I really really HATE to be negative, but as things stand right now…
Since Hogger was added 5 months ago, we’ve got a balance patch on January 19th, than there was an actual freaking Blizzcon were HotS wasn’t even mentioned in February and that’s BIG, and another balance patch on March 2nd.
Since than nothing, absolutely nothing. Not even a word. For 2+ months, nothing. At this point, I think it would be fairer from Blizzard to simply say that they’re canning this game, like they said with Sc2, instead of… this.
The issue is it’s Activision-Blizzard. Their priority isn’t making good games, but making a profit. They’ve not known how to monetize HOTS from the beginning. They foolishly went all in on the e-sports scene trying to mimic LoL’s success without factoring in that LoL took 5 years to grow to that level. Ranked mode didn’t even come out until 2 years after LoL first released.
Then they tried the Overwatch model with shoehorning in lootboxes except this game was never designed for that and they didn’t want to invest in content for said lootboxes so they just redistributed the content already previously available and gated it through looboxes.
Both of these strategies have failed and now they’re at a loss for how they can generate money off HotS. It’s all about profitability. If they don’t see HotS as a potential for new revenue they will never put money into developing it further. The irony of this is that the reason it is where it is at is because they never supported the game proper when it launched and players want new content. Instead they wasted millions on propping up an e-sports scene that they’ve since abandoned and the HotS 2.0 which the majority of development went to re-tooling the game around lootboxes.
It got reclassified as a Classic quite a while back and there is no more separate HotS team working on the game, the team works on all the Classics.
Also, a data miner on Reddit found a way to give the devs a huge list of bug fixes, expect those fixes to go live as the season ends.
That’s still better than nothing.
I’m also optimistic for a hero rework this year. Hopefully Nova but anything’ll do at this point.
If you think 2 heroes a year and balance patches are content then that is great.
But the lack of attention to making matches more enjoyable in all game modes, Dealing with afks and harassment and fixing old maps that never see play says enough for itself.
This game gets the smallest treatment activision wants it to have. I understand being loyal to a game but sadly that is not me when it comes to this. The longer the game is around, the worst it gets. I would take this game 5 years ago in a heart beat over what we have right now.
Hogger was the blizzcon material, only it was done for the actual blizzcon date, and not the pushed back one. The year prior had deathwing released aside from blizzcon too, and boy those booth/whatevers were super exciting airtime, right?
not counting wow/hearth expansions, the last ‘major’ blizz release was overwatch. That was 5 years ago for a company that used to put out games much quicker than that. quarterly reports have stagnated on blizz – which isn’t that surprising when they aren’t releasing anything – so staff keep getting moved to try to actually get out a game release.
Until the diablo games come out, and managing whatever response those get (mobile vs non) other games are on the backburner because blizz is years ‘behind’ their expected release schedule.
while people can keep neglecting obvious bits of information in favor of self-deceit (oh, i don’t ‘want’ to be negative) dota-like games can be rehashed and released with all sorts of glitter and sparkles as like what blizz has been doing with their other games. what’s that, a 20-something year old game is the next big expectation out of blizz that’s getting positive feedback?
dota 2 is a game that was literally remade from a mod to had magical sparkles and glitter twice and even had a lapse of something like 5 years without ‘content’ added to the game.
What would be ‘fairer’ is people actually pay attention to this crap and learn to take some stuff in stride. Yea, people obviously can’t get over the bi-weekly patches or the multi-hero release schedule, but that’s the skivvy on hero development: it takes time to do, or you need a backlong to distract the masses. The backlog team was pushed off to diablo projects so of course things are slow, and the ‘better’ kings of the genre have had their slumps as well.
The only thing you’re doing is putting yourself off by ignoring stuff like this in a call to “not want to be negative” that is largely offset by you… not “being negative”
Heck, for a bunch of ‘nothing’ the pushback on the season shift is an indication that the metric for change was shifted, not ignored, which *does8 indicate a “something”. but since all the obvious indications of a slowdown have evidently gone over your head – as with other posters – then clearly you’re going to overlook all the other topics that keep repeating that same stuff by people ignoring all the same other stuff.
yea, the game isn’t going to be magically ‘fixed’ with the next release; communication isn’t going to ‘improve’ overnight, and all that was pretty much ‘obvious’ at the previous blizzcon announcements regarding the shift for diablo stuff. but just like how blizz has a history of releaseing games that get new gliding on it (warchest, battle chest, remake, remaster, etc etc) that can simply be applied to HotS once they magically tied their playerbase over with “new” games.
but man, if you’re getting out of wack for ‘months’ of a slump, don’t think too hard about what the last 5 years tell about the next 5 to come…
Classic doesn’t mean dead, it just means the game gets the bare minimums plus bugfixes. Anything on top of that is icing on the cake.
I believe devs have promised us at least a hero rework which puts this game ahead in priority to some other classics like Diablo 2 which last had a patch in 2016 (though it is a 21 year old game, HotS merely 6)
Uhm… have you been following the news? Kinda strange you still don’t know there Diablo II Ressurected coming in couple of months.
And that’s not surprising. New games are likely coming from Blizzard, there’s Overwatch 2, there’s Diablo 4, and there’s likely a completely new franchise in developement. We know there won’t be anymore StarCraft (RTS experts are pretty much gone from Blizzard), but there’ll be new games. It’s all normal.
But at the same time its not gonna change, What we have now is what we are stuck with. Sure you will get a few hero buffs, maybe a rework but hell they have maps they just removed from the game and dont wanna address. Rank maps are not getting any rotations and I see more than enough posts to know the match making and report system is a waste of time.
Nothing is being done to bring players back and there certainly are no reason for new players to come and play. You can say that does not mean dead but without attracting new and old players, You will lose them to other games that will have more to offer.
I mean, they did announce anomalies on the Blizzcon following Deathwing’s release.
There was nothing after Hogger (Blizzconline or not).
It wasn’t the first time they went that long, though.
When Starcraft 2 came out, it had been almost 6 years since their previous “major release not counting expansions” (which was WoW).
It might be because I kinda got to know Blizz games during that time (I mean, I already knew of their games, but I got into them more during that 6-year gap), but to me it just feels “normal” that Blizz goes for half a decade without any new (non-expansion) releases .
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