 and LoL. HoTS only has 6.5 million players a month while LoL has 240 million.
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That number is very highly unlikely, I don’t know where you found it. Or it’s from the very launch of HotS right after the game went public.
Like Karabars said tens of thousands sounds realistic. Heroesprofile data would also support that.
If the game had over 6 million monthly players you would likely never see the same player twice within a year (outside GM which is restricted to 100 people).
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On Wikipedia. Tho not sure if it’s a good source to trust.
As of 2012, free-to-play MOBAs, such as League of Legends , Dota 2 , Heroes of the Storm , and Smite were among the most popular PC games.[75]
Hots wasn’t even released in 2012, alpha testing started in 2014 
Smite didn’t exist either… Oh wiki 
Damn. Didn’t know wikipedia lies so much 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplayer_online_battle_arena
I’d correct it but idk how to do that on their site or if guests are allowed to…
From 2018:
Based on HotsApi, two years ago more than 1 million played (not everyone gets uploaded jtbc).
So I think even now, it’s more than I frist thought. And it’s 100k+ both in EU and NA.
Also don’t quote me for fact, but I thought a huge number of players were AI mains. If not even the great majority. But I only have a hazy memory of some Blizzcon chart.
People playing ranked and QM are in the minority.
The community sometimes discounts AI people as not real hots players but there’s a ton of them.
Yea, true. They also use the servers, buy stuff.
So HotS seems more and more… alive.
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It depends on your rank. I can tell you that at Diamond and above, queue times are still poor. Five minute queue time is still the average. Certain days/times it’s impossible to find a match. Quality of games is poor as a direct result of small playerbase.
Depends when you log on and at what time. NA, mornings tend to be very dead, unless you wish to QM. QM you’ll find any time of day. SL or Unranked, evenings are best, especially weekends. Overnights, you can still find some but wait times tend to be long, they’re just better than mornings, I’d say up until maybe 3-4 AM.
If you want to troll and rage and game throw and screw up peoples games then this is teh game for you.
If you want to have a good time, expect reasonable updates at reasonable times and good team work and matchmaking then you are screwed.
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HOTS is on the rise recently, tons of ex-pros coming back, you can see twitch and reddit numbers and threads