“Why hasn’t Blizzard worked with those who play the game at the highest level and have a deeper understanding of hero’s kits, battleground mechanics and what the game needs better than the vast majority of the player base? What is there to lose?”
Mene’s proposed changes:
When Blizz comes up with a Hero/Hero Rework, give pros private access for their feedback before releasing it to the public in PTR and Live.
Blizz implements the choice of role pick (Warrior, Support, Assassin, etc) in Draft, like the one in League. That way, you end up having all vital roles a draft comp should have.
Improve aesthetics aspects of the game. (Hero models, UI and skins)
But yeah, Blizzard thought they could do everything by themselves, but that backfired really bad.
One of the things that makes me sad is that this game had potential for a lot more, maybe to get even more popular than League or Dota, but Blizzard just wanted to “make money” instead of doing a solid system. It’s really infuriating when you read that all HGC players had a meeting with Blizzard to discuss things that the game needed; they gave lots of ideas for better matchmaking, clan system, ranked changes, etc etc etc, but Blizzard just said “nah the game is fine” after listening to everything they said.
They hoped that not acknowledging development issues would have the people criticizing give up and others wouldn’t come to the same conclusions. Instead, more and more people have expressed their discontent with this game’s direction over time while the player base diminishes.
I agrre with you that the game have the potential to get much more popular then League of Legends or Dota 2.
It is also ok that they want to make money.
But it’s not ok that they dont listening to the pro-scene.
Blizzard can make a lot of money with hots…
But for that, they’d have to jump over their shadows and listen to the people in the pro scene.
I don’t even say it’s just ‘‘listen to the pro scene’’, but high level players in general. Or even the player base. People are asking for so many really good changes/features for years and we get nothing.
To me it really looks like they just released hots early for the sake of releasing it, lacking so many things (even basic things). Looks like the game is still in beta.
The top players can indeed give good hints about some mechanics but not always their point of view is the best for the whole community, since they’re just 5% of the population (more or less).
Nevertheless their opinion should really be taken into account expecially during the release of a new Hero or map.
And it always has been. Some ppl are just crybabies who would never be happy unless every single thing was done exactly how they want it (but then another pro crybaby won’t be happy, since that’s now what HE wants).
It’s blizzard’s game, they have their own vision how things should function, but they clearly take all feedback into account, proven multiple times by some decisions.
Im not big on the idea that only pros know what’s best for the game. Like someone pointed out, they’re the small minority of the comminity, regular players like us can come up with some solid ideas too.
I’m just afraid we’ll end up with more heroes like Maiev, Medivh, Tassadar, Malfurion, etc if pros were making the decisions. Such heroes are impactful on the pro scene, but “regulars” can’t really make them work, or they aren’t fun to play (I’m talking about you, Malfurion).
Pros in Hots are not always the best vessel for balancing the game and making it better. for all those comparing hots to lol, the engine in hots simply can’t match that of lol. hots is too latency and pc dependent that it makes it a non enjoyable experience for a the casual gamer.
hots has been and always will be a game in perpetual hot patching. putting band aids on things that are fundamentally broken. they created a meta where you have to team fight but no one wants to tank or soak (hence the Call To Arms patch) so the match ups and the data they gather is always skewed.
maybe if they focused their resources are creating a more rigid meta they can make the game less rng. like educating players and letting them know why they were stomped or did well is valuable to the player. most players in hots don’t care to get better, there’s this mentality of “i am just here to have fun”.
i dont’ like comparing it to LoL, but in Lol if you suck you can’t have fun at all, you will literally get camped out at the 2:30 mark. if you want to play LoL and have fun you have to get better, doesn’t mean you have to be the next faker, but there are basics ie warding at the right time, knowing on the clock when its danger time or certain item spikes on certain champions. these are necessities that you have to learn to enjoy and play LoL. after all these years in hots, people still do not know how to soak and that is the Hots dev team’s fault for not enforcing that simple concept. i can go on and as to why hots is way too player friendly for it to grow beyond its current state and for it to reach its full potential its needs to look at what is going to make the game better and part it might be going back to the drawing board.
the things that make hots amazing is unfortunately its greatest downfall. exposing all your abilities at lvl 1, shared exp, no itemization, no bounty and super penal late game death timers. all these game mechanics are meant to make the game less taxing and cumbersome for the casual player, and steer games to be more compact, but there are major drawbacks. like for instance you can die late in the game, loose the game but there is nothing for you to look back on to analyse why you lost the game, maybe it was your fault for being out of position, or maybe your comp wasn’t drafted properly or it could be plethora of other things that you might have no control over. essentially there is no where or means to pin point why you lost, won or how you can improve your play. in other games it is clear as day why and how things were lost. i am not talking about hgc and gm games, those are obvious, but for the rest of the 99% of the games, if they are meant to balanced MMR rules put in place, as a casual player you really have no idea what really happened.
The quote in the article by him makes this sound like an awful thing.
He is wrong and quite a few heroes have needed buffs, not nerfs after introduction.
We have a “pro player” basically saying that he would want to make the hero super strong. As Imperius being close to balanced == disappointment.
They could already do this? PTR is a thing. Make a comment as a “pro” and it will probably be uplifted and seen by Blizzard.
HGC teams had contacts to Blizzard/HotS team. It might not have been their official purpose, but giving balance feedback on PTR heroes directly to Blizzard should always have been possible.
No. Absolutely not. As I understand, that means you cannot try to do things like, skip a support, or skip actual assassins and go bruiser/warrior heavy composition.
This is a terrible idea for the game. It might be good to have a popup saying “your team has no supports or warriors yet, picking these will increases your teams odds of winning” or something similarly in draft.
But I’ve got people in HL to be willing to go 5 specialists, or 4 tank, 1 healer. et cetera. Because you can make this things work!!
yup. The issue is everyone has the things they want cosmetically. I wish there was an ideal fix for this.
The game was literally halted and the devs bent their knees for the pro scene. Almost every single change after 2.0 was a direct answer to the pro scene. Heroes were as generic as possible and the maps were being changed to be as generic as possible. Every single game play change was because of how it would behave during HGC.
That’s the problem, they listened too much to the pro scene and forgot about what made this game unique in the first place and why it attracted so many players before 2.0.
Thankfully Esports are gone but the damage is done. That guy speaks purely out of self interest, like anyone giving their opinion on a game. The opinions of people who play the top 5% of games rarely align with the best interests of those playing the other 95%, nevermind those at the bottom.
The hots team director/designers are just untalented at game design.
They chose terrible priorities, ignored the most important features, had poorly thought out policies. They just didn’t know how to make the game better.
I look back and I would say they wasted the last 2 years. Since hots 2.0 nothing tangible has really been developed. Yeah sure, there’s been a lot of reworks, new hero’s, gameplay reworks, map reworks, pointless reworks just to rework…
They basically spent all that time remaking the same thing over and over again while matchmaking, ranked system, silence system, social features, player profiles were all ignored.
If they undo ALL of the things they did in 2 years time, the game would basically feel the same to most players.
Pro scenes should be built from what drives the common player, not the other way around. You build a house by establishing a foundation and building up the structure, not by hanging a roof from a crane and working downwards.
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