How to increase the player base

3.0 would be nice but

blizzard has already invested tens of millions into HGC / Marketing. The roi was subpar.
I don’t think the blizz executives trust the hots dev team to produce a quality underlying product.

You really think releasing a 3.0 version of this game would really boost its popularity and playerbase?

I don’t think so.

4 Likes

What they need is a good director and a good head of design.

4 Likes

What they got was dabiri and his team zzzZZ

have resource value build up your keeps/minions/characters. make them more snowbally. have characters to where you can feel the impact you are making. make it more challenging. make merc camps more threatening. make taking keeps harder. make objectives more impact full. or have objectives give you buffs or rebuild broken keeps. give us more choices. the current game is basic not enough build paths not enough challenges.

You could give that rating to the beginning of 2.0
I don’t think any serious player, playing this game for at least 2 years would give more than 2-3 / 10
There is potential, but not capitalized. It’s like using fuel for driving downhill where you just had to roll down(with the help of the players feedback). Wrong decisions made by wrong people, eventually or most likely, much room for your own interpretation of how the game turned in the last 2 years.

1 Like

i think i said something about this before though. HotS had a commercial at one time actually. it was waaaay back at release (didnt see it), but it existed. no advertising since then though.

which if you think about that its not surprising at all.

the last TV commercial they made for HotS was back at release. i know not long ago i remember seeing the LoL commercials. i even commented here about it saying how LoL really showed how much they wanted ppl to join them vs HotS. advertising right? havent seen any for HotS.

any kind of advertising in browsers? automatically deleted. i use uBlock Origin to block ads. i dont want to deal with a bunch of ads when im browsing. never mind that some sites ‘may’ have their ads hacked and such which poses various security risks. so i block all that. if blizz thinks advertising in this method is good…well, sorry. adblock and ublock have been around a very long time. there are a lot of ppl using them.

its just something to think about. i mean i have a DVR too so i can skip TV commercials :wink: , but ppl (speaking from my experience here) are far more likely to see the TV commercial than an a browser ad because the ones on the computer are completely gone. the ones on the tv are still there.

I am speaking for a part of the SEA region.

What do you mean the rest of the countries? Do you operate under the assumption that players from other countries don’t know what is HoTS due to the lack of advertising reason that you sincerely believed?

No, ads in browsers are not gone. The people using adblock are in a minority. Most of them don’t even know such tech exists.

By ads i mean proper ads, explaining how game works, adverising articles etc, not flash adware injected by google ads/facebook ads. Prople automatically run away from these products

I’d say go back to thr things which made the game popular in the first place. And that is the difference from other mobas…

Like ammo, specialists and other things…

2 Likes

i wouldnt call a ‘guide’ an ad. certainly it may gather some sort of attention but that is not its intention obviously. the intention is learning and so its not an ad.

on the other hand interviews could be a form of secondary marketing. its not substitute though for standard advertising practices though.

i didnt say they were gone from the internet. i said for ME they are gone because i use an adblocker. they do not exist (for me). also, for at least 25% of the US users this is also true. which is a fairly big number.

…but yes like you say many ppl still watch the computer ads.

specialist was never more than a catch all category for heroes that did not fit any other category. the dev team even said as much. it really was a bad decision to even have such a category because it allowed them to make bad things that didnt conform to a ‘standard’ which could lead to balancing issues. like back in the day when you had Zagara who was pretty much a ‘specialist’ that could put out very high ranged assassin numbers and at the same time destroy lanes. where if she was just classified into ranged assassin from the start things may have been different.

ammo was another thing that was crap since you had heroes that could summon lots of minions over and over to just suck up tower shots, or chen who could just sit there taking shots. then there was leorics dying over and over again to drain your forts while no one was around… ya that was a thing. abathurs tunneling to behind a fort to let their locust drain stuff and porting out. it was a bad design. what they have done to progress on this is definitely better.

There are ppl in my country who didn’t even know what LoL was, so guess what.

NOPE, ignore that, like completely IGNORE new playerbase

Make the game (playing experience) as much as TOP NOTCH as possible, “reward” will follow… That is one of the problems of Marketing folk = they always gun for the success (i.e. result) whilest sometimes PROGRESS (i.e. task) should be higher priority rather

“Increasing playerbase” is simple the wrong mindset, and wrong goal… It’s the same mistake that gave this current result after 4-5 years of prioritizing so, but yes, I know it’s contrary to almost (probably every ?) single “success book” released out there but HotS should focus on maximizing QUALITY of ranked experience of those that ALREADY play the game rather

Wish I could make a good article/blog or even a vid of “demonstration” of what I think HL should be and how it should’ve worked, but they are doing something else already so gotta wait and see I guess, still don’t think merging is the better move

Might be the EASIEST move at this point though but the Ranked system should probably receive almost a complete overhaul…

The point is, you guys assumed that advertising will help the game grow when I am simply telling you that even those who knew HoTS will not play HoTS due to the gameplay design.

Advertising would indeed help the game.
The basic tactic of advertisment is based on the human mind loving familiarity.
The more you see something, the more you like it. You become curious.
And saying there are no one who doesn’t know HotS but would like it is in fact delusional.
Even if they heard about it before, but never tried. They’d might like it.
There are a lot of ppl with a ton of different tastes and preferences.
The Rule of Big Numbers.

1 Like

If you can’t get 4 out of 10 new players to stick to HoTS for a month maybe you should find the reason why is this happened instead of blindly throwing more advertising money to get 100 or 1000 new players.

1 Like

I hate to inform you all, but the only fix to this game would be a complete overhaul.

The shared mechanics in this game made it DOA. It is the reason why this game is not popular.

You can argue all you want, but its pretty evident and has been since the beginning that shared mechanics that prevent your full effort in a match from shining through make this a niche game without enough of a player base to support it.

1 Like

What are you even talking about? You came up with a 100% imaginary picture with made up numbers and you say HotS should change based on that?

2 Likes

To be honest , I didn’t know about Hots until they had the Overwatch skin event. I knew about other MOBA games like LoL and Dota though. I think Hots is a great game and was poorly marketed.

This is a golden opportunity for the devs to focus on community driven balance (over pro balance) and make the game into what it should have been from the start, a love letter to Blizzard games.

If we get some quality hero balance, fixes to matchmaking and some fun fan favorite heroes, Hots could make a strong comeback.

I’m not giving up on this game and no one else should. I’ve even managed to convince some friends to pick it up and we play it weekly now. I love this game and look forward to what comes in the future.

hots was unlucky enough to get devs that either didn’t care about coming in to work and doing a good job or they were just unaware of good game design.

Dabiri was a total failure but it wasn’t him alone making the decisions, i’m sure he took advice/opinions from a team of people.

Those people are just as responsible for the failures as Dabiri was