Stumbled upon this video as I browsed Youtube. It explains how and why Blizzard’s ‘love letter’ MOBA, Heroes of The Storm, rose to new heights and suddenly ‘fell out of meta’.
The usual points/reasons have been mentioned: late to MOBA party, pushing E-sports too early, lack of essential features, not enough financial support etc.
And yes, I agree to the comment on the game’s future being uncertain.
Have to admit this is really high quality.
As in didn’t make profit and was a waste of resources. I’ve watched the video and it’s so badly biased that I sincerely hope nobody looks at it and thinks that it’s the truth. It’s a pity video for those who are no longer paid for playing the game in scrims and who decided to take the risk and it’s also narrated from their perspective. It’s interesting but mostly over-exaggerating just to shame Blizzard for making a good financial decision
HoTS 2.0 improved the game? Let me stop you right there. The HoTS exodus of my friends list directly correlates with the poor 2.0 changes. This video acts like death of HGC was what ruined HoTS. The truth is that it was bad development decisions and gambling mechanics that drove away the player base.
If by bad development decision you mean matchmaking changes that happened 2 years too late even though they could’ve just simply tweaked the numbers to make it more strict, having awful hero balance by keeping certain heroes in trash tier while artifically making certain heroes relatively stronger, changing talents in a way that made players abandon those heroes completely and trying to elevate the pro scene at a huge cost for the casuals: You’re right.
But 2.0 definitely was an improvement on all aspects there’s no denying that. It introduced a progression system that captivated a lot of new players to the game (including myself from hiatus) and the best part about it was that cosmetics weren’t behind a paywall but were still available for purchase. The only way they could improve the lootbox system is copy what Overwatch did and offer only new cosmetics of a certain rarity up until you have all of the cosmetics from said rarity
I don’t need random legendary tint for a skin I’ll never use.
I’ll take my dust from crafting instead.
Now, if it is “no duplicate tints or items” (for legendary)… Fair enough, I can see the appeal.
Items behind a paywall were better than items randomly acquired through gambling mechanics. More cosmetic content was introduced and people were bribed with tons of free cosmetics. Giving stuff away for free to distract from predatory gambling practices is a smart PR move, but the loot boxes were unethical nonetheless. The created a scenario where original players had no incentive buy anything HoTS related going forward as they were bombarded with tons of cosmetics but were still blocked from purchasing the exact cosmetic they wanted via artificial scarcity.
The trend of making older heroes obsolete started in 2.0 in favor of the newly introduced OP hyper mobility heroes to coddle the OW fan base.
Not exactly what happened, the lootbox change in Overwatch did was they drastically reduced the chance of duplicates to give them a better experiences when being opened, you technically still have a chance to get a duplicate in each box but its lower than it previously was, including for those who previously unlocked all half of all cosmetics.
The big downside of this is gold collecting is no longer reliable as it previously was, make it even more rarer due the fact duplicates are if not super rare.
By development decision, he means development decisions. Not balancing the game which is a small subset of it. The developers only gameplay addition for years are new heroes, everything else is skins and cosmetics. During all those years alot of features were promised (in detail, not in general like we will improve the matchmaking - but specifically we will introduce performance based mmr in a few months, hype about it for a 6month period, release it for 3 days , remove it without any reason or promise to ever give it back and act like nothing happened then patch the game and call it version .2 and all they did is add skins and changed the interface.)
Thats the developer decisions he is talking about… 0 improvement of the game and next to zero addition of gameplay features, while focusing on the shop and lootboxes. Even the cut down of the e-sports part and cut down of employees COINCIDED SUSPICIOUSLY with the huge backlash and start of goverment regulations to the gaming industry.
Like: ok we will keep this game developing only skins and lootbox roulette and not make it into a decent moba. Oh, crap the governments will take measures this is not a valid investment anymore, cut back on it.
i recall them even saying that at some point a player WILL get duplicates no matter what because they have so much of the content already that it is inevitable.
in other words for ppl like me that have been around since alpha and have most everything already. have piles of gold and shards. i have loot boxes even just sitting around in my hoard looking pretty.
… its pretty much a worthless change. duplicates would happen no matter what. however for say a new person that has nothing or even someone with only half the content. they would find a change like that very helpful.
2018 was a pretty terrible year for hots though. Especially with streamlining talents and unneeded reworks. The blight moving bottom up, as soon as the casual playerbase started leaving (especially at high MMR) , esports died. You cannot have esports without a competitive ladder, and blizzard did everything to kill the ladder.
Yea they made a casual moba, marketed it to casuals, then tried an esports scene that none of the casuals watched except for a select few to pick up tips. esports would have been okay if they kept it small and at specific times of the year. game is in a fine spot right now and i appreciate all the updates the devs have been doing. lets be honest we really dont need a new hero every month with all the heroes we currently have in the game.
I actually disagree with his initial point slightly. I agree with him that he states that theorycrafting and trying new builds keeps the game fresh and players interested … however.
The problem with HotS is that much of that theory-crafting and hero-building is stuck behind a team-play wall. Take someone like Medivh; successful team play is critical to success.
This is counter-intuitive to making it accessible to casual players.
The biggest issue I see was brought up around 14:40. It’s true that Developers are trying to seize control of the e-sport’s scene instead of allowing the players to decide. I can guarantee you that HotS would still have an HGC if the players decided.
I actually hated the loot chests when they came out in 2.0, because i got like 100 chests and it diluted the value of having a good skin. I had worked pretty hard to earn some master skins with gold, so getting 100 on my login felt broken. And so many chests that i wasn’t (and still dont) even look at the items unless they are legendary or epic. The emoji’s and sprays were pretty cool thought, if they had limited the chests to those it would have been better. And maybe only legendaries are skins.
I wish that they would focus on improving the ranking system and personal rank adjustment, those are the two things that need the most help.
Making who, what now!?
There are no none played heroes in the game at this moment, and it is in a fantastic state in my opinion.
Why are people so in love with the old? I don’t get it.
People hugging wow vanilla like crazy, wow vanilla had so many issues i can’t even begin to adress them.
Speaking to people about “Well levling is not the fun part, and so levling for 3 months is especially not fun, the mobs are hard to take that’s fun ok, but so are Raids.”
Like can we not start the same trend here?
2.0 was a MASSIVE improvement.
The loot system i agree it is abit meh, they tok away master skins which was an ok change, since like 20% of the master skins actually looked like master skins, we could have gotn a replacement but i mean i love cosmetics ingame, and now i got cosmetics for all my heroes.
Complaining about getting alot of loot on your first login?
Like how is that a bad thing?
There are so many things to collect even, they just gave you alot of stuff for free be happy about it.
I watched the video about a week ago or so, the video explains why things did go the way it went with HOTS, it’s not a dead game, but it’s not flourishing to say lightly.
People constantly complaining about things, and posting daily about the game being dead is not helping aswell.
I mean if you love the game you should support it, not tear it down.
There’s a massive difference between posting improvements and just dead down trying to rip the game apart through the community.
So can we not go back to 20 heroes sharing the same talents (Mule for example)
And keep the 2.0 going where everyone got new thematic talents, that at first looks imbalanced as F but really does a good job for the hero.
Oh this is definitely something they could’ve also improved upon and is the one flaw in the lootbox system right now. You should be able to use gems for everything so I agree, but calling it gambling is a matter of perspective so it’s just your opinion. To me it’s them handing out the paywall cosmetics to F2P players with a monetization plan in mind since almost everything can be bought
But in practise that’s what happened. The only practical exclusion was event lootboxes during which you could still get duplicates since it didn’t just roll event commons for you even if those were the only ones you didn’t have
That was the case if you were a filthy casual with minimum playtime. You could easily gain all the base cosmetics within 300-400 levels after which you would get nothing but duplicates and credits so if you play consistently even between events you’ll get enough credits for 2 legendary event skins which would be half of the current summer events
AFAIK PBMMR was highly inaccurate to begin with and the new matchmaking system during xmas 2018 didn’t have the playerbase to support a proper matchmaking so queue times skyrocketed when players were supposed to be equal. Both changes were 2 years too late so it’s on them though
There are plenty of improvements they made like balance structures and remove ammo from turrets just to name one form the top of my head. Even if you disagree and think that these changes weren’t good they did try a lot of different things
Lootbox regulation is a joke. As somebody who lives in EU I don’t see it spreading anywhere. The countries that have made actions are radically conservative about anything that can be compared to gambling. The biggest reason for them pulling out was simply that it was leeching their resources like a b
It’s true. This game is really great and IMO the best MOBA out there so it doesn’t need any drastic changes, but we need matchmaking changes that the current playerbase can’t sustain so unless they’re suddenly able to get 300-500k new active players the game will be pretty much dead until they pull the plug 
I am acctually sad that in 2.0 we got loot boxes instead of the feauters that would make the game better like clans and guilds.I am also said that they removed master skins and made them accesible from loot boxes.What do you think about battle passes in general?
About the PBMMR: As far as you know, or as i know it could have been a slight improvement or highly innacurate we have 0 data on it and to me it seem a little bit better match quality wise, but not queue wise. What i said is that they hyped it, and they removed it without a reason after 1 day. I mean it LITERALLY. They REMOVED IT and they didn’t STATE their intention or reason for removing it and an ETA of it will be back or not. This is disgusting from a marketing point of view as well as development. Hyping features then not delivering them and not even admitting or stating the reasons they failed. Acting like it didn’t happen. That’s why you say “AFAIK” because they didn’t actually say anything about it.
And the lootbox regulation ain’t a joke. I am also an EU citizen and i get informed on the news, they punished the biggest offenders already and that sets a precedent that such practices will be regulated if they become the norm, huge companies that make investing decisions (usually by people that are not interested in gaming and couldn’t tell the difference between hots lootbox and a pay 2 win browser game) take these things seriously.
And imo, they did 0 improvements in the game design, but thats just a matter of opinion i guess.
Was there talk about clans/guilds in 2.0?
That would be epic.
I loved the idea of the master skins, like bragging rights for perfecting a champ, but i don’t think they all looked that well.
Gazlowe forexample looked horrible, i refused to buy his skin because it was so damn ugly compared to his default skin.
When it comes to battle passes i am abit torn, for Fortnite it works partly, but i am more leaning towards a better reward system for perfecting heroes.