In my opinion people are vastly overreacting. Why would it be dying?
They canceled the HGC.
So what? That concerns only a small amount of players directly. Yeah, sure many were watching the HGC, but I don’t see how cancelling it will kill the game.
I wasn’t even watching it until they started giving us loot boxes for doing so.
HGC or no HGC that doesn’t concern regular players. Maybe only the ones that were hoping to compete in the HGC one day, but as I said, they aren’t that many.
They are cutting down the dev team’s size.
While this is kind of concerning, it’s not like they will stop supporting the game. They said they still have a fully functional team, so we will still be getting updates, even if it will be at slower rate.
As a matter of fact, the smaller team may even prove to be better than the old one and we may get more irregular heroes like Abathur (or another multiclass-like hero) during their reign. A smaller team may be willing to take more risks Like, they are considering to allow us to buy separate skins with gems (if I understood correctly)!
But yeah, they will keep releasing new heroes (they already have several in the oven, left by the old team). We will keep getting reworks. We will keep getting new features and stuff. And even if it’s at a slower rate, does it really matter?
IIRC DotA gets something like 2 new heroes per year. So is it dying too? I don’t think so. And while the constant hero releases and patches were a thing keeping the game fresh and interesting, getting them less often, or getting less things per patch isn’t the end of the world.
The MM sucks.
Yeah… and it’s been like that since the game’s release. Why didn’t the game die right away? Other MOBAs have problems with the MM as well. It can never be perfect. Not to mention that a player’s performance can vary on game to game basis. Just look at the HGC finals: Dignitas - the unbeaten vs Genji, who almost lost to Leftovers (who got stomped by Dignitas earlier). And Genji won with 3:0.
This may have nothing to do with MM, but it’s a clear example how you can have a great team and be matched against a seemingly weaker team, and still get stomped, making it seem like you were matched with noobs.
I do hope however they find a solution for the QM MM. Giving players the option to wait longer for a quality match seems like the best decision in my eyes.
And I also hope they decide to DO implement the PBA in ranked games, not only as an advisor, but as a tool that helps you find your rank faster. They can just disable it for new/reworked heroes until there is enough data on them.
Players have been quitting the game.
And that has been so for a very long time. Every time a player quits the game - 2 or 3 new players start playing it. It’s just that some of the quitters decide to make a post or 10 on the forum about it, while the new players don’t
But yeah… I don’t see any merit in the claims that the game is dying.
When HGC was cancelled obviously something happen behind the scenes. When it was first announced HGC was cancelled the reaction was pretty big from most of the community.
I couldn’t understand what was going on but I felt like I needed to prepare for the worst. Days after the announcement we had futher news of Twitter and the team shortage that may spark or reinforce the thought of the decline of the game.
I already put my differences aside what I felt about it, and started to do my own investigating instead of listening to what others rumored.
In the end I found that the only thing that’s gone is HGC and few other dev team members.
HGC was a good way to promote the game in expanding an audience to the normal day to day inter-pleb to trying out the game. It was awesome entertainment, and I loved to see pro teamwork plays.
Now that it is gone, the ones who were pros of HGC had to decided if they wish to stay, and most of them didn’t. I see it as bad thing since the quality of game-plays will drop, but overtime it will steadly recover it’s players base skills back to what it was- thanks to those dedicated for the love of the game.
Dedicated- you know long ago I use to play. Warcraft 3 non remastered custom games and there where players who were just so good that you had to learn quick in order to keep up. I’m starting to find those kinds of players in HotS with some fundamental rough edges.
Don’t get me wrong I loved HGC and it promoted a healthy competitive scene.
But- No I don’t think the game will die since it is still being updated. A game that is rarely updated or not updated at all is a sign of a dying or dead game.
Will the game ever be competitive again?
Mostly among friends and individual tournaments.
600 seconds to find 9 people who are silver 2 which is apperantly 80% of the player base… basically there is like 39 people in silver 2 in NA and the 9 people need to wait for a game to end before they find their 10th.
Supposedly the game has been run by the newer director (who overseas the new small team) since about the time of the Nexomania event and IMO the game has been getting progressively worse since that time.
Are there even good players left? GMs now regularly as in every single game face diamonds because not enough master and GM players are online.
Have you had single good game recently? Well, neither has anybody else because there aren’t enough good players to make a single game, top segment of the playerbase is essentially gone. Well then there is those who wish to climb top to get good games but since those no longer exist that segment gone or disappears once it reaches the “top”. What about new players? Game looks to have bleak future which turns people away, no tutorials, awful MM, long ques, poor quality games, any reason for them to stick around? That pretty much leaves the dwindling casual playerbase that has no means to grow and based on the feedback many of them are fed up with MM and game balance.
Remember almost year ago they cut chunk of the dev team? What they said is that they will shift the focus to balance current heroes with less new heroes… What we got was indeed less heroes and smaller balance patches half as often, some focus that was! The balance team at this point is pure joke in HoTS.
You do know that the current director has been in the job, the same job for last half a year pretty much at this point? He has done the job despite not having the title and nothing has changed so far, only now he will have even less manpower to execute his visions making your hopes very unlikely to happen.
Reworks and balance patches, yeah they are extremely important for the game. They keep older heroes viable and relevant so them both slowing down is really bad for the game.
The difference is that they work a lot more on game balance. I wouldn’t mind there not being single new hero for next year if they had actually worked on the game balance. They haven’t and they won’t which is why we keep seeing same heroes game after game while whole bunch of heroes you see maybe once every blue moon.
I actually do think this is true, well more along 1,3-1,8 players joining for every veteran quitting. The problem is that most of the players joining are on the ultra casual side. In the old days pre-season rank 1 games on average were better than master games these days(and they were not that good back then). The first ranked season many many veterans came back(quality went up by huge leap) but also left towards half and two-thirds of the season majority left never to come back. Next season few still gave it a shot but almost all left within few weeks. As those guys left many others kept leaving because matches were getting worse and worse which made even more matches horrible. This was steady trend every season being worse than previous one. Only exception to this was season with placement bugs, that was huge dead drop in quality for worse not in any way comparable to previous seasons steady drop in quality. Actually scratch that, this season has been another gigantic drop in match quality.
There are no more good matches. Every single game has huge difference between skills with people. They are not even close games nor are they any fun. If this season hasn’t felt like dead game I don’t know what ever would. This season you find yourself hoping for player to disconnect for adept AI, it will play better than a lot of diamond and even master players. That’s the state of the game currently.
Not sure about that. First of all, change of leadership doesn’t lead to instant changes in the product. Like, there are projects from the old leadership that are still being worked on and keep getting released for a while after the leadership has been changed. And the new projects require some technical time to be developed before they can be released. So we will start seeing the results of the new leadership several months after its change. Like… about now.
And the latest changes - Sylvanas and Stitches reworks, exp changes, QM MM changes, armor system changes; seem good to me, with minor exceptions But they are better than what we were getting before that.
Based on the past one leaving in October, it would be a new one since that time.
But given timelines it is likely that there is always 1-3 months of content in the pipeline. So you have to wait that unknown amount of “done content” to really see what new person will push towards.
This is how you dismiss hundreds of people losing their jobs 2 weeks before Christmas? Blizzard has departed their community oriented goals. They’re a selfish, greedy company.
When the last director left in October he said in his letter how we are in good hands and that he has taken the back seat and the new director has been basically in charge since Nexomania.
Cutting the size of the development team isn’t an indication that the game is dying? I can’t even respond to such faulty logic. Your claim is incredulous.
whenever a game company leaves a fluff filled message saying how much they love the game but they’re cutting the staff, the game is screwed…
don’t let any of the fluff fool you, what they are saying is “we aren’t making mad stacks of cash, so we’re sacrificing this game to send the majority of the team to work on cashgrab titles.” (in the case of Activiblizz its mobile garbage)
The most recent Quick Match changes make the mode extremely frustrating to play with a party of friends wanting to just have fun with a wonky comp. If we queue up as 3 or 4, the game will literally REFUSE to let us play what we want to play, and if we play as 5 with some dumb drunk comp, there is zero chance will be matched against anything remotely similar to fool around. And all that is on top of having 5-10min queues compared to 30s queues previously. Quick Match was supposed to be the fun, wacky, Wild West mode where everything is made up and the points don’t matter. I enjoyed it immensely as such. But all you Quick Match tryhard whiners had to ruin that for everyone instead of doing the rational thing and take your nonsense to Unranked Draft.
The recent XP and laning changes make the metagame work in such an idiotic fashion that I can’t even. Very, very little you do in the early game matters for anything. You can wreck 4-5 buildings with all your forts standing and chances are you will still be on par in xp. Every match is either a complete stomp by one of the teams, or a game between equal teams, in which case NOTHING you do before the 20min mark counts for anything and the game is decided solely by which team wins the lv20 brawl at the end. I used to enjoy strategizing and employing different lane strategies. There is no point to that now. The game is now 100% about 5v5 brawls. I have no interest in playing a 20-30min game if there is largely no point to anything but the last 5 minutes.
I don’t care about the HGC or any other form of organized play. I don’t care about the team being downsized and more time between updates. I care about the game being enjoyable to play. And after the last couple changes made to it before the big announcement, it is not.
Never in a million years have I expected to say this, but I am having more fun playing League of Legends right now. It actually makes me sad to admit that, ‘LoL player’ was almost a derogatory slur within my play circle and right now there’s a full five-man on Discord playing it and all I can think about is how bummer it is there’s no slot for me ATM.
Pretty much, I don’t get why anyone is fooled by the fluff anymore and not able to see through it. Especially after being screwed over in their other games lately like WoW/Diablo. I would have thought that eventually most people would reach a breaking point/see whats going on here but I guess denial is still in effect for some.
@1
The way they did it was disgusting, they wont see my money again
@2
Ever played Diablo3? There was a devteam that became smaller but still had goals… Rather sooner than later not much of that devteam was left, the necromancer shipped and no patch came for like 1.5 years afterwards.
Even if the HotS team doesn`t know it, but I guess they will “help out” at other projects at some point and never returned is my guess. Not all at once, but in a few months you will see what i mean.
@3
While MM always was problematic, the early 2018 desaster never got reverted. Little example: Theres a NA GM player that was gold before the messed up placements, he placed Master1000 and thanks to rank adjustmentpoints and similar boosted players he is GM. This is not ok.
@4
2-3 new players is very optimistic. Keep in mind that thx to no hgc and cutdown on devteam, there`s also less exposure for the game.
the games dead and it’s the design teams fault. They failed. The c-suite wanted an esports title and they treated this game like it was hearthstone or candy crush.
Honestly said, the HGC was kind a hurting the game balance in some ways. Like the support nerf was caused by the fact “people prefer watching full team wipes instead of fights, where both teams have good sustain”. So they just killed the whole double support trend… Even if it was a thing in only ~5% of the regular games.
Also, heroes like Hanzo, Medivh, Tassadar, Tracer, etc couldn’t get any buffs, even if they are undertuned, because they would otherwise be overperforming in the HGC.
The game balance was suffering because of it xP
And while it may not be a good thing they’ve canceled it, there are some merits to that decision as well.
At the end of the day, HGC’s non-existence does not change anything concerning why I play the game and a smaller dev team is not the same as no dev team.
![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d3rakab8gpdsa3.cloudfront.net/en/heroes/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
Like, they are considering to allow us to buy separate skins with gems (if I understood correctly)!![:smiley:](https://d3rakab8gpdsa3.cloudfront.net/en/heroes/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")
But they are better than what we were getting before that.