Bad Advertising.
Mobas aren’t the genre of game that want to bring in and cater to casual players. But they marketed it as the “easy” moba, so that had a lot of people new to the genre interested.
Most of those kinds of players have long since jumped ship, and I’m honestly really resentful of how it’s been branded now. Comparatively it might be mechanically simpler but I feel that HotS is far more intense on a lot of levels because of how much weight each individual player has to carry during the fight. There are no “hard carries” and there aren’t many cases where you win strictly through superior stats, so every player on the team needs to be contributing all they can.
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First of all “The players loved it” is disingenuous at best half the teams mailed it in The teams got paid less than a full time job at a fast food restaurant, and the league on the whole cost Blizzard 3 million dollars a year to run, and they got tired of footing the bills.
Now you might say BUTTT BLIZZARD IS A BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY WHATS 3 MILLION TO THEM… The answer is it allows them to pay the CEO and CFO more monies…
The reality is HGC was the advertising budget for HOTS, and it didn’t yield the growth in the playerbase , or draw advertisers to their programming or get teams to invest enough of their own capital to justify the constant expenditure so better to cut it off when they did.
I’m sad HGC is gone I enjoyed it and supported it (with actual money) but the reality is the growth needed want there.
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People keep quoting the late arrival time to the MOBA scene as the major factor that prevented HOTS from succeeding. I want to convince others it was the premise of the game that played a larger factor, not the timing. LoL has just the right amount of mechanics compared to DOTA (too hard), and HOTS (too easy). Last hitting is “difficult” for true HOTS players, but LoL has easier last hitting than DOTA. In DOTA you can deny the enemy your creeps by last hitting them yourself (harder than LoL as you have to watch both minion sides).
Being casual means you’re less likely to have a competive Esports. Now, let’s assume 0 people gave a darn about E-sports (untrue statement but it’s the best case scenario to get more players in the HOTS box of the MOBAs). HOTS still has major problems within its game that LoL doesn’t because of the devs’ refusal to copy the backbone that makes a MOBA work.
- Quick Match. You’ll get current players who love QM and defend that mode. However, LoL Blind pick > Quick Match. Not only would blind pick would have worked better in HOTS, HOTS devs refused to copy the backbone of a successful MOBA. Blind pick would allow teams to make a comp without the pick/ban phase of draft pick. You’d be able to see if the team needs a tank BEFORE you’re in the match. The queue should pop faster as matchmaking only has to pair 10 similarly MMR players together. If none of you can play tank, then it’s likely you wouldn’t have gotten a tank anyway under our current system.
To improve upon LoL’s blind pick, we could have had: List 2 role preferences when blind picking, but not picking a hero. Then keep our current 30 seconds and see if there’s a tank + healer preferences on the team. If there is among 5 players those 2 roles on both sides, match those players up, and bam you got a match! If no tank + healers in the same mmr found within 30 seconds, expand search to just find 5 players similar mmr on both sides as we have in our current system. Now, I know there will be the white knights that say “don’t force a standard comp on me.” Oh well.
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Low hero count. Not many heroes is a negative for me, but may be a positive to the majority of players. I’d just cite this as a negative for bringing in new players. The more heroes, the harder to balance, but for any MOBA there isn’t any that has too many for me… yet. There will be the day you’d have 100 characters per role and the developers would only be able to show characters per role by using a role tab. Now that’d be (500+ characters) when there’s too many characters. You can’t just stop production on characters though as eventually most of the player population played every character. New players will learn in time too (500 characters would take 3 years to learn, but keep in mind for a low elo you don’t really need to know more than the 100 meta heroes or so).
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Overly team-oriented team game. Now this is the most debatable point of what I’m arguing. Being team-oriented is loved by many players here, but being overly team-oriented leads to the loss of classes a hero could be. My favorite one: hypercarries
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Similar to point 3, but HOTS philosophy revolves around keeping heroes generally the same power levels in the end game to prevent players from hard carrying. Other MOBAs have extremely varying levels of characters that peak in the early/mid/late game. Team comps can revolve around strategy based on game time. Some teams want to stall and drag the game out to get to their power spike. And speaking of power spikes…
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No items. Now I acknowledge that HOTS is “unique” and simpler so no items. This is a minor point to bring up and pretty much undefendable. I’m just pointing it out even though I know on the forum HOTS players hate items. You think talents get you variety in playstyle? Items can do that in LoL even though it’d definitely not be optimal to run a healer with ADC items.
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Supports. HOTS players say supports in HOTS are more impactful and more fun to play. However, I want to point out in LoL there are different types of supports than just a healer. There are mage supports that deal damage, enchanter supports that heal (except lulu and janna) and play like traditional HOTS healers, and tank supports (HOTS only has Uther for that).
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Moves that are deemed “too powerful” in HOTS when in other MOBAs, they aren’t that huge in the power budget of a character.
Example: Stitches hook is overly feared by the devs, and they trashed the rest of stitches’ kit to compensate when they didn’t have to. In LoL, Blitzcrank, Thresh, and Nautilus have hooks. Pyke has a hook. Kled has a mini-hook/tether.
Hooks are powerful, but they are deemed too powerful by the community and HOTS devs. Just. Dodge. The. Hook. Yes, one hook in the late game could mean GG for the one person’s team who got hooked. The thing is hooks are generally high cooldown and the hook character lost the one thing that made them good. They have 3 other abilities, but they are vulnerable in the sense they can’t help their team as much after missing.
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The problem with your assessment is that your trying to turn it in to a debate; Gameplay mechanics VS Game starting late.
This issue here is, no matter how well you play devils advocate, you cannot win this debate. It make zero sense to even try to debate it. There’s nothing really to debate, part of the games failure is the time it took to come out; this is a fact. The co-founder of Blizzard even made the claim himself.
For the 5-6 years that it took for Hots to come out, it gave LoL and Dota the monopoly over the rules of how Moba’s ought to be played. Your arguments is automatically somewhat true because of the gap in years. Had Hots existed at the same time these games came out, your arguments wouldn’t be as easy to claim, especially since pre-HGC the game was doing pretty decent for a game that came out late.
My main issue with your arguments is that the Moba-style that Blizzard adopted that you claim unappealing is the very reason that most ppl who played this game casually/competitvely had flocked to this game previously and/or still are. Many players who started playing this game came from LoL and Dota and perhaps even Smite. It was appealing to the mass majority of HotS players. When HGC got canceled, people didn’t quit playing because of the style of moba this game was, but because the competitive scene had come to an end.
I have no doubt in my mind ppl didn’t pick this up because of the reasons you claim. This is undoubtedly true, we cannot argue this. But it isn’t the reason why the game went in to maintenance mode. At the end of the day, it has more to do with finances than anything else.
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So players here prefer the quick match style of grouping players (if after a certain time, you just get no tank on your team as HOTS system picks the heroes before being in game) over blind pick in LoL? Moves that are “too powerful” are just that for the players here? People who tout high elo gameplay always say just “L2P” and dodging hook for a long cooldown is just that.
Yeah. I am aware. But people keep saying Activision is Blizzard’s killer 
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I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say here.
Do people prefer QM over Blind pick? I don’t know. This game has never had a blind-pick so I can’t answer that. Would this game be better with blind pick? Maybe. I would say yes, but even blind pick has it’s drawbacks.
As for the rest of what you ask, I don’t quite understand what message you’re trying to relay. I’ve never heard of abilities being “too powerful” unless those abilities are over-powered (except for Auriel’s revive). To my knowledge, as long as the skill-shot is visible, it can be dodged, so I don’t understand where you’re going with Stitches’ hook. If you can’t dodge his hook, it is a L2P issue.
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I agree with most things, but where you say items give variety, it’s actually the opposite that makes talents good; they’re all always kit to that hero, whether or not they’re in-meta or terribly practical notwithstanding. That’s a far cry from the item system, where I can fully build an AD Soraka, it’s just not going to have the optimising of, say, an actual ADC. That’s variety.
What HotS does is instead just offer ways to enhance what that hero is intended to do by design. That’s what gives it its appeal; you always know exactly what your hero is going to be capable of as by their talents.
So on one hand you lose ADC Thresh, and on the other hand you don’t have every failure Thresh running a Shiv into Bork like some sort of reject Vayne. It’s a trade, variety for surety.
You make good points elsewhere. They bent against a lot of grains in the MOBA genre and not all were good and many could be considered arrogant slightings of their playerbase.
The way they’ve handled most of their matchmaking is kind of strange, like I know lowbie games are always subject to a level of chaos but people find high rankers in the strangest of places here. That’s probably the biggest weakness.
Stitches hook is deemed so powerful (by devs and players) it eats into his power budget of the rest of his kit. Slam is TRASH. 20 second devour is also really bad. TBH they think gorge is really powerful too but rn I’m focusing on the hook. This is why stitches is near the bottom of the tier lists and he’s just plain bad. And yet you’ll get the white knighters saying “he’s not bad, he’s just niche”
Well let’s be real. It is a powerful ability, to deny this is to simply be in denial. The guy can hook past your screen if you talent in to it. And I do agree slam isn’t the greatest. But again, how does Stitches’ hook affect how the game is in maintenance mode?
A minor issue that the devs don’t have a good sense of balance. What they perceive to be op isn’t actually op so the hero is left to rot (heh heh stitches rot). Their balance patches don’t nerf or buff the right things.
If cassia and xul aren’t nerfed the next patch, that pretty much sums up the point
Or perhaps they’re looking for alternate solutions…
Ppl and seeing everything in black and white…
Nerfing is very simplistic to do and doesn’t always solve the issue. Nerf one thing today, and tomorrow it’s obsolete and then ppl cry for more buffs. Let them figure it out.
Until then continue to complain about changes to a hero in which way. If ppl feel the same way, we can assume eventually the devs will react.
This is rich from you…
if this is what they do with their supposed freedom then they need more oversight
I don’t think it was so sudden, but more a gradual decline. Combine this with the disastrous 2018 Blizzcon and the crude manner in which they cancelled the HGC, it’s amazing HOTS is doing as well as it still is.
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Nor do any of the characters -as they are represented in HotS-.
Keep in mind that you’re comparing a snapshot to characters that have a full, or even multiple games behind them.
And with Activision pulling all resources into turning OW into an annual release schedule, there’s no room to flesh out the story of the Nexus. What little we got was intriguing and a great addition to the world we’re playing in.
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I can tell when a hero needs a nerf
Let me split some hairs here. Orphea’s release was a fantastic addition to the Nexus objectively.
I’m just not sure the Nexus itself needed such expansion, much less two such expansions, neither of which has been properly explored since. It’s kind of like when, in a story, they introduce a character for a scene and then they’re done with it.
That this is their game means it should be behind them. There are tons of games that handle this kind of material fantastically, but unfortunately the small snapshot excuse is kind of flat when the other characters don’t get the advantage of total creative freedoms, whereas Qhira and Orphea could have come out in any number of ways. What we got was very cut and paste; their kits were great, but for characters to stand out as flat in a game-- as you pointed out-- full of tropes to the tops, it should speak to something.
I might be asking too much of them. I just don’t like how one-note everything about them really is and feels. I also have a very critical stance when it comes to characterization.
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Diablo: Immortal was more an issue of Blizzard hyping up something to the point that their expectations were shot to the ground.
It’s like hyping up “pizza night” and getting chicken and vegetables.
If they kept it a more moderate expectation and said “oh we’re releasing a phone game” before the actual reveal then people’s expectations wouldn’t have been shattered.
Wasn’t making enough money, combined with Activision’s toxic, greedy fingers getting deeper into Blizzard’s pie and finally combined with how Blizzard has a track record of hubris; combined, they probably thought nobody wanted HGC and didn’t care how unprofessional cancelling HGC like that was.
I’m sure the devs are cool people, this isn’t laying anything on them, it’s laying it on Blizzard’s piss poor management style, which is a result of Activision being Activision.
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