A remake of this:
With some Shadowland-theme.
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Very cool, would like to see a shadowlands tie-in for HotS
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Heroes basically died when Blizz stopped putting out trailers for each new hero.
Heroes died mid-2016?
Perhaps better to say went downhill from that point.
Remember guys, say not to Fel magic, look what it did to our boy Kael’thas. Well, at least he recovered some of his beauty after dying.
I like KT is back but World of Warcraft stars feeling like a shonen anime where nobody truly dies.
I mean, Deathwing had a trailer, and that wasn’t too long ago.
Deathwing’s feels more like a gameplay trailer than a cinematic. I think the last real trailer was Probius’, and they were kinda spotty throughout 2016.
I still fail to see how that’s relevant though, considering HotS’ peak was probably all of 2017.
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Oh, I would say that it definitely peaked in 2017, but I find it odd that people use strange ways of determining when the decline started. Since we do not have access to actual game play numbers, speculation is fun, but fruitless. There will always be semi-random blips for unforeseen reasons. For every rule for determining the exact peak, there will always be exceptions.
These trailers were so bad, imo.
It declined when it got side-lined from major development due to failing to meet expected performance targets. The issue was that there was a general reduction in casual MOBA players as many changed over to battle royal or other games of the fashion. Making all the new content regularly was very expensive and HotS’s revenue could not justify sustaining such expenditure. Many other MOBAs have ceased development altogether or even closed down.
HotS was never meant to compete with DotA 2. Such hardcore players will keep playing DotA 2 until the end of time. Its only real competitor was LoL, which judging by some of the changes they made was forced to react to HotS and HotS was a real threat. However with LoL launching first and the combined player pool of casual MOBA players not growing as expected the result was that HotS failed to get the player counts needed to justify the huge development costs unfortunately forcing it to be down sized and slightly fade away from the spotlight.
One of the reasons HotS failed to take away players from LoL was due to its accessibility. Where as LoL runs more like Diablo III/World of Warcraft/Overwatch, HotS runs like StarCraft II, the game it was based on. This means that a reliable internet connection is required for a good play experience with HotS as all clients have to be kept in sync, with unreliable connections resulting in random disconnects or impossible to play stutter. LoL does not suffer from this as the server constantly streams updated state so at most an unreliable connection will cause some rubber banding or teleporting as the client state gets corrected with more recent state updates. LoL developers even went as far as to hire their own backbone network in the USA to help improve communication reliability. Their engine also allowed for features such as jump in play or observing, which are impossible in the StarCraft II engine due to how the client state needs to be constructed.
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I hope Kael’thas get a Shadowlands skin. I think that Venthyr is the most interesting of the covenants.
This is very much not true. The fact that LoL’s servers stream states to local machines greatly increases the network requirements for the game. I routinely see people with 300-400 ping in that game.
In fact, LOL has one of the worst netcodes among RTS/MOBA games. Even when your internet works correctly, there is still lag, actions don’t get registered at all or registered too late, actions get overriden by what the server thinks is the correct state.
The reason HOTS failed due to 5 factors that occurred about at the same time:
1.The introduction of the buddy system for QM and unranked, which shuffled experienced players with noobs.
2. The rework of XP in 2018, which removed upfront XP rewards for destroying keeps.
3. The removal of the specialist role, transformation of existing specialists mostly into generic assassins.
4. The automated ban system that resulted in mass punishments for abusive chat but left trolls and AFKers go unpunished.
5. General failures in the match making, MMR, seeding and PBMMR, which resulted in skewed placements for old accounts.
1 and 5 are self explanatory.
2 and 3 transformed the meta into the 4-1 split we see today, greatly reducing the effectiveness of other strategies.
4 resulted in massive bans for people who were trying to educate the noobs introduced by 1.
It increases the network requirements, but it also makes network play a lot more robust. If your internet dies for 30 seconds during play you can leap back into the action as good as immediately once it is restored. With HotS you then have to stream the commands players issued from the server and then fast forward those 30 seconds, calculating every of the 16 frames per second that HotS runs at, before you are allowed to control your hero again.
Players will also experience unreliable connections in a less annoying way. Instead of constant stutter, their character will remain moving smoothly with only some rubber banding or teleporting occurring to correct whatever state updates were missed.
LoL is not using an RTS engine. Its engine is closer to a RPG/FPS engine in the way it syncs. This is why commands can be missed. During the same situation HotS would be a stuttering mess with a high chance to disconnect the player. SC2 and WC3 used to “wait” or slow down for such players, but HotS does not so if a player falls too far behind they will enter catch up mode or eventually be dropped for being unable to keep up with the required 16 updates per second. When dropped they have to reconnect which can take anywhere from a few seconds to minutes.
I am stating this from observations made on these forums over years. A ton of people have complained about networking related problems when playing HotS rendering the game as good as unplayable while also mentioning that they can play LoL fine.