If you're playing much less than you used to, why?

General Discussion
41

I stopped playin in December.

  1. the community is trash, people care only for themselves and ignore built in game mechanics

  2. discrimination vs your pick. Being targeted with hostile vitriol by people FOR PICKING a character that they don’t like and then having to suffer their attacks. Also turning off chat doesn’t turn off draft. Draft is the most toxic chat this game has

  3. Blizzard doesn’t even care about this game and they show it by pulling people off of the game.

  4. the community isn’t as hospitable as it used to be, it’s really just a cease pool of toxic behaviour.

  5. the punishment system has become way too heavy handed and is a complete joke.

1 Like
43

For me it comes down to a few things:

  1. Matching making in QM and ranked.
  2. The ranked system. Have to win 6 games in a row to advance a rank. All your hard work can be derailed by one afk or salty person who wants to throw. I also am not a fan of TL. I often have to play ranked solo as my friends and I were never on together at optimal ranked times for my region (so we would just play QM). Now without HL it seems if you face a 5 stack u just get stomped.
  3. Killing HGC and possibly trying to kill the game. I quite enjoyed watching HGC as I learnt knew things and enjoyed watching in the background while I played or was waiting for a game. Also when “maintenance mode” was announced it felt like their would be no point playing anymore.
  4. Removal of random hero 100% QM xp bonus. It always seemed to be available when I was playing and most* of the time I got; a hero I wanted, in a semi balanced comp, with 100 extra xp.

I still play just find myself playing less and caring less if I play.

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44

The super mega long time queue. Seem a bit better now

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45

My favorite hero was reworked and it stopped working in the leagues I’m participating in. The majority of my hero pool is in the 45% winrate category.

At some point I realised that playing this game is sort of a treadmill, unless you have the capacity to improve a lot and keep up with the changes. I suppose I have achieved everything I could - from now on it’s just playing for fun. It doesn’t mean ignorance, it just means not trying hard. (Losing a lot is not fun, though.)

There are also some positives, some fun matches and I like to take some heroes out for a spin. I reinstalled after watching the Blizzcon games.

Unfortunately it’s a burden, too. I’m not ready to spend so many hours learning new heroes with many other games to enjoy, especially as it’s a gamble (I have 90% with Nova, but 10% with Varian or Malthael, or 35% with Muradin at level 16 without a boost).

1 Like
50

I have been playing less just because the game hasn’t been as fun for me lately.

I have been seeing more AFK’s (players intentionally leaving the game), trolling (intentionally not participating in game), and new players (account level below 50) in the last two weeks than I have ever seen from 2 years of playing this game.

Additionally, i have noticed some strange things like having extremely unfavored matchups basically all night the day after having a huge win streak.

51

Because Blizzard gave up on HOTS a long time ago.

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52

Reworks ruining some of my favorite heroes and maps.

Also, mentor-buddy system still seems to be forcing win/loss streaks in QM.

6 Likes
53

“They keep banning my accounts” XD

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54

Playing less cuz most of my friends in this game are also busy with real life, like me. Been reading online books and webtoons more than before. Trying to get back into my hobby that is drawing and storymaking.

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55

no point in playing ranked when my fav hero and only hero i care to play is banned most of the time due to the enemy knowing who they are playing against. also only a matter of time before my account is permanently banned and nothing i can do to stop it.

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56
  1. blizz being happy dippy with the suspensions/bans
  2. match making times in ranked are stupidly high
  3. balance is awfull
  4. well the game is dying
  5. blizz as a company treats me like shiiiiiit so…
1 Like
57

Well, everyone has their reasons but among the main ones, without a doubt, the MM of this game is one of the worst things, and the worst thing is that it takes years like that and nothing is done about it.

That is to say, I think that this game is good has a good potential totally wasted by blizzard.

3 Likes
58

Numerous reasons. I used to play like 10 games a day , now I play 1 or 2 games every two or three days.

One of the reasons is the way the game is heading. I loved beta, I changed dota and lol for HotS because it was different. Shared experiences, no items, tower ammo, talents to counter-pick enemy choices, numerous path builds, specialists, and so on.
Slowly the game changed into something I don’t like that much anymore. Forced e-sports, changed to experience gain, map layout, heroes, talent trees, removal of ammo, third tower, specialists… Everything I liked is being slowly removed, reworked, changed. Like last role reclassification. Tell me again, what was wrong on specialists? Because Probius is totally range assassin comparable to Zuljin or KaelThas. The game now is not the game I wanted and started to play.

Second reason is the abuse-able reporting system. I won’t say I never exploded and was not toxic. I was. Yes I was also silenced and I deserved that. At least two of my silences were not justified, where the GM kept the silence after providing me one weak proof, because he couldn’t find anything. But I said screw it and turned the allchat off.
But something I never ever done was giving up, afk or so. Yes, my favorite hero is Abathur. But getting notifications about being afk/nonparticipate in the game with probability of getting banned did lower the number of games played. You know that the reporting system is not working when you experience it yourself.

And as last, but not least, it is the matchmaking. Since I remember, it was bad. Full of promises, 0 real solutions. No changes over the years to make it better, 2017 december screw-up with the placing, where I had to make the placements THREE times, yet ended up 9 ranks below where I was. Managed to climb back, but it was so painful that I never ever will do that again. If they place me low again, ranked is forever over for me.
Oh, and add the last merge of TL and HL into storm league, where they took the higher rank. So mostly from TL, where 80% of players were placed wrong. And they did not even add the “play solo” button they promised…

5 Likes
59

To be honest there are several factors. After quite surprising announcements (surprising in a way that I didn’t expect it to happen this year at least) about cutting development budget and ending support for organized play, I started to play less and less. I completely abandoned doing daily quests (before I would at least do the quests once in 3 days fast in vs AI or ranked when I wasn’t in a mood for playing HotS) and I played almost exclusively only if some friends called me. Then I had 10 days vacation 2-3 months ago during which I didn’t play anything at all and after I returned I just didn’t really see a reason to pick up the game again. Blizzard killed all the enthusiasm I had for this game which was there basically up to the mentioned announcements.

60

I’ve been playing this game since around the time that Artanis came out in in fall 2015. I’ve never really put it down since, but i definitely find that it’s a game i play for 3-6 months then i put it down for 3-6 months and rinse, repeat.

I’m definitely playing the game more than i ever had though at the moment. This is edging towards a full year of playing mostly just this game. It is as fun as its ever been for me. Maybe more so.

61

I usually play less when I sadly don’t have time for HotS or if I’m really tired so my gaming experience won’t be that great. But I still play at least 2 games every day.

62

Matchmaker producing onesided matches. My patience is strong, but not eternal so I’ve stared experimenting with DotA 2.

3 Likes
63

Lesser Lightning Bond still hasn’t made a reappearance and there has been no Dev mention on the topic (that I’ve found) since its removal. /sigh

Hope is slowly fading away…

64

I play many games and only have so much time. And new games trump old and extensively played, for me anyway. Gets dull doing the same thing over and over, needs a cooldown period.

At some point Heroes will cycle back into the time sink roster.

65

For me it was the following:

1- The matchmaking, right now is about steamrolling games where either my team stomps the other one with a huge advantage or we get stomped with no chance of coming back.

2- The focus on team-fights and nerfing siege. The siege component was always exciting for me as it provided an additional strategy layer besides “5 man deathball”, split pushing, diversions and lane rotation were much more fun back then. This also had a direct impact in comeback mechanics and made objectives somewhat less relevant.

3- Changes and reworks to most of my favorite characters, in particular Sylvanas, I found her rework to make he boring and even more fragile than she used to be.

Again this is just MY opinion, yours might be different and as valid as mine.

5 Likes