(I agree, QM, Aram and Draft mode should be removed)
In any game that the “agenda/design” dictates what “fairness” is, it destroyes the learning curve. This is one of the reasons after all these years noobs still can’t learn or get better… and we pay the price.
A few years ago a game called H&G was released, it was fantastic and amazing. After a few years they started to punish skilled players and reward noobs, guess what happened? Skilled players moved away and noobs dominated the serves.
Just like we are doing here today in the forum, me and other players tried to do in the past, according to devs “the skill gap was too big”, they decided to “level the ground”. Player based started to deteriorate and eventually the studio sold the game, not long after that the game is no more.
When we see the path we are walking, we can reach a conclusion about what’s going to happen!
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And what do you suggest they should add instead of ARAM, QM and ranked ? Noob players is not just a Hots thing. All Mobas got them.
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I wrote draft not ranked!
And ranked is all about drafting so what is your point again ? its like that in every game.
I played Smite and in that game you got blind draft and bans just like you got here.
Draft it’s not Ranked, you can check it in game modes. Also I’m not the first who agree quick match shouldn’t exist.
Quick match add’s nothing to the learning curve, just look at the game state right now. Do you think the way things are it’s getting better? Don’t be silly.
Ok I don’t think I need to explain why this is a really bad idea but I will anyways. Looking at the play rates of QM it is pretty clear to me assuming QM is the more casual mode, that the majority of the players are casual (including myself), what happens when casual players don’t have a way of playing the game in a casual way, well lets look at Wings of Liberty, its not necessarilly completely accurate but hopefully its accurate enough. For wings of liberty the casual gamemode was campaign, the statistics of people who played the ladder after the campaign given out by the devs themselves was 20%, they lost 80% of their audience because they could not appeal to the casual player.
Lets say we delete QM ARAM and Draft, where are those players going to go? Atleast for me certainly not HotS because the devs just showcased they are the biggest morons in the entire gaming scene by trying to make a moba known for being casual exclusively competitive with a clearly doomed to fail method aka removing the casual scene altogether which probably wouldnt even increase the players playing ranked. (this is after the first time they tried to do that with their forced esports scene costing them a ton of money and probably being a pretty large reason why HotS is no longer being worked on)
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A large potion of Hots players are casual so removing the only thing they want to play is a no go.
Its like back in the HGC era where all balanced patches was based on what 0,1 % of the players was doing. If you want a stable game you dont cater to the 0,1 % but to the 99,9% who are your main audiance.
Ranked IS a draft mode. There is no game mode named Draft. There’s Storm League and unranked Draft.
If you say “draft” People will think you’re talking about Ranked (Since unranked draft isn’t used anymore)
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Oh but there is a counter argument (and then I am invoking Darak who plays Lol also) that LoL dont have QM or ARAM and has more players than HotS. I am not of those people that think that quantityy = quality but that is an argument that you will come across.
This is such a cheap stab.
It has nothing to do with inclusion.
It’s accessibility, either when learning or when wanting to play a specific hero.
I never dream about playing Heroes, however I do dream about shooting Frostbolts with Jaina, or various arcane thingies with Li-Ming.
If I return with some Tassadar lightning spells in my head, and I end up having to draft some tank or bruiser because the team needs it, I am not satisfied. Simple as that.
As for including multiple skill levels in one game, I believe it’s more to do with the very expressed requirement of minimizing queue times. Good composition, fairness, less important. Although I had 10 minute queues in the US recently, so there are still some hard rules.
Level 2
a) Why do you care? You like draft, play it.
b) Is this a nicely disguised attempt to solve lower player numbers?
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ah yes, I clear reminder that you ‘perfectly’ know what’s going on.
A “draft mode” is any mode that has rotations of picking and banning heroes. Dota 2 has several modes that all use ‘draft’ (random draft, captains draft, single draft) but HotS only has 1 style of ‘draft’. If you’re ‘removing’ aram, qm, and “draft” that that removes all forms of play except custom games.
If you’re only going to play custom, then you don’t need to remove the other modes as that filters out the ‘noobs’ that are the subject of your complaints.
Instead of having an informed opinion that should align with your ‘years’ of experience in the genre, it looks like you’re just deluding yourself of a few select buzzwords and then turning your brain off afterward. So much for that ‘learning’ curve.
If those other modes were removed, I’d just stop playing hots. I don’t care for competitive game modes, I just want to have fun, and I find that playing competitive modes makes me have less fun.
If that’s what you have fun doing, keep doing it - but you’ll never solve the problems of noobs existing because you threw them into the fire first because they’ll get even more overwhelmed and quit.
Also, I can’t tell if this is trolling or not…
You could say people in general are just bad at playing at team game where everyone has to coo-up to win. LOL gives you plenty of oppertunities to show your skill alone and make you less independant of your team while Hots dont. Also surrender button helps alot and rewards for players that contribute while feeders and trolls gets no rewards.
Good players want to know they get rewarded for thier skill and you cant do that in Hots where game sometimes gives the good players trash teammates. Also dont forget most LOL players play LOL cause they are LOL addicts and game have also showed the dark side of humans with people getting in jail for what they told other players to do.
LOL might be more popular but LOL has its own problems just as much as Hots got its own problems.
People afk in base after you refused to accept a surrender is one of them. Or 10 year old keyboard warriers who trash talk in chat after you stole a kill from him.
What is this unranked draft you speak of?
Okay, less goofball, I think maybe the OP is referring to URD, which was never popular on any server, even when Hots was in its prime.
For whatever reason, the majority of Hots players prefer not to draft and mostly stick to QM/ARAM. When the Dev’s shared the data on how popular different modes were, it’s worth noting (at that time) that vs AI was the most popular mode of all. If I had to guess, I’d say ARAM is now the most played mode in Hots.
Perhaps this can be traced back to Hots originally being presented as a “casual MOBA” and a hero brawler. Even if that isn’t a factor, as URD and ARAM didn’t exist until much later, most players jumped first into QM, so I think it was understandable that many players had a more casual approach to the game.
Had Hots launched with URD and no QM, I wonder if that would have helped or hindered the popularity of the game? Personally, I think it would have hindered it, people really love playing their one trick hero, and goofing around with no draft or points on the line.
Hindsight and what not, but I think the Dev’s should have leaned more into the idea of a hero brawler that was friendly to casual players, rather than go all in on the HGC.
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keep in mind that there were 3 key phases of the game: the initial passion project (as just as starcraft 2 map), the beta of the game (with mostly generic talents) and then the push toward HGC.
I don’t think that HotS started out as a “LoL killer” but it was forced to try to become that from something not suited for doing that. HotS didn’t get much mention on investor reports, but it clearly had some sort of budget and expectations for a ‘live service’ model.
Blizz character suit a power fantasy that probably would have worked better as an FFA battle-arena style game where all the big names fixate on getting the biggest numbers or most kills as that’s part of what is common between starcraft, diablo, and warcraft. WoW tries the roles – and roles can set HotS apart from LoL – but there’s still a lot of friction between various ways to play WoW and that works for WoW because people have to play to indulge those.
If HotS were better about of the ‘team’ side of the gameplay, then development should have released heroes in teams with a better distribution in roles. QM gets slammed by assassins because it suits the power fantasy, and also has the most heroes in that role; even if all heroes were played equally, it would still skew QM as assassin heavy.
Otherwise, talents would have needed to be reworked to suit generalist/multiclass expectations, but tl;dr being that on 3 different fronts, HotS execution hasn’t suited the gameplay demands.
Granted, removing modes at this point wouldn’t ‘fix’ the game, and a design overhaul and monetization/support may has well just need an entirely different game that hopefully reuses assets as best it can, esp when compared to what diablo or warcraft get to recycle.
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yeah this is a common mistake many devs make in our modern age of failure…the death of meritocracy has consequences, but most people haven’t figured it out yet
From what I can recall and was told (don’t quote me on it) was that HotS had a team of equal or greater size than World of Warcraft when it was cranking out heroes and content frequently.
Which if true is quite weird as the game had little to no advertising.
The HGC was supposed to be the advertisement for Hots, so yeah, that didn’t work out.
there’s at least one commercial made from the blizzcon reveal for the games official release, there’s blizzcon movies that circulate through various channels online, heroes dorm events, the espn contract, carbots commercials…
it’s not as if it’s nothing and animation gets expensive, especially since they were making/using unique models.
Obviously, HotS should have done a night elf mohawk campaign instead of genji vs diablo