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.
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I’d rather have a lawyer trained in law making the calls for my legal defense over a regular guy with a ‘solid idea.’
Pros may have some bias, but so do we. Ultimately they are more qualified than you or me and that’s a fact, and facts don’t care about your feelings.
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Not a good analogy it is more like saying.
I rather a old fat guy at the bar who watches hockey every day make choices for everyone then the 30 teens outside playing it.
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Idk, in terms of competition. Fancy backgrounds can open doors. But all in all it come down to: who does the job better.
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).
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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.
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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.
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LOL.
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.
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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.
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Those high level players aren’t watching it, they are playing it…
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.
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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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Blizzard spent so much on HGC and heroes of the dorm when their own devs were driving the game into the ground.
I think if we had better game designers HoTS could have taken off.
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Listening to pros only isn’t going to turn the game into its best version, i’m pretty sure most of what they have done has been done by listening to some of the pros.
Well I played on and off not rated but I know it doesn’t appeal to me much with how many drastic changes have occurred since it released, especially to some heroes getting a new make over in talents and towers no longer have ammo.
You do know that the exact statement that you give, is what hold the game down… no, it’s even what killed the game in the first place. I dont want to sound too harsh but the “we casuals, we also want fun, we like easy” is what destroyed Heroes of the Storm.
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I never said that the game should be balanced around casual players. But I don’t think that balancing it around only pro players is a good choice.
Like in all things, the right way is probably in the middle: taking Diamond/Master as target, imho, is probably a lot better than HGC or Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum as sample on which decide fixes.
What if I told you; that diamond/plat players hardly know anything about the game… 
Would you play a game balanced by players not knowing what the game is about?
Ok, the point that I was trying to tell is not the specific target. I just think that nor the top 5% nor the 75% lower players are a good sample to take into consideration for the game balance.
That’s because both of those are on the two “extreme” of the “skill spectrum”.
What drives a common player is cluelessness, sure is a great way to build something …
The more important aspect is that they don’t have any actual data. Just how it “feels”. Devs have the data. No player can actually do balance decisions. They can just give suggestions to take into account. Which in fact, how it always has been, and which is the reason why Hots is actually balanced.