This is a great game, I understand not being anywhere near the level it was during its prime, but I don’t understand why you can’t keep a small development team to give us 2-3 heroes a year, with balance patches and some skins. Thats literally all it would take to keep people invested in the game, and keep it alive for a decade to come. The foundation has been there for years now… the gameplay is solid, there are many fun maps, great heroes. Why can you not actively support this game? Make new heroes only available to be bought with direct currency if necessary. I would be willing to support this game that way. I don’t think you understand the passion and love that people have/had for this game. It wouldn’t take much to rekindle a great amount of interest in it. A small dedicated development team is all it would take. Stop abandoning your gems, be the Blizzard of old, give this game the energy and passion in deserves.
I mean, they didn’t even really try different things before they called it quits. They basically developed one money model for the game and then stuck with it until the bitter end.
I think if they had transitioned into a battle-pass once they killed HGC and cut the dev team, they could have sustained some income and maybe things would be different.
But they literally didn’t try a single thing and just let the game die. It’s really unfortunate.
Blizzard puts as much effort into their released games as much as they put into a safe and discriminatory free work place.
Matt: Our average Hero is probably somewhere in the six to nine month range.
Downside of any hero/dev story is they use the same figure of time, but not the manpower in that time. The team would have multiple heroes in the works so the development process was better streamlined to keep each part of the process working on something, so while a number of incomplete assets may be floating around, it typical takes several kinds of skills for the full process of creating, animated, coding, testing new hero kits. If such elite team could produce a hero with only a few members, blizzard would rather put that sort of skill toward a more lucrative project.
People have been moved elsewhere. Some left blizzard, others have been promoted to other positions. While the typical player sees "oh company made ‘x’ money, they can ‘afford’ to do ‘y’ with it. That’s not how company budgets work. The company has bigger investors in it than it has gamers; game units are a metric to appease share-holders and the like, and those that invest in the company have those in place to agree to ‘z’ investment for ‘w’ return over a particular duration of time. While it is common for projects to go over budget, past deadlines, and so on, there needs to be something feasible for the return on investment afterward, let alone someone willing to shell out the money to fund such a thing as the circulation of the money reported is not the same thing as freely-available resources to just toss at whatever they want.
On top of that, there’s the scale of purchases linked to new content that increase the value of the work done. If a new hero is created, it might be one sale for the hero, and perhaps nothing of any skins that haven’t been made, because the skin would have to exist to make that sale.
If that same effort were put in to make a new hero class for Diablo Immortal, that’s going to have ‘now’ purchasing power that needs to have that new character leveled up, skin-textures already in work to suit the character, gems and gear already established, and so on. The design of Heroes in HotS limits most of the scope of the continual purchases people will make after a new hero, so it’s a lot of work without a system to get better value from that work.
Given the type of issues the game has with sustainability, demands for new engines to fix by-design problems, monetization, and making content players actually consume, any sort of effort that could be put into the current game could either by multiplied upon return in one of the other games, try to help release one of the announced projects that much sooner (and return on investment for those that sunk years of losses into the company) or be put into trying to make a 3.0 stand-alone client of the game to try to resell a better system instead.
What you’ve projected on what the game ‘deserves’ is mostly unsubstantiated statements that would be difficult to sell someone an investment idea on that. Players need pve content, skins that don’t have such individual effort to them (recycle assets) and a better feel for the players themselves to keep invested in the game.
What would a battle-pass offer that would be different than just having a stimpack booster? You don’t know what they did or didn’t try, you only have semblance of what was live, and even then, it’s not that good-enough an idea. Someone there probably mentioned it, and shot it down for more reasons than you’d be willing to put into, so of course it seems silly to you that it wasn’t implemented.
reason: Money.
Developers cost money, time and resources.
They had money, they have tons of it. They want more. They want billions if not trillions. It is never enough.
If I had a company, I wouldn’t invest into something that won’t bring me returns even if I “had the money”.
They don’t need Hots to keep making money, so why invest on it? Hots is just a product, just like cookies, chocolate, a car, etc… While you see it as “THIS IS SO GOOD FOR ME, IT SHOULD LAST FOREVER AND THE COMPANY NEEDS TO INVEST IN IT!!!”, in the end it’s just a product. If it brings money, investors are happy, company is happy, they keep investing in it until it stops making money. If it does not make money? Well, investors are mad, company is sad, product is shutdown and they move on to the next one.
HOTS was bringing them in a profit or it wouldn’t of last as long as it did. It wasn’t bringing in World of warcraft or heavily littered microtransaction pay to win hearthstone profits. SC2 was very profitable and could of continued on with SC3 or anything related to it but they “finished it” because it wasn’t bringing in huge profits. If it wasn’t bringing in profit at all the community wouldn’t be blamin blizzard.
If this game was made by real Blizzard, things might have been different. I blame Bobby Kotick.
I think their biggest mistake, besides a split design philosophy, was HotS 2.0. I didn’t need to spend a penny after the release.
Very disappointed, been playing off and on since alpha. Spent lots of money years ago on it. Sadly they only care about money. It can still make them money I don’t get it. :waitwhat:
Making money and making profit are 2 different things.
You also have to think that even if it’s bringing some profit, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good product to keep investing on. Lots of products are discontinued even when being profitable just because they’ve decided it won’t be profitable in the long term, or even in the mid/short term.
Hots was already losing players, viewers, etc even before 2018… They probably saw it wouldn’t be worth it to keep investing in it. It’s fine, it happens.
ps: keep in mind that I definitely agree that they were and are extremely greedy, I just don’t agree that they put the game in maintenance mode because of their greed. Their move was right. HOWEVER, this all had to be done because of their greed.
I think they had the wrong goal or expectations. They wanted to be the best moba and expected to be the best moba and approached it in such a way where they thought that putting out HoTS and pumping a bunch of money into pushing their e-sports would make HoTS the best. It didn’t work and they pulled out and then 4 years later here we are. Which is funny because the game is so solid right now and offers something other mobas don’t fast paced, rumbles, with numerous different maps (with different play styles per map), and map objectives where you see the outcomes visually.
I have tried to play LoL since last weeks announcement because I figured I would give it a shot. I like it, but good god is it slow compared to HoTS. Also not having a mount SUCKS on a map as big as the LoL map is. Andy WHY only have a single map? It’s so boring, but that is because I have been conditioned to think there should be numerous maps.
I think HoTS could gain traction if Blizzard leaned into what the game is. A easily accessible moba for the masses WITH the potential for high end professional levels of play. Build off of the player base that is still there (and who seem to be sticking around until the servers are shut down), provide reasons for that player base to give money to the game (cosmetics, mounts, sprays, etc, battle pass) and use HoTS as a promotional tool for your other Blizzard games (like they did in the past) to bring people from HoTS to other titles and from other titles to HoTS.
The professional community is literally trying to build itself but it is falling short and I can only imagine this is in part because of the perception of the game being “dead” from the outside looking in as well as the almost complete lack of promotional funding or attention from Blizzard.
I am still going through my stages of grief. It’s unfortunate because HoTS is in a better place now than it ever has been in terms of the quality of the game and I just feel like we need a 3.0 with realistic expectations and some tender loving care from the higher ups.
Sorry for ranting.
No abandonen a este gran juego, tiene todo el potencial para ser mucho mejor que LOL, tiene mucho más lore y sus graficos son excelentes.
I used to hate how slow League felt, but now it’s one of my favorite aspects. I really enjoy how strategic the laning phase is. It kind of makes the game feel more 1v1 or 2v2 (outside of jungle ganks) for the first 15 or so mins of the game, which I personally enjoy.
The bigger map/lack of mounts also brings its own form of strategy. Stealing objectives, or pushing lanes when you see the enemy team on the other side of the map is actually a thing in League. In Hots, everyone rotates so fast, it’s a lot harder to pull those kinds of things off.
It’s funny because my feeling on how slow it is also made me think how it felt like a single player experience strategy game in the early moments of the game. I will say LoL is growing on me and maybe I will just focus on LoL on my phone and HoTS on my computer for a different and separate experience.
I like effing off in the jungle though and there are other aspects of LoL that I am coming around on.
Yeah, it took a while for League to stick for me. I think I tried it 2-3 times before I finally started playing it as my daily game.
My favorite difference between the 2 games is also the jungle. I really enjoy how valuable vision is in League. Lunara’s wisps kind of get overlooked in Hots, but they would be AMAZING in League. Not knowing where the enemy jungler is and knowing you could get ganked at any second is exciting, especially if you haven’t unlocked all of your basic abilities yet.
I also like how much more punishing dying to a gank is in League. It’s a long-walk back to lane, so you aren’t getting gold or experience, plus you just gave someone gold for killing you. It just makes the game feel a bit riskier.
Definitely riskier. The whole ward system is something I am just now wrapping my head around. I do think they could do better at explaining things in the menus and in game. I am probably missing the option, but having a tool tip for everything you see would be helpful.
Actually a YouTube video for HoTS to LoL would be nice, but also very niche. lol
Even Battlerite experimented with adding an in-game item shop and a battle-royale mode before they pulled the plug.
Hots didn’t even try. I’d rather they go out with an insane hail-mary that might ruin or save the game instead of not trying anything and let it stagnate until it fizzles out.
And more importantly, putting them elsewhere makes them more money (they believe).
It’s not that putting devs on HotS is a waste of money in itself, but they don’t want to ‘waste’ devs on such small profit margins when they can put them to work developing better cash cows instead.