The game actually feels less fun than it was before.
“innovate instead of reverting” was the worst game design philosophy Ghostcrawler ever had. After a while it becomes change for the sake of change just to avoid saying “oops, I was wrong about this, I thought it would be a fun choice and it turned out to not be.”
Admit when you’re wrong and you might get some players back.
If the game was in its current state back in 2014 I can guarantee it would have been canned. Everything that came after 2017 killed this game and your internal metrics, i can guarantee, show your playerbase falling off the face of a cliff immediately after the 2018 rework.
If you don’t want to take responsibility for reverting it, find someone who will. You already placed the game effectively in maintenance mode, you have nowhere to go but up.
the game would have been 10x more popular. lots of anti snowballing mechanics, incentive to play support and tanks for QM, decent Matchmaking for Rank, and the game isn’t ugly as compared to on launch
Games in a really good state for my friends and i right now. Easy to get into games, snowballing is ALMOST nonexistent, and all the heroes are either pretty balanced or obvious bans. People always complain but its in a decent spot right now. I’ll admit 2017 changes were all over the place and rather than fixing the snowball mechanics they just pissed off a bumch of people for minor issues, but the xp changes have made the game alot more fun for me.
I know you’re really high up in the rankings (was it TL or HL, i forget. But you hit #108 yeah?)…
But of the last 11 games in HL, after my placements, 9 of them felt pretty damn close. Where either side could have won, with back and forth battles. And only 1 of the 11 had any “favored/unfavored” adjustment.
One game I think we clearly better than other team (shocked did not get point reduction from being favored).
One game was really bad (range from Bronze 1 to Diamond 5 players…)
But the other 9 were pretty good.
Managed to pull out a win in more often than not, which always helps. But they felt close. Not like stomps either way.
Honestly, HotS has been steadily improving. They do need to consolidate some of the standard game modes to get more players playing together.
For example, people on the Asia server don’t play Hero League (1300s+ wait time on average) or Unranked (300-400s+), but Team League is nice and comes in around 100s on average for a game.
Cut queue modes down to just unranked and ranked, and this game will be in a pretty solid spot. I’d love to see other improvements, but they are minor in the grand scheme of things.
In comparison to years ago the game has improved a lot. Of course not all the changes may be liked by everyone, but the overall experience is a lot better.
They only big issue, imho, is QM: the most played mode and the first approach for new players and still we can’t have a proper balance queue time/decent comp.
They should address it as one of their top priority in order to avoid further disappointment.
Yeah…agree too…now is a lot better cross check with open beta versione. The biggest problem woould stay player base. In 2019 incomeing ranked quests…wich a little make out play a little better. And if they implent this mine suggestiones like this:
Bring back old like 2015 y. pop up middle sreen text for quad ,anihilatione sound ,text effect .Feel was awesome. Replay some old youtube movies.Not like this current versione. Do you remember it and feel?!
And i did suggested more ideas(during this period of time).
Like if ine player die over 10 times for limit 10 times ,no matter how many games to be banned for 1 week from ranked ,witch this way they forced to play only Unranked. And.more wich they never will implent.
Incomeing Ranked quests…anf.more durring 2019. Lets pray they add more better ideas.
i have to disagree. games that stay stagnant inevitably fall out of favor. it is how the typical game works. you have a high rise in interest as the game comes out and then it falls off as ppl complete all the content available. without producing more, and arguably more compelling content than competitors, then the game eventually dies.
a similar thing can happen when games hold on too much to an idealistic view of the past (as much as i hate to admit that being i love a lot of the classic games). if they made just another LoL/DotA clone this game would have been DoA. it never would have competed with those two. one of the interesting things about HotS is that it doesnt conform to the typical moba. they did some interesting innovation on this one and stepped out of the box. they brought the normal ‘laning’ phase and spread it out over the entire game and in between being in lane you would be in team oriented fights over objectives. another thing they changed was to get rid of the extraneous last hits and item shops. these changes, for me, are what really draws ppl to the game over other moba outside of just being a fan of some part of the blizzard universes.
Exactly this. The employees at blizzard are just a bunch of kids, pretending to be adult, but noone of them is adult enough to ever admit that they failed. They rather change (and destroy) the whole game, than to admit that they failed.
But that not new, anyone who paly with any of their games, can see it clearly since ages…
Overall the overwhelming majority(90%+) of moba players play lol or dota2, so yeah, the changes maybe was good for a few percent, but most still avoid hots like plague…
That’s where you are wrong kiddo.
The only reason why this game wasn’t DOA is only one simple fact:
Hots uses well know blizzard heroes from 3 of the greatest computer universes.
If they would’ve use random noname heroes instead, like that orphielawhatever, it would’ve died instantly.
But despite having hundreds of millions of potential fans, it’s strives to live cause the retarded and unfun mechanisms which those not so smart developers put into it.
Hots isn’t played cause there are no shop or lasthit… players play it cause their loved heroes.
However that only lures the players for a short time, as even if your favorite hero is here, if the game paly is sht, then the players will quickly leave, just as it happened in hots.
In beta, many was hyped, as it had a lot of potential. But after they started playing, they understood, that they play with literal sht and left…
You can be egoist and pretend that you are the BIG AND GREAT DEVELOPER that will reinvent the moba genre… but on the long term it ain’t a good idea to do the opposite what your players want, and exactly the same happened in hots, and you can see the result…
Not at all. Those are just a kind of mechanics, common to DotA2 and LoL but I really doubt that those are the reasons why HotS is the less played. HotS has tried to bring a different approach to mobas with new interactions (different maps, no items or last hits, team exp and so on). If it had been just a copy+paste of DotA2 it would have failed even faster.
It arrived on the market very late (about 6 years after LoL) and in such genre people invest tons of time and efforts to learn the game and get better, so they won’t change easily.
HotS has the advantage of famous chars from some of the biggest universes but several mistakes have always prevented it from growing (like a terrible MMS, just to name the biggest one).
The issues with HotS are not that it’s far from the “classic” moba, the never fixed problems regarding very important aspects were its downfall in the end.
Spoon do yourself a favour and just don’t. Owl and a few others that lurk around the forum are hard-liners that believe that HotS would have succeeded had the Dev’s basically cloned LoL.
You and I both know that isn’t true but believers gotta believe.
What’s funny is that there are players that are so clueless as to how this game works that people don’t even know they are losing until their core starts chunking down to zero.
