so here you demonstrating your apprasial of not-dead things with your oh so keen intellect in trying to chime in on a reply thats 5 months old that you evidently had t put in the effort to roll an alt account on a “dead game” and then fish up this topic.
Good job on not thinking this stuff through
It failed because of poor marketing (hero brawling, “casual moba”, ect), stupid cash shop decisions (2.0 making you couldn’t buy that specific skin you wanted…like wtf), and complete and total failure of none game play systems like match making.
I think we have a self-manifesting reason!
Activision balances HotS like Riot Games balances League of Legends, and that’s becoming the death of this game to me. With each patch, it feels more and more like the burst-y style of LoL that I hate.
And of course, there was the catastrophic idiocy that was the stealth rework.
TL DR
This post is already in point form. The whole post is essentially a TLDR
Not enough advertising outside of Blizzard
Too many WoW players in alpha turning HotS into a hero brawler just like their crappy PvP esport nobody watches (have you seen the viewership at Blizzcon?)
Shared exp was a double edged sword. It allows for Aby, but it puts too much pressure on team skill rather than individual skill. The vast majority of people who play MOBAs and do not play HotS usually point to this as a concern.
It’s almost like the same person designed all of their games now and there is no creative freedom for any designers at Blizzard to make complicated and intelligent games. Overwatch, HotS and even Starcraft is now focused on the team-play aspect.
The strategy is too loose - there is more than one way to tackle a map. The game is so tightly designed around team-play that having one moron on your team can sink the whole ship if they aren’t meshing with the other players and their strategy.
Zero customization outside of talents.
Quests were a small hope for individual skill, but people complained that a skilled player can power spike. Geeez … really? A good player can win? How about that! “But in WoW I can just click the enemy and win wah wah wah”
Blizzard is from California and thinks everyone should win. As a result the winners lose and move on to other games.
Team-play mechanics are incompatible with individual MMR and cause complete stupidity in match-ups.
I play this game because it looks good the characters are awesome, the maps are awesome and the battles feel good. The rest is garbage - including the engine it sits on and the core design.
I’m going to add a couple points here about why HotS esports failed.
The team-based play comes into account here was well, the lack of customization and the lack of a beginning phase of the game.
The game starts with a bang, people start fighting each other right away. This sounds good in theory but it lacks the excitement of other MOBAs where you get to see two or four pros in a battle of wit and skill in a lane alone with each other. There is also no strategic build-up watching different players power-up at different rates. There is only one strategy here -> Soak
Now we are at level 10 and the most important things you can do is:
Now that we are level 13 or 16 there is only one thing left to do:
Notice there is little you can do outside of your team except for ganks if you are a mobile assassin.
In the end it becomes two balls of heroes bouncing off of each other. If one team can grab camps efficiently in-between bounces, they will win if the other ball doesn’t deflate their ball first.
The predictability of this game makes it boring to watch.
Oh, right… and lack of customization beyond talents. Blizzard likes to be in control - your hero is exactly the way Blizzard wants it to be. You play that hero exactly the way Blizzard designed that hero to be. And since Blizzard only has one designer, you have no choice.
This is also very boring to watch. Zero potential for a surprise build or using a character in a different way. Vanilla, colorless… boring.
what is masked language? i dont understand
if you want to use a bad word and use **** instead.
For example i could say “nice” or I could say “n**e”. Replace with a bad word and you get why.
Another example is using leet. For example, I want to say “massive” but I use “ma$$ive” instead
Eh kinda but not quite.
Tbh personally I think messing with exp, fort and keep exp, removing ammo on top of that and making mercs stronger, removing siege heroes, and removing wave clear from healers, made kind of a mess with making the game extremely dependent on soak, but give you little reward tangible reward for it. Comeback mechanics were always in the game, but the massive changes to exp and siege made it much much worse and unsatisfying.
On top of that, the game never had a proper learning tool. As Nubkeks said it, league players struggle with late game. Most people learn laning first, partly cause its much easier. Its easier to understand more or less set match ups, farming patterns, ganking patterns etc. The harder part comes in late game, cause teamfights are harder than 1v1s or 2v2s in bot. Understanding map movements, freezing lanes, putting pressure and neutral objectives coordination is a lot harder. Hots has this from the get go.
It makes the learning curve a lot harder, but the game doesnt really give you realistic feedback on your performance, due to everything being shared.
All games have delusional players, but hots allows players to be both delusional and bad and gives them near 0 feedback or punishment for it. Meanwhile good players usually remain forced into mass soaking, doing merc and defending, while showing up to objectives and hoping their team wont completely run it down.
It makes the whole thing waaay more frustrating.
Today I had a game where I was playing Zag top on dragonshire. My team kept coming top ‘‘to gank’’ even tho i was easily winning lane against illidan and you know the whole idea of having zag top, would be to force the enemy to send more people top allowing my team an advantage bot/mid. Which I told my team multiple times. It didnt help. So now we have 4 people top for some reason and no one soaking the massive wave mid, so I go mid, what does my team do? Gets bored top so leaves 3 enemies pushing top now (they ofc went as a response to my team going top), and is now splitting up between bot and mid while the enemy is pushing top. They spent the entire game running around the map just trying to get kills, with 0 consideration to exp, camp timings, heroes on both teams, lane states, or objectives and when we lost their conclusion was: UNLUCKY.
I think Hots in the olden days had a lot of potential. but then they made so many seemingly random changes, while not adding any tools to teach the players how to play the game well.
I got silenced for three days for that, so yeah, be careful with that.
Every Moba or Team based game has most of the issues you mentioned. That Nubkeks video was so biased and bad (his previous one was more objective and had good arguments). Idk if that applies to LOL, but in Dota you still depend on your teammates to not suck in order to win. Even if you win your lane, if the other lanes are lost you still can’t “carry” As you can’t simply 1v2 equally farmed cores, well unless RNG is in your favor (Dota is full of RNG btw) and most importantly if you are not the “carry” role than you totally depend on them to win.
Personally I largely prefer the Hots model, and I played Dota for a long time (since 2007) but I find their design really bad. And people are only attracted to that “carry” fantasy.
I played HOTS during alpha, beta and when it got released. The concept of no items and more teamwork was refreshing and lots of fun. I took a long break from MOBAs and started playing league again recently (i mute the whole team so it’s enjoyable) I played HOTS again this past weekend and man, it was so boring. The heroes are so bland, the new hero’s (the black girl) skill sets don’t really play well together like LOL’s champions do. Just thinking of some of the most fun and dynamic LOL champions: Jhin, Ekko, Lissandra, Draven, Morgana, Mordekaiser etc. Definitely more than half of their champs are a joy to play with.
It’s like blizzard doesn’t try to make dynamic and interesting heroes. There are some like Greymane and Artanis imo, but not enough. And I’m complaining because I really wanted HOTS to be a king in the space, especially because of my love for the blizzard universe.
A very good summary of the biggest mistakes Blizzard made with this game. I would also add the absolutely stupid disconnect feature: It STILL makes you instantly lose 500-600 ranking points which you never get back, even when your connection wasn’t the problem. They had a time when you would at least get bonus points for the next victories but no longer. And the most incredible thing is, they did do it right in hearthstone…you just dont lose points or maybe 1 loss at max but not 3 lol
Yup, I just uninstalled because of this exact thing. There are so many bad things in this game it’s just NOT fun at all to play. Even though I suck at LoL, it’s still fundamentally a better game.
The most annoying thing in Hots that bothers me is the way the damage feels. It’s feels like I don’t even do damage when I hit someone. The health bar doesn’t go down like in LoL. It’s just not impactful. When I hit someone in LoL it takes a chunk from their health bar. In Hots, I see nothing.
This game is about nothing but winning the map. The map wins the game, not the players and that just feels bad to me.
Dota originated from Warcraft. Dota succeeded, Hots didn’t as much. Pretty much explains the difference between devs. I know dota since it had total 24 heroes. It was one of those crappy wc3 random maps.
3? In low Bronze when you are getting 25 points per win… lol the 500 points loss is well ya… I hope you win the next 20 games in a row haha not happening.
Agreed. I quit Dota for this game. I was forced to play support every game, if I didn’t I knew we would have too many carries fighting for those last hits, and everyone would rage at each other. In this game in QM I can play the hero I want, whenever I want, it’s great even though some games will be very unbalanced .
People don’t complain nearly as much in this game from my experience, but I was high mmr in Dota, that tends to increase toxicity because it becomes more serious. There are so many changes and new items in Dota these days that I can’t keep up, I have studying and other things to outside of gaming, there is no incentive for me to go back to Dota anymore. Hots is much more fun for me these days, it feels more casual even though skill is rewarded, most things in life are better when it is casual imo, when things become too serious the fun factor deminishes. Therefore I cannot say i’m satisfied with the e-sport direction most games take these days.
This game failed because of QM. Had HotS not had QM and just had unranked draft as the main game mode, it likely wouldn’t have declined as much as it has.
Why does this keep getting necroed? This post is a year old… Can’t ppl just make a new and reference this post?
Playing well on a team and showcasing individual skill are not mutually exclusive. Depending on the game, there is room for both. For example, in basketball, teams have players who have incredible individual skill and that skill translates strongly to winning games for their respective teams. Of course, it is also clear that individual skill alone does not automatically gain wins in a team sport.
In any case, I think the point is that people play sports for different reasons. For example, some play to support their teammates, some play purely for fun whether win or lose, and some play to show their skill is good enough to carry the game.
It’s clear that HotS focused more on team play in favor of individual players - shared experience and team objectives. Thus it would alienate skill-based players and attract team-based players. This begs the question, what is the distribution of the target audience (“MOBA video game players”) with respect to skill-based vs team-based.
Taking a look at League of Legends, a MOBA that arguably contains the bulk of HotS’s target audience. In the game, the most team-centric role is support. It is also the least played role (being the easiest to queue into). Thus we can estimate that approximately less than 20% of the LoL player base wants to be a team player.
Assume the target audience is composed of 25% team players and 75% skill based players. Assume a game that leans towards one type of player captures 90% of that audience and only 66% of the other audience. Then a skill-based game may capture 16.5% and 67.5%, a total of 84%, of their target audience while a team-based game may capture 22.5% and 49.5%, a total of 72% of their target audience.
Adding in the fact that LoL exists prior to HotS and is a skill-based game, more skill-based players may decide to revert to HotS. Their team-based friends may feel compelled to play whatever game their skill-based friends play. Overall this hurts an already lower estimate (72% versus 84%).
Of course this is a bunch of theory crafting, but the narrative makes sense to me.
I’d rather play Foodball than Basketball. Unlike basketball, where showboating is probably more important for success than in other team sports, Football requires a team effort. You could be the best receiver in the league but it meaningless skill if the QB can’t pass the ball to you. That’s what’s HotS is, and that’s why a lot of players play the game. If you would rather be showboating, there’s League and DotA2.
That’s not to say that individual skill can’t shine in a game like HotS, it just needs to come secondary to working together as a collective team rather than each player individual.
If you want to know why this game “failed” (I don’t think it’s a failure, just not as successful as Bizzard might have hoped), it’s because Blizzard focused on providing features for individual payers (in a world already dominated by 2 other games that catered to those players) rather than providing tools for teams.